Page 28 of Rules for Heiresses
He stared at her after his outburst. So many emotions ran across his face. Anger was the most obvious, even to her fuzzy senses, then exasperation, followed by anger again. Fear was there, too, as well as resignation of some kind. But at the heart of it, he was clearly very angry with her. She didn’t want him to be angry. She wanted him to hold her. To gather her into his arms and hold her tight, and never let go. But first, she wanted to erase those deep lines of worry and strain from his brow.
“Cordy?” she whispered.
“What?”
“I’m glad it was you.”
His brow furrowed more. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I’m glad I found you again.” She burrowed into his blankets, inhaling the clean, comforting scent of him into her aching lungs. Her eyes fluttered shut, exhaustion overcoming her in a rush. “I missed you.”
“I missed you, too.”
Perhaps she’d only imagined that soft response, because the next thing Ravenna knew was the comforting embrace of oblivion.
Eight
Courtland ran a hand through his hair, having returned after a sleepless night on a hard couch to stare at the sleeping woman sprawled in his bed. Hiswife. His to protect and he could very well have lost her last night. His chest felt uncomfortably tight, his limbs brittle as though they might snap. The feelings that chased through him were unfamiliar.
And unwelcome!
All because of the fiery-tempered, shockingly direct, and intolerably vexing temptress currently ensconced in his bed. His fingers twitched, longing to drift over the satiny-soft skin of her shoulder just visible over the edge of her night rail. Memories of that lustrous skin flushing in the throes of orgasm assailed him—all rosy and delicious—she’d been the most exquisite thing he’d ever seen. He would treasure that gift forever, no matter how much she claimed to hate him.
Last night, she’d thought him Hades.
Hell, perhaps he was. The god of the underworld was far from a benevolent creature. He’d touched her and left her, avoiding her as much as he could. Coward that he was, he’d been holed up on the captain’s quarters, poring over complex engineering diagrams and looking at the same steam-turbine prototype specifications over and over. The fine drawings and sheets of numbers had served to distract him for a good while. But then Rawley had brought word that the duchess was wandering about the ship, foxed out of her mind. Thankfully, Bingham had been the one to find her and not one of the other guests.
Lady Holding would have been irreparably scandalized.
And Sommers would have taken dreadful advantage.
Helpless fury flooded him, but having Sommers here was a necessary evil. Courtland was so close to securing his trust. The man was pure scum. He was a smuggler and a criminal with a cruel streak. The Earl of Waterstone had been tracking him for some time and had only recently enlisted Courtland’s help to expose and arrest the man.
His marriage and the trip to England had come at an inopportune time…and so, he’d invited Sommers to visit his ducal estate in London. Like most of his ilk, the lure of hobnobbing with the crème de la crème of English aristocracy proved too big to resist. Though Courtland did not want his wife, or any of the other female guests, in any kind of proximity to Sommers, he’d had no other choice.
Waterstone had agreed it was the only way. The earl was a British agent who’d been on Sommers’s tail for years for the illicit smuggling of undeclared goods under the guise of legitimate trade. Courtland had tried to get Sommers to use his ships to catch him in the act, but the slippery man had always refused. So the only alternative had been to befriend him and ferret out his secrets that way. It turned Courtland’s stomach, but if his help put a criminal away, then it was worth it.
Not if it endangered his wife, however.
He glanced at the duchess, who moaned fitfully and shifted against the bedsheets before settling. God knew what had possessed Ravenna to pick up a bottle of spirits that had been left behind by a group of French poets and artists who’d been onboard theGlorysome months ago.
He corrected himself. He knew exactly what had driven her to do so. Her brother had warned that she was not as tough as she pretended to be. Leaving her as he had after the intimacy they’d shared had not been well done of him by any stretch of the imagination.
Hell, he was a cad.
But if he hadn’t left that room, if he hadn’t stayed away, he would have finished what he’d started, and plowing his deliciously responsive wife wasn’t an option. Divorce was expensive and difficult, even with the recent changes in British law, which made such separation legal without an Act of Parliament.
While mutual pleasure was a gray area, consummation would only make things harder, especially if he intended to let her go at the end of all of it. And he did. Courtland had no intention of keeping her trapped in a marriage she did not want. And worse yet, if a child resulted from an act of passion, she would be even more tied to him. Neither of them needed that kind of complication.
Therefore, he would keep his distance. Hehadto. Even if it meant he had to be as distant as possible so she had a chance to walk away with her dignity intact and reclaim the future he’d deprived her of. It was the least he could do.
The end of the season was only a few short months anyway. They would go to London and be seen, he would deal with Stinson and the dukedom, and then Ravenna could go back to Kettering to live her life, whereupon he would return to Antigua.
They would both get what they wanted, and go their separate, happy ways.
Easy enough, if he could keep his lust in check.
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