Page 36 of Loving a Beast of a Marquess
He had never felt as he did with her. The world could have gone up in flames around him, and he would not have felt its heat; the only thing that mattered in all the world was her and the softness of her mouth, the tiny mewling sounds she made at the back of her throat, the desperate way she clutched at his lapels to pull him closer.
Yes, she was the girl from the garden—and how could he not have seen it? She responded to him with that same urgency, met every sweep of his tongue with hers, caught him in a blazing inferno that would never cease as long as she was here, and she was kissing him. He throbbed with need, with the desperate desire to finish what they had started all those days ago.
“Zachary,” she muttered, drawing him even closer and linking her arms around his neck. “We should not. Someone might find us.”
“Then let them and have done with it.”
“Zachary.” Her hands fisted in his hair, and he slid a palm down her back to the curve of her backside. She was all lush curves and rich softness he wanted to lose himself in.
“Evangeline,” he said. Even her name suited her—its sweetness, its beauty, the way his tongue curled around it in the same way he wanted it to curl around the most intimate parts of her. He longed to know if she tasted as sweet as she smelled. “If you are the lady from the garden then you should know I have been able to think of nothing but you since we—”
He stopped, other memories of that fateful night returning. Evangeline stepped back, her lips red and swollen in the light.
You may mourn the death of a father, but it will never place you in such a predicament as I now face.
“You told me you mourned the death of your father,” he said. The world shifted about him. Evangeline Pevton, daughter of the Duke of Wellton, had told him her father was dead.
The Duke was dead. The Dule he had come to see, whose counsel he had placed his entire trust on, was dead.
There was no one left to help him. He was alone to navigate a world that seemed so much harsher than it had as a young man of two-and-twenty before his father had died, and he’d lost everything that he’d known.
He had not known the Duke, but the loss hit him almost as hard as if he had lost another father figure. Everyone who was supposed to guide him was gone. He was alone.
ChapterFifteen
Evangeline watched the play of emotion cross his face as he sagged against the table, arms braced against the edge, looking for all as though he might collapse under the weight of the discovery.
She, too, felt she might collapse under its weight. Their secret was out. Now the Marquess knew—the Marquess, who had been staying in their house with the express intention of seeing her father—they could conceal it no longer.
“No one else knows,” he said slowly.“Everybody believes he is abroad and will arrive home imminently. You have concealed his death from the world.”
“As you would too if you knew the circumstance around his death.” Evangeline raised her gaze to his. “The truth will ruin us,” she said, each word succinct, almost curt, hiding the hurt she tucked away in her chest. “If we do not marry before it is known he—” Words failed her, and she glanced away. Tears stung her nose and made their way to her eyes. She was going to cry before the Marquess, and there was nothing she could do to prevent it. “We must marry,” she finished, “and soon.”
“And that is why you have been pressing Emily to marry—why you tried to convince that boy to propose to you.”
Shame crept through her lungs. “Yes.”
“And I have been waiting here for him. Like a fool.” He raised his gaze to hers, the hollowness in his eyes touching something in her chest. She had not thought he would be affected by the news—beyond perhaps some passing sadness and an understanding that he, now, would be the new Duke—but there was more than that there. He grieved her father almost as much as she did.
She pressed her hands against her eyes, pushing and pushing until she saw flowers bloom on her eyelids. But the tears still slipped past, and her shoulders shook with quiet sobs she could no longer hold back. She had been strong for her family, strong for Emily, strong when she needed to be strong, but this was the outside of enough. They were ruined. The Marquess was their new guardian—and he knew. He could do whatever he wished with them.
“Evangeline,” he said bleakly. He rose and approached her, running his hands first up her arms, then across her shoulders, pulling her into the warm encasing of his arms. He smelled like wood smoke and leather and cologne, and his coat pressed against her nose. “Forgive me,” he said, one hand against the back of her head, and the simple fact of beingheld—of having someone hold her for the purpose of comforting her—gave rise to an embarrassingly loud sob. “I did not know you carried this grief.”
“He is dead, and we can tell no one.” She had not known what a burden that was until she said the words out loud. “We cannot wear black, go into mourning, or hide from society. We must keep going as though nothing is wrong.”
“I’m sorry.”
“And to think now it was all for nothing,” she said, unable to keep the bitterness from her voice. “You know now, and we must all pay the price.”
“If you do not wish for me to tell anyone, I shall not.” He drew back a little and tipped her chin up to meet his gaze. “I do not have any wish to be the Duke at present. Your secret is safe with me.”
She could hardly believe it, but there was nothing in his face to suggest he was lying. And the man in the garden, inebriated as he had been, had not been a man in search of greatness or grandeur. He was a man seeking to know how best he could live a life he perceived to be cruel to him. Evangeline understood that, at least.
“You wanted to see my father,” she said. “You wanted to speak with him. Why?”
“It hardly matters now.”
“I beg you would tell me.”
