Apollo bent to kiss her shoulder and then took a corner of the sheet to tenderly wipe his seed off her belly and thighs. “May I stay?”
She sighed. “Yes, unless Moll returns before morning. I’d”—she licked her lips—“I’d like for you to stay.”
He smiled against her shoulder, ridiculously pleased.
Her hand reached up and he felt her fingers in his hair. “So they’re your family?”
He wasn’t sure he wanted to delve into the matter now—his blue blood seemed to dismay her. “Yes.”
She moved as if she were looking at him. “Are they all you have left?”
His head was on her shoulder and he concentrated on tracing around one rose-tinted nipple. “Besides my sister, yes.”
“She knew you were in the garden?”
“Artemis?” He finally cocked his head back so he could see her expression. She had a tiny frown between her brows. “Yes. She brought me food and clothes and other things when she could. It’s how Trevillion found me.”
“Found you?”
He sighed, abandoning the nipple with regret. “Trevillion was looking for me. He knew Artemis was my sister and he followed her until she led him to me one day. The day you saw us fight.”
“But…” The frown had grown deeper. “Why was he looking for you in the first place?”
His jaw clenched as a sudden shiver shook his frame. The fire had died down in the grate and the room was drafty. He got up, padding to the fireplace.
“Apollo?”
He closed his eyes. She’d stopped calling him Caliban and he didn’t want that. Didn’t want his past to rise up between them again.
He glanced over his shoulder to see that she’d sat up and pulled the coverlet over her breasts like a barrier between them. There was no help for it, then—it always came back to that wretched night. The night his life had been destroyed.
“Trevillion was the soldier who arrested me for the murders.”
Chapter Fourteen
From that day forth Ariadne found more and more skeletons, and for each one she stopped and respectfully prayed and scattered dust. As she neared the center of the labyrinth, she wondered what horrors awaited her there. But when, on the seventh day, the tall stone walls revealed their heart, she discovered something entirely unexpected…
—From The Minotaur
Lily watched Apollo. He squatted unselfconsciously nude at the hearth, stirring the fire. He was silhouetted in the firelight, powerful shoulders black and almost monstrous, narrowing to muscled hips and thighs. No wonder they’d thought him a murderer. No wonder they’d taken one look at such a big man and been afraid.
But was that entirely what had happened? He’d told her little, and what else she’d heard was from snippets of gossip and newssheets. Trevillion was the soldier who had arrested him, but now that same man was working to prove him innocent. There were gaps in her knowledge and she was tired of secondhand information.
She cleared her throat, the sound loud in the silence. “Can you tell me what happened that night?”
He’d been about to lay a scoop of coal on the fire, and at her words, he paused for a fraction of a second before continuing. He rose, dusting his hands, broad back hunched, the flames reflecting off the sheen of his skin. He turned his head so that she could see his profile, large nose, prominent forehead, craggy lips and chin.
“You have to understand,” he said quietly. “I was young. Four and twenty. That might not seem so very young to you, but I’d spent most of my life in schooling. First at Harrow, where my grandfather paid for my education, and then Oxford. When I came to London I had a very small stipend from the earl, delivered through his lawyers. I spent it drinking and wenching, mostly.”
He turned at last, though she still couldn’t see his features.
“That’s what men of my rank do. They spend money and drink. They don’t labor—even if their family might be starving.”
“Was your family starving?” she asked sharply.
He shook his head immediately. “No. But neither did they have very much to live on. My father had gone through nearly all the money he’d had and the earl refused to give him more. My sister and mother lived very simply in the country because of it. Artemis never had a season, nor a dowry.” He began walking toward the bed. “But I grew weary of the aimless days, the expectation of nothing. I was supposed to live my life waiting for the old earl to die.”
She couldn’t imagine him—so physically and mentally active—consigned to waiting on another’s death.