Page 90 of The Secrets of Lord Grayson Child
Gray hesitated, but it was she who was asking, and given all she’d revealed and what he wanted to build with her… He paused, marshaling his thoughts.
She waited patiently, attentively.
Eventually, he said, “If we’re to have any chance of a shared life, then between us, we must have trust—absolute and unequivocal.” He met her eyes. “That means I need to bury the past and all I thought and felt about you then and trust you as you are now—the woman I’ve observed over the past week, the woman I know you are today, one who deserves my unreserved trust. So…to answer your question, I’ll tell you what I haven’t told anyone else, not even my oldest, closest friend.”
She tipped her head and waited.
He almost smiled. “I know what it’s like for people like us not to have money. Not to have recourse to something we grew up taking for granted.” His mind balked at giving hereverydetail—not yet, too risky. Instead, he said, “After I arrived in America, over a period, I lost all the money I’d brought with me. I was too proud to contact my parents and ask for more, so I was forced to work, to eke out a living using my bare hands in whatever way offered. I worked in fields, helping with the harvest, and eventually, I worked on the railroads being laid across the country. I was almost to the west coast, in a state called Oregon, when news about the Gold Rush in California broke. I hired on as crew on a ship running down the coast and got myself to the gold fields. Trust me when I say it was a hard and bare existence, scraping out the ore with picks and shovels, panning in the streams, living under canvas or the stars.”
He held her gaze and quietly said, “By then, I was little better than what Americans call a ‘bum.’ I had no money, and what I managed to get, I spent on food and…entertainment. And drink. One night, after leaving the saloon—a tavern—I was so inebriated that on my way back to my tent in the dark, I collapsed in a ditch and…stayed there. I was all but delirious, and at that point, I truly didn’t care if I woke or not.”
She squeezed his hand. “You’d reached rock-bottom.”
“I had. But, it seems, Fate hadn’t finished with me. I woke with the dawn, and as I was hauling myself out of the ditch, my hand landed on a rock. Only it wasn’t just a rock—it was a nugget. Not a small one, but one of the biggest found to that point.”
“What did you do?”
“I seized it, but I also took it as a sign—as having been given one last chance. I cashed in the nugget at the assay office, took the money, and swore to reform. To become the best man I could be. I took the funds and invested them, specifically in ways that would benefit others—in businesses that gave others jobs. Honest and reasonably paid jobs. Once I’d established such a business, others came looking to purchase it, offering me yet more money. So I sold out, took the money, and moved on to my next venture. In that manner, I progressed, company by company, town by town, gradually traveling back across America to the east coast again. When I reached Boston, I stopped and asked myself what came next.”
Her eyes on his, she tipped her head. “And what did?”
He smiled briefly. “That was when I finally faced the question of what I actually wanted to achieve with my life. My epiphany was realizing that I was trying to—and possibly needed to—justify myself to my family, to society here, and I accepted that it was time to come home.” He paused, then went on, “It was as if my time in America had been about teaching me things I would never have learned while being Lord Grayson Child over here. But given I’d learned those lessons, it was time for me to come home and face my ultimate challenge, namely, to pick up the reins of being Lord Grayson Child and craft a satisfying life for myself here, where I actually belong.”
He met her eyes. “That’s why I returned—why I came home.”
Izzy digested that, then observed, “Both of us have learned lessons of life and of ourselves by being forced to exist without the funds we took for granted in our earlier years. I had to become Mrs. I. Molyneaux, and you had to become the man you are now. In order to survive, both of us shed the trappings of noble birth, and to be perfectly truthful, I don’t regret that. As Mrs. Molyneaux, I’ve learned more about the common hardships and realities of life than I ever could have as Lady Isadora Descartes.”
He was nodding. “That’s how I feel, too. That time was no picnic, but I gained a great deal from the experience and, I hope, have emerged a better man than I was before.”
“I appreciate you telling me your story.” She studied him for a moment more, then nodded. “I agree it’s time for us to bury our past and leave it behind us, fully and completely.”
An almost-imperceptible tension eased from him. “Our pasts don’t define us. We are the people we are now, not ghosts from years gone by.”
“Agreed. And”—she drew in a breath and forced herself to ask—“returning to your earlier question regarding how I might react if you proposed, is it the lady I am now you wish to offer for or a wraith from our mutual past?”
His smile was slow. “Definitely not the wraith. In fact, given what I now know of myself, I’m not at all sure the Lady Isadora of ten years ago would have been lady enough for me.”
She arched her brows. “Really? But now?”
He sobered. “Now, the lady you are is all I want and all I need.”
She tipped her head, sensing the ruthless certainty in the declaration. “You sound exceedingly sure.”
“I am.” His eyes didn’t leave hers. “What about you?”
She considered, but could see only one way of adequately answering that. She shifted closer and raised a hand to lightly trace his cheek. Voice low, she murmured, “I’m notquitesure…”
Stretching up, she pressed her lips to his. She kissed him, and for a long moment, he let her. Let her fit her lips to his and savor the firmness of his mobile lips against her lusher, softer ones. Then he responded, and the world spun away until nothing else mattered but the simple, honest, candid exchange.
He reached for her, one steely arm sliding about her waist and slowly drawing her closer. His other hand rose to encircle the wrist of the hand framing his face, but he didn’t draw her palm from his cheek. Instead, his long fingers artfully stroked the inside of her wrist, a strangely intimate caress that fractured her awareness.
If she’d wanted to know if he desired her, the answer was there in the sudden heat that flared when he angled his head, and instinctively, she parted her lips, and his tongue surged in and claimed.
Ardent and entirely certain, she responded and pressed closer. She slid her fingers from his cheek and speared them through his thick hair, then raised her other hand and, gripping his head between her palms, met his questing tongue with her own.
She matched him in the increasingly ravenous exchange and, captured by the moment, by the surging passion and all it promised, brazenly urged him on.
With lips and tongues and melding mouths, together, they forged deeper into passion’s lair, tempting, exploring, inciting.
