The Serpent Prince (Princes #3)(36)
Author: Elizabeth Hoyt

Lucy shook her head helplessly.

“You won’t speak, won’t tell me,” he said huskily. “Are you taunting me? You taunt me in my dreams sometimes, sweet angel, when I’m not dreaming of . . .” He sank to his knees before her. “You don’t know me, don’t know what I am. Save yourself. Throw me from your house. Now. While you still can, because I’ve lost my determination, my will, my very honor—what little of it I had left. I cannot remove myself from your presence.”

He was warning her, she knew it, but she couldn’t tell him to go. “I won’t turn you away. You can’t ask that of me.”

His hands were at either side of her on the settee. They bracketed her but did not touch her. He bowed his head until all she could see was his crown of shorn pale hair. “I’m a viscount; you know that. The Iddesleighs go back a fair ways, but we only managed to pocket a title five generations ago. I’m afraid we have a tendency to pick the wrong side in royal wars. I have three homes. A town house in London, one in Bath, and the estate in Northumberland, the one I told you about when I woke that first day. I said it was a wilderness, and it is, but it’s also quite beautiful in a savage way, and of course the land’s profitable, but we needn’t ever go there, if you don’t wish. I have a steward and plenty of servants.”

Lucy’s eyes were blurred with tears. She muffled a sob. He sounded as if he were . . .

“And there are some mines, copper or tin,” he continued, staring at her lap. Was he afraid to look her in the eye? “I can never remember which, and it doesn’t really matter because I have a man of business, but they pay quite well. There are three carriages, but one was my grandfather’s and is getting rather moldy. I can have a new one made, if you want one of—”

She caught his chin with her shaking hands and tilted his face up so she could see his pale gray eyes, looking so worried, so alone. She placed a thumb over his lips to still the river of words and tried to smile through the tears coursing down her cheeks. “Hush. Yes. Yes, I’ll marry you.”

She could feel the beat of his pulse against her fingers, warm and alive, and it seemed to echo the wild fluttering of her own heart. She’d never felt joy such as this, and she had the sudden fierce thought, Make it last, please, Lord. Don’t ever let me forget this moment.

But he searched her eyes, neither triumphant nor happy, only waiting. “Are you sure?” His lips caressed her thumb with the words.

She nodded. “Yes.”

He closed his eyes as if terribly relieved. “Thank God.”

She leaned down and kissed him softly on the cheek. But when she would’ve pulled back, he moved his head. His mouth connected with hers.

He kissed her.

Brushing across her lips, teasing her, tempting her, until she finally opened to him. He groaned and licked the inside of her lower lip. She brought her tongue forward at the same time and tangled with his. She didn’t know if she was doing it right. She’d never been kissed like this before, but her heart beat loudly in her ears, and she couldn’t control the trembling of her limbs. He grasped her head between his hands and held it, angling his face across hers to deepen the embrace. This wasn’t like Eustace’s gentlemanly kiss. This was darker—hungry and almost frightening. She felt as if she were on the verge of falling. Or of breaking apart into so many pieces she’d never be able to put them back together again. He took her lower lip between his teeth and worried it. What should’ve been pain, or at least discomfort, was pleasure that went to her very center. She moaned and surged forward.

Crash!

Lucy jerked back. Simon looked over her shoulder, his face taut, a sheen of moisture on his brow.

“Oh my goodness!” Mrs. Brodie exclaimed. A tray of demolished china, oozing cake, and puddling tea lay at her feet. “Whatever will the captain say?”

That’s a good question, Lucy thought.

Chapter Nine

“I don’t mean to pry, Miss Craddock-Hayes,” Rosalind Iddesleigh said nearly three weeks later. “But I’ve been wondering how you met my brother-in-law?”

Lucy wrinkled her nose. “Please, call me Lucy.”

The other woman smiled almost shyly. “How kind. And you, of course, must call me Rosalind.”

Lucy smiled back and tried to think whether Simon would mind if she told this delicate woman that she’d found him nude and half dead in a ditch. They were in Rosalind’s elegant carriage, and it turned out that Simon did indeed have a niece. Theodora rode in the carriage as well, which was rumbling through the streets of London.

Simon’s sister-in-law, the widow of his elder brother, Ethan, looked like she should be gazing from a stone tower, waiting for a brave knight to come rescue her. She had gleaming, straight blond hair, pulled into a simple knot at the crown of her head. Her face was narrow and alabaster white with wide, pale blue eyes. If the evidence wasn’t sitting right next to her, Lucy would never have believed she was old enough to have an eight-year-old child.

Lucy had been staying with her future sister-in-law for the last sennight in preparation for her wedding to Simon. Papa had not been pleased by her match, but after grumbling and shouting for a bit, he’d reluctantly given his blessing. During Lucy’s time in London, she had visited a bewildering variety of shops with Rosalind. Simon was insistent that Lucy get a completely new trousseau. While she was naturally pleased to have so many fine clothes, at the same time it gave Lucy a niggling worry that she would not make a proper viscountess for Simon. She came from the country, and even dressed in lace and embroidered silks, she was still a simple woman.

“Simon and I met on the lane outside my home in Kent,” Lucy hedged now. “He’d had an accident, and I brought him home to recover.”

“How romantic,” Rosalind murmured.

“Was Uncle Sigh in his cups?” the little girl beside her wanted to know. Her hair was darker than her mother’s, more of a gold, and curly. Lucy remembered Simon’s description of his brother’s curly locks. Theodora obviously took after her dead father in that respect, although her eyes were her mother’s wide blue.

“Theodora, please.” Rosalind drew her brows together, creasing two perfect lines into her otherwise smooth forehead. “We’ve discussed the use of proper language before. What will Miss Craddock-Hayes think of you?”

The child slumped in her seat. “She said we could call her Lucy.”