Page 77 of One Night with a Rake

“Love. Is that all?”

“Isn’t that everything there is?” Feeling unaccountably shy since he’d moved away from her, she sat up, tucking the sheets under her armpits. “There’s no need for us to complicate matters.”

“As in do anything that might upset your match with the royal duke?”

More specifically, do anything that might upset her parents. “The match with the Duke of Cambridge is not set in stone.”

He eyed her with the watchfulness of a lion near a watering hole. “Do you want it to be?”

She dropped her gaze to her lap. “No.”

“Then why don’t you simply refuse him?”

“And send my father into apoplexy and turn my mother into a social pariah?”

“I don’t believe that’s it for a moment,” he said testily. “You’re the most stubborn woman I know. You have no trouble risking your parents’ ire when it means you’re traipsing about the armpit of London doing your good works. Why do you hesitate when your own happiness is involved?”

It seemed to have escaped his notice that he hadn’t offered her a viable alternative. While Georgette wasn’t sanguine about life married to a royal, she was even more certain she wasn’t made for spinsterhood. The way her sensual nature had bloomed under Nate’s attentions proved that. The fact that he hadn’t offered her marriage stung, but perhaps he was working up to it, as clumsily as he’d finally managed his mangled declaration of love.

The real reason she wouldn’t refuse the royal duke was a darker one, however. She swallowed hard.

“Everything was so easy for Anne. She was the golden one, the apple of my parents’ eyes. I was an awkward girl, and I don’t know that I’ve outgrown it as a woman.” The small keening hurt inside that was never quite stilled throbbed afresh. “When Anne died, I always had the suspicion that my parents wished it had been she who survived the fever instead of me.”

“Surely they—”

“Oh, nothing was ever said outright,” Georgette assured him, trying to keep her voice bright. “But there are some things one knows without knowing how.”

Nate didn’t say anything and she was grateful for his silence. She blessed him even more when he took her wordlessly into his arms and rocked her slowly. It gave her the courage to finish what she feared putting into words.

“People make all sorts of bargains with God when eternity yawns before them. I know. I went several rounds with the Almighty during the worst of the fever,” she said. “I promised then to try to be the daughter my parents wanted, to make them proud.”

Nathaniel tightened his embrace. Georgette leaned into him, wishing she could keep her head resting on his shoulder forever.

“When I came to the attention of the royal duke, it was as if I’d finally made good on that promise,” she said. “Suddenly they did love me. They did want the best for me.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “And they didn’t wish I was Anne.”

He kissed her neck once, a sweet brush of his lips. “I don’t wish you were Anne. I wouldn’t change you a bit.”

Her heart ached sweetly at the completeness of his acceptance of her.

“Except maybe to make you more cautious for your own safety,” he added.

She smiled at him. “That’s why I have you.”

“But if you marry Cambridge, how can you have me?”

Her face crumpled. “I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it. Please, Nate. Let’s not spoil now.”

He pressed a kiss on the crown of her head. “If we don’t want to spoil now, we need to think about returning you to Yorkingham House with as little fuss and fanfare as possible. Come. I’ll be your lady’s maid.”

Nathaniel pulled back the sheet and helped her dress, pausing to caress her in small ways before he covered her decently. Once he fastened the last button, she was more of a mind to let him start undoing them again, but he was right. They couldn’t afford to dally in Cheapside any longer.

“You haven’t told me what you learned at White’s this morning,” she said as she retrieved her scattered pins and began to do up her hair. The small shaving mirror mounted over a washstand wasn’t as conducive to the task as her large vanity mirror at home, but it was all she had to work with. “What about your Lord Gobberd?”

“I’m satisfied he had nothing to do with the murder of either Vesta or Mr. Bagley.” Nathaniel shrugged on his shirt and went in search of the wrist studs. He bent to retrieve one near the foot of the bed. “He seemed genuinely relieved to have lost the House of Sirens to me.”

In the mirror, Georgette caught him watching her as she fiddled with her long locks but made no move to help her dress her hair. Evidently his skills as a lady’s maid were limited to robing and disrobing the female form.

“He did mention my former tenant as one who would be furious enough at the changes on Lackaday Lane to do something about it, though.” Nathaniel found the other stud and affixed it to his wrist. Then he pulled on his waistcoat.