Unveiled (Turner #1)(101)

“Ash, you cannot call on a lady looking like that.”

Ash looked down. His trousers were spattered with mud he’d collected over the course of his perambulations. He’d discarded his cravat hours ago. “I can’t?”

“Even you cannot.” Mark’s eyes glinted with humor. “I am protecting you, recall.”

A few minutes’ delay. Ash juggled that with the prospect of looking civilized for her. He supposed the time wouldn’t matter anywhere except in his own racing heart.

“Damn,” he swore, and he raced up to his room.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” he heard Mark calling from behind him. He ignored that.

He didn’t bother ringing for his valet—the man was too fastidious, and the toilette he would insist on putting Ash through too time-consuming. Instead, Ash shrugged off his sodden coat and tugged at the sleeves of his linen shirt, eager to remove it.

And that was when he heard a gentle, feminine clearing of a throat. He froze, his hands at the buttons of his neck.

“You know,” a voice said behind him, “if you rush the disrobing, I don’t get nearly so much enjoyment from it.”

He was almost afraid to look about, lest her voice prove to be a product of his fevered imagination. Slowly, he turned around anyway.

If this was his imagination, he realized, his imagination had produced a gray silk dress and hung it over the back of his dressing chair, not six inches from him. He reached out and touched the silk gingerly. It felt real. It smelt of roses.

And then he lifted his eyes from the chair to his bed. If this was his imagination, his imagination was glorious. Margaret lay on his coverlet, stretched out full length. She still wore a corset and petticoats, but they’d been hiked up so that he could see where her garters tied at the knees. She crooked one finger at him and smiled.

“Margaret. What are you doing here?”

“I,” she said, “have been procuring my future.”

His mind went blank. He didn’t know how to take it. She’d decided to have him, after all. She’d realized she didn’t need him, not one bit. His head pounded. His heart swelled in a mix of hope and despair.

“I want you.”

Hope. Hope. It was all hope. He took a careful step towards her.

“Wait. There’s a condition.”

“You know,” Ash said, his throat closing, “that if you are half-naked on my bed, all conditions will be met. Instantly.”

“Ah, but this is one of the conditions I did not deliver to Lord Lacy-Follett earlier today.”

If he’d been overwhelmed by her appearance before, he was stunned now. “You talked to Lacy-Follett? You cannot be serious.”

“Oh, but I am. I had to renegotiate, after I’d heard what you had done. I had been so blinded by my loyalty to my brothers that I could not see that I owed loyalty to you, as well. I was wrong. I love you, Ash.”

He swallowed.

She smiled up at him. “I love that you make me feel as if I’m the only woman in the world. I love that you’ll always be there for me.” She sat up on the bed, and her petticoats fell, so that only her toes peeked out at him from underneath those layers of fabric. “I want to paint my own canvas, Ash. And I want you on it with me.”

Delicately, she stretched out one leg. Her foot flexed, and then her toes found the floor. He was helpless. Just seeing her push to her feet got him hard. And seeing her in his room—on his bed—made every part of him reverberate with the rightness of it.

She shook her head at him. “Still nothing to say? Lord Lacy-Follett and his group will vote down the bill in Parliament. I told them to do it. They agreed—every one of them—but to get them all on board, they wanted to ensure the duke’s line would continue. They insisted that we marry.”

“Have you any plans tomorrow?”

She held up one hand. “I’d like to ask for a wedding gift. Not—not an allowance for my brother. But an independence. I know it’s possible to obtain titles, if you make a donation to the Crown. If you know the right people. Could you do that for him?”

“After what he did to you?”

“Yes. After what he did to me.” She tilted her head, and her unbound hair spilled over her shoulders. “Because we’ve had enough of vengeance between us. Because I don’t want to be so caught up in what has been done that I forget what we could have in the future instead.”

“And what of you?” Ash asked hoarsely. “When we talk of what could be, what of you?”

“Yes, indeed.” Her smile broadened. She minced towards him, stopping mere inches from him. He could have reached out and drawn her against him. He might have leaned down and taken her lips in a kiss. “What of me, Ash?” she asked.

Instead, he laid one finger on the gold chain of her necklace. He hooked his little finger underneath it and then undid the clasp. “Here,” he said, dropping the master key back onto the necklace. “That’s yours, my love.” He let it drop, and the key slid down the chain. It hit her locket with a clank.

Ash fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, until he found what he was looking for. “And this—” he pulled a second key from his waistcoat “—this will unlock my rooms in town.” He let it fall down the chain, as well, and it slid to clank against the other key.