He remembered their kiss in the countryside. The taste of her. The heat of her. The feel of her so right in his arms. Like they'd been born for each other's embrace.
Crispin reluctantly shoved to his feet. "She wants more than seduction," he said, his voice hoarse to his own ears.
Fielding chuckled. "If you believe that, then you know your wife even less than you credit."
With the earl's obnoxiously amused laughter trailing after him, Crispin quit his club and started home.
One that was no longer empty, where Elizabeth even now slept.
A lightness settled around his chest. How very right that felt. Sharing a household with her, one that would be a home if they were together. And how it would steal his happiness again if she left.
No. The deal they'd made, of one night together, would never be enough. He wanted her in his life--forever.
Chapter 13
He'd gone out.
The housekeeper had just taken her leave, and when Elizabeth had sought out the floor-to-ceiling double windows that overlooked the Mayfair streets, she'd spied him.
He'd not bothered with so much as a change of garments or a bath, but instead, had climbed astride a different mount and ridden off.
And he'd been gone for two hours since.
It shouldn't bother her.
He'd expressed remorse for the great misunderstanding that had divided them, but he'd never indicated there was anything... more. Between them, that was.
There had been the kiss.
Elizabeth pressed a callused fingertip to her lips, and they tingled from the memory of his mouth on hers.
Seated at the window seat in her temporary chambers, she dropped her head back against the wall and knocked it lightly. "You are a fool." The old clippings scattered on her lap, their content committed to memory long ago, were proof enough of her foolishness.
For there had been kisses between Crispin and... many women.
And because she was a glutton for her own suffering, Elizabeth picked up one of the yellowing pages she'd torn out at Mrs. Belden's nearly eight years ago.
The recently widowed Baroness Norreys was discovered in a scandalous state of dishabille leaving the Pleasure Gardens of Vauxhall. The gentleman to follow shortly from that midnight rendezvous...
"Was none other than the Marquess of W and future Duke of H," Elizabeth whispered into the empty room.
Jealousy lanced through her, suffocating in its intensity. Embers popped and hissed in the hearth in an echo of her own blasted misery.
For surely the hundredth time since he'd gone off, Elizabeth stole another glance out at the empty streets below.
She would sit here, while Crispin did... whatever it was that rogues did. For what purpose? With sleep eluding her, Elizabeth stuffed the neatly snipped articles back inside the valise at her feet and set out to explore Crispin's residence.
The heavily padded carpet, warm under her feet, muted her footfalls as she took leave of her rooms.
Or rather, the duchess' chambers, as the housekeeper had referred to them. For Elizabeth's weren't simply guest apartments for any mere stranger, but ones reserved for the lady of the household. Intimately aligned with Crispin's, they remained separated by a wall and two walnut-veneer doors.
Elizabeth wound her way through the halls.
Every other Empire-style crystal and bronze swan sconce remained lit, with the candles' glow illuminating the wide corridors and the wealth and grandeur of this place. The rosewood pedestal held a gold urn that gleamed from the efforts of the dutiful servants who looked over these treasures. An oil painting hung in a large oval frame, the lone piece of artwork in the length of the corridor.
Elizabeth briefly considered the framed scene.
According to the lessons she'd been forced to conduct on the proper decor for a nobleman's residence--and Mrs. Belden and the books on the subject had all been abundantly clear--the artwork on display was to be of the distinguished ancestors and the family who dwelled at the property, as a reminder of their power and greatness. Elizabeth had always scoffed at the pomposity of that, but Crispin had none of those figures on display. Instead, the single work was of a bucolic country scene.
Adjusting her spectacles, Elizabeth lined herself up before it and took in the small cottage, bent trees, and rolling hills that could have been any English countryside.
"It is miserable, isn't it?"
Elizabeth tried to reconcile that wistful regret with the same man written about in the papers, who'd dashed off the moment he returned, likely to visit one of the scandalous clubs he frequented.
Oftentimes, it was as though Crispin were two very different people--the tempting scoundrel and the scholarly gentleman--and both held her enthralled.
Drawing the belt of her wrapper tighter about her middle, Elizabeth resumed her exploration of his home.
What might have been their home together had she stayed.
"I want you gone. We will find a way to secure the annulment Crispin so greatly desires."
Elizabeth jutted her chin out. "And if I refuse to leave?"
"Pfft. I always thought you were more clever than that."
Heat rushed to Elizabeth's cheeks.
"Why would you stay? You've heard yourself, Miss Brightly. My son regrets wedding you." The duchess sent her a hate-filled stare. "And he'll regret it even more when we cut him off without funds and sever his fellowship at Oxford."
The duchess' long-ago threat squeezed at Elizabeth, filling her with the familiar hurt, but now there was something more--a biting, vitriolic fury for the one who'd manipulated both her and Crispin.
Forcing the memory of that day and that woman into the furthest chambers of her mind, Elizabeth wandered in and out of parlors, located the Portrait Room where Crispin's ancestors had been all neatly organized, until she reached the farthest recesses of the townhouse.
A pair of painted, white lead-light doors stood as a vibrant contrast against the dark of the hall. The stained-glass perimeter of the frame had been adorned in...
Her breath caught audibly as she was drawn on silent feet closer--
"Butterflies," she mouthed.
She stretched a hand out and trailed her fingertips over the crimson wings of one of the glass renderings.
It was a coincidence, and nothing more.
Her throat worked. Only--
"They live just a handful of weeks." Sprawled on her stomach, the dewy grass dampening her dress, Elizabeth followed one monarch as he fluttered from flower to flower. "How very sad their existence is."
"On the contrary," Crispin murmured in soft tones, his gaze taking in the delicate creature's every movement. "It isn't how long one lives, but what one does with one's time while they are here."
From that moment on, her love of the winged creatures had been forever linked to Crispin and that summer day in her family's gardens. She'd studied the butterfly, learning every detail from every book Crispin had sneaked off from his tutors to feed her insatiable thirst for a greater knowledge of them.
Elizabeth pressed the handle, and a warm heat filled the hallway, a soothing balm against the night's chill.
Hurrying inside, she closed the door behind her and leaned back against the glass panel. And promptly exhaled her whispery surprise.
The expertly designed room trapped and retained all the earlier warmth of the previous day. Lit gilt brazier stands set around the conservatory added a layer of heat to the gardens.
Elizabeth drifted deeper into the grounds, her tread silent upon the plush lawn. Holly and ivy climbed trellises artfully placed throughout, while Eucryphia and glossy dark evergreen created the illusion of an outdoor scape.
A pale blue hanging snagged her notice from the corner of her eye.
Wandering over to the neatly tended holly tree, Elizabeth contemplated the unusual piece that dangled from a thin branch. Nearly two feet long and several inches wide, it had the look of a house her papa had once constructed for the warbl
ers that inhabited the poplar outside her chamber windows.
Going up on tiptoe, Elizabeth peered inside each of the narrow slots, trying to make something out of the darkness.
Above the tops of the tree, a holly blue flitted about, and Elizabeth went absolutely motionless as the butterfly drifted lower and then slid effortlessly into one of those side slats.
"It is--"
"A butterfly house," Crispin called out from over her shoulder.
Elizabeth gasped and spun about.
Crispin stood at the front of the room, his arms folded across his chest. At some point, he'd discarded his jacket and cravat, but remained in the same wrinkled lawn shirt and mud-splattered boots he'd worn for his ride that morning.
"You're not abed," he noted, strolling over with lazy, languid steps.
Damn him for being so captivating... even just walking. It was infuriating that he should take ordinary and transform it into spellbinding. She focused on drawing in an even breath. "No," she acknowledged. "I was unable to sleep." He sharpened his gaze on her face. Elizabeth hurried to clarify. "I was awake so long that my body has moved beyond rest." Did he sense the lie? Did he gather that her own tortured imaginings of him with one of his lovers had robbed her of all hope of sleep?
"I see."
And though there was not even a hint of arrogance or conceit contained in those two words, something told her that he very well knew. With his instincts and insight, he saw more than she wished to share.
Disquieted, she reexamined the wood structure. "I've never heard of a butterfly house." He came over and took up a place beside her, standing so close their arms touched. Her pulse pounded, and she struggled to make her suddenly heavy tongue move. "I-it is like a birdhouse, then?"
"They are different," he said, so even and pragmatic in that pronouncement that it effectively doused the haze he'd cast. "Birds require a sheltered place to raise their young. Butterflies don't."
"No," she murmured, peering deeper into the darkened recesses. "They are delicate, but far more resilient." A wistful smile tugged at her lips.
He lowered his lips close to her ear, and little tingles danced along her lobe, pulling a breathless laugh from her. "How many nights did we spend searching the grounds with nothing but a lantern to light our way, peering under leaves for slumbering butterflies?"
"Countless ones." He'd been an unjaded boy, free with his smile, his garments as mud-stained as her own.
Whenever they'd been together, he hadn't bothered with the constraints of a jacket or cravat. How singularly odd that he should be in a similar state of dishabille and yet with wholly different pursuits bringing him to that point.
Her smile faded.
It was a sobering reminder about the new divide between them.
"Tsk, tsk. I am disappointed, Elizabeth."
Elizabeth drew her brows together. "I don't--"
"The girl I recall never had fewer than a dozen questions on any topic. You possessed even more for those discussions on the butterfly."
"I was different then." We were different. "I've learned to be more measured. More restrained." Her livelihood at Mrs. Belden's had relied upon it. She gave him a meaningful look. "More careful."
Crispin dropped a hip against the carved stone sundial and hooded his gaze. "I know you," he insisted in the melodious, rogue's murmur that conjured seduction and sin. "You might present one way for the world, but you're the same girl you always were. Inquisitive. Eager to know and explore... everything."
Her heart thumped an erratic beat.
Somewhere along the way, they'd shifted course, and they were no longer two adults speaking of butterflies or forgotten memories. She was a woman, and he was a rogue who, with his words, whispered of the forbidden.
"You presume much," she said for her own benefit. Elizabeth wetted her lips, and his gaze homed in on that gesture. His thick lashes swept down, barely concealing the desire in the sapphire depths of his eyes--for her.
"Do I?"
"You do. I've changed." She looked him up and down, lingering her stare deliberately on his wrinkled garments. "We've both changed." In ways that made any hopes of any future impossible. Because she could not, even if he wished for her to remain here, do so if he were going about at all hours of the evening... visiting wherever it was he'd been. It would break her in ways their first separation hadn't managed.
He narrowed his eyes. "Why do I believe that was intended as an insult, Elizabeth?" Frustration rippled off his frame.
She'd offended him. Why should he care? If he was an unrepentant rogue, happy for his freedom, what should it matter what she believed about him?
"Not an insult," she said, shaking her head. "Rather, it was stated as a matter of fact. I don't have time to run around hillsides and ponder a butterfly's wings for the length of the day. I'm a finishing school instructor, Crispin. I'll leave, and there won't be room for endless hours of discussion on anything but those topics you rightly disparaged." She could at least own the truth of that. He'd been correct. There was nothing honorable in the lessons she doled out. All of that, her future, her work at Mrs. Belden's, left her bereft.
"You can stay here," he said quietly.
Those four words, a suggestion and a question all rolled together, shrank the air between them.
"What?" she whispered.
Crispin straightened, unfurling to his full height. He closed the handful of steps between them, and capturing her chin in a delicate grip, he ran his thumb down her cheek. "Stay."
Stay. Her breath stuck somewhere between her throat and lungs, trapped there as she stood stock-still, afraid to move, to breathe.
"You don't have to have that life you described," he continued in somber tones stripped of the earlier rogue's murmur. All the while, he continued that delicate caress. Soft as the butterfly's wings, it brought her eyes briefly shut, and she leaned into his touch, his offer, desperately yearning for both. "We can have a future together."
And there it was. The dream she'd pined for in silence for ten long years, laid out. As a tender offering.
Crispin lowered his mouth to hers, and Elizabeth tipped her head back to receive the kiss, but the scent of whiskey wafted over her lips.
She turned her head, and his kiss grazed her cheek. Reality came rushing in. "You're a rogue." She drew in a breath and stepped out of his reach. "You smell like spirits and cheroots."
His cheeks flushed. "I'm not ape-drunk, Elizabeth. And I wasn't smoking. The smell is merely attached to my garments."
"It is the places you go," she entreated, needing him to understand. "It is the people you keep company with." She paused. "It is the life you've lived since we've been apart."
He opened and closed his mouth several times, but no words emerged.
Elizabeth scrunched her toes into the soft lawn. Oh, God. She silently begged with the earth to open up and take her under. "I do not begrudge you for... taking a lover... lovers," she amended lamely. Liar. You hated him for it. And you hated them even more for having earned his affections. Even as it was her fault for leaving him and their marriage.
"Look at me," he commanded with a quiet insistence that brought her gaze up to his. "I met with a friend this evening, Elizabeth. When I was broken with your leaving, the Earl of Fielding was the only one there for me."
He'd had another friend in his life. He hadn't been alone. How was it possible to feel joy and an aching sadness at the same time? When she'd been miserable and missing him at Mrs. Belden's, Crispin had found another.
Her shoulders sagged. "You don't owe me any answers, Crispin," she said tiredly. "As you pointed out... I left. You were free to live your life, as you wished." And as he would when she returned to Mrs. Belden's.
Elizabeth pressed the frames of her spectacles back behind her ears and, bowing her head, started for the butterfly doors.
"You believe I was unfaithful to you?" he called after her. The annoyance and hurt wrapped around the question froze her midstride.
/>
Elizabeth completed the step and turned slowly back. "I..." There had been the papers and his own relish several days past in throwing his reputation in her face.
The pale glow of the moon played off the chiseled contours of his face and illuminated the spark of regret in his eyes. "How low your opinion of me is," he noted, and where there'd been anger before, now there was acceptance. "I gave you no reason to doubt my devotion." He strolled over, the bulge of his corded biceps making a lie of any feigned casualness. Crispin roved his eyes over her face. "There has never been any other woman, Elizabeth."
That statement brought to a cessation the flow of all logical thought.
He quirked his mouth in an irreverent half-smile. "The papers?" he supplied for her. "The gossip? The world is content to see what they want to see. A bachelor duke, friends with a scoundrel, must be a rogue." The knot in his throat moved rhythmically. "There was only ever one woman I wanted. One woman I desired."
"Who?" she asked, giving him nothing more than that single, breathless syllable.
A pained chuckle rumbled from his chest. "Oh, Elizabeth. How is it possible for a woman to be so very clever and to know nothing all at the same time?" He dropped his forehead atop hers. "It is you, Elizabeth. There has only ever been you."
And just like that, the world ceased spinning on its axis.
*
Elizabeth fluttered a hand about her breast. "You've never...?"
Crispin pressed his fingertips against his brow and rubbed. And he wished in this instance that he was the rogue the world had proclaimed him to be. For then he would have all the charming words expected of him. But so much of his life had been lived fulfilling expectations--those his family had of him, those the ton had for a duke. "I realized I loved you when I was six and ten, but I've loved you forever."
She emitted a soft, whispery gasp.
And before she might again reject him, he covered her mouth with his and kissed her. Crispin kissed her as he'd dreamed of since a long-ago kiss stolen under the crisp Oxfordshire skies. Kissed her as he had just a day earlier, but this time without the restraint, giving himself over to the hunger tearing through him.
Filling his hands with Elizabeth's slender hips, he drew her close, pressing her body to his.
Moaning, Elizabeth melted into his embrace, and parting her lips, she allowed him entry.