How to Woo a Reluctant Lady (26 page)

“I suppose.” At least in Bath there would be dancing and plenty of sights.

His smile turning heated, he took her hand again. “I’m not sure we’re going to
want
to do much looking about, anyway.” Lifting her hand to his lips, he kissed her wrist, making her pulse dance madly.

Ah, so that’s what he was about. In Bath there would be a great many important people who would expect to visit with them. Perhaps he wanted to be somewhere it could be just the two of them, enjoying themselves. The more she thought about it, the more intriguing it sounded.

He went on in a low, coaxing voice. “You do, after all, have Rockton acting as a French spy. You should get a flavor for the country before you write any scenes where he visits France.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I thought I wasn’t supposed to write about Rockton anymore.”

He shrugged. “You don’t
have
to stop writing about him. Just make him less . . .”

“Like you?” she said, smothering her smile.

“Exactly.”

“Are you sure you don’t want me to kill him off? I could give him a spectacular death, with blood and guts spilling all over the place, and a dying speech to rival one of Shakespeare’s.”

He frowned. “You said that with entirely too much relish.”

“Oh, dear. I must strive to better hide my murderous intent. It wouldn’t do to have you guess the many ways I could—”

He kissed her—a quick, brusque kiss. Then as she stared up at him, a teasing smile on her lips, he cupped her head in his hands and kissed her with the leisurely enjoyment of a man who knows what he wants and how much time he has to gain it.

When he drew back, she murmured, “I thought you said we couldn’t do this until we reached the house.”

“I changed my mind.” He proceeded to nibble on her ear, his breath tickling her cheek. “Think of this as the first course to an all-night feast.”

“Oh, no,” she said in false solemnity. “I think we should wait until we reach—”

This time his kiss was all-consuming, the kind that made her want and ache and need more. She slid her hands up about his neck, and he pulled her onto his lap.

“You were saying?” he murmured.

She kissed him, and that was all it took to have him devouring her mouth and fondling her breast through her gown and generally driving her to utter distraction. This part of marriage might make the rest of it worth it.

Still, she noticed he practiced restraint in the carriage. He kissed and caressed her, oh yes, until they were both breathing heavily and his arousal was stiff enough beneath her bottom to bludgeon someone with. But he touched nothing beneath her
clothes.

It was driving her insane. “For a rogue, you’re very circumspect,” she whispered against his mouth.

“And you aren’t circumspect enough,
mon petit mignon,
” he murmured. “I will have to walk into our house, you know. No one can tell what state
you’re
in beneath your clothes, but everyone will be able to see what state
I’m
in.”

She cast him a solemn glance. “Good. I like you better when you have no secrets.”

He drew back to stare at her with a shadowed gaze. “You like me better under your thumb, you mean. But if you think you’re going to drag me about by my . . . er . . . arousal, Minerva, think again.”

“Trust me,” she said earnestly, “if I wanted to do that, I could do it as easily as this.” She snapped her fingers.

“You think so, do you?”

“I know so.” Not for nothing had she watched her sisters-in-law handle her brothers. Giles liked her for her body. And she would make good use of that if she had to.

“I haven’t been
that
susceptible to a woman’s charms in years, minx,” he drawled. “I want you very badly, but I’m not the sort of man to lose his brains to desire. I made that mistake once. I’ll never make it again.”

She eyed him closely. “When did you make that mistake? Or is that another thing you refuse to tell me about your past?”

The carriage rumbled into London. Though the noise of workers going home and calling to one another filled the air, inside the carriage all was silent as a snowfall. Giles shifted her off of his lap, then angled himself so he could stare into her face. “Do you really want to know about something I did with another woman?”

She hesitated. But if it helped to explain him to her . . . “Yes.”

“All right. You’ll probably hear about it eventually, anyway.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “How well do you know my brother’s wife, Charlotte? Who used to be Mrs. Harris?”

Her blood stilled. “I’ve met her a few times, and of course I saw her at the wedding today. I know she created the School for Young Ladies in Richmond, the one everyone calls the School for Heiresses.” Until now Minerva had admired the woman, not only for her keen mind and kind spirit, but also for her perseverance in building up her school from nothing.

“What most people don’t know is that she and my brother were on the verge of marrying nearly twenty years ago. It was the summer of the year your parents died, when I was eighteen and she and her family came to visit. She and David were getting along very well. Until I did something stupid that broke them apart.”

A pressure built in her chest. “You and she didn’t—”

“No,” he said hastily. “I doubt my brother would have forgiven that. But as you know, he and I resemble each other a bit. David had given me his dressing gown while Charlotte was visiting, but she didn’t know that. It was fairly distinctive, and she’d only seen David wearing it.”

He glanced out the window. “We had a maidservant who was very . . . loose with her affections. Molly had worked her way through most of the footmen and had decided I was going to be her next conquest. She asked me to meet her outside on the terrace late one night. I did, and we . . . coupled.” A muscle worked in his jaw. “That probably shocks you.”

“No,” she lied, but it did. Her brothers were rogues—or had been—and her father had been the worst rakehell ever, but to her knowledge none of them had ever trifled with the servants, not even Oliver when he was in his wild phase and had lived in a bachelor house of his own. Only the worst of the worst toyed
with servants.

Then again . . . “You were young,” she said softly. “Men do stupid things when they’re young.”

“Kind of you to excuse it, but we both know it was unconscionable. That wasn’t the worst part, however.” He dragged in a heavy breath. “Charlotte saw me and thought I was David.”

“Oh dear.”

“Exactly. For complicated reasons that I won’t go into, Charlotte didn’t speak to David about it. She just broke off their association in a rather dramatic way. She sent him a letter that somehow ended up in the papers—”

“Wait, I remember this! That was quite a scandal—that anonymous letter that everyone figured out was about your brother.
She
wrote that? Good Lord. But it didn’t say anything about . . . well . . . seeing him doing . . .”

“No. That’s why for years, I wasn’t sure if I was responsible for their rift. I told myself I wasn’t.” He gave a harsh laugh. “But some little part of me always knew . . .” His gaze met hers. “It was the one and only time I ever let my physical urges lead me to do something so foolish, and it destroyed their lives for
years.
I never dreamed . . .”

“Of course not,” she said, his clear guilt making her wish she could wipe it away with a word. “How could you anticipate that?”

“Once I learned of it, I made a solemn vow never to let myself be so carried away by desire that it impinged on my duty to my family. Never to let it make a fool of me again.”

Her heart twisted in her chest. “Is that how you see our desire for each other? As making a fool of you?”

That seemed to stymie him. “No, that’s not what I meant. I meant that . . .”

“You don’t like to be manipulated with it.”

He let out a breath. “Exactly.”

“And you haven’t been trying to manipulate
me
with desire at all,” she said, baffled by his logic.

That arrested him. “What do you mean?”

“From the moment we began our faux courtship—or what
I
saw as our faux courtship—you kissed me senseless every chance you got. Assuming that you weren’t letting desire run away with you—as you’ve said quite clearly—you must have been trying to use it to make
me
amenable to your suit.”

“Perhaps a little.” He shifted uncomfortably on the seat. “But it’s not like that between us. I wasn’t just trying to manipulate you. Our desire was a natural manifestation of our affection for each other. And we were always sensible about it. We didn’t let it drive us to do stupid things. We should continue in that fashion.”

She nearly pointed out that they hadn’t been very sensible about it the day they’d gone to the pond. Or in the inn. Or even when they’d been walking in Hyde Park. But perhaps logic wasn’t the way to handle this.

Because he didn’t sound logical. He sounded more . . . panicked than anything. Men did get panicked with women. She’d recently begun to understand that. Certainly her brothers had panicked when they’d started caring about the women who’d become their wives. She would swear that Giles was starting to care about her. And clearly it panicked him, too, a bit.

“The point is,” he went on, “do not think to use our hunger for each other to twist me about your finger, Minerva. It won’t work with me.”

She doubted that very much, but he needed to believe it. He needed to think he was in control. Still, the very fact that
he’d told her this little part of his past meant he was already opening up to her. It reassured her as nothing else had that they could have a good marriage.

“Well, there goes my dastardly plan,” she said lightly. “You really are a spoilsport, Giles.”

His low chuckle sounded relieved. No doubt he’d expected her to fight harder. And she would. Just not the way he thought.

“Anything else you want to warn me about?” she went on. “Any hidden vices like knuckle cracking or sleepwalking?”

“Nothing you can’t handle, I expect.”

He had no idea. She was ready to handle just about anything from him. She might have been forced into this marriage by her own recklessness in succumbing to her desires, but now that she was here, she meant to make the most of it.

G
ILES WAS STILL
cursing himself as they drew up in front of the house. What had possessed him to tell her about that night with Molly? For God’s sake, this was his wedding night. He was supposed to be sweeping her off her feet, not spilling his unsavory secrets.

He stepped down from the carriage. And why had he bristled so at her assertion that she could have him do her bidding if she wanted? She couldn’t. He knew that.

Well, he knew it intellectually, anyway. Physically . . .

Just helping her out of the coach was having the same potent effect on him she’d been having for weeks, even months, ever since their Valentine’s Day dance. Her hand in his, so dainty, so . . . naked without her glove on, had the perverse effect of making him want her even more. God, he was in trouble.

They got to the top of the steps, and the door opened as his
new butler strove to impress the new master and mistress. Giles stopped her just before entering. “Oh, no, darling, we’re going to do this right.”

When he swept her up in his arms and carried her across the threshold, she laughed. It made her beautiful eyes sparkle, and her cheeks shine a rosy pink that had his blood roaring in his veins. He must have been mad to tell her she couldn’t manipulate him with desire. She could do anything she pleased when she looked at him like that.

“Finch,” he said, “you’re dismissed for the evening. You and all the servants.”

“Yes, sir,” Finch answered, barely hiding his smirk.

Then Giles carried her toward the stairs.

“Put me down!” Minerva said, her eyes twinkling up at him. “You’ll break your back hauling me about the house! I’m heavier than I look.”

“Ah, but I’m stronger than
I
look.”

“All the same . . .” She wriggled out of his arms to cast him a coy glance. “You need to save your strength.” With another laugh, she darted up the stairs.

“So
that’s
how it’s going to be, is it?” he called out as he followed her leisurely.

It wasn’t as if there were many places for her to go. The house was large enough to be comfortable but nothing like the mansion she was used to. She could hardly get lost in its rooms, and with scarcely any furniture yet there were few places she could hide.

So when he reached the first floor he wasn’t surprised to find she wasn’t even trying to hide. Instead she stood motionless in the doorway of a room that was
not
the bedchamber.

He smiled as he realized which room it was. Perhaps it would make up for how he’d bungled things in the carriage.

“What is this room?” she asked as he walked up beside her. “Is it your study?”

“No. My study is downstairs.
This
, my dear, is your wedding present. It’s your own study. For writing.”

“For writing my books?” she said, almost disbelievingly.

“Unless you’ve been writing something else I don’t know about. Please tell me Rockton isn’t going to appear in a play.”

“Don’t be silly.” Her eyes filled with tears that she brushed away, as if embarrassed. “Oh, Giles, that is the sweetest thing you could ever have done for me!”

When she broke into a blazing smile, his heart flipped over in his chest. At that moment he would have given her whatever she wanted.

Careful, man. Don’t be a fool.

But it was hard not to when she was so excited. Hurrying to the center of the room, she twirled like a little girl, then walked about, examining the bare bookshelves, the desk he’d fitted up with writing materials, and the comfortable couch he’d placed near the fireplace.

“It’s still a bit sparsely furnished,” he said, “but I figured you’d rather do that part yourself anyway.”

“It’s perfect, absolutely perfect.” She spotted something and let out a cry. “Oh, and you’ve even had my books and papers brought up here!” Rushing over to the trunk, she began to remove things. “I can put the novels on that shelf, and the papers—”