Lady Lyte's Little Secret (20 page)

Though he recalled making love with her twice during the previous night, his body now ached for Felicity as though they’d been long parted. Had it not been for the likelihood of someone blundering in on them, he might have tossed one of the tiger skins on the sitting room floor and seduced the mistress of Trentwell, then and there.

“Please be sensible, Thorn.” She averted her face and made a token effort to retreat from his embrace. “Don’t make this any harder than it must be. And don’t pretend my fortune is the only thing that stands between us.”

Deprived of her lips, Thorn set about the delightful occupation of drizzling kisses up and down her slender, sensitive neck.

“I’m tired of being sensible,” he whispered as his lips ravished one delicate ear. “I want to make it so hard for us to part that we’ll do
anything
in order to stay together. I don’t care what stands between us. I can’t abide the thought of any other man in your life. Nor can I abide the thought of
my life
without you.”

Felicity drew back from him, just enough to let their gazes meet.

The quickening wonder of a thousand springtimes glowed in her eyes. Yet Thorn sensed something else, too. The bated hope of a child watching a beautiful but flimsy soap bubble waft on the breeze.

At last she risked shattering their fragile moment with a few quiet words. “The young man you saw me talking to in the gallery, he’s not what you think he is.”

Thorn struggled to retain his composure. “What is he to you, then?”

A shadow of old pain and humiliation darkened her features. “Rupert Norbury’s mother was one of my husband’s many mistresses.”

If she had brained him with the heavy jade tortoise carving from the curio cabinet, Thorn could not have been more dazed.

He remembered the flippant reference Felicity had once made to her late husband’s illegitimate progeny. Seeing one of them, and sensing a faint echo of the anguish she had suffered on their account was another matter entirely.

“Y-you let him stay here?” Made him some sort of allowance, too, if the young rascal’s wardrobe was any indication.

Felicity gave a reluctant nod. “Mister Norbury seems to think he has a better right to Trentwell than I have.”

“Preposterous!” For reasons he could not fathom, Thorn found himself no less indignant for understanding Rupert Norbury’s true position in Felicity’s household. “Why, the fellow’s a walking, talking insult to you.”

“This is the only home he’s known for many years. I hadn’t the heart to deprive him of it.” She made it sound as though she was admitting a vice. “Beneath my show of sophistication, I’m rather a sentimental ninny.”

“I warn you, madam.” He gave her nose a delicate tap with his forefinger. “I won’t stand idly by and hear the woman I love maligned.”

“The woman you love.” Felicity savored the words on her tongue and appeared to find their flavor very sweet. “She is a fortunate creature, indeed.”

“Not half as fortunate as I, if she could return my feelings.”

“She fears she does return them, Mr. Greenwood.” A faint sigh escaped Felicity’s exquisite lips. “But she fears so much else besides. You may have no designs on her fortune, but there are those who would claim you do. Could a respectable man like you abide being the subject of vicious gossip?”

Before he could stop himself, Thorn flinched.

“You see?” Felicity raised her hand to brush against his side whiskers. Not as their usual signal for lovemaking, Thorn sensed, but as a gesture of endearment and wary trust. “I would feel the same about malicious tattle that the trade heiress had bought herself another man.”

Thorn shook his head vigorously. “No one with any sense would believe that a woman of your beauty and charm needed to purchase a husband.”

The sweet beginning of a genuine smile lit Felicity’s face with a soft, rosy glow. “And no one with any judgment would believe you capable of dishonor.”

“In that case,” said Thorn, “if all the people with
sense and good judgment know better, who are we to care what spiteful fools may speculate?”

When he moved to claim a kiss, Felicity drew back. “There is still the matter of children, my dear. Don’t pretend you can shrug that one off so easily.”

“No, I cannot.” Thorn hadn’t consciously weighed his decision, but the problem had brooded in his heart. Now he knew what he must do. “I won’t deny wanting a family of my own, very much. I believe I have it in me to be a good father.”

Was that part of what made him care so much—the need to be the kind of father he had lacked?

“Yet, weighed against the prospect of losing you from my life…I fear even that falls short.”

Felicity stared at him, her eyes blinking furiously to dispel a faint but persistent mist in them. “W-what are you saying, Thorn?”

What else could he say? “I know these aren’t the only things that stand in the way of a future for us. But if we weigh each one as I have done, I believe the scale will always fall in our favor.”

He dropped to one knee. “Don’t let us part, Felicity…ever. Please say you’ll marry me.”

As the silence between them swelled like the heavy hush before a storm, Thorn watched fondness and faith war with doubt and distrust for possession of Felicity’s heart.

Why had he blurted it out like that—so bald and colorless? What self-respecting woman would accept such a proposal, let alone a woman who had reason to doubt the sincerity of any marriage offer?

At that moment, Thorn would have sold his birthright to borrow Weston St. Just’s glib tongue for five
minutes. Just long enough to ask the most important question of his life with persuasive eloquence.

As he steeled his spirit in vain against the anguish of her rejection, Felicity gave him her answer.

The second most beautiful word in the English language.

“Perhaps.”

Chapter Fourteen

P
erhaps
.

A soft, seductive echo of her answer to Thorn’s unexpected proposal whispered through Felicity. Not just in her thoughts, but in her heart and along her veins, it made a kind of bewitching music.

Perhaps he had bewitched her.

She hadn’t meant to give him false encouragement. She’d intended to reply with a firm, unswayable
no
. But his words had sounded so reasonable, his voice so sincere. The glow of passion in his eyes and the tender ardor of his touch had worked an innocent magic over her. One that had proven too potent to resist.

If she had not exercised the waning strength of her will at the last moment, the answer that passed her lips might have been a thoroughly impossible
yes
.

The look on Thorn’s face was enough to prevent her from dashing his hopes.

“I’ll be content with
perhaps
.” He spoke softly and without haste, all the while making a determined effort to curb his smile. As if he feared any show of eagerness might change her mind.

Yet he could not keep himself from adding, “For now.”

He would kiss her, Felicity knew, if she gave him even a crumb of encouragement. Once he began, she might never summon up the resolve to stop him.

“The tea!” she cried. “We should have some before it grows cold.”

Thorn glanced toward the well-laden tray. “We haven’t exactly been taking regular nourishment since we left Bath, have we?”

“We must compensate for that.” Felicity tugged him toward the settee.

The familiar rituals of pouring and serving might give her a welcome opportunity to regather her tattered composure. It would be futile to discuss matters of consequence between bites of dainty sandwiches and sips of tea, when a weighty remark might be countered with an offer of cake or a query about how many lumps of sugar Thorn preferred.

Felicity craved the sanctuary of polite, meaningless table talk, during which she might sort out her new, uncertain feelings. She reached for the teapot as if it were a lifeline, and she were atoss in a stormy sea.

Her hand trembled a little as she poured the steaming amber liquid. “Cream or lemon?”

“I never took anything but cream for the longest time.” Thorn spoke with an intensity that scarcely befit such a commonplace remark.

Curiosity prompted Felicity to lift her gaze from the tea tray and meet the compelling look he focused upon her. He was talking about something more than the tea….

“Lately, I find the piquancy of lemon much more to my taste.”

A peculiar sensation crinkled along Felicity’s shoulders and up her neck.

“Lemon.” The flesh of her mouth tingled as if she had just bitten into that tart fruit. Employing a pair of tiny silver tongs, she lifted a slice from the bowl and deposited it in Thorn’s tea.

“Sugar or honey?” she asked. “We keep our own bees at Trentwell.”

“Trentwell honey?” Thorn seemed to savor a drop of it on his tongue. “That sounds too sweet to resist.”

Just like every word out of this man’s mouth, Felicity mused as she drizzled a measure of thick golden syrup into his cup. Whether remarking about the refreshments, beguiling her with stories of his family or urging her to make a permanent place for him in her life, Thorn Greenwood appealed to her in a way no other man ever had.

Their fingers brushed as he took the delicate cup and saucer she offered him.

How ridiculous to feel a tremor of suppressed excitement over a chaste, casual touch, when she’d taken the man into her bed on a regular basis for many weeks. But there it went, all the same—unbidden. Overpowering her carefully cultivated self-control in a way that both roused and frightened her.

An odd but potent fancy rose in her mind. Of she and Thorn sitting in this very room taking tea thirty years hence, with a large family gathered around them. The kind of family Felicity had never known but for which she’d secretly yearned her whole life.

She could almost hear their laughter and good-natured quarreling. It did not take much imagination to picture Thorn’s hair thinner on top and liberally frosted with silver. Nor the deeply etched lines that
would fan out from the corners of his eyes whenever he smiled. She imagined herself a bit stouter with a wrinkle and a white hair to match every one of her husband’s.

Two things did not change in her wishful glimpse of the future. One was the steady glow of affection in Thorn’s eyes, and the other was the giddy spark of desire that leapt within her whenever they touched.

Was not the promise of such a future worth braving whatever obstacles might rear up between now and then? Like Trentwell honey and Thorn’s fond assurances, the notion was too sweet for Felicity to resist.

“Eat up.” She held a plate piled with tea sandwiches. “Then I’ll take you for a look around the rest of the house. We can discuss what we’ll say to Oliver and your sister when they return.”

What would she say to her nephew, Felicity wondered? In good conscience, could she advise him to resist the powerful lure of love, when she was on the verge of surrendering her own heart?

Thorn nodded toward the window where fat raindrops beat a muted tattoo against the glass, driven by a brisk southwest wind.

“I suppose the first thing we’ll say is, ‘Go change out of those wet clothes, the pair of you.”’ He glanced at Felicity. “I expected they’d be back long before this. Hadn’t we ought to send someone out to find them and fetch them home?”

Her thoughts had already turned in that direction. Before Thorn had finished speaking, she pulled on the bell cord to summon a footman from the servants’ hall.

If Oliver and Ivy looked suitably contrite and sufficiently in love, Felicity decided, she might intervene on their behalf. If Thorn agreed to let them undertake
a proper courtship, away from tattling tongues in Bath, the young lovers might well be relieved to abandon this elopement nonsense in favor of a family wedding in a few months time.

A double wedding…perhaps?

He was going to have the devil’s own time looking properly severe when he reproved his scapegrace little sister and her beau, Thorn decided some time later while Felicity conducted him on a tour of the great house.

If not for the necessity of chasing down the young runaways, he and Felicity would now be going about their separate lives in Bath. He, nursing a broken heart and trying without success to forget her, wrongly convinced that she’d never cared twopence for him.

In one elegant salon, he caught sight of his reflection in a looking glass framed with gold filigree. Thorn scarcely recognized the fellow staring back at him with a daft-looking grin on his face.

“Don’t tell me you’re growing vain, Mr. Greenwood.” Felicity’s face appeared in the mirror with Thorn’s.

For an instant he gazed at the image of them together and savored the wonder of it. Felicity’s reflection cast him a flirtatious little smile.

“Like something out of a French fairy tale, isn’t it?” She nodded toward the ornate looking glass. “Do you suppose if we ask it who’s the fairest in the land, it will tell us?”

Thorn wrapped his arms around her and bestowed a kiss on the base of her neck. “It’s already showing me the fairest one.”

“I might accuse you of flattery.” She inclined her
head toward his, nuzzling his hair with her cheek. “But I’ve never known you to exaggerate the truth.”

“Nor am I now.” He’d have been perfectly content to stand there for hours, sating his senses on the sight, sound, touch, scent and taste of her. In a state of complete…felicity.

No doubt about it, the woman was aptly named.

“Wasn’t there another magic mirror?” Felicity mused, raising her hand to rest against his cheek in a proprietary caress. “One that showed a person their heart’s dearest desire?”

“A remarkable object, this glass of yours.” Thorn gazed into it and beheld his heart’s dearest desire—the two of them, together. “It scores on both counts.”

Even better, he decided, for this was no magical illusion.

“Would you like to see the library next?” Felicity asked in a high, breathless tone that roused Thorn from his modest flight of fancy.

He steered his lips toward her ear, watching her face and his own as he whispered, “Is there any way I might persuade you to conduct me on a tour of…the bedchambers? A magnificent house like this must have some very fine ones.”