But two hours later the children had still not been found. Every room had been searched; the barns had been rifled; the sty was turned inside out.
There was no sign of two small girls.
“They must have run away,” Villiers said. “That’s what I would have done.”
“There’s nothing more we can do at the moment,” Eleanor said. “We must go home. It’s long past time for luncheon. You’ll send your footmen out to search the surrounding countryside and they’ll find the children in no time. They can’t have gone far.”
That was true. He could feel the logic of it like a balm to his soul. “You called me Leopold in the orphanage,” he pointed out.
“A moment of weakness,” she said, accepting a footman’s hand to climb into the carriage.
Once in the carriage, he put his head back so he didn’t have to meet her eyes and said, “You must think it’s very odd that I…” He tried to figure out how to phrase exactly what happened to him.
“You were terrified,” Eleanor said, pulling a little mirror from her net bag and rubbing a smudge on her cheek. “That sty! That grotesque woman! I was just as frightened, and the children aren’t even mine.”
“I can hardly claim them as my children, in that sense of the word. I didn’t even know where they were living until a few days ago. I never gave them a second’s thought until this year. They could have been spending every night in a sty, for all I knew.”
“Nonsense. You paid for them to be well-housed, warm, fed, and educated. That’s more than many fathers in the same situation do.” She peered at herself in the small glass and then dropped it back into her bag. “Lord knows, you’re rich enough to give them all settlements, and that will buy them a future.”
“No man is rich enough to buy back his past,” Villiers said.
She met his eyes and the regret in hers made him feel better. “True. But there’s no point in wailing over it. I hope to goodness that Willa remembered to walk Oyster. If not, my chamber is going to be as malodorous as the sty itself.” She started searching about in her bag again.
She is a good person, Villiers thought, watching her under half-closed eyes so that she didn’t realize. He’d never noticed what a firm chin she had until she faced off with Mrs. Minchem.
There was something about Eleanor that made him want to bite her. He’d like to bite that firm little chin. And then do the same to her neck. Her neck was as strong as she was: a beautiful, fierce column.
Without thinking too much about it he rose and sat down beside her, crushing her skirts. She squeaked some sort of reproach, but he kissed her silent. She tasted like one of the first raspberries in spring, so sweet and tart that it bit the tongue. And she tasted angry somehow, which made him wonder about why he could taste what she was feeling.
But then she stopped being angry and her arms wound around his neck and she said “Leopold” into his mouth. He stopped thinking altogether and just focused on kissing her. After a while it dawned on him that there was something different about the way she was kissing him. Something he didn’t recognize.
She was kissing him back. Really kissing him back.
She had one hand woven so hard into his hair that it almost hurt. And her tongue was playing with his, swooping and hiding and generally driving him mad with desire.
It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been kissed before. But when he let his mouth trail away over her cheek, thinking to bite her ear, she bade him return in a husky little command. And when he didn’t, she grabbed his head and pulled him back.
That was new. No woman had ever…
He lost the train of thought again because she said his name, his given name, in sort of a purr, and every inch of his body blazed.
She was flushed and pink and utterly desirable. She looked at him that way she had, as if she were smoldering, as if she wanted only one thing in the world…
“You’re no virgin,” he said, surprising himself. Gentlemen didn’t say that sort of thing to ladies, let alone the gently-bred daughters of dukes.