“Pardon me,” Mrs. Hollingbrook said, wiping at her tears. “I’m not usually so maudlin.”
“Don’t apologize,” Hero said firmly. “You have suffered a great shock. It would be strange if you were not melancholy.”
Mrs. Hollingbrook nodded wearily.
Hero stayed a few minutes longer, drinking the tea in companionable silence. But her urge to see Griffin—to feel for herself that he was alive and well—was still strong. She soon excused herself and walked rapidly to the door.
On the tedious carriage ride back to the better parts of the West End, she couldn’t stop herself from dwelling on the most grotesque thoughts: Griffin dragged before a magistrate, condemned and humiliated, and the most horrifying of all—his limp body swinging from a hangman’s knot.
By the time she mounted the step to his town house, she was near hysterical with her own morbid imaginings.
The door was pulled open by Griffin himself. He didn’t seem to employ very many servants. He scowled down at her, the stubble thick on his jaw, his shirt open at the throat, and his bare head tousled. Deep shadows circled his eyes.
“What are you doing here?” he growled.
Her relief at seeing him well, albeit surly, brought contrary irritation to her chest. “Will you let me in?”
He shrugged and stepped back, his grudging movement ungracious.
She entered anyway, following when he turned his back and led the way into his library. She took a moment to look about. Last time she’d come here, their argument had flared so fast and intense she hadn’t had time to notice his house.
Now she saw that his library was expensively if carelessly appointed. An exquisite painted globe of the world was draped with a waistcoat. Several small paintings of saints, delicate and fine and looking very old, hung on the wall, but two were crooked and all were dusty. The bookshelves were filled to overflowing, the books crammed against each other in whatever way they’d fit. In just a glance, she saw a large book of maps, a history of Rome, a naturalist’s study, Greek poetry, and a recent edition of Gulliver’s Travels.
“Have you come to critique my reading taste, my lady?” Griffin poured himself a brandy.
“You know I have not.” She turned and looked at him. “I’ve begun the Thucydides, though I’m afraid I’m very slow. My Greek is rusty.”
“Do you like it?”
“Yes,” she said simply, because it was true. The work necessary to understand the Greek script made her feel all the more accomplished when she did finish a paragraph.
She waited for a reply from him.
But he shrugged and tossed back the brandy. “Why have you come?”
“To warn you about my brother.” She removed a stack of books from one end of a settee and sat since he made no move to offer. “He knows that you’re distilling gin in St. Giles.”
He stared at her. “That’s it?”
She frowned, her irritation increasing. Didn’t he care about his own safety?
“Isn’t that enough? You must give up your still at once, before Maximus sends soldiers to arrest you.”
He studied the amber liquid in his glass. “No.”
She felt wild frustration rising within her breast. Maximus may have given his word that he wouldn’t act against Griffin, but as long as Griffin had his still, he was in danger. “Whyever not? You’re more than a man who is good at making money, Griffin. So much more. You’re caring and funny and noble. Can’t you see that—”
He looked up at her, and she caught her breath, cutting off her words. His green eyes shone as if with tears.
“What is it?” she whispered.
“Nick is dead,” he said. “Nick Barnes. He started the still with me. You may not remember him—he was with me when you saw the still. The big man with the scarred face.”
“I remember.” She remembered that they had seemed to be friends despite the difference in their station. She looked at him. “What happened?”
“Nick went out this morning to get jellied eels.” Griffin made an odd face, half grimace, half smile. “He loved jellied eels. The Vicar’s men shot him and I found him….”
His voice trailed away as he shook his head.
She rose and crossed to him, unable to stay so far away when he was in pain. “I’m sorry.” She took his face between her palms. “I’m so sorry.”
“I can’t leave it now,” he rasped, his pale green eyes intense. “Don’t you see? They murdered Nick. I can’t let them get away with it.”
She bit her lip. “But your life is in danger.”
“And what is it to you?”
Her mouth dropped open. “What?”
He let his glass fall to the carpet, where it rolled under the settee. His hands grasped her shoulders. “What do you care if my life is endangered? Am I a friend you share a bed with? A brother-in-law you’ll invite to your wedding? What, Hero? What am I to you?”
She stared at him, trying to find the words. She cared for him, that much was true, but beyond that she couldn’t tell him. She hadn’t the words to describe her feelings.
She simply didn’t know.
He seemed to understand her dilemma. Frustration warred with despair in his eyes.
“Damn you,” he hissed, and kissed her.
HER LIPS WERE soft and yielding, but that didn’t assuage Griffin’s anger. He wanted to imprint himself upon her. To make her acknowledge that he was more than simply a friend or a potential brother-in-law. To ensure she never forgot him.
He wanted to engrave himself upon her very bones.
His grief and anger over Nick’s death seemed to twist and transform until all he felt was a raw ache for Hero. Right here. Right now.
He arched her over his arm, cruelly putting her off balance as he ravished her mouth. He could feel the clutch of her fingers in his back, but she wasn’t struggling. She made no effort to escape him or his savage plundering of her mouth.
That placated the beast within him a little. He pulled back and looked into her diamond eyes. They were dazed, blurred with sensuous need. He picked her up, ignoring her squeak, and bore her from the library like a rapacious Viking marauder.
Deedle had just entered the hallway. The valet’s mouth dropped open as his master passed.
Griffin shot him a glare, ensuring there would be no unasked-for comments. Then he was mounting the stairs with Hero in his arms.
She buried her face against his chest. “Oh, Lord! He saw us.”
“And he won’t say a damned thing if he wants to keep his position,” Griffin growled.
He strode down the upper corridor and carried her into his bedroom, kicking the door closed behind him. He flung her down on the bed and immediately began prowling up her supine form.
She looked at him with sleepily erotic eyes and whispered, “But he’ll know what we’re doing in here.”
“Good.” He straddled her, caging her with his body. “Were it up to me, all of London would know what we do here.”
Her eyes widened at his words and he expected protestations. Instead she reached up and ran her palms over his head.
“Griffin,” she said, low and a little sadly. “Oh, Griffin.”
The sadness made his chest hurt, but he wouldn’t have been deterred even if she had argued. Not now. Not this time. A great urgency was building inside of him, a need to complete this with her before it was too late. He tore at the laces to her bodice like a ravening beast.
She didn’t try to stop him but simply lay beneath him and smoothed her hands over his short hair as if to soothe him. He got her bodice open and threw it aside, impatient. Her stays seemed to resist him willfully. He who had never had trouble removing the clothing of any woman.
“Let me,” she murmured, and gently set aside his shaking hands.
She unlaced her stays, and he filled his hands with her warm flesh. He made himself calm, touching her as delicately as he was able to in this state.
“All of it,” he ordered. “Take off all of it.”
She raised her eyebrows but complied, slowly working herself out of the miles of expensive fabric while he went quietly insane. When at last she’d kicked off her shoes and reached for her ribbon garters, he reared up.
“Leave them.”
He examined her, like a connoisseur with a particularly fine piece of artwork. Her body was slight, her breasts high and delicate, her hips slim, and her moonlight skin seemed to glow in his dim bedroom. The tuft of hair at the apex of her thighs was a gleaming red beacon.
His cock was hard and throbbing, but it wasn’t lust he felt looking at her, naked and vulnerable beneath him. It was a strange kind of possessiveness, a need to keep her close, to defend and honor her. She could be hurt in so many ways, this proud woman, and the thought of each was like the cut of a knife, so that in the end his very soul seemed to be awash in blood.
Couldn’t she see his blood? Couldn’t she keep him from hurt in return?
He looked at her, wanting, hating, needing. She had a trio of faint freckles on her left shoulder, and he bent to lick them.
Her hands clutched at his head. “Griffin.”
“Hero,” he murmured mockingly. He bit gently at the juncture of her shoulder and her neck. “Do you like that?”
“I… yes,” she whispered, and he was filled suddenly with a kind of melancholy yearning.
“What else do you like?” he asked.
“I want to touch you.”
He drew back and looked at her. She lay quietly, watching him with those serious diamond eyes. He was used to being the one who led the seduction. He did things to his lovers; they rarely reciprocated. Possibly it was a need to be in control or simply the dominant male animal asserting itself. In any case, he was unused to handing over the reins of lovemaking.
“Please,” she said.
Reluctantly he moved aside, ready to catch her should she jump up and try to escape. But she rose and knelt beside him, looking at him curiously. He still wore his breeches and shirt.
She touched his throat with a single finger, trailing it down to where his shirt parted on his chest. “Take this off, please.”
He shifted enough to tear the shirt off over his head.
“Now your breeches.”
He kicked them and his smallclothes off and lay back down, naked.
She sat on her knees for a moment, her head tilted curiously as she simply looked at his body. He itched to move. To grab her and roll her under him. But he took a breath and let her have her moment of silent examination.
Then she placed both hands on his chest, her fingers tightening a little, kneading the muscle above his nipples. Her eyes half closed.
“I didn’t know men had such hair upon their bodies,” she said quietly. “It’s never there on statues—unless in neat small whorls over the groin. But you have more than that, don’t you?”
Her hands stroked up, his chest hair curling over her fingers before springing back. It tickled a little, pulled a bit more. He moved his legs restlessly. He’d never thought much about his own body, save as it could please either him or a lover.
“Does it disgust you?” he asked.
“No,” she said consideringly. “It’s just so very… foreign.”
Her fingers were tracing over his belly now, circling his navel. She glanced at him. “Does it itch?”
His eyebrows rose in sudden humor. “No. Sometimes it catches in my clothing, which is quite painful, but that doesn’t often happen.”
She nodded, seemingly content with that answer. Her fingers were stroking through his pubic hair now, close to but not quite touching his cock.
“You have it, too,” he whispered. He lifted a hand to thread his fingers through her pretty red curls. Her legs were closed tightly, so he could do no more than pet.