Elijah stroked forward again, long and deep.
It was so intoxicating that she twisted up against him any way she could. She couldn’t stay still.
He made a noise that was somewhere between a groan and a laugh and dropped her hands, pulling her hips up so her legs wrapped around him and she couldn’t move.
“Elijah!” she cried, shocked by the vulnerability of her position. But he wasn’t listening, just moving, and suddenly she got it, and pushed back against him at just the right moment.
“Yes,” he said, between his teeth, his eyes intent, fierce. He kept moving that way, hard and deep, and she arched toward him frantically, at the right moment. The fire in her legs was spreading and making her seethe and tremble.
Elijah was looking down at her the whole time. The look in his eyes, the raw possession, made the feelings in her body spiral tighter and tighter.
“Jemma,” he said, deep and hard as his body, and she wrapped her arms around him and broke the way thunder cracks in the sky, into a before and after, into the Jemma-who-had-never and the new Jemma.
He came with her, into the fury and the heat of it, and the only thing she heard was one word, and it wasn’t love, but mine, and that was good enough.
Chapter Twenty
April 1
Morning
Villiers looked with some distaste at the page delivered from Templeton’s office. It contained a neat list of eight names and eight addresses. Why eight, one might ask? He, of all people, knew that he had six children. Or rather, to be precise, he had five children and was paying for six.
Yet the list explained nothing. There was an ominous feeling to it, as if Templeton, his little rat of a solicitor, had disappeared into a hole from which he wouldn’t be re-emerging. And if that were the case, Templeton had likely taken a good amount of ducal coin with him.
Either the list implied that he now had eight children, which explanation he rejected, or two children were unaccounted for in a welter of addresses.
He sighed and summoned his coach.
The first address was a house in a respectable area of Stepney. He considered instructing a footman to knock on the door and simply fetch the child, but thought better of it. This was the place where lived—the very thought made him clammy and slightly nauseated—his firstborn son.
The woman who answered the door was pious, by the look of her. But there was a hint of spice in her eye. Villiers deduced that she had settled for piety when she couldn’t find something more lively.
“Good morning,” he said. “I am the Duke of Villiers. Are you Mrs. Jobber?”
“Huh.” She was clearly nonplussed by the appearance of a duke. Though of course Villiers did not fool himself that there were any in the kingdom who looked more ducal than he. This morning, he was wearing pale rose velvet and could have graced the king’s court with ease.
Instead he was standing before a battered-looking little house. The irony was not lost on him. One might wear all the velvet in the world and still discover that one’s children were living in a small house in Stepney.
“I’ve come for my son,” he said to her.
A flash of pain crossed Mrs. Jobber’s eyes. “You’re taking him?”
Of course she would have come to feel affection for the lad. Of course she would. It was what any reasonable parent would prefer. “If you would be so kind,” he said, bowing.
She stepped back, holding the door open, so Villiers left his footmen outside and followed her into the shadowy house. It smelled like flour and apples. “He’s just down for a nap,” she whispered.
“A nap?” By Villiers’s estimation, this child had to be twelve years old. He hadn’t napped at that age. Well, as far as he remembered.
“We’ll have to be quiet,” she said. “They all sleep together, of course.”
“Do you take in many children?”
“I’ve five at the moment, four girls and he. He’s a sweet one.” She stopped and turned, her arms crossed over her bosom. “Did someone tell you aught about the way I’m raising these children? Because it’s a lie. I never take more than five, and they have their own beds. They go to church of a Sunday, and wear a clean pinafore every other day. There’s no—”
“Absolutely not,” he said. But she seemed to be owed an explanation, though it irked him to do so. “I have decided to rear my son in my own house.”
“In your house?”
He allowed a flash of annoyance to cross his face, and then stated, “I shall rear my baseborn children under my own roof.”
“Goodness me,” she said, looking not the least afraid. “That does make me feel better about letting him go. I’ve come to love him.” She opened a door to a sitting room full of rather faded but clean furniture.