The Earl's Practical Marriage Page 24

  And out here she could forget what was waiting for her inside the hot room only feet away. On this terrace with the scent of exotic flowers heavy in the air, only now mattered. Just enough light shone from the ballroom for her to see his eyes were ice blue and hot at the same time. Her breath stuttered when he pulled her further from the lights of the party and the glow of a waxing moon gave them a world of their own.

  ‘You should not trust me, Belle. I’m dangerous,’ he said almost seriously. ‘I’m a wolf in wolf’s clothing,’ he added as if he believed it.

  ‘It’s not full,’ she told him and sensed his bewilderment. ‘The moon,’ she explained with a nod towards it where it seemed almost touchable, on the horizon, ‘so you can’t claim the moon made you do it.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Kiss me,’ she heard herself say rashly. A sane part of her was so shocked it was as if it flopped down on to the stone bench nearby and sat there with its mouth open.

  ‘Oh? And why would you let me do that, Belle? Perhaps you’re as wild as I am,’ he murmured, suddenly closer than she remembered.

  She should run, dash back into the familiar noise and heat and glitter of a tonnish ballroom, and find the nearest respectable female to chaperon her. Instead she stayed as if her feet were rooted into the still-warm stones under their feet. She could touch and taste him if she stayed, hear the urgent saw of breath he’d been holding too long. Moonlight fell on high cheekbones and dark, dark hair springing almost to disarray despite all his efforts to tame it. The hint of a frown at his dark eyebrows told her a goodly part of him thought he ought to fight this basic, gut-deep attraction as well. But there was enough light for the sensual curve of his mouth to betray the fact urgency and passion were getting the upper hand even without her exploring touch and silent encouragement to get on and kiss her and to hell with the real world.

  ‘I think you’re right,’ she whispered as she padded her fingertips against his tense jaw, feeling how it clenched and suspecting it was taking everything in him not to fall on her like the wolf he claimed to be.

  But reason gave way to madness and suddenly she was in his arms. This was the kiss that would bring Isabella Penelope Alstone fully to life. The one she’d been so secretly waiting for since the day she began to be a woman. She hadn’t even let herself know she wanted it until now. His mouth fitted lushly against her eager lips and he felt so familiar against her. He murmured something as if he agreed with her unspoken thoughts and she opened her mouth to say Yes, please, but he dipped his tongue inside first, as if he had to know more, had to know everything now she was here at last. She was melting from the outside in, or should that be the inside out? Heat beat through her in time with his hurried breaths and the dart of his gently exploring tongue, as if he knew she’d never felt passion like this before and it was a shock that echoed through them both.

  Yes, there was the shake of novelty and wonder in his fingers as he danced them across her cheekbone and down to outline her chin as if he was learning her with every sense he had. Never before had she been tempted to burrow into a man’s arms, to try to become a part of him by melding her heat with his, her mouth with his. For a minute reality threatened to pull her back and her mind told her body to flinch away, but the alluring stranger snatched all her attention back by sliding his wickedly exploring tongue over her lower lip, deepening the kiss.

  She shifted even closer and copied his exploration. His cheek and jaw felt so firm under her touch and her fingers were intrigued by the contrast between her own softer features and his hawkish ones. She could feel the suggestion of his beard despite a careful shave and she spared a moment to scent the clean, sharp smell of soap and something tangy used to take the sting of the blade away when a gentleman was making himself civilised and smooth for the company of ladies.

  Real life threatened to jump in again, but she told it to go away and muttered something encouraging instead. Nothing in reality could beat a meeting outside time and all the rules of polite society. Her heart beat so fast and her breath demanded air while pleasure and hope and a big, wide yes to life and this stranger and all he could be opened up inside her. She was shivering like a thoroughbred and rode a tide of heat more intense and deep and demanding than anything she’d ever felt before. There were no words to describe how right it felt when he pulled her closer to show her what she was doing to him. She felt the tension of deep desire in his rigidly muscular form. This was the carnal, primal need that carried men and women to places they’d never intended to go to when they started an evening not even knowing one another.

  Instead of flinching back and telling him, no, they couldn’t go any further down that road when they didn’t even know one another’s real names, she pushed her curious hands under his unbuttoned evening coat and gave a pleased little grunt at the feel of a hot, needy and intriguingly muscular male under her exploring touch. Her fingers soothed the tight muscles at the base of his spine, whispered inquisitively downwards, desperate to know the difference between his spare male flanks and her own sleekly feminine curves. He gasped as if she’d stung him, then sucked in breath as if he might need more if she was going to carry on, so she did. She could feel his muscles shift and soothe, then tense again as she explored the sparseness of his buttocks and the honed, pared-down line where they met long, strong legs. Her own legs wobbled and almost let her down as their stance thrust his unmistakably eager manhood emphatically against her.

  This was what uncontrollable desire felt like. This was how a woman felt when she was desperate for the man she loved to take her somewhere magical. That old taboo, that stark little four-lettered word sounded like a death knell in a corner of her mind, but she was moon-mad and curious enough to ignore it for a little longer. It put a hiccup in her sigh, though, a caveat in her exploration even as she buried a gasp of awe and need against his shoulder, then stood on tiptoe so that every bit of her felt it knew every bit of him.

  But they didn’t, they couldn’t; not with so many sharp eyes and curious minds dangerously close by. She felt him stand a little straighter, pulling back his leanly powerful shoulders so he stood more sceptically apart from her as she burrowed against the warmth and strength and certainty of him and tried to hold on to this moment for a little while longer. If she let go, she’d have to see what she’d done and what she ought to have been doing instead. Ever since she’d given in to impulse for once and stepped outside the stuffy ballroom behind them, the way her life was planned out from now on was weightless in the balance against this rebellious encounter under the stars. Let him go and that weight would tumble back and she would end up more wrong than she had ever been in her life.

  As she stood in the stronghold of his arms, trying to hold the real world at bay for as long as she could, voices started to disturb the fog of her mind.

  ‘Isabella can’t be out here,’ she heard Magnus Haile’s voice say in the vast, close distance between his world and the one she and the stranger and the moon inhabited.

  Now just a few yards away his voice sounded pacifying with forced casualness. She stiffened and felt her fellow moon-led simpleton do the same. Magnus must be with his father for him to sound like that. The Earl of Carrowe was a despot with his family, but so sleekly charming in the polite world the stark difference between public and private man still took Isabella’s breath away.

  ‘Where is she, then? Get your engagement puffed off so I don’t end up in the sponging house or have duns to breakfast. You have shilly-shallied for far too long, so you find her before her upstart brother-in-law withdraws his consent or I’ll spill your secrets.’

  ‘She’s of age and so am I. We need no consent,’ the Honourable Magnus Haile asserted uncomfortably, as if he was trying to remind himself that he and Isabella were two free and unencumbered adults.

  Even as she stood in another man’s arms and felt him go rigid before he let her go as if she’d suddenly grown horns and
a tail, Isabella frowned at the flatness in Magnus’s usually pleasant tenor voice. He had spent last Season courting her so half-heartedly it took her until the end of it to notice. Then he had asked his fateful question and it shocked her even now to recall she had agreed. They were friends, she reassured herself. They would run in harness well together and she had never met anyone who made her heart race or her inner wanton melt with greed and heady desire. Until tonight. When it was too late.

  Isabella stepped cautiously away from her stranger; stiff as he was now reason had rushed back in. A sluggish breeze stirred the sticky heat and fluttered her pale gown as space opened up between them.

  The Earl of Carrowe pushed his protesting second son aside and stepped away from the pool of candlelight. Still as a statue now, Isabella froze and held her breath. This familiar stranger standing so stiffly next to her felt remote and withdrawn as an iron statue. She desperately hoped the night was deep enough for the Earl not to see them standing here like guilty lovers. Who would have thought a man she never laid eyes on until tonight could show her Isabella the Undone? All in the space between the ballroom and here and now.

  ‘You don’t need consent, you need a pitchfork up your...’ the Earl said in the coarse manner he saved for his family. Or at least those who depended on him for a leaky roof over their heads. Here at Haile Carr he had to hide his true self or risk the fury of his wealthy daughter-in-law and her even wealthier father.

  ‘You’ll keep a still tongue in your head about my future wife if you want me to go through with this marriage.’ Magnus sounded as austere as a monk and halted his father’s trail of obscenities in their tracks.

  Isabella stifled a hum of sympathy as she felt the weight of real life settling back on her shoulders. It felt even more of a burden now than when she had first decided to share Magnus’s responsibilities. They weren’t in love, but she never wanted to be in love anyway. Love was a trap and an illusion, nothing like the fairy-tale emotion three-decker romances portrayed. Isabella had agreed to Magnus’s proposal for one reason—to get him and his sisters out from under the Earl’s thumb—to give her best male friend outside her family a chance to be free of the monster she had heard bully and even beat his children. She had had no idea until a visit to the Haile ladies showed her the insults and foul language of the real man under the Earl of Carrowe’s urbane outer shell. The Countess had hidden Isabella’s presence and even took her out down the backstairs so the Earl wouldn’t know she had been there. From that moment on she was filled with a passionate desire to help the Earl’s daughters and Magnus had given her a chance to do it, so she took it and him and told herself all would be well because she didn’t want to be in love with her husband anyway.

  Except it felt as if they had missed something vital out. Isabella had been restless and hot and uncomfortable in her own skin in the ballroom and bolted outside to get away from what she’d done with her eyes wide open. And look where that had got her; she’d taken light in the arms of a stranger and now had to live with the memory of it on her conscience while she pretended to be Magnus’s glowingly happy bride-to-be.

  ‘Renege on our deal and I’ll tell the world what you did last year and who you did it with,’ the Earl threatened Magnus as if he couldn’t bear to be bested by another son after his heir married a rich woman and got control of his own purse strings. The atmosphere in the ballroom had felt oppressive with Viscount Haile and his wife holding court while family tensions simmered just below the surface. Or maybe she was making excuses for her own bad behaviour.

  But what did Magnus do last summer? A couple of times since she arrived here Isabella had sensed something was deeply wrong with Magnus. It felt as if she knew only half of what was going on. Their engagement was supposed to be a surprise that would make this annual party even happier, but it didn’t feel very joyous to Isabella. Her money and family power were pitted against the Earl’s extravagant self-indulgence and his cruel grip on his family. He’d traded control of his unwed daughters for part of her fortune; Magnus would save his sisters and Isabella could start the family she longed for. But then she arrived here and the reality of marrying the man who’d been her friend since she made her debut finally hit home. To make those babies they would be intimate together and it felt like a giant factor she left out of her calculations about marrying for sense and companionship. Much as she liked Magnus she wasn’t sure she wanted to couple with him. She was a country girl at heart and three and twenty; she knew enough about the mechanics of marriage to shiver at the very idea of the one she’d committed herself to while she stood so close to a man who had nearly taught her a lot more than she needed to know about how a man and a woman were together when they wanted each other so urgently they couldn’t even wait for a bed.

  ‘You need money too much to risk Isabella jilting me,’ Magnus was arguing now and she felt the man at her side wince.

  Not for her sake, she sensed, or for the Earl’s. So he must be on Magnus’s side. She could feel fury arcing across the few bare inches of late summer air between them. The shame of her own betrayal was bad enough—the wrong she’d done Magnus with this stranger. So what about him? He was furious with her, but fairness whispered he hadn’t deserved to kiss another man’s affianced bride as if she was free as air, then find out how wrong he was before their lips were cool from kissing. Even more guilt twisted in her belly and finally saw off the wanton Isabella who still longed for more from a lover and never mind who he was and who he wasn’t.

  ‘No, damn you, I need all that gelt to keep the duns at bay,’ the Earl was saying now. ‘You find the wench so we can announce the engagement before all the local clodhoppers go home.’

  ‘I’ll see if Isabella is mending a flounce or visiting the ladies’ withdrawing room, because she’s clearly not out here. You shouldn’t judge her by your low standards. Not everyone has your genius for sin.’

  ‘Speaking of sinners, where’s your mother?’

  ‘Maybe she’s with her prospective daughter-in-law, avoiding you.’

  The string of obscenities that greeted that provocation faded as father and son turned to go back inside. Isabella wasted a few moments wondering how quickly the Earl could put on the mask of genial host after his unpleasant tirade. No doubt it would be plausible as ever by the time he was back in the crowded ballroom that she now dreaded so deeply she would almost prefer to stay out here with a furious male of a very different kind than re-enter it and face the future.

  ‘I presume you know your fiancé’s mother, Miss Alstone?’ he asked coldly.

  She shivered despite the sticky heat that hit her again now the magic of the moonlit night had flown. ‘How do you know my...?’ she began, then her voice trailed off when he turned to face her.

  ‘Who else but you would skulk on the terrace at Haile Carr, trying to avoid her fiancé in the arms of a stranger? Who else did I come here to see and maybe even steel myself to meet?’

  ‘I don’t know, but why are you here?’

  He grasped her arms as if she was the last person he really wanted to touch and walked her towards the pool of golden light on the still-warm stones. Her gaze ran over his hawkish features and heat and excitement flashed through her once again, but there was such fury in his uncannily light blue eyes it suffocated.

  ‘Can you see it now?’ he demanded roughly, shaking her a little when she stayed silent. ‘The mark of Cain you have put on me tonight,’ he bit out and the rage and guilt beneath his bitter words felt formidable.

  For another cowardly moment she let her gaze linger on features that seemed uniquely his. Eyes clear and pale and steely blue, yet so alive and passionate even the fury in them seemed better than the cold aloofness he was striving for. Eyebrows and wild curls so dark above his icy gaze that looked so hard now. His features were so strongly marked and masculine she couldn’t sort them from a softer, more blurred version that nagged at her memory.


  ‘The Countess, you’re Lady Carrowe’s...’ Yet again she let her voice tail off as if she was an incoherent and bedazzled debutante. Even the thought of being so silly and unguarded made her stiffen her spine and meet his eyes as if it didn’t cost such an effort. She felt sweat bead her brow. ‘Youngest son,’ she ended, because she knew who he was and still refused to name-call over one thing that certainly wasn’t his fault.

  ‘Say it, Miss Alstone,’ he ordered with weary impatience. ‘I’m my mother’s publicly denounced shame since the day I had the bad taste to be born alive. I’m the cuckoo in the Earl of Carrowe’s nest; Lady Carrowe’s disgrace; destroyer of innocent ladies’ reputations and all the names they call me if I’m stupid enough to enter a room full of your kind. And what about you, Miss Alstone? You’re Magnus Haile’s affianced wife and far more of a disgrace than my mother ever was in private. She married a monster and you’re about to wed his very opposite; you have no excuse for luring in a lover before you even marry my big brother.’

  ‘That’s between us and none of your business,’ she said coolly.

  ‘Tell him about this and I’ll tell the whole world what you did tonight. Dare whisper a word to hurt him and I’ll make sure the world finds out what we’ve done.’

  ‘You can’t ruin me,’ she defied him and knew it was cheap to invite him to throw mud at the Earl of Carnwood’s youngest sister-in-law if he dared.

  ‘Wulf FitzDevelin may not get past generations of rank and privilege and be-damned-to-the-rest-of-you, but Dev can do it with a few flicks of his pen and a lampoon from a scurrilous friend who owes him a favour.’