And he knew, with the keen knowledge of one who had been so long in control of his desires, that he would ache for her for an eternity.
But he would take the ache to save her.
For once in his sorry, worthless life, he would save someone he cared for.
I should not have believed in you.
Pippa’s words from earlier echoed through him, taunting him.
He would save her.
“Maggie’s not a bad hand, Cross. She’ll make you pretty heirs.”
Cross lifted his gaze to follow Knight’s meaning, meeting Maggie’s eyes, recognizing the shock and disappointment there. She didn’t want to marry him any more than he wanted to marry her. He leveled her with a serious look. “Your father is mad.”
“I’m beginning to see that myself,” she replied, and Cross thought that if the situation had been different, he’d have smiled at that.
But the situation was not different.
There was only one course of action.
He approached Knight’s daughter—nineteen years old with mediocre French—dropped to one knee in front of her and said, “I’m afraid I haven’t a choice.”
He had lost so many. This time, he would save one.
The most important one.
Maggie nodded once. “It seems, my lord, that in that, at least, we have a great deal in common.”
Unshed tears shimmered in her brown eyes, and Cross wished he could say something else. Something that would make her feel better about the whole situation. But the truth was, Meghan Margaret Knight believed him a coldhearted man who ran a den of iniquity and made his money on sin. She believed that he consorted with ruffians and prostitutes and scoundrels the likes of her father, and that a marriage to him—once blessed—would be the result of blackmail and coercion, and nothing remotely fonder.
Meghan Margaret Knight, who had not known him for the better part of an hour, already knew more of his truths than Philippa Marbury ever had.
So, instead of comforting her, he lifted one of her gloved hands from where it clutched the green fabric of her skirts, held it in his firm grasp, and said, “Miss Knight, would you do me the honor of becoming my wife?”
Pippa was enjoying herself immensely.
She might have spent much of the last weeks unimpressed by the poorly lit, library-quiet main floor of The Fallen Angel, but tonight, she finally understood its appeal. By night, the club filled with light and sound and a long, languorous lick of sin that Pippa could never have imagined if she were not here, now, witnessing it.
Night breathed life into this great stone building, darkness somehow plunging the room into bright, bold light—a whirl of color and sound and thrill that Pippa drank in with heady excitement.
She stood at the center of the main floor of the club, surrounded by masked revelers: men in their dark suits, boldly colored waistcoats their nod to the evening festivities; women in their silks and satins, dresses designed to showcase skin and scandal.
Giving herself up to the movement of the crowd, Pippa allowed them to carry her from one side of the room, where she’d escaped Temple’s chaperone, to the center of the revelry, past piquet and roulette and hazard, and throngs of laughing, masked beauties and their handsome counterparts. She knew better, of course—knew that each of these bodies had flaws, likely significant ones—but somehow, masked, they seemed more than the sum of their parts.
Just as, somehow, suddenly, she seemed more than the sum of hers.
But she did not fool herself into thinking that it was her mask that made her feel so powerful, so different. Nor was it the room.
No, it was the man.
Her heart raced as she recalled the clandestine events of mere moments ago, of the heady, overwhelming touch that she had not expected but that she had craved.
And the kiss.
One hand lifted of its own volition at the thought of that devastating, remarkable caress, the one she had known would be everything she’d imagined and nothing like it, all at once. She regretted the instant that her fingertips brushed her lips—hating that their touch had erased his.
Wishing she could take it back.
Wishing she could find him once more and urge him to restore the memory of his kiss.
A thread of feeling settled deep in her belly, unfurling in slow, steady time as she recalled the moment, as she imagined the softness of his hair in her fingers, of his skin against hers . . . of his lips.
Of his tongue.
The room grew warmer as she realized that even the thought of his touch, of his kiss, of him, made her ache. But it was the location of the ache that unsettled—a deep, secret place that she’d never realized existed.
He showed her things she’d never known about things she’d always thought she understood. And she adored it . . . even as it terrified her.
Even as it made her question everything she thought true.
She resisted the thought, her gaze rising to one large wall of the club, where the Angel’s namesake fell in beautiful glass panels from Heaven to Hell, from good to evil, from sainthood to sin. It was the most beautiful window Pippa had ever seen, the work of true artisans, all reds and golds and violets, at once hideous and holy.
It was the angel himself who fascinated her, the enormous, beautiful man crashing to Earth, without the gifts he’d had for so long. In the hands of a poorer artist, the detail of him would have been less intricate, the hands and feet and face would have been shaped with glass of a single color, but this artist had cared deeply for his subject, and the swirls of darks and lights in the panels were finely crafted to depict movement, shape, and even emotion.
She could not help but stare at the face of the fall—inverted as he fell to the floor of the hell—the arch of his brow, the complex shade of his jaw, the curve of his lip. She paused there, thinking on another pair of lips, another fall. Another angel.