“Did you enjoy your little visit?”
Anger surged at this characterization of it. “It was nice to see him.”
“Nice,” he repeated, after a moment. As if that word were a profanity.
There was a pause.
“Did he propose?”
“Good God, Marchand.” Her temper flared. “Mince a word now and again.”
“Did he?” He was relentless. He never, ever was intimidated by passion or fervor, and God how she loved it.
She felt a flush of shame. “No,” she said softly.
“Why not?”
She didn’t answer that.
“Dowry problems?”
She felt like kicking him.
She didn’t want to tell him the truth, because she knew it would hurt him, because it hurt her, and it was all of a piece now for the two of them.
And yet there was no avoiding the truth of what Francis had said before he departed.
Ginny swallowed. “He said that he’d heard the Woodvilles’ circumstances have changed for the better, and he hoped to have an important conversation with me when I returned to Sussex for the marriage settlement discussions in a few days. He did not use the word ‘marriage’ or ‘married’ and he doesn’t know anything about... what happened with Hogarth at Lucifer’s Fall. All the losses.”
The horrific eradication of her dowry, in other words.
Did Marchand truly understand the humiliation she would feel if Francis had asked her to marry him, and she’d accepted—only for him to learn later that she had no dowry, after all?
Did he understand how humiliated she would feel if she had to tell Francis outright that despite their recent inheritance, she currently had no dowry? That it had all disappeared, because her brother had gambled it all away at a gaming hell? And was then compelled to watch Francis’s sweet face fall, to see betrayal and hurt in it?
The notion of any of these scenarios curdled her blood.
How was it that Marchand, who had known so much fear in his life, did not seem to recognize how terriblyafraidshe was? About her future. About her feelings about him. She wasn’t worldly. He was too much for her, yet exactly enough, and she feared nothing else would ever be enough again.
She was miserable, and she was aroused, and neither condition seemed likely to be eased soon.
He was quiet for some time.
“Ginny...” When Marchand turned her name into a sigh in her ear, spangles immediately stood all the little hairs on her nape erect, and a pulse of what she knew to be pure lust throbbed between her legs. “Here is the thing...” This, too, was more breath than words, uttered drowsily. He leisurely feathered his lips down her throat, and she sighed and arched into him, in thrall to these new, glorious sensations. She couldn’t help it. She would take them while she could. “I might be little better than a street rat dressed up in a rich man’s clothes...” When he touched his tongue to her ear, a soft moan spiraled from her; she was half angry, half astounded. “But I don’t understand what kind of man can’t make his own money for a woman he wants.” His lips, his tongue, his breath were on the bare place below her hair, at her nape; she could feel his erection hard against her bottom and the heat pooling at the crux of her legs, as if readynowto receive him, and she sighed helplessly, softly. “A man who wouldn’t go to the ends of the earth for a woman he wants strikes me as no kind of man at all.” The words were incendiary, infuriating, but he delivered them like a mesmerist, and she found herself turning as unresistingly as a flower in the breeze to abet his wandering lips as pleasure sparked to life everywhere across her body. “A man who wouldn’t buy her everything she needs, keep her safe forever, give her children, never let her know a moment’s worry or want again. Would payanyprice for the privilege of being with her. But then, as we both know”—his tongue, and then his teeth, delicately toyed with the whorls ofher ear, as her breath came in staccato tatters now—“I’m not a gentleman.”
Anger and despair and lust and wonder warred within her like those cats outside. His jealousy was darkly satisfying, even erotic. But she knew at the root of it was deep pain, and that scared her. She desperately hated being the cause of his suffering. She hated being the cause of herownsuffering.
Everything he said was everything she had ever wanted to hear from a man, and she had never realized it until now.
But were these really thingshewanted, were these really things he was offering her, was this really proof that he could indeed read her very soul?
Or was it possible that he was just playing dirty because he was jealous, and wanted to win?
“Funny. I don’t feel a thing.” She didn’t recognize the slow, pleasure-drugged sound of her voice as he drew his tongue along the cords of her throat.
“No?” She heard the dark laughter in the word. His fingers lightly skimmed the length of her arms, then his hands covered her hands, which were clasped in front of her.
Then he lifted them and she let him, because God help her, she thought she would let him do whatever he wanted to do to her now.