David Lord of Honor (The Lonely Lords) (18 page)

In David’s long history of seductions, encounters, and trysts, and even a few orgies, his initial coupling with Letty was embarrassingly unsophisticated. They kissed, he mounted her, slid home, and started thrusting.

But the sensations… Ah, God, the sensations.

For the first time, David Worthington, Viscount Fairly, accomplished swain on four continents, wasn’t in control of a sexual joining. Letty was making love
with
him
, arousing him, driving his passions into a spiraling coil of want and pleasure rather than providing him a performance or a mutual accommodation.

“Slow down, love, or I’ll spend.”

“Spend,” she whispered. “Hold nothing back.”

She
held nothing back, but instead locked her ankles at the small of his back and urged him closer. The slight shift in the angle of her hips gave David better purchase, and as he thrust more strongly, she began to shudder around him.

She had no artifice in this either, made no attempt to delay her pleasure, to duel with him for greater displays of self-restraint or control. A soft groan slipped from her, full of desire and longing as she bucked hard against him.

Her pleasure was too much for him. He pounded into her endlessly, the mindless violence of his release coming from a place in him as primitive as it was honest, as it was foreign to his usual habits.

When the storm abated, David lay full length on Letty’s limp form. His mind would not work, his body could barely move.

“Merciful suffering saints,” he breathed, chest heaving as he raised his torso up by slowly straightening his arms. He stared down blankly at the woman in his bed. “God in heaven, Letty…”

“Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain.” She kissed his mouth and used her hands to urge him back down to her. “Though there was certainly something of heaven in that.”

He let her hold him, needing her arms around him, not understanding what had been so
different
. The sexual pleasure had been unprecedented, though he’d barely offered Letty a moment’s teasing beforehand.

Some lover, he.

“I’m too heavy,” he murmured against her shoulder, trying to retrieve his manners.

“Hush,” Letty admonished, her hand stroking the back of his head. “Just hush. You feel lovely.”

Yes, he rather did, feel lovely. He gave up trying to puzzle it out, gave up his attempts at manners, gave up fretting generally, and dozed in contentment on Letty’s sweet body.

When he awoke, he was still right there, lying heavily over her, his cock slipping from her sex while she continued stroking the back of his head. Her hand stilled on his nape when he gazed down at her. She wore such an expression of affection that David felt… shy.

Also profoundly pleased.

“Cloth,” he muttered. He levered off of her, retrieved a basin and towel from on top of his bureau, and brought them to the bed. His own ablutions were brisk and efficient, but when he wrung out the towel and gazed down at Letty, he was momentarily at a loss.

“You are going to be so sore.” He held the cool cloth to her sex. Multiple continents of erotic experience, and he’d fallen on her like a beast. Even in her inexperience, she had to know she’d been ill-used.

“Stop mumbling. Get under these covers, lest you take a chill.” Letty held up the covers for him as he climbed back into bed. If he touched her again, he might become aroused, or possibly weep, so he curled up on his side, facing her.

“Letty Banks, I have never before had to apologize for my conduct in bed, and yet—”

She put her fingers over his lips. “You don’t have to now. I don’t want to know that polite, careful, controlled man who can find his pleasure without engaging his passions. I want to be in bed with
you
.”

“You make me sound like a courtesan.” Or like a viscount who managed his way through life.

Letty’s thumb brushed over his nipple, and she studied the effect of her touch. “You aren’t a courtesan, but you are as careful as one.”

“Not with you.” David rolled to his back, turning his head to regard her. “Would you like me to take you home now?” Lest he abuse her generosity yet more.

She left off playing with him, her expression suggesting he’d blundered again. “What I would like, is to be held.”

And she’d wanted somebody to call her wench. He threaded an arm under her neck. “Then come here, Letty Banks. Come here and let me hold you.”

She wrapped her arm around his waist, hiked a knee over his thighs, and let him hold her.

***

“By the time I was thirteen, I hated the entire New Testament by heart.”

David’s hand on Letty’s neck paused, while across the room, a shower of sparks shot up the fireplace flue. “That is a lot of hate for one very young lady, Elizabeth Temperance Banks.”

He’d apparently read her signature, and even murmured her name twice in the throes of passion. Letty carefully did not remark on the pleasure of being called by her Christian name.

“When your papa’s the vicar, there’s a lot of New Testament,” Letty said, and such was David’s ability to encourage confidences that she didn’t roll over and draw the covers over her head. “I hated soup grown cold because grace took so long. I hated kneeling, my left knee in particular hates kneeling to this day. I hated Sundays, because the weather is always fine on Sundays until services are over, and then it’s miserable. I hated and hated and hated.”

While her brother Daniel had learned to love.

David’s hand resumed its slow, soothing caress of her nape. “Most adolescents are rebellious. My aunts were determined I should go to university, but I pouted and sulked and raged until they let me go to sea for several years as a surgeon’s apprentice.”

Letty was at sea, though with David spooned around her in his big bed, she was also firmly anchored. “I haven’t discussed my childhood in years.” Hadn’t had anybody to discuss it with.

“You’ve been preoccupied with survival. Given your upbringing, I’m surprised any of the local boys were brave enough to sin with you. Was your foray into romance another rebellion?”

Of course it was, though Letty hadn’t taken the time to realize that. “He wasn’t a boy. I sinned with the curate, of course. Isn’t that how the farce is usually cast?”

She must have surprised her worldly, sophisticated lover, because he gathered her against him, bringing the scent of country-washed sheets and freshly bathed man closer. “Letty, I am so sorry.”

Because her back was to David’s chest, the tears that rose up didn’t need to be dashed away. “Not as sorry as I was.”

Sorry, humiliated, bewildered, and hurt. Very hurt. When David rearranged her so she lay along his side, Letty hadn’t the strength to thwart him.

“You loved him.” David used the sheet to dab at her cheeks. “Must I find this wretch and call him out for you?”

What a hearteningly violent offer. “You need not. Hell should await such a one as him, or so I hope. I did not love him. I flirted with him, and he made promises, and all I could think was I would be out from under my father’s roof if those promises were real. The curate was handsome—there’s a rule somewhere that all penniless curates must be handsome—and when I told him I wasn’t interested in further dealings with him, he went to my father and confessed our misdeeds. I was so stupid, so painfully, wretchedly stupid.”

David kissed her stupid, damp cheek. “You were not stupid. You were young, and he was wicked. The curate told your father that your charms had tempted him beyond his strength, that he repented sincerely of his lapse, and that he’d offered you holy matrimony, but in your wantonness, you’d refused him. He saw no recourse but to seek the forgiveness and guidance of his spiritual superior, who happened to be your father. And there you were, caged between a lying, self-serving bastard, and your father’s judgment. If the man’s not dead, I can make him wish he were.”

Maybe this was what had allowed Letty to join David Worthington in his bed. All that exquisite tailoring and all those fine manners hid a savagery Letty found attractive—an honorable savagery.

“He eventually became a vicar.” Daniel, who’d made it a point to keep up with church gossip, had worried that the news might
upset
her. He hadn’t been as reluctant to tell her of the man’s eventual death from natural causes.

David’s caresses trailed over her hair, and beneath Letty’s cheek, his heart beat in a steady tattoo.

“As a physician, I became familiar with a number of poisons. I’ve always thought a slow poison would be a good revenge. One could watch the victim fading. You might bear that in mind for future consideration. In any case, I’m glad you didn’t marry him.”

The fire in David’s room was no paltry bed of embers, but it did not cast enough light that Letty could fathom his expression. “You’re glad because I’m available for romping with you now?”

And was this romping, exchanging memories and regrets naked under the covers as the fire burned down?

“A mere romp would never trust me with her cold soup and sore knees, Letty Banks. I’m glad, because if you had married that curate, then night after night, you would have been required to offer your body to a man you did not respect, a man who did not respect you. The law would not have protected you should he have become violent or diseased. On the path you chose instead, you were intimate with a man you at least felt a passing fondness for.”

She had not loathed Herbert. He’d been bluff, self-indulgent, and generous for show rather than out of good-heartedness, but not mean. “You aren’t… wrong,” she said.

“I’m right,” David rejoined, kissing the center of her chest. “If a protector’s attentions become distasteful, you can send him on his way. There’s nothing he can say to it. The life you’ve chosen is hard, but you’ve kept a control over your fate and a dignity the curate’s wife would never have had.”

Everything in Letty came to a still point, as if she could strain to hear a far-off, faint angel chorus over the braying of the parson in his pulpit. “You think I made the right choice?”

Because if even one person agreed with Letty’s choice, even one, then she might hold on to that dignity in truth.

“I know you did. Also the more difficult choice. Imagine the pity you would have been showered with when your husband strayed again. Imagine the piety ascribed to you, the martyrdom, when some other sweet, sheltered young lady tempted him to sin yet again. And again. And again. Like a physician, a man of the cloth has private access to women at their most vulnerable. Your curate knew that.”

Letty sat up, the better to reenvision her entire adult life. “I would have hated that. I would have been filled with hate, every day. For my own husband—for
myself
.” And raising children in such a household would have made the whole awful, sordid business worse.

David sat up beside her, hiking his knees and wrapping his arms around them. “I came to hate the woman I married.”

Letty’s thoughts stopped midflight, knocked out of the sky as if by a raptor. “You’re
married
?”

Eight

So great was David’s focus on the admission Letty’s honesty had provoked, that her dismay took a moment to penetrate.

“And if I
am
married?”

“Then we are not lovers.” Letty started to scramble off the bed, as if David were that deceitful, treacherous cleric from her youth, or something worse.

“My wife is dead.”

She stopped, one leg over the side of the bed. “Dead?”

And because he was desperate for Letty to get back under the covers, he added, “Neither she nor the child survived childbirth by more than a few hours.” The words no longer hurt the way they should, which was an entirely new sort of pain.

“They died nearly a decade ago and an ocean away. I’d finished my medical studies as a proper physician, and thought to practice in the New World. I was smitten, not with the lady herself so much, though she was a comely young widow, but with the idea that somebody might stand with me through all of life’s vicissitudes.”

That
anybody
might stand with him. Fortunately, he’d given up on that bit of foolishness.

Letty resumed her place beside him on the bed. “Lifelong loyalty and fidelity are quaint notions. Others have found them appealing.” She rubbed his bare back, the way a fellow rider might have after a bad fall in the hunt field, to help him regain his wind.

“Though her family hid it from me when I courted her, the lady had a fondness for the bottle, and all my efforts to limit her consumption only provoked her into drinking more. She’d already conceived by the time I’d admitted the magnitude of the problem.”

He managed to sound as if he recited a case history, but this small tragedy still didn’t feel like a case history. With Letty sitting on the bed beside him, he admitted he never wanted it to.

She mashed her nose against his arm. “You were not stupid. You were young, and she was wicked.”

Her misappropriation of his words gave him a reluctant smile. “Wench.”

The hand on his back slowed. “I’m sorry. I’m not sorry you’re free to be in this bed with me now, but I’m sorry you were hurt.”

“My pride was devastated. I was a physician, a healer, and my own child—” A tiny, beautiful scrap of life, who had fought hard for a few hours and then fought no longer.