"I couldn't stay away."
He smiled at me with desire in his eyes. "Come closer."
When I stepped onto the soft, warm blanket, he rose up on his knees and touched his open mouth to my quivering belly, licking and suckling just below my navel until my-
A knock rapped hard at the door, and Rebecca slammed the musty diary shut, then stuffed it under the pillow.
Taking a few seconds to cool her thoughts and subdue her racing heart, she slid off the bed and crossed the small room of the Pembroke Village Inn. She paused briefly at the door, listening. "Who is it?"
"It's Grace," her aunt whispered from the other side.
Exhaling with relief, Rebecca smoothed out the fabric of her dressing gown before she opened the door for her aunt, who was barely visible beneath the flouncy mountain of costumes in her arms.
"I'm glad it's you." Rebecca struggled to distract herself from her wicked reading just now, by stepping forward to peer up and down the narrow corridor. "I panicked for a moment, thinking it might be Father."
She stepped back in.
"He has no idea where we are. We're safe for the time being," Aunt Grace said.
Rebecca looked more closely at her aunt's gown for the ball that evening. "This is beautiful."
Grace was going to the Pembroke Palace Fancy Dress Ball dressed as Mary, Queen of Scots. Before she'd lost her head, of course. "I can't wait to see you in it, Aunt Grace."
"And I cannot wait to see you in your costume. Shall we begin?"
Rebecca stepped aside to invite her aunt into the room, so they could assist each other in preparing for the ball. Neither of them, under the present circumstances, had dared to bring their maids.
Her aunt squeezed her plump figure along with the oversized costume through the door. "I wore this two years ago at the Summervilles' costume ball in London. I do hope none of the guests at Pembroke attended that particular evening, or I shall be quite embarrassed."
"There was hardly time to have new costumes made," Rebecca reminded her, recalling with a shiver how they had fled her home in the night like two thieves making their escape. "I'm sure it will be fine, Aunt Grace."
But would it really be fine? she wondered uneasily as she went to withdraw her own costume from her valise in the large armoire. Her whole life had been turned upside down in the past week with the devastating news that her father intended to marry her off to their neighbor, Mr. Rushton.
Though he was handsome by certain standards and could wield some charm when he wished to, she could never marry him, not in a thousand years, for he was a bully and a tyrant. He slapped his horses in the face when they were not quick enough to obey him, and once, not long ago, when she was out walking, she had seen him kicking his dogs into submission. She had boldly confronted him about it a day later when he paid a call to her father-for what purpose she never knew; they always conversed in private-but he denied doing any such thing and assured her it must have been one of his grooms. With a mocking, patronizing display of shock and concern, he promised to reprimand all of them.
Even now she felt her jaw clenching as she remembered the incident.
For her father's part in this…Well, she could only conclude that his pain was what had made him irritable these past few years-so irritable that he seemed to resent her very presence in the house, despite the fact that she was the only person in the world who still endeavored to cling to the tattered remnants of her affection for him.
She often asked herself why she continued to cling to them with so little return of affection, and the answer, she supposed, was simple. Because he was her father, and he was not well. She wanted to be a good and dutiful daughter, to be patient and understanding about his cantankerous moods. She did what she could for him. She wanted him to be comfortable. She genuinely did not want him to be alone in his discomfort, for there was a time, many years ago, when they had been close.
But now, because of this mad promise he had made to Mr. Rushton with no concern for her wishes, everything was different. His actions had chipped away at her compassion. Now, all she could do was accept that his isolation from the world had caused him to lose all sense of reality. He had not stepped outside his home in over a year, and therefore could not comprehend that there was life beyond the borders of his estate. He could not even fathom that there were other men in England she could marry. When she had suggested it, he had insisted her duty was there, near the estate-to him and the Creighton title, for it was one of the few earldoms that descended through the female line.
She laid her costume out on the bed, and thought about how difficult it had been to deliberately defy him by leaving without a word. A daughter was supposed to obey her father. She knew that.
But to marry Mr. Rushton?
She sighed. Perhaps in some ways, she should be grateful for this call to arms, for she had been living far too long in the thin, dwindling realm of her optimism, clinging to her dreams and bright hopes for the future, even when her life had become unbearable, while she had remained at his side.
She had never had a proper debut or a magical first Season like other young women her age, nor had she accepted a single invitation to anything outside the vicinity of her father's estate. A few country fairs and dances under the chaperonage of an elderly female neighbor were the most she had experienced.
Looking back on all of it now-from a very different and desperate vantage point-she wondered if she had accepted that life for so long because she had been living in a world of dreams, and experiencing passion through someone else's diary-the mysterious Lydie. Perhaps she might have fought harder for her independence if things had been different, if she'd never found that diary to keep her dreams alive-dreams of a particular gentleman who had left England for America three years ago.
Perhaps his absence was the very thing that had allowed her to be content in her small world, because she knew someday he would return, and she was perfectly willing to wait for the kind of relentless passion she had been reading and dreaming about. The kind of passion she had known once before for herself on a deserted country road not far from the inn.
Well, the waiting was over at least, she thought, struggling to regain her wounded optimism as she sat down in front of the mirror and watched her aunt sweep her wavy red hair into a knot on top of her head, then pull a single lock free to trail down her back. Lord Hawthorne had come home. He had arrived just in time for his mother's fiftieth birthday celebration ball, and just in time to give Rebecca hope again. She, with her aunt as chaperone, would be in attendance at that ball, because Rebecca needed him. Urgently.
"Do you think he will remember me?" she asked, working hard to sound relaxed and nonchalant as she looked at her aunt's reflection in the mirror.
She was going to the ball dressed as Helen of Troy, and had chosen the costume with the express purpose of attracting his attention. Helen's beauty had launched a thousand ships, after all.
"I don't know, dear," her aunt replied as she pinned Rebecca's costume more snugly over her shoulder. "He's been gone for so long."
Rebecca wet her lips and nodded, trying not to feel too disappointed.
Her aunt smiled at her in the mirror. "Oh, what am I thinking? In the past four years, how often could he have come to the rescue of a beautiful red-haired damsel in distress in a runaway coach, whose driver had fallen down drunk from his seat?"
Rebecca tried to smile. "You are right, Aunt Grace. Surely he remembers that night, but what I want to know is-will he remember me, or more importantly, will he treat me differently, now that I am older? I was only seventeen then. I am almost twenty-one now."
Six days shy of her twenty-first birthday, to be exact. And six days short of her majority.