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A large hand curved around her breast. His lips followed his fingers, slipped below the line of her bodice. Henrietta was too busy trying to decide whether she should allow him to make this sacrifice to pay much attention. Not that she wasn’t aware of his big hands roaming around her body, but her mind was still spinning with the implications of his lace empire. He didn’t need her money. He didn’t need her. He could find a mother—a nanny—

anywhere. And the woman he married would be able to bear him children.

Misery threatened to swallow her, but there was an insistent, sweet ache that she hadn’t really noticed. There was a lot she hadn’t really noticed. Darby had pushed her bodice so low that her breast—her naked breast—was visible. And he had his hand cupped around it, holding it as if it were some sweet fruit he meant to devour.

As she watched, so shocked that she couldn’t even summon a response, he lowered his head and lips drifted across the creamy surface of her breast, rubbed across the nipple, drifted to the other side.

Henrietta’s entire body went rigid. A sharp wave of pleasure shot through her midsection. He brushed his mouth back and scraped gently over her nipple again.

Henrietta found she was going light-headed from not breathing, but when she let out her breath, it sounded awful, a hoarse noise, as if she were getting ill. 224 Eloisa

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The sound just seemed to encourage him. He cast her a glance, a wicked, laughing glance, and then brushed his head back and stayed . . . stayed at her nipple, sucked, stroked, nipped, and Henrietta couldn’t catch her breath at all. She couldn’t move either. She just sat there, trying to catch her breath, and feeling as if pleasure jolted through her body with every move of his lips, with every touch of his hands. And Darby feasted on her. Discovered that her breasts had a curve as exquisite as he’d seen in his life, that she was as delicious as he had imagined. Listened, in the back of his mind, to a small voice saying: this is what you want. Relief bloomed in some remote part of his heart.

“I want you,” he said against the smooth cream of her breast. “Damn it, Henrietta, I even like you.”

At that, a tiny smile grew in those beautiful eyes.

“I’ll marry you,” he said, and his voice had a little rasp.

“Oh yes, I’ll marry you.”

< 31 =

Motherhood Is An Ideal State . . . Sometimes Henrietta hadn’t seen her husband-to-be since Esme’s dinner party, five days earlier. The following morning she had received a note saying that he would obtain a special license from the Bishop of Salisbury; Darby hadn’t been seen since.

“Darby is adjusting to the shock,” Esme advised. “Men can be foolish when their routine is upset. Just remember that once you’re married you need to keep him on his toes by changing your mind—and plans—once a week or so. You don’t want to nurture this type of impoliteness.”

Henrietta lay awake at night thinking about how devastated Millicent’s face had been when she realized that her stepdaughter had done such a loathsome thing as bed a gentleman without the benefit of marriage. Her stepmother hadn’t said much about it since. In the carriage on the way home, she said, “I am sure you are aware of how disappointed I am, Henrietta. We need not refine upon the subject.”

Henrietta tossed and turned in her bed, thinking that she would tell her stepmother, that she had to tell the truth. But Millicent had a firm grasp of morality, and Henrietta was 226 Eloisa

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quite certain that her stepmother would feel it necessary to inform Darby about Esme’s deliberate revelation of the letter. It was one thing to admit to Darby that she, Henrietta, wrote that letter. But it was another to admit that she was part of a plot to force him into a marriage proposal. As it was, he had assumed that the letter had been mixed up with the note she sent him about hiring a nursemaid.

Was it terrible to start a marriage with such a falsehood? But what if she told the truth, and he denounced her as a scheming woman and refused to go through with the marriage?

The problem was that she desperately wanted to marry him. Desperately. With every inch of her body, and it didn’t have that much to do with Josie and Anabel either. She had to face that cold truth in the middle of the night. She was manipulating a man into marrying her because she coveted him, and that was a despicable thing to know about oneself. He desires me, she thought, but she knew it was a weak defense. Darby—the elegant fashion leader of the ton—would never marry a mere nobody from the country if he weren’t forced to do so. If only he weren’t so rich! She had little problem with the ethics of the plan when she and Esme thought that Darby had no money, and that he needed her inheritance. She had even thought, rather smugly, that he must marry so that Anabel and Josie would have dowries. But Darby didn’t need her inheritance. He didn’t need her. She had overheard a conversation between Darby and his friend Rees Holland that confirmed her assessment. It was after the dinner party, when everyone was putting on their wraps and preparing to return home. She was kissing Esme good-bye when Holland’s bellow floated from the drawing room: “Why in God’s name would you marry the woman if you haven’t even tupped her yet?” She couldn’t hear Darby’s reply. But the earl hadn’t stopped there. “Don’t do it merely because the woman has a bloody fortune. I shall dower Josie. The baby as well.”

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Henrietta paused in the very act of pulling on her gloves. Esme raised her eyebrows but they both stayed absolutely still.

“The devil you will.” Darby’s voice sounded calmly uninterested to Henrietta.

“Didn’t say I can, ” Rees retorted. “Said I shall. Got more than enough blunt for myself, don’t I? And since my wife is unlikely to give me an heir—”

“Their dowries do not present a problem.”

“Wasn’t Rawlings’s estate entailed?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“Then . . . You can?”