A Lord’s Desperate Love Part Ten ~ A Historical Romance Story

A Lord’s Desperate Love

A Historical Romance Story

Part One

Part Two

Part Ten

“Is there someone else? Is that it? Have you moved on from me, Vi? You didn’t have to flee London and hide here under a false name, in blacks, to do that. You have been doing it for years. I am no monster for you to be scared of. Yet I don’t understand what I have done? One minute you say goodbye to me at your bedchamber door and the next moment the house is empty. Tell me! What did I do?”

“Geoffrey…” The pain in his eyes was pricking at her soul, like he was stabbing at her conscience with hairpins, and it tore at her heart. She felt his loss too. Dare she speak? Was there a possibility for them? He had said, I love you.

He stepped closer and his fingers lifted to her face. “Violet?” They were cool and his touch feather-light. She’d never have any physical contact with him again if she did not speak.

If she did speak…?

“What did I do wrong, Vi?” His pitch softened as his anger seemed to blow out. “Tell me and I swear I’ll never do it again. I love you, I can’t let you go.”

“You did nothing wrong.” The words came out on a breathless sob as tears burned at the back of her throat, gathering in a lump.

A look of confusion creased his brow. “Is there someone else? Do you not feel the same? Is that it?”

She shook her head as his palm pressed against her cheek, offering comfort and expressing need.

“Then what, Vi?”

“Nothing,” she whispered the moment before his lips touched hers.

There had been this connection between them for weeks, this hunger and craving. They could not be together in a room and not touch.

His hand slid down her back and sought to draw her closer. But she held rigid aware of what was between them. Yet she opened her mouth to him and his tongue swept in. Longing flooded her. He was all she had missed from London, just him. But her fingers gripped his arms and set him away. She had to tell him…

His eyes blazed as they looked down into hers, shining like gold again. “Violet.” It was another plea for explanation.

She took a breath to speak but as she did his fingers lifted and tugged loose the tape tying her cloak. It slipped from her shoulders as her mouth opened to say the words. To tell him the truth. But he looked down, his gaze sweeping over her body, as it he’d developed a habit of doing all summer, and he saw the truth for himself. Her stomach was too round now for him not to see the convex rise beneath her dress.

“My God!”

“I was going to tell you.”

“You were clearly not, Vi.”

It was her turn to grasp his arm in plea. “Geoffrey.”

His hand lifted and swept across his face. He did not look happy… He looked shocked – and angry again.

“A child!” That was what this was all about. “A child… Good God. Violet?” Geoff knew from his sister’s pregnancies how far gone she must be. She was surely past mid-term. How had he not noticed it in London. He must have been blind. “I suppose it is mine.” The words slipped from his mouth in accusation. He was angry. Why had she kept this from him? Run from him? Hidden from him?

Horror filled her eyes. “Of course it is yours…” Then her words drifted and her eyes suggested she regretted her admission… What on earth was going on?

He touched her cheek, his palm flat against it, as his thumb gripped beneath her chin. This woman had the same face as Violet, her eyes were blue and her hair the colour of spun gold, with the perfect pale skin he knew covered her entire body. Yet, it was not Violet speaking to him. It was not the confident, dressed in vanity woman he’d known in London, who’s whole demeanour said come-love-me.

He took a breath. “Why are we here, Vi? Why not tell me this in London. There is no one else?” He was completely unable to fathom what was going on here. “Why are you dressed in black? I don’t understand.”

His touch fell to the clear outline of a small bulge beneath her gown. How had he not noticed, for God’s sake? He had made love with her only just over a week ago. But then his sister had had pregnancies like that, usually with boys, when the child suddenly turned and shifted to show more prominently.

Was this his son? His fingers spread wide over Violet’s stomach, and my God, he felt the child move.

Looking up he met Vi’s gaze and the blue shone with doubt, but even so, her hand covered his. “It is yours Geoff. I only knew for certain I was with child before I left.”

“But you must have suspected. Were you denying it?”

“Yes.”

“Violet.” His fingers left her stomach and instead he held her, tightly.

Her face buried into his neck and then he heard her sob and felt her shoulders shake. Violet was not a woman to weep, she was strong and brash. She was known for being callous, not this.

He held her for a little while and then his fingers tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

“I’m here, darling. No need to worry now.” She had been enduring this burden alone. Worrying. Alone. But why? Why had she run? Did she not trust him? “Darling, I’ll say it again, why are we here?”

She pulled away and her blue eyes shimmered with tears as she looked up at him. Those eyes which had always burned with self-confidence and said take me as I am or go away, now looked vulnerable and afraid.

“I will not let you take the child from me,” she whispered as his fingers cradled her cheek. “I want it, I want to keep it.”

Ah. “Violet –”

A Lord’s Desperate Love is the story of two of the secondary characters from the 2nd book in the Marlow Intrigues Series

~ ‘The Passionate Love of a Rake’.

The true story of a courtesan, who inspired The Illicit Love of a Courtesan, which I’ve been telling every Sunday, will continue alongside this, and if you fancy more reading, the 3rd book in the Marlow Intrigues series, John’s story, is out on 3rd April click on his cover in the side bar to pre-order. My lovely, moody, arrogant, fractured-golden-hearted Duke! Plus – so much going on – I Found you – my bestselling contemporary novel – is reduced to $1.99 from $7 in the USA until 31st March (it is £2.99 in the UK)

Jane Lark is a writer of authentic, passionate and emotional Historical and New Adult Romance stories, and the author of a No.1 bestselling Historical Romance novel in America, ‘The Illicit Love of a Courtesan’.

Click here to find out more about Jane’s books, and see Jane’s website www.janelark.co.uk to learn more about Jane. Or click ‘like’ on Jane’s Facebook page to see photo’s and learn historical facts from the Georgian, Regency and Victorian eras, which Jane publishes there. You can also follow Jane on twitter at @janelark

A Lord’s Desperate Love Part Nine ~ A Historical Romance Story

A Lord’s Desperate Love

A Historical Romance Story

Part Nine

Violet watched Geoff take off his hat and put it on a table in the hall. Then he took off his gloves too and dropped them on top of it.

She’d told Janet to leave the house for an hour or two. The maid had looked at Violet and then glanced at Geoff with a question in her eyes before disappearing. Violet’s reputation in this village would be shredded. This was not London. People would not turn a blind eye to such things. The gossip would spread within hours. She was entertaining a man alone – and when it was a man of Geoff’s quality, well.

She did not offer him tea, she did not wish him to stay, she had only proposed they come here to take their argument off the street so others might not hear him rail and swear at her.

Her heart lurched as he began unbuttoning his greatcoat. He had such long-fingered, masculine hands.

When she had seen him standing there with the sun behind him, placing him in silhouette, her heart had burst with joy and love, and an overwhelming sensation of recognition. Her heart knew and wanted him. She’d never felt like this before. And now, as he started stripping off his outdoor coat, she was intensely aware of the body she knew beneath his clothes too.

He’d said, I love you? “You are not staying,” she whispered as he slipped the third button free. Her body and her heart might want him, but her head had more common sense. There was the child.

“I am not going,” he answered with a brutal depth. “You are not throwing me out, Vi. You’ll have to find someone to do it physically if you wish to. I am not moving.”

Oh Lord. “Geoffrey…” Her heart raced. What did, I love you, mean anyway? Did it change anything between them? How could it though?

“Geoffrey, what, Violet? What is going on?”

She turned and walked into the parlour leaving him in the stone-flagged hallway. She had no way to make him go. When she turned back she saw him slip off his coat and turn to hang it on a peg near the door, as though he belonged here. He did not. But he had become a constant presence back in London and her body ached to step into his arms.

Her chin tilted up, when he turned again and entered the parlour.

“Why the blacks, Vi? Has someone died? I didn’t think you had any family left…” His words ran dry and he looked at her blankly for a moment then his gaze flashed hard and sharp. “Mayer was you maiden name wasn’t it? Your father’s name?”

He clearly knew more about her than she’d told him. She’d never spoken of her childhood to him. He was aristocracy and she had come from a family who had made their money from sugar plantations in the colonies. It was another reason he would not wish to marry her and not something she cared to discuss publicly, but there were those who remembered. Those who he had obviously been talking to behind her back. But had he been talking because he cared, or because he was prying…

“Did someone die?”

She didn’t know how to answer and so she did not, just stared at him.

“Let me take your cloak?”

He moved forwards. She stepped back, struggling to find the persona of the merry widow and some way to put Geoff off.

“Violet? What is going on?”

She turned away from him, her fingers trembling as they lifted to untie the ribbons of her bonnet. She did not answer because she could not think of anything to say – except the truth. Yet the truth would not do. She dared not tell. Her child. Their child. Was too precious to risk. It was so unlike her to feel confused. It had been a rule of hers to never let a man close enough to hurt her – but Geoff. I love you.

“Violet, speak to me for God’s sake.” His hand gripped her shoulder and turned her back. “I have been through hell. You vanished from London without a word. I visited every damned entertainment searching for you, for three nights, like an idiot. You were not there. Then when I finally call on you because I realised you were not looking for me, I discovered you gone. I have threatened your solicitor and throttled poor Selford. Then you lead me on this damned trail! I have stopped at every toll to find you, and stalked inns and agents in Bath.” He took a breath. “Violet, I don’t understand. Is this a game? Was I amusement? Because it was far more than that to me, and I thought, well… I thought it was bloody mutual.”

She opened her mouth but no words came. His beautiful hazel eyes shone like gold in the autumn sunlight pouring through the window.

“Let me take your bonnet.”

“No.” She stepped back as his hand lifted, her head tilting sideward, then slipped the bonnet off herself. It dangled by its ribbons from her hand for a moment as she took a breath, before letting her bonnet fall into an empty chair.

“Damn it, Violet!”

She found her voice at last and her words erupted with the confidence she’d oozed in London. “Must you keep swearing, Geoff.” But she did not feel confident here.

“Swearing? If you wish for swearing…” The next expletive was obscene, and certainly one a man should not use before a lady.

A blush burned her cheeks. Why must he be so obtuse?

A Lord’s Desperate Love is the story of two of the secondary characters from the 2nd book in the Marlow Intrigues Series

~ ‘The Passionate Love of a Rake’.

The true story of a courtesan, who inspired The Illicit Love of a Courtesan, which I’ve been telling every Sunday, will continue alongside this, and if you fancy more reading, the 3rd book in the Marlow Intrigues series, John’s story, is out on 3rd April click on his cover in the side bar to pre-order. My lovely, moody, arrogant, fractured-golden-hearted Duke! Plus – so much going on – I Found you is reduced to $1.99 from $7 in the USA until 31st March (it is £2.99 in the UK)