Ann Lethbridge - Regency Society

The clock on the mantel struck the hour and outside the clatter of hooves on the cobbles could be heard. But here, now, all she felt lodged in her throat and in her stomach.

A magician. A trickster. A man who had been tutored well in the art of loving and in saying things that any woman might want to hear!

She did not move as he reached out and took her hand, his forefinger running along the lines of her inner palm, gently. Barely there! The breath left her body and the room fell away beneath them, the light streaming hot and golden. As she closed her eyes, the stretch of her belly was long as heat seared into quickness.

Mirrors and gauze and the satiny wet folds between her thighs. Rocking. Wanting. Hours when she had forgotten time and only lived. Desire became a roar as warmth coursed through her, loosening the tight, dry centre with dampness.

His silvered hair and velvet eyes, the smell of masculinity unfettered by age or illness. She revelled in the brown smooth skin on his hands and the strong muscles moving beneath the fabric of his jacket.

‘Cristo?’

Even the word was like a salvation, transformed in wonder, spilling from her lips in a lush and radiant question.

Leaning forwards he took her mouth, not gently either, but daring her to resist, a seductive naked want that carried the unsaid promise of all that had been lost between them.

But found again here in the ornate gilded front salon of his London town house, the very Englishness of the décor adding an unreal flavour to what had already been.

She could not stop, could not pull back from his heady vividness. A feast after five years of famine and compromise, her skin sparking as his touch glided along her arm to her throat, reeling her in with only a little force.

Taking everything. Her hat fell away, the ribbons anchoring the bonnet to her shoulders in a drunken uncertainty, his hands through her hair, closer again as all reality was lost against passion.

Like an angel , she thought, as he whispered her name between the loving, even as the terrible heartbreaking need that had brought her ruin once again surfaced. But she could not care. Would not care.

She placed her hand across his cheek and smiled as he turned into her palm, the warm pulse of his flesh beneath making her nipples stand proud against the silk of her bodice. She knew he saw the promise of her lust and her capitulation, but, shaking his head, he held her against him, heartbeat loud and quick.

‘Eleanor, I cannot.’

Only that with the sunshine flooding in and the sound of church bells close! She squeezed her eyes against panic as all she had allowed him became real.

What was she to say now? The glint of her marriage rings caught her eyes as she moved her hand, the small scar Florencia had left there when she had thrown a stick as a toddler, opaque above them.

A wife and a mother who would chance it all away on the promise of lust? She could not even raise her eyes to look at him. Guilt and shame and humiliation all wrapped in stupidity, and the thought that she could be so guileless twice was barely comprehensible.

Cristo stepped back towards the window, trying to assert some sort of control on the situation. No one had ever made him feel the way Eleanor Westbury did. Frustrated. Furious. Desperate. He wanted to drown in her pale eyes and feel the satin smoothness of her skin again. Wanted to lie beside her under an English sun for all the hours that he needed to dull the urgency that had built up inside him.

But he couldn’t. A husband stood between them and a whole night’s worth of loving that should never have happened.

She did not glance at him once as she rearranged her hat, the brim of it tilted so that it shaded her face from his.

Lord help him! For just a moment, when she had arrived alone, the world was exactly as it should have been before it had skewed into something less tenable.

He needed to tell her how he felt, but for the life of him he could not quite work it out.

Leave your husband and stay with me for ever! Risk the ire of society. Be banned entirely from proper company .

As he was thinking Eleanor began to speak. ‘My husband is a principled man of high moral fortitude and unequalled fairness.’ The timbre of her voice had risen, almost desperate.

‘A Samaritan, then?’ In the light of what had happened he should have been kinder.

‘Indeed.’

He hated the glint of tears in her eyes. If he had been less scrupulous, he might have reached forwards then and thrown all caution to the wind, taken her upstairs to his room and damned any repercussions. But he had done this once before, and look where that had got them both.

When he did not speak she walked to the door and let herself out. Cristo counted each step that she took across the tiled floor of his foyer as Milne saw to her exit.

Eleanor’s hands fisted as she climbed into the carriage waiting for her around the corner. Had Milne recognised her? Had the old butler known her as the woman he had shepherded from the room in the Château Giraudon, with the luridly coloured gypsy skirt swirling around her ankles and an unmade bed left behind? She could barely credit the danger she had allowed herself to be subjected to and the fact that the servant had not seemed to know her was no reason at all to let her guard down.

The truth shattered into fragments. Not quite this or quite that, but an amalgam. Eleanor remembered her father’s suicide the year after her brother’s death. Her mother had died eighteen months later in a carriage accident with a man who had a reputation for having a way with older women. Her maternal grandfather had denied such rumour, of course, as they sat in the big house after the funeral, but she had seen the look in his eyes that suggested otherwise, and the need for care given that they were the last surviving members of a family that luck had deserted.

Her own youth had been sandwiched between falsities and now here they were again, hemming her into all that she had never thought to become. Well, she could not let them. She would not allow herself to be alone with Cristo Wellingham again. Ever. Cradling the cross she often wore at her neck, she made the promise to herself before turning to look at the people on the busy streets outside and dreaded the Wellingham weekend that she had said she would attend in three days’ time.

Honour Baxter arrived less than an hour after Eleanor had left, and she looked neither relaxed nor happy.

‘You watch Lady Dromorne like a lover might, Cristo, a dangerous tendency given the power of her name and of yours.’

He stayed still. Honour was no fool, despite the rather frivolous appearance she presented to the world, as he well knew from her Paris days, before she had made her way to England and married.

‘I think she wants you, too.’

He turned as she said it.

‘There is a child, of course, and the Earl of Dromorne would never countenance any threat to his daughter’s happiness and stability.’

Shock rendered him speechless. A child? Eleanor had a child? He had heard no word of one at all.

‘How old is she?’

Honour shrugged her shoulders. ‘Nearly five. A girl who is rarely seen out in public. Florencia is her name.’

Nearly five.

Florencia.

If Eleanor had been fertile at Giraudon, then conception would have been the easiest thing in the world.

Nearly five. He counted back. Was the child his? Could he be a father? The heavy beat of his heart vibrated in his ears and he shut his eyes as he sat on the sofa.

‘Are you quite well, Cristo? Should I call someone?’

‘No, please don’t.’ His voice sounded like the string of some instrument tuned to the very last of its strength, a breaking point just waiting to happen as loss welled in his throat. Florencia. Even her name was beautiful. Swallowing, he made himself listen to Honour’s next words.