Angel's Fall

  "You're right to be annoyed with me. It's none of my affair. It's just—I hurt for you when Darlington was so cruel."

  "I don't give a damn what that fop says." Adam gave a harsh laugh. "Juliet, when you're born a bastard, you have two choices. Go into a towering rage every time you hear the word, or laugh in people's faces when they fling it at you."

  "But you weren't laughing inside, Adam."

  He should have roared with laughter, should have cast out some witty, biting words to distract her. But her perception lanced through the hard shell of mockery, cynicism, years of denial, leaving him stunned. Only one other person in his life had realized that truth, slipped past his guard to discover the raw place, the vulnerable place he'd struggled so hard to conceal.

  Gavin—his half-brother, the boy who had been his nemesis, the youth who had been his conscience, the man who was the person Adam loved most in this infernal world. Gavin, who had seen but never spoken about the pain, the hurt, the isolation of bastardy, any more than Adam had spoken of Gavin's secret pain—the fact that their father had quietly despised his true-born son.

  "Adam?" Juliet's hand, angel-soft, warm, curved over his jaw, her thumb tracing ever so delicately the ridge of the faded scar. His jaw knotted beneath her touch, a touch so searingly tender his chest ached. "I don't mean to poke about in something painful. It's just... I want you to know that it doesn't matter to me that you were born out of wedlock. It can never change the man you are."

  "What's this? The bright angel granting me absolution?" He should have laughed at the absurdity. Might have, if it weren't for the strange tightness in his throat.

  "Juliet, Juliet, don't bleed for me. My life was far better than most. My father loved my mother, and they raised a batch of children together. There was always plenty of coin—a stable full of horses, presents and trinkets, the best to be had—to make up for the fact that we didn't carry his name. And I was the luckiest of all."

  "How?"

  "I was the earl's favorite."

  The knowledge should have given him some sense of satisfaction. Why was it then that the thought of his father made his stomach burn? Burn with frustration and anger and a hundred issues that could never be resolved between them.

  "You must have loved your father very much."

  "Too much." Adam closed his eyes against a hundred memories. How many times had he all but broken his fool neck in an attempt to impress the earl? Sometimes, when a sword flashed toward him and death glinted on its tip, he wondered if he was still trying to reach his father beyond the grave.

  "It isn't a sin to love."

  "The love between my parents was. But why did God plant such a raging seed of loving in their hearts if it was such a vile sin? For the entertainment of watching them suffer an eternity, not able to touch each other, possess each other the way their souls burned to?"

  Juliet's cheeks flooded with color, and Adam wondered if this bright angel with her loving heart and generous spirit had any idea of the kind of passion that could exist between a man and a woman—hot, raw desire flaying to the very bone. Obsession so deep every breath drawn echoed in their beloved's heart. No, her one taste of physical passion had been the kiss he had forced upon her. But, God, the temptation to teach her...

  "I don't pretend to understand the reasons why God gives us the challenges he does. But my papa—"

  Adam shoved back the unexpected haze of need that tightened his loins, grasped bitterness and cynicism and safety. "Yes, your papa, the vicar. I'd wager he had all the answers. Our vicar certainly did. I remember the old curmudgeon letting loose a particularly nasty sermon on sins of the flesh one Sunday when my father wasn't at Strawberry Grove. My mother and all the rest of us children sitting there in the pew, while he rained fire and brimstone down on our heads."

  He should have stopped, withdrawn, brushed her aside with a laugh. God alone knew what power goaded him to go on sharing things he'd never shared, speaking of things he'd never voiced even to his own brother. "The villagers looked down their noses. The only time they dared was when Father was away. They knew my mother would say nothing to him. She always did her damnedest to hide that kind of ugliness from him. That Sunday, she didn't turn so much as an eyelash. And after the service, she bid the vicar farewell the same way she always did, with a radiant smile."

  "The vicar's cruelty must have hurt you very much."

  "Hurt me? Bah! I've never believed in wasting time being miserable. No, I spent the whole service plotting vengeance—a much more productive business." A faraway smile nudged the corner of his mouth.

  "Adam, you didn't..." She hesitated. "Surely you didn't fight the vicar with a sword?"

  "It occurred to me, but no. I was barely ten, but I already knew a challenge like that would have revealed more than I cared to. I crept into that sanctimonious dog's bedchamber while he was sleeping. I filled his hand with ink and then took a feather and tickled his nose."

  "Oh, my!" She pressed one hand to her lips, but her eyes filled with admiration.

  "The result was quite spectacular. In fact, the whole affair would have been altogether perfect except for one small problem. When my father returned, he somehow got wind of the affront to my mother. In a belated effort to silence the man's denouncements, the earl offered him a bribe of sorts. He hired the vicar in the one capacity he might serve at Strawberry Grove."

  "What was that?"

  "My tutor."

  "Oh, Adam." He'd never heard such gentleness, such soft empathy.

  "You can imagine the kind of scholar I made. Nothing brought out the demons in me more than being locked up in a schoolroom reading a bunch of moldering old texts until I was half blind. Played havoc with my aim when I got to the important part of my day—my lessons at swordsmanship with Monsieur le Trec. It was a battle of gargantuan proportions between old Vicar Tinworthy and me. The only question was who loathed the other one more. He spent the next year trying to beat the devil out of me, and I spent it showing him I didn't care a jot."

  "But your father—how could he have let that beast abuse you?"

  "I went to the greatest lengths to hide it, so he didn't know. No one did until..." Adam stopped, staring down into that creamy oval face, bathed in the rainbow colors from the lantern light. "You know, I never breathed a word of this to anyone before. How strange. Is that how you lure your fallen angels into your toils, Juliet Grafton-Moore? With those heavenly eyes that seem to hold all the light in a dark, dark world?"

  She nibbled at her lower lip, looking for all the world like a guilty angel caught pilfering the secrets from a mortal's soul. "You don't have to say anything more if you don't want to." It was the tiniest catch in her voice that yanked something tender in his heart.

  "God, you remind me of him." Adam grimaced. "I should have run when I had the chance."

  "Who do I remind you of? Your father? The vicar?"

  "My brother. Half-brother, really. Gavin Carstares, Earl of Glenlyon."

  "The one Miss Stonebridge was talking about? Who saved the Scottish children?"

  "It might sound bloody heroic and romantic to the ladies, but it's still a wonder to me that we weren't both hanged in the bargain. It surely wasn't for lack of effort on Gavin's part." Adam couldn't stop the smile that played at the corners of his mouth any more than he could stifle the surge of loneliness at the thought of his brother.

  How long had it been since he'd seen Gavin, his wife Rachel and their brood of children? Too long. Ever since he noticed that when he gathered his newest little niece or nephew in his arms he felt raw, knowing that such familial bliss was forbidden to him—a bastard who could only leave his children a heritage of shame.

  Never had he felt that rawness more acutely than he did now, with Juliet Grafton-Moore so close he could feel her breath against his jaw, see the pulsebeat in the delicate hollow of her throat. So close, yet far beyond his touch.

  "Gavin came to live at our house ten months after the vicar was put in charge of my e
ducation. I hated him. The true-born son, the heir. It was easy to pretend that he didn't exist when he lived with his mother across the county. It might as well have been on the moon. But after his mother died, father brought him to Strawberry Grove."

  Adam raked back a lock of hair tumbling over his brow. "Gavin was the one who stopped the vicar from beating me. The old devil was lashing away at my hands until they bled, and I was staring him in the face, daring him to hit harder... harder. Gavin grabbed the switch, stepped between us and said... said that if Tinworthy ever dared strike me again, Gavin would make certain he was driven away from Strawberry Grove forever."

  "But what could a mere boy do?"

  "Gavin would be the earl someday. He told Tinworthy that the instant he was, he'd use every bit of his power to make certain the man never stood on a pulpit again as long as he lived. Ten years old, scrawny as a drowned rat, Gavin was, but I'd never seen anyone so infernally brave."

  "You must have loved him then."

  "Loved him?" A bark of laughter erupted from Adam's chest. "Lord, I almost killed him for interfering. The instant we got outside, I flew at him like a fury. Didn't need his damned charity. We fought like tigers, both of us full of grief and anger, resentment and rage. I outweighed him by twenty pounds and he barely reached my shoulder. But he landed one hell of a punch, and I crashed into the stable door. Split my jaw wide open." Sword-toughened fingers caressed the old scar.

  "Gavin stood there, silent, while the doctor stitched me up. And afterward, when father summoned us to his study, demanding an explanation, Gavin didn't tell father I'd flown at him. Made up some wild story. I think it was the only time I ever heard him lie."

  Adam was astonished to feel delicate feminine hands enclosing his massive paws, smoothing over them with such a gentle touch they could melt away the rough-hewn edges, the calluses worn in by battle. She turned over his palm and laid one cheek in its cup. He knew the instant she felt the raised ridges the vicar had left in his flesh. She dampened it with tears.

  "Poor hands," she whispered. She shifted her face against his palm until her lips, soft and moist and healing, pressed feather-light kisses upon the faded ridges of the scars Tinworthy had lashed into his skin.

  Adam remembered the countless times he'd rammed his clenched fists into his frockcoat pockets, shoved his swollen hands into riding gloves in an effort to hide the bloody slashes. Determined that no one would ever know. How could that gruff, stubborn, fiercely proud boy ever have guessed the healing power of feminine tears and soft mournful kisses? Yet her sweet sorrow tightened a knot in his throat.

  "It was all a long time ago, sweetheart," he said, capturing her chin between his fingers, tipping her face up into the lantern light. What he saw stole his breath away. Bright droplets of tears clinging to thick lashes, streaking rose-petal cheeks, lips trembling with an innocence he'd never known, and a compassion that had terrified him forever. A willingness to take another human being's pain into her own heart, to ache for them, bleed for them in a way that selfish Adam Slade never would dare.

  He'd been subjected to bouts of hysterical feminine tears, performances created to bend a man to a lady's will. They'd been easy enough to dismiss. But this... this quiet anguish of the soul, this desperate wanting in her face, wanting, nothing for herself, but rather, wanting to wipe away his pain—it cinched about his chest, tightened his throat, drove him to take mad risks like threading his rough fingers through the golden silk of her hair.

  Need pounded like battle drums in his belly, fear made his fingers tremble. But nothing could stop him from lowering his mouth to the quivering sweetness of Juliet's own.

  She gasped at the contact, her eyes widening, and he would have drawn away except that at that moment, she gave a tiny whimper and melted against his chest.

  Adam shuddered at the unbearably precious weight of her as he gathered her in his arms, drinking in the honeyed sweetness of her mouth. He could feel the dampness of her tears against the beard-roughened surface of his cheek, the inner light in this valiant woman warming places chafed by his soldier's uniform, washed with other men's blood— men whose only crime had been that they stood beneath another man's command on the opposite side of a battlefield.

  Like a man lost in a frozen wasteland, he sought that warmth, fastening his mouth tighter over the swells of her lips, tracing the delicate bow with his tongue. Her fingers swept up to clasp his waist, and he probed the crease between her lips, seeking entry.

  Trusting, ever so trusting, she opened her mouth to him with the same generosity she opened her heart. And Adam delved deep into the hot, moist cavern beyond, tasting all of her, sweeping the delicate inner flesh, rubbing his tongue against hers, savoring the tentative seeking of her, the fragile questing of fingertips upon the rigid muscles of his back, the trembling weight of breasts quivering with her breathless little gasps against the hard wall of his chest.

  She felt so damned fragile, like one of the porcelain figurines his mother had polished upon the mantel of her bedchamber. Fairy-queens and woodsprites whose wafer-thin wings had disintegrated at the merest brush of a callused hand.

  Every fiber of his being was excruciatingly aware that the slightest roughness would bruise her, not only the pale satin of her skin, but a heart far too tender for the brutal reality of this world.

  An honorable man would have pulled away from her, knowing it was wrong to steal even this little taste of the goodness inside her. But Adam Slade was no hero. And never, in the multitude of years since he'd lost his virginity to a pretty dairymaid, had he felt such sweet madness consume him as at her yielding—this thirst nothing could quench, this hunger, deep in his vitals.

  "Juliet," he murmured into her mouth. "So damned sweet. Tastes like... redemption."

  Her fingers traced the muscles of his arm, caressed the caps of his shoulders, found the sensitive cords of his neck. Her hand burrowed beneath his hair, settling into the hollow at his nape, drawing his mouth tighter against hers.

  Fire—she painted it onto his lips with tiny forays of her tongue, pooled it in the corners of his mouth as she tasted them, her face shining with a child's wonderment at discovering something beautiful.

  Yet Juliet had no idea that she brought all the beauty to this forbidden kiss. Or that she was wasting it upon a man who could never give her what she deserved. The kind of love Gavin had given to his lady—a hero's heart, passion and light and sensitivity.

  Tenderness instead of the raging lust, gentleness in place of the fierce desire of a warrior, a bastard without even an honorable name to give her. Even now, Adam would have ransomed his soul to the devil to be able to sweep his scarred palm up between their bodies, fill it with the liquid heat of her breast, feel the nudge of her nipple as it pearled, her body's sweet invitation to taste that place where she was dark and rosy and aching.

  Adam deepened the kiss, a low growl of frustration in his throat, his imagination tortured with images of Juliet last night in her nightshift, firelight turning the gown into gossamer petals so sheer he could see the dusky centers of her aureoles, tempting, untouched, so sensitive he could imagine with agonizing clarity how her untried body would react the instant his mouth fixed upon that delicate crest.

  He felt his sex go rigid behind his breech-flap, his hands gliding down her tiny waist, the subtle flare of her hips beneath their layers of petticoats and panniers. His imagination plunged deeper, bunching up those yards of fabric, parting her thighs and—

  Sweet Judas, he thought with utter self-disgust. He was such a blasted monster of a man he'd cleave her in two if he were ever so insane as to—to what? Seduce the innocent young woman he'd vowed to protect?

  "No!" he growled the denial, his fingers clenching on her ribs, pushing her away. He knew he'd always remember the gasp of disappointment as those soft lips pulled away from his. "Juliet, no. This is... we have no business... bloody hell, angel, do you really want to fall?"

  She blinked up at him, awed and a little fr
ightened and so beautiful his breath was a jagged thing in his chest. "Fall?" she echoed faintly.

  "Because I'm more than ready to shove you off the cliff, sweetheart, and I'm not much of a man for heroic fits of self-denial. I want you, Juliet. Like a man wants a woman. Like the men who despoiled your ladies wanted them— lying in my arms, my mouth drinking pleasure from yours, my—"

  He had wanted, needed to drive that dream dust from her eyes, banish fairy tales and dash the salt of reality across the tumultuous emotions playing like quicksilver across her exquisite features. But he'd had no idea how deeply it would cut him to see her fold in upon herself like a tender blossom burned by too-fierce sun, closing herself off from him in a dozen subtle ways.

  "Oh, my... my goodness," she stammered, pressing her shaking fingers to her lips, skittering back a step, her eyes wide with chagrin. Someone passing by on a nearby path tinkled out a laugh, and Juliet's cheeks went pale as parchment as she turned to look around her.

  Adam lashed himself with self-revulsion. Yes, he'd drawn her into the shadow of the tree, but even that couldn't totally conceal them from the other pleasure-seekers wandering the paths of the gardens. There were plenty of Londoners just burning for Juliet Grafton-Moore to slip, to make a mistake, so they could brush her aside. And he'd almost created a spectacle with her more damaging than any Mother Cavendish might have orchestrated.

  "Juliet, forgive me," Adam said, feeling like the scurviest cur who ever breathed. "I just—when you cried over my hand, I—"

  Felt my heart shatter? Wanted to turn and run like the veriest coward? Forgot who I was, who you are...

  She glanced at her surroundings, horror spreading over her kiss-blushed features. "This was... I cannot think what possessed me to... to allow... no." Her voice fell. "I cannot cast the blame on you, when I was kissing you back."

  "Juliet, don't." Her self-blame raked at Adam. "This meant nothing," he said, relieved he'd learned to be such a good liar. "We were both still unnerved by the scene with Darlington, and all that happened last night. God knows, neither of us had much sleep."