by Mary Balogh
“You waltz well, Moira,” he said. “A great deal has happened since the first time we waltzed together.”
“Yes,” she said, and he could see the recklessness fade from her eyes to be replaced by an almost dreamy look. “It was the very first time I had waltzed. It had a reputation in Tawmouth as a scandalous dance.”
“A justly deserved notoriety,” he said.
“It is the most wonderful dance ever invented,” she said. “I thought so then, and I think so now.”
They danced the rest of it in silence, moving together with an instinctively shared sense of its rhythm, and with a mutual awareness of the other dance they would perform together in the privacy of their own home before the night was over. The cool evening breeze fanned their hot cheeks. The lamps on the pavilion and in the trees merged into a kaleidoscope of color about the edges of their vision.
* * *
IT could not be all that far from dawn, Moira thought later as they rode home in the carriage. It had been the last entertainment of the Season. Everyone had been reluctant to see it end. She kept her eyes closed and felt pleasantly sleepy and even more pleasantly aroused for what was to come when they arrived home.
She kept her thoughts firmly away from tomorrow.
“You are not sleeping, by any chance, are you?” her husband asked.
She opened her eyes to smile at him. “I am not,” she said. “I am just resting.”
“A good idea,” he said, a wealth of meaning in the words.
She wondered suddenly why there was a decision yet to make. They had quarreled during the two weeks they had been together, but not all the time. There had been more times when they had not quarreled. She would guess that there were many marriages in which there was more bad feeling between the partners than there was between her and Kenneth. And yet somehow those other married couples succeeded in rubbing along together well enough.
Rubbing along together—she sighed inwardly. That was the whole trouble. Merely rubbing along with a husband could never be enough for her, and she suspected that the same was true of Kenneth. Though it was not entirely true of her, of course. She would have married Sir Edwin Baillie, knowing very well that the marriage could only ever be tolerable at best. But then, that had been a different matter altogether. She had not loved Sir Edwin.
It was too complicated a matter to be thought of tonight, she decided, and she had promised herself that she would not do it. Tomorrow would come soon enough. She wished tomorrow would never come. She wished tonight could last forever.
“We are home,” a low voice said close to her ear, and her eyes snapped open. Her head was resting very comfortably on a broad, warm shoulder.
“Perhaps,” he said, “I should escort you to your room and leave you there to sleep.”
“No,” she said, sitting up. “I do not want to sleep—yet.”
“Ah,” he said. “You wish to dance again, ma’am?”
“I told you I wanted to dance all night,” she said.
“And your wish is my command,” he said.
* * *
IT was a dance in which they were immediately in harmony. He left all the candles burning, stripped away her nightgown and his nightshirt, kneeled with her on the bed, face-to-face, explored her with lightly seeking hands as she did the like to him, watched her through half-closed lids as she watched him, touched her face lightly with opened mouth and caressing tongue as she touched his.
When he lifted her breasts high with his hands and lowered his head to lick at her nipples, to suck them one at a time into his mouth, she held his head with both hands, her fingers threaded into his hair, and lowered her own head to croon to him, to moan her pleasure.
He was on fire for her almost from the first moment. He had never wanted, he realized, as he wanted tonight. Always before Moira there had been simply a woman’s body to give him pleasure, to be pleasured in return. Tonight, more even than for the past two weeks, it was her body, and he knew that all his adult life he had lived this moment in fantasy though he had never admitted it to himself until now. Always there had been Moira, as unconsciously a part of his life as the air he breathed.
She knelt with spread thighs and threw her head back as he slid his hand beneath her and teased her with fingers experienced at arousing desire. With his mouth he caressed her throat. Desire was a pain that throbbed in his groin and pounded against his temples and thundered against his eardrums.
Women, he knew from long experience, drew their sexual pleasure far more from foreplay than from penetration. He would have patience if she needed patience. He would wait for her all the rest of the night if necessary. Tonight she would know all the pleasure there was to know if it was within his power to give it to her.
“Does this feel good?” he asked against her mouth. “Do you want more? Do you want me inside? Tell me what you want.”
“Come inside me,” she whispered.
He put himself between her thighs, lifted her astride him, positioned himself, thrust hard and firm up into her—and waited for her to settle into a more comfortable position and wrap her arms about his shoulders.
“Dance with me now,” he said. “Let us share the rhythm and the melody.”
“Lead the way, then,” she whispered, “and I will follow.”
She stayed still for a few moments, as she had always stayed still during his lovemakings, while he began the thrust and withdrawal of love, and then she began tentatively to match his movements. After a while she added the rhythm of inner muscles clenching and unclenching about him and he lost all sense of time or place. Everything became sensation: the sound of labored, sobbing breath, the smell of cologne and sweat and woman, the feel of hot, slick, muscled depths, the instinctive determination to hold back, to prolong pain until he felt his partner first burst into release. Moira. His partner. She was part of the sensation. Not for one moment did his body lose its awareness that she was Moira.
She broke rhythm. She bore down hard on him, clenched hard about him, strained with tautness.
“Yes,” he murmured against her ear, holding deep in her, rocking his hips against her. “Yes. Come, then. It is the end of the dance.”
Release did not burst from her, as he expected. It came in soft sighing murmurs and in a gradual and total relaxation. It came in peace and incredible beauty. He withdrew slowly and slid deep once more, releasing his pain, his need, into her, sighing against her hair.
“Yes,” he said softly when he had finished.
“You were right,” she said a long while later. They were still kneeling up, clasped together, joined at their core. “There was more pleasure to be had. I had no idea.”
“I am always pleased to be of service to you, ma’am,” he said, kissing her nose.
“Pleasure is good—for a while at least,” she said.
“Very good.” He pondered her words: for a while at least. It was so easy to believe when one was engaged in sexual activity that sex was all. It was not, of course. Not even nearly all. And he had needed Moira to remind him of that. He lifted her carefully off him and laid her down on the bed, straightening her cramped legs. “And so is sleep when the dancing is at an end.”
He got off the bed, covered her, picked up his nightshirt without bothering to pull it on, and smiled down at her. “Good night, Moira. That was a great pleasure indeed.”
“Good night, Kenneth,” she said. She did not smile back at him. She closed her eyes before he turned away.
And tomorrow we will talk. Neither of them had spoken the words aloud. But they had both heard them quite clearly.
Tomorrow they would talk.
* * *
DESPITE the late night, made later by an hour of vigorous lovemaking, they were up and out by the middle of the morning. They walked to Rawleigh House to wave the viscount and viscountess on their way. The sky was a brilliant blue,
unmarred by even the smallest of clouds, and the day, already hot, promised to be a scorcher later on.
“It is a reminder,” Kenneth said, “that it is time to leave London behind for the opener spaces and cleaner air of the countryside or the seaside.”
“Yes,” Moira said.
They had been chatting quite amicably since she had joined him at the breakfast table earlier. And yet it had needed only carelessly spoken words like these to silence them. Moira did not doubt that he was as aware as she of the difference between what they had done together in bed the night before and what they had done during the two weeks preceding it. And of course he was as aware as she of the decision they must come to during the next day or two. He had just come perilously close to putting it into words.
They walked the rest of the way in silence.
Viscount Rawleigh and his wife were in good spirits. They were clearly excited at the prospect of returning home to Stratton Park in Kent. Mr. Gascoigne had also come to bid them farewell. Lord Pelham had not.
“He fully intended to, Rex,” Mr. Gascoigne said, grinning. “But I daresay he is still abed, fast asleep after—ah, after the late night at Vauxhall.”
“I daresay you are right, Nat,” the viscount said dryly while Catherine caught Moira’s eye, tossed her glance ceilingward, and shook her head.
Lord Pelham, Moira thought, must be thoroughly infatuated with his new mistress.
“Thank you for coming to see us on our way, my dear,” Lord Rawleigh said, taking one of Moira’s hands in both his own. “We will miss our friends. I asked Ken to bring you to Stratton for a few weeks, but he assures me that you have other plans. Enjoy the summer, then. It has been a delight to meet you.” He raised her hand to his lips.
“Moira.” Catherine hugged her tightly. “I feel that I have known you all my life instead of just two weeks. I am so glad our friendship will continue because our husbands are friends. I will write to you—at Dunbarton? Is that where you and Lord Haverford are going?”
Moira smiled and nodded.
“You must come and visit us there,” Kenneth said from behind Moira before taking Catherine’s hand and bowing over it. “Must they not, Moira?”
“Of course.” She smiled again. “It is in one of the loveliest parts of the world.”
“Perhaps next year,” the viscount said with a chuckle. He looked fondly at Catherine. “After a certain event has been brought to a safe conclusion.”
She smiled back at him and blushed. Moira, looking at them, felt a stab of envy.
Mr. Gascoigne was kissing Catherine’s hand. “And you, sir,” she said. “May we expect you at Stratton anytime soon? We would both be very happy to have you. Or is your father seriously ailing?”
“I suspect,” he said, grimacing, “that my father’s indisposition arises as much as anything from the fact that he has five daughters yet to marry and a niece who has been growing mutinous.”
“Oh, dear,” Catherine said.
“I believe,” he continued, “that he has pleasant mental images of me lining up eligible suitors for my sisters and taking my cousin over my knee and giving her a good walloping. He is wrong on all counts, of course. But I am going, you see.”
“If I were you, Nat,” Kenneth said, “I would emigrate to America today—or, preferably, yesterday.”
“Is there no more distant location?” Rex asked.
Mr. Gascoigne smiled almost apologetically. “I went home just before Waterloo, if you will remember,” he said. “I stayed for five days before leaving again in a hurry—so many females, all of them riding roughshod over my poor father, who loves nothing better than to spend his days in his library. But now that I have recovered from the shock of finding the girls all grown up, I must confess to a fondness for them.”
“And a desire to line up those eligibles for them,” Viscount Rawleigh said, slapping a hand on his shoulder. “To it, then, Nat, old chap. Take Eden with you.” He laughed. “We must be on our way, my love.”
He handed Catherine into the carriage and within minutes they were on their way, both of them waving from the open window.
“Well,” Mr. Gascoigne said, gazing after them, “that was one hastily contracted marriage that appears to have turned out well.”
Moira stiffened. Kenneth said nothing.
Mr. Gascoigne swung around to look at them. He winced and grimaced simultaneously. “Oh, I say—” he began.
“Think nothing of it,” Kenneth said. “You are quite right. Moira and I are going to stroll back through the park. Would you care to join us?”
“I hope to be on my way later today,” Mr. Gascoigne said. “There are numerous things to do first. You will excuse me? Lady Haverford, ma’am—” He took Moira’s hand in his. “It has been my great pleasure to make your acquaintance. Ken is a lucky devil, if you will pardon my language.”
He shook Kenneth’s hand and then the two of them hugged each other impulsively before he strode away, leaving them standing together on the pavement outside Rawleigh House.
“Shall we stroll in the park?” Kenneth asked.
Moira nodded and took his arm. She had pictured them talking in the drawing room, deciding their future there. But there was a tension between them as they walked, a silence that was in no way comfortable. It would happen in the park, she guessed. They were walking toward the most crucial moment of their lives.
“We will wait until we are inside the park,” he said quietly, as if he had read her thoughts. “We will walk down by the Serpentine, I think.”
“Yes,” she said.
* * *
“WELL, Moira.” They had not spoken for fifteen minutes or more. But they had strolled across lawns, beneath trees, along by the Serpentine. They had watched a group of children trying to sail a boat on the water, guiding it with a stick so that it would not sail beyond their reach. A nurse had warned them rather weakly to be careful.
Kenneth could hear his wife inhaling slowly.
“Three months ago,” he said, “we married because circumstances forced us into it. The morning after and again a week after that you told me you wished never to set eyes on me again. A little over two weeks ago you joined me here because I had—summoned you. You agreed to remain to enjoy what was left of the Season. Have you enjoyed it?”
“Yes,” she said.
“And to decide if you still felt as you did three months ago. Do you?”
There was a lengthy silence. “We were both to decide,” she said at last. “You were as reluctant about the marriage as I. You were as eager to get away from me as I was to see you go. Why you decided that we should rethink that decision I do not quite know, but it was both of us who were to do it. Do you still feel the same way?”
It was quite as difficult as he could possibly have imagined. A mutual decision necessitated that either he commit himself first or that she do it. It could not be done simultaneously. And then the other must react. But what if the other had made the opposite decision?
If she still felt as she had done at Dunbarton, though, would she not have said so without any hesitation at all?
But she spoke again before he had framed an answer to her question. “Why did you cry?” she asked hurriedly. “When you told Mr. Gascoigne that I had miscarried, why did you cry?”
“The devil!” he said, horrified. “He told you that?”
“No, not he,” she said. “Catherine told me.”
Good Lord!
“Why did you cry?” she asked again.
“I lost a child,” he said. “One I had only recently learned about, one I had hardly accustomed my mind to expecting. And then it was lost—in pain and anguish. You lost a child—my child. A child died that night and with it—two other lives. Or rather, a possibility for a life, a—I do not know what I am trying to say. I believe I wished during the days following that I
had died in battle. I—did not particularly wish to live on. Perhaps I still felt the same way when I spoke to Nat. Perhaps I thought that I might have wished to live on if only that had not happened. Perhaps I thought that the wrong person had died on that night. I do not know what I am saying. Am I making any sense?”
“Why did you send for me?” she asked.
“Perhaps to discover if there was anything to live for,” he said. “Though I have never thought of it quite that way until this moment.”
“And is there?” she asked. “Anything to live for?”
Was there? Somehow one dreamed . . . No, he must say it aloud. “One dreams of perfection,” he said, “of happily ever after. Of romantic love that defies time and death and spans eternity. It is hard to accept the very different reality of real life. We could never know perfection, Moira. There could never be a happily ever after for us. We could never truly love each other. Am I willing to settle for less than the dream? Are you?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I have tried to imagine life without you. I have tried to imagine returning to Dunbarton alone, knowing that I would never see you again.”
“And?”
“It is an image of peace,” she said.
Ah. He had not realized how much he had wanted her to contradict all that he had just said. He felt suddenly shattered. But he could not blame her. It was a mutual decision they were making.
“It is an image of emptiness,” she said.
A little boy and his father were trying to get a kite aloft without much success. There was too little wind. But the father patiently tried again, bending over his son and positioning his hands correctly on the string. Kenneth felt a wave of envy and of longing.
“Moira,” he asked, “when are your courses due?”
“Now,” she said. “Today, yesterday, tomorrow. Soon.”
“How would you feel,” he asked, “if you found that you were with child again?”
“Terrified,” she said. “Excited.”
“You know,” he said, “that I would not leave a child of mine to grow up without a father.”