“I love you too, Ellen,” he murmured, feeling elated and sheepish at the same time, as he gazed into her eyes at extraordinarily close proximity. “I…I think I’ve always loved you, from the moment we met, but I was…unfamiliar with the feeling.”
Ellen giggled and wriggled so that she could embrace him more fully with her arms and legs. “You were frightened of the feeling, silly,” she told him, brushing a lock of sweat-damp hair back from his forehead.
Joseph let out a bashful sigh and dropped his head to her shoulder for a moment before peeking up at her. “Sorry. I’ve just never met anyone like you. I’ve never felt this way about anyone before.”
He felt that statement all the way to the core of his being. There was no one in the world like Ellen, and if it was the last thing he did, he would take care of her the way she deserved to be taken care of.
With a renewed strength and sense of purpose, he levered himself above her. Instead of letting himself wallow in sheepishness at all the things he’d probably done wrong his first time—and honestly, if he’d known it was going to feel that good, he might have been tempted to partake of such things much sooner—then again, he couldn’t imagine doing any of that with anyone but Ellen—instead of feeling embarrassed and young, he gazed down at her with the love a man felt for his woman. She deserved the best, and that began with him.
“Ellen, I know this question has been long overdue—”
She sucked in a breath and her blue eyes went wide and sparkled with the light of a perfect summer day as she gazed up at him.
“Ellen Garrett, would you do me the honor of—”
“Good God, what is going on in here?”
Joseph was shocked half out of his mind by Francis’s sudden, loud question coming from the doorway.
All at once, he realized that he and Ellen were still in a deeply compromised position. He had slipped away from her at some point, but they were still in extraordinarily intimate contact. Ellen’s leg on the side where Francis stood was exposed all the way up to her hip, and her bodice and corset were completely undone, leaving her breasts bared. He wasn’t much better himself. Somehow, his pajama top had been removed during the course of their activities, and his bottoms were bunched around his knees.
Francis was a man of the world. He knew what had happened. Of that Joseph had no doubt. What made Joseph want to disappear into the sofa and take Ellen with him to avoid embarrassment was the grin Francis was trying to hide behind a look of mock disapproval. Did his brother actually find the mortifying situation funny?
“You know very well what is going on here,” Joseph growled at him, doing the best he could to shield Ellen from his brother’s gaze. “Be a gentleman and turn around so that I can protect Miss Garrett’s modesty.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” Francis said, clearly trying not to laugh.
He did as Joseph had told him and turned to face the other way, but the smug bastard didn’t leave. Joseph peeled away from Ellen gingerly, catching a brief, erotic glimpse of all the parts of her body he’d been so eager to touch and join with that he hadn’t actually looked at. Ellen grinned and swept a gaze over his nakedness as well, the same sort of curiosity after the fact that he felt in her eyes. They would have to find another occasion to peruse each other’s bodies and to learn all the things they should have learned before rushing into what they’d done.
But that was not something he wished to think about at that moment.
“You could go away,” he told Francis with a frown as he set to work helping Ellen cover herself, then tugging up his pajama bottoms, retying the drawstring, then searching around for his top. Where had the bloody thing gone?
“Oh, no,” Francis said with a shake of his head. “After what I’ve just witnessed, I believe it’s time you and I had a particular talk. You too, I’m afraid, Miss Garrett.”
Ellen winced a bit at Joseph, as if to communicate she knew they were both in trouble.
“What are you doing here anyhow?” Joseph said, straightening himself enough to stand and fetch his robe from where it had landed on the floor by the far end of the sofa. “I thought you and Priya were still in Lisbon.”
“We returned late last night,” Francis said, peeking over his shoulder to see what state they were all in. “I’m surprised you did not hear us come in.”
Joseph scowled. He’d had a busy day hunting Montrose and had gone to bed early, exhausted. “I was asleep,” he said.
Thoughts of Montrose and everything he’d discovered about the man and the dire situation their enemy had gotten himself into reenergized Joseph. He took a step toward his brother.
But before he could say anything or reveal all the work he’d done while Francis was away, Francis turned to face him and Ellen—who had righted her appearance and now sat primly on the sofa, hands clasped in front of her, cheeks bright red with embarrassment—and took charge.
“You know there must be consequences to this behavior,” he said, suddenly every bit the eldest brother.
Joseph frowned, not liking where Francis was heading with his statement. “It was never intended to go without consequences,” he said, though he hated referring to the fact that he had quite literally had a proposal for Ellen on his lips when his brother had walked in as “consequences”.
Francis nodded once, clasped his hands behind his back in an unconscious imitation of their father that sent a sick twist through Joseph’s stomach, then said, “The two of you will marry, of course.”
Joseph let out a heavy breath, as though Francis had punched him in the gut. He glanced back to Ellen, who wore a sympathetic look of hope, then back to his brother. In one casually uttered sentence, Francis had robbed him of what could have been the sweetest moment of his life. He’d turned what should have been a loving proposal, a promise to give his all to Ellen and to share his life with her, into something seedy and contractual, a result of bad behavior.
“Yes, of course,” he said, shifting restlessly. He wasn’t certain whether he wanted to tell his brother to go away or whether he wanted to walk over to the man and slap him for being so rude and callous about something that felt wonderful and world-changing to him. “I was quite literally in the process of proposing when you interrupted.”
He glanced back to Ellen again, appealing to her with his eyes to believe his statement and to feel the intensity of what he felt for her.