Stroke of Genius (31 page)

She cried out, but he didn’t relent.

He was deep inside her when she came, limbs bucking, incoherent sounds escaping her white throat. Her inner walls contracting around him while he held her lovingly impaled. He joined her climax, pumping into her with surprising force for one so lately sated.

Then she collapsed on his chest, dragging in the huge breath she’d been unable to take while locked in passion. Her whole body trembled.

He made hushing sounds, comforting sounds, but was capable of no real speech. She stole his breath and his voice as well as his heart. And yet, their connection made speech unnecessary.

Grace quieted and went as boneless as a cat. She was so still, if he hadn’t been able to feel the steady thump of her heart on his chest, he might have been concerned. He stroked her hair and enjoyed the slow rhythm of her ribs expanding and contracting with each long breath.

Then he heard it. A small, very ladylike snore.

She’d fallen asleep with his cock still inside her. 

He resisted the urge to chuckle. It might wake her. There was time enough for more later. They had all the time in the world.

He pressed his lips on the tousled crown of her head. “I love you, Grace,” he whispered and joined her in dreams before their bodies had a chance to separate.

* * *

“Mam’selle! Are you in there?”

The urgent whisper made Crispin’s eyes open. The rap on his bedchamber door made Grace pop upright beside him. Dawn was breaking through the slits in the heavy damask drapes.

“Oh, no! I didn’t mean to fall asleep.” She scrambled off the bed and pulled the coverlet off with her, wrapping her body toga-style. “Yes, Claudette. I’m here.”

Her maid opened the door, but froze at the threshold when she saw Crispin in the bed. Her pink French lips formed an ‘oh.’

“If you came here to find your mistress, you can’t be truly surprised, can you?” He tucked the sheet around his waist and laced his hands behind his head on his propped up pillows. “Don’t stand on ceremony, girl. Come in, if you’re going to.”

She bustled in then, all business.

“Mam’selle, when I saw that you had not come to your bed last night, I was overcome with the worries. Here. I brought these.”

She opened a small valise and pulled out a fresh chemise and stays for Grace.

“Thank you, Claudette. You’re a godsend.” Grace took the undergarments and disappeared behind a chinoiserie dressing screen.

“What time is it?” she asked, while her maid pulled a morning gown of sprigged muslin from the valise and gave it a vigorous shake.

Claudette draped a pair of pantalets and stockings over the screen. They disappeared behind it amid a rustle of unseen activity. 

“Time for your father and his lordship to go fishing,” Claudette hissed. “I managed to beat them out of the manor, but they are on their way to the pond. If we meet them on the way back, you must say you woke early and have been taking the air or needed to walk or . . .”

“Wanted a quick swive or two with a member of the riff-raff before you settled into ladyship in earnest,” Crispin finished for her.

Grace’s head popped up over the dressing screen. “That’s not fair.”

“No, that’s honest,” Crispin said, a bitter taste rising in his mouth. “It’s life that’s not fair.”

“Crispin, it was not—”

“Please, mam’selle,” her maid interrupted her mistress in her urgency, scurrying behind the screen with the morning gown. “You must hurry. There is no time. Talking, she is something to do later.”

Crispin folded his arms across his chest and waited for Grace to finish dressing. Then he rose from the bed, sheet wrapped around his form. He didn’t want to plead with her. If he had to demand she choose him, it wouldn’t be her free choice. It would be a cheat. And if ever he’d needed to win the game without coercion, it was this time.

 Either he was important to her.

 Or he was not.

 “Hurry, mam’selle.” Claudette buzzed around her mistress like an angry bee. “We just tuck your hair under this bonnet so and
le voila
! You are fit to greet the preacher.”

The maid all but shoved her toward the door.

“Grace.”

She turned to look at him, her eyes huge, dazed, as if the enormity of what they’d done was finally real to her.

“What will you do?”

She ran to him and threw her arms around his waist, burying her face in his bare chest. He hugged her close, daring to believe she’d made her choice.

“Mam’selle!”

Grace looked up at him then, her face crumpling. “I will do what I must. I know you don’t understand, but please be patient. I have to—”

“You have to go now, my lady! Or it is ruin for you and the sack for me for letting it happen.”

The maid actually took her arm and Grace let herself be dragged away. Crispin limped after them, the muscle in his thigh throbbing in agony for the first time since Grace slipped through his French doors last night.

He walked to the large open room he’d been using as his studio and stood at the multi-paned window where the dawn streamed in. Grace and her maid were making their way across the meadow at a sedate pace. Grace even stooped to gather a bunch of bluebells to bolster the maid’s story of an early-morning ramble.

He watched her as she zigzagged up the hillock until she disappeared over the crest. She never turned to look back once.

Crispin was still standing at the window, even though his leg trembled with the effort, when Wyckeham came bearing a breakfast tray from the main house. Cook had sent him a “plate of something,” as Addison had promised. The riff-raff was firmly in his place and all was right with the Dorset world.

Wyckeham made a small noise of surprise when he discovered the pile of Grace’s clothing near the piece Crispin had been sculpting. He wisely refrained from asking any pointed questions.

His manservant gathered up the ruined gown, the stays and chemise, pantalets, and stockings into a neat bundle and carried it over to Crispin. Grace’s warm scent still clung to them.

“What do you want me to do with all this?”

“Burn it,” Crispin snarled and stomped away. “A marchioness never wears the same gown twice.”

Chapter 33

Love is not love unless it is chosen freely.

So why did Pygmalion regret giving Galatea a will of her own?

“You never rise before I ring you, Claudette,” Grace said as she picked her way around the duck pond. Dodging sheep droppings and goose poop at least gave her something to focus on besides the wreck of her life. “What made you check on me so early today?”

“Truth to tell, mam’selle, I was only returning to my little room and thought to see if you were sleeping well before I found my bed.”

“Returning? From where?”

Claudette blushed, something Grace had never seen her do before, not even when explaining the mechanics involved in losing one’s virginity in lurid detail. 

“This wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that Mr. Wyckeham is quartered in the main house, would it?”

“His name, it is Brice, mam’selle,” Claudette said with a sigh. With her French pronunciation of the ‘r’ so deep in her throat, the name sound almost like “Bwice.”

Grace stifled a giggle.

“Brice, now is it? Never say you’ve caught yet another footman’s eye,” Grace said. Whatever else her maid was, her love life was always entertaining and gave Grace a welcome diversion from the thorns in her own.

“
Non
, mam’selle,” she said. “What kind of girl do you take me for? Brice is Monsieur Wyckeham’s name. It is beautiful,
n’est-ce pas
? A saint name, it is and yet I will not hold that against him so long as he does not make to act like one.” 

“Then you and he are reconciled, I take it?”

Claudette smiled again and wiggled her little finger in the air. “Here is where I have him, all wrapped about. And where he will be pleased to be kept.”

“And what of Mr. Allen?”

“Oh, la! Him, I forget to remember so long as Brice behaves himself.”

Her maid had no trouble taking charge of the men in her life. Grace wished Claudette would lend her a bit of whatever enabled her to consistently arrange her
affaires du Coeur
to her liking.

Grace saw her father and Lord Dorset strolling across the exercise yard between the stables, long poles strung over their shoulders. They were headed in Grace’s direction. If she’d delayed leaving Crispin by only a few minutes, they’d have reached the duck pond and would have seen her leaving the cottage in the pearly dawn.

A perverse part of her thought that would’ve been no bad thing. At least, it would have taken the question of how to tell her parents she couldn’t marry the marquess out of her hands. Lord Dorset wouldn’t want her after he learned she was not the virginal bride all men of good breeding sought.

Yet, she couldn’t shame her parents. Last night had been a terrible risk. But a terrific reward as well. Crispin made her feel things no mortal should this side of paradise. And she’d done the same for him, despite her inexperience.

She couldn’t hurt Crispin by delaying matters. His face was a veritable storm cloud when she left him, but surely he realized the situation called for some delicacy.

He hadn’t made things easy for her. There had been no offer of marriage. Now that she thought about it, there hadn’t even been a declaration of love between them.

But he wouldn’t have done those deliciously sinful, adoring things to her if he didn’t love her.

Would he?

Thoughts swarmed in Grace’s brain like a hornet’s nest, angrier and more uncertain by the minute. How difficult would it have been for him to say ‘I love you?’ Even this morning, he could have stopped her from leaving with the right words. But he simply asked her what she was going to do without even presenting her the option of choosing an honorable life with him.

Perhaps his intentions weren’t honorable.

From the moment she first met him, Crispin Hawke had played games. Was that all she’d been to him? When she sought him out and gave herself to him, had she lost one of his games along with her maidenhead? 

“Halloo!” her father called out to her. “You’re bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning.”

Grace blinked back the foolish tears she’d allowed to gather and closed the distance between them with as quick a trot as her narrow column gown would allow. She stood tiptoe to press a kiss to her father’s whiskered cheek. Here at least was someone she was sure loved her.

“Good morning, Papa. My lord.” She dropped a curtsey to Lord Dorset.

“Now, Grace, I thought we settled on you calling me Richard last night,” he said with an easy smile.

Oh, yes. How could she forget such gracious condescension from one so highborn? “You’re right. Forgive me. Good morning, Richard.”

“Just don’t let it happen again,” he said with mock severity. A friendly wink softened his words. “Your father and I are off to drown a few worms. Don’t suppose you’d care to join us?”

The marquess was such a fine gentleman, mannerly and well-spoken. With his title and wealth, he was everything her mother ever dreamed for her. As he gazed expectantly at her, Grace couldn’t help wondering if the butterflies she was missing in her stomach would have been fluttering for the marquess’s benefit, if only she hadn’t met Crispin Hawke first.

“No, the girl never cared a bit for fishing,” her father answered for her. “If she stays, we’ll be forever baiting her hook and listening to her squeal if she gets a nibble.”

Perhaps that was her real problem. Other people had been answering for her all her life and she let them. It was high time she answered for herself. Even if she risked answering incorrectly.

“Thank you, Richard,” she said with a forced smile. “I believe I will try my hand at fishing.”

“Splendid! You, girl.” Richard commandeered Grace’s maid as if by right. “Run up to the stables and find Jeremy. Tell him to bring another kit and tackle box down for your mistress. Off you go and step lively, now.”

Grace nodded at Claudette and she hurried away.

While she listened to the marquess explain the finer points of fishing, Grace strained to keep the smile on her face. Her cheeks hurt after only a few minutes. She wondered what happened if one allowed artificial smiles to live on one’s face for long periods of time.

Would a real smile ever grow in its place?

Or would the face merely grow accustomed to the false one?

When she heard the first clang of Crispin’s hammer echoing over the little valley, she had her answer.

* * *

Mr. Makepeace showed himself an admirable sportsman, casting with a practiced rhythm and flinging his fly into the quiet eddies, places sure to entice a bite. His stringer of lake trout was filling quickly. His daughter, however, was having less luck.

Richard watched Grace fidget with her pole for a good quarter hour. He’d decided to fix her a simple hook with a bobber instead of trying to teach her to cast properly. He doubted the tight little sleeves on her morning gown would allow the range of arm motion needed for a fly cast.