To Hunt the Hunter (Girls Who Dare Book 11) Page 21

  She sighed and turned in his arms, the flutter of her eyelids revealing a flash of blue like the glimpse of a kingfisher on a summer’s day.

  “Lucian,” she whispered, tugging at his neck, drawing his head down for a kiss.

  He took what she offered, demanding more, deepening the kiss as something like desperation stole over him. His breath caught as her hand slid down his body and curved around his arousal, already slick with his desire for her.

  She broke from his mouth and kissed his jaw, trailing kisses down his neck, his chest, lingering to tease at his nipples, nipping with her teeth. He closed his eyes and let bliss steal over him, his mind growing hazy as her sweet mouth moved lower. With no other lover had he ever been anything other than in control. He’d preferred it that way until now, but with her everything was different. He spoke little to his bed partners usually, preferring deeds to words, but now he could not stop. Love words and endearments fell from his lips, and he would not have halted them if he could. She deserved to hear them, even though he had no right to speak them.

  She had settled between his legs now, her warm breath fluttering over him, a heady torture she likely did not understand she was inflicting.

  “Oh, God, please. Please, love,” he begged her, beyond pride, desperate for her mouth on him. “I want you so much.”

  “Like this?” she asked, and gave him a tentative lick from root to tip.

  Lucian’s mind grew black and he swallowed a curse, clutching at the sheet beneath him, reacting like an innocent to that timid swipe of her tongue. The words that had fallen from his lips with such ease just moments earlier fled, leaving him stupid with shock.

  “Yes,” he rasped, the breath knocked from his lungs. “Oh, yes, just like… Oh, God.”

  The decadent feel of her mouth closing over him was so overwhelming that he felt like a green boy, ready to spend at the first touch of a girl’s hand.

  “You like that?” she asked, the enquiry a little shy.

  Lucian made a choked sound, somewhere between laughter and desperation. How did she do this to him? He’d been bored to death in recent years, the most skilled of lovers only ever bringing release, nothing more. Yet barely a touch of her mouth and he was on the brink, holding on for dear life.

  “Yes,” he managed, somehow dredging up the memory of what words were and how to use them. “Yes, I like that very much.”

  “Oh good,” she said, pleased. “So do I.”

  Her words shot straight to his groin and the little sound of pleasure she made as she repeated the action was almost more than he could take.

  “Oh God, oh God, oh, God,” he muttered, praying that he could hold on. He did not want this delicious torture over before it had begun.

  “You feel like hot silk here,” she said conversationally, trailing a fingertip over him that made him shiver. “And I like the way you taste.”

  Lucian groaned and flung his arm over his eyes, clinging to sanity by a thread. The need to turn her onto her back and lose himself inside her was so powerful he could have wept with frustration and regret at the slightest provocation.

  She returned her mouth to him, inexpertly but with growing confidence. Lucian concentrated on breathing, on holding tight to the forbidden, exquisite pleasure of this night that was to be as fleeting as a sunrise, the beauty of it imperfectly remembered, never living up to the stunning reality when it was brought to mind again.

  “I want you inside me, Lucian.”

  The plea in her voice undid his control, what little of it remained, and he reached for her, pulling her into his arms, plundering her mouth. He rolled her onto her back, moving swiftly between her legs. She opened to him at once, welcoming him into the cradle of her body. Their bodies moved on instinct, ready to fit flawlessly together and he stilled, poised to slide inside, into the perfection he knew awaited him.

  “Lucian,” she begged, and he heard the plea in her voice, heard the urgent demands of his own flesh as he buried his face in her neck and breathed, steadying himself. “It’s all right, please, I want this.”

  He closed his eyes, wanting to rage and curse as he shook his head, loathing himself for denying her anything at all when he wanted to give her everything. Yet this would not be giving but taking, and he could not, could not dishonour her so thoroughly, could not risk leaving her with child, and he did not have nearly enough control to promise he wouldn’t let that happen.

  She made a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob. “Damn you, Lucian, and your blasted honour.”

  “Yes,” he agreed, utterly wretched. He turned onto his back, releasing her and more than a little surprised when she shifted close again. “I’m so sorry.”

  The words sounded hollow, pathetic, and he had never hated himself more.

  “I know,” she said, regret and forgiveness in her voice.

  She moved over him, her hair tickling his chest as she pressed kisses to his skin, and his breath caught as she slid her body intimately against his arousal. He watched as she sat up, her hair a tumble of golden curls about her beautiful face, her blue eyes staring down at him with such love he felt his heart would burst. She bent and pressed her mouth to his and he gripped her hips, taking control, wanting her to take her pleasure with him.

  She sighed and closed her eyes. He watched, imprinting the sight on his mind as she rocked against him until she cried out, clutching at his shoulders, and he could hold back no longer. He pulled her down to him and they clung together, shipwrecked in the storm until it tore them apart for good.

  Chapter 19

  Dearest Ruth,

  I don’t know whether you will be fortunate enough to intercept this message on your journey to London, but if you do, please come at once to Matlock Bath instead. Matilda is there and she will need us all.

  In haste, with much love,

  ―Excerpt of a letter from Mrs Bonnie Cadogan to Mrs Ruth Anderson.

  9th May 1815, The Old Bath Hotel, Matlock Bath, Derbyshire.

  “I wish you could come too,” Phoebe said with a sigh.

  “So do I,” Matilda replied. “I have wanted very much to visit the mills and see everything your uncle has been doing to improve them. But you must tell me all about it, so fetch your bonnet and gloves and get ready. You don’t want to keep him waiting.”

  Matilda watched the little girl run off, looking up a moment later as Lucian came into the room. He stole her breath away as he always did, impeccably dressed and empirically handsome, he exuded power like no other man she’d ever known. She smiled at him as he came forward and took her hand, bowing over it and kissing her fingers, a courtly gesture that made her smile.

  “Good morning, my love.”

  “You said that already,” she observed, daring to remind him of how he’d woken her this morning and all that had followed.

  “So I did,” he said, the warmth in his eyes bringing an answering spark of heat deep in her belly.

  “You’re taking Phoebe with you,” she remarked, tearing her eyes from him before the temptation to throw herself into his arms and disarrange his perfect cravat became too overwhelming.

  “You disapprove?”

  “No,” she said, frowning a little. “At least, I don’t think so, but… if it is a very dreadful place….”

  Lucian nodded, understanding at once, as she’d known he would. “It is no longer the hellish place it once was, but it is not a comfortable place to be either, and so Phoebe must see it. We live gilded lives and it is dangerous to believe anything other than luck separates us from them. Phoebe must appreciate the privilege to which she has been born, and the responsibilities that come with it. It is no more fair that I cannot marry the woman I love than that they live the way they do, but it is the world we have been born to.”

  Matilda stared at him, a little surprised even after everything she had learned about him. “You believe it is nothing more than luck that stands between you and a beggar on the streets?”

  He shrugged. “Luck,
circumstance, whatever you wish to call it. An accident of birth, of fate.”

  He laughed as her mouth fell open, and she closed it with a snap.

  “I have heard no one of your rank speak so, have heard no one who did not believe their blood, their breeding made them superior.”

  A derisive snort was his first response, and she saw the glimmer of Montagu in his eyes, haughty and aristocratic.

  “Naturally, class yields advantages, a superior education being only a part of it. My blood is bluer than most anyone outside the royal family, but who decided I was born to be Lucian Barrington, and what sleight of hand might have seen me raised in a workhouse? I don’t pretend to understand whether that be the hand of God, fate, biology….” He made a dismissive gesture, the heavy gold signet ring he wore on his little finger glinting. “But we all have two eyes, two hands, two feet, a heart, and all the other component parts that make us the same.”

  “I always believed you so high in the instep,” Matilda said, shaking her head. “All the talk about the Barrington superiority, about breeding and power, but it never came from you, did it? You inherited it all.”

  He shrugged. “I was raised to believe it.”

  “Yet you don’t.”

  “No more than you do,” he countered. “You treated all your friends with the same kindness, the same extraordinary loyalty, no matter who they were or the circumstances of their birth.”

  “I had a good name once,” Matilda said, her tone thoughtful. “One the ton welcomed, and it disappeared in the blink of an eye. Yet, I had not changed in the least. It is all a fabrication, these rules we have made for ourselves that entrap all of us one way or another. We should do well to throw them all aside.”

  “Would that I were that powerful. I would do it. I would change the world for you if I could,” he said, such longing in his voice her heart ached. So, she smiled, trying to lighten the mood.

  “Yes, I believe you would. What an extraordinary fellow you are.”

  Lucian chuckled, following her lead before their words led their emotions astray.

  “Finally she realises,” he said with a sigh, followed by a quirk of his lips that gave her a tantalising glimpse of one of those elusive dimples.

  She laughed, wishing she could make him smile more often, that it wasn’t such a fleeting pleasure, wishing she could chase away the loneliness and the burden of responsibility for good, not just for the matter of days that remained to them. His wretched aunt’s ball was no doubt being planned with military precision. The nineteenth, she had said. That left ten days before Lucian announced his betrothal. Matilda wondered if he had already made his choice, and bit her tongue against the desire to torture herself further by asking.

  Phoebe ran back into the room, neat and pretty in a simple dark blue spencer that matched her uncle’s coat, and a plain bonnet with a blue ribbon.

  “How handsome you both look together,” Matilda said, steadying a sudden quaver in her voice as she noted the resemblance between them. It was not only in the way they looked, though the high cheekbones and fair complexions were certainly cut from the same pattern book, but in the tilt of their heads, a careless gesture of their hands, a grace and elegance in the way they moved that was inherently natural and could not be learned.

  “We should look a matching set if you were with us,” Phoebe observed, her smile falling as Matilda had to look away to blink back tears.

  “Come, sweetheart,” Lucian said, his voice soft. “We’d best go. We shall see you this afternoon, Matilda.”

  Matilda took a breath and composed herself, nodding and returning a smile that felt false and uncomfortable. “So you shall, and I expect to hear all about it.”

  Phoebe ran to her and kissed her cheek before hurrying from the room. Lucian stared at Matilda for a long moment but did not come closer, and she knew he did not trust himself any more than she trusted herself not to cling to his lapels and not let him out of her sight ever again.

  “Goodbye,” she said, hoping to make it easier for him.

  He gave her a slight bow, the glimmer of a smile at his lips, and then he was gone.

  ***

  Lucian suppressed a shiver as the carriage conveyed them closer to Liddon Mill. He did not believe in magic or ghosts, yet he felt the weight of all the wickedness done here as the mill came into view. Despite himself, he drew Phoebe closer and took her hand in his. She went willingly and he thought perhaps she sensed it too, though he had not told her the details of what had gone on here. Some truths were too vile for a child’s ears, and he would protect her where he could.

  She would not know, as he knew, of the abominations that had taken place here. It seemed impossible to credit, as the tranquil beauty of their surroundings was breathtaking.

  The delightfully named Water-Cum-Jolly Dale ought to have been a place where children would run and play and laugh, but that had never happened here, though Lucian was striving to change that. These children had been stolen from London, orphans every one, and abandoned to their fates here by the ‘Guardians of the Poor.’

  Lucian’s stomach had turned as he’d learned the story, how with the promise of learning a trade, Mr Burton had taken children on as indentured apprentices. The workhouses he’d taken them from had been happy as he’d paid for the children, and the children believed they would be taught a useful trade and so signed away their lives, though they could neither read nor write. For this, Lucian had discovered they’d endured hazardous work, rising at five am and working for fifteen hours Monday to Friday, and sixteen on Saturday, when an hour would be spent cleaning the dangerous machinery. They were starving and exhausted, so mutilations and fatal accidents had become commonplace, with illness and epidemics rife. The bodies were then taken away under cover of darkness and buried in unmarked graves. He’d done what he could, creating a memorial for those vanished in the night but it was a pitiful compensation for too many lost lives. Those poor devils that had survived Burton’s barbaric regime had been turned off when they reached their late teens and returned to the tender mercies of the poorhouse. After all, there was a ready supply of little orphans, who were cheaper to feed and easier to control than their adult counterparts.

  The corporal punishments for even the slightest misdemeanours were cruel and vicious, and had made Lucian sick when he had heard of them. It had been the hardest thing not to cut Mr Burton into tiny pieces when he’d had the chance, not to mete out his own justice, knowing whose hand had directed such treatment. If not for the risk of his uncle finding a way of using the crime against him, he would have.

  Lucian took a deep breath as the carriage finally rocked to a halt and turned to look down at Phoebe. “Are you ready, sweetheart?”

  Phoebe nodded, her little face solemn, and Lucian squeezed her hand.

  “Then we’d best begin.”

  ***

  Matilda set her book to one side as she heard the door swing open. Lucian came in, holding Phoebe’s hand, and one look at their faces told her everything she needed to know. She held her arms out to Phoebe and the little girl ran into them.

  “Are you all right?” Matilda asked gently.

  “I am,” Phoebe said, sounding a little shaken. “But I hope that Uncle hurt that wicked man very badly. Very badly indeed.”

  Matilda hugged her.

  “I believe he did,” she replied, uncertain if that were the right thing to say to a small girl, but aware of Phoebe’s sigh of relief at her words, at a little of the tension easing from her slender frame.

  “We will put it right, won’t we?” Phoebe said, looking to Lucian for confirmation. “It’s already much improved, but Uncle will build new houses for the workers and make the conditions inside safer for them, and with better pay.”

  “Yes, love,” Lucian said. “We shall do all of that, I promise.”

  “Would you like to take your bonnet and gloves off now?” Matilda asked, releasing Phoebe at last and tugging at the ribbons of the bonnet as Phoebe
nodded.

  “Yes, thank you, and I think I’d like to see Pippin.”

  Matilda nodded, smiling, aware that Pippin also provided excellent hugs. “Run along, then.”

  She waited until the door had closed and got to her feet, moving towards Lucian. “Do you need a hug too?”

  He gave an unsteady laugh and nodded. “I do.”

  She held out her arms to him and he moved into them, resting his head upon hers with a sigh. “There will be no doubt of the story now. It will publish in every major paper all over the country, and Burton will be prosecuted for his part in it. God, Matilda, if ever a place was haunted….”

  He shook his head as if trying to rid himself of the little ghosts.

  “You will make it right,” she said, believing in him. “And you will allow the ghosts to rest in peace.”

  “Such faith you have in me,” he said in wonder, touching a finger to her cheek. “Like Phoebe, believing I can make everything right.”

  She returned a wistful smile. “Perhaps not everything, but this.”

  He nodded and held her tight until a knock sounded at the door. With a regretful sigh, he let her go and put some distance between them.

  “Come.”

  To Matilda’s surprise, Flash Jack walked in, looking about the lavish hotel room with his eyes almost on stalks. She wondered what he would make of Dern Palace when he saw it. He clutched his battered tricorn hat in his hands, silver rings glinting on his meaty fingers.

  “The meetin’ is all set up like you asked, lord,” Jack said. “The fellow is holed up in some little cottage up on the heights, so there’s no chance of him running into yon newspapermen. I got my fellows watchin’ him close, though, just in case.”

  Lucian nodded. “You’ll meet him tonight?”

  “Aye, six o’clock, afore it’s full dark. So, there’s the matter of proof. I used that shirt like you said,” he added, reaching into one of the capacious pockets of his greatcoat and hauling out a fine linen shirt, soaked in dried blood.