This Wicked Gift (Carhart 0.5)

“William.” She touched his shoulders tentatively, as if he were the one who needed comfort. As if even his vile penetration could not shake her absurd trust in the world. And so he took her, thrusting into her. She clenched around him, the walls of her passage tight around his erection. She brought her hips up to his. And by God, that heat, that pulsing heat that wrapped around him, that cry she gave—it couldn’t have been. She could not have come. But she had, and then he was pumping into her, loosing his seed into her womb and crying out himself, hoarsely.

As his orgasm faded and his mind cleared of lust, he realized what a despicable man he was. He’d taken her like an animal. Oh, she’d let him—but what choice had he left her? He should have stopped. He should have let her go. Instead, he’d been so intent on himself that he hadn’t cared what she wanted at all. He was as sorry a specimen as had ever been seen.

He pulled out of her and sat on the edge of the bed, his back to her.

The mattress sagged as she rearranged her weight. “William,” she said.

He could not bring himself to turn around and see what he’d done. Would her eyes reflect the betrayal of trust?

“William,” she said. “You must look at me. I have something to tell you.”

He knew already what a despicable blackguard he was. He’d taken her virginity, and damn, he’d enjoyed it. But everything had a price, and the price of William’s physical enjoyment would be this: her cold censure, and a speech that he hoped would cut him to ribbons. He deserved worse. And so he turned.

There was no judgment in her eyes—just a quiet, unfathomable serenity.

“When I told you my brother was not yet one-and-twenty,” she said, “I did not intend to engage your sympathies. I was trying to point out that he is legally an infant. He is incapable of forming a contract. That promissory note is unenforceable.”

William’s mind went blank. Instead of thoughts, his head seemed to fill with water from the bottom of a lake—chilled liquid, dwelling where light could not filter.

“You had nothing to coerce me with,” she continued. “You could not have done. No magistrate would have compelled my brother to pay the debt.”

Her words skipped like stones over the surface of his thoughts. Hadn’t he coerced her? He was sure he’d forced her into his bed. He deserved her condemnation. Damn it, he wanted it.

Instead, he was as empty as the wick of a candle that had just been extinguished. “Oh,” he said. That one bare word didn’t seem enough, so he added another. “Well.” Other thoughts flitted through his mind, but they were also single syllables, and rather the sort that could not be uttered in front of a member of the gentler sex. Even if he had treated her in a most ungentle manner.

There was a vital difference between lust and love. It had been lust—desperate lust for her body—that had brought him to this point. Lust did not care about the loss of a woman’s virtue. Lust did not care if a woman’s feelings were wounded. Lust howled, and it wanted slaking. It didn’t give a fig as to how the deed was accomplished. Lust was a beast, and one he’d nurtured well with a decade of resentment.

William thought of his four pounds ten a quarter—eighteen pounds per year of drudgery—and of the many years ahead of him while he garnered the recognition and the recommendations he would need so that he could one day become a man who earned…what, twenty-three pounds a year? He thought of the hole in Lavinia’s glove, and her brother asking when she’d last had a new dress.

“Lavinia,” he said carefully, “I don’t deserve such a gift.”

“Nobody gets gifts because he deserves them.” She stood up and shook out her wrinkled chemise. “You get gifts because the giver wants to give them.”

She wasn’t arguing. She wasn’t throwing herself at him. She wasn’t weeping and carrying on. If she had done any of those things, he could have borne it. But she exuded a calm, cool competence that lay entirely outside William’s understanding.

“I can’t support a wife,” he continued. “And even if I could, I’m not the man for you, Lavinia.”

She reached for her dress. “I knew that the minute you tried to coerce me into your bed.”

He shifted and fixed his gaze past her on the blighted tree outside his narrow window. “Then why did you agree to it? You had no need.”

She had not trembled when he’d threatened her, when he’d made his horrible proposition. She had not shivered, not even when he’d claimed her body. But her hands betrayed the tiniest of tremors as she fastened her dress and reached for her cloak.

“No need? You said that everything worthwhile had a price. You were wrong. You are absolutely and without question the most completely misinformed man in all of creation. Everything really worth having,” she said, “is free.”

“Free?”

“Given,” she said, “without expectation of return.” And she looked up at him, a fierce light in her eyes. “I wanted to show you.”

That clear trust in her eyes was unbroken yet. He’d taken her virginity. How had she managed to keep her innocence?

“I have no notion what love is,” he told her, almost in a panic. “None at all.”