“Take off your coat and use it as a blanket,” she said. “It’s warmer that way.”
He removed it, shivering at the onslaught of the chill.
Alice lifted up the edge of her own cloak. “Here, come join me for warmth. We’ll share.”
He wanted to weep at how soft and warm her ermine looked, how her body must be just as soft and warm beneath it.
Which meant he must resist.
“I’m sorry, Alice,” he said, drawing his coat over his own body and turning away from her. He turned his back and closed his eyes.
But sleep did not come to him. He was so cold that his fingers and toes ached, so cold that the coldness felt like a pain spread out inside his body. Beside him, Alice’s teeth were chattering noisily. Every time a gust of snowy wind blew in from the window, she shivered violently and swore.
Was she right? Was he allowing decorum to get in the way of the larger Christian duty towards protecting life and health? Perhaps he was, or perhaps he was just too cold to care.
(The latter.)
“God forgive me,” he muttered. “Come here, Alice Hull.”
He lifted up his coat and she scurried under it, lodging herself under his arm.
Such soft, plush, warmth, her body. She curved against him the way a snail fit to its shell, perfectly spooned within the contours of his larger frame. He draped her cloak over the layer of wool, and since they were already long past the point of decency, drew her to him with all his strength to help warm her.
She burrowed herself into him as tightly as she could. “You could have done this an hour ago, you wretched man.”
“Don’t remind me of my failed convictions or I might change my mind.”
(He would not change his mind. Having her in his arms was far, far better than freezing alone on the floor.)
He closed his eyes and she shifted sleepily against him.
But he still did not fall asleep. For now that he was not so cold he was in pain, the pleasure of her next to him did not feel purely comforting.
It felt dangerous.
All he could feel or think or see was her—the rising and falling of her chest as she breathed, the occasional shivers that went through her when the wind picked up through the broken window. The smell of woodsmoke that wafted from her hair.
He was no longer tired.
His exhaustion, he realized with rising dread, had been replaced with a more troublesome sensation: the stirring of his groin.
Cretin.
He tried to edge away from Alice, to put some modicum of distance between them, but she groaned in protest and snuggled back.
With horror, he felt his cock thickening.
You gutter-bred, Devil-cursed wretch, he imagined her saying if she noticed.
How could he produce such a state amidst this bitter cold?
He edged away again, praying she was too lost to slumber to feel the hardness that exposed his shame. But every time he moved away, she grumbled and shivered and restored the distance.
The fourth or fifth time he tried to move aside, she reached behind her and clamped his leg down over her haunches with her bony little fingers. Surprising strength she had, for such a tiny person.
“Henry,” she said wearily. “I know you have a cockstand. I don’t care. It’s the natural reaction when a young man lies with a woman, particularly a young man who perhaps is not accustomed to such practice. I am very cold, and I would much rather feel your cock poking me than freeze to death.”
He did not know what to say.
Some part of him was relieved that she had simply addressed the problem. Some other part of him wanted to climb out of the nest they’d made and run into the cold and freeze to death in a snowdrift.
He held himself stiff, barely daring to breathe, for in truth his breath was coming more quickly due to the surging of his desire and he did not want her to perceive how bad a state he was truly in.
He prayed for his cock to go down like he had never prayed for anything before.
Instead, the bugger surged to life, pulsing about inside his breeches, leaking. The trail it left was wet against his belly—a cold reproach.
The third time it twitched against her he could not stand to ignore it in silence.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, scarcely getting the words out around his acute embarrassment. “I don’t mean to it’s just … happening.”
“Henry,” she sighed, squeezing his shoulder, which did not help at all. “Nothing you wish to tell me about cocks would surprise me. I spend my days wiping their leavings from the floors. I’ve seen them swell at all manner of things. Don’t worry. Just hold me and try not to freeze.”
But he couldn’t, for his wretched, hungry organ was pulsing rudely at the pressure of her hand innocently patting his back, and the notion of her familiarity with the state that he was in.
She laughed softly and shifted her buttocks to better accommodate the space so insistently claimed by his erection, which made him groan involuntarily.
He was going to die of embarrassment or lust, he did not know which.
She sighed with what sounded curiously like sympathy. “If you need to attend to yourself to be comfortable I don’t mind. I won’t watch.”
He stopped breathing. Was she suggesting—
“No!” he said in a strangled voice.
She inhaled, as if in understanding. “Aye, I suppose you’d need your hand for that.”
Before he could sputter a response, she moved her own hand to his stomach, touching him lightly over his shirt. “I could satisfy you, if it would help,” she said in a voice that was more amiable than seductive. “Perhaps then you could sleep?”
His brain disappeared in a puff of smoke, filling his head with ash. He was nothing but the throbbing beneath his hips, the nerves that rippled at the light pressure of her fingers on the cotton between their skin.
He lurched backward. “Have mercy, Alice,” he sputtered out, “not to speak of such things.” He’d be cursed with remembering this agony for months. Years.
“Just thinking of your comfort,” she said in a frank tone, as though the situation was entirely unremarkable.
“Alice! Please, don’t speak of this. I am celibate. I told you that.”
She went quiet, allowing him to focus more intently on his exquisite humiliation.
“You mean you don’t even touch yourself?” she whispered, after a long pause.
“No!”
“Never?”
“Do you?” he parried miserably, to end this conversation, wanting to disappear.
She laughed softly. “Nightly.”
His question had not been serious. He was not even aware women did such things. His cock lurched violently at this idea, and to his horror a sound left his throat that was something like a moan.
“Oh, you poor man,” she chuckled. “No wonder your cock is flopping around like a dying weevil. You must be in agony. How have you not gone mad?”
“Please let’s not discuss this,” he said, for his cock was indeed now in such a state that if she moved any closer to him it might erupt, and if that were to happen he would never, ever be able to look at her again.
(And yet an evil, treacherous part of him wanted to discuss this. A vulgar, sinful part of him delighted in the idea of Alice Hull doing such a thing—touching herself. He wanted to know how and when she did it and what she thought about and—)
He wanted her so much. So bloody much.
“Very well, Reverend,” she said. “But I hate to see you suffer on my account.”
“Of course I would not dishonor you like that,” he croaked in the rough, shattered remains of his voice. “Or myself.”
“Dishonor? I think when someone wishes to give or receive such a favor, it can be quite an honor.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, genuinely baffled.
“I mean it’s flattering, to be wanted. Or tended to, when one is in a state of need. It’s the closest thing we common
folk get to being royalty. There’s no reason to fear such things, Henry.”
“You … do this. Exchange … favors?”
“Mmm,” she said, in sleepy affirmation. “There’s plenty of lovely favors that don’t lead to trouble for a girl. I could tell you about them, if you want.”
He shifted about and pressed his cock into the floor, to keep himself sane.
“A bit of touching, tender, between the legs,” she provided, her voice slightly breathy. “Kissing those wanting parts. It can’t be too grave a sin, I’d think. Just harmless fun that leaves one feeling like a princess.”
Her voice was so husky that he wondered if she was touching herself as she said this. At the thought, his thighs began to tremble. Oh no. Oh no. A low moan burst from his throat as, without so much as a touch from either of their hands, his seed began to flow. “God forgive me,” he whispered, his hand over his mouth.
He shook, unable to stop the emission, unable to silence his shaking breath.
He was coming and she was right beside him, her shoulder beneath his arm, and surely, surely she must know.
“You know, Henry,” she said in a tender, sleepy voice. “I used to think lust was a plague. I used to lie awake with it night after night, wondering what was wrong with me. But I’ve come to see there’s no affliction in relieving it. It always makes me feel so much better.”
She knew he had just erupted right beside her, touching her, and she was telling him not worry about it. He said nothing, furtively wiping away the emission with his shirt as best he could, hating himself for the fact that he did, in fact, feel better, now that the agony had ended.
“Anyway, Henry Evesham,” she whispered. “I shall not corrupt you further with my wicked tongue. But I might have enjoyed the chance.”
He did not answer her, for he was reciting prayers in his own head.
Asking his savior why it was that if Alice Hull confessing her most private secrets to him was devilry, it had felt so much like grace.
Chapter 22
“Alice.”
Alice awoke on a cold, hard floor to a bright morning and Henry Evesham murmuring her name. She groaned, and kept her eyes shut tight against the light. She felt Henry move nearer, crouching over her.
Touch me.
His fingers brushed her shoulder. Yes.
“Alice?”
She fluttered open her eyes, just enough to see his face, and lifted up her arms. Get down here and make me warm.
But he moved away without acknowledging her invitation, moving about like nothing at all was different between them.
Like nothing had been whispered, nothing stoked, the night before.
She felt all at once unpleasantly awake.
“Time to rise,” Henry chattered, rummaging about. “Are you hungry? I found a dry log in the shed for a fire. I’m going to make porridge.”
She sat up and wiped her eyes. He made a triumphant noise and turned around, brandishing a single silver spoon.
“There is only one. But better than eating with our hands.”
She hunched inside her cloak, breathing into her palms for warmth, as he poured oats into a pot of melting snow and stirred his concoction over the tiny blaze. When it was cooked, he came and presented her the pot, filled with beige mush, and the single spoon. “For the lady.”
He sat down opposite her. She dug the spoon into the porridge and took a bite. She tried not to wince. It was very hot and very bland.
“Delicious,” she said, trying to force the flavorless mush down her throat.
Henry chuckled at the look on her face. “Normally I make it with milk and a bit of salt.”
“No wonder you decline spiced buns and kippers, with tasty fare like this at the ready.”
She forced down another bite, then pushed the pot across the floor to him. “All yours. Thank you.”
He took a bite and winced. “Not my finest, effort I’ll admit.”
“Better than starvation,” she allowed. “But only slightly.”
He ate a few more bites, then pushed the pot away and looked into her eyes.
“Alice, I’m sorry for last night.”
Ah, so he was going to acknowledge it.
She shook her head. “There is nothing to apologize for.”
“Oh, I think there is,” he sighed. “You are … That is, around you, I feel… ,” he looked at her, then down at his hands. “Quite a bit too much for my own good, it seems.”
The yearning in his eyes made her want to cry. Made her want to take him in her arms.
But he was not professing the kind of sentiment that invited more affection. He spoke in a tone that made clear his desire for her was an unwanted temptation to which he had succumbed.
She understood. She did not wish to want him either. The chasm that ran between their ways of thinking was too deep to ever be breached in any satisfying way. She wanted a man who wanted her affection and her lust. Not a lover whose judgment—of her or of himself—she had to fear when morning came.
Still, she wanted him to know he had not been alone. She was not remotely innocent. Every word she’d said to him in the dark had been deliberate. Every intake of his breath, every tremor of his body, she had felt like it was hers.
“Henry, if I spoke too boldly to you last night, then I’m sorry, too. I was caught up in the moment, and perhaps I imagined … You see, you make me feel quite a bit as well.”
She hoped he understood, in his modest way, that what she really meant was: I wanted you. My body does not reveal its want as unmistakably as yours does but if it did, you would understand that even now, I am alive with it.
She sensed he did understand, for his mouth opened, and then shut. A fierce red flushed at the center of each cheek, and he looked down at his lap. “It was not your fault, given my excitement. I’ve been … wrestling with things, desires, and I …” He lowered his voice. “I am flattered that you felt the same.”
I know all about it, Henry, she wanted to say. How it feels to burn. The only difference between them was that she no longer believed in the merits of burning. Life was short and often brutal. To suffer willfully—to deprive oneself of easy, harmless pleasures—struck her as a waste of breath.
She reached across the table and took his uninjured hand. “No shame in it, Henry Evesham, to be alive. To want things.”
“Thank you,” he said softly. “If things were different … well, you are lovely, Alice.”
Oh, she would miss him. She would miss him so much that the sadness of it almost left her breathless.
Get accustomed to it. There are many things you long for you will have to live without.
She stood up quickly. “I’ll gather my things so we can go. “
She set about picking up the gowns she’d slept on and rolling them up, so she didn’t have to look at him. When she turned around he had retrieved her satchel and held it open for her to stuff the gowns back into it.
“One minute,” she said, trying to jam them into a smaller ball so that they’d fit.
His eyes shifted down inside the bag, and his expression changed. She followed his gaze, and realized what he was looking at.
A book bound in brown leather.
Her heart dropped to her toes. The only thing she could think to do was to pretend she hadn’t noticed what he’d seen, and hope he’d assume he was mistaken. But he reached inside her bag and grabbed the book.
“Henry,” she said quickly, but he had opened the book to confirm his suspicions and was now staring at his own writing.
He looked up at her, stricken. “Alice, what—” He shook his head, like he was searching for words.
She had no earthly idea of what to say. How could she possibly explain? “I didn’t,” she sputtered. “You see—I—that is—”
“You have my journal,” he stated, like he was trying to make himself understand that this was true. “You have my journal.”
“I picked it up by mistake,” she said feebly. “I didn’t
even know it was yours. I only realized yesterday.”
“Have you read this?” he asked, holding it up with his good hand, which was shaking.
“No!” she said. But that was not true.
“Yes,” she admitted, more softly.
He regarded her like she was a snake.
“I was going to give it back. I was just trying to think how to explain why I came to have it, and—”
“You should have returned it the instant you found it, unread,” he shouted. “This is private. This is personal. Aren’t your people the ones always going on about trust? Discretion?”
She didn’t know what to say. He was exactly right. She should have done so. But it would have made them both uncomfortable and made her look like a thief or a blackmailer, and she had not wanted to fall in his esteem. She’d decided returning the book to Elena’s would be the most elegant way around the whole mess.
He looked up at her, his cheeks on fire. “Is this why you offered to touch me last night? Because you know about my—”
“No!” she cried. “I wanted you before I read it.”
He froze. She realized she’d just said directly the thing they’d talked around with such tortured vagueness. She decided to tell the truth.
“When I realized it was yours, it just made me want you more.”
He put the book in his own satchel, looking disgusted. “Come,” he said tersely. “Let’s go.”
Chapter 23
Henry drove slowly but determinedly down the road, occasionally stopping to remove tree branches that had fallen in the storm, ignoring Alice’s protests about his hand.
He invited the pain. He welcomed anything that might distract him from his thoughts.
From her presence beside him.
From the drive, which should have taken less than an hour, but took two.
During those two hours, he did not say a single word to Alice. The closer they got to Fleetwend, the more miserable he felt. The sharpness of his anger had settled into something more like a weight around his heart.
It hurt him, that she’d done this. It hurt.
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