“For God’s sake. Your boys love you, and that little sprite of a sister of theirs…”
“Yes?”
“When I look at that child, I don’t know how much longer I can stand to stay away from my sisters and my home.”
Other people had problems, too, even people who outranked Trenton and owned thousands of acres of beautiful Irish countryside.
“You could go back for a visit. Just take a peek.”
Though the idea of Cato deserting the stables just now did not…sit well.
Cato’s smile was tired as he set his empty glass on the sideboard. “Irish gossip has a quality that the English variety lacks. The grooms and tenants and such didn’t just see me up before my papa when I was a lad, they cuffed my ear from time to time, sat me down to milk and buttered soda bread, chased me from their haylofts when I was up to mischief with the dairymaids.”
“No privacy.” Though Wilton had left his children no privacy either, Cato’s experience was not based in a parent’s need to manipulate and control.
“No privacy, but worlds of safety,” Cato rejoined. “I couldn’t slip home for a little spying on my sisters. Clancy’s swineherd’s mother’s cousin would see me fifty miles from home, and the fatted calf would be dead, dressed and cooked before I trotted up the lane.”
“But those people,”—Trent made a circling motion with his hand—“the swineherd’s cousin’s whatever who kept an eye on you, they’re how you know for sure Wilton is evil and you are not.”
Cato regarded his employer with what Trent feared was pity. “This troubles you. You believe you’re your father’s son, exclusively?”
Trent sank back into his chair, when he wanted to lay himself down in a bed of fragrant pink flowers. “By the time she died, my mother wasn’t much better than my father. She hated Wilton and attributed to him every nasty motive possible. I grew extremely resentful of my own spouse before she too went to her reward.”
Resentful and desperate, which his mother had been as well.
“Which only makes my point. You and Wilton are different. He embittered his wife and beat his sons. You cared for your wife and cherish your children. You are not your father.”
A silence built, while Trent pointedly ignored the decanter and let weariness make him pathetic.
“I’m avoiding Ellie. I tarried in Town when I could have written to my man of business to sell the house I’ll never use there again. I dithered over a visit to my younger sister, Emily, when she’s having a grand time breaking in her dancing slippers at various assemblies. I put off coming back here, though I missed my children terribly.”
Missed them—and Ellie, and worried about the lot of them.
Cato refreshed his drink with the air of a man resigned to an awkward discussion. “This makes you like Wilton, because you don’t want to see the woman shot, disfigured, or poisoned?”
“I won’t stop taking precautions until I’ve held my in-laws accountable.”
“You think because Ellie has your attention, they might spread their resentment to her?”
“I don’t know what to think.” Trent rose again and turned away from Cato to survey the back gardens. In the evening light they were for the most part orderly, blooming, peaceful and pretty—also fragrant—thanks to Ellie. “Part of me resents the burden of complication that comes from dealing with a female again. I was growing content in my isolation after Paula’s death. Another part of me is scheming how I can climb in Ellie’s windows of a night and enjoy every favor she so generously offers me.”
“That’s easy. On the west side of the house, there’s an oak whose branches were never pruned sufficiently. You can climb from it to the porch outside the family parlor. Rammel used to do it when he wanted to escape Ellie’s notice after hours, or arrive without benefit of censure from the servants.”
Easy indeed, when a man’s own sons recognized him as proficient at climbing trees. “How do you know this about him?”
“Rammel had the occasional use for a pint in low places, and the man would talk horses and hounds with anyone.”
“The west side, you say?”
Cato’s smile grew into a grin. “I would never say such a thing.”
“Gentleman stable master that you are, you would never contribute to my moral dilemma.”
Cato snorted, sounding curiously like Darius when disgusted with Polite Society. “That wee fellow in your breeches wouldn’t know a moral if it swived him silly. I’m merely taking away an excuse.”
“An excuse?”
“You say you want to keep the lady safe, and to do that, you don’t want to foster an appearance of anything untoward between you. Instead of addressing the appearances—the source of the problem—you’re thinking of withdrawing from the field entirely. If you’re simply wrestling with second thoughts, you should withdraw and allow Ellie the freedom to choose others, and not tell yourself you’re protecting with your neglect.”
“Ellie? She’s not Lady Rammel to you anymore?”
“She’s Lady Rammel to me, and Dane’s widow, and breeding, and I can’t offer her as much as you can, so no, you needn’t bristle at me like a stray dog, Amherst.”
“I am bristling, aren’t I? Well, hell.” He’d doubtless referred to the lady as Ellie in Cato’s astute hearing.
“That about sums up the condition of a man in love, particularly one who won’t admit his circumstances to himself.” Cato tossed back the last of his refill. “I’m off to the stables. You’re too tired to be worth a decent game of chess tonight and should seek your bed. Things will make more sense in the morning.”
“Yes, Mother.” Trent let him go without another word.
The west side of Ellie’s house faced the paddocks, not the stables or the outbuildings where prying eyes might see a few shadows moving in the depths of the oak by moonlight.
Trent called for his bath, tried to think of a brief story to read his children before he tucked them in, and wondered how early Ellie might retire on a pleasant summer night.
Chapter Fifteen
Trent was naked in Ellie’s fairy-tale bed, naked in her arms, before she woke up.
“Trenton.” She wrapped herself around him in welcome, and within the minute, he was inside her willing heat.
When he’d been up in London, making his calls, closing up his town house, he’d been frantic to get back to her. His mind had been set in one direction, like a young man’s, completely at the mercy of his desire.
Then he’d returned to Crossbridge, and he’d felt the same reluctance overtake him he’d experienced when coming back from Belle Maison. An anxious, hollow, ache under his cross-eyed hunger.
But now, hilted in Ellie Hampton’s delectable feminine sweetness, all he felt was a towering relief.
She levered up and got her mouth on one of his nipples, and he wished she’d consume him, devour him, and take him inside her in every way imaginable.
“I worried for you.” She tightened her hold of him as she whispered the words against his chest, while Trent’s urgency abated fractionally.
She deserved better than this from him, better than a quick, desperate swiving in the dark. He slowed the undulations of his hips and eased his grip on her backside.
“I’ve missed you, too,” he whispered, finding her mouth with his own.
He mentally started over, though his cock stayed buried in her while he reacquainted his mouth with the taste of her. When her tongue was lazily stroking against his in response, he cruised his nose over the fragrance of her hair, then the delicate scent at the juncture of her neck, so warm and sweet. He took her earlobe between his teeth as her sigh fanned past his temple and her hands winnowed through his hair.
Ellie shifted under him to lock her ankles at the small of his back. “Trenton, please…”
He cupped her breast, giving her the slightest pressure on her nipple, and that was all it took.
She unraveled with a soft, surrendering groan, her body clutching him
hard, repeatedly, until she sighed and relaxed beneath him. He gave her a minute to catch her breath while he kept his movements easy and slow, then sent her right back up again in a short burst of more purposeful thrusts.
The next time he heard her whisper, “Trenton, please,” it was a plea for clemency, but he’d found his stride, and his sense of purpose—his sense of home. She became so sensitized he could send her over the edge with a few powerful thrusts and some well-placed caresses.
He felt when she stopped fighting her pleasure, stopped thinking about how much was too much and how many was enough. And still he wasn’t ready to let go, or to give up the banquet that their lovemaking had become. Trent could not have said how long they loved, but he took her from peak to peak, sometimes lazily, sometimes more forcefully, until his own completion ceased to matter, so thoroughly was he attuned to hers.
He’d become relaxed almost to the point of sleep, moving easily, when Ellie’s legs wrapped around his flanks again. She slid a hand over his backside, anchoring herself to him as she turned her face into his shoulder.
“You,” she said. “This time, you, too.”
She used her inner muscles on him, and that sensation was so keenly pleasurable Trent forced himself to keep his tempo slow enough that she could synchronize with his thrusting. He let the tension build, and build, and build, and still, Ellie kept up with him. Vertigo stole over him, and pleasure welled, an inexorable, ecstatic drenching that obliterated his control and shook him from the inside.
“Jesus God, Ellie…” The pull of her mouth, her fingers, her body went on and on, drawing sensation into a tight coil of intimacy and desire. Longing was tangled up in the physical sensations—longing for relief from worries, for oblivion from sorrow, for a life free from duty, appearances, and familial tensions.
Longing for uncomplicated pleasures, and for a future with Elegy Hampton.
She did not relent. She harried and hounded him with her kisses and caresses, she wrapped herself—her body, her scent, her dearness—around him and would not let go.
Trent surrendered to long moments of wrenching satisfaction, after which his pleasure didn’t so much end as it dissipated, like the last notes of a beautiful composition, lingering delightfully in memory.
He levered up on his forearms and gathered her close, laying his cheek over hers, only to pull back. “Ellie?” Trent nuzzled her cheek with his nose and confirmed she had indeed been crying. “Love?”
Between them, the baby moved, provoking such a depth of tender feeling Trent’s throat constricted with sentiments he dared not voice.
“Elegy,” he whispered when she’d quieted. “Talk to me. Don’t slip off to sleep and leave me here alone.”
She gave a shuddery little laugh that broke his heart.
“Like you left me alone?” She pushed his hair back off his forehead, a sweet caress that didn’t hide the pain in her words. “I told myself I wasn’t going to do this.”
“Do this?” Trent levered up on his elbows, sensing that whatever was on Ellie’s mind he wouldn’t be able to cuddle and pet her past it.
“Will you please get off me?”
She closed her eyes on a wincing sigh as he withdrew, suggesting he’d made her sore. He had to have—he was sore, a novel experience for him. He made use of the washing water and sat by Ellie’s hip, passing her a cool, damp cloth.
She tidied herself while he watched, an intimacy he could not recall any other woman permitting him.
“Are we to argue, Ellie?” he asked as he climbed in beside her.
“I hope not.” She turned on her side to regard him. “But I find…”
“You find?” He settled an arm around her shoulders and drew her against him.
“I have been unable to govern my emotions adequately where you’re concerned, Trenton Lindsey. This past week, while you’ve been gone, I could not stop fretting for you.”
“I’m not used to anybody fretting for me. It’s good of you.”
They were the wrong words, and yet they were honest words. She was a good woman, plain and simply good. He stopped himself from elaborating in the direction of dear, precious, and other indications of folly.
“Good of me.” Ellie repeated the phrase as if finding it underdressed at a formal dinner. “Perhaps it might be, if I felt I had a choice, but I cannot say I do. Nor do I like it, feeling this fretfulness. I did not allow fretting where my husband was concerned, and he at least had the courtesy to drop me the occasional note, to let me know where he was and how long he intended to bide there.”
“A note.” Trent’s post-coital beatitude curled in on itself. He was about to get what he’d told Cato he wanted: leave to take himself off, leave to disentangle himself from a woman who deserved safety, at least.
And other things he couldn’t yet promise her.
“A note Trenton, a simple courtesy. You owe me nothing, I know. We are merely dallying, satisfying our animal urges with each other.”
“You are not an animal urge to me. Good God, after what went on in this bed, how can you think—?”
Ellie put two fingers to his lips. “After what went on in this bed, how can you deny our animal urges are involved?”
“Well, of course they are, and God be thanked for it.”
“Don’t do this.” Ellie drew her fingers over his lips gently. “Don’t try to find soothing platitudes and pretty courtesies, Trent. You are prodigiously talented in bed—I’m not so inexperienced I don’t know what I’m giving up—but when it comes to dallying, that manual we’ve joked about is written in a language I can’t comprehend, and my ignorance leaves me discommoded.”
“What are you saying, Elegy?” But he knew what she was saying: He had Botched It with her, Badly. He’d wanted her safe, not heartbroken, not sad and angry. He knew that much, even with his brain sizzling from lust and his body chronically exhausted.
“I can’t do this,” Ellie said softly. “I can’t make passionate love with you then go on about my life for a week or so, then welcome you back into my bed, Trenton. Not when your life is arguably in danger and you won’t let me come to you. You hold all the cards in this dalliance. I spent five years letting my husband hold all the cards. I thought I could be a merry widow, but I find I cannot. I’m sorry.”
He got out of bed, and she watched him in the moonlight, her expression solemn, her gaze sad. He came around the bed, climbed in behind her, and threaded an arm under her neck.
“I’m sorry, too.” He kissed her temple, all manner of difficult feelings rioting through him—relief not among them. “I did not mean to hurt you, but if this is what you want, I’ll leave you in peace.”
She kissed his wrist and offered him not a shred of argument.
Or hope.
He was doing the right thing, acceding to her wishes, letting her break it off to keep her safe—and to stop the runaway freight wagon of their mutual feelings for each other while they still could.
Even having given her what she wanted, and what was doubtless best for her, and—his self-disgust was running high enough to fuel brutal honesty—what was least uncomfortable for him—he knew he’d still made her cry again.
***
“I’m off for the rest of the week.” Thomas Benning tossed his last pair of clean stockings into a haversack, grateful for the excuse not to meet his older brother’s eyes.
“Take French leave if you must.” Tidewell Benning’s voice held supreme indifference, which Thomas knew to be false. “It’s what you do best.”
“Not fair, Tye.” Thomas glanced around the room, anywhere but at the brother who lounged on his bed, boots and all. “I’m damned sick and tired of the nonsense you get up to. That girl was thirteen and you knew it.”
Tidewell folded his hands behind his head, not a care in the world. “She was a tart. Girls marry at thirteen, have babies at thirteen.”
“You’d know more than I would about that. And there’s thirteen, and then there’s thirteen.” The p
oor thing had been simple, and the blood…
“You think a house party will assuage your overactive conscience?”
A house party would let him drink himself to oblivion without having to pay for it, and without having to see the disappointment in Papa’s eyes.
“Somebody in this family needs to marry money,” Thomas shot back. “The house parties are the consolation offered to those who failed to snag a husband during the Season. I’m tired of hearing Papa strut and rant and admonish you once again to choose a bride.”
Except the local women wouldn’t have Tye, that much had been plain for years. Like Thomas, Tye was tall with wavy, dark hair, but middle age was stealing a march on Tye’s waist and his hairline.
Tidewell grinned, showing a glimmer of the charm that had got him into so much trouble. “I have time yet for choosing a bride. You act like we really do need the blunt.”
“I’m nearly certain we do, Tye.” They were alone, and Thomas was nagged by an obligation to be honest with his brother. “Papa isn’t looking quite so sanguine these days, and the past few harvests have been bad. You’re his heir. What does he tell you?”
“To keep my breeches up when I’m in the vicinity of little girls whose brothers know their way around a dueling ground.”
“Always sound advice.” Thomas couldn’t muster a smile, because Papa hadn’t been joking, though Tye had. “Papa sent Paula into Amherst’s arms with a damned generous settlement, but since then…”
Tye’s expression became mean. “She needed a damned generous settlement. Stupid twit was barmy.”
“She was our sister.”
“And she cost this family a pretty penny,” Tye retorted, “which you’re suggesting we now can’t afford.” He crossed his boots at the ankles, leaving a smear of dirt on Thomas’s counterpane.
“I’m suggesting you talk to Papa. And Tye? You really do need a wife, some tolerant, easy-breeding country girl who thinks being your baroness would make up for your shortcomings.”
Which were legion.
“You are turning into an old woman, Thomas.” Tye sat up, boots hitting the floor. “If you’re so set on the proprieties, you take a wife.”
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