“Will it sound too odd if I admit I count myself relieved?”
“Of course you are,” he murmured, feeling foolish. “Whatever your mother may be guilty of, ‘tis certainly preferable to losing her. I apologize.”
“Yes, but that isn’t what I meant. I was going to do it, you see. I think I really was.”
“Do what?”
“Marry William.”
Henry’s shirt felt too tight at the thought of Alice marrying William, or anyone at all. (Except for … Henry.)
(Which, of course, was absurd, as that could never be.)
(Unless … But no, no, what was he thinking?)
But William! William. Alice Hull—who played music like she played for God himself, who frightened men double her in size, who kissed him like she wanted to sear herself inside his body—deserved better than the likes of William, who considered her a shop window and an inherited one at that.
“You care for him?” he forced himself to ask.
He went weak with relief when she sputtered out a mouthful of ale at the very notion of it.
“No. William’s a kind man, but I have more of a spark with Vicar Helmsley, if I’m honest. I considered it because we would not have been able to keep the house without my mother’s widow’s income, and I can’t very well bring Liza and Sally to Charlotte Street. I’ve been so sad thinking about the life I would have, married to him. So in a way, I am glad this happened. Because now my family know everything, and I’m free to do whatever I like.”
She slathered a piece of bread with butter and bit into it.
“And what will you do?” he asked.
“I’ll go back to Elena’s and finish my training.”
“Training?”
She nodded, chewing. “She wants me to specialize in discipline, but I don’t know. I might prefer the chapel.” She smiled wolfishly.
“The chapel?” he asked.
“Yes, the chapel. You recall—the one you ran away from?”
She clearly thought he was now ready to laugh at this, but he was not. He did not know what he wanted. To know more. To steal her ale and drink it down in a single gulp. To go outside and drive into the blinding rain, and away from this terrible feeling of wanting and loathing himself for wanting.
He coughed. “What is it that you would do in this … chapel?”
“It’s a bit like you wrote in your journal. Some members are excited by stern nuns, or lusty vicars. Others like the atmosphere itself. The sin of it.”
He felt like his cravat was actually trying to choke him. He knew she had read about his fantasies. He had not known she was training to fulfill them herself.
“Alice, I should not have asked. We mustn’t speak of this in public.”
She gave him a very feminine smile. “Very well, Henry,” she said primly. “Perhaps when I’ve done my training you can pay me a visit and we can speak of it in private.”
Now his breeches were choking him. He nearly fell on the serving girl in gratitude when she arrived with their plates, if only because it meant Alice would eat instead of tormenting him.
As they waited for the meal she chattered about this and that, her life in London, and he tried to listen, but his mind kept returning to what she’d said.
Between sentences she ate, heartily, in that way he’d become so fond of—fawning over each thing on her plate. As he picked meagerly at his own roast turnips and stewed beets, she looked meaningfully into his eyes.
“Don’t you ever get hungry, Henry?”
He frowned, surprised by the question, since she knew his diet.
“Vegetables and grains are very filling and nutritious, and I supplement them with milk and eggs.”
“But don’t you ever get hungry?” she repeated. “For more than you allow yourself?”
He put down his fork delicately, then looked up at her. “Alice, I’m always hungry for more than I allow myself.”
She flushed.
He realized she thought he was referencing what happened in the church.
(He was.)
She stared at him, as if coming to some resolve. “Then just for tonight, we must order you something delicious.”
She flagged the serving girl and asked for something sweet. He protested, but when an apple tart studded with currants and dusted with cinnamon arrived, she added extra cream and dug a fork into the center, taking the best part.
He liked the girlish way she licked cream off her fork, closing her eyes in delectation.
She caught him smiling. “I thought you disapproved of rich foods.”
“I do. For myself. But you deserve them.”
“And why is it that I deserve them but you do not?”
“Because I am a sensualist by nature, which goes against my principles. Even a small bit of indulgence and I find myself unchecked and sinning profligately. And so I must impose great discipline to live up to my ideals.”
This time, he was certain he was talking about what happened in the church.
Her face made clear that she knew it too.
“Alice, I’m so sorry.”
She stared at him, a tiny sliver of her tongue resting on a tine of her fork.
“Forgive me, for how I acted,” he continued babbling. “I wanted you, and it was rash, and I hope I didn’t—”
She looked into his eyes. “The only thing that I regret, Henry, is that we had to stop.”
She speared the fork into the dessert again and prepared a perfect bite, with fragrant tender apples, succulent currants, swirls of caramel sauce, and a dollop of cream so sweet he could smell its freshness across the table. She held it out to him.
“Take a bite,” she ordered.
“Alice…”
“I promise I won’t let you have more than you can bear.”
Something came over him, and instead of taking the utensil, he leaned in, opened his mouth, and ate from her outstretched fork.
He closed his eyes in ecstasy.
It had been so long since he’d consumed food of this richness—sugar and spice, warmth and fat, a hint of salt—all the things that made life delicious.
When he opened his eyes, she was staring at him, looking as hungry as he felt.
“Apple tart was always my favorite,” he confessed.
“Have a little more,” she whispered.
He wanted her to feed him, but he noticed an odd look from the innkeeper across the room and came to his senses. Instead, he took the fork from her, and fed himself just one more bite.
It was decadent, satisfying. It made him happy.
She smiled at him, pulled the dessert back across the table, and ate the last two bites.
“See,” she said. “You’re not in hell. Just a man who ate a bit of tart.”
He suspected they were no longer talking about tarts. “Are you evangelizing, Alice?”
“I just think you would do well, Henry, to accept that you cannot be sustained by prayer and deprivation. Everyone needs pleasure and joy. I know you get great fulfillment from your faith, but I wish you would not be so strict with yourself about all the lovely parts to life. Did God not create our bodies and our hearts for us to use them?”
“I wish it were that simple.”
She looked at him so sadly that he had to look away.
“I’m sure nothing is simple,” she said softly, “but I do believe you can be a good man without denying yourself everything. You are one, in fact.”
“Stop,” he whispered.
“Oh, Henry, I’m only saying—”
“Stop,” he repeated, louder.
He could not stand to listen to this because his self-denial was a part of who he was.
And until now, he could live with it.
There was only one thing he would regret denying himself, and she was sitting across the table. And he could not look at her any longer without saying something maudlin.
(Or worse: permanent.)
He rose abruptly to remove the temptation, and hi
s knees hit the top of the table painfully. He hissed, and watched a pitcher of cream overturn. A rivulet dripped onto the floor, a waste of sweetness.
Alice stared up at him like she knew exactly why he was leaving, and like she had expected him to do just that, and like it caused her pain.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m going out for air. I’ll collect a blanket from the innkeeper when I come back and try not to wake you. I might be late.”
Chapter 28
He cared for her.
She knew it from the way he ate that tart. From the way he had looked up at her, quick and unguarded, and said I’m always hungry for more than I allow myself.
She cared for him too.
She’d known it when he’d touched her in the church, so full of desire, and yet more gently than any man ever had before. She’d known it when his face had broken open when she’d told him he was good.
They cared for one another, and they wanted one another, and it would not change a thing.
He would never act upon it. She was just another sinful thing that he’d deny himself.
And it was a shame, for were it not for the central difference that stood unshakably between their ways of thinking, she could do far more than care for a man like Henry Evesham. She could love a man like that. A man who was so much more generous when it came to her than he was to himself. A man who tried so hard to be disciplined, despite wanting so badly the things he had forbidden himself.
But it didn’t matter whether she cared for, or loved, or wanted him because that single central difference between the way they saw the world may as well have been a continent. A mountain range. An ocean.
She had once asked Henry not to preach to her, and she would extend him the same courtesy. She would not try to convince him that his way of life—his deepest beliefs—were wrong.
She would not ask him to give them up for her.
The kindest thing, to him and to her, was not to give him any further hint of how she felt. To not let him see how he’d somehow nestled in her heart. To not tell him how deeply she desired him. For she was at a juncture in her life where she could not afford to be a sentimental creature. She must be a practical one. She must not focus on the heartache, but the lesson:
Henry Evesham was an educated man, from a wealthy family, with a great deal of responsibility and power. He could choose to have more than he would claim.
Having spent her life unable to claim anything by a simple act of will, to have such opportunity and not use it seemed a tragic waste.
She would not make the same choice.
Watching him eat a single bite of tart like a starving man—watching him look at her with hungry eyes as she offered him herself, and choose to run away instead of take it—she knew she must save herself from the same fate.
She would leave no uneaten scraps of tart upon the table.
She would return to London and take whatever risks she needed to build a life she would look back upon without regret.
She would not ask Henry Evesham to choose her. She would choose herself.
The freedom of this choice made her feel so weightless that she closed her eyes and laughed aloud in the silent, tiny room. She spun around and collapsed onto the bed, languid and light, imagining all the wonderful things that were ahead of her. She could work on Charlotte Street, write music, read books, take lovers.
Perhaps she would find someone who treated her as Henry did—or at least looked at her like Henry did—except, of course, without his air of being tortured by wanting what he saw. Someone who possessed his gentleness and his desire for her, but who would come to her without guilt or regret.
She ran her hands over her breasts and down her belly imagining they were that man’s hands.
Her body, which had been nothing so much as a repository for her sorrow and worry this past week, suddenly felt alive in all its particles.
She undressed to her chemise and luxuriated in the feeling of her own touch.
Oh, she needed this.
Henry Evesham’s body against hers had made her a festival of needs.
She closed her eyes and remembered the smell of the church. Beeswax polish on old wooden pews, the faint memory of smoke in the air from the candles he’d lit.
Henry, trembling and unsure and straining towards her.
His skin still cold and damp from the rain.
His body strong and sturdy, like he was made of oak.
She imagined Henry making love to her with unchecked abandon and it made her shiver. She hiked up her skirt and ran her fingers across her hips, then lower, toward her cunt, slick against her fingertips.
Oh, Henry. Henry.
She remembered the desperate sound that had emerged from his throat when he’d finally kissed her. The bulge of his cock, and how it had felt as she’d rubbed herself against it.
She wanted that feeling again.
She glanced around the room, looking for something that might feel the way he had felt before they’d been interrupted. There were four short, knobbed posts at each corner of the bed frame. Yes, that could do. She raised herself above one, so that the curved wood hit her right at the parting of her cunny. She held herself open and steadied herself against it, bracing her hand against the wall for balance.
Oh, yes. That was it.
She closed her eyes and rocked, wishing it was him beneath her. Them, together in this small dark room, frantic once again with their desire for each other.
She gave herself over to the fantasy, adding to the friction with her fingers. She wanted to moan with the pleasure, but she did not want to alert any passersby in the hallway to her activities within. The need to be silent made her arousal sharper and she gasped as the promise of an orgasm welled up inside her. She threw back her head and put her hand over her cunt, imagining Henry’s lips curving around a fork, desperate to go over the edge.
The first tremor took her and she gasped and bucked against the bedpost. As pleasure claimed her she couldn’t help but cry out into the darkness. She clasped her hand over her mouth and opened her eyes and the dimness in the room was broken by a flash of light from the hallway.
“Alice? Are you awake—”
She froze.
Henry Evesham stared at her, agape.
“What are you—” Henry asked in a strangled whisper. But it was rather obvious, as she was mounted on the bedpost with her hand clutched to her cunt.
“Oh God,” she cried, frantically rearranging herself and her limbs and her shift. In her haste to cover up her lower half she pulled her shift askew, exposing most of her breasts.
Henry stood silent and still in the shaft of light from the corridor, half inside the room, half out, looking as if he’d had a stroke.
In desperation she grabbed his arm and pulled him inside and shut the door behind him.
Which left her topless, holding him by his cravat in a tiny room that smelled of her desire.
“I thought you would be longer,” she said, turning around and fumbling to cover up, trying to still her ragged breath. “I thought you would be longer. You usually walk for miles. You said you would be late.”
“I came back for my satchel—I … no. No.”
Something in his voice made her pause. She stopped fumbling and turned back around to look at him.
“That’s not why I came back,” he said more quietly.
Slowly he reached out to her shoulder. Gently, ever so gently, he drew up the sleeve of her shift to cover up her breasts.
In her state, the feeling of the soft lawn falling against her nipples made her gasp. He noticed. She saw his eyes fall from her face down to her chest, to the peaks of her hard nipples beneath the sheer fabric. His lips parted.
“Why did you come back?” she asked him.
His gaze rested on her collarbone.
With his hand still lingering on her shoulder, he drew nearer, and placed a kiss in the shallow of her neck.
She stood completely still, unsure of what
was happening.
He finally looked into her eyes. “I came, Alice, because I needed to say this plainly, or I am false.”
Heat radiated from his skin, and he was trembling.
“I want you to be mine,” he whispered. “So much I’m sick with it.”
Chapter 29
He’d said it. Out loud.
It made him so weak with happiness that he took Alice in his arms and crushed her mouth to his and kissed her like she was all the things he’d ever given up.
“Henry,” she gasped out, pushing her palm against his sternum. “Henry, wait.”
He stopped, but he didn’t want to wait. He was starved for softness and pleasure and abandonment and all the things that were here in this small, dark room.
But mostly he was starved for Alice.
“What is it?” he gasped, wanting to consume her. Wanting to sink his teeth into her flesh, his nose into her hair, his cock into her—
“Henry, you must be certain,” she whispered, even as she lifted up his shirt and caressed his bare skin.
“Oh,” he whispered, at the lightness of her touch. “Oh.”
She melted against him like a pat of butter on hot toast. He kissed her at her beating pulse. Her fingertips dug into his hair, his scalp.
“Certain,” she gasped out, sentences as lost to her as words were lost to him.
But he had to find them, he had to say this, because the answer was yes, he was certain, so certain, no parenthetical.
“Alice, I’m sure. Be mine. Be mine.”
She lifted her shift over her head and dropped it to the floor and stood completely nude before him. Her breasts were like pale teacups capped with small, pretty nipples the color of a berry.
He leaned in and took one in his mouth, marveling at its firmness, at its heat. He was shocked at himself, but she did not seem to be. She sank back on the bed and pulled him down on top of her and he put his hands upon her breasts and found her mouth and kissed her like a starving brute.
Her hand clamped over his straining breeches and fumbled with buttons and then they were on his manhood and he hissed, for no hands save his own had ever touched that part of him.
The Lord I Left Page 19