Page 32 of Along Came a Rogue

“Oh yes,” she sighed in a long exhalation, no longer bothering to hide her enjoyment. Her head sagged forward, and with his thumbs, he massaged the back of her neck and rubbed out the tension. Oh, this was nice…very nice.

He took her shoulders and eased her back against the tub, then reached for her arms to leisurely wash each one. Despite the heat of the steam drifting up from the water, she shivered as his soapy hands rubbed down her arm to her hand, then tantalizingly along each finger.

“You’re barely showing at all now, but you wouldn’t have been able to hide the baby much longer.” He gently lowered her left arm into the water and reached for the right, then started all over with the delightfully slippery caresses. Everywhere he touched, goose bumps dotted across her skin in his wake. “If someone was watching you, they’d have soon known.”

Her soft admission came as a breathless sigh. “I had a plan.”

“Of course, you did,” he murmured.

She thought she heard a touch of amused admiration in his voice, but all logical thought was driven from her mind at the wickedly scandalous feel of his hands slipping down under the water to reach for her leg, to begin the sweet torture of washing down her thigh and calf to her foot. She bit her tongue to keep back another soft sigh of pleasure, not wanting him to think her a complete wanton for enjoying a simple bath this much. But that was exactly how she felt, and she liked it immensely.

“Yardley has a sister in Glasgow who owns a dress shop. I was planning to go there, change my name—” She caught her breath when he ran his fingers between her toes. Oh, how much she liked that! If he kept that up…She licked her lips and forced out, “She was going to take care of me until the baby arrived. If it was a girl, I would have gone back to London to be with my family.”

“But if it was a boy,” he murmured, his hands moving to her other leg, his fingers gently kneading along her calf to her knee, “he’d be the heir to a marquessate.”

“Then we’d have stayed in Scotland, and no one would ever have known.”

His hands paused in their caresses. “You would have denied him his birthright?”

“Yes.” If it meant saving her son’s life, she would have done exactly that. This baby meant the world to her, and she would sacrifice everything to keep him safe.

“You would have had to live a lifetime of secrets,” he mumbled. “Could you have done that?”

“You have.” She opened her eyes to find him staring at her, his chocolate-brown depths warm and arousing in the firelight. “Your entire life has been a lie.”

* * *

Grey froze, his heart stopping for a fearful beat. His hand stilled against her body beneath the water.

What she implied was impossible for her to know. Impossible. He’d covered his tracks too well over the years for anyone to figure out the truth. Not even Edward Westover and Thomas Matteson. And especially not some society chit living in Yorkshire whom he hadn’t seen in five years.

Yet somehow, she knew. In the stormy blue pools of her eyes, as she waited patiently for him to let down his pretenses so they could truly be themselves with each other, he could see the truth. But there was no judgment on her face, no disdain, no pity—he thanked God for that, because he didn’t think he’d have been able to bear any condemnation for the way he’d chosen to live his life. Not from her. For some reason he couldn’t name, what Emily thought of him mattered.

He sat back on his heels, drawing his hand out of the water. “I’m just an army officer. No secret there.”

“Perhaps not,” she said quietly. “But what were you before?”

“Younger,” he quipped. Ignoring the sudden tightening of unease in his chest, he curled his lips into a half grin, the smile he used whenever he wanted to get his way with a woman.

But when she frowned like a governess, his grin faded. He should have known charm wouldn’t work on this one, not that he needed any more proof that Emily Crenshaw wasn’t an ordinary woman.

“Who I was doesn’t signify,” he stalled, hoping she would let the matter drop.

But of course, she didn’t. “It does to me.” She reached for his hand, and the warmth of her touch shivered through him. “Who are you, Nathaniel Grey?”

A forced shrug of his shoulders. “Just the runaway son of a blacksmith.”

“From Trovesbury Village,” she added flatly.

“Yes.”

Her eyes saddened, and he felt the force of her disappointment as fiercely as if she’d slapped him. “There is no blacksmith in Trovesbury named Grey. There never has been.” She laced her fingers through his, as if she could sense in him an urge to flee. “When Thomas told us you’d been wounded, I tried to write to your parents, to assure them that you had friends in our family and that we would do whatever we could to help.”

Oh God. His world began to rock beneath him.

“Even though the letters were franked, they weren’t received, so I contacted the local constable for help.” Her eyes fell to their two hands, her soft fingers interlocked with his rough ones, and humiliation curled through him. “He told me that there were no blacksmiths named Grey, not in Trovesbury, not in the entire county.” She took a deep breath. “Thomas doesn’t know. I haven’t told anyone. It’s your secret, after all—”

“Yes, it is,” he snapped.