Chapter Fifteen
Elizabeth lay in her bed, staring up at the ceiling in the darkness. She was exhausted but unable to sleep. Memories of his kiss plagued her. The fiery and passionate man from the night before, the sweet and tender man who had comforted them both that afternoon. Was it possible that both of those were simply facets of the same person? He accused her of not trusting men, and that was true to a degree. But more so, she no longer trusted her own judgment.
How long had it been since someone had touched her with such tenderness and caring? In truth, never. Her own family had been cold at best. She had not suffered as cruelly as Benedict and his sister had at the hands of their abusive, adoptive family, but she hadn’t been loved and cared for either. And while that kiss and the wealth of feeling she’d thought she read in his gaze had made her heart leap and inspired the girlish dreams of a grand love to once more spring to life, it was the other kiss that kept her awake. She was tormented by her own response to it—to him.
She had thought herself beyond such temptations, that perhaps she had managed to subdue that weakness within herself… after the last time. It had been years since she had felt a man’s touch, much less a kiss. Even then, she had been a girl and her lover had been little more than a boy. Benedict, however, was a man grown, with a man’s needs and far more skill than anything she had experienced in the past.
Turning onto her side, her eyes were drawn to the pale sliver of light that filtered in between the curtains. Her skin felt too sensitive, even the weight of her night rail against her flesh was more than she could bear. It wasn’t just the lingering desire ignited by his kiss, by the hard press of his body against hers, but also the disquiet of her own thoughts.
Being forced to acknowledge and to accept that she was not as far removed from the woman she had once been as she had thought was difficult to come to terms with.
“Damn,” she whispered. It felt so good to utter that curse into the darkness, to let some small bit of the wickedness inside her out into the world.
Unable to sleep, unwilling to continue lying in her bed and letting the frustration eat away at her, she shoved back the bed clothes and sat up. With her feet planted firmly on the floor, she rose and tugged her wrapper on, tying the sash with jerky and agitated movements.
There was brandy in the library. She would get a book and a little dram of it to help settle her nerves and, hopefully, lull herself to sleep.
Easing her door open, she stepped into the hall and peered carefully about her. She did not want to bump into Benedict—Mr. Mason, she corrected herself—in the dark. He was dangerous enough to her even in the bright light of day.
With the corridor deserted, Elizabeth made her way quietly down the stairs. Perhaps it was instinct, perhaps after the attempted kidnapping she was more attuned to her surroundings. Regardless, halfway down the stairs, she stopped. With one hand clutching the railing and the other gripping the sides of her wrapper together, Elizabeth was overwhelmed by the sensation of not being alone.
“Hello?” she whispered. Part of her desperately wanted someone to answer while another part of her was terrified that they might.
“I won’t bite you.”
The response came from the bottom of the stairs, an acerbic tone to a voice that was becoming dangerously familiar to her. She’d left her bed to avoid memories of Mr. Mason and had, instead, run directly into the man himself.
“What are you doing down there?” she demanded. As if she had the right! It was not her place to question him.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he admitted. “I thought brandy might help. Dare I say that you seem to be suffering a similar predicament?”
“I heard a noise,” she lied.
His grin was evident in his voice. “How very brave you are, Miss Masters, to investigate it all by yourself. Brave enough that you deserve a reward… if you come down, I will share my brandy with you.”
The idea of being alone with him in the darkness, of letting him steal another kiss, was far more intoxicating than any brandy ever could be. Against all reason and defiance of everything she knew she ought to do, Elizabeth found herself descending those stairs to where he waited in the shadows below. It was far too late to retreat now. Her pride wouldn’t allow it.
When she reached the small pool of light that poured from the library, she hesitated again. He stood just inside the door, a second snifter of brandy in his hand and a speculative gleam in his eye.
“I won’t accost you in the library… Elizabeth,” he promised.
His tone was low and alarmingly seductive. The way his lips positively caressed her name rang every warning bell that she possessed. But once a hedonistic and willful hellion, she thought, always a hedonistic and willful hellion. Try as she might to deny and crush that part of herself, it was still there, lurking beneath her prim, drab clothes and her stiff demeanor.
“I still have not given you leave to use my name,” she reminded him as she took the glass from his hand.
“I’ve tasted your lips, Miss Masters. Twice, as a matter of fact. It seems the worst kind of hypocrisy to retain such formal address when the intimacy of our acquaintance has already surpassed such nonsense,” he replied smoothly. “Tell me, what disturbing thoughts dragged you from the comfort of your bed this evening?”
“You, Mr. Mason.” It was not an admission of the nature of her thoughts, only that he occupied them. “I cannot help but wonder at your true identity and your true purpose here… at what manner of man you actually are. You appear to have a very changeable nature.”
“That again,” he nodded. “It is a conundrum, Elizabeth. I can assure you that I did not intentionally allow someone to shoot me just to gain entrance to this house. I have no designs upon a title that is most obviously not mine. Regardless of what you may think of me, financially I have no need of anything that belongs to Lady Vale. There are more than enough reckless young bucks willing to throw the family fortune upon any table in my establishment. More often than not, they leave a healthy chunk of it behind.”
“You do not aspire to her wealth… you do not aspire to her title and position. So what are your aspirations, Mr. Mason? What precisely, other than your conveniently timed heroics, has brought you into our midsts?” She wanted to anger him, to offend his honor in such a way that he would have no choice but to leave and she could at least attempt to put him from her mind and continue on with her peacefully boring existence. It was better that way, to force him out before she, once again, felt the bitter pain of disappointment.
He stepped forward, close enough that their bodies nearly touched. As he loomed over her, she had to tilt her head back to meet his steely gaze and to measure the tension of the ticking muscle at his jaw. She wanted alternately to step back and give herself space to breathe but also to provoke him, to tease the fire of his anger to the point that both of them would lose all sense. It wasn’t simply that she wanted to lose control, but to cast it off like an offending garment and embrace her inner wickedness.
When he spoke, his voice was perfectly modulated, his tone completely civil, and nothing in it indicated the cold fury she saw banked in his eyes. “To find my sister and nothing more. I could not sleep because every time I close my eyes, Miss Masters, I cannot help but envision all the horrors that could be visited upon her… the same horrors that might have been visited upon you had I not intervened. And I wonder, Miss Masters, what will become of you if I leave here as you are surely trying to encourage me to do.”
Despite the well-modulated and civil tone, there was a note in his voice, a hint that perhaps he had witnessed those kinds of horrors firsthand, that perhaps his sister had, as well. What did they know of him really? He admitted that his adoptive parents had been cruel people but, beyond that, they did not know anything of the couple. In truth, they knew nothing of him. And while her first instinct was to trust him, her instincts had been wrong in the past and she had paid dearly for it.
“Then why have you not left to find her, Mr. Mason? You are not being held against your will.” That wasn’t entirely true, of course. If he attempted to leave before Lady Vale was satisfied that he was not her missing son, she might very well attempt it.
He didn’t answer immediately, but took a sip of his brandy instead. “Because I have to admit that I am not able to do so. Right now, if I were put in a situation where I had to fight for Mary and for myself, I would fail. Also, Lady Vale has resources at the ready, and as I am currently unable to adequately pursue her captors myself, I am dependent upon her assistance. Despite my initial misgivings, Mr. Adler is proving to be more than competent. That is all. I tolerated your accusations earlier because you had no knowledge of who I am or what I’m about. I find that I’m less inclined to tolerate it politely any longer.”
Elizabeth laughed at that. “Tolerate it politely! Ha! You are not a gentleman, Mr. Mason. Do not pretend to be.”
“And you are not a lady. I’ll drop all of my pretenses if you drop yours,” he challenged.
The accusation stung, primarily because there was more than a small kernel of truth in it. “How dare you!”
“I dare because you constantly accuse me of being untruthful, Elizabeth, when the only person lying is you. You lie to yourself and to the world at large every time you don one of your drab, ugly gowns and pretend to be meek and obedient. That isn’t who you are! Be true to yourself and what your cold-hearted and soulless relatives think of you will matter less and less every day!”
She drew her hand back as if to strike him. It was an instinctive response, a need to make him stop saying the things that echoed the traitorous whispers in her own mind. Before her hand could touch his cheek, he caught it, his long fingers wrapping about her wrist in a hold that was gentle but unbreakable.
“Do not test me, Elizabeth,” he warned softly. “You will find that I dare many things.”
“I am not afraid of you and I will not be cowed by you! You do not know me and you have no right to dictate to me how I should be living my life!” Her words were whispered, hissed out between clenched teeth as she glared at him. Because it felt good to be angry, because it released some of the misery she’d been carrying around inside her for so long, she continued, “You are not Lord Vale! You are not her vanished son returned to her! For the sake of her already broken heart, can you not at least attempt to make her see reason?”
He let go of her abruptly and scrubbed his hands over his face and let his fingers comb through his golden hair, sending the locks into disarray. “I have told her, Elizabeth. Every time I have been in her presence, I have told her. Short of being unnecessarily cruel to a woman who is already beyond fragile, what would you have me do?”
“Lie,” Elizabeth said. “Tell her you remember your true parents. Just tell her anything that will keep her from clinging to this false hope.”
“And if it isn’t?” he retorted. “What bothers you the most, Elizabeth? That right now I’m the completely disreputable owner of a gaming hell you shouldn’t even speak to much less kiss? Or is that I might be the lost lord… and too far above your own lowly station?”
It was both. She hadn’t allowed herself to actually put it into words, not even in her own mind, but there was no denying the truth once he uttered it. In his current position, to entertain any sort of romantic entanglement with him was to toss away any remaining vestige of respectability that she possessed. But if he was, in fact, the missing Lord Vale, she would never be anything to him other than a mistress, too far beneath his station for anything more concrete.
Perhaps she wasn’t as hedonistic as she’d once believed herself to be. Even in her brief affair with Fredrick, she’d believed, somewhat naively, that she would one day be his wife. She no longer possessed the ability to lie to herself to that extent. There was no future with Benedict Mason, regardless of how attractive she found him or how much she was drawn to him. Not that he had expressed any interest in the future. Everything he appeared to want was in their very immediate present.
“Is it wrong that I know my place in this world, Mr. Mason? That I understand the standards of behavior I must adhere to in order to maintain my position? I have no aspirations to climb any higher, but I refuse to fall any further than I have!” she snapped.
*
Benedict wasn’t entirely sure what it was that infuriated him so in her heated response. Perhaps it was simply that everything she said made perfect sense, and sense was not what he wanted in that moment. He wanted recklessness and heat—he wanted to feel her come undone beneath him and, for once, to have her look at him without suspicion and caution. She stirred something in him that was beyond simple attraction and desire. It maddened him. Crossing to the desk again, he refilled his glass and took a healthy swallow of the amber liquid.
“To hell with your place in the world and to hell with mine! If I’d listened to everyone who told me where my place was, I’d still be stacking rocks in the north country, stooped over with an aching back and hands too rough to even touch you with,” he said. “Make your own place, Elizabeth. Decide what you want and then do whatever it takes to get it.”
“Is that what you did?” she asked. The heat in her voice had subsided, leaving in its stead a wistfulness that pricked at his more tender feelings. The nightmarish visions that had plagued him had left him feeling raw and eager to lash out at anyone who might strike his ire. But those feelings faded in her presence, faded as they both carefully lowered their guards and met one another on even ground.
“It’s what I mean to do now,” he vowed.
Placing his glass once more on the wooden surface of the desk, he took two steps toward her until he could grasp her wrist. A simple tug was all it took as he pulled her to him, because there was no resistance in her. It was clear from the way she leaned into him, from the soft sigh that escaped her lips as their bodies touched, that it was what she wanted, as well.
“Why do I crave you?” he asked. “It is glaringly apparent that no two people have ever been more ill-suited to one another… and yet, from the moment I first spied you in that square, all shy and proper, then later hissing and clawing like a feral cat in that alleyway, I could not get you out of my mind.”
“I wish I knew the answer to that. We should not continue this,” she said. But even as she uttered that small token protest, she made no move to break free of his embrace. Instead, she pressed her face into his chest, resting her head against his shoulder.
Dipping his head, Benedict inhaled the soft scent of lemon verbena that clung to her hair. It was a scent that would haunt him for the remainder of his days. “If I kiss you again, Elizabeth, it will not be enough.”
“You kissed me twice and it hasn’t been enough,” she murmured.