The Earl's Mistress (44 page)

He was tired of leaving her bed. Tired of leaving
her
.

Tired of his worn and empty life.

But Isabella’s life—her rich, new life, full of choice and promise—was just beginning.

He drew a deep breath and smiled into her eyes. “Well, you do not really need me now, Isabella,” he said, giving her hands a reassuring squeeze. “Not to keep the girls safe; not with the sort of money you’ll have.”

“W-what do you mean?”

“You can give Jemma and Georgie the world, my dear,” he said, “and hire enough solicitors to drag Everett into court and keep him there for the rest of his natural life. But he won’t bother now, because he knows the Flynt fortune will never be his. His only hope was to keep you poor and beaten down. To get you to marry him before you learned the truth.”

Suddenly, she shivered. “Dear God, Anthony,” she said. “I owe you . . .
everything
.”

He lifted her hand to his mouth and pressed his lips to it. “You owe me nothing, my love.”

“Oh, I do, but I can still hardly make sense of this,” she said. “Indeed, I won’t believe it until . . . well, I don’t know what would persuade me, honestly. But all I can think of is that I am so grateful it was just the money, Anthony.”

He frowned, puzzled. “I’m afraid, my love, that I do not follow.”

“I’m relieved it was because of the money that Everett wanted me,” she said. “
It was just the money.
It was not . . . something vile and unspeakable. It had nothing to do with Jemma or Georgie.”

He understood what went unsaid. “Oh, my poor girl,” he murmured, drawing her into his arms. “This has been one of the worst days of your life, I do not doubt. And now this strange twist of fate. Your head must be spinning.”

In his embrace, she shrugged wanly. “I don’t really care about the money,” she said, burying her face against the turn of his neck. “I care only that I am free of Everett, and that you are . . .”

“Yes?” he quietly encouraged.

She held perfectly still for a long moment. “What did you mean, Anthony, by what you said to Everett?”

“Oh, I’ve said a lot of things to Everett today,” he said grimly, “and I meant every damn word.”

Slowly, she pushed away from his chest, her hands set to the front of his silk waistcoat. “What did you mean,” she clarified, “when you said . . . that you w-would marry me?”

He held her gaze very steadily then, and carefully considered his words. “I meant just what I said; that I would marry you to keep you safe from him,” he whispered. “But more than that, I meant that I
wanted
to marry you. I meant that I love you. Madly. Passionately. My soul, I feel, is so thoroughly subsumed within yours, Isabella, that I cannot envision a life without you.”

“Oh,” she said quietly, her voice catching. “Oh, my. How utterly . . . romantic you sound, Anthony.”

He tipped her chin back up with one finger. “But you do not have to
marry
me, Isabella,” he said. “Now that we’ve found Colfax first, Everett will not be back to trouble you. That’s what I meant, my dear, when I said you no longer need me. You don’t need me to protect you from Everett. His game is up.”

“And what about . . .
your
game?” she murmured, dropping her gaze seductively. “Is it up?”

He drew her hard against him then and kissed her—kissed her for a very long time, with his tongue and his hands and his heart—even as he prayed he would do the right thing by her. He kissed her until she was breathless and her hair was tumbling down. Until she was pressing her breasts fully to his chest, practically crawling in his lap.

It was all he could do to maintain decency; to restrain himself from pushing her back onto the sofa and rutting like some beast. He had the most dreadful fear of losing her, but never would he lie to her.

When at last she broke the kiss, her eyes gone dark with desire, he set her a little away.

“I have
never
played games with you, Isabella,” he said hoarsely. “What burns between us—oh, love, it is no game. It is deadly serious. And it will never be over—
never
—marriage or no.”

“But d-do you wish to marry me?” she asked, her voice almost inaudible.

“More than anything,” he said fiercely. “I love you, Isabella. I cannot—no, I
will not
live without you. And I will never let another man have you. Yes, I want to make a life with you. A family with you. And yet I’m scared of it all the same.”

“And I love you,” she said quietly. “Moreover, I am not scared. Not in the way you mean. I will be fine bearing children; I know it with certainty. But I will not be fine without you. That, Anthony, is the thing that might destroy me.”

He cupped her face between his hands. “But again, my love, I need you to understand that you do not have to marry me,” he said more stridently. “I am yours. And you—God help you—you are mine.
Mine
. I would have throttled Everett with my bare hands before I’d have seen you go to him. Do you understand? As I would throttle any man who dared try to take you from me.”

She looked at him almost pleadingly. “Anthony, what are you saying?”

“That you are wealthy, Isabella, and safe. Safe from Everett. Safe from hardship and poverty. Safe from, to a large extent, even the rumor mill, because wealth is society’s greatest insulator,” he added. “Moreover, my love, you do not have to . . . to run the awful risk that marriage brings.”

“The risk of childbed,” she said. “That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

He squeezed his eyes shut. “Yes,” he rasped. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

“But, oh, Anthony, I want more than anything to have children,” she whispered. “
Your
children. Children to play with Lissie and Georgie and Jemma. But I want you more, even, than that.” She gave a nervous laugh. “I think I want you on any terms. However I must take you.”

He kissed her again, more gently now.

“Yes,
that,
” she said throatily, drawing away and letting her gaze fall to her lap. “I want you, and what you can give me. What
only
you can give me. Do you understand, Anthony?”

“All that,” he murmured, brushing his lips over her temple, “and children, too?”

“I am going to be wealthy,” she said. “Yes, then. I want it all. Is that not what wealthy people say? Lady Petershaw always did.”

He threw back his head and laughed. “Then God help
me,
” he said. “Taking lessons from
La Séductrice,
are you?”

“Actually, I have been taking lessons—or at least advice—from her for some time now,” Isabella confessed.

He managed to laugh. “Actually, I had noticed,” he confessed. Then he considered what next to say. “Well,” he finally added, “I had better do this properly.”

Her gaze followed him to his wall safe, hidden within his bookshelf.

“What are you doing?” she asked as he piled the
Encyclopædia Britannica
on his desk.

He made her no answer but instead unlocked the safe behind the books and returned to the sofa.

“Isabella Glaston Aldridge,” he said, going down on one knee, “I humble myself before you. I am a bad man, and not worthy of your goodness or your beauty. But will you have me for better or for worse? Will you marry me and live out your days doing my wicked bidding, and bearing my children?”

“It sounds like such a bargain when you put it that way,” she said. “Yes, Anthony. I will marry you, with the understanding that sometimes—
sometimes
—the wicked bidding will be mine.”

“Yes, that financial independence is going to your head already, I see,” he murmured.

With that, he produced a ring of half-carat amethysts mounted around a diamond that looked large enough to span from one knuckle to the next.

“Very well, my love,” he said, taking her left hand lightly in his, “I love you more than life itself. And I will marry you—and yes, do your wicked bidding—under one ironclad condition.”

Her fingers already outstretched, Isabella drew them back an inch. “What one condition?”

He looked at her, all the teasing gone from his eyes. “That you take every penny of the Flynt fortune, however much it is, and put it in trust for your sisters,” he said, “and, if you wish, our children. But I do not want it; not a sou. And Lissie does not need it. Do you understand, Isabella, how important this is to me?”

“Very well, yes,” she said on a laugh, “but you act as if it will be millions.”

“Regardless of the amount, my love,” he said, “you have promised? If you cannot promise me this, I must reconcile myself to nothing but a long and torrid
affaire de coeur
with you.”

“Yes, then,” she said more solemnly. “I have promised.”

He slipped the ring a little awkwardly onto her finger. “Then I promise to be a faithful and devoted husband,” he said solemnly, “until death do us part.”

Isabella wiggled her finger. “Now that,” she said a little breathlessly, “is a beautiful ring—but a trifle too snug, I fear.”

“I think you’re right,” he agreed, “because you were a good deal thinner, Isabella, when I bought it.”

“Ah,” she said quietly. “At Garrard’s, I suppose?”

“Yes.”

Then Hepplewood bowed his head, lifted Isabella’s hand to his lips, and pressed them lingeringly to her knuckles again.

EPILOGUE

H
epplewood stirred to the sensation of sun dappling his face, shadow and light shifting above him in a warm breeze. Opening his eyes, he blinked up into a canopy of green, then moved to lift his hand as if he might drag the cobwebs of sleep from his face.

But his hand oddly resisted.

He roused to the sound of soft laughter and rolled his head to see Isabella sitting on the blanket beside him.

“
Umpfh,
” he managed to mutter. “Slept, eh?”

“And
snored,
” she accused. “One might have heard the racket all the way up to Thornhill—well, if anyone were home.”

Still drowsy, Hepplewood tried to cut a glance at the manor on the hill to his right. Then realizing his movement was restricted, he finally glanced down at his wrist.

“The devil!” he said.

The witch had bound him.

Trussed him up like some clever little Lilliputian as he slept in the sun, binding him wrist and ankle to the spindles that surrounded the minuscule gazebo—well, those few spindles remaining. The balustrade about them dipped and listed like a drunken sailor in a hurricane. The shingles, too, had long ago flown to the four winds, leaving scarcely a skeleton of rafters above.

Like much of Isabella’s old home, it was little more than a lovely ruin.

Tentatively, he twitched at the thin rope that bound his left ankle. “Meaning to have your wicked way with me again, are you?” he said, grinning as he felt the rot give.

“I mean to bend you to my will, yes,” she said with an airy wave. “Precisely what form that subjugation will take I am still pondering.”

“And the rope?” he asked, amused.

“From the old bothy by the gate.” She tilted her head coquettishly toward the garden’s once-elegant back entrance. “Papa’s gardener always kept it. And now I’ve made you my prisoner.”

He laughed and let his head fall back onto something soft. “Oh, my love, I have long been your prisoner,” he said. “By the way, what is my head resting upon?”

“My underthings. I made you a pillow.”

“Ah.” He glanced at the modest crinoline she’d flung aside. “Most intriguing.”

“I took them off,” she said, “merely to cradle your head.”

“My dear, you are too kind,” he replied.

She grinned. “Actually, I’d hoped to stop the snoring.”

“Kind
and
plainspoken,” he added. “I have indeed married wisely.”

“Stop talking,” she ordered, rising gracefully onto her knees. “You are my prisoner. I am deciding what use to make of you.”

“You already have your drawers off,” he pointed out. “Might I offer an immodest proposal?”

“No,” said his wife sternly, “—or at least not so willingly.”

“Aye,” he murmured, narrowing his gaze against the sun. “Sauce for the goose and all that, eh?”

“Indeed, quite.” She leaned over him, her gaze running avariciously down his length as her dark, feathery lashes dropped suggestively lower.

And although he lay well sated from an earlier romp in the garden, Hepplewood felt a hot rush of longing go twisting deep. His body stirred to sensual awareness—as it inevitably did when she dropped her gaze in just such a fashion.

“On top,” he ordered gruffly.

Isabella drew a finger pensively—tormentingly—down his cheek, and then along his jugular vein. “That sounded dangerously high-handed for a man who’s been tied up,” she said, her voice husky.

“Isabella,” he said more evenly. “Come, love. Just unfasten my—”

“In time, perhaps,” she interjected, drawing nearer.

His coat and waistcoat having been cast off somewhere on the hillside that led down from the house, Hepplewood had drifted off in his shirtsleeves. Leaning over him now, Isabella inched one shirttail free with an almost agonizing deliberation. When the second followed, she bent low and drew her tongue lightly through the hair that trailed up his belly.

“
Umm,
” he moaned, willing himself to lie perfectly still.

She worked her way up, inching the fabric along as she went. And though he suspected the thin ropes had long ago rotted, he let her have her way. By the time the woman was done with him, his forehead had beaded with perspiration, his trousers were open, and his breath was rasping.

“Come, love,” he choked. “Be reasonable.”

Isabella took mercy on him then, gathering her skirts about her knees and straddling him. Then, taking him well in hand, she impaled herself upon his erection on a soft sigh of pleasure. And with her small, pale hands set wide upon his chest, her wedding ring glinting in the sun, they rocked and thrust and whispered words of love unending until they found that inexpressible joy once more.

He came in a shuddering explosion of pleasure, then slowly settled back down from the heavens; back to that place of quiet and peace he had enjoyed at such leisure since his marriage. Isabella was splayed across his chest, gasping, her lustrous hair tumbling down. Slowly, he let his hands fall from her slender waist. Only then did he realize he’d ripped the old ropes asunder.