“I have my own obligations,” she said tightly, lifting her chin. “I’ve changed, too, you know.”
His gaze flickered over her face. “Is that so?”
“I no longer shirk my responsibilities.” She shook her head, feeling painfully foolish to ever have thought that she could, that she could have been that selfish, that she could have been so much like Bertram. Squaring her shoulders, she confessed, “My brother has left us, departed for foreign soil.”
“He abandoned you?” The astonishment in his voice rang clear and Portia smiled grimly. Heath would not be able to make sense of such a thing—a brother, an eldest son, fleeing duty, leaving his family to face trouble alone.
“Where has he gone?” he demanded in affronted tones, as if he himself would fetch her errant brother home.
She laughed dryly. “He did not exactly leave a forwarding address. It’s for the best, I suppose. Scandal was imminent if he remained. Bertram became involved in certain activities.”
Heath stared at her for a long moment before nodding, accepting the little she had told him and not pressing for more.
“With Bertram gone,” her voice faded. “Well, suffice it to say things have become rather desperate.” Humiliation stung her cheeks, sharp as a Yorkshire wind. It scraped her pride to make such a confession, to reveal her brother’s abandonment, to disclose the weaknesses of her family—even if logic reminded her that his family had its fair share of flaws.
“Portia,” he began, his hands flexing over her bare arms, the rasp of his calluses on her flesh fluttering her insides. “Let me help. Marry me and—”
“No,” her voice rang out, sharp and inflexible. Automatic. Although she had accepted the notion of marriage, she could not accept the notion of marriage to Heath. Let me help. So now he would marry her out of pity as well as obligation? Could he humiliate her any more? Regardless of how he made her feel, how her body responded to him, she could not tolerate marrying him for those reasons. And for what reasons could you tolerate marrying him? Shaking her head, she shoved the question into the dark night of her mind.
“No?” he echoed, his angry voice reverberating in the confined space, eyes flashing in the glow of the moon. “Why am I not acceptable? I thought deep pockets were the only requisite? You said you’ve decided to wed. You need to marry someone capable of supporting your family. I’m willing. Why not me?”
Why not me?
She shut her eyes in one long blink, hating how logical he sounded—how illogical he made her sound. Why not him?
His face as she had seen him that last day in the library—his handsome features twisted in loathing—flashed in her mind. He’d hurt her, wounded her to the core. She could not let him do so again. She couldn’t be that weak, that stupid.
Her lips moved numbly, spilling forth an explanation that had nothing to do with the one that squeezed at her heart, “Oliver Simon will not simply support us, he will also settle Bertram’s debts.”
His fingers dug into her arms, nearly lifting her off her feet. “I can do that.”
“Why would you want to?” she bit out. “With Simon it’s an even trade. I get something. He gets something. Business. Plain and simple.”
The opera resumed, the music swelling until it pounded all around them, humming along the walls and floor beneath their feet.
“And what exactly does he get?” The question was loaded, rife with danger. Heath’s gaze slid over her, indicating he had already formed an opinion.
It was the one question she refused to dwell on. Not when her nights were spent thinking about Heath, remembering his hands and mouth on her. “Mr. Oliver wants respectability, an entrance into Society.”
“He smells of the docks.”
“It’s a practical arrangement. You and I—”
“Make a hell of a lot more sense that you and him.”
She smiled tightly, wanting desperately to fling his words back at him. There is no you and me. Instead, she settled for, “We don’t suit.”
“No?”
The tiny hairs on her nape tingled and she knew she had provoked him too far.
The air in the tiny room changed subtly, thickened, grew electric. He snatched both her wrists and pulled them above her head.
“What are you doing?” she squeaked as he pressed the hard length of his body against her.
His unsmiling face looked down at her, watching her intently as he lowered his head. His head inched toward hers, but she dodged his mouth.
His eyes narrowed, lips thinning into a grim line. Releasing her wrists, he spun her about and crushed her into the wall. He grasped her hips in rough hands, pulling them out slightly from the wall. A shocked gasp escaped her as he nudged her thighs apart through her gown.
“What are you—” her voice froze, trapped in her throat as his hands came around to clasp her breasts. A hard bulge prodded at her backside through the volume of her skirts.
His fingers rolled, tweaked and squeezed her nipples into rock-hard points. Desire pooled low in her belly. A keening moan escaped her. She turned her face and rested one cheek against the wall, unable to move, unable to resist the seductive assault.
His hands dropped. She moaned in disappointment.
Then she felt him hike her skirts to her waist. He shoved down her undergarments. Cool air caressed her. His hand traveled over her thighs, her backside. A hissing cry escaped her when he bent and nipped at her exposed buttocks. His hand slid between her legs, fingers probing, pushing deep inside her.
She came out of her skin, sobbing as his hand plundered her. Then the hand disappeared. An anguished whimper ripped from her throat, swallowed by the music pulsing around them. She bit her bottom lip, waiting, desperate for what was to come, what she had thought she would never have again. Her body burned, ached, trembling like a leaf.
Hard hands fell on her hips, fingers digging into her softness, lifting her to accept the hot length of him sliding inside her. He penetrated her deeply and a scream welled up in her throat.
His hands shifted, angling her for deeper invasion, anchoring her for his thrusts. She clawed the wall, fighting for a handhold. Her knees felt like water. If not for his hands on her hips, she would have slid to the floor in a shuddering, boneless pile.
Cries tore from her mouth at his every plunge. He lifted her higher, the heels of her slippers coming off the floor. His own breath came hard and fast in her ear as he ground into her bottom.
One of his hands slid from her hip, kneading and squeezing her bottom possessively before sliding around, dipping, finding that plea sure spot between her quivering thighs that begged to be touched, stroked, set afire. She gasped as his fingers worked their magic, moving in fast little circles until she broke, shattered, convulsed between the wall and the man at her back that had become her entire world.
A few more powerful thrusts and he stilled, buried to the hilt. He pulsed within her, spilling his seed deep within her.
A mixed sense of elation and horror grabbed hold of her heart, squeezing tightly. The night at the lodge he had always withdrawn, always held himself in check. Not so now.
She lifted her cheek from the wall and gazed at her hands splayed flat before her. Moonlight washed the walls, tingeing the flesh of her hands blue.
Strong fingers brushed the back of her neck. “Portia—”
“No,” she choked, loathing for herself—for him—burning a bilious trail up her throat as she squeezed between him and the wall. Her hands shook as she bent and set her undergarments to rights. “Don’t say a word.”
Straightening, she risked a glance at his face and her heart constricted at the almost tender look on his face. If his words matched the look on his face, she was doomed.
Her unsteady hand touched her hair as she moved toward the door.
His hand clamped down on her arm. “Surely now you can see—”
“I see nothing save two people who haven’t a shred of sense or dignity.” She inhaled a great gulp of air. ?
??Who just copulated like beasts in a closet.”
The tender looked fled, a hard mask taking its place.
“Marry me and you won’t have to worry about that. We’ll be husband and wife.” He scoured her with a dark look, one full of lust and promise. The smoldering fire in her belly flared to life, betraying her. “You can have this every night without threat to your sense of dignity.” He uttered the word as if it were a jest, something that did not exist. And perhaps for her it did not. When it came to him she had displayed very little dignity. It was as if she lost the ability to think when he entered the room.
Marry me and you won’t have to worry about that. We’ll be husband and wife. No, but she would have to worry about much more. Her heart, her pride, her self-control—her future with a man who held the ability to wound her like the sharpest of blades. She would have to be daft to bind herself to him.
“You once told me that I didn’t belong at Moreton Hall,” she said dully. “Well, you don’t belong here. Go home, Lord Moreton. I’m sure you’ll have no problem finding a bride more suited—”
“Oh, we suit,” he inserted, his voice as dangerous as a whip cutting air. His gaze trailed over her, insulting in it thoroughness, as if he stripped off her gown and stared upon her nakedness. “In the most fundamental way. Except you’re too pigheaded to see it.”
Shaking her head, she turned and slipped from the room. Hands clenching and unclenching at her sides, she told herself that he was wrong.
Heath didn’t return to his box. He stormed from the theater and hailed a hack, calling out the name of his hotel as he bounded within the musty confines.
Perhaps he should listen to Portia and leave—let her marry her smelly dockworker. Although the image of her beneath the brawny fellow, taking him inside her body, invaded his head and soured his stomach.
How many times did she have to say no before he finally quit? He thumped his fist on the seat. He had affairs to tend to—his sisters sitting at top of the list. Now that he knew there to be no threat of madness, he needed to see about getting them married. Mina would be delighted. Constance…he was not so sure. Still, he had better things to do than traipsing after some female who spurned him at every chance.
But her body opened like a flower at his slightest touch. Closing his eyes, he dropped his head on the back of the seat. He could still feel her heat, the tightness of her snug around him. He had released himself inside her, gloried in it. It had been the greatest sense of liberation—a claiming of himself right along with her. The thought of a child growing in her womb even now filled him with inexpressible joy.
She wanted him as much as he wanted her. They both knew it. He would do what ever necessary to prove it.
Alone in her room, Portia undressed herself, her hands lingering over the places Heath had touched, kissed. Her mouth, her neck, her breasts. Her skin still tingled, still ached for him.
Before donning her nightgown, she sponged herself clean. Washing away the evidence of their lovemaking from between her legs, she tried not to notice how her sensitized skin reacted to her ministrations. Still, she wished it were Heath’s hands there.
Mortified at the wanton she had become, she flung the sponge back in the bowl and quickly covered her traitorous body with a nightgown. He’d be gone soon enough. Once she and Simon announced their engagement, Heath would see that they were well and truly finished.
She moved to extinguish the lamp but paused when she spotted the letter. Her mother’s letter.
A sigh welled up deep within her chest. Might as well read it. Releasing her sigh, she picked up the missive, bracing herself to hear all about her mother’s exploits abroad—places seen, people met, things done. Then the letter would end with the “wish” that Portia could be there to share in it all.
Unfolding the parchment, she skimmed her mother’s elegant, scrawling handwriting with a numb heart, feeling none of her former excitement and anticipation when reading such letters, so grateful for a glimpse into her mother’s life.
Her heart stopped beating altogether when she came to the end, to the words that suddenly took life and leapt off the page, instantly breaking from resembling all the previous letters she had received over the years.
Her fingers went limp and the letter fluttered to the floor, gentle as falling snow. She looked down, staring at the letter that lay there as innocuously as a forgotten handkerchief, a white smudge on the dark blue and green swirls in the threadbare carpet.
The words her mother had written struck her like a blow to the face, robbing her of breath, ripping at her heart.
I’ve married, my darling girl. He’s a wonderful man and we want you to join us in Athens.
Chapter 27
“Have you decided when we can announce our betrothal?”
Portia opened her mouth but no sound emerged.
Simon repeated himself.
Faced with the reality of becoming his wife, of allowing him the intimacies she had only shared with Heath—one word fell from her lips, “No.”
Portia frowned. How had that slipped from her lips? It had certainly not been her intention to reject his suit. She had hardly given Simon a thought until he had showed up for tea today. Her thoughts had been too wrapped up in Heath and the mother who had married—who finally remembered she had a daughter.
For years, Portia had lived in wait for such a letter, longing for the day her mother would want her, would turn her promise into a reality. Her mother had sent for her. At last. Just when Portia had ceased to hope. Except it didn’t matter. Portia no longer cared. She had been avoiding life, avoiding her duties and responsibilities for the sake of a dream. And now that the dream hovered within reach, she no longer wanted it. It was the dream of a girl, a little girl who had needed her mother. That girl no longer existed.
Portia needed something else now. Heath’s face emerged in her mind. Aggravating, considering the way he had humiliated her in Yorkshire, but nonetheless there. Always there. And she was beginning to suspect he always would be.
Simon shook his head, looking as confused as she felt. “I thought you were eager to wed.”
“I was—am.” Portia paused and pressed her fingers between her brows where her head was beginning to throb. Suddenly, a sense of knowing filled her. Dropping her hand, she looked him directly in the eyes. “I cannot marry you, Mr. Oliver. I apologize for giving the impression that I could.”
He stared at her a long moment, an odd little smile fixed to his face. Clearly, he had not heard her.
“I cannot marry you,” she repeated as gently as possible. “I thought I could, but I cannot.”
“No?” he queried, rising swiftly to his feet.
“You must see we don’t suit.”
He looked down at her, his face flushed an unbecoming shade of red. “Your sister-in-law assured me you were agreeable to this match.”
Nodding, she dropped her gaze to her hands. “You mustn’t blame her. I thought—”
“You thought you could,” he finished in a snarl. With surprising swiftness, he leaned down and circled her neck with his hand, exerting the slightest pressure as he said, “I’ll not be made a fool, my lady. No one makes a fool of Oliver Simon.”
That said, he released her neck and stormed from the room, flinging the door wide open. It crashed against the wall, the sound reverberating on the air for several moments. She sat there for a long moment, her hand at her throat, willing herself to cease shaking.
“Portia?” Astrid said, hurrying into room, her face pinched tight with concern. “What happened?”
“I—I—” Portia glanced back at the door, wondering if she might somehow call him back, yet knew she could not. Not when to do so pinched at her heart and made her feel as though she were betraying not only Heath but herself.
“Portia?” Astrid pressed.
“I refused to marry him,” she blurted.
Astrid gave her head a small shake as if she had misunderstood. Pressing her hand against her
temple, she cocked her head to the side.
“Astrid?” Portia asked, trying to catch a glimpse of her sister-in-law’s eyes. Only she continued to look away, as if the sight of Portia disgusted her.
Portia leaned forward, her voice urgent. “Astrid, I will marry. I promised you and Grandmother that I would. Only not Oliver Simon.” The image of Oliver’s face, mottled red with anger, his beefy hand on her throat like a steel collar seized her and she suppressed a shudder. Right or wrong, she could not marry him. “Give me a little more time. I’ll find someone else.”
At this, Astrid laughed. A grating sound that sent a chill down Portia’s spine. “Who else would marry you? You’ve nothing to recommend you save a family name that, thanks to your brother, is now in question.”
“Astrid—”
“Have you not heard the whispers?” Astrid demanded, swinging her dark gaze back on Portia, the venom reflected there lethal as hemlock.
Portia shook her head, then stopped. She had noticed a few stares. Yet she had chalked that up to her new wardrobe, and the fact that Oliver Simon, not the most cultured gentleman, escorted her about Town. It had not crossed her mind that everyone whispered behind their gloves about the pathetic Derring women, abandoned, rejected, scrabbling for a way to survive penniless among the echelons of Society.
“Everyone knows Bertram fled in order to escape trial. We’re the talk of Town. The destitute Derrings.” Astrid’s dark eyes shimmered suspiciously.
“I will find someone else,” Portia insisted, already thinking of Heath and weighing how degrading it would be to seek him out, to ask him if he still wished to marry her—despite all her protests. Would she look the complete fool?
“All I need is a little time,” Portia vowed.
Time to find Heath. To swallow what little pride she had left and tell him she would marry him. For duty’s sake and not love.
Portia stared blindly into the dark, straight and rigid as a slat of wood, fingers laced tightly over her stomach. Two days and no sight of Heath. No sight of him since the theater when he had obliterated her will and reduced her to a shallow creature that lived and breathed for him and passion alone.