The Lady Always Wins Page 3

  But she didn’t go. Instead, she stepped forward and took his wrist. She heard the slight intake of his breath as she examined his hand—a man’s hand, big and broad, with a callus on his thumb and index finger where he’d wielded a pen. Little nicks marred his skin, ones that hadn’t existed seven years ago.

  She turned his hand over.

  “On second thought,” he said. “We could adjourn to your bedchamber now.”

  Ginny undid the backing of his cufflink and slipped it into place. “Poor Simon,” she said, making sure the little diamond-eyed beetle was secure. “Do you want me very, very badly then?”

  His other hand touched her face. Slowly—almost unwillingly—she let him raise her chin from contemplation of his wrist. His eyes seemed dark, and they glittered with some unspoken emotion. “Yes,” he said. “God knows I’ve wished it otherwise over the years. But yes. I have wanted you since I first knew what want was.”

  Under the rules of the game, she should make light of that admission. She needed to say something to defuse those words of their latent power.

  But she could not make herself do it. Some things were too true to dismiss.

  He leaned down and ever so lightly brushed his lips against hers—so softly, it was as if their breath kissed, rather than their mouths.

  “Go get your bonnet,” he told her.

  Chapter Three

  THEY DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING for the first minute of their walk. Then he noticed the men working in the field and he turned to her in shock.

  “They’re cutting your tulips,” he said. “Why are they bloo—I mean, why are they cutting your tulips?”

  Ginny sighed. She didn’t want to have this conversation. “Because Mr. Redright is paying me twenty pounds for them.”

  “But—”

  “Maybe twenty pounds is nothing to a man with diamond cuff links, but it’s a great deal to me at the moment.”

  He scowled. “God, Ginny, I—”

  “Don’t worry about me.” She patted his hand. “I’m just showing my foolhardy Barrett blood after all these years.”

  He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I hate it when you talk that way about yourself. I hated it when my parents did it. I hated it when anyone else did it. So you weren’t as well-off as my people. What does that matter?”

  He had always been hotheaded and ill-mannered. Her other friends had never been able to understand why she enjoyed his company. But the other side of his total disregard for etiquette had been an utter indifference to the disparity in their stations.

  True, he’d never treated her like a lady. He’d treated her like an equal instead, and that had seemed far more precious.

  “Simon,” she said slowly, “I was—I am—a Barrett.”

  “So?”

  “So, we’re not just polite folk who quietly run a little out-of-pocket from time to time. Barretts are the most foolish of any fools who have ever had pretensions to gentility. Just look around us.” She spun, indicating the acres of tulips. “Where do you think these came from?”

  “I have no idea. I really don’t care. I thought they grew because your aunt liked them.”

  Ginny let out a shuddering laugh. “Two acres of tulips? No. They’ve been here for centuries. Old Farwell Barrett was a modest tradesman who thought to make his fortune on one simple gamble. So he sold his fine home, and a good bit of land beside. He sunk the entirety of his funds into an investment that—he was sure—could not lose: tulip bulbs. Which, at the time, were selling for an ungodly sum of money, the price going up on a daily basis.” She laughed again, and wished she could feel the humor. “Six weeks later, everyone realized how ridiculous it was to go mad over tulips, and the price plummeted. In a fit of pique, he planted every one of those bulbs here. And that is why the cottage is called Barrett’s Folly.”

  “Hm,” he said, sounding unconvinced.

  “Marrying you would have been the sort of thing that a mad Barrett would do. Trading on hope and delusions. If I had married you, your parents would have been right about me. I’d have been a foolish, impecunious schemer, just like my forebears. I told you I wouldn’t marry a poor man.”

  He leaned forward and touched one finger to her chin. “And what do you think of me now, then?”

  “You’re every bit as bad as you were before.”

  “Yes, but…”

  “If I had somehow missed your fashionable hat and your cunning cuff links, I would have noticed your pronouncement yesterday. Also, I do read the newspapers, and from time to time they make comments about wealthy, eligible bachelors. Come, Simon. You did not use to be so gauche as to wear jewels simply to impress a woman.”

  He colored faintly, but leaned in. “Maybe it’s because nothing else about me ever impressed you enough.”

  Even after seven years, Ginny recognized that this was one of those things that Simon said, hoping to be contradicted. So she simply furrowed her brow. “True.”

  His eyes narrowed and he started toward her. “Why, you little baggage. I ought to—”

  She shook one finger at him. “You’ve only got two days, Simon. You can’t afford to waste a single hour remonstrating with me.”

  He didn’t stop. Instead, he took her arms and pulled her close. “And what did you think I was threatening to do?” Her belly fluttered. He reached up and set his thumb against her lips. “I know all too well I can’t argue with you. You’d never admit it when I won.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “All I can say is that you are not a mad Barrett. You are the most—”

  “I am mad,” Ginny told him. “I am just like them. Oh, God, Simon. These last weeks… I’m selling my tulips, that’s how close things have come.”

  His arm settled around her and he pulled her close. “Shh,” he said. “Shh. It will all come out right.”

  “I know that,” Ginny said, her voice muffled by his chest. “I know that now. But for a while there, before you came… You have no idea how much I risked. It was close. I thought I might have to sell Barrett’s Folly, too.”

  It was the height of foolishness to let him hold her. To let the warmth of his arms come around her and to draw strength from him. But then, for all the pain that he’d caused her once, he’d also been her best friend. Her only true confidant. There had been a time when his embrace would have healed any wound. They’d had games and they’d had Simon’s brash arrogance. But she’d loved him most for this—for this certainty that everything would come out right, so long as he was near. She’d missed him.

  He gently stepped away from her. “We haven’t come to the oak yet,” he said. “I’m on a schedule. I’m not supposed to kiss you until we reach the oak.”

  Ten years ago, when she was fifteen, everything had changed. By that time, they’d been friends for years, and—as his parents had realized with dawning horror sometime during the first week of summer—they were rather too old to be wandering about alone. Why, anything could happen!

  They had talked with Ginny’s aunt. It had been agreed by all the adults that they weren’t to see each other unchaperoned any longer. But Simon had pooh-poohed the very idea. What, he had said scornfully, were those old biddies imagining? Really?

  What indeed? she had echoed, just as scornfully. But inside, she’d cringed just a little. She had just begun to imagine things that brought a blush to her face.

  They’d become rather adept at sneaking out. Just to fish, he’d said. And climb trees. And walk. But over the course of the summer, Ginny had fallen secretly, passionately, horribly in love with him. She didn’t dare mention it—she was sure he would have laughed at her, if he’d known. She’d kept the emotion to herself through their morning walks and their dares. She’d not said anything, not even when they met late one night to watch a meteor shower.

  Until Simon had turned to her one August evening, shortly before he was scheduled to leave. And in that peremptory, arrogant manner that he had, he’d announced, “I’m going to kiss you tomorrow.”<
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  Ginny had flushed all over. Her lungs had burned. Simon was older—a full year older. He was on the verge of attending university. She’d imagined him with other girls, walking the streets of Cambridge. Those other women would be pretty and soft and ladylike. They were all well-to-do, just like him. And they’d be beautifully dressed in clothing that was all lace and flounces and kid leather.

  At his proclamation, she’d burst into flame, a riot of innocent expectation.

  “Well?” he’d demanded. And that was when she’d realized that he was nervous about how she might respond.

  “No,” Ginny had said, her mouth dry.

  “No?”

  “You’re not going to kiss me tomorrow,” she’d managed to get out.

  He had taken one step toward her.

  “You’re going to kiss me right now,” she finished.

  “Oh, God,” he’d said. “Ginny. Ginny.” And he had leaned in and kissed her, the dark green leaves of the oak shielding them from the summer sun.

  After that, he’d made his way to Chester-on-Woolsey whenever he could, telling his parents he was visiting friends. They had kissed and held hands and talked and planned. They’d argued and schemed, too—and the game they’d made of arrogant assertions coupled with dares had become all the more exciting.

  They’d had two years of stolen visits. All the while, Ginny waited for him to realize that she wasn’t what his parents would call the “right kind of people.” Ginny knew too much of the world to believe that a boy like Simon would marry a girl like her. He was talking about taking articles, becoming a barrister like his father. She was turning her gowns for the third time, and hoping that nobody noticed how badly the pattern had faded. Still, she’d been too much in love to put him off.

  And then his parents had found out they’d been seeing each other in secret.

  Ginny sighed and shook her head, pushing away those old memories. He was too old to be disciplined by his father now. Simon was watching her carefully, as if no time at all had passed since their clandestine meetings so many years ago. They came up under the oak and stopped, turning to one another.

  The leaves were the light green of spring. Everything was different from the day of their summer kiss all those years ago. Almost everything—there was still that sense of charged expectation, that tingling in the palms of her hands.

  She had to say something. “You never did become a barrister.”

  He shrugged. “Ginny, I’m rude and arrogant. Half the time, I forget myself and curse, and never mind the company. Do you know what would happen if I did that before a judge?”

  She couldn’t help herself; she smiled.

  “Besides, my father would have expected me to work with him, and after what happened with you…”

  “He wasn’t wrong.”

  “Devil that,” Simon muttered.

  “Your father was right,” Ginny repeated. “When I knew you would be destitute, I told you I was marrying another man. A wealthy man. You can’t argue with that, Simon. It’s a fact.”

  Telling Simon he couldn’t argue with something was, she remembered, an exercise in futility. He could argue with a deaf chicken. But this time, even though he glowered, he managed not to say anything back. Finally, he looked heavenward and tried something else. “So. How did marriage suit you?”

  “He was a good man,” she told him.

  “Old, though.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “Thirty-three when I married him. Were it not for his heart, he would still be alive.”

  He looked up once more. “God help me for asking this, but…he treated you well?”

  Ginny sighed. “He did. He was a good companion.”

  His voice lowered. “Was he anything else?”

  “If he’d wanted a chaperone,” she said tersely, “he surely would have advertised for one. I was his wife. In every way. And one cannot spend seven years with a man, through sickness and health, without coming to care for him. He was a good friend. He didn’t ask for my love when we married, but he needed my loyalty. You know what his nearest relations were like.”

  Simon scowled and kicked up leaves underfoot. “Lovely,” he said.

  “But then, that is not what you were asking. What you really want to know was whether I missed you. And I missed you every single day. I tried not to—I didn’t want to be unfaithful in my marriage, even if it was only inside my skin. Nonetheless, on the days when I didn’t think your name, there was an unfillable void inside me. I kept hoping that you would marry so that I would know that what had been between us was over and done. But you didn’t. I went on for years, trying not to think of you.”

  He didn’t say anything at all. But he reached out and took her hand, pulling her to him. Her heart pounded heavily in her chest.

  “So there you are,” she said, as calmly as she could manage. “That’s the first part of your promise, already come true. I can’t make myself regret those years. But I regret your absence more than you can ever know.”

  He was holding her, but he didn’t look at her. Instead, he examined the leaves above them. “I’m going to seduce you today,” he announced.

  The game had never had this edge before—this crackling sense of both bitterness and arousal. But no matter how quickly her pulse beat, Ginny made herself speak calmly. “I thought you had granted yourself three days for that. Accelerating the schedule, are you?”

  He frowned up at the branches. “No. I need that last day to stomp on your bleeding heart. Don’t forget that.”

  “Of course. You need time to properly revel in my abject misery.”

  He should have agreed.

  Instead, he reached out and laid his fingertips against her cheek. She knew what he’d claimed at the beginning. But what she saw in his eyes…

  Simon never did anything by halves. He brought every bit of his bristling, awkward intensity to any task worth doing. And now, he ran his fingers lightly along the curve of her face.

  “Come here, Ginny,” he said in a low, laughing tone, “and let me kiss you.”

  Her breath seemed too hot for her lungs. His hand left a trail of sparks along her face. She took one step forward, and that was enough for him. His mouth sought hers. She had a moment—so small—to savor the smell of him, before his lips came down on hers and drove all other thoughts away.

  There was only Ginny and Simon, and a kiss that had been seven years in the making.

  The last time they’d kissed, they’d both been virgins. Eager, willing, lustful virgins, yes—but virgins nonetheless. Even their most heated kisses had been innocent.

  There was nothing innocent about the way Simon touched her now. He set his hand in the curve of her spine and pulled her forward until her skirts molded against his legs. He slid his fingers down, down, until he cupped her buttocks, and then he leaned into her and nipped her lower lip.

  Ginny let out a gasp, but no sooner had she opened her mouth then his tongue met hers, tasting her, taking her.

  He knew just how to touch her this time—one hand pressing her body flush against his, the other drifting up her ribs to settle against the side of her breast, a warm weight not so much giving her pleasure as promising that it was certain to come.

  This was a man who knew what he wanted. This was a man who knew what she wanted. And yet there was still a rough edge of irascibility in his kiss. He held her just a fraction too tightly; he scarcely let her breathe. She could almost sense him exulting in her shivers. See, his kiss seemed to say, this is what you missed, all those years.

  She’d missed it dreadfully. She’d missed him.

  He deepened their kiss, pressing her against the trunk of the oak. Bark met her back; he leaned the weight of his body against her and then kissed his way down her jaw. His fingers, cupping her breast, made little circles. And his form… God, he was a delight, slim and yet muscular. The hard ridge of his erection pushed against her.

  “God, Ginny,” he growled against her skin.

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sp; She put her hand on his chest and pushed him away—only an inch, but enough to let the cool air flow over her skin, enough to take a deep breath, to try to cleanse her whirling thoughts.

  “Don’t even argue,” he said. “I’m having you in my bed tonight.”

  She could scarcely think. She was certain—almost certain—that his claims of stomping on her heart were pure balderdash. He had really only ever seemed brash and arrogant on the outside. But she knew him. The more he swaggered, the more uncertain he was feeling.

  And the truth was, he had the power to stomp on her heart even if she didn’t take him to bed. She’d proven that to herself seven years ago.

  Maybe she was mad. Maybe she was lonely. Maybe it was simply that she couldn’t imagine that a man who had made cuff links in her honor four years past would ever hurt her. She gave him her most brilliant smile. “If you have just forty-eight hours to seduce me, we had better spend as much time as we can in bed.”

  Chapter Four

  BY THE TIME SIMON crashed through the front door of her house, he was wild with desire.

  He didn’t care who saw them—he only knew he wanted her, and he was finally going to have her.

  But she conducted him into the front parlor where they’d had tea before. Somehow, she managed to look untouched by lust. Only the sparkle in her eyes and the rough redness of her lips where he’d kissed her gave any hint that she had said they would go to bed.

  Would it be churlish to demand that they make their way there now?

  She walked to the window and looked out at the tulips. Half the field was denuded now; another wagon was being driven away. She shook her head sadly.

  He should have comforted her. He should have reassured her. But truth was, he had nothing to reassure her with. Instead he crossed to the door behind her and locked it.

  She must have heard the sound of the key turning, because she smiled. She didn’t protest or turn to him. She drew the curtains, hiding the disappearing flowers behind folds of crepe. And then, slowly, she turned to look at him.