The Virtuoso

“I shouldn’t have kissed you,” Ellen said, her head coming to rest on Val’s shoulder as if the weight of truth were a wearying thing. “But I’m lonely and sometimes a little desperate, and it seemed safe, to steal a kiss from a handsome stranger.”

“It was safe,” Val assured her, seeing the matter from her perspective. In the year since he’d seen Ellen FitzEngle, he’d hardly been celibate. He wasn’t a profligate Philistine, but neither was he a monk. There had been an older maid in Nick’s household, some professional ladies up in York, the rare trip upstairs at David’s brothel, and the frequent occasion of self-gratification.

But he surmised Ellen, despite the privileges of widowhood, had not been kissed or cuddled or swived or flirted with in all those days and weeks and months.

“And now?” Ellen pressed. “You show up on my porch after dark and think perhaps it’s still safe, and here I am, doing not one thing to dissuade you.”

“You are safe with me, Ellen.” He punctuated the sentiment with a kiss to her temple then rested his cheek where his lips had been. “I am a gentleman, if nothing else. I might try to steal a kiss, but you can stop me with a word from even that at any time. The question is, how safe do you want to be?”

“Shame on you,” Ellen whispered, turning her face to his shoulder.

“Shame on me is right, for I do not offer you anything, you see, but kisses and illicit pleasures. Those I can give you in abundance, if you want them.”

She pulled away, peering at him in the moonlight. “Are you insulting me?”

“I am not. I am commenting on my own unworthiness as a mate to a decent woman. I can bring you pleasure and take some for myself, if you offer it, but that is the extent of my utility.”

“You do not intend to stay here,” Ellen concluded, pulling her wrapper a little more snugly around her.

“I rarely stay in one place for long.” His home had been wherever there was a piano. He had no idea how to define home now. “I am not looking to marry, Ellen. I hazard you are not either, else you would have ended your widowhood some time in these past five years.”

Sitting beside her, Val felt a creeping fatalism seeping through him. This reckoning between them had sneaked up on him, but now that he was sitting in the dark, making indecent offers to a decent woman, he realized they needed to have this conversation and be done with it.

He could get her rejection of him behind them, and they could set about being cordial neighbors through their shared wood, just as if they’d never kissed. Were his hand not crippled—he hadn’t wanted to admit to that word previously—he might at some point be offering for her instead. She was gently bred, a lady to the bone, and sexually attractive to him on a level beyond the superficial easing of lust.

But he was a cripple, and the longer he went without playing the piano, the more he experienced his disability as emotional as well as physical. He’d been right to tell Darius the piano was how he’d had a soul. How he’d known himself to possess a soul.

“You are looking to dally,” Ellen said softly, bringing Val’s thoughts back to the present.

“I am looking to share pleasure,” Val replied, hoping it was true. God above, what if he couldn’t even please a woman anymore? With his arm around her and her fragrance wafting to his nose among the myriad floral scents, his strongest urge was not to lay her down and bury himself inside her.

It was to hold her close and learn the feel of her under his hands, to offer himself to her for her own stroking and petting and caressing. To take his time and learn how to pay attention to her as carefully as he’d attend a fascinating piece of new music.

“I have not your sophistication,” Ellen said, her head back on his shoulder. “Physically, I was married. I comprehend for men certain acts are more profoundly pleasurable than they are for women. Emotionally…”

“Ah.” Val’s hand stroked over her spine and rested on her shoulder so his thumb could caress her nape. “I will protect your privacy, Ellen, and your good name.” And he would show her when it came to certain acts, women could experience more pleasure than any man could endure.

“And if I conceive?”

“I will provide for you and the child.” It was the answer required of a gentleman to a lady without a reputation to protect, and it sat ill with him. “If you demanded it, I would marry you.”

“I would not demand marriage,” Ellen said on a sigh. “I was married for five years and could not give my husband a child.” There was such sadness in her voice, such surrender in the way she rested against him, Val knew in her single, quiet sentence she was hiding a story with an unhappy ending.

“You wanted children.”

“Desperately. Francis needed an heir, and I was his choice as wife. I could not produce even one son for him.”

“Francis was your husband, and you loved him.”

“I did.” Ellen seemed to grow smaller as she leaned against him. “Not well enough, not soon enough, but I did. I would have done anything to provide him the children it was my duty to give him.”

Val stroked her back, feeling his heart constrict painfully—for her. “Sometimes we are denied our fondest wish.”

“He was a good man.”

“Tell me about him,” Val urged, his hand returning to her neck. If there was etiquette involved with a prospective lover asking about a late spouse, he neither knew nor cared about it. Apparently, neither did she.

“As Baron Roxbury, Francis held one of the oldest titles short of the monarchy,” Ellen began, “but he wasn’t pompous or pretentious. I didn’t know him well when we married, but I thought him such a prig at first. He was merely shy and uncertain how to deal with a wife nearly half his age.”

Baron Roxbury? Val held still, kept up his easy caresses on Ellen’s back, and absorbed the fact that he had propositioned the Baroness Roxbury on her own back steps. What was she doing rusticating like a tenant farmer’s widow when she held such a title?

“You must have been very young,” Val managed.

“Seventeen. I was presented after my marriage, of course, but never had to compete with the other girls for a husband. Francis spared me that, and I went from being my parents’ treasured miracle to his treasured wife. I didn’t know how lucky I was.”

“We often don’t.” Val forced himself to keep listening, to keep his questions behind his teeth, as he sensed Ellen did not discuss her past often. It wasn’t just that she had secrets, it was that she grieved privately. “You miss your Francis.”

“I miss…” Ellen’s voice dipped. “I miss him bodily, of course. As we became friends, we also became affectionate, and that was a comfort when the children did not arrive. I miss him in other ways, too, though, as my spouse, the person through whom I was afforded social standing and a place in society. That’s a trite phrase until you don’t have that place anymore.”

Val said nothing but turned slightly and looped his other arm around her so she was resting not merely against him but in his embrace. He willed her to cry, but she only laid her forehead to his collarbone and sighed against his neck.

He rested his chin on her crown and gazed out across the moon shadows in her yard. There was peace to be found in holding Ellen FitzEngle like this. Not the kind of peace he’d anticipated, and maybe not a peace he deserved, but he’d take it as long as she allowed it.

“It isn’t well done of me,” Ellen murmured, trying to draw back, “pining for my husband in your arms.”

“Hush. Whose arms have been available to you, hmm? Marmalade’s, perhaps?”

“You are a generous man and far too trusting.”

From her words, Val knew she wasn’t being entirely honest, but he also knew she’d had little comfort for her grief and woes, and trust in such matters was a delicate thing. When he shifted a few minutes later and lifted her against his chest, she did not protest but looped her arms around his neck, and that was a kind of trust too. He carried her to her porch swing and sat at one end so her back was supported by the pillows banking the arm of the swing. He set the swing in motion and gathered her close until she drifted away into sleep.

Val stayed on that swing long after the woman in his arms had fallen asleep, knowing he was stealing a pleasure from her he should not. He’d never been in her cottage, though, and was reluctant to invade her privacy.

Or so he told himself.

In truth, the warm, trusting weight of Ellen FitzEngle in his arms anchored him on a night when he’d been at