A Masquerade in the Moonlight(83)

Marguerite folded the cloak over her arm and laid it on the back of the couch, directly beside the jacket he had worn that morning. “Well, Donovan,” she said, spreading her arms as if to encompass the entirety of the mess, “in that case—how would you know if you’d been robbed or not?”

He thought about her statement for a moment, then laughed, especially when he considered that the adjoining chamber looked, if anything, worse than the sitting room. He’d planned to clean up the place, truly he had, but time had slipped away from him and his head had been too filled with thoughts of Marguerite to play the housewife. “You have a valid point. I doubt I would know. Excuse me for a moment, all right? I, um, I have to check something in the other room.”

“Please, don’t let me stop you,” she said, balancing herself on the edge of a chair, that morning’s newspaper taking up most of the seat. “And when you get back we can talk. I really think we should, don’t you?”

No, he didn’t, actually. But he could see all her fears were back, and he decided he would give her a few moments to collect herself before he approached her again with the idea of taking up where they had left off in the coach.

“All right,” he fibbed, and went into the adjoining room, quickly snatching the discarded neck cloths from the bed and looking around him for someplace to stuff them.

“You might try that cupboard over there.”

He whirled around to see Marguerite standing in the doorway, his jacket in her hand.

“I, um, I thought you might want this—to put it away,” she said, her eyes wide as saucers as she looked at the large bed he and Dooley had been sharing since coming to London. And then she smiled. “You need a keeper, Donovan, do you know that? I never saw such a mess in my life.”

“Paddy says I was born in a pigsty,” he told her, aiming the neck cloths in the direction of the corner as he advanced toward her, amazed by her beauty as she was lit from behind by the candlelight. “When I was young I only had two suits of clothing, neither of them much better than rags, and now that I’ve come up in the world I have my man, Jenks, to pick up after me. Only he isn’t here, and Paddy makes a reluctant valet.”

As he spoke he kept walking toward her, stopping now he was directly in front of her and resting his hands on either side of her waist.

They looked at each other for a long time, neither of them saying anything, until Donovan smiled and asked, “Are you as nervous as I am?”

“More,” she answered on a sigh, curling her slim fingers around his forearms as she gazed up into his face trustingly. “I’ve thought about this all day, wondering if you were thinking what I was thinking, planning what I was preparing for. But now that it’s all actually happening I—”

“I’ll take you back,” he interrupted, prepared to do what was right even if it killed him, and it most probably would, for the ache in his chest was close to sending him to his knees.

“That might be best,” she said, wetting her lips with the tip of her tongue. Her moist pink tongue. “I believe we may have been carried away with the thrill of the thing, the, um, the passions of the moment, and haven’t really considered the consequences if we were to—”

“I’d love our child beyond life, Marguerite,” Thomas interrupted, unable to look away from her mouth. “I have a big house in Philadelphia. We’d be happy there, you and I and the babe, I promise.”

She looked at him queerly, as if that thought had not occurred to her. “Why, thank you, Donovan. But I couldn’t possibly leave my grandfather.”

“I told you. It’s a big house. And I have another one in the country. That one’s even larger. We’ll take him with us,” Thomas said quickly, sliding his hands up her slim ribcage, stopping just beneath the swell of her breasts, dying a little, knowing he should go no farther even though he already knew the glory that awaited him. “Paddy says Sir Gilbert wants to see Philadelphia.”

“Wild Indians, Donovan,” Marguerite whispered, raising a hand to trace Thomas’s mustache from one side of his mouth to the other. A convulsive shiver ran through him, from the base of his throat to his toes. “Grandfather thinks Philadelphia is chock-full of them, remember? He’d be extremely disappointed if he sailed all that way just to find that there weren’t any.”

His breathing was becoming ragged. “I’ll hire some.”

“Idiot! But there’s more to be considered, and we both know it.”