by Rose Lerner
When it was, he handed her his handkerchief—not Rafe’s, but a plain white one—and slumped to the ground. He felt exhausted, wrung out. He wanted to stretch out on the warm flagstones with her and gaze at the ceiling as if it were the night sky.
When she gave the handkerchief back, Ash wiped himself clean with it and set it aside to dry. “Thank you.” Buttoning his trousers, he sat there, feeling heavy and weightless at the same time. “Thank you very much,” he added after a minute or two.
She laughed and settled down beside him. “You’re welcome.”
It was that, her calm patience, which finally prodded him into action. “Did you like that?” he asked her.
She shot him a sidelong glance. “Yes.”
A last warm ripple of pleasure spread through him. He tried to wipe the smile off his face and gave it up as a bad job. Tugging her into his lap, he palmed her breasts. “Feeling all tingly and sensitive?” She squirmed, legs falling open, and he slid a hand down and cupped her there too. “How much time do we have before dinner?”
“Show me your watch,” she said breathlessly. He did. “Ten minutes.” There was frustration in her voice.
“Don’t worry. It won’t take me that long.”
Chapter Fifteen
Ash’s head spun a little when he stood, but he fetched her fur-lined cloak and laid it out on the stone. “Lie down.”
She obeyed. He put his hands on her silk-stockinged ankles above gossamer slippers and slid her skirts up the dizzying curves of her legs, resisting the temptation to unhook her brightly embroidered garters.
“I thought no one would see them,” she said. “I know I shouldn’t be wearing colors, but buying new ones seemed such a waste.”
“I like them.” He had never thought before about how intimate it was, to know what someone’s underthings looked like. They’d be sitting at dinner, respectable as you please, and he’d know these were there. He crooked a finger around the ivory satin before abandoning them for the bare skin above her stockings. Curving his hands under her thighs, he drew them apart. Her skirts pooled. When she pulled them out of the way, there was her cunt, laid bare to him.
He felt like a virgin, a fumbling boy overwhelmed by the very idea that women had bodies. In the dim light her pale skin and darker hair looked like milk and honey, like the Promised Land. Kneeling, he reverently kissed her inner thighs, the left and then the right.
She lay very still, but she wasn’t calm or patient now. He could feel the tension radiating from her. Mostly lust, of course, but he remembered her saying, It’s more like fear that you won’t think I’m a lady anymore, and thought that there must be some of that mixed in. He hated the idea of fear threaded through this moment. But promising he’d never use this against her would only make her realize he was thinking of all the ways he could.
“Thank you,” he said at last, smoothing his thumbs along the creases of her thighs. “I’ll treasure this memory forever.”
She didn’t answer, so he bent his head and licked up her until he found the right spot. When he sucked it gently into his mouth, she drew in a deep, heaving breath, her hips tilting up and her thighs pushing into his hands.
He raised his head to tell her it had been a while, and she could give him instructions if she liked.
“Please do that again,” she said in a taut voice.
He obliged her. She tasted incredible and smelled better, nothing like flowers at all. He loved the way she surrounded him, how she moved slow and urgent as planets revolving. Her skin was like nothing else, not satin or silk or cream, just human flesh, hot and wonderful in his hands. He loved the way her curls poked at his nose, loved her short, desperate breaths, loved her.
He teased her slit with his finger. She was so wet he slipped in almost without meaning to. She froze, clamping around him. “Sorry,” he said, wiggling his finger. “May I?”
There was a long, hopeful moment. “Yes.”
“Good. I want to feel it when you spend.”
He could feel her give up whatever control she’d still been holding on to, her legs thumping to the ground, her head hitting her cloak with a muffled thud—had she been watching him? He could feel her pushing towards him, welcoming him, giving him what he wanted—generous even with her own pleasure. “Please,” she said, “I—please.”
He frigged her slowly and insistently, putting his mouth right where she needed it and working her until she fell apart, her muscles rippling around his finger with the force of a shipwreck.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, thank God. I needed that.”
He didn’t understand why his stomach started forcing its way up his throat at her words. He didn’t understand the sudden piercing stab of loneliness. But there it was, a physical sadness so immense it felt as if a door inside him had opened onto the chilly, airless expanse of space. Maybe he’d used up his store of happiness in one intense burst, and this was all that was left.
“Does my hair look all right?”
He nodded. Her hair looked perfect, as if nothing had happened at all. Ash wiped his mouth and fingers on the clean half of his soiled handkerchief and put it in his pocket. Standing, he offered her a hand up. Her eyes searched his face, but for once, he couldn’t manage to meet them.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
This was what he did. He took a deep breath full of oranges and jasmine and rich earth and thought about how he was about to have dinner with her, how he was going to be served good wine and waited on by footmen and—
Just now, the idea of being waited on made him feel cold too. Liveried servants had seemed impossibly well-off to him once, when he’d watched them coming in and out of a fine house he was planning to rob. What right did he have to their deference? What right did anyone have to the deference of another human being? Why did people fight so hard to create distance between themselves, when all anyone wanted was closeness?
For so long, when he wanted to smile, he’d used a memory of his little brother. Rafe had always been a sunny orb of happiness behind his ribs.
Drek. If he wasn’t careful, he’d cry.
“I’m fine.” It wasn’t even a tremor, barely a hum, but his voice gave him away. He could see it in her face. “It’s a reaction, that’s all. An imbalance of humors. I enjoyed that far too much, and I’m crashing back to earth with a vengeance.”
There was silence. He wished he hadn’t said anything. He should have brazened it out. He should have managed.
“Very well,” she said. “We’ll wait before going back to the house. Do you want me to stay, or would you like a moment alone?”
He gulped in a breath, his chest feeling less tight at her simple, matter-of-fact acceptance. “We’ll be late for dinner.”
Miss Reeve smiled. “I’ve learned today that nothing is a surer symptom of love than uncharacteristic rudeness.”
Her staff would be watching them at dinner. They knew her, and they probably also knew the servants of every other major family in the district. He had to be in high form at dinner. “I’ll take a quick turn in the air. Wait for me here. I won’t be above five minutes.”
He put on his overcoat and stepped outside. Then he stood there—not even like a statue, but like stone before the statue, a shapeless lump of rock without a story…being a rock sounded terribly quiet and soothing…
He shook his head and forced himself to walk, to breathe in the chilly air, to wake up and get his heart pumping again. He pulled out the tangled mass of threads in his chest and looked at it.
It wasn’t much of a surprise. He knew why he felt this way. He hadn’t liked the way she’d said I needed that. He hadn’t liked to be reminded that for her this was a physical urge, an itch to be scratched. She hadn’t even said Thank you. She had said, Thank God, as if Ash hadn’t been there at all.
He’d known from the start that he’d be in love w
ith her before their time was up. He’d known it would break his heart to leave her. He hadn’t thought much of it; his heart had been broken before, and mended.
But something new occurred to him now. If he played his cards right, maybe he could have this to come back to. Of course he couldn’t stay—he was a whoreson thief and she was the next best thing to a princess. He was a wanderer and she was planted in this town like an oak tree. The idea of wearing starched collars and being waited on and mouthing respectable Tory sentiments for the rest of his life was preposterous. It tickled and choked like smothering in down. But there was no reason he couldn’t visit her a few times a year, if he confined his swindling to the middling sort of people and avoided the surrounding counties.
Now that he had a goal, he felt better. He didn’t think it would be hard to make her fall in love with him. She had a heart wider than the Thames. But she wouldn’t change their bargain just because she wanted to. No, he’d have to convince her he was a good decision. That would be a challenge, because he was a terrible decision.
But he thought he could do it. He’d be the perfect husband for six months. Rafe, genius that he was, had taken the right tack at once when he’d offered to help with her correspondence. Ash would be useful. He’d be unexceptionable. He would make himself popular in the town and adored by the servants. He’d win over her little brother. He’d make sure the Tories came out ahead in their charity auction.
Hope and plans blocked up the doorway to that bleak empty wasteland. Ash’s body felt solid again, his clothes snug around him, the air cold on his skin, the ground crunching beneath the soles of his shoes. He went back to the greenhouse suffused with mild embarrassment at having made a cake of himself.
When he opened the door, she was sitting curled up with her cheek against the heated wall. She started to her feet, and he realized she was feeling more uncertain than she’d let on.
“I’m sorry,” he said before she could speak. “This should have been special for you, and I spoiled it.”
He meant it, but she shook her head so vigorously he felt as if he’d manipulated her into contradicting him. “You don’t owe me anything. I don’t need you to pretend.”
“I pretend. That’s what I do.” He shouldn’t have said that. It wouldn’t help. He smiled at her. “It scares me a little, when I find I can’t.”
She shook her head again. “You don’t have to win me over by confiding in me,” she said earnestly. “I’ve been thinking, and—you can tell me whatever you like. You can tell me the truth or you can lie, I don’t care—but tell me things because you want to. Please.” She twisted her gloved hands together, and added, “Unless the truth could have a material impact on our plan, of course.”
Ash didn’t know what to say to that. He didn’t know what he felt, and he didn’t have time to sort it out. He wished he hadn’t told her so much about himself.
Only—she’d said she didn’t mind if he lied to her. No one had ever said that to him before.
“And you didn’t spoil anything,” she said. “Even if we don’t repeat the experience, I’m very glad to have had it.”
Even if—what? Ash’s composure wavered. “Have you decided you’d rather not repeat it?”
She shook her head, blushing. “I thought maybe—you—”
He gave her his very best smile. “On the contrary.”
It was only her relief now that told him she’d been disappointed before. “Oh. Good.”
He leaned in to kiss her. “It took me by surprise, that’s all.” She clutched at the lapels of his coat, and when he pulled back, she actually laid her cheek against his shoulder and leaned on him. He put an arm around her and kissed one of those shining copper loops. “Next time I’ll be prepared.”
She made an amused sound.
“You’re right. That’s ludicrous. No one could be prepared for how beautiful you are.”
She laughed outright. He squeezed her. She shifted a little, almost squirming, and he was suddenly very conscious of how close she was, of what they had done, of everything they hadn’t done yet. It had been all of a quarter of an hour, and he wanted her again. He slid his hand lower to cup her buttocks and pull her hard against him.
She made a sound that was half squeak and half moan and drew away. “We have to go to dinner.” She stretched her neck and tried to peer down at her bodice to make sure it was straight. Adjusting it a little, she bit her lip hard as if the shifting of her stays against her breasts felt all too good. “We just did that,” she said, exasperated. “How can I already want to do it again? What an ill-regulated appetite.”
Ash felt giddy. Maybe he hadn’t spoiled it after all. She still wanted him, she was still willing to lean on him. And, she was adorable. “Indeed,” he agreed solemnly. “What can the Almighty have been thinking of? Makes him seem rather a Peeping Tom, doesn’t it?”
She gave a shocked laugh. “Mr. Cahill! I am sure He was thinking only of the propagation of the race.”
Right. There was that. Now probably wasn’t the time to bring up children, and how he didn’t want them, and anyway he hated the idea of having one he wouldn’t be there to raise. He couldn’t say that to her, when it was so obvious she would give a child a far better life than he ever could. Only—she’d told Rafe she didn’t want children, either, hadn’t she?
He winked at her and went to the door. She put on her pattens and out they went, shutting the plants up snug and warm in their house.
“About the propagation of the race,” he said. “We—I—”
“I don’t want children,” she said flatly, and stumbled over the gravel because she was watching for his reaction.
“Neither do I.”
She sighed with relief. “Good.”
“How do you plan to prevent it?”
“There’s a woman in the town who grows pennyroyal. I’ll go on Monday.”
Good old pennyroyal tea. He thought his mother must have used it, because the sharp, minty smell always brought him a sense of happiness and a still image of a reed-bottomed chair he thought had been in their room, a red shawl draped to hide its cracked back. He wondered if she had been sorry she’d let him be born. He didn’t think so.
“Mr. Cahill—”
“You can call me Ash, if you like.”
“I rather like calling you Mr. Cahill. It feels terribly proper and domestic. A fortnight from now, you can call me Mrs. Cahill.”
It was a strange and wonderful thought that had entirely failed to occur to him. He was to become one of those new husbands, referring unnecessarily and often to Mrs. So-and-so and my wife. It seemed a miracle, that she and him could be marked as belonging to each other, just like that. “Mr. and Mrs. Cahill. I like it. Will you miss being Miss Reeve?”
“Maybe a little. But Jamie isn’t Mr. Reeve anymore, either. He’s Wheatcroft. So I don’t know that it makes much difference.”
It struck Ash that Rafe would be using a new name now. A name Ash didn’t know, a name he might not even recognize if he saw it in a newspaper. He felt a little sick.
“Does it bother you that it isn’t your real name?” she asked.
“No. Does it bother you?”
She gave him a sidelong smile. “I like it.”
She was the most darling woman in the world, and his luck was beyond anything. All he had to do was not ruin it.
Too bad ruining things was his second-best skill, after swindling.
Lydia thought Mr. Cahill still seemed sad at dinner. He had enjoyed that story about Grandfather’s claret, so she brought out more tales from the riotous elections of the last century. The more extravagant and financially irresponsible, the more his eyes shone.
“I don’t know the last time I saw you so gay,” said Aunt Packham, wondering, and Lydia felt self-conscious and guilty. Lord Wheatcroft had been ashamed of these stories. He had worked har
d to do away with the drunkenness and revelry that had made devoted government men, to whom the people entrusted their well-being and their country’s fate, look like a pack of greedy, wasteful children.
Of course, she wasn’t giving all fifty voters a whole pineapple. She was merely talking about it.
But she had given away her virtue. Her father would have been sick over that, if he knew. She should feel different—cheapened, damaged, as if something precious had been cracked and spilled like an egg.
She did feel different. She felt better, as if she’d been given something precious—and nothing she had to be so careful of as an egg. This new knowledge was a strong, living thing that leapt from between her hands, dancing in the air above her head and showering her with gold and silver sparks every time she looked at Mr. Cahill.
If the thought intruded, every so often, that their tryst had not had the same effect upon him—well, he had said his melancholy was a reaction, and no reflection on her. If Jamie had broken with her yesterday, she couldn’t be happy either. Mr. Cahill had been patient with her grief, had made her feel that she could show it without troubling him. She would do the same for him. She’d do her best to cheer him, without demanding he be cheered.
He had apologized for spoiling things, but Lydia refused to let them be spoiled. She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt so happy either, and she held on to the feeling as hard as she could.
If Mr. Cahill noticed that not one of her stories was about herself, he didn’t say anything.
Ash had never heard a reaction like this to the reading of banns. The entire church, hundreds of people, erupted in a buzz of gossip. The backs of the pews were high enough that, sitting, he couldn’t see anyone in them. But the poorer folk leaned out of the gallery, staring and pointing down at them.
He was already a little on edge from being in a church with Miss Reeve. Even though no one else would know how to interpret it, the way she kept looking at him to make sure he knew his cues felt like a giant signboard reading JEW, THIS WAY.