by Eloisa James
“What do you mean, where—” She turned around. “You mean that you don’t know where to find water?”
He shook his head. “Mac was right. I must have lost my mind. I didn’t ask Kettle if he had a well.”
“How much water is in that bucket?” she asked. Ewan could visualize his grandmother’s reaction to this disaster. He would have deserved every moment of her harangue. But Annabel just looked rather surprised, standing there with a potato in each hand. She had pinned her hair up again, but she had a black streak of ash on her cheek.
“We have enough to drink tonight,” he said, dropping the pail and coming over to her. “As long as we drink wine with supper.”
“Wine!” she squeaked, but he couldn’t wait for a taste of her sweetness, and so he took her mouth with all the gladness of a man who deserves to be shrieked at and instead finds his future wife blinking at him in surprise. And she let him rock against her body without shrieking over that either.
There was a small thunk as first one of her potatoes dropped to the ground, and then the other. It was a while later that he let her fall away from him, once her eyes had gone all sleepy and she was limp. He was trembling with hunger for her. He felt depraved, wild—and just close enough to madness to know that they had to stop kissing. He couldn’t take this much longer.
“Wine?” Annabel asked a moment later. “Wine?”
Ewan picked up a potato on his way over to the bed. Then he bent down and pulled out a large wicker basket.
“The picnic basket!”
“It’s always full,” he told her. “In case we lose a wheel on the road.” He hoisted it onto the table, bumping a blackened, misshapen potato that fell over the edge and bounced on the floor.
Annabel was humming happily in her throat as she unpacked. “A whole chicken, that’s lovely, bread and—”
“A bottle of wine,” Ewan said, pulling out the corkscrew.
“But I needn’t have made the tablecloth!” Annabel said, an unmistakable pang of regret in her voice. “There’s a linen one here.”
“I like yours much better.” He wasn’t very good at describing things, so he just waved his hands lamely. “The house looks all red and homey.”
She looked so happy that he broke his new kissing prohibition. And then they ate supper and Ewan had four potatoes with fresh butter, and insisted they were the best potatoes he’d eaten in his life.
Annabel perched on the stool and watched Ewan eat his fifth potato. She was searching for something to say that wasn’t a question. She had a growing feeling that their kisses were edging toward some corner from which there would be no return. And she didn’t want that…or so she told herself.
But she couldn’t help peeking at the bed. It seemed to have grown twice as large in the last hour.
“Peggy doesn’t have a bolster,” she finally said.
“We’ll have to sleep without one, then,” Ewan said. He wasn’t looking at her, but his voice was rough and tender.
Desire streaked down Annabel’s legs and the breath seemed to disappear from her lungs. She opened her mouth to say—to say…? A refusal? But why? They were as married as a couple could be without saying rites before a priest. Ewan stood up and went to fetch a large armload of wood that he carried as lightly as a baby.
“Those were very good potatoes,” he said over his shoulder. “A man could live on potatoes like that.”
“Poo!” Annabel said. “They tasted like ash.”
“All the better for a little seasoning.”
Then Ewan was gently pulling her to her feet. “Annabel?” he asked. There was a question in his voice that didn’t need to be spoken out loud.
For a fleeting second, Annabel thought about what she was about to give up. She had always scorned young women who found themselves in the family way and without a husband. But none of that was relevant to Ewan; to the hunger in his eyes, and the ragged sound of his voice. Nor did it seem relevant to the ache she felt.
She didn’t want any more kisses—or at least, not only kisses. She was tired of going to sleep with her heart pounding, her body squirming against the sheets, feeling unsatisfied, curious and desirous, all at once.
She turned her lips to his throat and kissed him softly, but the taste of him made her shake with excitement. “Yes,” she whispered. “Yes, Ewan…Yes. Please.”
Twenty-two
They were sitting in the courtyard of the Pig & Sickle, waiting for a light supper before they climbed back into the carriage for three more hours. Josie was braving a scolding from Griselda by taking off her bonnet and sitting in the last rays of afternoon sunshine reading. Mayne had found to his delight that the innkeeper had an only slightly out-of-date copy of Racing News, and he was reading every line. Naturally, Imogen was devoting herself to irritating him.
“Draven loved Scotland,” she was saying, thankfully without that edge of grief that often haunted her voice. “He always said that horses trained better here. He thought the air was bracing, and that when you took them back down to England they would run faster, because their lung capacity had grown from breathing Scottish air. Do you agree, Mayne?”
He muttered something. Anachronism had won the Newmarket Stakes; he couldn’t believe it. He’d considered buying the roan and decided she needed too much work. Apparently the Syvern stud had seen the same potential and done the work. If Anachronism was in top form, the horse would certainly beat his own entry in the Ascot.
Imogen broke into his thoughts again. “One thing you can say about Draven was that he did things with all his heart.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You,” she said pointedly. “You and your flirtation with horses. Anyone can tell that you’re utterly obsessed, just as obsessed as Draven ever was.”
Mayne cast her an irritated look. “I’m not planning to take a race so seriously that I leap on the horse’s back myself, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”
“Uncalled-for,” Imogen remarked, tapping her fingernail against the table and eying him in a way he didn’t like. “For all Draven made mistakes, he was no dilettante. He took his study of horses seriously.”
Mayne turned over his racing sheet. “Thank you for your suggestion,” he said, controlling his voice to an even keel.
“I’m just thinking that you might take more pleasure in life if you allowed yourself to actually be interested in horses,” Imogen said, showing no reaction to his rebuff.
Mayne bent his head to read a squib about Burlington’s stables at Raby.
“I think you’re bored. You’re all of, what? Thirty-seven years old?”
“Thirty-four!” he snapped.
“You’ve more money than you know what to do with, no ambitions to take a wife or set up a family and no particular interest in your estate.”
“I take all proper interest in my estate.”
“I’m sure you do,” Imogen said in a soothing voice that wouldn’t have fooled a child. “Likely the roofs are mended, but that’s not my point. It doesn’t interest you.”
“And what precisely could interest me about it?” he asked, irritated beyond all bearing. “Are you suggesting I take up farming?”
She shrugged. “Lord knows, I don’t know what gentlemen do. Some of them seem to find it all quite engrossing. Look at Tuppy Perwinkle.”
“Tuppy fishes,” Mayne said flatly. “I cannot imagine anything so tedious as sitting on a riverbank in the rain.”
“In all probability, he would feel the same about the stables,” Imogen persisted. She opened a sewing box and was beginning to pull apart the tangled mess inside.
“Just what are you going to do with that?” Mayne said in a feeble attempt to change the subject.
“Sort Griselda’s embroidery yarns,” Imogen said, and then she turned directly back to the subject. “You’re in a malaise from pure boredom. You’ve nothing to do.”
“I’ve a great deal to do,” he answered, nettled beyond all bearing.
>
“No, you don’t. You have an excellent man of business, and I happen to know that Tess’s husband advises you on what to sell and such things, so you needn’t make any decisions there.”
“Only a fool would reject Lucius’s advice,” Mayne said. “What’s your point?”
“You’re bored. That’s my point.” Her rosy-tipped fingers danced over the skeins, selecting a plum-colored one. She started to tease it from the tangle.
Mayne considered going for a walk, anything to get away from her.
“Perhaps you should take up your seat in the House of Lords,” Imogen suggested.
He tried to imagine himself standing up on the floor, lecturing to all and sundry about the Corn Laws. And then his imagination failed. “No.”
“It is difficult to imagine you in such a place,” Imogen agreed. “It’s unfortunate that you have developed such a distaste for dalliance, since that kept you happily occupied for the last ten years.”
Mayne didn’t like that statement, however casually it was delivered. He didn’t like it that his memories of the last ten—no, the last fifteen—years were made up of little more than a glittering sweep of intrigues, stolen kisses, furtive erotic encounters and the odd duel with an enraged husband. Meetings with complacent husbands who didn’t give a damn had become routine. As had a few tears dropped on his sleeve once he made it clear that he had decided to move to another woman. Another woman, and another, and another.
Thinking over those years gave him a sour taste in his mouth.
Imogen had managed to free the plum-colored yarn and was starting on a sky-blue one. “There’s no use in bemoaning the past,” she said, without even looking at him. “I expect you enjoyed yourself at the time.”
Mayne’s lips twisted. In retrospect, those perfume-saturated evenings seemed tediously similar, tawdry and shallow, fueled by too much wine and a hearty sensual appetite.
Until the sensual appetite deserted him…and left him with nothing.
“But you seem to have lost your predilection for illicit dalliance,” she said, as if she read his thoughts. “Consider me, for example. You look at me with all the interest of an altered tomcat.”
“That’s disgusting,” Mayne snapped, at the same moment that Josie inquired, “What’s altered about a tomcat?”
“You must be the most indelicate female of my acquaintance!” he told Imogen, ignoring Josie’s question.
“Do you really think so?” Imogen said, utterly unmoved by his criticism. “And here I thought gentlemen had such a variety of acquaintances.”
“There’s been nothing so adventuresome about my life. Generally speaking, I’ve had the pleasure of knowing ladies whose language matched the delicacy of their minds.”
“Ha!” Imogen said. “If that is what you believe, then it doesn’t take much speculation to realize that you have never really had an intimate conversation with any woman in your life.”
Mayne had a flash of near-homicidal rage, a reaction that was becoming common around his supposed mistress. “I have had many intimate conversations,” he said. “Not that such intimacy or a lack thereof is a suitable topic to discuss before your younger sister.”
“I may be young, but I have a great deal of common sense,” Josie said, looking over the top of her book. “I am perfectly aware that Imogen has made you several proposals of a less-than-honorable nature, and that you have rebuffed her. I expect that explains her impertinence; Plutarch says there is nothing sharper than the sting of rejected affection.” She turned back to her book without further ado.
Obviously Josephine would be just as much trouble as her sister once she reached her majority; Mayne shuddered a little at the thought.
“Why don’t you set up your own stables?” Imogen asked.
“I have stables. How many times have I told you that I’m missing the Ascot and I’m running two horses there?”
Griselda appeared from the door of the inn, leaning on the arm of her maid and looking marginally better than she had an hour ago. “I have steeled myself to return to that vehicle,” she called to them, her face as set as that of a French aristocrat facing the guillotine. “Josie, put on your bonnet. How many times must I tell you that freckles are most unattractive? If you would all enter, please, the innkeeper tells me that he has prepared a light repast.”
“I know you have a stable,” Imogen said, winding up the blue yarn and scooping the tangle back into the box. “Why don’t you let yourself take it seriously? Hire a proper training crew. My father talked of his competition for years, of you, as well as every other man in England who might be persuaded to buy a horse from him. You’re a gentleman dabbler, buying a horse here or there, selling it if it doesn’t win its first race. You’ve never taken your own stables seriously. Well, how could you? You were always in London.”
And I was never awake until afternoon, Mayne thought. He picked up the ribbon box and headed after Imogen toward the door of the inn. Her traveling dress hugged her every curve. He eyed them deliberately and discovered—
Nothing.
He was completely uninterested. An altered tomcat indeed.
She was right. Without women, what was he? What would he do?
Twenty-three
She gave him a smile she had practiced and never used, the smile of a siren beckoning Odysseus, the smile of Venus hailing Adonis, the smile of any pagan goddess faced with male beauty. “We’re marrying as soon as we reach your lands,” Annabel stated.
“That is not tonight,” Ewan replied. But she could see that his eyes were black, and his voice hadn’t even a thread of amusement. “We would be anticipating the bonds of matrimony. I shouldn’t—”
“Tonight,” she whispered achingly. “I want you, tonight, Ewan. I want you to make love to me. I like the coney’s kiss. I did. But there’s something more, isn’t there?”
It was as if all sound had drained from the room. “Oh, God, Annabel, of course there is. And you know it.”
“Show me. Please.” She caught his face in her hands, pulling him down to her, brushing her lips over his. “We’re alone,” she said into his mouth. She put little kisses on the strong curve of his lips, on the angle of his jaw, on his ear.
Then, just when she thought that he might have changed his mind, that his principles were stronger than his desire, he turned his face and captured her mouth. She could read the truth in the possessiveness of his touch.
“You won’t regret it?” he asked her, his voice hoarse. “We aren’t married.”
“Never,” she gasped.
He turned her toward the bed, keeping her body against his, and then stopped short.
“What is it?” she asked.
Ewan eased her away from him. “The bed,” he said, voice tight with need. “I forgot to ask my man to put on our sheets.” He looked around. “In fact, I forgot to have our sheets taken off the carriage.”
“Oh,” Annabel said, pulling back the thin coverlet. The sheets were a grayish color. “I expect Peggy finds it difficult to do washing.”
“I can take care of it,” Ewan said. “Just let me find the linen closet.”
A little smile played around Annabel’s mouth as she watched him prowl around the cottage. “Ewan,” she said finally, “there is no linen closet.”
“Well, where does Peggy keep clean linen?”
“She doesn’t have any.”
“For God’s sake,” Ewan said. There was a soft growl in his voice. He was so beautiful that Annabel’s body tingled all over just looking at his broad shoulders and the square line of his jaw.
“The tablecloth,” she said, hearing the tremor in her own voice. “We can use the tablecloth that was in the picnic basket.”
Ewan jerked the cloth from the basket so fast that crumbs flew through the air. Annabel stripped off the bed, and they found that the beautiful linen tablecloth—generously embroidered with Ewan’s crest all around the hem—fit the Kettles’ bed perfectly.
“Now,” Ewan
said, with a note of slumberous satisfaction in his voice. “Come here, Annabel.” He sat down and held out his arms.
She moved toward him, suddenly shy.
“My wife,” he said, pulling her toward him.
“Not yet,” she whispered.
“In my heart. You know that I believe in the soul, Annabel. But”—he paused and skimmed a kiss along the edge of her mouth—“not all the teachings of the church. You are my wife in my heart and soul, from this moment forward.”
Annabel drew a shaky breath. In truth, she wasn’t even thinking in words. She craved Ewan with the depth of her being, craved his mouth and his touch, and the weight of his body.
Two seconds later she was lying on cool linen. Her clothes were gone, stripped away by Ewan with the ease of someone who had disrobed many a woman. And yet…The stray thought made her body suddenly rigid. She didn’t have much idea how to do this, and if everything Ewan said was correct, neither did he.
The village women had told her that consummation needn’t be painful, if she married a man who knew what he was doing. “Marry a tired rake,” Mrs. Cooper had said. “They know everything, and yet they’re worn out and ready to settle down. As long as he doesn’t have the pox.” The pox was something she didn’t have to worry about. But Annabel’s thighs tightened at the thought of pain.
He knew instantly. “Ach, lass, are you frightened?” he whispered against her skin.
“There are ways to make it not painful,” she said hopefully.
“Old wives’ tales, or so Nana says.”
“You asked your grandmother such a thing?”
“Nana knows all there is to know about a woman’s body. She told me once that some women suffer quite a bit, and others don’t even notice and might as well not be virgins at all.”
It was too late to change her mind, so Annabel nodded, a little jerkily.
Ewan looked down at his bride-to-be. One moment she gave him the most temptingly seductive smile he had ever seen on a woman’s face, and the next she was trembling and clearly scared out of her wits. She had her eyes shut tight; they tilted at the corners with an exotic little curve that was at odds with the practicality of planning adultery before she even decided whom to marry. The very thought of it made him grin. But he had to admit that for a woman this passionate, and yet so set on marrying a man of wealth, adultery was likely just a practical suggestion.