“I haven’t the faintest idea what’s going on.” And for once that was the truth, damn it all. Sebastian perused the letter again, then folded it to place the thing in his pocket. Breeding cattle could be an expensive and extremely long-term proposition, and he had no intention of sinking any of his funds into the project on a whim. And where Zachary’s interests were concerned, nearly everything was a whim.
He would wait a day or two before he answered; by then, Zachary would likely be involved in a completely different project, so the refusal wouldn’t anger him. As Sebastian sipped his coffee, he did feel a little gratitude toward Dimidius the cow. At least Zachary seemed to have forgotten the army. He could only pray that would continue.
“I’ve never seen them so concerned about talking to a man,” Caroline said, grinning as she and Zachary left the house after luncheon. “One might almost think they’ve realized their efforts tomorrow at the soiree might not be in vain.”
“I hope it all goes well for them. I’ll certainly do my part.” Zachary glanced at her, gauging her mood against the question he wanted to ask. “Did you ever wish to be married? When you were six or seven, perhaps?”
Caroline shrugged, her hand brushing his as they headed down the pond path toward the ruins. “I suppose the thought entered my mind. But back then it would have been all about riding on grand horses and living in huge castles with liveried servants and grand ballrooms, and rose petals carpeting all the floors.”
Except for the rose petals, she might have been describing Melbourne Park. He wasn’t about to say that aloud, though. Not when he could think of little but her bare skin against his and her moans of pleasure. Tomorrow. “You’re still on schedule with the portrait, yes?”
“Yes. Barring disaster, it will be finished tomorrow and ready for me to post the day after.”
“Good,” he murmured, reaching over to feather her hair behind her ear. At her responding shiver, he went hard. Come hell or high water, she was going to finish that damned painting tomorrow.
As Caroline looked at the finished portrait, she knew she’d captured the essence of Zachary Griffin. The problems she’d initially encountered had vanished the moment she’d decided to paint him at the ruins. His adventurous, hopeful spirit had responded to the rather exotic location and appeared in his expression, on his face. The meld had been perfection.
Now that she’d painted the last stroke, though, she hesitated to say anything. In the warm summer air, the paint would dry enough that she could package the portrait in its waiting wooden box by tomorrow afternoon. She’d signed her name in one corner, but still she kept him standing over there amid the ruins.
Of course one step did remain—she needed his letter of approval. And to get that, she needed to tell him she’d completed the work. Caroline took a deep breath. “Would you like to take a look?”
He lowered his leg from its stance, bending to stretch his back. “You’re finished?”
“I’m finished.” A thrill ran down her spine; one that had nothing to do with the portrait, and everything to do with the promise he’d made her for afterward.
Zachary glanced at Molly, who was snoring quietly on the bench behind the roses, then approached to look at the portrait as she stepped aside. He gazed at it in silence for so long that she began to worry she’d made some error, invisible to her, but blatant to anyone and everyone else who would ever look at it. Oh, she was going to have to be the stupid Eades’s stupid governess, after all.
“Caroline, it’s stunning,” he finally said. “If I didn’t know who’d painted it, I would attribute it to Joshua Reynolds.”
“Zach—”
“I’m serious,” he interrupted. “If Monsieur Tannberg knows anything about talent, he’ll take you on in a heartbeat.”
She wanted to sing, to dance, and mostly to kiss him. “Thank you.”
He shook his head. “Don’t thank me. I only stood there. You did the work.” With a smile he reached for his coat and dug into the inside pocket. “And because I did sneak a few looks at it yesterday and the day before, I had a feeling I could save us—you—a bit of time.” Pulling a folded paper free, he handed it to her.
Caroline unfolded it. Addressed to Monsieur Tannberg, in simple terms it expressed not only Zachary’s satisfaction with the portrait but also his pleasure and delight in working with such a skilled, professional artist. “You mean all of this,” she whispered, moved beyond words.
“Now that I see the finished portrait, I’m glad I didn’t say more. It speaks for itself.”
“I mean, you didn’t write it just because you want…you know.”
Zachary smiled. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “That letter says what it does because you deserve it.”
Carefully she refolded the letter and set it on the easel. She so wanted to throw herself on him. He would think it was gratitude, though, and he wouldn’t be wrong—but there was more to it than that. It would be a celebration, a symbol of completion, an exclamation mark that her life as she’d known it no longer existed.
“How long do you want to wait before you box the painting?” he asked, squatting down to pick up the blanket she’d brought to cover her legs against the chill earlier in the morning.
“Tomorrow afternoon, to be safe. It’ll start drying nicely out here.”
Zachary sent another look at Molly. Then he hooked a finger through the open buttonhole of Caroline’s maroon pelisse and drew her toward him. As she stumbled against his chest, he tilted her chin up with his free hand and kissed her.
He’d been teasing, flirting with her when they’d kissed before. That became immediately evident as his mouth molded against hers, sending heat spearing down her spine. Caroline wrapped her fingers into his dark hair, moaning as she drank him in.
Abruptly he broke the kiss. “Shh,” he breathed before she could protest, and shooting a glance toward their supposed chaperone. “This way.”
Taking her hand, he helped her over the fallen pillar and into the small clearing behind it. Before she could say anything, thank him again for all that he’d done, his mouth found hers again. This could be enough, she decided, the heat and the floating. How could just a touching of lips and mouths feel so electric and arousing?
Then his hands brushed the outsides of her breasts, and he slowly slid his palms toward one another across her chest until they covered her nipples. She jumped as he pressed against her. Good heavens. A warm, breathless tightness began between her legs. Abruptly kissing wasn’t enough. She wanted more.
“Caroline,” he murmured, moving his mouth to the base of her jaw, “I’m going to ask you once if you still want this. Answer me truthfully.”
She lifted her eyes to his. “It’s not fair that a man may do this whenever he wishes, as long as he is discreet, and a woman, even though she has decided to live a single life of propriety and quiet, may not. I am choosing my own path.”
He grinned, eyes dancing. “Is that a ‘yes’?”
Releasing his hair, she placed her hands over his, which still covered her breasts. Shifting, she undid one of the buttons of her pelisse, then moved his fingers to undo the next one. “That is a definite ‘yes.’”
“Good.”
In a second he had her pelisse open and had pushed it down her arms. This time when he kissed her, her knees felt wobbly. Lips, mouths, tongues—heavens, how could any woman be expected to forgo this simply because she’d decided to remain unmarried?
Pressed hard against him, her hands twined around his neck, his close around her waist, she could feel his arousal against her abdomen. Her breath came faster, her heart pounding. “Zachary, I don’t know how much time we have.”
“Twenty minutes before luncheon,” he whispered back, reaching around her to undo the back of her gown with a skill that left her breathless. “Not enough time, but we’ll just have to make due.”
As he slid her dress and shift off her shoulders, the summer breeze against her bare skin made her shiver�
�not from cold but from anticipation. With stumbling fingers she undid the buttons of his waistcoat, then pulled the shirt from his trousers. He kept saying the right things, the sensitive ones, the concerned ones she wanted to hear. If it was part of a seduction, though, it was wasted energy. She wanted him, and this was the best opportunity she would have to indulge her passions.
He knelt on the blanket he’d tossed to the ground and drew her down beside him. “I want you to show me everything,” Caroline murmured, sliding her hands beneath his shirt and up his bare chest.
“It’s not so much a matter of showing, as of feeling,” he returned, leaning forward to kiss her bare shoulder. He nudged her dress and shift down further, his mouth following. As his lips brushed the top of her breast, her breath caught.
“I see what you mean,” she managed.
Zachary chuckled. “No, you don’t. Not yet.” He sat back a little and tugged her gown down to her waist. For a long moment he gazed at her bare breasts, then slowly lifted his hands to cup and caress them.
With a harsh breath, Caroline leaned into the caress. Dear heaven. She’d always considered herself led by thought and logic in everything but art, but this sensation was…extraordinary, and so deeply arousing that she wasn’t certain she could stand much more. And then he took her left breast into his mouth and rolled his tongue across her nipple.
“Oh, God,” she gasped.
He put an arm around behind her and guided her flat down on the blanket. Caroline arched her back as he switched his attention to her right breast, and she tangled her hands into his hair to hold him against her chest. When he chuckled again in response, she felt it all the way down to between her legs.
Shifting a little, he raised up only far enough to yank his shirt off over his head, then returned to his torment. She loved the feel of his bare skin, smooth and velvet, with muscles of steel beneath. Running her hands down his back, she stopped at his waist and trailed forward to fumble at the fastening of his trousers.
“Not yet,” he said, pulling back away from her reach. His trousers half undone and an obvious bulge at the apex of his thighs, he took the top of her gown and pulled downward. She lifted her hips and the dress and shift came free, followed by her shoes as he removed them and tossed them one by one over his shoulder.
Caroline lay there, naked beneath the elm trees and climbing roses, as he took her left ankle and placed feather-light, glancing kisses along her skin and up the inside of her leg. She couldn’t hold still, clasping her fingers and running her palms along her own hips and breasts as he moved slowly and agonizingly upward.
Sinking onto his stomach, Zachary parted her thighs a little further and leaned in. As his tongue darted inside her, she gasped again, bucking. “Please, Zachary,” she quavered, trying to keep her voice down and barely remembering why, “I can’t stand any more. I can’t go any farther.”
“Yes, you can,” he returned, his own voice unsteady at the edges.
He worked his way down her other leg with the same maddening patience. How could he stand to take his time, when every inch of her body felt such an incredible urgency to be with him?
Finally he knelt upright again and finished unfastening his trousers. He lifted up a little and shucked the dark gray material down past his thighs. “You’re the reason artists create sculptures,” she breathed, sitting up to look at him.
“I was going to say the same thing about you, love, but thank you.” With a warm smile, the expression in his eyes telling her exactly what he intended to do next, he moved over her. Taking her mouth in an open, hungry kiss, he followed her back down to the blanket, trailing his lips down her throat to her breasts again.
“Zachary, we’re running out of time,” she complained, grasping his hair to tug his face up to hers again.
“The next time, we are not going to rush.”
The next time? She wasn’t certain she would survive this encounter. “Please.”
“Hold on,” he whispered, lowering his hips until his manhood pressed against her. Very slowly, with a care she noted even though she wanted him to hurry, he pushed forward.
She felt a sharp pain when he entered her. She closed her eyes in surprise. Every ounce of her was centered deep inside her as his slow slide continued until he was buried completely.
“Jesus,” he muttered, his arms shaking a little. “Open your eyes.”
Caroline did so, gazing up at him just a few inches from her face. And then he began to move his hips. Bucking again, she grasped her hands around his shoulders, digging in her fingers at the deep, tight pull inside her. His mouth found hers again, and she drank him in, pulling his hard body as close to hers as she could. Even being joined as they were wasn’t enough. She wanted more. She wanted everything.
His rhythm increased, and she couldn’t help her small whimpering moans which matched his thrusts. The clenching inside her grew tighter and tighter, until with a gasp she shattered, clinging to him helplessly as her mind shut down completely.
He sped his motions, in out, in out, and then with a groan from deep in his chest, he withdrew and lowered his head to her shoulder. Breathing hard, she kissed his ear and tried to remember where they were, and why it was they needed to stop doing this and put their clothes back on. Not yet. She wasn’t ready for the moment to end.
Chapter 16
Zachary shifted his weight onto one elbow, resting his head on his hand to look down at Caroline. Sweet Lucifer. Virgins weren’t supposed to be that eager or that responsive, and they weren’t supposed to arouse him to the point that he still wore his damned boots, with his trousers jammed around his knees. Virgins were supposed to be nervous and shy, and by this time they were supposed to be crying and lamenting their ruin.
Caroline, though, ran her fingers across his chest, probably memorizing his musculature or something. And then her hand roved further down, her inquisitive touch making him jump. It had taken every bit of self-control and resolve he’d possessed to withdraw at the last moment. If there was one thing she didn’t want to be, it was with child.
“You’d have to give me a short while before we could repeat the process,” he said, leaning forward to kiss her lightly, “though I don’t think we have time today, under the circumstances.”
She kissed him back. “That was extraordinary,” she commented, still sounding ragged and out of breath. “What would you do differently if you had more time?”
He lowered an eyebrow. “You weren’t pleased?”
“I was very pleased. You just said you’d wished we had more time. So what would you have done if we did?”
Zachary ran the tip of a finger around her nipple, watching the bud contract again in response. “Well, there are other positions, for one thing.”
“Goodness,” she breathed, arching her back again.
Twenty damned minutes wasn’t enough time. “And—”
“I’ve seen art books with naughty pictures,” she interrupted, clearly trying to regain her strong sense of logic.
“Oh.” He stifled a grin at her serious tone. “And there’s mutual pleasuring, of course.”
She lifted her head. “You didn’t feel pleasure?”
“I felt pleasure. A great deal of pleasure. That’s not what—”
“I thought you did.” Turning her gaze toward his nether regions again, her eyes abruptly widened. “You mean—”
“Caro, Zachary, it’s time for luncheon!”
Almost as an echo to Susan’s yell, Molly snorted and mumbled something startled. Bloody hell. Kneeling again, Zachary grabbed a cloth, then yanked up his trousers and fastened them. At the sound of multiple feet prancing up the path, he grabbed his shirt and waistcoat and cravat. Caroline was struggling into her gown, and he helped her on with her pelisse and pulled it over the open, gaping back of her sprig muslin.
“Tell them I went for a walk,” he hissed, and dove into the underbrush.
He found a good spot behind a half-collapsed faux stone wall and cr
ouched down to pull on his shirt. From a few yards away he could hear Caroline calmly saying that they’d finished the portrait and he had felt the need to stretch his legs. Thank God she had sense—and thank goodness she wasn’t one of her sisters, mad for marriage. Otherwise Edmund would probably be on his way from the house with a musket in his arms and a parson in tow.
Once he’d fastened the buttons on his waistcoat and tied his cravat as well as he could, he circled past the edge of the ruins to the path that led around the pond. Then, with a deep breath and a last check to make sure everything that should be fastened was, he headed back for the clearing.
“I thought I heard someone say luncheon,” he said as the gaggle of females came into view.
“You should see the ballroom,” Joanna said, prancing forward to take his arm. “I think Mama’s bought all the yellow ribbon in Wiltshire. It’s everywhere.”
“It looks like a spider’s web,” Anne commented.
“No, it doesn’t. It’s lovely. And the yellow irises and lilies are being delivered right now.” Julia took his other arm.
What he wanted to do was take Caroline’s arm. Angling their retreat, he headed the twins toward the portrait. “Did you see the finished result?” he asked, freeing his arms to indicate the painting.
“It’s lovely, Caro,” Anne said, taking her eldest sister’s hand. “Monsieur Tannberg will love it.”
“Thank you,” Caroline returned. “You go ahead. I need to bring it up to the house so it can finish drying.”
“I’ll help you, Miss Witfeld,” Zachary said quickly. “We’ll be along in a moment.”
Zachary thought Anne threw him a suspicious look, but it might very well have been his own nerves. That had been a very close call. As the girls, complaining loudly about Caroline’s monopoly of his time, vanished back down the path, he moved up beside her.
“I couldn’t find my shoes,” she whispered, picking up the painting and carefully settling it into its crate so she could transport the piece without smudging it.
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