Ethan slipped behind Alice in the library and wrapped his arms around her waist, feeling her curl back against him on a sigh. “Can I ask you something?”
Lemon verbena had become his favorite scent. It brought to mind not just Alice, but the sheets on her bed, where Ethan had spent many pleasant hours.
“You’ve asked me a great deal lately, Ethan Grey: my favorite flower, my favorite author, my political opinions, my name day, and my birthday.”
He hadn’t asked her to make love with him, and they both knew it. She wrapped her hands over his at her midriff. “Ask me, Ethan.”
“We have on occasion mentioned the scandal in your past,” Ethan said. “If there were scandal in my past, personal in nature, would you want to know?” The answer to this question mattered, and had something to do with Ethan’s reluctance to consummate their dealings, much as he wished that were not so.
Also with his inability to go for long without touching her.
“I know about your wife.” Alice slipped from his hold and turned to face him, defeating his hug-her-from- behind-so-she-won’t-see-your-face strategy. “And you’ve told me Joshua may not be your son. What could be more personal than that?”
“Joshua is every bit my son. But about the scandal, you’d want to know?”
“If you wanted to tell me, I’d be happy to listen, but what befell you in the past matters a great deal less than who you are now, at least to me.”
“I could never be ashamed of you, and as to that, we don’t quite consort, Ethan. This is beginning to puzzle me, because I am willing, and you seem interested, and yet we don’t… Have you lost interest?”
She sounded bewildered and a trifle hurt. He could not abide either.
“No, never.” Ethan jammed his hands into his pockets to keep from reaching for her. “But conception is an issue, and the timing hasn’t been right.” That was true, as far as it went.
“I don’t understand.”
“Your courses came just after…” Ethan paused, searching for delicacy. “After the picnic at Heathgate’s.”
“And?”
“And I would not importune you at such a time.” Ethan felt color rising across his cheeks. He took her by the wrist and pulled her to a printed calendar hanging behind his desk. There were marks on it in pencil—ships arriving, contracts due, payments to be made—but he tapped his finger on the date of the picnic.
“I think you started your courses here.” He shifted his finger two days. “Am I right?”
“You are.” And it was Alice’s turn to blush. “How did you know?”
“Your breasts were more sensitive then.” Ethan kept his gaze on the calendar. “And you were… affectionate and quiet, but would not encourage certain types of advances, and then you asked me to let you catch up on your sleep for a few nights.”
“And you took that to mean I was indisposed?”
“I hoped it meant that.” Ethan glanced at her fleetingly, not sure whose modesty he was sparing. “Not that you were having second thoughts.”
“Why would you think that?”
Ethan’s gaze went back to the calendar. “Perhaps we might finish with our earlier topic?” He was dodging. He knew it, and she knew it, but they tacitly agreed not to confront the knowledge—yet.
“Please. I can’t help but feel embarrassed you should know of these things and I would not.”
“I kept a mistress,” Ethan reminded her, “a woman with whom procreation was my last intention. The knowledge became relevant too late to do me any good.”
“This is very… intimate.”
There, on that date a few days after the picnic, Ethan had made one small mark—a little cross, and the significance of it was known only to him and her. He liked that; she was probably mortified by it.
“Personal, and having a child with someone more personal yet, whether the act is intended or not.”
A look passed across Alice’s face, one of stark, undisguised longing. Ethan dared not comment on it, for having a child with Alice—many children with Alice—would be a gift of miraculous proportions. She might be dallying with him out of curiosity and loneliness, but she would love her children.
He could trap her with that love, just as Barbara had trapped him with duty.
Ethan wrenched his thoughts back from that moral precipice and completed his explanation of contraceptive timing.
“And you think Barbara lied to you regarding her cycle?” Alice worried her lower lip, her expression disgruntled.
“I know she did. I interviewed her lady’s maid when Barbara announced her pregnancy. I wasn’t visiting her very often at that point and had bought her a parting gift, so I wasn’t as attentive to her calendar as I might have been. After we married, Barbara boasted of her scheme to me.”
Alice’s eyes filled with ire. “She tricked you. Is Jeremiah even yours?”
“Painful question.” Though Alice’s mind, confident with facts and knowledge, would have leapt to it. “The same lady’s maid kept careful track of her mistress and went everywhere with her. She assured me my wife was too set on having my wealth to give me any cause to repudiate her before the license was procured.”
“Some comfort there, I suppose.”
“Some little comfort. Once we were wed, the magnitude of our unsuitability only grew.”
“She was not remorseful.”
That succinct observation gave Ethan a pang, for it pointed to a larger reality: Barbara
“Her brazen infidelity was the excuse I needed to stop trying, to stop deceiving myself.” To give up hope. “We struck terms, with me agreeing to support her in the style she preferred, and Barbara agreeing to do nothing to harm our child, and at least exercise some discretion. When I was certain I’d found reliable staff for the nursery, I kissed my son good-bye and went traveling as often as I could.”
“I am so sorry.” Alice wrapped her arms around his waist and hung on. Ethan said nothing, but held her to him in the quiet of the library, wondering why’d he’d burdened her with his unhappy history.
And yet these disclosures, while by no means the worst of his past, did not bring the awkwardness they might have with another.
These confidences.
“It’s in the past,” he said softly. “I have two wonderful sons, I tell myself Barbara is at peace, and I have much to be grateful for.”
“You do. We both do.” She looked right at him when she said it. “I want you to come to me tonight. I’m not going to change my mind, Ethan, and if you are, you’d best tell me now.”
“Tomorrow night,” Ethan said, thinking of that small mark on the calendar. “It will be safer. And I won’t change my mind, either, Alice. If we’re to develop a conscience at this stage, it will be your doing.”
She slipped from his embrace and went to stand at the French doors, looking out over the gardens that were in the riotous, slightly untidy glory of late summer. “I would feel a greater burden on my conscience if I did not consummate our dealings, Ethan Grey, than I would if we suddenly succumbed to a false piety now.”
He said nothing, realizing he shared her sentiment. Again, he slipped his arms around her from behind and pulled her back against his body. He wanted to give her words, to tell her he cared for her, but it wouldn’t be a gift to speak of his feelings.
Alice had offered him a sort of friendship, an intimate friendship that would include pleasure and companionship for a time. If he cared for her—hell and the devil, if he
“You are very dear, Ethan Grey. Promise you’ll come to me.”
“I promise.” Ethan kissed her cheek and gathered her more closely. He’d never stood quietly with Barbara like
