Chapter Eleven
Graham watched as horror and heartbreak played across Lydia’s delicate features. And there was empathy, too, a tiny understanding that he wasn’t certain most in his life would feel. This woman had endured something. That was what he was supposed to find out about tonight.
Instead he stood before her, stripped half naked in body and fully naked in soul. And yet saying that horrible thing out loud somehow felt…better.
“Graham,” she whispered at last. He could see how much she wanted to rush to him. To touch him, to hold him. But she didn’t. For his sake. To allow him this moment without trying to crowd it out of him, and he appreciated that, too.
“She was lovely,” he said. “Quiet and kind, gentle to all around her. She used to tousle my hair when she didn’t think he was looking. She called me Gig—I guess that’s what I used to call myself when I was learning to talk. My father hated that. He said she was making me soft and weak. He had to make me strong. He had a very specific way of doing that.”
Lydia swallowed hard. “With his fists.”
He nodded once, pain flooding every part of him. He could stop now. He could see that if he did she wouldn’t push him. She would let him back away from the past he never spoke of to anyone. And yet he couldn’t. Now that the ball had begun to roll down this long and dangerous hill, he couldn’t call it back. He had to let it crash as it would, at the bottom.
Perhaps it was better that way.
“I always knew he hit her. We were a pair, the two of us. She’d throw herself in front of me and eventually I started throwing myself in front of her. Protecting each other. Only there was no protection from that…monster who paraded around like he was a godly man. A good man. A decent man who was liked by those who thought they knew him.”
He shook his head and caught a glimpse of his bruised knuckles. Evidence that perhaps he was no better than that wolf who’d masqueraded as a sheep. He’d lost control, like he’d seen his father do so many times.
“What happened?” she pressed, drawing him back out of his musings. But to no better place.
His breathing rasped in the quiet around them. His battered hands shook. “I was seven years old. I’d broken something—a dish, perhaps. An accident. And he lost all control and reason. He came at me across a room like a bull in a paddock and I froze, utterly terrified. He was so fucking big, Lydia. He felt like he was ten feet tall, with a fist the size of a ham. He was screaming, almost incoherent with rage. And she stepped between us, trying to stop him, to calm him.”
He stopped because the room around him was fading, replaced by images of another room, another night. Replaced by the sounds of his mother screaming as his father’s fists rained down on her slight body. Of the screams stopping suddenly and heartbreakingly. Of his father turning on him, his hands bloody just like Graham’s had been earlier in the night.
He could still remember what he’d said next, “You will come to heel, boy. Or you’ll end up buried next to her.”
Lydia gasped and Graham blinked, back in this room. He realized he’d been speaking out loud, reciting what he saw in that state. Lydia’s hand was pressed so hard into her mouth that her knuckles were white, her eyes were wide as saucers. Tears streamed down over her cheeks and her fingers as she stared at him in voiceless and helpless pain.
“She died two days later. He told everyone that it was a sudden illness. And he sent me away to school soon after. Eventually I met Simon and James and the rest, and I hid with them as much as I could. One day I just got too big to push.”
She moved toward him now, her hand outstretched. How he wanted to let her touch him, to let her comfort him as he could see she would. To let her fold herself around him and fill the gaping emptiness that he had carried forever.
Only he knew there was some part of him that couldn’t be filled. And he backed away.
“Don’t,” he said softly. “Not after tonight.”
“And what does tonight have to do with your mother’s death at the hands of a monster? Or what he did to you in the years before and after?” she said, her voice tight.
He shook his head as he looked at her. “You know what, Lydia. You saw me. You stopped me. You know what I was doing.”
“Defending me!” she snapped, but there was something in her tone that told him she knew the truth.
He barked out an ugly sound. “No, Lydia. I was the monster tonight. I was my father.”
She sucked in her breath between her teeth and now she charged forward again, beautiful and light and completely unafraid despite what she’d heard and seen. He found himself leaning toward her, incapable of drawing back one more time.
She caught his arm, holding tight as she stared up into his face. “You were nothing like your father. Not tonight, not ever,” she insisted.
“You who have known me, what, a fortnight?” he said, but he still didn’t pull away from the comfort Lydia offered. Now that he’d spilled all he was to her, he had no strength to fight anymore.
He would be selfish, because that was what his father had put in his blood.
Her face twisted at his question, and for a moment he saw something in her gaze. Something…guilty. But then it was gone.
“Perhaps I haven’t known you, truly known you, for very long,” she said softly. “But I do know you, Graham. What you did tonight, what you did when you struck Simon, those things don’t make you your father.”
She moved even closer, brushing his hair back from his face. The air began to leave the room as she locked eyes with him. And his need to have her close began to transform into something with more purpose and heat.
“Ewan said I needed your secrets,” he confessed as she brushed her thumb over his lower lip. “And here I gave you mine, didn’t I?”
Adelaide froze, her finger still heavy on his full lips as she stared up into his eyes. Secrets. He’d been on a mission to find her secrets when his own painful past had fallen from those same lips she touched now.
And her own secrets felt so damned heavy right now. So painful.
She stepped back a little. “You—you spoke to a friend about me?” she asked, pretending that she didn’t know that Ewan was Ewan Hoffstead, the infamous Silent Duke of Donburrow.
Graham nodded slowly. “I did. And—”
He cut himself off, and she fought the urge to groan out her frustration. That he would speak to a friend about Lydia Ford was meaningful. He wanted to be closer to this character she had created.
She was thrilled and horrified by that fact in equal measure.
“And?” she pushed, needing to know what he would say next.
He caught her wrist and smoothed a thumb across the delicate bones there. “I did, that’s all,” he said.
Her heart had begun to throb already, but as he drew her a little closer it pounded like a wild stallion set free. She was in dangerous waters beyond her wildest imaginings now. The wrong move and she might very well drown.
A fate that didn’t seem all so terrible when he lowered his lips to hers and she tasted the sweetness of his kiss and the pulsing heat of his desire behind it. But there was something more there tonight. He needed her. Not just physically, as had existed between them in the past.
He needed her comfort. Her presence. Her touch. Only he needed all that in the guise of Lydia Ford. She pushed aside the pain of that fact once more and sank into his kiss, winding her arms around his neck and gently stroking her tongue into his mouth.
He sighed, the sound shuddering from his lips as his arms came around her waist and he held there, almost sagging from what she knew was emotional exhaustion. She knew it all too well.
Gently, she guided him backward, toward his bed. When they reached it, she broke the kiss and looked up at him. “Will you let me take care of you tonight?” she whispered.
Emotion flashed over his face once more, and he said, “Do I deserve such pleasure?”
She nodded. “In my mind you do. And mine is the only opinion that matters, isn’t it?”
A tiny smile tilted his lips. A shadow of his normal knowing, wicked grin, which he only seemed to gift Lydia. But the fact that there was any pleasure to be had for him buoyed her determination to offer him this comfort.
“Who am I to argue with a lady?” he asked.
She stiffened slightly. A lady? Oh, he didn’t know the half of it. She stepped back. “Remove the rest then and up onto the pillows you go.”
He stared at her. “And what will you do, Lydia?”
She put her back to him and drew a deep breath before she began to unfasten her torn costume. She was pleased to be in it at present, for it was easy to remove on her own, designed so she could quickly alter her look in the wings of the stage between acts or scenes.
“You worry about yourself, Your Grace. I’ll worry about me,” she tossed over her shoulder.
She faced him as she unbuttoned the last button and smiled. For all his arguing, he had removed his clothing as she’d asked and now lay across his bed in all his naked glory. Oh, and there was glory to it. He truly was magnificent, a beautiful specimen of the best a man could be. Muscled and toned and hard and hers.
She shimmied the dress away slowly and stood before him, as naked as he was. He caught his breath, a loud inhalation in the quiet room, but he made no move to touch her or control what was happening. Perhaps he was too exhausted by what he’d shared. Or perhaps he just wanted to surrender to her tonight.
Either way she felt a swell of power that this man who could control any situation or person within his reach would concede any quarter to her. That took trust. A trust she most certainly hadn’t earned considering all the ways she was lying to him.
He sat up on his elbows and tilted his head. “You’re thinking, Lydia.”
She smiled slightly at his easy read of her turbulent mind. “Am I? And what’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing except I want you to be busy touching me, not analyzing everything that is happening.” Now he did reach out a hand, but his blue eyes didn’t leave her face. “Please.”
The please was said so softly and with so much need that she couldn’t resist it. Slowly she climbed onto the bed and crawled toward him. She ignored his outstretched hand as she caged him in with an arm on either side of his head. Her hair fell down around them in a curtain and her body brushed his as she lowered her lips and kissed him once more.
He opened to her with a soft sigh, and she took and took and took, drinking deeply of this man who so enthralled and captivated and frustrated and terrified her. This man who she had tried to avoid for most of her life and now she couldn’t get enough of.
This man she wanted beyond reason, even though she couldn’t truly have him, not in either life she had created for herself, as Lydia or as Adelaide. He was out of reach, stolen from time.
And in that moment she didn’t give a damn. She gently straddled him as she continued to kiss him, feeling the hard thrust of his erection pressed between her legs. But she didn’t take him, even though she was slick and ready and aching for him. No, tonight was about comfort. She hadn’t even begun to offer that yet.
She dragged her mouth away from his, sliding down his body. She’d had experience before, of course. She hadn’t been a virgin the first night Graham touched her. But what she’d done back then was nothing like what she shared with him. She was driven to touch him, to hold him, to taste him, to take him into her body. Her needs controlled her as she kissed along his shoulders, his collarbone, and finally dragged her tongue across his nipple just like he had done to her so many times.
He arched slightly under her ministrations, his muscles rippling beneath her touch as his eyes came shut and he groaned her name under his breath. Only it wasn’t her name, and Adelaide flinched at the evidence of the falsehood she had so carefully crafted.
Then she forced those thoughts away and surrendered herself to Lydia. She dragged her fingers down his stomach, tracing a pattern with her nails across his skin before she gently cupped his cock and stroked it once, twice. He lifted his hips into her with a garbled curse, and she smiled against his skin.
Pleasuring this man was the gift of a lifetime. Not for him, for herself. She would surely remember every single one of these moments long after this thing between them was over. But she refused to think of the end. She focused on this moment.
And dragged her lips even lower. His skin tasted like man and heat and Graham. She memorized every flavor as she licked his hip and then found herself face to face with his cock.
She looked up at him and found him staring down, his eyes wide and filled with breathless anticipation.
“You don’t have to,” he grunted.
She smiled at him. “I don’t have to do anything, Your Grace.”
Then she lowered her mouth over him and took him inside. She’d heard her friends at the theatre talk about this act. She’d even walked in on a lightskirt performing it on another actor once, so she wasn’t entirely uninformed. But seeing and hearing were very different from doing. She wasn’t fully ready for the hard and soft of Graham against her tongue, filling her mouth as far as she could take him.
She also wasn’t prepared for the pulse of hot and heavy need that cascaded through her, setting her on fire as she began to take him. His hands fisted against the coverlet and his neck dipped back, revealing the veins and tendons there. She watched him as she took him with her mouth, slowing her strokes when he moaned, adding her tongue when he seemed to like it, gently fisting the length she couldn’t manage to take into her throat.
She could feel him easing toward the brink. She wanted to push him over, to give this man pleasure without asking for anything in return. But he was Graham. Of course he wouldn’t allow for that.
He sat up and caught her arms, pulling her mouth away as he dragged her up his body and smashed his lips to hers. She slid over him, straddling him once more, and cried out with pleasure as he speared into her body with one long thrust.
His kisses were desperate and needy, but so were hers. She began to grind over him, her body clawing for pleasure, milking him for his as his fingers dug into her bare hips and moved her harder and faster over him. She threw her head back as the orgasm flamed through her, jolted her hips without control.
He pushed hard up into her, and then he cried out and she felt his seed spill into her body before he flopped back against the pillows, dragging her still twitching body over his where he held her like he would never let her go.
Adelaide lay on her side facing Graham. He was sprawled on his stomach, his face turned toward her, gentle in sleep. She was doing a math problem in her head. A calculation of how deep a mistake she had made tonight. Graham had spent inside of her. Not a problem, perhaps, for a woman like Lydia Ford. A woman like that could leverage a child into a windfall from a man like this. He’d pay to protect her child. She would go on as before.
No one would be hurt.
Only Lydia Ford didn’t exist. Lady Adelaide did. And if her math problem wasn’t correct, she would end up swollen with a child, ruined forever, perhaps out on the street if her aunt reacted as poorly as she had the last time Adelaide had fallen. And that time it had been private. Easy to hide.
Only the math in her head told her that a child was not very likely. So perhaps there was nothing to fear.
Except that she had gone too far with Graham tonight. Not because of making love. Because he had given her so much of his soul. Lydia. He’d given Lydia his soul.
Adelaide reached out and traced a small, pale scar on Graham’s ribcage near his back. He stirred slightly but didn’t wake as she stared at the mark that proved the pain he had confessed to her hours before.
She rose and quietly dressed herself as she continued to stare at the remarkable, wonderful man on the bed. The one she was lying to. She had to tell him the truth. That was clear.
Only she didn’t know how. He would be devastated when he realized the wallflower he thought nothing of was the one who had seduced his secrets from him. And what of the nights they’d spent together? He was a decent man, an honorable man. If he thought there was a chance she could be breeding, he might even force a marriage.
Her heart thrilled at that briefly, but she shoved it aside. She would never force him to marry her. So perhaps she could wait. Wait until after her courses came. Then she could tell him without hesitation there was no child.
And whatever consequences that came after, she would bear. He would hate her and she’d take that. She’d earned it, after all. And she’d still know that she’d had him, if only briefly.
If only because of a lie.