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“Not yet.”
On a sigh, he decided against arguing. He didn’t want to spoil this silent communication flowing like a calm ocean between them.
He knew he surrendered to self-delusion as unrelated to harsh reality as an opium addict’s fantasies. But the knowledge couldn’t compete with the soft pleasure of lying here with the woman he’d wanted for so long and who at last gave herself to him without demur. Antonia surrounded him. Her hair, her skin, her scent.
Time and necessity blurred into a golden haze. He floated in a pleasurable dream as his body gradually quieted.
He summoned his last ounce of strength to turn his head and place an exhausted kiss on the side of her neck. He clung to the dream a little longer, then forced himself to speak. “I wasn’t careful.”
Her hands paused in their fiendishly sweet movements and he felt her struggle for breath. Because of his weight or because of what he said?
After a silence, she started to stroke him again. Her voice emerged with a steadiness that surprised him. “There’s nothing we can do about it.”
He frowned into the soft cushion of lavender-scented hair. That response seemed uncharacteristically fatalistic. He needed to see her face. Her words told him nothing.
At last, reluctantly, stiffly, he rolled off her. As their bodies separated, he stifled a pang of sorrow. For too fleeting an interval, life had been perfect. He wasn’t yet ready to relinquish that heaven.
Rising on one elbow, he rested his head on his palm. “In Surrey, I promised to protect you from a child.”
With a slight wince, she lifted herself on the pillows and pushed her hair off her face. He imagined she must ache after that untamed mating. He’d used her hard and without mercy. But then he checked more closely and masculine satisfaction swamped any guilt. She looked like a rumpled, well-pleasured goddess.
Her eyes were grave but clear as they leveled upon him. “Neither of us was thinking just now.”
Her calmness left him puzzled, mistrustful. He’d expected her to be angry at his carelessness. Hell, he was angry at his carelessness. “There could be repercussions,” he said with studied mildness.
A shadow flickered across her face. To his regret, she tugged the sheet up to cover her nakedness. “I . . . I didn’t fall pregnant when I was with Johnny,” she said in a faltering voice.
Like that, Benton’s name ripped a jagged chasm between them.
Ranelaw struggled to say something. Something that wasn’t a furious question about how a woman like her could ever imagine herself infatuated with that sapskull.
After a fraught pause, she spoke. “Maybe I’m barren.”
And maybe Benton wasn’t man enough to get a child on you.
Of course Ranelaw couldn’t say that, however his gut twisted with frustrated rage. What right had he to deride Benton? It was the height of hypocrisy to want to murder the cur just for the crime of touching Antonia.
The silence that descended bristled with difficult questions.
Eventually he could no longer endure his clamoring curiosity. As he couldn’t endure not touching her. He caught her hand in his, gripping hard. The contact immediately settled the restless brute inside him in a way he didn’t want to examine.
He inhaled and voiced the question that had tormented him since he’d discovered she wasn’t a virgin.
“Will you tell me about Benton?”
Antonia had dreaded this moment, even as she’d known it must come.
Old misery flooded her. Whenever she contemplated her youthful sins, shame coiled in her stomach like angry snakes. Tonight was meant to be an occasion of joyous pleasure that she’d remember forever. It wasn’t meant to be about her guilty secrets.
The full, disastrous story remained locked in her heart. She’d never really spoken about what had happened when she was a girl. The last person she should ever confide in was a man notorious from one end of the kingdom to the other for his profligate appetites.
She prepared to tell Nicholas to mind his own affairs. To insist she owed him no explanation. To point out such a libertine was in no position to demand an accounting of a lover’s past liaisons.
Antonia opened her mouth to give Nicholas the setdown he deserved. Different words emerged. “Johnny was at Oxford with my brother. He came to stay with my family the summer I turned seventeen.”
“Benton recognized your beauty from the first, didn’t he?” Nicholas’s tone was edged with anger—for her or her lover?—but his grasp on her hand conveyed more of that damned tenderness. The tenderness she resented because it made her yearn so fiercely for more.
“He certainly flattered me,” she said expressionlessly.
