Hester wondered if Nathaniel could hear the wild leaping of her heart from the other side of the bedroom. To her it was unnaturally loud, cutting through the taut stillness and beating so hard she could feel it hammering right down to her toes. She was completely exposed, standing with nothing to shield her, but the conclusion she’d come to during the carriage ride from Farleigh drove her on—even if the thought of what she was about to do made her tremble from head to foot.
‘Hester? What...?’
Nathaniel rose from the bed, but checked as she held up a hand. He didn’t come any closer although his eye raked over her, its intensity making her shiver, and, screwing up all her courage, Hester asked the question she half dreaded him answering.
‘Was it really me you came back for tonight? You were telling the truth?’
Relief flooded her at his single nod—along with a nameless rush that stirred sparks in her belly. His expression was inscrutable and yet with that one dip of his head Nathaniel told her all she needed to know, the atmosphere suddenly airless as each watched the other’s every move.
‘Is that why you’re here? To ask me that?’
Nathaniel’s voice was steady, but a thrill ran through Hester at the strained undercurrent only one hoping for it would have heard. There was a definite note of careful restraint, and it lit a taper beneath the thin fabric of her gown, increasing the temperature that was already scalding.
She swallowed. The speech she’d rehearsed seemed so foolish now: as if she ever could have hoped to put something that defied description into words. Nathaniel’s revelation that evening and the repeating of it now pushed her closer to the edge until there was nothing to do but jump—out into a void where the only thing she could be sure of was the dizzying whirl of her own feelings...at last.
All the confusion and soul-searching and the denial of what she couldn’t fight had fallen away at his simple confession. Now she was just a woman standing before a man, hoping he had come to feel the same.
‘Hester?’ Nathaniel prompted her quietly, still sounding as if he were under tight control. ‘Is that the only reason you came to see me? It’s getting late and you must be tired. We can talk about it in the morning if you’d like.’
‘No,’ Hester managed to croak, hearing the parched anxiety in her voice but unable to stop it. ‘There’s something else. Something else that I...I want to...’
She couldn’t bring herself to finish. The sentence faded, tailing away into nothingness, and Nathaniel allowed it to die with a patience that belied the tension pulled painfully taut across the room.
‘Something else? Something else you want?’
Hester shook her head. She couldn’t make herself say it out loud: the desire for him that held her so unescapably in its grip, tightening each day until tonight her defences had finally snapped. The last time she’d been this nervous in a bedroom alone with her husband had been on their wedding night, so long ago she could barely remember what had transpired. She only knew how it had made her feel—alive in every sinew, burning with an inner fire she hadn’t understood.
Everything was different now, however. So much had changed since then that they might be two other people entirely—although Hester’s newfound mettle abandoned her as she tried to find the nerve to do as she’d planned. Rooted to the spot, she wavered, unable to go forward or back, hesitating on the threshold between her room and Nathaniel’s and cursing herself for the indecision she feared would make her look weak.
But then—terrifyingly, delightfully—Nathaniel acted first.
Slowly, as if to give her plenty of time to run, he came towards her, Hester having to raise her chin to look up into his face and what she saw there making her throat clench with strangling force. She didn’t move a muscle, standing perfectly still until Nathaniel’s hands reached for her and with one smooth movement lifted her from the ground.
Her legs came up immediately to encircle his waist, matching the swift twining of her arms around his neck. Supporting her with effortless strength, Nathaniel ducked his head to capture her mouth, a hand beneath each of her legs pinning Hester against him with nowhere to hide even if she’d wanted to.
It was as if her blood had turned to something hot and fierce, surging inside her and spurring her on. Clinging to Nathaniel, she wound her fingers through his hair, pressing his lips down harder onto hers and feeling every last nerve crackle at his low groan. Her nightgown was rucked up scandalously high but she couldn’t break away to arrange it in any semblance of modesty, a gasp escaping her as she felt Nathaniel skim the bared flesh of her thigh. His palm was scalding, blistering heat following its progress higher until his fingers slid beneath the hem of her nightgown to cup the generous curve they discovered. Hester’s breathing grew ragged, each snatched breath mirroring the sharpness of Nathaniel’s own.
He turned for the bed, stumbling blindly as Hester bit down on his lower lip. Still carrying her pressed tightly to the front of his body, he sank onto the mattress, Hester kneeling astride his lap but neither willing to break the blazing contact of their searching mouths.
Acting on the basest of instincts, Hester let her hands stray down to Nathaniel’s chest, only managing to surface when her fingers found the buttons on his untucked shirt. ‘Can I—?’
It was the same question he’d asked her that night in her bedroom, when their kiss hadn’t been the only thing on fire, and the answering glint in Nathaniel’s eye told her he recalled it too. The hungry gleam sent a shudder skittering the length of Hester’s spine, and her eyes fluttered closed again as Nathaniel leaned forward to nip the sensitive place beneath her jaw.
‘Yes. If you’ll allow me the same liberty.’
She nodded briefly, somewhere in the back of her mind admiring his restraint. Her own sense of propriety had fled, only animal impulse and long-denied desire surging to carry her along a path she’d never known existed as with trembling fingers she freed the first button. The next one followed, and then another, and another, until Nathaniel’s shirt hung free and she ran questing fingertips over the warm ridges of his muscled stomach, revelling in his harsh sigh.
A vague, indistinct memory of their very first time together flitted through her otherwise blank mind: as a lad of eighteen his physique had been nowhere near as impressive, and she couldn’t help but wonder anew exactly how the intervening years had brought about such a change.
But then Nathaniel’s hand moved to the ribbons at her neck, and nothing else seemed to matter but the heat of his palms moving downwards across her shoulders, slipping her nightgown away as they went, until it pooled, soft and white, around her waist. Hester saw Nathaniel’s jaw tighten, a tendon in his neck working furiously as his gaze swept across her with molten need, and she found the nerve to smile instead of cover herself as a prim voice somewhere deep in her subconscious insisted she do at once.
‘Are you well?’
‘I’m not sure...’
Nathaniel’s voice was like gravel, the dark want in it enough to make Hester’s skin blaze.
‘All of a sudden I’m finding it hard to breathe.’
‘Perhaps you’re too warm. Let me help you.’
Copying his movements, Hester traced the firm shape of Nathaniel’s shoulders, sliding her hands beneath his shirt to peel it away. Allowing herself a long look at his bare chest, she drank in the line of hair stretching down to his breeches, guiding her like an arrow to places unknown. Exactly what lay below that waistband she couldn’t remember, although with a hot flush of sudden shame she realised just how much she wanted to find out.
Her flicker of hesitation must have been obvious. At once Nathaniel slackened his hold on her hips and drew back, his eye still hazy, but clouded by concern that touched her heart.
‘Hester? Is something amiss?’
He searched her face so earnestly Hester had to fight the urge to take his in her hands and kiss him again.
‘Do you want to stop?’
‘No.’ She shook her head firmly, setting the unwanted sensation aside. ‘Not unless you do?’
A glance down at the front of Nathaniel’s breeches answered that question without a shadow of a doubt, and Hester’s smile returned as he took one fallen ringlet between two unsteady fingers.
‘Forgive me...’
He sounded hoarse, the ripple his voice sent through Hester’s stomach only growing as his hand strayed from her hair to the back of her neck, to gently stroke the nape.
‘I shouldn’t have rushed. For some things a man ought to take his time.’
Hester tried to reply but found she’d forgotten how. Nathaniel’s fingers, so warm and skilled, drifted from her nape to her collarbone and—with the briefest of searing glances to gauge her reaction—moved down, skimming over one soft peak and stealing every coherent thought Hester had ever had. Her eyes closed in an instinctive desire to feel every sensation to the fullest, and when she opened them again the helpless longing in Nathaniel’s face was more than she could bear.
She stood up. Her nightgown fell to her feet and she stepped out of it, hardly believing her own daring as she watched Nathaniel’s lips part on a hungry intake of breath. Hester stood before him, goosebumps rising on every inch of her skin that had nothing to do with the night air, and she felt herself almost come apart at the seams as he looked up, hers to do with as she wished. The very idea made her knees buckle—something Nathaniel must have seen as a slow smile unfurled itself across his face.
‘Or perhaps time is of the essence... What would you decide?’
In place of an answer Hester leaned down to press her lips to his. Immediately his hands were on her, drawing her closer, until with one deft move she found herself on the mattress, looking up at the canopy above. Turning her head, she saw Nathaniel by the bed, their positions suddenly reversed but the feeling of power still singing in Hester’s blood.
Watching him unfasten his breeches, her heart railed against her ribs as if trying to break free. His fingers shook with what she knew to be yearning, and her own hands were no steadier as his breeches finally slid to the ground, revealing the full glory of the man she had married with no idea of the journey their lives would take. Another fleeting fragment of their wedding night tried to emerge, but it flickered out again as Nathaniel came closer, kneeling beside her on the bed, and the sight of him was too mesmerising to allow any other thought.
He lay along her side, the vast expanse of him so hot to the touch that Hester wondered if he’d burned her and she reached out to pull him closer still, feeling the delicious friction of rough hair on soft skin as his weight came down on top of her. Bracing himself on his elbows, he took her lips once again, a growl issuing from his throat when she gently ran neat nails down the broad landscape of his back and then ventured further, the mystery of what his breeches had concealed a mystery no longer and enough to make her gasp.
‘Hester...’ With what seemed like great difficulty Nathaniel broke the kiss to stare down into her glazed eyes, his own eye growing darker as her fingers continued their exploration of his unmapped skin. ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’
She looked back, breath coming hard and fast and finding it difficult to think. Nathaniel’s face, so close to hers and handsome enough to make her sigh, obliterated all reason, feelings seeming so much more important than thoughts—until she forced her brain to work.
‘Are you sure you want to do this?’
Even almost at the moment of no return, Nathaniel had stopped to ask the one question he must be praying she’d answer with yes, and Hester marvelled yet again at how much he had changed. The passionate man who now waited for her reply was worlds away from the cold stranger she’d married, and he had proved tonight that he was capable of putting her first—even before the business she’d feared would always be his only concern. He might not love her, exactly, but it was enough to build on until—who knew?—they might even find something close. He had given her hope where once there had been none at all, and Hester felt the last of her doubts fall away as she stretched up to reclaim Nathaniel’s mouth.
‘I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.’
Faint birdsong roused Nathaniel from a deep and dreamless sleep. It was hard to tell exactly what time it was but his best guess would be near dawn, the room still dark but those first few tentative chirps signalling the start of a new day. Slowly emerging from unconsciousness his mind felt sluggish—until with a jolt he sat up sharply.
The other side of the bed was empty, the rumpled sheets still warm, and a horrible sinking feeling gripped him at once.
Where’s Hester?
Throwing off the coverlet, he was about to stand when a voice came from the other side of the room.
‘Are you going somewhere?’
Peering through the gloom, Nathaniel made out a shape crouched beside the cold hearth, and felt his sudden tension bleeding away at once.
‘To look for you. I thought you’d run away from me.’
He caught what might have been the shake of a blonde head. ‘I woke to see the fire had gone out. I wanted to see if I could light it again, as you did for me, but I’m not sure how to begin.’
Nathaniel leaned back against the pillows, feeling a welcome surge of relief. She hadn’t fled from him, then, in a fit of regret for their night together—the thought of which made a particularly interested part of his anatomy sit up and take notice. Hester’s nightgown still lay in a pale puddle beside the bed, and the question of what she was wearing as she knelt by the fire made his pulse tick faster.
A further look proved disappointing, however. By the pallid gleam it seemed she had wrapped herself in one of the sheets from his makeshift bed on the floor, and with more than a flicker of regret Nathaniel likewise folded one around his waist as he got up and went towards her.
‘Can I help?’
‘Unless you want us to freeze to death before breakfast, please do.’
She didn’t sound the least bit hesitant or reserved; something to be grateful for, he thought as he felt along the dark mantel for his tinderbox, all too aware of the barely dressed form of his wife mere inches away. It would seem there was little danger of her lamenting what had happened in the early hours and Nathaniel blessed her for it. The single most wonderful experience of his life had been bearing down upon Hester and hearing her sigh of delight, and if she had felt ashamed afterwards it would have broken his heart.
He crouched beside her, still hardly able to see, but sure she was watching. Her quiet breathing was close to his ear and his skin prickled at the sensation, stirring the hairs at the nape of his neck and making his hand shake slightly as he struck the flint and sent a spark dancing out into the gloom. It settled among the heap of kindling Hester had so helpfully arranged and began to smoulder, the flames growing stronger as he blew onto the burgeoning fire.
In the soft light he could at last see Hester’s face, and for a second he feared his chest might burst at the smile he found there.
‘Good morning.’
‘Good morning to you, too.’
Her colour deepened a little, but still there was nothing more than the natural, sweet shyness anyone might show under the circumstances.
‘Did you sleep well?’
‘Yes, thank you. When I eventually got round to it.’
Hester’s lips twitched—but then her gaze shifted to fix on something Nathaniel realised far too late he hadn’t meant her to see.
‘Your patch... It must have come off while you slept.’
Instinctively he reached up, his chest tightening when his fingers met ruined flesh instead of leather. Pressing his hand over the vivid scar, he turned away, determined to spare Hester the sight of something he didn’t relish himself.
‘Damn it. I never meant for you to see me like this.’
He tried to get up from his crouch beside the hearth, but warm fingers on his arm made him stop.
‘Don’t,’ Hester said quietly, her voice firm but soft. ‘Let me look at you.’
Still kneeling on the ground, wrapped in the white sheet with her dark golden hair spilling over her shoulders, she looked like a Greek goddess, so powerful in her beauty that Nathaniel had no choice but to obey.
Reluctantly he sat down again, although he didn’t move his hand. ‘You don’t need to see this. It’ll give you nightmares.’
She shrugged, the pale moon of her face glowing in the firelight. ‘As I told you before, I have a strong stomach.’
Hester moved a little closer and Nathaniel readied himself, although his heart still leapt as she took his hand and lowered it to her own lap. He forced himself to meet her eyes as in silence she studied his missing one, feeling himself tense as he waited for the verdict.
‘I suppose I disgust you now.’
He tried to speak lightly, but failed. How could she not be repulsed by the mess left behind by the foreman’s whip? Nobody could see that and remain unmoved—and Hester, although extraordinary in many ways, was human like any other.
But she was also surprising.
‘You suppose wrong.’
Taking his face in her hands, she drew his head down until Nathaniel could have counted each sweeping lash, and gently—so gently it felt more like a summer breeze than a kiss—she touched her lips to the red welt where his eye should have been.
‘I’m glad you finally shared that with me. I’d very much like it if there were no secrets between us now.’
Caught between warring emotions, Nathaniel said nothing—although that didn’t stop his mind from whirling. The feel of Hester’s velvet lips on his marked face, their perfection a jarring contrast to his flaws, made his innards burn with the desire to catch her up and kiss her back. But something else—a creeping shadow of uncertainty and guilt—cautioned him to think twice.
There was still one secret left, and he had no wish to share it with the woman who had stolen his heart.
Returning Hester’s gaze, he admired its clarity, intelligence and honesty combined beneath a blue more lovely than any other. To tell her the truth of how he had lost his eye would reveal how far from grace he’d fallen, and how would Hester ever be able to look at him the same way once she knew how low he’d crawled?
‘Of course.’ He managed a pale imitation of a normal reply, although at the questioning tilt of Hester’s head he could have sworn she knew more than he cared to imagine. ‘I would like that too.’
His hand still lay in her lap, and Nathaniel took a sharp breath as she traced each finger, skimming over the missing index as though she’d done it all her life.
‘With that said, are you ever going to tell me what happened while you were away?’
The unease in his stomach circled faster. ‘I thought you were determined not to ask?’
‘That was when I thought... Well, it doesn’t matter what I thought then. I’m asking now—is there anything else I ought to know?’
Her fingertips crossed his palm—something that might have tickled if Nathaniel hadn’t been so distracted by the twist of his insides. Two rival voices murmured in his ear, each tempting him to follow, but damning him whichever way he chose.
If I tell Hester how I really spent the last five years, won’t she see me differently?
The idea of putting his nightmare into words, describing how as a slave he had been treated little better than an animal, made Nathaniel recoil. Once he had kept the truth from Hester out of mere pride, but now everything was different. Her good opinion mattered more than ever, and seeing pity in her face—or worse—would be more than he could stand. She was a strong woman who deserved a strong man, and surely learning that he had been kept as a beast of burden would tarnish him for ever in her mind.
Then again...
If I lie, I’ll be no better than the selfish boy I was before. Putting my thoughts and feelings above Hester’s and keeping her in the dark.
He swallowed hard, feeling as if his throat was filled with broken glass. Neither option was one he wanted, and yet they were the only ones he had. Backed into a corner, he had to choose: turn away from all the progress he’d made, both as a husband and as a man, or risk Hester thinking as badly of him for his humiliating servitude as he did of himself.
He would have to find the lesser of two evils, but nothing could be more difficult—especially now they were closer than ever to forming a connection he’d never dreamed possible.
Nathaniel made his choice.
‘No.’ Looking down at Hester’s fingers, intertwined so prettily with his own, he forced himself to finish what he’d started. ‘There’s nothing else.’
With his attention fixed on her hand Nathaniel couldn’t see Hester’s expression, although judging by her continuing silence he feared she wasn’t fooled.
The room was growing slowly lighter as weak sunlight bled beneath the curtains and soon there would be nowhere to hide from the all-seeing sharpness of those periwinkle eyes. Guilt and uncertainty sat heavy like a stone, but Nathaniel sought to ignore it as he cast about swiftly for a way to divert her from his lie.
‘I ought to go back to London. I thought perhaps tomorrow.’
‘Oh?’ Carefully Hester disengaged her hand from his, the movement clearly to disguise a disappointment he hardly dared believe. ‘So soon?’
‘I’m afraid so. But I’ve been thinking... Why don’t you come with me?’
Her head came up at once. ‘What? Really?’
Despite his self-inflicted discomfort, Nathaniel couldn’t help but smile at her surprise. ‘Yes, really. Have you ever seen the warehouses? I’m sure you’d find them interesting.’
‘In truth, I’ve always wanted to. It’s never seemed right to me that I know so little about how the company is run. I’d jump at the chance to learn more.’
Hester returned his smile, sending a river of relief through Nathaniel that his distraction had worked. But then her lips turned down instead of up, and his unease returned with a vengeance.
‘But what about your father? Won’t he mind my being there?’
Nathaniel set his jaw. His father was the very last person he wanted to think of while wearing nothing but a sheet, Hester’s enticingly similar state of undress never far from his mind.
‘I can’t say I care if he does.’
Unwelcome as they were, however, thoughts of his father came regardless. They found a way in to stir a fresh pang of guilt, holding a harsh mirror up to his conduct and casting doubts that gnawed like hungry rats.
I have lied to Hester as my father lied to me. How can I claim to want to be a better man when I still take him as an example?
The question repeated itself in a taunting echo as he knelt beside the fire, Hester still close but suddenly seeming out of his reach. She was the kind of woman a man might search for his whole life and never find, and the fact it had taken him so long to realise only increased the shame that held him in its fist.
The spectre of his father’s influence loomed larger the more Nathaniel sought to pull away, chasing him down as though he were prey. Hester ought to have the world, but he couldn’t even manage to give her honesty, Nathaniel realised, angry at the similarity that tied him so cruelly to the one person he no longer wanted to imitate in any form.
‘Was I very much like him before I went away?’
The words came out as a blurted mess he wished he could have phrased better, but with Mr Honeywell’s presence like a ghost at his shoulder Nathaniel couldn’t think clearly.
‘My father, I mean. Was I really the kind of husband to you that he is to my mother?’
To her credit Hester met his eye without flinching, although her flame-lit face clouded. ‘Why do you ask?’
Nathaniel shrugged helplessly. Why had he asked, when he already knew what the answer would be? Perhaps some masochistic part of him craved punishment for his dishonesty—confirmation that his sudden wretchedness was his just reward.
‘Because I need to know.’
‘Then, yes,’ she answered simply. ‘And, yes.’
It was exactly what he’d been expecting, but to hear it out loud hit him squarely in the gut and made it hard not to look away.
‘I’d like to change.’
‘You already have.’
The flare of guilt grew hotter. He had changed, but not enough. In a horribly ironic twist, the prospect of losing Hester’s regard had caused him to shut her out—the very thing she’d detested in him to begin with—and Nathaniel felt desperation rise.
‘Even more. I’d like to be the kind of man who deserves a woman like you.’
Hester’s lips parted, drawing his focus at once. In the feeble morning light her skin shone like a pearl, smooth and beautiful and tempting him to touch. When she smiled it dropped a lit match into Nathaniel’s stomach, setting fire to his regret, and the flames leapt higher with her reply.
‘You can work on that. Starting with taking me back to bed.’