Restoration Series - A Scoundrel's Kiss Part 21

"You are hardly the embodiment of virtue my father thinks, and I have the proof."

"Why?" she demanded. "Why would you seek to destroy me in your father's estimation?"

"Oh, please, Arabella, no more of this coyness!"

"I do not understand."

"Then perhaps your stupidity explains why you had such difficulties interpreting your father's silences."

She gasped as if he had stabbed her. Tears started in her eyes. "Get out and never speak to me again!"

she ordered, her voice quavering slightly.

"Arabella, I'm sorry!" he cried softly, meaning it as much as he had ever meant anything in his life.

"Forgive me! I should not have said that."

More, he knew he should not have acted as he had, alone here with her. He had behaved like a despicable cad, a rake, a libertine-like Buckingham and Sedley and their ilk. He, who always prided himself on his self-control, had been no better than the most selfish brute, because he wanted her so very, very much. Just being alone with her robbed him of his self-control.She remained motionless, glaring at him. She looked like an avenging angel standing there, her curling hair a halo in the moonlight. "You sneak into my bedchamber, press your kiss upon me, and now you request my forgiveness?"

"Yes."

"Since I am a Christian, you have it." She pointed imperiously at the door. "Now get out and never seek to come near me again."

He held out his hands in a placating gesture. "Please, Arabella, do not send me away before I can explain."

"There can be no good explanation for your conduct in this room tonight."

"Except a little loo much wine and a great deal of human frailty."

"Or madness," she proposed harshly.

"All three, perhaps."

"Then truly, my lord, you do not belong here. You should be in Bedlam."

He walked toward her cautiously. "Perhaps I am in Bedlam. I think I have been half mad ever since you arrived, or perhaps Bedlam has expanded its boundaries to encompa.s.s me."

"My lord, I-"

"It is your fault, Arabella."

"Mine?"

"For being so beautiful that you make every man desire you."

"I cannot help how I look."

"As I cannot help how I feel. Please do not marry Foz."

"Who told you I was going to marry him?"

"My father and Lady Lippet approve, do they not?"

She did not respond, and he knew he was right. "You don't love him, do you?"

She stared at the floor, still silent.

"Do you no longer wish to marry for love?"

"I have been given to understand that is no longer the fashion," she murmured.

"You told me once that if you could not have love from your parents, it was your dearest wish to have a husband's love."

She raised her eyes, which seemed to glow in the moonlight like the North Star guiding a lost soul home.

"You do remember!"

"You were very certain then.""We were both younger then."

"Yet when I first saw you here, you did not seem so very different."

"You did. What happened to you, Neville?"

"I grew into a man and came to London."

She sighed softly. "I wish you had not."

He turned away and went to the window. "I had little choice about coming to London. Life with my father was unbearable."

"Because he criticized you?"

He turned to face her, the moonlight casting a long shadow. "Constantly. Unendingly. Nothing I do or have ever done has earned me one good word from him.

"But I am not a peevish child, Arabella. There is more amiss between my father and me than those apparent faults he declares so loudly and so often. Another reason he could not bear my presence, and one that I can never amend."

She took a step closer. "What is it?"

"I am like my mother." He swiped a hand over his perspiring brow as he turned to look out the window again.

He was reacting like a fool. He wanted-required-her to believe herself in love with him, and if painful revelations were necessary to accomplish that, he would make them.

But that was the only reason he would speak of these things. "She liked music and dancing and games.

She craved amus.e.m.e.nt and joyful things. You have seen my father. You can guess that they did not exactly suit."

"Yet your father took me to the theater," Arabella said. "He has gone to Whitehall and, indeed, seems to enjoy himself there."

Neville sighed. "Well, I suppose they might have managed well enough, or as well as plenty of other n.o.ble couples do. But then came Cromwell and his Roundheads. When the king was executed, my father would not leave England, and she would not stay.

"By then, of course, I had been born and I had lived. The succession was secure.

"So also by then," he continued, hostility creeping into his voice, "they each had a lover. My mother went to France with hers, my father stayed in England with his-and his child, who resembled his absent wife in feature, voice and disposition."

"She left you?" Arabella asked, her voice full of pity, her heart aching for him. "How terrible. But it must have been difficult for her, too. I'm sure she felt she had no other choice."

He turned around and c.o.c.ked his head. "As much as I would like to believe that, I know it is not true.

She was being what she always was-selfish. Her lover would not welcome me, so she left me behind."

"How do you know this? Your father-""Never spoke of her again for good or ill. I found her in France a few years ago, and she told me this herself in her own charming way, shedding the falsest tears I ever beheld. Then she asked me to leave.

She was expecting a man-her latest lover, without doubt-and didn't want him to think she was being unfaithful."

Then he laughed, but it was the most ghastly, unnatural laugh Arabella had ever heard. "Have I not been blessed in my parents? Honor thy father and thy mother, indeed!"

"Neville, I am so sorry!"

"You need not be," he replied, and this time, she heard the bitter pain beneath his flippant tone. "All you need do is understand that there is more than childish petulance where my father and I are concerned. He hates me." He straightened his shoulders and resumed his cavalier air. "I should be glad his hatred and resentment got me out of Grantham."

"Don't!" she cried softly, hurrying to him.

"Don't what?"

She put her arms around him in a gentle, loving embrace. "Don't talk that way! It is not you!"

He stood as stiff as a sentry. "What, pray tell, is me?"

"You are yet the boy in the garden!"

He glanced down at her. "By the world, you would have time stand still?"

"I am certain you are not so completely changed. You have built a wall of flippant composure around yourself, but the Neville I knew is there, hidden behind it."

Her arms went around his neck, and then she kissed him tenderly. Lovingly.

A kiss of affection, not l.u.s.t. Of a love he had never known before. Of a love he never wanted to lose.

His embrace tightened about her as their kiss deepened. He would keep nothing back but would give her all his love.

Tonight and for the rest of his life. For as long as his heart continued to beat, it would be hers.

Moaning softly, she opened her mouth, and with heady delight he plunged his tongue inside its welcoming warmth.

How the languorous dance of her lips over his aroused him! And her fingers-each light brush of their tips seemed to set him aflame.

He needed her so much!

Still kissing her, he stripped off his jacket and let it fall to the ground. She tugged his shirt from his breeches and put her hands under it, slowly moving them upward over his naked flesh.

"Oh, sweet heaven," he groaned as he pulled off his shirt.

She leaned forward and kissed his bare shoulder, then lower, until she took his nipple in her mouth.

With fumbling fingers, he untied her satin-soft hair so that it fell freely about her smooth shoulders. Hetook her chin in his hand and lifted her face to press another pa.s.sionate kiss upon her succulent lips.

He would love her as he had never loved a woman, he vowed. He would love her with his heart and soul as well as his body.

Now. Here. At once.

He lifted Arabella in his arms and strode to the bed, laying her upon it, gently sliding his hands from beneath her lovely, eager, willing body.

She looked up at him, her disheveled curls upon the pillow, her face slightly flushed, her lips parted.

He knew what he saw in her luminous eyes. He had seen that look in a woman's eyes too often not to know what it meant.

She trusted him. She thought she was in love with him. He could do with her what he willed with no promise given, no pledge of obligation exacted.

And be the lascivious, derelict scoundrel his father thought he was.

Without a word, Neville grabbed his discarded clothing and strode from the room.

If the walls had crumbled about her, Arabella could not have felt more stunned, shocked and dismayed.

For a long moment, she did nothing. Then, slowly, she got off the bed and knelt on the floor beside it, regardless of the hard wood beneath her knees.

Clasping her hands, she began to pray. She prayed for strength, because she was as full of sin and l.u.s.t as her father had always said. She prayed for forgiveness, because as she had lain on the bed, looking at Neville, she had been every bit as weak and tempted as Eve. She prayed that the earl would see his son's merit, for Neville's righteous strength had saved them both from a terrible sin.

Evidence of his worth?

Neville had just provided all she would ever need by not taking what she had so wantonly offered.

Chapter 15.

Four nights later, warbling the chorus of a particularly bawdy ditty, Neville lurched drunkenly through the darkened streets of Bankside as he vainly searched for his new lodgings or at least another tavern.

He had been cracking a bottle ever since he had left Arabella and had every intention of continuing for as long as his limited funds lasted. If his father thought him a drunkard, he would be a drunkard. And a wastrel. And a rogue.

By leaving Arabella without making love with her, he had, of course, abandoned all hope of hisinheritance and even the fifty pounds of the wager.

His last virtuous act might very well be his final virtuous act, and he was going to have to find some way to earn a living.

Maybe he could emulate Richard.