Page 59 of Winter's Waltz
He caressed her nape, that paradise where her skin was warm from the chignon there. “Back to Blunderbury, am I?”
He could not keep the regret from his voice.
Her levity fled. “It is better this way.”
His head was dipping of its own accord, his lips hungering for the supple give of hers beneath them. “Better for whom?”
“Me,” she whispered.
“Are we alone?” he asked.
“Arthur is in my office.”
“The rest?”
She shook her head. “I sent them home. Tomorrow, if I have my way, we will be overrun. No need to work tonight when we sit empty.”
A gift from the heavens, surely.
Still. He needed to make the choice hers. “If you send me away, I shall go.”
His fingertips had found their way into her hair now, and he was gently massaging her scalp. There was such tension there. He longed to ease every bit of it away for her. To protect her. To kiss her. To make her his.
“Why would I send you anywhere?” She cast him a smile that on any other woman he would have supposed was an act of practiced flirtation. On Gen Winter, it was merely genuine.
Vulnerable in a way he had never seen her, not even when she had been naked before him.
“You were eager to be rid of me before.” He found a knot and rubbed gently. “You work too hard, love.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, leaning her head into his touch. “I was never eager to be rid of you. And I work as hard as I must. I was not born into wealth and privilege.”
He had been. And he had never been ashamed of the circumstance of his birth. Indeed, before he had fallen in love with her, he had scarcely given a thought to his own advantage over others. It was merely what he had always known. But he saw it now, the inherent unfairness of this world. Understood it better than he could have had he not experienced his sojourn in the East End.
“Let me take care of you tonight,” he said, then instantly regretted the words for the connotation.
He wanted to make love to her more than he wanted to take his next breath, and that was a matter of course. However, his desire to see to her welfare this evening was not carnal in nature. He wanted to ease her worries. To distract her. To tend to her when no one else was about to do so. Indeed, he suspected no man before him had ever done, and he aimed to rectify that travesty now. If she would allow it.
“You are a difficult man to deny, Marquess,” she murmured, her voice throaty and low, eyes still closed.
“I have improved in your estimation in the last few minutes,” he could not resist observing as he pressed a reverent kiss to her cheek. “I have gone from Blunderbury to Marquess.”
He drew back in time enough to catch the fleeting smile on her mouth before it disappeared. “You charged to my rescue tonight, and I am grateful.” Her eyes fluttered open then, her gaze bright and searching. “Tell me, why did you seek out Jasper Sutton? Why not one of my brothers instead? Or me?”
“I was not certain you would believe me. As for your brothers, I knew you did not wish to involve them in your problems, and that you wanted to solve them on your own. But I also needed someone with a good knowledge of the East End to aid me in finding the information I sought. Sutton seemed a reasonable enough choice since he was already familiar with Wilmore. I suspected Peter, but I also supposed he could not be acting alone. I needed proof, however.”
“But you once owed Sutton a great deal of blunt. It is plain he is not an admirer of yours. Yet you sought him out.”
She was not wrong. Gen Winter was an intelligent woman.
“I did it for you.” Also truth.
“After I didn’t believe in you.”
He could not deny her words. Her lack of faith in him—along with his own pride—had driven him from Lady Fortune a sennight ago. And he had returned to the familial flock, dutiful. Reformed.
Miserable without her.
“I don’t blame you for not believing in me,” he admitted. “It hurt, I’ll not lie. However, you have known Peter Moore for most of your life. You considered him like a brother to you. I cannot deny my past. I’m a ne’er-do-well who lost more money than he possessed at the gaming tables and drew others into his troubles. I would not trust me either.”
