Trenton Lord of Loss (Lonely Lords) (28 page)

Cato would know exactly how tedious and corrosive talk could be in a rural earldom.

“I might not begrudge him some socializing with his neighbors,” Trent said, “but he’s swiving a local girl silly, and she was decent before he got his paws on her.” 

“She’ll dine out on her wicked youth for decades. Moreover, he’ll let her go with a parting gift that should keep her in style until her dotage.” 

“I pay quarterly pensions to two women who were given parting gifts by his lordship.” Trent pinched the bridge of his nose. “Half-siblings make one hell of a parting gift. My mother claimed there were others whom she dispatched with lump sums.” 

Cato shifted, making the chair creak. “Not uncommon for an English peer, particularly with men who ascribe to the old-fashioned
droit de seigneur
school of aristocracy.” 

Diplomacy was not what Trent sought from the discussion. “Wilton is conscienceless. I will have another very frank talk with the young lady’s father.” 

Cato rose. “Must be awkward as hell, having to warn the locals off your own father.” 

“Even more awkward having to warn my father to cease his games,” Trent said. “He’s up to something, planning some grand coup. I can feel it.” 

“You can feel it?” 

“When I was young, he would humiliate me periodically. His tantrums grew predictable. He’d find some fault with my studies and thrash the hell out of me, then leave me in peace for a time until his ire built again. He’d find another pretext, then get out his cane and have at me over a trifle. It became a dilemma.” 

“In what sense?” Cato poured a drink and offered it to Trent.

A whiff of roses wafted by on the evening air. Trent shook his head, and Cato sipped at the drink himself. 

“When I was small, and trying to endure my father’s discipline, I’d reach the point where I cried, or screamed, or tried to run off. Then Wilton would beat me for not accepting my punishment. I eventually learned to keep my peace, lest the footmen be required to hold me for my canings.” 

Cato downed the rest of the drink in one swallow. “If my papa were alive, I’d kiss him on both cheeks for never doing more than swatting my arrogant little backside with his hand, or worse, giving me his disappointed look.” 

“Thank him anyway. I could not stand the pity of the footmen, so I learned to take my medicine without a word. That only challenged Wilton to see how much I could take.” 

“Your father is an evil man. You probably don’t need me to tell you that, but to go after your own son that way… It doesn’t build character, or instill respect, or whatever else he tried to tell you. It hurts an innocent child, plain and simple.” 

Cato was certain of his point, and that was…reassuring. 

“What?” Cato tried to take another sip of his drink, then glared at the empty glass. “You’d argue with me? The man is a monster, Amherst. If he were a horse, he’d be shot for his vile temper lest the trait breed true in his progeny.” 

“I suppose that’s what I’m afraid of.” The realization made Trent abruptly queasy. “
I am his son
, and while I don’t beat my children…” 

“For God’s sake. Your boys love you, and that little sprite of a sister of theirs…” 

“Yes?” 

“When I look at that child, I don’t know how much longer I can stand to stay away from my sisters and my home.” 

Other people had problems, too, even people who outranked Trenton and owned thousands of acres of beautiful Irish countryside. 

“You could go back for a visit. Just take a peek.” 

Though the idea of Cato deserting the stables just now did not…sit well. 

Cato’s smile was tired as he set his empty glass on the sideboard. “Irish gossip has a quality that the English variety lacks. The grooms and tenants and such didn’t just see me up before my papa when I was a lad, they cuffed my ear from time to time, sat me down to milk and buttered soda bread, chased me from their haylofts when I was up to mischief with the dairymaids.” 

“No privacy.” Though Wilton had left his children no privacy either, Cato’s experience was not based in a parent’s need to manipulate and control.

“No privacy, but worlds of safety,” Cato rejoined. “I couldn’t slip home for a little spying on my sisters. Clancy’s swineherd’s mother’s cousin would see me fifty miles from home, and the fatted calf would be dead, dressed and cooked before I trotted up the lane.” 

“But those people,”—Trent made a circling motion with his hand—“the swineherd’s cousin’s whatever who kept an eye on you, they’re how you know for sure Wilton is evil and you are not.” 

Cato regarded his employer with what Trent feared was pity. “This troubles you. You believe you’re your father’s son, exclusively?” 

Trent sank back into his chair, when he wanted to lay himself down in a bed of fragrant pink flowers. “By the time she died, my mother wasn’t much better than my father. She hated Wilton and attributed to him every nasty motive possible. I grew extremely resentful of my own spouse before she too went to her reward.” 

Resentful and desperate, which his mother had been as well. 

“Which only makes my point. You and Wilton are different. He embittered his wife and beat his sons. You cared for your wife and cherish your children. You are not your father.” 

A silence built, while Trent pointedly ignored the decanter and let weariness make him pathetic.

“I’m avoiding Ellie. I tarried in Town when I could have written to my man of business to sell the house I’ll never use there again. I dithered over a visit to my younger sister, Emily, when she’s having a grand time breaking in her dancing slippers at various assemblies. I put off coming back here, though I missed my children terribly.”

Missed them—and Ellie, and worried about the lot of them. 

Cato refreshed his drink with the air of a man resigned to an awkward discussion. “
This
makes you like Wilton, because you don’t want to see the woman shot, disfigured, or poisoned?” 

“I won’t stop taking precautions until I’ve held my in-laws accountable.” 

“You think because Ellie has your attention, they might spread their resentment to her?” 

“I don’t know what to think.” Trent rose again and turned away from Cato to survey the back gardens. In the evening light they were for the most part orderly, blooming, peaceful and pretty—also fragrant—thanks to Ellie. “Part of me resents the burden of complication that comes from dealing with a female again. I was growing content in my isolation after Paula’s death. Another part of me is scheming how I can climb in Ellie’s windows of a night and enjoy every favor she so generously offers me.” 

“That’s easy. On the west side of the house, there’s an oak whose branches were never pruned sufficiently. You can climb from it to the porch outside the family parlor. Rammel used to do it when he wanted to escape Ellie’s notice after hours, or arrive without benefit of censure from the servants.” 

Easy indeed, when a man’s own sons recognized him as proficient at climbing trees. “How do you know this about him?” 

“Rammel had the occasional use for a pint in low places, and the man would talk horses and hounds with anyone.” 

“The west side, you say?” 

Cato’s smile grew into a grin. “I would never say such a thing.” 

“Gentleman stable master that you are, you would never contribute to my moral dilemma.” 

Cato snorted, sounding curiously like Darius when disgusted with Polite Society. “That wee fellow in your breeches wouldn’t know a moral if it swived him silly. I’m merely taking away an excuse.” 

“An excuse?” 

“You say you want to keep the lady safe, and to do that, you don’t want to foster an appearance of anything untoward between you. Instead of addressing the appearances—the source of the problem—you’re thinking of withdrawing from the field entirely. If you’re simply wrestling with second thoughts, you should withdraw and allow Ellie the freedom to choose others, and not tell yourself you’re protecting with your neglect.” 

“Ellie? She’s not Lady Rammel to you anymore?” 

“She’s Lady Rammel to me,
and
Dane’s widow,
and
breeding,
and
I can’t offer her as much as you can, so no, you needn’t bristle at me like a stray dog, Amherst.” 

“I am bristling, aren’t I? Well, hell.” He’d doubtless referred to the lady as Ellie in Cato’s astute hearing. 

“That about sums up the condition of a man in love, particularly one who won’t admit his circumstances to himself.” Cato tossed back the last of his refill. “I’m off to the stables. You’re too tired to be worth a decent game of chess tonight and should seek your bed. Things will make more sense in the morning.” 

“Yes, Mother.” Trent let him go without another word.

The west side of Ellie’s house faced the paddocks, not the stables or the outbuildings where prying eyes might see a few shadows moving in the depths of the oak by moonlight. 

Trent called for his bath, tried to think of a brief story to read his children before he tucked them in, and wondered how early Ellie might retire on a pleasant summer night. 

Chapter Fifteen 

Trent was naked in Ellie’s fairy-tale bed, naked in her
arms
, before she woke up. 

“Trenton.” She wrapped herself around him in welcome, and within the minute, he was inside her willing heat. 

When he’d been up in London, making his calls, closing up his town house, he’d been frantic to get back to her. His mind had been set in one direction, like a young man’s, completely at the mercy of his desire. 

Then he’d returned to Crossbridge, and he’d felt the same reluctance overtake him he’d experienced when coming back from Belle Maison. An anxious, hollow, ache under his cross-eyed hunger. 

But now, hilted in Ellie Hampton’s delectable feminine sweetness, all he felt was a towering relief. 

She levered up and got her mouth on one of his nipples, and he wished she’d consume him, devour him, and take him inside her in every way imaginable. 

“I worried for you.” She tightened her hold of him as she whispered the words against his chest, while Trent’s urgency abated fractionally. 

She deserved better than this from him, better than a quick, desperate swiving in the dark. He slowed the undulations of his hips and eased his grip on her backside. 

“I’ve missed you, too,” he whispered, finding her mouth with his own. 

He mentally started over, though his cock stayed buried in her while he reacquainted his mouth with the taste of her. When her tongue was lazily stroking against his in response, he cruised his nose over the fragrance of her hair, then the delicate scent at the juncture of her neck, so warm and sweet. He took her earlobe between his teeth as her sigh fanned past his temple and her hands winnowed through his hair. 

Ellie shifted under him to lock her ankles at the small of his back. “Trenton, please…” 

He cupped her breast, giving her the slightest pressure on her nipple, and that was all it took. 

She unraveled with a soft, surrendering groan, her body clutching him hard, repeatedly, until she sighed and relaxed beneath him. He gave her a minute to catch her breath while he kept his movements easy and slow, then sent her right back up again in a short burst of more purposeful thrusts. 

The next time he heard her whisper, “Trenton, please,” it was a plea for clemency, but he’d found his stride, and his sense of purpose—his sense of
home
. She became so sensitized he could send her over the edge with a few powerful thrusts and some well-placed caresses.

He felt when she stopped fighting her pleasure, stopped thinking about how much was too much and how many was enough. And still he wasn’t ready to let go, or to give up the banquet that their lovemaking had become. Trent could not have said how long they loved, but he took her from peak to peak, sometimes lazily, sometimes more forcefully, until his own completion ceased to matter, so thoroughly was he attuned to hers. 

He’d become relaxed almost to the point of sleep, moving easily, when Ellie’s legs wrapped around his flanks again. She slid a hand over his backside, anchoring herself to him as she turned her face into his shoulder. 

“You,” she said. “This time, you, too.” 

She used her inner muscles on him, and that sensation was so keenly pleasurable Trent forced himself to keep his tempo slow enough that she could synchronize with his thrusting. He let the tension build, and build, and build, and still, Ellie kept up with him. Vertigo stole over him, and pleasure welled, an inexorable, ecstatic drenching that obliterated his control and shook him from the inside. 

“Jesus God, Ellie…” The pull of her mouth, her fingers, her body went on and on, drawing sensation into a tight coil of intimacy and desire. Longing was tangled up in the physical sensations—longing for relief from worries, for oblivion from sorrow, for a life free from duty, appearances, and familial tensions. 

Longing for uncomplicated pleasures, and for a future with Elegy Hampton. 

She did not relent. She harried and hounded him with her kisses and caresses, she wrapped herself—her body, her scent, her dearness—around him and would not let go.

Trent surrendered to long moments of wrenching satisfaction, after which his pleasure didn’t so much end as it dissipated, like the last notes of a beautiful composition, lingering delightfully in memory.