Say Yes to the Marquess (Castles Ever After #2)(50)
Author: Tessa Dare

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“I hope not.”

“I’m here to see the lavender nightshirt.”

Oh, his face. Clio wished she were better at sketching, so she might have preserved that astonished look forever.

“The lavender nightshirt,” she repeated. “The embroidered one you told us about tonight. You had better be wearing it under that bedsheet. Because I know your story about Piers was pure fabrication, from beginning to end.”

“Well, you’re wrong.” He pushed the bedsheet down to his waist. “See? No lavender nightshirt.”

No, no lavender nightshirt.

No nightshirt at all.

He was bared to the hips, every inch of his torso hard and gleaming in the firelight, like a sculpture cast in bronze. She was rocked by the impulse to reach for him, but some ingrained voice of warning held her back—not the voice that warned a girl away from dangerous men but the voice that kept her from reaching for a potato that had fallen in the coals.

He would singe her fingers.

“Then you cheated,” she managed to whisper, dragging her gaze back up to his. “You told more than one lie. You rogue. Men have been called out for less.”

“What is this? We’re dueling now? No one gets called out for parlor games.”

“No. They get called out for trifling with a gentlewoman’s virtue and ruining her chances at happiness. This is my life at stake. And you lied to me.”

The sleep was gone from his expression now. He was awake, and angry. “I said that Piers loves you. Why is that so damned hard to believe?”

“Because my lie was so close to the truth. He never even kissed me, Rafe. Not once in eight years of betrothal.”

He shook his head in disbelief.

She folded her hands in her lap. “It’s true. When you kissed me in the tower a few days ago . . . ? That kiss was my first.”

“Your first?” Rafe couldn’t believe it.

He sat up in bed. The linen bedsheet pooled about his waist. “That’s not possible.”

“I assure you, it’s true. It’s beyond humiliating to admit it, but it’s true.”

He stared at her, with her delicate profile and her unbound hair falling down her back in golden waves. She was so lovely, he ached. For the first time, he began to question his brother. Could Piers be one of those men who preferred his own sex?

Surely not. Rafe dismissed the idea out of hand. When they were youths, his brother was forever “borrowing” Rafe’s best French engravings from his bottom drawer, even though he pretended to know nothing about it when confronted. And there’d been stories of the usual debauched adventures in his university days. Not a lot of stories, but a few.

No, Piers liked women.

Which made Clio’s confession all the more baffling to comprehend. How could Piers resist kissing this woman?

Rafe had excellent reasons not to kiss Clio, and he’d succumbed to temptation—multiple times—despite them.

“I was truly your first?” he asked.

She nodded.

White-hot triumph forked through him like a lightning bolt. Rafe could have run a victory lap around the castle. He hadn’t felt this good since winning his first championship bout. He couldn’t even be angry with his brother now. Knowing that he was Clio’s first kiss, her first touch . . .

It made him want to be her first everything.

Not just her first, but her last. Her best.

His hands made fists in the bedsheets. “You need to return to your own chamber.”

Instead of leaving, she eased herself farther onto the bed and tucked her crossed legs under her nightrail. Making herself right at home.

To be fair, he supposed she was in her own home. Very well. He could be the one to leave. Not just this room, but the castle. If he went to saddle his gelding right now, he could be in Southwark by daybreak.

He nodded at his shirt and trousers, draped over the arm of a chair—just out of reach. “Hand me my clothing, will you?”

She didn’t move, except to toy with a lock of her unbound, golden hair. When she spoke, her tone was husky. “Would you like to hear a bedtime story?”

“Not particularly, no.”

Laying a hand to his chest, she pushed him back against the mattress. “You’re going to hear one anyway.”

Holy God. There was rock-hard, there was hard-as-steel, and then there was the solidity of Rafe’s current erection—which so thoroughly surpassed all his previous experience, he suspected it might be of interest to science.

He considered closing his eyes, sticking his fingers in his ears, and chanting Broughton’s rules at the top of his voice until either she went away or morning dawned. But one look at the stubborn set of her chin, and he knew it was no use. She was determined enough to wait him out.

She was too accomplished at patience, this woman. And that was his idiot brother’s fault.

“Once upon a time,” she began, “I imagined myself to be Sleeping Beauty. Promised in my cradle to marry . . . well, not a prince, but something close. I was surrounded by well-meaning relations, showered with gifts. Wealth, good breeding, education. Even a castle.”

She hugged her knees and stared at the banked fire. “And right around my seventeenth birthday, I went to sleep. There wasn’t any spindle to prick my finger. But I fell asleep just the same, and I stayed that way for eight long years.”

Firelight played over her face, caressing her cheek with more tenderness than a brute like Rafe could ever muster.

“All around me, my friends were marrying, traveling, having children, and making their own homes. Not me. I was still asleep in that tower. Still waiting on my prince to come home and kiss me, so I could wake.

“Then one day . . . I decided to give myself a good pinch and wake up. The prince wasn’t coming for me. And maybe—just maybe—I didn’t need him, anyway. I’d been given so many gifts. An education, a fortune, a castle. Who was to say that simply because I was female, I couldn’t make something of those gifts myself?” She looked at Rafe. “Then came you.”

“I’m no kind of prince.”

“No, you’re not. You’re wild and rebellious and rough-mannered. But you kissed me in a tower. You brought me every flower in the hothouse. You gave me an entire roomful of cake. You swept me off my feet.” She rested her chin on her knees and regarded him. “And tonight, you remembered what I wore to my come-out ball when I was seventeen years old. Down to the pearls studded in my hair.”