She could not have borne for him to be disappointed in her, could not have borne to see the warmth and approval in his gaze shift to speculation and disdain.
To whom had she surrendered her virtue?
Upon how many had she bestowed her favors?
Was she diseased from all that excess?
Had she borne a child, perhaps, as a consequence of her folly?
But no, Deene had not disappointed her, had not let her down by asking too much or giving too little.
All those promises Canby had made—glorious pleasure, nothing like it, you’ll want it again and again, you’ll want me again and again—what lies they’d been.
While Deene had asked nothing and given her true pleasure.
What a goddamned perishing shame they were destined never to share more.
Eve was marshaling her courage to draw back and remove herself from Deene’s lap when his hand tightened on the back of her head, and a shocked, very familiar voice sounded from the doorway.
“Good gracious God in heaven.”
And then Jenny’s voice, urgent, low, and miserable. “Mama, come away. Come away now, please. We must close the door.”
Six
Eve tried to scramble away from the man holding her so gently on the couch, but his embrace became inescapable.
“They’ve gone, love. Stay a moment more. There’s nothing to be gained by haste at this point, and we need to sort this out before we face your family.”
Love? Now he called her love?
“Let me go. I can’t breathe…” She tried to wrestle free, but he had his hand on the back of her head, his arm around her back.
Out in the hallway, the front door didn’t close; it banged shut with the impact of a rifle shot ricocheting through the house… and through the rest of Eve’s blighted, miserable life.
“Mama slammed that door, Lucas Denning. Her Grace, the Duchess of Moreland, slammed a door, because of me, because of my stupid, selfish, useless, greedy, stupid, asinine…”
There were not words to describe the depth of the betrayal she’d just handed her family. She collapsed against Deene’s chest, misery a dry, scraping ache in her throat.
“Eve, many couples anticipate their vows, even a few couples closely associated with the Duchess of Moreland.”
The reason in his voice had her hands balling to fists.
“I will not marry you.” She could not, not him of all men. That signal fact gave her scattering wits a rallying point.
Deene did not argue. When an argument was imperative, he did not argue. His hand stroked slowly over her hair, and as the fighting instinct coursing through Eve’s body struggled to stand against a swamping despair, some part of Eve’s brain made a curious observation:
Deene was breathing in a slow, unhurried rhythm, and as a function of the intimacy of their posture, Eve was breathing in counterpoint to him. The same easy, almost restful tempo, but her exhale matched his inhale.
“We cannot marry, Deene. I won’t have it. A white marriage was as far as I was willing to go, and then only to the right sort of man, a man who would never seek to… impose conjugal duties on me.”
His arms fell away, when Eve would very much have liked them to stay around her. Better he not see her face, better she not have to see his lovely blue eyes going chill and distant.
“We need to set you to rights.”
His hands on her shirt were deft and impersonal, his fingers barely touching her skin. The detachment in his touch was probably meant to be a kindness, but it… hurt.
“Lucas, I cannot think.”
“We’ll think this through together. I can guarantee you not a soul will be coming through that door until we decide to pass through it ourselves.”
“I hate that you can be so calm.”
And—worst thought yet—she loved him for it too, just a little. He wasn’t stomping around the room, trying to subtly blame her, cursing his fate while figuring out how to duck away from it. He wasn’t thrusting her aside so he could put himself together while he left her floundering to right herself with clumsy fingers and a clumsier mind.
She loved him for his simple gestures of consideration, though one could love and hate simultaneously. When she’d been recovering from her accident, this truth had borne down upon her every time Jenny or Louisa offered to read her another hour’s worth of bucolic poetry.
“I feel just as if I were lying in that filthy sheep meadow, the scent of sheep dirt all about me, the cold in my bones, the…”
Eve snapped her jaw shut. What on earth was she babbling about?
Deene paused in his tucking and buttoning and put a warm hand on either side of her jaw. He kept his hands there until Eve managed to meet his gaze. “If you are in some stinking sheep meadow, I am there with you. Is there tea in this house?”
Tea. Oh, of course, tea. “Yes.”
And still he did not lift her from his lap. While she watched, he withdrew a handkerchief from a pocket and swabbed at his flat belly.
He had a moderate dusting of chest hair. That she would notice this made Eve doubt her sanity—Canby had had no chest hair—because her impulse was not to look away, it was to touch him. What would it feel like to run her fingertips over that chest hair? With self-discipline making far too late an appearance, she denied herself the appeasement of this one small curiosity.
When they were both more or less tidied up, Deene wrapped his hand around the back of Eve’s head and once more drew her face down to his shoulder.
“You shall not blame yourself for this, Eve Windham. You are a lady, innocent of any wrongdoing, and I have breached the bounds of gentlemanly behavior altogether.”
Not quite altogether, though the distinction would make no difference. “Lucas, you have no idea…”
He squeezed the back of her neck, gently, just as he had when Eve had been suffering a megrim weeks ago. “We’ll sort this out, Eve. You have nothing to make apology for, not to me, not to Their Graces, not to anybody.”
Papa’s heart would be broken. She closed her eyes at that realization. Her Grace would be disappointed; she’d get that tight “where did I go wrong?” look about her eyes and mouth, but Papa…
“Come along.” Deene patted her hip. “We’ll make some tea and get the color back in your cheeks. It won’t be so bad, Eve.”
He waited for her to extricate herself from his lap, and this took some doing because her hip was stiff—it hardly ever gave her trouble anymore, but of course it would today. When she was on her feet, Deene rose as well, tied her stock around her neck in a neat, graceful bow, saw to his cravat, and offered her his arm.
She took it, a reflex—one she resented even as they arrived to a spotless, empty kitchen.
“May I rummage for some food?” He asked her this as she tossed kindling on the coals in the hearth and took the kettle from the hob.
“There should be bread in the bread box.”
Maybe it was a propensity for self-preservation in the adult male, maybe it was the instincts of a former soldier, but as Eve assembled a tea tray, Deene’s foraging produced bread, butter, strawberry jam, and cheese. They domesticated in the kitchen in an oddly comfortable quiet, and by the time the tea was steeping in a plain white ceramic pot, Eve realized Deene had been giving her time to settle her nerves.
Or perhaps to settle his own—a cheering thought.
When she lowered herself to a bench at the worktable, Deene came down beside her, meaning she had to scoot a little.
“Don’t run off.” He poured her tea, buttered her a slice of bread, then spread a liberal portion of strawberry jam on it.