Her Husband’s Lover (17 page)

‘Let me help you.’ He pushed his way inside, and then pressed the door to behind them. ‘Problems with Amelia?’

‘It’s nothing. She’s at an awkward age. And bitter because we are here rather than in town where she could participate in the season.’

‘She’s unlikely to find such attentive company in town.’

‘Amelia doesn’t see it that way. She believes we are depriving her. She thinks that I’m cruel because I seek to curtail her involvement with the gentlemen. I only mean to keep her safe.’

‘Let her be, Emma. Allow her to make her own mistakes. We all must.’

Emma stubbornly shook her head. ‘I can’t do that to my only sister. I do want her to be happy.’

‘You can’t make people happy. That’s something they have to discover for themselves. And how do you expect to make her happy when you’re not yourself?’

‘I’m … My God, Darleston, you can’t be in here.’ How had she grown so used to his company that she’d barely noticed his invasion of her room?

He gave a nonchalant shrug. ‘I was in here last night for long enough.’

‘I’m dressing.’

‘And then you were undressing.’ He raised his hand as if to touch her. Emma scuttled away, returning to her former position before the mirror. ‘We need to talk, you and I.’

‘What about?’ Emma reached out to take her hairbrush, only for Darleston’s hand to close around the shaft first.

‘Allow me.’

No one had combed her hair since Beatrice died, nigh on twenty years ago. The memory of Bea’s squeals of laughter and the sensation of her chubby little hands tugging at the knots lent additional steel to her already straight back. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t sit still and allow him to brush.

Emma remained frozen in the chair watching him warily. Darleston stood so close she could hear his breathing. If she moved, she would have to squeeze against him in order to escape. She’d gathered all her strength in order to touch him this morning, but couldn’t find the same resolve to push him away now.

‘Relax, Emma. Push your hair back over your shoulders.’

For some inexplicable reason she complied. Why could he make her do these things? Why was she simply prepared to listen and obey?

She closed her eyes in anticipation of the first stroke of the brush, only to snap them open again equally fast. The darkness amplified the unknown and awakened more memories. Better she stay in the here and now than descend into the darkness of her past.

Darleston lifted the first lock of her hair. Slowly, with excruciating care, he pulled the bristles over the length of one entire brown wave. The process was repeated, again and again, with Emma steeling herself against the initial contact each time. Though she had to accept that he kept his word. If his fingers tangled in her hair, it was only momentarily. While she was all too aware of his body, he didn’t crowd her.

‘I’m sorry that I pushed you away earlier,’ he said, voice buttery soft and full of contrition. ‘I didn’t want to do anything that I’d later regret. You have to understand, I haven’t your control, and nothing would please me more right now than to be able to hold you properly.’

Emma gently shook her head. ‘You don’t mean that. I’m sure Lyle’s a much better prospect, even given the unholy complications of the situation. He loves you. He can give you all the affection you want.’

‘Unholy!’ He grinned. ‘Yes, I think the church would agree with you on that. But you are wrong about the rest. Lyle can’t give me everything I want. Although, heaven help him, he’s trying his damnedest.’

Warily, she bowed her head, refusing to meet his mirrored gaze. She wasn’t even sure whether to believe in his interest. ‘I can’t give you anything.’

He bent low so that his mouth drew close to her ear. ‘You’ve already given unimaginable pleasure. Even now …’ Darleston closed his eyes. His smile stretched across his face. ‘I have a fertile imagination, Emma. I can make much of little.’

The simplicity of his words raised extra shivers. Emma hugged herself tight. They were walking a dangerous line together. One she knew she couldn’t cross. He just didn’t understand. She hadn’t chosen to be this way. Life had simply conspired.

She lifted her chin when Darleston resumed brushing again. Despite the soothing, rhythmic rise and fall of his hand she couldn’t entirely shift the tension from her shoulders. Heavens knows what truly lay in Darleston’s heart – he certainly had the reputation of a devil – but what she saw in his reflection was fearful enough.

Darleston was not the sort of man to be denied. Yet he would eventually have to accept that she couldn’t be the woman he wanted.

‘You must know this will never work. This … whatever it is between us.’

‘You say that with such conviction, and yet you’re sitting here allowing me to brush your hair. Has Lyle ever brushed your hair?’

She shook her head, disquieted by the thought. She’d allowed Lyle to touch her only once, when he slipped her wedding band onto her finger. That wasn’t something she could escape. However, she’d turned away when he’d tried to kiss her.

‘Yet,’ Darleston continued, ‘we’ve known each other only a few days now and you’ve allowed me a privilege you deny your husband.’

She had. Somehow Darleston seemed to sneak past all her defences, or perhaps he was simply more belligerent than Lyle. More likely still was the possibility that he was genuinely interested in her.

‘You forced the issue,’ she murmured.

‘Hardly.’ A small chuckle escaped his throat. For some reason the sound seemed to warm her. ‘Forceful is something else entirely. I don’t think you’d care for that, though your husband certainly does.’ Darleston came to her side and knelt. He set the brush upon the table top. Emma stared at his fingertips curled around the lip of the table. ‘What is it you fear so much, Emma? What is it that makes you so resistant to another person’s touch? Something made you this way, did it not?’

He looked up at her with his smoky-grey eyes and she seemed to fall into his gaze.

Bodies.
That’s where the fear, the desire for numbness came from.

Bodies pressed close, squirming against her, holding her captive. Frozen limbs locked tight, forever curled around her flesh. Hair plastered to her clammy body. Short fine blond strands and thick, long darker ones, hair that wasn’t hers, but nevertheless covered her, strangled her.

Emma bolted out of her chair, knocking the hairbrush from the dressing table so that it skittered across the carpet and landed with a clang against the coal bucket. She saw Darleston move – just a rising grey blur in the mirror – and turned to face him. He had his arms outstretched, ready to hold her, to offer comfort. ‘Please don’t.’ Emma raised her palms to ward him off, and her fingertips made glancing contact with his chest. The effect was like a scald. She pulled back, whimpering in pain, colliding with the vanity, which she then tried to clutch, but her palms slid over the powder-covered glass and prevented her gaining a purchase.

Darleston slowly backed off, two steps then a few more, until he reached the bed and sat down. His head drooped a little, but he continued to watch her.

‘We weren’t always wealthy,’ Emma gasped. She had to give him some sort of explanation for her behaviour.

Life had become easier the older she’d become, but the memories remained of going to bed with her stomach cramped from hunger, and of sleeping squashed together in one bed with her siblings because that was their only source of heat.

‘Jack Johnstone and the others changed that.’ She couldn’t recall the name of the first fighter her father had trained; only that he smiled a lot and all his front teeth were missing. It had taken her years to equate that gentle, smiling man with the fiend he became in the boxing ring. His was the first fight she’d watched, huddled on the sidelines of that seething, blaspheming crowd, between her brothers Thomas and George, holding tight onto little Beatrice’s hand – Bea, who was too young to be there but nevertheless refused to be parted from her and held on tight right to the bitter end. Bea, whom she’d cosseted and loved in ways she’d never loved Amelia.

The crowd that day had been particularly fierce. Ale and gin ran freely. The sun had baked the ground into clay and everything stank of stale sweat and pigswill. When her father’s man went down, the baying for blood reached fever pitch. He only just escaped with his life, battered and torn, his nose forever misshapen.

Even now, it still didn’t seem right that such a handsome life should be built on the back of such raw brutality, but that’s how it was. Slowly the family’s fortunes had turned around, little by little, season by season, until now they were wealthy enough to host an Earl’s son, and her father’s prize-fighters were good enough to attract the attention of the
ton
.

‘Are you suggesting your father’s business practices are responsible?’ Darleston asked. His brows furrowed.

‘No.’ Emma sauntered towards the window. She let herself out onto the balcony. A chill wind had risen since the sun began to set, which whistled around the side of the house and tugged at the hair that spilled over her shoulders.

Her father’s enterprise had come too late. Oh, the deaths had slowed once the prize-fighting money began to roll into the household coffers, though there were few of the family left for the reaper to claim. Her mother had fallen to puerperal fever ten days after the birth of her fifteenth child. The boy – she did not do well with boys – was stillborn, and entombed with her in a single coffin. Emma had raged against it, but her grieving father had dismissed her concerns as childish. They’d needed the money too much to go to the expense of two coffins. But then he didn’t understand the true horror of being pressed together like that, while Emma could never forget the sensation of waking to find another curled against her like a frozen crab.

Darleston caught her. She hadn’t heard him move, but neither had she been aware of the floor rushing up to greet her until his arms encircled her body and shocked her out of the faint to which she’d succumbed. ‘I’m fine,’ she barked, trying to push him away. Lord, the heat of him was intense; it burned through the layers of their clothing to sear her skin. It made her pulse fire so fast and so hard that her head ached from the pressure.

She’d forgotten … she’d forgotten how it felt to be encompassed by so much warmth.

‘You’re not. You just collapsed.’ As she frantically wriggled in his grip, Darleston carried her all the way to the bed, where he laid her upon the quilt. ‘Emma, I’m sorry I touched you, but I couldn’t let you fall.’ He crouched by the bedside. ‘You were damn close to the edge.’ She saw the horror in his face then, the fear that penetrated right to his eyes. His pulse had been racing too; the thud of it had beaten against her arm as he’d carried her. If she’d swayed forward and toppled that way instead of back into his arms then the low balustrade might not have saved her.

She turned her head away from him, tears welling in her eyes, frightened as much by his concern as by the aftershock of his touch.

‘Mayhap it would be best if you skipped dinner.’

‘No.’ Emma pushed herself upright. If she hid here then Amelia would be completely unmanageable. The silly twit would believe she’d triumphed with her little show of autonomy. She needed reining in before she did something ridiculous and disgraced them all. Nor could she lie here and fret over what had just occurred and what might yet be. The normalcy of dinner would serve her better. ‘I’m all right. I’m all right.’ She rubbed at each of the points where he had touched her, as if the action would somehow wipe away the contact. Instead, it made her skin tingle all the more.

Emma rose and hurriedly bound her hair. The call to dinner came while she was still pushing pins into place. It was only as she scuttled toward the door that she realised Darleston still sat upon the bed. His expression remained thoughtful. ‘Are you coming?’ she asked.

He slowly bowed his head. ‘Go ahead. I’ll follow you down.’

She hesitated a moment. ‘What is it? Is something wrong?’

He tentatively shook his head. ‘No. Not at all. As I said, I’ll follow.’

* * *

The situation at dinner only exacerbated Emma’s unease. Their father turned a blind eye while Amelia acted the jade. And she … she could do nothing for the memory of Darleston’s touch spinning around in her head, as though at any moment she might leap upright and be forced to blurt that he had held her and that she had touched him too. Only Lyle’s watchfulness curbed such rashness. His attention repeatedly returned to her throughout dinner, as though he were checking to ensure that she remained where she ought to be and he hadn’t somehow mislaid her. His soft brown eyes were somewhat mournful this evening. He reminded her of an old family pet, beloved and yet left behind while they went out for a walk. Perhaps he worried over the potential for tragedy they were brewing between the three of them. While Emma felt no desire for Lyle – she had never wanted passion from him or been inclined to offer pleasure to him – she did not harbour any wish to maim him. He had held Darleston dear first. She knew the men had known one another long before Darleston’s arrival at Field House. Darleston: it was he who made everything different and difficult. If she had been another woman, matters would surely have culminated before now. Only her fears and pantheon of old ghosts held her back, else she might well have given herself up to his love.

Emma dipped her head when Lyle’s gaze lingered a little too long. Perhaps he realised the discomfort he caused, for he turned away too, only to look upon Darleston with much the same expression of woeful longing. Lyle had said to her that he did not mind her lusting after his lover, if only she promised not to steal him away.
I’ve not deliberately coaxed him in any way.
She was sure she’d tried to thwart Darleston’s efforts to persuade her into his bed, yet things kept occurring between them that she could not explain as normal interactions between one man and another’s wife.

‘Miss Amelia, have you some entertainment for us this evening?’ Mr Aiken asked, raising his head from the political meanderings of Mr Tipton.