The Wickedest Lord Alive (26 page)

“You like that,” he murmured in her ear. “Harder?”

“Yes.” She said it without hesitation, reaching up behind her to press down on his nape.

He bunched a hand in her hair and gently pulled to further expose her throat. On a groan, he bit down as he thrust deep inside her, and the mixture of pleasure and pain made her shatter.

And oh, Heavens, that wasn’t enough for him. Soothing the bite with his tongue, he reached down and rubbed at that place between her legs, so that even as her first orgasm faded, another one built and built like a rolling wave. Within seconds, helpless shudders claimed her again.

He let go then, pounding up into her, kneading her breasts, prolonging her ecstasy until with three, final, hard thrusts, he buried his face in her neck to muffle his groan of release.

It was much later before Lizzie remembered her scar.

Had he seen it? He must not have noticed, though it seemed as though he’d explored every inch of her quite thoroughly tonight.

They lay spooned together with the coverlet pulled over them. He did not seem able to stop touching her, however. Muzzily, she enjoyed the feeling of his fingertips trailing over her body, discovering her.

She might pluck up the courage to pursue her own investigations very soon.

Lightly, he traced a line on her lower back. A very precise line, along a particularly sensitive path.

She turned her head and met his eyes. He knew. Of course he did.

She rarely thought of the scar, or of what had caused it. The pink, slightly puckered line of tissue did not hurt, and it was a case of out of sight, out of mind, she supposed. Beth had not even mentioned it, though of course she must have seen it many times by now.

Lizzie hadn’t forgotten it tonight, precisely. But she’d been too excited and overwhelmed and concerned for Xavier to consider how he might view this mark upon her body. This disfigurement.

Suddenly, her throat was dry. She tried to swallow. “Do you find it repulsive?” Better to get it over with.

“Of course not,” he said with a slight lift of his eyebrows, as if the very idea were absurd.

Relief warmed her. She’d never conceived of her body as a thing of beauty, but for a time, he’d made her feel like the most exquisite, most desirable woman on earth. She didn’t want to spoil that illusion. Not yet.

She turned to face him, surprised to feel a tightness in her throat.

“Your father.” He made it a statement, not a question.

Well, of course. He’d seen her father with his favorite weapon, hadn’t he? A horse whip. Strange that the man never took to his horses the way he took to his womenfolk.

Xavier stared at her hard, as if he was preparing to detect her in a lie. “Was it because of me? Did he threaten to beat you if you didn’t marry me?” His voice grew hoarse. “Were you … were you already hurt that night I came to you?”

“Oh, no!” Horrified, she took his face between her hands. “No, I wanted to marry you, Xavier. I told you that. Every word was true.” Her father
had
threatened to beat her, but it had been unnecessary. She’d wanted the young marquis from the first moment she laid eyes on him. She could admit that to herself now.

A fraction of tension went out of him. “Then why?”

She licked her lips. The memory of it still made her flesh cringe as if awaiting a blow. “I—” She blew out a breath, mustering the courage. “When I was about sixteen, I found him whipping one of the maids. When I tried to stop it, he…”

Slowly, Xavier nodded, as if to encourage her to say it.

“He tore my gown, and—and he told the maid to undress me down to my shift. And then he yanked it up and whipped me. Just once, but it was very painful.”

“Once was enough.” There was murder in Xavier’s eyes, the same expression she’d witnessed when he defended Lady Steyne.

“It is in the past,” she said. “And truly, it was the humiliation of it rather than the pain that hurt the most.”

He took her hand and kissed it. “I will not sully your ears with what I think of your father.”

She rather thought he would understand how she felt about Lord Bute. “I cannot be sorry he is gone.”

When he didn’t look shocked, she was reassured. A little hesitantly, she added, “I can only imagine how horrible and painful the experience must have been for your mama.”

Xavier looked at her very strangely, tilting his head as if by doing that he would see from her perspective. “You waste your sympathy there, believe me.”

His tone was dry, but it held an undercurrent of suppressed emotion she couldn’t decipher. Had he pushed his mother away just as he’d set everyone else at a distance?

“You do not speak very kindly of her,” she said. “Yet I saw your face that night when you strangled my father to defend her.” She ventured to put a hand to his cheek. “I know you love your mother, deep down, Xavier. If only you’d—”

She broke off, taken aback at his harsh crack of laughter. He pulled away from her and sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That’s just it, Xavier. Until you confide in me, I’m working in the dark.”

“Work? What work?” He turned his head, and she flinched to see his old sneer. “Oh. You’re trying to fix me, are you? I see.” He slid from the bed and stood up, naked and magnificent and leaving her again.

It hit her then. She didn’t want to save him or be kind to him or please him by being a dutiful wife. She wanted to love him. And loving him meant knowing everything about him and accepting it: the darkness, the pain, and the scars.

She shook her head a little wonderingly. “I want to know you, Xavier. I want to be on your side. But how can I get close to you if you will never tell me anything?”

He bent to pick up his trousers. “I’m trying to spare you. Trying to protect you from a side of life—of
my
life—that should never be allowed to touch you.”

Xavier pulled his trousers on and buttoned them, then reached for his shirt.

“I am stronger than you think,” she said in a low, trembling voice. “I am not some delicate flower who must be sheltered from every wind.”

He paused then. “Lizzie, I told you once that I wanted to corrupt you. Now I find that is the exact opposite of the truth.”

He went on dressing and then collected the wine bottle and glass, preparing to leave her.

“We’ll announce our engagement tomorrow night at dinner,” he said. He might as well have been commenting on the weather.

He moved to the door.

“Don’t go,” she said softly. “Not yet.”

He stopped without looking at her. “It would not do for me to be found here.”

That wasn’t the reason he was leaving. Things had become too difficult, too painful, so he withdrew. She’d been wrong when she’d called him cold. He was only too vulnerable to pain.

He started for the door again.

She scrambled up. “Xavier, I
love
you.” She hurled the words like a handful of rocks at the back of his head.

He turned back to face her, and his hot gaze traveled down her bare flesh in a way that made her blood rush and hum even as it hurt her heart.

“No, Lizzie,” he corrected her gently. “You only think you do.”

The door closed silently behind him.

Lizzie stared so hard at that door she might have burned a hole in the paneling. “Of all the pompous, arrogant, condescending…” She mimicked his clipped tones.
“No, Lizzie, you only think you do.”

She picked up a cushion and hurled it at the door. It dropped to the carpet with a soft and wholly unsatisfying thud.

Minutes passed in a haze of disbelief. How could she have let this happen? Hadn’t she known? Hadn’t she predicted from the very first night he’d come to her after their wedding that this would be the outcome if she allowed him into her heart?

And yet, here she was, facing a lifetime of misery. Of living so close to him, of sharing his bed, yet never glimpsing what was in his heart.

Her face crumpled. Her entire body clenched tight with misery. All the pressure that had been building inside her since he’d come into her life again seemed to burst from Lizzie in one ghastly sob.

She’d been terrified this would happen. She’d known it would. That she would give him everything. Not just her body but her trust and her love. The pleasure his body gave hers was not enough and never would be.

She would be trapped in this marriage with him, wanting him, loving him, and knowing that he would never let himself love her.

The difference now was that she knew he cared. She
knew
it. But he was too closed off from his own emotions to see.

Chapter Seventeen

Outside Lizzie’s bedchamber, Xavier leaned his shoulders against the door, tilted his head back and squeezed his eyes shut.

That had been more difficult than he could have believed possible. He might not love Lizzie. He might not believe she cared for him with that enduring passion so lauded by the poets. But he did not want to hurt her.

How the hell had she come to think herself in love with him? Hadn’t he been autocratic, cold, at times sarcastic to the point of brutality? What could she possibly have found in him to like, much less love?

Was Lizzie a beggar for punishment, like …

No. He would not pursue that line of reasoning. Dear God, how he hated the way Nerissa tainted everything of significance in his life. Particularly his history with Lizzie. He could never untangle his mother from the skein of deceit and intrigue that had led to his marriage.

Of a sudden, he wished he could be as lighthearted and naïve as bloody Cyprian, with his flights of fancy and his lyrics of thwarted love. Lizzie deserved someone like that. Someone equally and most happily deluded about the human capacity for deep affection.

Well, no, not someone like Cyprian. The poet would drive her demented. She was, after all, a practical lady at heart.

A practical lady and a persistent one. She’d wanted to know what troubled him. At one point, he’d even tried to tell her.

How might he have phrased it, exactly?
My mother is colluding with my uncle to murder me. I just killed a man and concealed the evidence.
He could imagine how that conversation would go. She’d think him deluded, insane.

If it hadn’t been for that letter and the damning evidence it contained, he might have almost thought it himself.

Until he read the missive written in his uncle’s hand, he had not fully believed the plot existed. He’d only realized that he entertained hope when it was extinguished, finally, by hard evidence.

Still, the notion was fantastical. What sort of a mother contemplated such an act against her own son?

Nerissa was headed for Harcourt, would arrive tomorrow if he were any judge of her determination.

Rebellion and anger thrashed inside him. He needed to protect Lizzie, protect what they had from his mother’s venomous bite.

Lizzie
. So innocent, so inexperienced despite her wit and resourcefulness. He wished he hadn’t been obliged to bring her into this.

A notion flashed into his brain, almost blinded him. His babe might be planted in her belly at this very moment.

After all his machinations to bring her to this point, that thought had only struck him now. The time he’d spent in her arms had obliterated logic and planning.

Their lovemaking had been passionate and lusty, yet intimate in a way he’d never experienced before. Maybe she’d felt its unique quality too, and that was why she’d blurted out her declaration of love.

The need to get away made him push upright from her door. That was when he heard the sound. A dry, gasping noise like …

Xavier shut his eyes, gripping the wine bottle hard. He’d made Lizzie Allbright weep.

Something tightened painfully inside him. For the first time ever, he wished he could give a woman what she wanted from him.

He was not going to resile from his response to her declaration. He balked at telling Lizzie he loved her just so she’d continue sleeping with him. That would be too bloody cynical and manipulative even for him.

He didn’t want her to be miserable, but if her happiness depended upon him declaring his love for her, she would be doomed to disappointment.

For a bare instant, he considered revising his position on allowing her to take lovers once she’d borne him sons. But the rage that burned through him at the mere notion made him dismiss that idea.

Perhaps, he thought, she would take joy in their children and physical pleasure with him and that would be enough.

For the sake of the succession and his estate, it would have to be.

*   *   *

Lizzie forewent her usual morning hack about the countryside that morning. Feeling tender from the evening before in both body and spirit, she sought out Cyprian Westruther, who at least was restful company.

She found the poet in the library, surrounded by papers and still wearing his evening clothes.

“Have you not been to bed, Cyprian?” she said, automatically sifting through his papers, tidying them, and putting the discarded sheets into a pile.

He didn’t answer, but kept scribbling away as if demons possessed him. The tip of his tongue protruding at the side of his mouth gave him the look of a small boy intent on some complicated endeavor, and Lizzie smiled.

She possessed herself of the stack of papers she took to be finished product and seated herself opposite him. Taking up a spare quill, she began transcribing them in her fair, neat hand.

The work required concentration, but her thoughts strayed often to the previous evening and Steyne’s parting words. What would it take to convince him that her love was real? What would it take to make him acknowledge he cared for her?

There had been moments when their bodies were joined, when he’d caressed her with such wonder, that she’d thought he might harbor tender feelings toward her. He certainly had not made love to her like that when he’d been merely doing his duty.

Her skin tightened and thrilled at the memory.

“There you are, Lizzie. I’ve been searching for you high and low.”