Say Yes to the Marquess(69)
“I assure you, it’s true. It’s beyond humiliating to admit it, but it’s true.”
He stared at her, with her delicate profile and her unbound hair falling down her back in golden waves. She was so lovely, he ached. For the first time, he began to question his brother. Could Piers be one of those men who preferred his own sex?
Surely not. Rafe dismissed the idea out of hand. When they were youths, his brother was forever “borrowing” Rafe’s best French engravings from his bottom drawer, even though he pretended to know nothing about it when confronted. And there’d been stories of the usual debauched adventures in his university days. Not a lot of stories, but a few.
No, Piers liked women.
Which made Clio’s confession all the more baffling to comprehend. How could Piers resist kissing this woman?
Rafe had excellent reasons not to kiss Clio, and he’d succumbed to temptation—multiple times—despite them.
“I was truly your first?” he asked.
She nodded.
White-hot triumph forked through him like a lightning bolt. Rafe could have run a victory lap around the castle. He hadn’t felt this good since winning his first championship bout. He couldn’t even be angry with his brother now. Knowing that he was Clio’s first kiss, her first touch . . .
It made him want to be her first everything.
Not just her first, but her last. Her best.
His hands made fists in the bedsheets. “You need to return to your own chamber.”
Instead of leaving, she eased herself farther onto the bed and tucked her crossed legs under her nightrail. Making herself right at home.
To be fair, he supposed she was in her own home. Very well. He could be the one to leave. Not just this room, but the castle. If he went to saddle his gelding right now, he could be in Southwark by daybreak.
He nodded at his shirt and trousers, draped over the arm of a chair—just out of reach. “Hand me my clothing, will you?”
She didn’t move, except to toy with a lock of her unbound, golden hair. When she spoke, her tone was husky. “Would you like to hear a bedtime story?”
“Not particularly, no.”
Laying a hand to his chest, she pushed him back against the mattress. “You’re going to hear one anyway.”
Holy God. There was rock-hard, there was hard-as-steel, and then there was the solidity of Rafe’s current erection—which so thoroughly surpassed all his previous experience, he suspected it might be of interest to science.
He considered closing his eyes, sticking his fingers in his ears, and chanting Broughton’s rules at the top of his voice until either she went away or morning dawned. But one look at the stubborn set of her chin, and he knew it was no use. She was determined enough to wait him out.
She was too accomplished at patience, this woman. And that was his idiot brother’s fault.
“Once upon a time,” she began, “I imagined myself to be Sleeping Beauty. Promised in my cradle to marry . . . well, not a prince, but something close. I was surrounded by well-meaning relations, showered with gifts. Wealth, good breeding, education. Even a castle.”
She hugged her knees and stared at the banked fire. “And right around my seventeenth birthday, I went to sleep. There wasn’t any spindle to prick my finger. But I fell asleep just the same, and I stayed that way for eight long years.”
Firelight played over her face, caressing her cheek with more tenderness than a brute like Rafe could ever muster.
“All around me, my friends were marrying, traveling, having children, and making their own homes. Not me. I was still asleep in that tower. Still waiting on my prince to come home and kiss me, so I could wake.
“Then one day . . . I decided to give myself a good pinch and wake up. The prince wasn’t coming for me. And maybe—just maybe—I didn’t need him, anyway. I’d been given so many gifts. An education, a fortune, a castle. Who was to say that simply because I was female, I couldn’t make something of those gifts myself?” She looked at Rafe. “Then came you.”
“I’m no kind of prince.”
“No, you’re not. You’re wild and rebellious and rough-mannered. But you kissed me in a tower. You brought me every flower in the hothouse. You gave me an entire roomful of cake. You swept me off my feet.” She rested her chin on her knees and regarded him. “And tonight, you remembered what I wore to my come-out ball when I was seventeen years old. Down to the pearls studded in my hair.”
Rafe’s pulse stuttered to a halt. His mouth dried. “No. That wasn’t me. I told you, that was Piers.”