At ten o’clock in the evening, a proper spinster, serving as a young lady’s companion, would be tucked away inside her chambers.
But then, Daphne wasn’t truly the proper lady that Daniel, and the world, took her to be. It was not, however, past wickedness that had her tucked away in the spacious library. Leaning against the arm of the leather button sofa, she stretched her arms forward and then winced as the knotted muscles clenched spasmodically.
Concentrating on her breathing, she laboriously shoved herself back into a reclining position and closed her eyes. In accepting Daniel’s offer of employment and coming to London, she’d battled the fear of again facing Lord Leopold and having him reveal to the world that she was more whore than proper lady. She’d worried over entering Polite Society and suffering through their cold, mocking stares and pitying whispers.
But she’d not put proper thought into all the exertions that would be required of her. Thirty-three stairs, climbed countless times. Jaunts through the uneven London streets that were really feats of movement better fitted to the god Achilles. Climbing in a carriage. Climbing out. There was always movement. Constant movement that strained the limits of her body in ways that drew forth all her deepest regrets and frustrations. In dreaming of employment, where she helped formatively shape ladies into the strong figures they should and would become, Daphne had not allowed herself to think about how greatly her leg impaired her work.
She bit the inside of her cheek, despising herself that weakness, and briefly pressed her eyes closed. An unholy desire gripped her to be the carefree girl she’d once been, running through the countryside and not confined to a goddamned leather sofa because her leg was too useless to move. Certainly too useless to manage another thirty-three stairs this night.
Drawing in a slow breath, she again sat up and stretched her fingers toward her knotted calf. That’s when the groaning floorboards penetrated the nighttime still. On a gasp, she whipped her gaze to the doorway. Her stomach promptly sank.
Bloody fantastic.
“Hullo, Daphne.”
With her leg throbbing as a mocking testament to her own miserable lack of beauty, the last thing she cared to be presented with was the splendidly perfect Daniel Winterbourne with his languid steps and effortless grace.
He leaned one shoulder against the doorjamb. Must he be so smoothly elegant? “I’ll give you a hint, Miss Smith,” he said on a husky whisper. She damned her heart for tripling its beat. “This is where you return a greeting.”
“My lord,” she said, despising the breathless timbre to her voice. She gripped her skirts. Mayhap he’d not heard it. Mayhap…
His lips curled up in a feral grin better suited a hunter stalking its prey. He pushed away from the doorway. A fledgling hope stirred to life that he’d turn around and—he pulled the door closed. Of course, he’d closet them away. The bounder. “A good companion would, no doubt, rise and curtsy,” he continued, slowly advancing.
“I never proclaimed to be a good companion,” she muttered, covetously eyeing the wood panel between her and freedom. And there were also those too many steps and thirty-three stairs. She’d not forget those. “You are the one who put the demands to me. I simply wanted my references.”
“Your false references,” he pointed out.
“Given your less than honorable reputation,” the one he took such delight in reminding her of, “I—” He stopped before her seat, bringing her gaze directly in line with his thickly corded thighs. Her mouth went dry. She’d scaled trees more narrow than their impressive breadth.
“You were saying?” Daniel drawled and she jerked her head up.
The knowing glint in his chocolate brown eyes sent heat rushing to her cheeks. What had she been saying? What was it…?
He flicked a hand. “Given my less than honorable reputation?”
Oh, yes! Daphne cleared her throat and with all the dignity a lady confined to a sofa for the better part of four hours could manage, proudly angled her chin. “I expected writing on behalf of a former friend was certainly not outside the realm of your moral culpabilities.”
He layered his palms to the arm of the sofa. His gloveless fingers brushed the sensitive skin of her nape as he leaned forward. “I don’t have any morals. Quite reprehensible, really.” Then, he stroked the pad of his thumb along her right earlobe, bringing her eyelashes wildly fluttering. She gave thanks for the dimly lit space and his own positioning that protected her from that telling reaction to his careless caress.
A rake like Daniel had far more fiendish pursuits to attend than teasing her in a library. Alas…
He slid into the leather winged back chair closest to her and proceeded to drum his fingertips on the arms.
She sighed.
“Unable to sleep?” he hazarded.
Daphne forced herself around. She made to lower her legs on the floor, but the joint locked at the knee, suspending movement. Catching the flesh of her lower lip hard between her teeth, she smiled through the agony ripping through that limb.
He stared at her dubiously.
“Yes,” she managed when she trusted herself to speak. “I am unable to sleep.” Which wasn’t altogether untrue. If she couldn’t get herself abovestairs to her bed, then she certainly wasn’t able to sleep. “I take it you do not have any other roguish—”
“Rakish,” he neatly slid in.
“—pursuits, demanding your attention?”
Her question brought an immediate cessation to his drumming. “Do you know, Daphne?” he asked, stretching his legs out before him and hooking them at the ankles. “It occurs to me with your frequent questions and mention of my dissolute lifestyle, that you have an inordinate fascination with it.”
She stared longingly at his crossed limbs. How easy it was for him. How simple and effortless. And it had once been that way for her, too. Then his words registered and she swiveled her head up to meet his hooded eyes. She snorted. “Do not be silly, Daniel.” Despite the opinions he had of her as a straitlaced, virgin spinster, she was no innocent. She certainly knew what a rake’s intentions were and where those seductive words and improper glances found a lady.
“Ah,” he said, drawing out that syllable as he shoved himself up and dragged his seat closer to her. “So it is me you are so fascinated by?”
Daphne forced a laugh, but it emerged as a husky whisper of breath that sounded wicked to her own ears. “Your arrogance knows no bounds. And lest we forget, I am the one who taught you how to bait a hook.” That reminder, harkening back to their past, came out more for her benefit than anything.
“But on matters of seduction—”
“You are shameless.” She tossed her book at him and he easily caught it. Not bothering to steal a glance at the title, he set it aside.
“You judge me for being a rake,” he said straightforwardly. “But at least I live.” At his charge, she set her teeth. “What of you? How have you spent the past thirteen years?” Tucked away in her parents’ house, reading, and embroidering. God, how she’d despised the tedium of that task she’d always been rubbish at and being confined to the cottage. And in this moment, she despised Daniel for being so bloody accurate. She went tight-lipped, refusing to let him bait her. “Hidden away in the country,” he accurately supplied. “When was the last time you danced or swam or played shuttlecock?”
She’d been ten and he’d been almost thirteen. They’d played until the moon chased away the sun. “You know nothing of it,” she groused. How dare he presume to know what she’d lost that long ago day and how it had shaped ever day thereafter? Her toes twitched, aching to take part in those long abandoned activities.
He inclined his head. “I gather it’s been since your injury, then?” Damn him for being accurate.
People didn’t speak of her leg. Instead, they offered pitying stares and low-expectations and, yet, Daniel did not. She appreciated that, but met that with stony silence, anyway.
“Very well,” he sighed. “We shall cease all talks of the downcast lady you’ve become—”
“I am not downcast,” she gritted out. “I am logical and practical.”
“Ah, yes. You said that earlier. We shall also end all mention of my devilish reputation.”
She studied him, welcoming the distraction from the pain radiating up her leg and from the too-personal charges he’d leveled. “Do you attach that word to any and every mention of your name to convince others that you are as wicked as the world believes you to be?”
But for a muscle that jumped at the corner of his eye, his body went motionless. “There is no convincing required,” he drawled. “I assure you, I’m quite depraved.” He fished a silver flask from his jacket, uncorked it, and toasted her. “Just as my father predicted.”
She frowned. He’d not always been the immoral figure who thrilled at his own wickedness. Once, he’d been a loyal friend. The boy who’d carried her countless steps when she’d broken her leg. After Lord Alistair’s drowning, Daniel had been forever changed—just as his entire family had. “Your father saw good in you,” she said quietly. Or he had. Daniel had slowly retreated over the years, so the details of that relationship were now foreign ventures she only made.
Daniel changed positions and kicked his legs out, once again, hooking them at the ankles. “The boy who killed his only worthy son?”
His words wrung a painful gasp from her. Surely the once-loving, late earl had not leveled such hateful words on his sole living son? Then, grief did awful things to a person. It turned men into monsters and fiery girls into spiritless creatures. “You didn’t kill your brother, Daniel,” she said with a firm resolve.
His gaze moved to a point beyond her shoulder. “I couldn’t save him.” There was an eerie emptiness to his eyes, such agonized pain, that the air lodged in her chest.
Is that why he’d become this empty shell? Mayhap for her earlier charges, he did, in fact, know something about retreating within himself. “Sometimes accidents happen,” she said softly, calling his focus back to her. “Sometimes there are wicked rainstorms that see little girls with a broken leg and sometimes young boys get carried away by a violent lake. There can be no undoing those moments.” No matter how much one tortured oneself with dreams of returning to an innocent past.
He gave a casual shrug and took another drink from his flask. “Mayhap, but I am still the dark scoundrel the world takes me for.”
“If you have to say it as much as you do, then you are less corrupt than you believe.” A lightness filled her at that obvious truth.
He snorted. “And if you believe that, then you are a naïve miss who’d do well to watch the rakes and rogues around you.”
His words hit her like a fist to the belly and she glanced down at her skirts. Of course, he’d never dare countenance that she, the prim, proper spinster hired to aid his sister, had, in fact, been the naïve miss he accused her of being. And that naiveté had seen her stripped of her virginity in a night of folly. Daphne forced her gaze back to his and found him watching her; the harsh, angular planes of his face set in an inscrutable mask. “Tell me about your profligacy, then, Daniel. Tell me so I can know.” And stop seeing good where there, in fact, was none.
He furrowed his brow. It was a remarkable slip in that impressive composure.
“Do you meet widows in alcoves?”
“Yes,” he said instantly.
Why did her heart twist at the rapidity of his reply and the images evoked with that single syllable utterance? “Do you bed other men’s wives?”
“Undoubtedly.” He gave her one of those mirthless half-grins, his pearl white teeth flashing bright in the darkened room. “Sometimes two at the same time.”
Disappointment flooded her, filling her with a regret she didn’t wish to feel. “And do you dally with debutantes? Offer them pretty words so you might be the first to bed them?” she forced herself to ask.
Daniel chuckled. “I’d never be so gauche as to bother with a virgin.” He winked. “Entirely too much work for me.”
The tightness in her chest. Yes, Daniel was so quick to present himself as an unrepentant rake. While he might toss around flippant replies about virginal debutantes, his answer stood as proof. “I don’t care what your father thought in his misery and grief, or what you’ve spent these years shaping yourself into. There is good in you,” she said gently. Whether he chose to see it or failed to acknowledge it, it was there. And it gave her hope for the boy he’d once been and the man he could still be.
Why had he divulged those details about his father? Words he’d never shared with anyone.
Mayhap because when he was with her, Daphne didn’t fawn or preen over him the way bored ladies of the ton did. Rather, she treated him as she always had, with a frank directness that knew no boundaries or bounds. And when was the last time anyone called Daniel Winterbourne, good?
Certainly not his father, who’d wished him dead too many times to count. Nor his departed mother, who had ceased seeing him after Alistair’s drowning. Nor the rakes he kept company with. And yet, he’d found the last, solitary soul in the whole kingdom who believed there was good in him, insisted on it even after he’d admitted such scandalous things to her. Words not fit for any respectable lady’s ears.
Foolish chit.
He’d even less of a desire to sit here, disabusing her of her foolish notions, than he had of a meaningful discussion on St. Albans’ worries about him. Pocketing his flask, Daniel shoved to his feet. “I will allow you to your reading, madam,” he said brusquely, sketching a bow. He’d rather lob off his left arm with a dull blade than sit here, resurrecting the memories of his youth.
Daphne inclined her head, but remained in repose. “My lord.” She did not stand. Rather, she sat, precisely as she’d been since he’d poked his head in the room and found her here.
Just go, damn it. Go seek out your rooms and drink your brandy. He narrowed his eyes on her face, taking in details that had previously escaped him. The tense lines at the corner of her mouth. The strain around her eyes.
Then the truth slammed into him, briefly robbing him of breath.
She is hurt.
Even after her injury, he’d only ever seen her as the strong-willed girl he’d called friend. He’d never seen limitations because, well, there could never be limitations with Daphne Smith. Her spirit would never allow for it. Yet, here she sat, motionless from an old injury and he didn’t know what to do with the realization.
Daphne angled her chin up another notch, all but daring him to voice that discovery aloud. She was as bold and proud as she’d been the day he’d come upon her at the edge of the lake, her leg broken.
With a sigh, Daniel reclaimed his seat.
“What are you—?”
“How long have you been down here?” he interrupted.
“I don’t…” He leveled her with a single look and her words trailed off. “Several hours.”
By God, she’d always been stubborn. “How many is several?” he asked impatiently.
Daphne lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “Four.”
He cursed roundly.
“But I do enjoy your library,” she said on a rush.
Daniel swiped her forgotten copy from the arm of the chair. “Oh, yes,” he said dryly. “There is so much to enjoy.” He wagged the aged leather volume before her face. “Colebrooke’s, A Grammar of the Sanskrit Language, I take is quite riveting?” It remained one of the several hundred titles not carted off by the auctioneers who’d systematically emptied his library shelves.
She shifted in her seat. “It really is fascinating stuff.”
“Even more so, if you read German,” he said, his lips twitching. “Have you acquired a grasp of the German language since we last met?”
Daphne pressed her lips together. “No,” she managed to push that denial out through them, anyway.
Setting aside all teasing, Daniel tossed the book aside where it landed on the floor with a loud thump. “You’re hurt.” Something in breathing aloud that somber charge, knifed at his chest.
“It is nothing,” she said quickly.
He thinned his eyes all the more. She’d always been a rotted liar.
With an exasperated sigh, she hurled her arms up. “My leg hurts, is all.”
He trailed his gaze down her slender frame and he lingered his stare on those lower limbs expertly concealed by her dress. A desire to tug the fabric back for reasons that moved beyond the sexual, gripped him.
“I promise, I am fine. I’ll be able to see to my responsibilities in the morning,” she rushed to assure him.
The air froze in his chest. “You believe I’d remove you from your responsibilities because of your leg?” He clenched his jaw. The fire’s glow bathed her in light, emphasizing the color that filled her cheeks in a damning testament to that very fact. Hurt stabbed somewhere inside his chest. Hurt and a slow-building anger. He fixed on the anger, the anger was safer. “Hardly speaks to the good you still see in me,” he sneered.
Her lips turned down at the corners. “Of course, I do not believe you’d send me away,” she said with such matter-of-factness, she knocked him off-kilter. “Not without references.” At that weak attempt at humor, she gave him a sheepish grin.
He sat there in mute silence and her smile faded. Why should it shock or surprise him that everyone, including this woman, had such an ill-opinion of him? They were right for those opinions. Yet it frayed on a jagged nerve he’d not known or felt—until now.
Daphne turned her palms up. “I believe in your effort to spare me from overexerting myself, you’d absolve me of certain tasks. I do not wish to be treated differently, Daniel. I want to be like every other companion, able to work without assistance. I want to be the way I was.”
That person had died at the lakeside under the rain-dampened leaves, long, long ago, just as who he’d once been had ceased to exist. “You’ll never be that woman, here,” he said quietly, touching her legs. She jerked as though he’d struck her. Did she see herself as inferior? Having liked the man he was of his youth far more than the man he’d become, he could appreciate that. Daphne, however, had not changed. Not truly. “But you remain the same woman you always were here,” he touched a fingertip to her forehead. “And here,” he pressed a palm briefly to her heart and stilled. Of its own volition, his gaze fell to his hand upon her, with only the thin fabric of her gown a barrier between them. All he needed to do was move slightly and he’d cup that delicate—
“You don’t know that.” Her challenge emerged breathless. Her eyes turbulent with unidentified emotion cut across the haze of desire clogging his senses.
He yanked his fingers back. By God, if ever there was a doubt of his rakish reputation, lusting after Daphne was proof of his wickedness. “Don’t I?” he challenged, winging an eyebrow up. “The girl who challenged me to races and fights is now a woman who’d storm my estate and demand I be a decent brother.” An impossible task, as there was nothing decent about him. “And you’re strong enough to make your way in the world.” Of all the ladies of his acquaintance, she was the only one who’d beg for references and not baubles.
At the sudden adoration seeping from her expressive eyes, he recoiled, backing up a step, the moment too real. Unease filled him. He didn’t know what to do with that sincerity. It went against everything and anything he knew or dealt in. To shatter the solemnity of the moment, he waggled his eyebrows. “Plus, I’d never send you away because I’m a selfish enough bastard that I’d never absolve you of your tasks when I have need of your assistance.”
A shuddery sigh filtered from her lips. Despite his tumult, that whispery exhalation pulled an unwanted grin from him. Of course, only Daphne would react so to those pragmatic words, when every other woman he’d bedded wanted his praise of their beauty. He reached for her leg and she squeaked.
“What are you doing?” she demanded on a scandalized whisper, all dewy-eyed awe gone.
“Examining your leg,” he said, easily disentangling her hand from his.
“You most certainly are not,” she demanded, gripping him by the wrist.
He made to shrug her off once more, but something in her eyes held him back, froze him. A pleading. Since they’d met as children of five and eight, respectively, she’d been bold and demanding, just as she’d been the woman who’d stormed his manor and put demands to him. Through it all, she’d never been this figure with entreating eyes. “I will not look at it,” he promised, in a gentled tone.
She eyed him warily and the clock ticked away a long stretch of silence. Then, she gave a slight nod.
With that, through the muslin fabric, Daniel ran a hand down the expanse of her lower leg.
Daphne gasped. “Wh-what are you doing? You said—”
“I promised not to look. I didn’t say I would not touch,” he murmured, stroking the taut, knotted muscles.
“You cannot… You should not…” Her protestations trailed off as he ran his knuckles in a circular rhythm over her upper thigh.
God, she must be in agony. It was a testament to that misery that she—now proper Daphne—did not resist his touch. Through the fabric of her out of fashion dress, he rubbed her calf until a little, throaty moan spilled past her lips. This was the first time in the whole of his life that he’d ever stroked or caressed a woman without sexual gratification being the ultimate goal to which they both sought. And oddly, there was a greater intimacy in this moment than any of the hot couplings he’d known.
“I have never felt anything so exquisite.”
Did those words belong to Daphne or him? He glanced up from his task and momentarily froze. She sat, with her head hung back, eyes closed, the delicate planes of her face softened in a languid splendor. A bolt of desire worked through him; a hungering from a simple touch, through her frayed skirts, no less.
She opened her eyes and he swiftly yanked his attention back to her leg. He lifted her skirts ever so slightly and she jumped. “You said, you would not—”
“Let me rub your leg, Daphne.”
Indecision raged in her eyes.
He’d been a rake far longer than he’d been a gentleman and, as such, a master of manipulation and words—it just had always been for his own personal gratification—until now. “Come,” he cajoled. “I’m the same boy who swam naked with you in a lake. There is nothing I’ve not seen.” A shame, he’d not had the proper appreciation to gaze upon her then.
She flared her eyes. “Daniel,” she whispered, stealing a glance at the closed door. “We were children.”
“There are no worries of disloyal servants,” he assured. “The majority of my staff was let go due to lack of funds. All that remains are the oldest, who with their advancing years, are all abed, as well as their kin.”
Daphne caught her lower lip between her teeth, worrying that flesh, and, by hell, if he wouldn’t sell what was left of his black soul just then to taste the same succor. Then, she gave another slight nod.
Daniel gently raised her skirts, slowly, allowing her time to voice any objection. He lifted his gaze, questioningly. She remained motionless and he resumed his efforts, pushing the fabric up until her lower limb was exposed.
Silence fell on the room and agony squeezed his chest. The lower limb, improperly set, had left the entire portion below her knee twisted.
…I’ll never ride again. Or curtsy. Or dance…
Her child’s voice of long ago, wreathed in pain, echoed around the room as loud as though they were the words whispered in the copse where he’d found her. Had she done those things with the passage of time? Or did the old injury make those movements impossible?
His throat worked. She’d marched to Mrs. Belden’s and then sought him out. And then marched back home with nothing more than a wooden cane to aid her. God, he was humbled by her strength.
Aware of her gaze burning a spot into his neck, he proceeded to rub the flesh, working the knots, and then continuing higher.
“D-Daniel, this is too intimate,” she chided, her voice faintly breathless as she made to push her gown back into place.
“Bah,” he interrupted. “This isn’t intimate.” He raised his eyes to hers and, never taking them from her face, said, “Touching you here,” he brushed his palm higher up her thigh. The warmth of her leg burned his hand and killed all levity. He forced himself to finish the thought, his tone garbled. “That would be intimate.” What had begun as an attempt at teasing, quickly faded as a charged undercurrent blazed to life. He lingered his hand on the smooth flesh of her thigh and worked his hand higher, stroking his fingertips over her searchingly.
Her breath hitched loudly as he came up slowly on his knees. His pulse pounded hard in his ears as he drew his hands out from under her skirts. Daphne’s eyes, limpid with desire, searched his face. “Daniel,” she whispered.
On a groan, he cupped a hand about her neck and availed himself to her lush lips as he’d ached to do since she’d pushed back her hood at Winterbourne Manor. Not bothering with gentility, he plunged his tongue inside her mouth, searching the hot cavern. A low, throaty moan spilled from her and he swallowed that testament of her need.
She twined her fingers in his hair, bringing her flush to his chest so her small breasts crushed against him. Emboldened, he reached a hand between them and caressed one. He tweaked the erect peak through the fabric of her dress and the bud pebbled all the more under his ministrations. His groan melded with her throaty whimper.
Fueled by a desperate hungering, Daniel slanted his lips over hers, drowning in the intoxicating taste of mint and chocolate. By God, she tasted of sweetness and innocence and he wanted to lose himself in her. He guided her down and shifted himself over her, never breaking contact with her lips. Working his hand up her legs, he cupped her mound and her hips bucked.
All these years, he’d disavowed innocence. With Daphne undulating into his hand while he rang little pleading sounds from her lips, he conceded that mayhap there was something to be said for innocence, after all.