Heiress in Red Silk, Hunter, Madeline [good beach reads TXT] 📗

Now she wore a self-satisfied smile. “I expect decent women are not supposed to do that,” she said. “Is that why you never asked it of me?”

It was a hell of a question. “I thought later, perhaps.”

“I told you the women talked. I know that men like it.”

“Yes. Well . . .”

“You liked it enough to beg.”

“I don’t think one ‘please’ is begging.”

“It wasn’t only one ‘please’ but a good number, along with some ‘yes, like that’ and ‘deeper’ and—”

He grabbed her and tucked her close so she would not feel obligated to repeat every desperate muttering he had made.

He began to drift away again.

“Tell me about Lady Greenough.”

Suddenly, he was alert, staring at the underside of the bed’s drape that billowed above them. “What about her?”

“I was told that you had a liaison with her last year. I thought you didn’t have lovers.”

His response shouldn’t matter, but an acute sense of caution made him hesitate. “For the most part, no.”

“Do you mean she was the exception?”

Damnation. “Yes, although it was so brief that ‘liaison’ is not the right word.”

“I thought you had no experience in discretion, but you must have had some after that.”

“Not really.” Discretion wasn’t needed when a man lived in a woman’s private chambers for four days. It had been a calculated orgy of two, a reckless gamble with a cynical goal.

Nothing else came for a good while. Then . . .

“Did you love her?”

He looked down on Rosamund’s crown. “No.”

She turned on her back with her head in the crook of his arm and shared his examination of the bed drape. “I don’t understand something. Why didn’t you tell Chase you had been with her when he was investigating your uncle’s death? It would have cleared up the questions about you right away if he talked to her.”

A series of comprehensions lined up in his head, each one more astonishing than the last.

She had known about the questions regarding his whereabouts on the night of the duke’s death.

She had never asked him about those suspicions.

She had ferreted out more information than Chase had.

Yet despite all of that, she had married him.

He could end this conversation by saying it had nothing to do with her and was not her concern. Or he could explain a few things that he had never told anyone, and that did not reflect well on him. Whatever he chose, this marriage, this forever, would probably change. He admitted that what it became mattered to him.

He turned on his side so he could see her. He kissed her cheek. “I want you to know that I never harmed my uncle.”

She turned her head so she looked in his eyes. “I believe that. I would not be here if I didn’t.”

The final discovery. She had weighed all of this before agreeing to marry. She had lined up evidence that could damn a man, and had chosen to believe in him.

He didn’t deserve her.

* * *

His gaze warmed after she said it, but she could see part of his vision had turned inward. She waited for whatever else he wanted to say. Perhaps he would drift to sleep now, content that he had reassured her.

“I was there the night before,” he said. “I went down to Melton Park to tell him I needed the money for Forestier. My uncle had invested, as had I. He saw the potential. However, he refused me more funds. We had a row. I told Chase this when he learned I had returned from France earlier than I claimed.”

“Did you think he had left his half to you in his will?”

He hesitated. “Yes. As far as I know, only Chase was aware the will had been changed, and even he did not know what it said.”

She didn’t point out that this hardly helped. He would know that.

“And you were with this lady all that time, being intimate?”

“Not all the time. Even I need my rest.” She did not laugh at his little joke. “I did stay there on that visit home, however. It was a flirtation. A momentary madness when I thought we might suit each other, only to discover we didn’t.”

Madness. Not love, but enchantment. Enchanted enough to consider marriage. Or maybe not. Perhaps it had only been desire. He knew all about that. Maybe he really wanted this woman’s money and had used his sensual powers to encourage such a match. He would find that an agreeable arrangement. Marriage and money in return for pleasure.

It was what he had done with her, wasn’t it?

“I was told by Minerva that Chase made a report to someone important,” she said. “It included all the people who could have done it, if it was done at all. You were one of them, as was she.”

“I don’t know the details about that. I do know that before he made that report, he told me to go to the coast to prepare to leave the country if necessary.”

“Did you do what he said?”

“I didn’t fancy hanging for something I had not done.”

Now that she talked about this with him, she only grew more worried. Felicity’s gossip was one thing. Knowing there had been a real danger was another.

“The conclusion it was an accident—could that change? Might someone in the future decide differently?”

“I expect so. It has weighed on me, of course. With each month that passed, it got better, however.”

She could not imagine what that had been like. Horrible. He had lived with a noose’s shadow on a wall of every chamber.

“I trust if it came to it, you would break your silence about where you were that night. You mustn’t be a stupid gentleman about it, to protect your lover’s name.” She returned her gaze to the drapery because if she saw anything like love in him when he thought about that woman, it would be hard to pretend it did not hurt her.

She scolded herself in the silence that stretched between them. She had