Her fan was in tatters beneath her fingers and her heart felt two sizes too big for her chest. Her throat was tight and dry. Her drawers were indecently wet.
She had to know. It was like a sudden addiction. “Who was that?” she cried.
“My half brother.” Prudence’s voice shook with…anger? Fear? An emotion Grace could not quite define.
“You have a half brother?”
“He’s a bastard,” Prudence continued, her voice contemptuous, using a word she should not. “My father’s by-blow. His first-born child, in fact, and my father is stupidly fond of him.”
Grace shook at the revulsion on her friend’s face. She was a bastard. Would Prudence feel the same way about her if she knew the truth?
Suddenly Grace felt as though she stood on a tightrope, balancing over a pit of wolves. No, this was the ton. Not wolves—mocking jackals with slavering jaws.
“He should be hung,” Prudence spat. “He’s a highwayman. Can you believe he is so bold as to come to this house? He’s probably robbed half the people here! And he was a pirate. Why the British Navy did not kill him, I cannot imagine. He’s a murderer, a scoundrel, and…” Prudence took a shaky breath.
Grace moved forward, startled by tears in her friend’s eyes.
“And our father loves him best!” Prudence cried and stamped her foot.
Grace hugged her friend. “Of course not!”
Prudence pulled out of the hug, shaking. “He does. His mother was a love affair, ours a duty marriage. Of course, he loves dashing Devlin Sharpe. But I hate him.”
“Why? Because of what he is?” Grace could hardly believe she wanted to press this. Why should she want to hear about the horrors of being recognized as a bastard?
“He murdered the man I loved. If I wouldn’t hang for it, I’d grab one of my father’s pistols right now and shoot him where he stands.”
Grace blinked. “How could he murder a man and escape punishment?”
Prudence balled her hands into fists, and Grace heard her fan snap. “I cannot tell you what happened. Not even you, my dear friend.”
She reached out and stroked Prudence’s arm as her friend turned red-rimmed eyes to her and asked, “Do I look awful? I have to dance with Lord Wynsome next.”
“You look fine.” But a chill washed over Grace as she watched Prudence stroll away. Prudence’s movements were controlled, precise, and lovely, belying her emotional outburst. If her illegitimate half brother had murdered the man she loved, how could he have dared walk into the house?
And even after hearing what a beast he was, she still ached between her legs. She was still flushed and anxious with desire.
She was supposed to meet Lord Wesley at midnight…After feeling all that mad, delirious passion and hunger and need.
She couldn’t bear to stand in this crowded, overheated ballroom one moment longer. She needed to escape.
“You weren’t planning to meet me after all, were you?”
Grace jerked away from the study windows and slowly turned around.
Lord Wesley stood in the doorway, the door closed behind him. There had been a key in the lock before and now it was gone.
His cravat was undone, the snowy-white cloth trailing over his black tailcoat.
He’d guessed the truth. She had not planned to meet him. She knew she couldn’t—for two reasons. Both that mad moment of lust for a stranger and the fact that she could not have intimate relations with any man until she wore his ring. So, she had slipped into the study and poured herself some brandy to take away the frustration of knowing she couldn’t meet him. But she tried to tease, “It is only the hour of eleven. You cannot possibly know that.”
“I can guess, Grace.” His lordship prowled toward her, his hip brushing a gilt table and setting the crystal glasses tinkling upon it. She saw from his unsteady gait that he’d been drinking. But then, so had she.
“I know you are afraid,” he said. “I know what you want.” He brushed back the now unruly locks of his white-blond hair.
“You do?” Brandy was hot in her blood. She leaned back against the arm of the settee. “I don’t even know what I want.”
“Yes, you do. But you deny it.”
“I liked you much better when you were direct. What do I deny, my lord?”
His dark eyes—a stunning blend of violet and blue—held hers. He was breathtakingly beautiful. Much more so than that coarse and bold highwayman who was his half brother. “You deny that you want passion. Heat. Fire. You want lusty, sweaty, passionate sexual pleasure. You want to strip away the gowns, the corsets, and the bloody propriety. You want to fuck, sweetheart. And you want to fuck me.”
She was shocked into breathlessness. The most confident, audacious grin turned up the edges of Lord Wesley’s sensual mouth.
“You are drunk.” She set down the glass, her heart like a live bird trapped in her chest. He was right. Of course. His very words had set her on fire. “And your sister warned me—”
“That I’ve bedded a lot of women. So have most of the other men here who act like eunuchs around you. The men who try to treat you like you are sweet and untouchable. Can you imagine a life wedded to one of them?”
“No.” It was simply the truth.
“You don’t want marriage, Grace. You want sex. You have to take marriage to get it.”
She laughed at that, thrown off balance by the entire conversation. Had she already waded in too deep? She could hardly swoon or race from the room now. She had shown him the woman she really was. But she liked speaking this way. Bluntly. Truthfully. It was exhilarating. “And you don’t,” she challenged. “What would ever tempt you to embark on marriage, my lord?”
“Love. Obsession.”
“The desire to possess something precious?”
“Perhaps that.”
“I saw a man tonight. Pru—Lady Prudence told me that he is your half brother. That he murdered—”
“Shh.” He pressed his fingers to her lips. “That is something that I intend to make right. I intend to spill his blood.”
Lord Wesley left her side and he raced over to the desk. She stood, stunned, watching as he wrenched open a drawer. He lifted out a brass box that gleamed in the firelight, laid it on the blotter, and opened it. When he lifted his hands, he held a six-inch dagger poised between the tips of both his index fingers, one pressed to the end of the handle, one pressed to the point of the blade.
Watching her all the while, he dropped the knife to the desk. It landed on its side with a thud. He stripped off his coat and threw it to the nearest chair—a leather club chair. His cravat and waistcoat followed.
There was only his shirt now. Fine linen between her gaze and his skin. “One day I will exact retribution from my damned half brother. But only if you tell me something that I need to hear.”
She stared in confusion as Lord Wesley let his cravat slide off, as he undid the ties of his shirt. As he strode to her he grabbed the knife and he yanked the sides of his shirt apart. He pressed the tip of the blade to his chest, just beneath the plane of his pectorals, on the flesh that covered his heart.
Her heart was in her throat. “What…what are you doing?”
“Marry me, Grace. Be my bride. Fuck me tonight and marry me afterward. I cannot wait another moment to have you.”
“Or you will stab yourself to the heart?” She was eighteen. She was not a