“Portia,” he began, his hands flexing over her bare arms, the rasp of his calluses on her flesh fluttering her insides. “Let me help. Marry me and—”

“No,” her voice rang out, sharp and inflexible. Automatic. Although she had accepted the notion of marriage, she could not accept the notion of marriage to Heath. Let me help. So now he would marry her out of pity as well as obligation? Could he humiliate her any more? Regardless of how he made her feel, how her body responded to him, she could not tolerate marrying him for those reasons. And for what reasons could you tolerate marrying him? Shaking her head, she shoved the question into the dark night of her mind.

“No?” he echoed, his angry voice reverberating in the confined space, eyes flashing in the glow of the moon. “Why am I not acceptable? I thought deep pockets were the only requisite? You said you’ve decided to wed. You need to marry someone capable of supporting your family. I’m willing. Why not me?”

Why not me?

She shut her eyes in one long blink, hating how logical he sounded—how illogical he made her sound. Why not him?

His face as she had seen him that last day in the library—his handsome features twisted in loathing—flashed in her mind. He’d hurt her, wounded her to the core. She could not let him do so again. She couldn’t be that weak, that stupid.

Her lips moved numbly, spilling forth an explanation that had nothing to do with the one that squeezed at her heart, “Oliver Simon will not simply support us, he will also settle Bertram’s debts.”

His fingers dug into her arms, nearly lifting her off her feet. “I can do that.”

“Why would you want to?” she bit out. “With Simon it’s an even trade. I get something. He gets something. Business. Plain and simple.”

The opera resumed, the music swelling until it pounded all around them, humming along the walls and floor beneath their feet.

“And what exactly does he get?” The question was loaded, rife with danger. Heath’s gaze slid over her, indicating he had already formed an opinion.

It was the one question she refused to dwell on. Not when her nights were spent thinking about Heath, remembering his hands and mouth on her. “Mr. Oliver wants respectability, an entrance into Society.”

“He smells of the docks.”

“It’s a practical arrangement. You and I—”

“Make a hell of a lot more sense that you and him.”

She smiled tightly, wanting desperately to fling his words back at him. There is no you and me.

Instead, she settled for, “We don’t suit.”

“No?”

The tiny hairs on her nape tingled and she knew she had provoked him too far.

The air in the tiny room changed subtly, thickened, grew electric. He snatched both her wrists and pulled them above her head.

“What are you doing?” she squeaked as he pressed the hard length of his body against her.

His unsmiling face looked down at her, watching her intently as he lowered his head. His head inched toward hers, but she dodged his mouth.

His eyes narrowed, lips thinning into a grim line. Releasing her wrists, he spun her about and crushed her into the wall. He grasped her h*ps in rough hands, pulling them out slightly from the wall. A shocked gasp escaped her as he nudged her thighs apart through her gown.

“What are you—” her voice froze, trapped in her throat as his hands came around to clasp her br**sts. A hard bulge prodded at her backside through the volume of her skirts.

His fingers rolled, tweaked and squeezed her ni**les into rock-hard points. Desire pooled low in her belly. A keening moan escaped her. She turned her face and rested one cheek against the wall, unable to move, unable to resist the seductive assault.

His hands dropped. She moaned in disappointment.

Then she felt him hike her skirts to her waist. He shoved down her undergarments. Cool air caressed her. His hand traveled over her thighs, her backside. A hissing cry escaped her when he bent and nipped at her exposed buttocks. His hand slid between her legs, fingers probing, pushing deep inside her.

She came out of her skin, sobbing as his hand plundered her. Then the hand disappeared. An anguished whimper ripped from her throat, swallowed by the music pulsing around them. She bit her bottom lip, waiting, desperate for what was to come, what she had thought she would never have again. Her body burned, ached, trembling like a leaf.

Hard hands fell on her hips, fingers digging into her softness, lifting her to accept the hot length of him sliding inside her. He penetrated her deeply and a scream welled up in her throat.

His hands shifted, angling her for deeper invasion, anchoring her for his thrusts. She clawed the wall, fighting for a handhold. Her knees felt like water. If not for his hands on her hips, she would have slid to the floor in a shuddering, boneless pile.

Cries tore from her mouth at his every plunge. He lifted her higher, the heels of her slippers coming off the floor. His own breath came hard and fast in her ear as he ground into her bottom.

One of his hands slid from her hip, kneading and squeezing her bottom possessively before sliding around, dipping, finding that plea sure spot between her quivering thighs that begged to be touched, stroked, set afire. She gasped as his fingers worked their magic, moving in fast little circles until she broke, shattered, convulsed between the wall and the man at her back that had become her entire world.

A few more powerful thrusts and he stilled, buried to the hilt. He pulsed within her, spilling his seed deep within her.

A mixed sense of elation and horror grabbed hold of her heart, squeezing tightly. The night at the lodge he had always withdrawn, always held himself in check. Not so now.

She lifted her cheek from the wall and gazed at her hands splayed flat before her. Moonlight washed the walls, tingeing the flesh of her hands blue.

Strong fingers brushed the back of her neck. “Portia—”

“No,” she choked, loathing for herself—for him—burning a bilious trail up her throat as she squeezed between him and the wall. Her hands shook as she bent and set her undergarments to rights. “Don’t say a word.”

Straightening, she risked a glance at his face and her heart constricted at the almost tender look on his face. If his words matched the look on his face, she was doomed.

Her unsteady hand touched her hair as she moved toward the door.

His hand clamped down on her arm. “Surely now you can see—”

“I see nothing save two people who haven’t a shred of sense or dignity.” She inhaled a great gulp of air. “Who just copulated like beasts in a closet.”

The tender looked fled, a hard mask taking its place.

“Marry me and you won’t have to worry about that. We’ll be husband and wife.” He scoured her with a dark look, one full of lust and promise. The smoldering fire in her belly flared to life, betraying her. “You can have this every night without threat to your sense of dignity.” He uttered the word as if it were a jest, something that did not exist. And perhaps for her it did not. When it came to him she had displayed very little dignity. It was as if she lost the ability to think when he entered the room.

Marry me and you won’t have to worry about that. We’ll be husband and wife. No, but she would have to worry about much more. Her heart, her pride, her self-control—her future with a man who held the ability to wound her like the sharpest of blades. She would have to be daft to bind herself to him.

“You once told me that I didn’t belong at Moreton Hall,” she said dully. “Well, you don’t belong here. Go home, Lord Moreton. I’m sure you’ll have no problem finding a bride more suited—”

“Oh, we suit,” he inserted, his voice as dangerous as a whip cutting air. His gaze trailed over her, insulting in it thoroughness, as if he stripped off her gown and stared upon her nakedness. “In the most fundamental way. Except you’re too pigheaded to see it.”

Shaking her head, she turned and slipped from the room. Hands clenching and unclenching at her sides, she told herself that he was wrong.

Heath didn’t return to his box. He stormed from the theater and hailed a hack, calling out the name of his hotel as he bounded within the musty confines.

Perhaps he should listen to Portia and leave—let her marry her smelly dockworker. Although the image of her beneath the brawny fellow, taking him inside her body, invaded his head and soured his stomach.

How many times did she have to say no before he finally quit? He thumped his fist on the seat.

He had affairs to tend to—his sisters sitting at top of the list. Now that he knew there to be no threat of madness, he needed to see about getting them married. Mina would be delighted.

Constance…he was not so sure. Still, he had better things to do than traipsing after some female who spurned him at every chance.

But her body opened like a flower at his slightest touch. Closing his eyes, he dropped his head on the back of the seat. He could still feel her heat, the tightness of her snug around him. He had released himself inside her, gloried in it. It had been the greatest sense of liberation—a claiming of himself right along with her. The thought of a child growing in her womb even now filled him with inexpressible joy.

She wanted him as much as he wanted her. They both knew it. He would do what ever necessary to prove it.

Alone in her room, Portia undressed herself, her hands lingering over the places Heath had touched, kissed. Her mouth, her neck, her br**sts. Her skin still tingled, still ached for him.

Before donning her nightgown, she sponged herself clean. Washing away the evidence of their lovemaking from between her legs, she tried not to notice how her sensitized skin reacted to her ministrations. Still, she wished it were Heath’s hands there.

Mortified at the wanton she had become, she flung the sponge back in the bowl and quickly covered her traitorous body with a nightgown. He’d be gone soon enough. Once she and Simon announced their engagement, Heath would see that they were well and truly finished.

She moved to extinguish the lamp but paused when she spotted the letter. Her mother’s letter.

A sigh welled up deep within her chest. Might as well read it. Releasing her sigh, she picked up the missive, bracing herself to hear all about her mother’s exploits abroad—places seen, people met, things done. Then the letter would end with the “wish” that Portia could be there to share in it all.

Unfolding the parchment, she skimmed her mother’s elegant, scrawling handwriting with a numb heart, feeling none of her former excitement and anticipation when reading such letters, so grateful for a glimpse into her mother’s life.

Her heart stopped beating altogether when she came to the end, to the words that suddenly took life and leapt off the page, instantly breaking from resembling all the previous letters she had received over the years.

Her fingers went limp and the letter fluttered to the floor, gentle as falling snow. She looked down, staring at the letter that lay there as innocuously as a forgotten handkerchief, a white smudge on the dark blue and green swirls in the threadbare carpet.

The words her mother had written struck her like a blow to the face, robbing her of breath, ripping at her heart.

I’ve married, my darling girl. He’s a wonderful man and we want you to join us in Athens.

Chapter 27

“Have you decided when we can announce our betrothal?”

Portia opened her mouth but no sound emerged.

Simon repeated himself.

Faced with the reality of becoming his wife, of allowing him the intimacies she had only shared with Heath—one word fell from her lips, “No.”

Portia frowned. How had that slipped from her lips? It had certainly not been her intention to reject his suit. She had hardly given Simon a thought until he had showed up for tea today. Her thoughts had been too wrapped up in Heath and the mother who had married—who finally remembered she had a daughter.

For years, Portia had lived in wait for such a letter, longing for the day her mother would want her, would turn her promise into a reality. Her mother had sent for her. At last. Just when Portia had ceased to hope. Except it didn’t matter. Portia no longer cared. She had been avoiding life, avoiding her duties and responsibilities for the sake of a dream. And now that the dream hovered within reach, she no longer wanted it. It was the dream of a girl, a little girl who had needed her mother. That girl no longer existed.