The Millionaire Rogue (34 page)

She surrendered.

She surrendered to the pounding beat of her passion. To the heavy weight of her love for him.

She surrendered to Henry.

They moved against each other ardently, lost in a whirl of pain and limbs and pleasure. Her hands moved over his shoulders, marveling at the roping and bunching of his back muscles as he worked between her legs. His lips trailed over her jaw and throat.

He slowed, suddenly, and then his eyes fluttered shut; he stilled and she could feel his cock pulse inside her.

“Christ,” he said when the pulsing subsided. His lips fluttered over her eyelashes. “I'm sorry, Caroline, I didn't mean . . . I meant to be more careful, but you felt so good, I couldn't stop. I wanted to stop.”

“I didn't want you to stop,” she whispered. “I don't want you to ever stop.”

Slowly he withdrew from inside her; she felt his seed seeping warmly from between her legs.

He cursed again when he looked down at the shirt beneath her.

“What is it?” she said.

“Blood,” he replied, mouth drawn into a line as he used the shirt to clean her. “A lot of it. Are you sure you're all right?”

Caroline flexed her stiff legs. She felt very sore between them. “All right. Sore. A little sore.”

He crumpled the shirt between his hands and tossed it to the ground. He tugged the coverlet aside, holding it open for her. “Here, lie down. I'll get a towel.”

She crawled between the bedclothes, smiling as she drew them up to her nose. They smelled like him. Like her husband.

He returned from the washstand with a damp towel, climbing into bed beside her. Thankfully he was still naked as the day he was born; he pressed his body against hers as he coaxed her legs apart, pressing the towel between them. It felt blessedly cool.

“I love you, Caroline,” he murmured in her ear, nicking the lobe with his teeth. She felt him smiling against her skin. “
Wife
.”

She smiled, too, a wide, irrepressible thing she felt in every corner of her being. Despite everything—despite how it appeared, her ten-thousand pound dowry and his lack of position—despite their youth, their parents' disapproval—despite all that, she knew this was where she was meant to be.

Caroline loved him. She felt loved by him. And wasn't that the end of everything?

Henry spun her around and tugged her against the hardened mass of his body, her back to his front. He pulled the sheets over their heads and she, giggling, yielded to his hands as he took her body again and again and again, until the sun burned away the darkness.

*   *   *

I
t happened the next afternoon. As she was wont to do when in need of solitude and space, Caroline disappeared into the garden. Henry—her
husband!
—had a habit of sneaking from his father's house to meet her there besides; she had half a mind to toss him beneath a bush and ravage him soundly, as she promised she would last night.

She was on her knees, digging at a half-dead holly, when she heard the telltale rustle in a nearby boxwood. Her chest lit up with excitement; she was smiling, hard, when she brushed back her hair and turned toward the noise.

Only it wasn't Henry. George Osbourne, Viscount Umberton, heir to the wildly wealthy Earl of Berry and Henry's very best friend, emerged from the hedgerow. Caroline's joy hardened in her throat at the sight of Osbourne's well formed, if slight, figure. His face was hard, his dark eyes soft.

A tendril of panic unfurled inside her belly. She didn't like that look; something was amiss.

“My Lord,” she said hopefully, as if she might will good news with the tone of her voice. “What an unexpected surprise. Have you . . . er . . . come for tea?”

Osbourne bowed. “My Lady, I am sorry to meet you like this, but I came straightaway.”

“What?” So much for the soothing tone of voice. “What is it?”

He wiped the sweat from his thick eyebrow with a trembling thumb. When he spoke his voice was low, hoarse.

“He's gone. Henry—Lake—he's gone. I—” Here Osbourne looked away. “I thought you should know. I understand the two of you have . . . become quite close this summer, and I—”

The brass-handled garden trowel fell from her gloved hand to the earth with a muted
thud
of protest. “Gone? Where? But how . . . I don't understand!”

Osbourne's face was tensed with pain as he looked down at her. He swallowed. “Emptied his drawers into a valise—there's nothing left, and he took the five pounds his older brother was hiding in his pillow. He left a note, something about duty, and not coming to look for him. He said he wouldn't come back. Lady Caroline, Henry is gone.”

Caroline's vision blurred; tears burned her eyes, and she fell back on her haunches. “Perhaps it's a mistake,” she said. “A misunderstanding with his father, or maybe it's a joke, or—or—”

“I know Henry,” Osbourne said. “He's gone, Caroline. I don't know where, and I don't know why. But he's gone.”

She was sobbing then, and George Osbourne fell to his knees beside her and held her to his chest. They sat like that, damp with the heat of one another's tears, until the garden was tawny with twilight.

That was the last Caroline heard of Henry Beaton Lake, her husband, before he disappeared from Oxfordshire, from England, from her life.

Before he disappeared forever.

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