Free The Virtuoso by Grace Burrowes Page B

a decent woman, he realized they needed to have this conversation and be done with it.
    He could get her rejection of him behind them, and they could set about being cordial neighbors through their shared wood, just as if they’d never kissed. Were his hand not crippled—he hadn’t wanted to admit to that word previously—he might at some point be offering for her instead. She was gently bred, a lady to the bone, and sexually attractive to him on a level beyond the superficial easing of lust.
    But he was a cripple, and the longer he went without playing the piano, the more he experienced his disability as emotional as well as physical. He’d been right to tell Darius the piano was how he’d had a soul. How he’d known himself to possess a soul.
    â€œYou are looking to dally,” Ellen said softly, bringing Val’s thoughts back to the present.
    â€œI am looking to share pleasure,” Val replied, hoping it was true. God above, what if he couldn’t even please a woman anymore? With his arm around her and her fragrance wafting to his nose among the myriad floral scents, his strongest urge was not to lay her down and bury himself inside her.
    It was to hold her close and learn the feel of her under his hands, to offer himself to her for her own stroking and petting and caressing. To take his time and learn how to pay attention to her as carefully as he’d attend a fascinating piece of new music.
    â€œI have not your sophistication,” Ellen said, her head back on his shoulder. “Physically, I was married. I comprehend for men certain acts are more profoundly pleasurable than they are for women. Emotionally…”
    â€œAh.” Val’s hand stroked over her spine and rested on her shoulder so his thumb could caress her nape. “I will protect your privacy, Ellen, and your good name.” And he would show her when it came to certain acts , women could experience more pleasure than any man could endure.
    â€œAnd if I conceive?”
    â€œI will provide for you and the child.” It was the answer required of a gentleman to a lady without a reputation to protect, and it sat ill with him. “If you demanded it, I would marry you.”
    â€œI would not demand marriage,” Ellen said on a sigh. “I was married for five years and could not give my husband a child.” There was such sadness in her voice, such surrender in the way she rested against him, Val knew in her single, quiet sentence she was hiding a story with an unhappy ending.
    â€œYou wanted children.”
    â€œDesperately. Francis needed an heir, and I was his choice as wife. I could not produce even one son for him.”
    â€œFrancis was your husband, and you loved him.”
    â€œI did.” Ellen seemed to grow smaller as she leaned against him. “Not well enough, not soon enough, but I did. I would have done anything to provide him the children it was my duty to give him.”
    Val stroked her back, feeling his heart constrict painfully—for her. “Sometimes we are denied our fondest wish.”
    â€œHe was a good man.”
    â€œTell me about him,” Val urged, his hand returning to her neck. If there was etiquette involved with a prospective lover asking about a late spouse, he neither knew nor cared about it. Apparently, neither did she.
    â€œAs Baron Roxbury, Francis held one of the oldest titles short of the monarchy,” Ellen began, “but he wasn’t pompous or pretentious. I didn’t know him well when we married, but I thought him such a prig at first. He was merely shy and uncertain how to deal with a wife nearly half his age.”
    Baron Roxbury? Val held still, kept up his easy caresses on Ellen’s back, and absorbed the fact that he had propositioned the Baroness Roxbury on her own back steps. What was she doing rusticating like a tenant farmer’s widow when she held such a title?
    â€œYou must have been very