The Mammoth Book of Regency Romance (90 page)

“I did.”

She cocked her head. Always so serious. “I suppose we all doubt ourselves to some degree or another, don’t you think?”

“Or else we’re insufferable, yes.” He brought her closer to his side, and she leaned in towards him. Philippa rarely smiled, and she did not now. He wondered what he could do to change that. She lifted her chin, eyebrows arched when their gazes locked. The deep awareness in her eyes was exactly as he recalled. “I’ve never thought you doubted yourself,” he said. “Why?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, and he fancied she sounded sad. “Quite often.”

“But why?” he asked in a low voice. He lifted a hand to touch her cheek, but didn’t. “Why so sad, Philippa?” he whispered. “What’s made you so melancholy tonight?”

She kept her torso turned towards him. His heart skipped a beat. “If I ask you a question, Alec, will you answer me honestly?”

Dane considered that. While she awaited his reply, in the distance, someone’s hound bayed. He’d learned a thing or two in London. “I cannot promise you that, Philippa.” Her fingers remained on his arm, and he reached over and placed his palm over the top of her hand. “There are subjects about which no gentleman should ever be frank.” Somehow, that seemed the wrong thing to say. “When a lady is concerned.”

Her mouth thinned. “It’s London that’s done this to you. Isn’t it?”

He froze in fear of her remonstrance against his immodest leers. Hell, he was looking even now. She knew the inappropriate direction of his thoughts. She’d always been one to divine his thoughts. “Done what?”

She looked … wistful. “Made you so infernally wise.” She studied him. “I felt it in your letters, you know.” The edge of her mouth quirked down. “Such wisdom in a man so young.”

He laughed. His amusement didn’t bring a smile to her mouth and it didn’t dispel his odd mood, either.

She shook her head. “I’m serious, Alec.” She took a step away, almost as if she were dancing with him. Her gloved hand fell slowly to her side. They hadn’t danced that night. Not even once. That seemed a pity to him now. “Your opinion matters a great deal to me.”

He pulled on his cuffs, but he looked at her from under his lowered eyes. “What wisdom I have is at your disposal.”

“It’s about Captain Bancroft.”

His heart sank. If he told her the truth, she might never forgive him. “Ask me something simpler. Please.”

Her mouth curved; at last a smile. For a moment he succeeded in making her back into the Philippa he’d been writing to all these years. The older woman with a life completely separate from his own. The illusion did not last long. “What would be the good of that, My Lord?”

She turned away, facing the garden and the shadowed forms of the roses. Her shawl drooped to her waist at the back. He found himself staring at the bare skin of her neck and shoulders. Another green satin bow nestled below her shoulder blades. A tendril of her hair had loosened from the curls at the back of her head and dangled just above her nape.

He stood behind her. Close enough to touch that so pale skin. Enough that he could see the curve of her breasts. “Ask me your question, then, and I’ll answer as honestly and politically as I can.”

Philippa bowed her head, then faced him again. Her tongue came out and tapped her lower lip just once. Dane steadied himself. They were friends. They’d practically grown up together. There had never, in all those years, been so much as a hint of sexual attraction between them. Not once.

“I think you’re my only friend.” Her eyes opened wide, and she was looking at him. Really
at him,
and he knew whatever she asked, he would give her the truth. “The only one whose opinion I trust.” She came close enough to rest her hand on his arm. He breathed in the scent of her perfume. “Is it not peculiar that you’re the only person I can think of who understands?”

“What is it you want to ask me about Captain Bancroft?”

She sighed and for a moment looked so miserable his heart broke for her. “You met him tonight. Spoke with him for a while?”

Dane nodded.

Her eyes surveyed his face. There was really no hope of him getting out of this. She’d always been able to tell when he was lying. “What was your opinion of him?”

He steeled himself against a reaction that would betray him before he had a chance to understand why she was asking. “Answer me this first, do you love him?”

She looked away, and he put a finger to her chin and brought her face back to his. His finger had a mind of its own for it slid along the edge of her jaw from the underside of her chin to the point just beneath her ear. Such soft, soft skin.

A part of him was aware that in touching her like this he’d begun a slide into intimacy that would take them well past friendship, if he let it.

“Come now.” He was aware that his touch was a lover’s touch and that his voice … Well … He’d spoken to lovers in just such a voice, hadn’t he? “Your letters mentioned him often enough. If you love him, you don’t need my opinion.”

“Why not?” Her mouth firmed. “Why shouldn’t I ask your opinion of the man I might marry?”

“If you feel guilty for loving a man who is not your late husband, you shouldn’t.”

She blinked several times, and he felt like a heel for his inappropriate reaction. He pulled his clean handkerchief from his pocket and put it into her free hand while she sniffled. “I don’t know. Sometimes I think …”

He took his hand away from her face and, somehow, his errant fingers ended up on her shoulder. On the skin bared by her gown.

The lights in the ballroom were doused now, and he and Philippa stood in shadowed night. He stroked her shoulder and ended up following the line of her collarbone. He shouldn’t be touching her, and yet he was. And she wasn’t moving away. Curious.

“It is difficult to be a woman alone,” she said. She gazed at him. “What was your opinion of him?” Her fingers squeezed the life out of his handkerchief. “The truth. Please.”

Dane sighed. The raw truth was that he hadn’t liked Captain Bancroft at all. “He struck me as reserved.”

Her hand tightened around his arm. “Unvarnished truth, Alec.”

God, yes. If he took her to bed, she would take what she wanted from him. For the first time since the thought had come into his head, he thought perhaps he ought to.

Philippa’s gaze was steady on him. “I am a grown woman and quite capable of coming to my own conclusions whatever you say about him. You won’t convince me of anything I don’t already suspect.”

“Very well.” He ought to put more space between them. He didn’t. “I thought him cold and condescending and insincere in his interactions with me.”

She sighed. “He is a proud man. That is a fault of his, I know. But he admires me, and I suppose I am to be flattered by that.”

“He would be mad not to admire you.” There. Unvarnished truth. “It’s a good match, Philippa. That’s what others are saying.”

“And you? What do you say?”

“That a man like him will do his duty.” He wanted to help her, to make her life turn out as it should, with her safe and happy and secure. She was right — a woman alone, especially a beautiful woman like Philippa, well, there were always difficulties for a woman in her situation. “He’ll look after you.”

She gave a tight nod. “He’s an honourable man.”

“Yes.”

Philippa looked at the sky as if a consultation with the moon would help her through whatever she was thinking. “Shall I make you a confession?”

He took a step closer to her. “You know you may.”

“I do not admire him as I ought.”

He didn’t answer right away and, when he found words, they weren’t the ones he’d planned to say to her. “Do you love him, Philippa?”

She walked away from the house. He went after her, stopping her with a hand to her shoulder. She halted, head bowed. In a low voice, she said, “Life is often more complicated than one wishes it to be.”

Dane stood behind her, scant inches between them. He put his hands on her shoulders. “Don’t marry him, Philippa,” he said into the dark. “Not if you don’t love him. Not if he can’t make you happy.”

“There’s a great deal to admire in him.” Her voice stayed low. “He commanded a ship of the line and was twice commended for bravery, you know.”

Again he trailed his index finger along the top of her shoulder. He watched the tip of his finger moving along her skin. So soft, her skin was. “More unvarnished truth for you, Philippa.” He breathed in. “I didn’t like him.”

More lights inside the house had been extinguished. They were now standing in full darkness, with the moon bright in a cloudless sky casting shadows on to shadows. And he was touching her as a lover might.

“I’ve met officers who served with him.” She didn’t move. No shrug to dislodge his fingers. No step away. “They were sincere in their admiration of him.”

He thought of Captain Bancroft, his dreary grey eyes and the disdain that oozed from him whenever he smiled. Daring you to believe the smile when the truth was in his eyes. “He’s a prig.”

Philippa turned around and they gazed at each other in the dark, with moonlight and the quiet falling soft around them. The light silvered her hair and deepened the shadows beneath her collarbones and between her breasts. Her mouth twitched. “I daresay he is.”

He slid his finger along the side of her throat and by now there was really no denying his caress. She didn’t move. He didn’t stop touching her; the rest of his fingers followed. Along the side of her jaw, the top of her cheekbone. Beneath the ripeness of her lower lip.

“I ought to marry him.” She turned her head away, towards the darkness, and Dane drew a finger along the neckline of her gown and, after a moment more, he leaned in and pressed his mouth to the side of her throat, breathing in the scent of verbena that clung to her skin. After one more moment, he pulled her into his arms and kissed her.

Philippa thought she was doing quite well, managing her conversation with Alec. He had, after all, given her his honest opinion of Captain Bancroft, and that was something. She had successfully ignored the trip in her pulse when he touched her or when their eyes met. Her reaction was not proper. They were friends. Not lovers or even potential lovers. So she had suppressed all her inconvenient admiration of his person.

And then, well, things simply went wrong. How it happened, she didn’t understand. But Alec, whom she had known since he was a boy, who was still, in her mind, unconscionably young, took her in his arms and kissed her.

Not on the cheek. Or the forehead.

On the mouth.

There really wasn’t any misunderstanding his intent.

She’d been thinking about kissing him for some time. And, when it happened, God save her soul, her stomach took flight.

She had a single moment of clarity during which she understood the enormity of her mistake in coming out here with him. One moment when she might have put a stop to whatever madness took her over. One moment, and all her good intentions dissolved like sugar into tea.

She was caught up, swept along by the way he wrapped his arms around her as if he had every right to, as if this was something they ought to do. As if doing so was actually a good idea. Surely it wasn’t. But if he thought so, who was she to object when she was so lonely without him?

He felt delicious. Warm and strong and certain of what he was doing. And she, she didn’t feel quite as alone any more.

He fitted his mouth to hers and, in her last moment of sanity and good sense, she recalled that he wasn’t even twenty-six and she was six years his elder, a mature woman who ought to know better.

Alec cupped the back of her head with one hand and slid the other tighter around her waist and, for the first time in her life, she had to lift her chin in order to be properly kissed. He was taller than her husband had been, and he was kissing her increasingly as if he wanted to do more than just kiss her. Something inside her wanted that. And more.

She gave up because Alec had grown into a man, and he knew, she quickly discovered, how to kiss. She had not been held like this since William died. Until this very moment, she hadn’t known how terribly she’d missed the physical intimacy, the knowledge that someone found her desirable even though she was no longer young.

Not to mention the unsettling discovery that she could be aroused by another man. She’d begun to think she would never want anyone but William. In Alec’s embrace, the greyness that had enveloped her since her husband’s death vanished. Her body came to life with a selfish desire to be touched, caressed, and even, Lord save her soul, to be penetrated. She was mad. She must be mad. Lulled into foolishness by the moonlight.

She wanted Alec Fall inside her, this young man who had grown up and become so much more than the handsome boy he’d been.

His mouth opened over hers, and she responded in kind. His chest was solid against hers, his arms strong, and she melted against him because he felt so good, because she missed a man’s embrace. He smelled of bergamot and lemon and — oh, how lovely — he wasn’t tentative at all. His tongue was in her mouth, and she wasn’t sure she could support her weight on her trembling knees. She wasn’t sure she wanted to.

She was aroused. Sexually. Carnally. Wickedly, thoroughly aroused for the first time in months and months. All this time, she’d been afraid Captain Bancroft would do more than kiss her cheek, to the point where she’d concluded there was something wrong with her. Alec forced her to confront the lie of that. She wanted him to do more than hold her. A very great deal more.

Somehow, she found the strength to push away. “Alec.” Her mouth felt bruised, her body alive. She swallowed. “My Lord.”

He kept his arms around her as if he had no doubts. “Mm?”

She closed her eyes, shivering. “You are so young.”