How To Bed A Baron (5 page)

Serena did not seem to think anything amiss, but accepted his mother’s kiss on her cheek as if it were her due, and started up the staircase without him. Of course, Serena knew very well where the portrait gallery was. They had played there as children, concocting war strategies beneath the gloomy presence of the Barons Farleigh of old.

              Arthur kissed his mother and murmured a distracted good night, before following Serena up the staircase. With his eyes on her delightfully rounded posterior, he did not notice his mother’s cat-in-the-cream smile.

              Serena stood staring at the portrait of his father. The butler had been there before them, for the candles were lit in the gallery, along with the wall sconces. There was not as much light as there would have been come morning, but the sunset still lingered beyond the western facing windows, and Arthur could see his father glaring at him even from the doorway.

              “He was never pleased with me,” Arthur said. “I was a disappointment to him until the day he died.”

              Serena leveled her green gaze on his face, and he felt exposed as he never was in the presence of anyone else. There was no pretense between them, and never had been. She was forthright and lovely as always, more so now that she was a woman, and not a girl. It was a woman’s gaze that took him in, a woman’s eyes that measured him in silence. It was the woman, not the girl of his memories, who spoke.

              “Then your father was a fool.”

              The harsh criticism of the paragon who had ruled over his early life and youth with an iron fist hung in the air between them, lingering in the silence like the tone of a bell. Arthur turned to the portrait of his father, half-expecting the man to step down from it and demand satisfaction, or at the very least, an apology. But the portrait stayed still, for it was as silent and as dead as his father was.

              Serena spoke again into the silence, not giving his father another glance. “You are the best, most honorable man I have ever known. If your father could not see those qualities in you, he was not worthy of his son.”

              Arthur felt a hard knot form at the back of his throat, and he swallowed it. Strong emotion was something he had trained himself to live without. Since his father’s death, he had not even felt anger very often. He felt love for his mother, and sorrow over her illness. He has been somewhat annoyed earlier that morning to be left on the roadside by his intended and her hulking Scot. But Arthur Farleigh was a man in control of himself, as his father had taught him to be. Only today, in this woman’s presence, had feelings he had long suppressed rise up. They did not come as a long-dried spring, gently seeping from the ground, but overcame him like a river’s torrent.

              Arthur felt the tears in his eyes, the first he had shed since he was a boy, when Serena had first gone away. She was at his side then, the generous bounty of her breast pressed against his arm. Her slender arms went around him, as no one else would have dared to do, and her lips were on his cheek, pressing close, taking away the one tear that had fallen.

              “I am sorry for your loss,” she said. “I know you loved him, even if he was an ass.”

              Arthur drew her close, burying his face in the fragrant wealth of her auburn hair. He shook with the need to touch her, as well as the myriad feelings seeing her again had brought to him. He felt for one horrible instant as if he were drowning, as if Serena Davenport were the only thing on God’s green earth holding him up.

              Then she raised her lips to his, and kissed him.

Chapter Six

Serena did not know what possessed her. Arthur should have been a near-stranger, after so many years apart. But her heart did not know it, and her head went unheeded as she acted like a brazen, wanton woman and pressed herself against him. At first she thought to comfort him, but when her lips touched his cheek, she felt the old fire in her belly that she had felt only once before, when she was eighteen and he had kissed her, asking her to stay.

              She had not been free to marry him then, and she knew that could not marry him now. But she was a woman now, and about some things, she could make her own choices.

              Serena felt his arms go around her as soon as she stepped close. They tightened only when her lips moved to his.

              The taste of him was sweet, a long-remembered warmth that she had longed for since the day she left him. He tasted of braised quail and honeyed carrots. He tasted of sunlight. He tasted of home.

He even smelled like sunlight. Not just his clean linen, but the warmth of his skin drew her as the sun draws a sunflower. Serena had taken a lover once before, but the entire encounter had not moved her as much as the touch of Arthur's lips on hers.

              Though his arms were around her, she could feel his reluctance in the lines of his body as she moved against him. Serena wondered for one moment if he might pull away, if his honor would compel him to set her aside.

              She opened her mouth under his, tightening her grip, and felt his resistance begin to give way. Arthur drew back from her to take a breath. “I should not touch you,” he said. “In all honor, I must let you go.”

              But still, he did not pull away, and she nestled closer, the heat of his body like a brick in winter, warming her through to her bones. She felt the first deep stirring of desire she had ever felt in her life, and she knew now why men were so obsessed with lust, and with opera dancers. If it led them to feel even a quarter of the heat she felt with Arthur in her arms, they must seek it everywhere they went.

              Serena was unable to swallow her smile in spite of the serious look on his face. She knew that even now, with the fire rising between them, Arthur Farleigh was doing his best to push her aside, and to cling to honor. She decided to speak for him, as she had always done in childhood.

              “I know you must find a schoolroom miss to marry,” she said. “I know you need a young girl to bear and raise your children. But there are no young girls here tonight. Only me. I am your friend, as you are mine. I’d like to walk this path with you, a man I trust, a man who holds me in esteem and respect. Will you offer me that gift, or have I been a fool?”

              She waited for him to speak, not knowing what she would do if her turned her away.

Arthur knew that he would marry this woman.

              She wore his ring out of kindness now, but from the moment he had taken her in his arms as he had always longed to do, Arthur knew that he would never let her go.

              Serena Davenport might want to travel the world and dig up the past all over Europe, and he would follow her to the ends of the earth if that was her wish. He would raise his heir in a tent beside an open furrow in the ground, watching while his wife unearthed wonders for the next generation of scholars to marvel at. He would use any influence he had among the elite at Oxford and with the Royal Societies to see to it that her work was not only accepted, but taken seriously. Arthur Farleigh knew all this in one sudden flash, as the light of knowledge came into the mind of Adam when he first ate from the forbidden fruit.

              She did not love him as he loved her. He put that hard truth out of his mind as soon as he acknowledged it. That fact would no doubt cause him pain in the years to come, but she loved him a little, as a friend, at least, as a man who held her respect, if not her heart. Arthur would force himself to be content with that. If his short time with Catherine Middlebrook has taught him anything, it was that he had waited too many years for Serena already.

              He did not make any declarations standing there beneath his father’s portrait. He had seen already that day how fickle women were, to bring a man to ride to Gretna Green only to stop when the first Scot showed up along the roadside. Serena was a woman used to caring for others, and used to getting her own way. When he could think again, when the blood had returned to his brain, sometime the next day, he would figure out how to woo her and how to win her. For now, he said nothing, but drew her close and kissed her again.

              Serena leaned back in his arms, letting him take all of her weight. They were of a height, as no other woman he had ever known had ever been. He wondered if their first child would be a boy, and if the boy would wear her red hair or his dark gold. He wanted to see that child in that moment almost as badly as he wanted to make love to her, and bring that child into the world. He wondered what flights of fancy this homecoming had taken him to, and he pushed aside all such thoughts of the future, and kissed her again.

              “Will you have me here?” Serena asked, her green eyes bright with untapped desire.

              Arthur felt a chill to hear those words from her lips, and wondered what she must have seen alone and unprotected in the wilds of Italy, save for her elderly father who was useless in anything but scholarship. Arthur tightened his arms around her until he saw her eyes widen, and he felt more a man than he ever had as he fought his jealousy down. “I don’t know who you’ve known, and I don’t care. But with me, you are a sacred being. I will have you in my bed.”

              She shivered against him, and he wondered for a moment if his ardent speech had changed her mind. But then Serena pressed her beautiful breasts against his chest again, and kissed him.

Chapter Seven

Serena wondered what had happened to the steady, staid man she had known all her life. For with desire etched on the lines of his face, Arthur Farleigh did not look as he always had.

She had never noticed before how beautiful he was. She had known it as an afterthought, as something that had nothing to do with her. But now that he was offering to become her lover, she saw the masculine beauty of him, his strong arms and wide shoulders, and she rejoiced in it.

              The heat of his touch made her shiver even as he stepped away from her. He reached out and placed his hands on her upper arms, steadying her so that she would not fall. She wanted to collapse onto that hard rosewood floor, and drag him down on top of her. But she remembered from their childhood that, on the rare occasions when he wore that implacable expression, he would take over their dealings. For one of the rare times in both their lives, Arthur Farleigh was in charge.

              And she liked it.

              He took her hand without another word, and drew her along behind him. He was stealthy and quiet, his booted feet making no sound on the staircase as they made their way down to the bedrooms on the second floor. Once, when she heard a maid coming down the hallway, rattling a box of coal, Arthur moved before she could think, drawing her into a tiny sitting room. She could not make out the room itself, for the drapes were drawn and the sun was almost down, but she felt the hardwood of the door against her back as Arthur Farleigh pressed her up against it and kissed her again.

              He came away from her, his lips close to her ear. She wanted to tell him to take her then and there, that she could not wait. But before she could speak, he opened the door again and drew her farther down the corridor.

              He stopped outside of his own suite of rooms, and drew her inside.

              There was a fire lit in the grate, though it was early June. The firelight gave the room a warm cheer that candlelight alone would not have. Arthur closed the door and locked it, leaving the key in the keyhole so that no one passing by might look in.

              He turned to her, and she thought he might sweep her off her feet and carry her to the bed, or have her there on the beautiful Aubusson carpet. But he was Arthur Farleigh, and he did neither.

              He took both of her hands in his, and kissed each one, then looked into her eyes. She had forgotten how blue his eyes were, the color of the first light of a spring sky, when all the world was new, and anything was possible. Standing in that room alone with him, for the first time since she had gone away, she felt like that again.

              Serena felt an odd lump form in her throat. She was not one for weeping. But Arthur was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. She had loved him all the time she was away. She would always love him, even after she left him to his debutante wife, whoever that young woman would turn out to be. But now, here, in this moment, she knew herself to be blessed, that she might stand alone with a man like him and feel a love like this.

              “I love you,” she said. “Whatever comes after.”