Unclaimed

by Courtney Milan

  Over the past seven years, her desires, her wants, had been submerged in the service of the men who’d paid for her. It had been years since she’d owned her own sexual response.

  It wasn’t an intelligent thing, what she did now.

  It was one thing to tempt him. It was another, entirely, to tempt herself, to fool her heart and her desires into focusing not on his seduction, but on him. Still, she couldn’t help but revisit that kiss. That moment of startled intensity, when he’d looked into her eyes and said, “Oh, dear.” She relived the touch of his mouth against hers and didn’t stop there. Not with a simple kiss.

  She wanted another and another. She wanted his hands on her, not just chastely touching her fingertips.

  She wanted to banish the cold fear she’d felt and replace it with the true warmth of his want.

  Her imagination sketched in the naked form of his body, stealing the imagery from the remembered curve of his biceps under her hand. He would be lean, but muscular, the lines of his body firm and strong. Jessica felt a slow shiver run through her at the thought, and her eyes fluttered shut. She’d worn his coat; she knew there wasn’t the slightest padding to it. The breadth of his shoulders owed nothing to clever tailoring.

  At the thought of his coat, the memory of the scent of his clothing wrapped around her once more, a hot blanket enveloping her in the midst of the cool evening. Mark’s scent was clean male, with a hint of salt and starch. No extraneous perfumes; no pomade, no cologne attempting to mask more intrusive fragrances. His skin would smell like that all over—subtle, strong and attractive—an aroma she couldn’t pin down, somewhere between clean sunshine and the clear, cold water of a mountain spring.

  In her imagination, she didn’t touch him. She didn’t need to. In her imagination, there was no reason to put his pleasure above hers, to set aside her own desires to make sure that he was fulfilled. He thought of her. He touched her. He took care of her.

  It was just her imagination, but, oh, she wanted him. And it had been so long since she wanted anything, let alone a man.

  She let herself want him in the safety of her own bed. She could want him without thought or analysis, without calculating the effect of every touch. She could want him purely for herself.

  She gasped, and the night air was cool against her lips. Fantasy-Mark had no hands, and so her own had to do. She touched herself, taking back territory that she had ceded to others over the last long years: her breasts, her thighs.

  She imagined his hand at her nipple instead of her own. His mouth. His fingers, spreading her legs, his palm brushing her thighs before he found the nub between them.

  It didn’t belong to anyone, that spiraling twinge of pleasure she felt. Not to anyone except herself. It was her want, her desire. Nobody else mattered. No one else needed to be satisfied. She had no need to falsify a response, to try and inflame another person.

  It shook her, that final moment. Ecstasy raced through her. It was stronger and more powerful than just physical release, and she almost wept from the joy of it.

  Hers. Hers.

  She belonged to herself again, body and soul, pleasure and heartbreak. She was every inch hers again, her body reclaimed from those long years of bitter ownership.

  She was hers.

  She drew a tremulous breath, shaking, her eyes opening to see only darkness before her.

  She thought of Mark. “Oh.” She exhaled slowly. “Dear.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE FIGURE THAT STOOD on Mark’s doorstep the next evening was not nearly so attractive as the one that had greeted him days ago in the rain.

  It was coming up on suppertime, but in the height of summer, the sun was still warm. The man before him wore a jacket of serviceable wool, creased by wear and dirtied around the cuffs. His skin had the look of a man constantly in the sun—spotted with liver and wrinkled. He held a shapeless slouch hat of dark fabric in his hands, turning it nervously as he avoided Mark’s eyes.

  “How can I help you?” Mark asked.

  His visitor smelled of sweat—not the sour sweat one might scent on a London vagrant, but the stronger, cleaner smell that belonged to a man who labored all day, every day.

  Large hands wrung the hat. “I…I wanted to… You see, sir, my wife and I—we’re not the sort to take charity. I’d offer you my thanks, but…”

  Something about the man’s tone, the way he avoided Mark’s eyes, suggested that he wasn’t talking about the pale gratitude that the wealthy townspeople offered because Mark had written a book. Had he seen this man before? He searched the man’s wrinkles for some memory of the person he might have been, but even if age hadn’t stolen any similarity, all his childhood memories had blurred into indistinctness.

  “You’ve nothing to thank me for,” Mark said. “I assure you, it’s all been forgotten.”

  The man shook his head. “I? Forget what your lady mother did for me? I’d be ashamed. I can remember it like yesterday. With my Judy alone with the children…” He shook his head. “Please, Sir Mark. If you won’t let me repay you, I’ll feel the shame of it the rest of my life.”

  Shame. It was Mark’s foremost emotion when he thought of his mother—that headlong rush into madness, the laughing looks the villagers had exchanged at every one of her tirades.

  He stepped to the side and gestured. “Please. Come in.”

  “I couldn’t. Didn’t mean to enter your home—”

  “But I’m inviting you. I should be honored if you’d accept my hospitality.”

  In many ways, despite the heights he’d ascended to, Mark felt more comfortable around this laborer than he did around the rector. The man followed him down the hall. From the corner of his eye, Mark detected a slight limp in his step—not so much to incapacitate him, nor even to render him lame. Just an old wound.

  The man thought nothing of Mark putting on a kettle for their tea on his own. He didn’t protest the simple bread and jam that Mark laid out or ask why Mark had no servants. For all the wealth his elder brother had won, Mark’s first memories were of sweeping the floor while his elder sister finished the washing-up. In his brother’s house, he was constantly fighting his urge to do things for himself—to fetch his own paper, to shrug on a coat, instead of standing still while a valet eased it over his arms.

  “I tend Bowser’s sheep, now,” the man said. “My wife—she’s Mrs. Judith Taunton.”

  “Taunton,” Mark said slowly. “I remember her.” The memory was dim—a single room in the village. She’d been a young woman, with two small children. His mother had visited her; Mark had come along. He’d always come along. “That was years ago. Decades.”

  “Aye,” Mr. Taunton replied, then met Mark’s eyes. “That would have been before I returned from transportation. I don’t know what Judy would have done without your mother.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yes,” Taunton said stiffly, “I was one of those young firebrands.” He stretched out his arms. “I helped burn the mill down, when they brought in the spinning jenny and sacked half the workers.” He glanced at Mark and colored—as if perhaps remembering that the mill he’d destroyed had belonged to Mark’s father. “The magistrates sent me away for my sins. It was your mother who made sure my boys had enough to eat. Your mother paid my passage back when my time was done. She found me work, posted a bond as surety for my good behavior, when nobody would hire a criminal.”

  “Maybe this is true,” Mark said quietly, “but I’m guessing it was my father who sacked you. The scales are balanced between us.” His mother would have agreed. She’d been mad, but there had been a frightening lucidity to everything she had done. She’d sold everything the family owned and had given it all to the poor. But she’d never seen it as charity. She’d always imagined she was giving it back.

  Mr. Taunton looked up at him. “I’ll beg your pardon, sir, but I don’t feel so balanced. I am very much in your family’s debt.” He rubbed his head. “Didn’t come h
ere to argue with you, in any event. You see, I have this dog. A bitch—the finest sheep dog in all of Somerset, she is. She’s a breed from Scotland.” The man’s eyes shone with a sudden light. “She came into heat a few months back. All the men hereabouts are mad for a chance at one of Daisy’s pups. There’s five of them, seven weeks old now. Four are spoken for. I’ve held the last one back, because…” The man spread his blunt fingers. The fingernails were lined by dark grease. “Sir Mark, are you by any chance in want of a pup? I’d be honored to know that Daisy’s whelp went to one of Elizabeth Turner’s sons.”

  Mark swallowed a lump in his throat. The wealthier members of the community—the mill owners, the landowners—had offered him a few scant meals around their table. Even that hospitality had not been freely given. They’d wanted to trade gossip and to boast that they’d had him as a guest.

  But Mark knew what a good sheepdog meant to these men. Not just income, but companionship, friendship, the difference between a hardscrabble life and comfort. It was as if the man had offered him his firstborn child.

  “Mr. Taunton, I came to Shepton Mallet to think…to think on an opportunity that presented itself to me. You see, I’ve been asked to join the Commission on the Poor Laws.”

  Taunton, for all the dirt he carried, nodded sagely. “That’s…an honor,” he said, his mouth twitching.

  Mark rubbed his forehead. “You mean it’s a nuisance. I’m not a proponent of the Poor Laws, and the Commission has bungled the administration worse than Parliament. I’ve no wish to spend my time attending to details like the allotment of gruel at workhouses around the country.”

  Taunton drummed his fingers against his knee. “If it’s a mess, mayhap you could clean it up. Happen they could use a good man.”

  “I know. It’s the only reason I haven’t turned the offer down flat.”

  And people—important people—would listen to him if he said the system was falling to pieces. He could make a difference. He’d been granted a measure of popularity by fate; he had an obligation to use it to do good. He just wished it didn’t sound like such an ever-loving chore.

  “But, you see, if I accept the position, I’ll be traveling constantly. I’d have nowhere to keep a dog. Surely, Daisy’s pup deserves better.”

  Mark looked across into a face that was slowly shuttering.

  “Of course,” Taunton muttered. “You’ll be going into the finest drawing rooms. No room there for a filthy mutt.” His shoulders squared. “Well, perhaps I might be of service some other way.” He looked around the room.

  Maybe Mark didn’t think of his mother’s actions as pure charity. But this man—this proud man—undoubtedly did. Mark could as soon have cut the man’s hand off as refuse the offer.

  “But my brother,” he heard himself saying. “My elder brother—he’d not lock the animal up in a tiny London parlor. And I know he’d enjoy having an animal around. I was thinking just the other day that I ought to get him one.”

  The man looked up, the light returning to his eyes.

  “In fact,” Mark promised, “I’m sure he’d want it. And the dog would be happier with him.”

  Taunton broke into a broad grin. “It needs a few days yet with its dam. But you’re right. I suppose there’d be more room to romp at Parford Manor.”

  “Actually,” Mark started to say, and then realized that he didn’t need to clarify which brother he’d intended the gift for. “Actually, I won’t be visiting him immediately in any event, so a delay is just as well. Thank you. You’ve no idea what this will mean to my brother.”

  Taunton gave him a jerk of a nod. “Truthfully, Sir Mark—this scarcely means anything. All these years, I’ve carried the shame of knowing I should have done more. About…about your sister. And you and your brothers. I saw what was happening, when I first came back, but didn’t dare to speak up.”

  Mark sat still, not wanting to move. Not wanting to acknowledge by so much as a breath that those words reached any part of him.

  Taunton continued, “Only one person in all of Shepton Mallet would have stopped that kind of wrong when it happened. And she was Elizabeth Turner.”

  One nod, that was all Mark could manage.

  “I always thought that what happened to you and your brothers after she passed on—that was her way of looking out for you, once she found her way round to herself again.”

  “Yes.” Mark felt as if he were standing at a great distance from the conversation. “Yes. I suppose it was.” The silence grew after that, and the man took his leave.

  After he’d gone, Mark wrapped his arms around himself. Sometimes he thought he was the only one of his mother’s sons who could see her clearly. She’d always been stern and earnest; devout, too. Even before she went mad, she’d had no balance, too much excess. She’d afflicted all her children with Bible verses for names, after all.

  She’d seen a great deal of suffering and had thought it her duty to alleviate it. She’d also seen a great deal of sin and had railed against that, too. Mark didn’t remember his father at all, but he remembered his mother. All too well.

  She’d let Hope, his elder sister, perish by neglect. She’d beaten Ash. She’d locked Smite in the cellar for…for longer than Mark could truly remember.

  But Mark… Mark she’d spared. She’d not felt it necessary to cleanse the devil from his soul. She’d told him once she didn’t need to, because he alone was her son, not his father’s. That she’d seen herself in Mark, that she’d identified in him the same unwieldy imbalance that had torn her to pieces, he kept first and foremost in his mind. Perhaps that was why he’d become who he was. He’d had to prove to himself that his mother’s finest qualities—her compassion, her charity, her goodness—could be married to peace and tranquility. He wanted to prove that he could be good without going mad.

  The thought of dedicating his life to the Poor Laws made him feel frenetic and unbalanced. It would be good. It would be righteous. But he didn’t want to do it.

  He’d come to Shepton Mallet to find himself. Instead, he’d met Mrs. Farleigh. Mark smiled faintly and thought of her fingers, warm and curling about his. The soft pressure of her lips—he’d have wondered what he’d been thinking when he kissed her, except it was perfectly clear he’d not thought at all.

  And now, he didn’t want to do good. He wanted to do it again.

  London, the Commission and every gossip rag in the country could wait another week.

  LONDON, IT TURNED OUT, had other thoughts.

  Three days later, Mark ventured into town. He was on his way to the square to deliver another handful of letters when a familiar voice stopped him.

  “Sir Mark!”

  Parret was the last man Mark wanted to see at the moment. Still, the tiny man hurried over, his boots clattering over cobblestones. He held his hat to his head with one hand as he ran, lending an odd, undulating appearance to his stride. “Sir Mark. I was hoping—it’s just you and me, out here in the country.” Parret stopped a few feet before him next to the gray stone of the Market Cross, doubling over. His words spilled out between gasps of air.

  “Indeed,” Mark said ironically, indicating the people around them.

  But Parret appeared gratified. He removed his top hat, revealing a pate covered by a few sparse, carefully combed strings of hair, and wiped beads of sweat off with a yellowing handkerchief of doubtful cleanliness. “Perhaps you might consider an exclusive interview?”

  Nigel Parret was nothing if not persistent. Mark would have admired him—or, at a minimum, felt sorry for him—except that the man published the most intrusive articles. On one particular occasion, he’d actually picked through Mark’s household trash and had published a piece in which he had explained, on rather dubious grounds, that Sir Mark preferred leg of lamb to beef.

  It happened to have been true…at least, it had been true until Mark was served lamb at every dinner he’d gone to for a fortnight.

  And that hadn�
��t been the worst of Parret’s sins. Three months ago, Mark had danced one dance with Lady Eugenia Fitzhaven. She had seemed a sweet girl—emphasis on girl—and he was friends with her father. It had also happened to be the supper dance, and so he’d taken her in to the meal. A hundred men in London had done the same for a hundred ladies throughout town that evening, and nobody had spoken of those conversations again. But Mark was not a hundred men. He was Sir Mark.

  Of course, he’d observed the brightness of her eyes, the color of her cheeks. He couldn’t help but notice that she was utterly tongue-tied in his presence. He couldn’t prevent impressionable young girls from imagining themselves in love with him. All he could do was recognize when the infatuation started and do his best not to offer them encouragement. Girlish appreciation had a way of working itself to nothing if he offered a polite distance. It didn’t take long for most ladies to shift their attentions to a source who would appreciate it.