Trenton Lord of Loss (Lonely Lords) (29 page)

He levered up on his forearms and gathered her close, laying his cheek over hers, only to pull back. “Ellie?” Trent nuzzled her cheek with his nose and confirmed she had indeed been crying. “Love?” 

Between them, the baby moved, provoking such a depth of tender feeling Trent’s throat constricted with sentiments he dared not voice. 

“Elegy,” he whispered when she’d quieted. “Talk to me. Don’t slip off to sleep and leave me here alone.” 

She gave a shuddery little laugh that broke his heart. 

“Like you left me alone?” She pushed his hair back off his forehead, a sweet caress that didn’t hide the pain in her words. “I told myself I wasn’t going to do this.” 

“Do this?” Trent levered up on his elbows, sensing that whatever was on Ellie’s mind he wouldn’t be able to cuddle and pet her past it. 

“Will you please get off me?” 

She closed her eyes on a wincing sigh as he withdrew, suggesting he’d made her sore. He had to have—
he
was sore, a novel experience for him. He made use of the washing water and sat by Ellie’s hip, passing her a cool, damp cloth. 

She tidied herself while he watched, an intimacy he could not recall any other woman permitting him. 

“Are we to argue, Ellie?” he asked as he climbed in beside her. 

“I hope not.” She turned on her side to regard him. “But I find…” 

“You find?” He settled an arm around her shoulders and drew her against him. 

“I have been unable to govern my emotions adequately where you’re concerned, Trenton Lindsey. This past week, while you’ve been gone, I could not stop fretting for you.” 

“I’m not used to anybody fretting for me. It’s good of you.” 

They were the wrong words, and yet they were honest words. She was a good woman, plain and simply good. He stopped himself from elaborating in the direction of dear, precious, and other indications of folly.

“Good of me.” Ellie repeated the phrase as if finding it underdressed at a formal dinner. “Perhaps it might be, if I felt I had a choice, but I cannot say I do. Nor do I like it, feeling this fretfulness. I did not allow fretting where my husband was concerned, and he at least had the courtesy to drop me the occasional note, to let me know where he was and how long he intended to bide there.” 

“A note.” Trent’s post-coital beatitude curled in on itself. He was about to get what he’d told Cato he wanted: leave to take himself off, leave to disentangle himself from a woman who deserved safety, at least. 

And other things he couldn’t yet promise her. 

“A note Trenton, a simple courtesy. You owe me nothing, I know. We are merely dallying, satisfying our animal urges with each other.” 

“You are not an animal urge to me. Good God, after what went on in this bed, how can you think—?”

Ellie put two fingers to his lips. “After what went on in this bed, how can you deny our animal urges are involved?” 

“Well, of course they are, and God be thanked for it.”

“Don’t do this.” Ellie drew her fingers over his lips gently. “Don’t try to find soothing platitudes and pretty courtesies, Trent. You are prodigiously talented in bed—I’m not so inexperienced I don’t know what I’m giving up—but when it comes to dallying, that manual we’ve joked about is written in a language I can’t comprehend, and my ignorance leaves me discommoded.” 

“What are you saying, Elegy?” But he knew what she was saying: He had Botched It with her, Badly. He’d wanted her safe, not heartbroken, not sad and angry. He knew that much, even with his brain sizzling from lust and his body chronically exhausted. 

“I can’t do this,” Ellie said softly. “I can’t make passionate love with you then go on about my life for a week or so, then welcome you back into my bed, Trenton. Not when your life is arguably in danger and you won’t let me come to you. You hold all the cards in this dalliance. I spent five years letting my husband hold all the cards. I thought I could be a merry widow, but I find I cannot. I’m sorry.”

He got out of bed, and she watched him in the moonlight, her expression solemn, her gaze sad. He came around the bed, climbed in behind her, and threaded an arm under her neck. 

“I’m sorry, too.” He kissed her temple, all manner of difficult feelings rioting through him—relief
not
among them. “I did not mean to hurt you, but if this is what you want, I’ll leave you in peace.” 

She kissed his wrist and offered him not a shred of argument. 

Or hope. 

He was doing the right thing, acceding to her wishes, letting her break it off to keep her safe—and to stop the runaway freight wagon of their mutual feelings for each other while they still could. 

Even having given her what she wanted, and what was doubtless best for her, and—his self-disgust was running high enough to fuel brutal honesty—what was least uncomfortable for him—he knew he’d still made her cry again. 

*** 

“I’m off for the rest of the week.” Thomas Benning tossed his last pair of clean stockings into a haversack, grateful for the excuse not to meet his older brother’s eyes. 

“Take French leave if you must.” Tidewell Benning’s voice held supreme indifference, which Thomas knew to be false. “It’s what you do best.” 

“Not fair, Tye.” Thomas glanced around the room, anywhere but at the brother who lounged on his bed, boots and all. “I’m damned sick and tired of the nonsense you get up to. That girl was thirteen and you knew it.” 

Tidewell folded his hands behind his head, not a care in the world. “She was a tart. Girls marry at thirteen, have babies at thirteen.” 

“You’d know more than I would about that. And there’s thirteen, and then there’s thirteen.” The poor thing had been simple, and the blood… 

“You think a house party will assuage your overactive conscience?” 

A house party would let him drink himself to oblivion without having to pay for it, and without having to see the disappointment in Papa’s eyes. 

“Somebody in this family needs to marry money,” Thomas shot back. “The house parties are the consolation offered to those who failed to snag a husband during the Season. I’m tired of hearing Papa strut and rant and admonish you once again to choose a bride.”

Except the local women wouldn’t have Tye, that much had been plain for years. Like Thomas, Tye was tall with wavy, dark hair, but middle age was stealing a march on Tye’s waist and his hairline. 

Tidewell grinned, showing a glimmer of the charm that had got him into so much trouble. “I have time yet for choosing a bride. You act like we really do need the blunt.” 

“I’m nearly certain we do, Tye.” They were alone, and Thomas was nagged by an obligation to be honest with his brother. “Papa isn’t looking quite so sanguine these days, and the past few harvests have been bad. You’re his heir. What does he tell you?” 

“To keep my breeches up when I’m in the vicinity of little girls whose brothers know their way around a dueling ground.” 

“Always sound advice.” Thomas couldn’t muster a smile, because Papa hadn’t been joking, though Tye had. “Papa sent Paula into Amherst’s arms with a damned generous settlement, but since then…” 

Tye’s expression became mean. “She needed a damned generous settlement. Stupid twit was barmy.” 

“She was our sister.” 

“And she cost this family a pretty penny,” Tye retorted, “which you’re suggesting we now can’t afford.” He crossed his boots at the ankles, leaving a smear of dirt on Thomas’s counterpane. 

“I’m suggesting you talk to Papa. And Tye? You really do need a wife, some tolerant, easy-breeding country girl who thinks being your baroness would make up for your shortcomings.” 

Which were legion. 

“You are turning into an old woman, Thomas.” Tye sat up, boots hitting the floor. “If you’re so set on the proprieties, you take a wife.” 

“I’m planning on it.” Because if nothing else, a married man could establish his own household. 

“As if you could,” Tye snorted, eyeing his brother’s crotch meaningfully.

“You need to be more careful, Tye.” Thomas ignored his brother’s insult, which was old and—much to Thomas’s relief—groundless. “Papa won’t stand for more of your carrying-on, and I’m done with it, too. We’ve become a perennial joke, with bets laid as to how long we’re allowed out of Hampshire before Papa has to drag us by the ears back to the family seat. Pretty soon, we’ll be like old Wilton, virtual prisoners of our family’s outrage.” 

“Wilton’s no prisoner.” A sly look came into Tye’s eyes as he crossed to the wardrobe. “He’s a canny old thing, and if you had the amusements to hand he did, you might not be off to dance and small talk your way through endless evenings of bad music and low stakes.” 

Thomas was weary, and not only because he faced a journey of several hours on horseback in the summer sun come morning. 

Tye handled the clothing in the wardrobe as if already choosing which of Thomas’s belongings to pilfer for his own use. 

“Now you envy the Earl of Wilton, whose own family won’t have him. Consider what that says about you, Tye, and consider that I mean it: I’m done with your nonsense.” 

“Safe journey.” Tye stepped back and closed the doors of the wardrobe. “I’ll be thinking you of, swilling orgeat and showing the debutantes around the archery butts, while I find better sport with an entirely different variety of female.” 

He gave an airy court bow in parting, and Thomas closed the door with a sense of relief. Old secrets, secrets that went back to childhood, bound them, and so, too, did a reluctant protectiveness on Thomas’s part. Tye had been the oldest, the one their mother doted on, and Thomas knew what that had cost his brother. 

***

“Why are you still awake?” Peak’s voice held a note of censure, but Cato knew that voice and heard the hint of concern in it as well.

“Missing me, Peak?” 

“Hush your trash.” Peak took the seat beside Cato on the bench outside the stables. Right beside him. “Pretty half-moon tonight.” 

“The moon always seems bigger in the summer. And to answer your question, I am waiting for our errant lord and master to come home.” 

“Paying a call on the widow, is he?” 

“He is.” Cato shifted, so his thigh was aligned with Peak’s. “Like an idiot, he walked through the self-same woods where somebody took a shot at him.” 

“Hard to shoot straight in the dark. Even with half a summer moon.” 

But easy to lurk in the shadows, as Cato had been lurking. “He wants to get shut of the lady, but the poor bastard’s so hard up he can’t give up his toy.” Cato glanced at his companion. “She lets him get away with this.” 

“Women are fools. Some women.” 

“Women have their pride. All women.” 

“Men, too.” Peak’s teeth gleamed briefly in the shadows. “Lady Rammel is no fool, and once she gets her bearings, she’ll send him packing.” 

“You care to wager on that?” 

“How are we to prove our wager if Amherst and the widow come to a parting of the ways? He’s not about to blame her for sending him elsewhere to scratch his itch. The woman has a baby on the way.” 

Peak’s insights were interesting, and often deadly accurate.

“You have a point, except Amherst talks to me more and more as if he trusts me. He might admit to being cashiered from her bed.” 

“You’ll abuse his trust, too, won’t you?” 

Cato blew out a breath and switched to Gaelic. “Do you know how close you push me to the edge, sitting out here with me like this on a soft summer night? How you abuse my trust?”

“I know.” Peak rose easily, too easily. “Believe me, Catullus, I know.” 

Maybe it was Cato’s imagination, or his wishful heart, but he could have sworn he felt deft fingers brush softly over his hair before Peak ducked into the safety of the stables. 

*** 

“Your mother is asking for you.” Robert Benning, Baron Trevisham, tried to keep his expression impassive as he surveyed his older son. 

“This is supposed to be news?” Tye took a casual sip of brandy. The quantity of liquor Tye could hold had become…appalling, even for a hounds and horses man who was never far from his flask. 

“She’s your mother,” Trevisham snapped. “She asks little enough in this life. You will attend her before you seek your bed.” 

“Yes, my lord.” The note of mockery in Tye’s voice was underscored by a small salute with his drink. “Before I do, Tom suggested I ask you about the family finances. Are we pockets to let, Papa?” 

Trevisham winced inwardly, for the familiar address grated coming from Tye. When had his strapping, smiling firstborn turned into such a selfish, useless man? “What has put such notions in your brother’s head?” 

“Who knows where young Thomas gets his fool ideas?” Tye sipped again. “We both know he’s fanciful, but he’s also occasionally right.” 

“The last girl you trifled with,” Trevisham said, “her family required a settlement.” 

“A settlement?” Tye rose, his tone incredulous. “For that little baggage?” 

“The little baggage required a surgeon when you were done with her, Tidewell.” A mercy she hadn’t required the priest as well. “I gather what few wits she had were still out begging a week after your tryst.” 

“Right. You were taken in by a Drury Lane farce, Papa.”