Almost Heaven Read online

  He grinned at the contrast between her words and her voice. “I know.”

  “You might have told me.”

  “I hoped to surprise you.”

  More correctly, he had hoped she didn’t know, and now he had his proof: Just as he had thought, Elizabeth had agreed to marry him without knowing anything of his personal wealth. That expression of dazed disbelief on her face had been real. He’d needed to see it for himself, which was why he’d instructed his butler to bring her to him as soon as she arrived. Ian had his proof, and with it came the knowledge that no matter how much she refused to admit it to him or to herself, she loved him.

  She could insist for now and all time that all she wanted from marriage was independence, and now Ian could endure it with equanimity. Because she loved him.

  Elizabeth watched the expressions play across his face. Thinking he was waiting for her to say more about his splendid house, she gave him a jaunty smile and teasingly said, “Twill be a sacrifice, to be sure, but I shall contrive to endure the hardship of living in such a place as this. How many rooms are there?” she asked.

  His brows rose in mockery. “One hundred and eighty-two.”

  “A small place of modest proportions,” she countered lightly. “I suppose we’ll just have to make do.”

  Ian thought they were going to do very well.

  He finished his meeting a few minutes later and almost rudely ejected his business acquaintances from his library, then he went in search of Elizabeth.

  “She is out in the gardens, my lord,” his butler informed him. A short while later Ian strolled out the French doors and started down the balcony steps to join her. She was bending down and snapping a withered rosebud from its stem. “It only hurts for a moment,” she told the bush, “and it’s for your own good. You’ll see.” With an embarrassed little smile she looked up at him. “It’s a habit,” she explained.

  “It obviously works,” he said with a tender smile, looking at the way the flowers bloomed about her skirts.

  “How can you tell?”

  “Because,” he said quietly as she stood up, “until you walked into it, this was an ordinary garden.”

  Puzzled, Elizabeth tipped her head. “What is it now?”

  “Heaven.”

  Elizabeth’s breath caught in her chest at the husky timbre of his voice and the desire in his eyes. He held out his hand to her, and, without realizing what she was doing, she lifted her hand and gave it to him, then she walked straight into his arms. For one breathless moment his smoldering eyes studied her face feature by feature while the pressure of his arms slowly increased, and then he bent his head. His sensual mouth claimed hers in a kiss of violent tenderness and tormenting desire while his hands slid over the sides of her breasts, and Elizabeth felt all her resistance, all her will, begin to crumble and disintegrate, and she kissed him back with her whole heart.

  All the love that had been accumulating through the lonely years of her childhood was in that kiss—Ian felt it in the soft lips parting willingly for his searching tongue, the delicate hands sliding through the hair at his nape. With unselfish ardor she offered it all to him, and Ian took it hungrily, feeling it moving from her to him, then flowing through his veins and mingling with his until the joy of it was shattering. She was everything he’d ever dreamed she could be and more.

  With an effort that was almost painful he dragged his mouth from hers, his hand still cupping the rumpled satin of her hair, his other hand holding her pressed to his rigid body, and Elizabeth stayed in his arms, seeming neither frightened nor offended by his rigid erection. “I love you,” he whispered, rubbing his jaw against her temple. “And you love me. I can feel it when you’re in my arms.” He felt her stiffen slightly and draw a shaky breath, but she either couldn’t or wouldn’t speak. She hadn’t thrown the words back in his face, however, so Ian continued talking to her, his hand roving over her back. “I can feel it, Elizabeth, but if you don’t admit it pretty soon, you’re going to drive me out of my mind. I can’t work. I can’t think. I make decisions and then I change my mind. And,” he teased, trying to lighten the mood by using the one topic sure to distract her, “that’s nothing to the money I squander whenever I’m under this sort of violent stress. It wasn’t just the gowns I bought, or the house on Promenade . . .”

  Still talking to her, he tipped her chin up, glorying in the gentle passion in her eyes, overlooking the doubt in their green depths. “If you don’t admit it pretty soon,” he teased, “I’ll spend us out of house and home.” Her delicate brows drew together in blank confusion, and Ian grinned, taking her hand from his chest, the emerald betrothal ring he had bought her unnoticed in his fingers. “When I’m under stress,” he emphasized, sliding the magnificent emerald onto her finger, “I buy everything in sight. It took my last ounce of control not to buy one of these in every color.”

  Her eyes lifted from his smiling lips, dropped to the enormous jewel on her finger, and then widened in shock. “Oh, but—” she exclaimed, staring at it and straightening in his arms. “It’s glorious, I do mean that, but I couldn’t let you—really, I couldn’t. Ian,” she burst out anxiously, sending a tremor through him when she called him by name, “I can’t let you do this. You’ve been extravagantly generous already.” She touched the huge stone almost reverently, then gave her head a practical shake. “I don’t need jewels, really I don’t. You’re doing this because of that stupid remark I made about someone offering me jewels as large as my palm, and now you’ve bought one nearly that large!”

  “Not quite,” he chuckled.

  “Why, a stone like this would pay for irrigating Havenhurst and all the servants’ wages for years and years and years, and food to—”

  She reached to slide it off her finger. “Don’t!” he warned on a choked laugh, linking his hands behind her back. “I”—he thought madly for some way to stop her objections—“I cannot possibly return it,” he said. “It’s part of a matched set.”

  “You don’t mean there’s more!”

  “I’m afraid so, though I meant to surprise you with them tonight. There’s a necklace and bracelet and earrings.”

  “Oh, I see,” she said, making a visible effort not to stare at her ring. “Well, I suppose . . . if it was a purchase of several pieces, the ring alone probably didn’t cost as much as it would have . . . Do not tell me,” she said severely, when his shoulders began to shake with suppressed mirth, “you actually paid full price for all of the pieces!”

  Laughing, Ian put his forehead against hers, and he nodded.

  “It’s very fortunate,” she said, protectively putting her fingers against the magnificent ring, “that I’ve agreed to marry you.”

  “If you hadn’t,” he laughed, “God knows what I would have bought.”

  “Or how much you would have paid for it,” she chuckled, cuddling in his arms—for the first time of her own volition. “Do you really do that?” she asked a moment later.

  “Do what?” he gasped, tears of mirth blurring his vision.

  “Spend money heedlessly when you’re disturbed about something?”

  “Yes,” he lied in a suffocated, laughing voice.

  “You’ll have to stop doing it.”

  “I’m going to try.”

  “I could help you.”

  “Please do.”

  “You may place yourself entirely in my hands.”

  “I’m very much looking forward to that.” It was the first time Ian had ever kissed a woman while he was laughing.

  * * *

  The afternoon passed as if it were minutes, not hours, and he kept glancing at the clock, willing it to stop. When there was no way to avoid it, he escorted her out to her carriage. “I’ll see you in London tomorrow night at the ball. And don’t worry. It will be fine.”

  “I know it will,” she answered with complete confidence.

  27

  Five nights before, when she’d arrived at the Willingtons’ ball, she’d been terrifi