by Lydia Joyce
Perhaps it was not the best solution for him to have compounded one difficulty with another, however logical it had seemed at the time. The ravings scrawled across the walls of the servant’s chamber, however ancient they were, seemed a stark insult to whatever it was that he and Fern were working out between each other, puncturing his hope for an easy solution. And yet, he felt as if he was coming very close to learning something extremely important—about himself, about Fern, and about everything.
Putting those thoughts from his mind, he set the towels next to the basin. “Come here, Fern. I will help you with your corset.”
Her expression had an edge of wariness. “You are through playing games?”
“Through with the last game, at least,” he said, privately amused at how any woman who looked so wanton could be so reticent.
She slid off the bed and stepped forward cautiously, stopping in front of him and regarding him with her frank gray eyes for a moment before turning her back and pulling her tumbled hair out of the way.
He untied the bow at the bottom of the corset and began feeding the laces back through the metal eyelets inch by inch to loosen the garment. He could feel her breathing through the corset’s rigid boning. Following a sudden impulse, he kissed her neck lightly, and she shivered.
“Why did you marry me, Fern?” he asked.
She stiffened. “What a queer question to ask a woman!”
“It is the same question you asked me only two days ago,” he pointed out.
“You never did answer it.” Her response carried no bite.
“Will you answer mine?”
She paused for a long moment, seeming to consider it, and he continued to feed the laces back through the corset. “Yes,” she finally said. “I will. I married because I am meant to be married. I married you because you are going to be a peer, you were a respected gentleman, I was deeply flattered by your attention—and because you asked.”
“You married my title, then,” he concluded, obscurely disappointed.
“It sounds so cold when you say it like that.” The protest was halfhearted. “I would not have agreed if there had been an indecorous difference in age or you had been a boor.”
“As much as it stings my pride to hear you, I was no more passionate in my choice,” he said. “You were pretty, quiet, inoffensive, kind, and had connections to the right families. What more could I want?” The words had a bitterness he had not intended to express.
“How about love?” she asked softly.
Colin stopped, then put his hands on her shoulders and turned her gently around. “Love was not anything I had aspirations to enjoy.”
“Why not?” she asked seriously. “Your parents seem happy enough together.”
“They are good partners,” Colin conceded. “But love? It is not something that would occur to them to miss.”
“Your mother was not sufficiently affectionate, and so you did not look for love?” Fern asked skeptically.
“No. My brother Christopher looked for—and found—his love match, as unlikely as it was for an Edgington daughter to agree to marry a man of the cloth.” Colin’s smile was wry. “And Peter has cut a wide and passionate swath through the debutantes for three years running. My lack was not caused by my parents, but it was, perhaps, allowed by their example to persist. Why did you not look for love, if you are such a romantic?”
“I thought it came automatically upon marriage, with the wedding ring,” Fern said simply.
“The more fool you?” Colin asked, the words causing a pang he had no right to feel.
“Not a fool,” she said evenly. “Merely naïve. Though I fear sometimes that you are a madman, I haven’t given up hope for us having something that is worthwhile.”
“Even love?”
She shrugged, seeming a little helpless. “I don’t think I know what it is anymore.” She dropped her eyes, as if to escape the conversation, and began unfastening the hidden hooks of her busk. “Right now, all I know for certain is that I want to be clean.”
Colin took the mass of hair from her shoulder and lifted it out of the way, letting it slide across her back. “It is so strange to me that we grew up in the same circles and never really knew each other.”
Fern shrugged out of her corset. “What was there to know? I was the middle sister. Faith was ethereal, Flora clever, and I … I was dependable. I envied Elizabeth and Mary Hamilton’s brazenness—I still do—and I became their shadow at all the summer house parties. But I could not be like them, and when I was with them, I seemed to fade even more, so that no one noticed me at all. Whereas you … you simply stood apart—apart from your brothers, apart even from young Hamilton, for all that he will be an earl. I remember you as a solemn shadow at the edge of the children’s games, and I remember thinking even then, How can someone so young be so grave? So, no, I did not know you, for all that we spent many summers of our youth in the same houses. No one did, I think. You weren’t a boy who could be known.”
Colin took in her unusually voluble speech in silence. What could he say? There were no secret motivations, no deep and burning wound that caused the distance that she observed. “I think, perhaps, that I was simply born with a character not easily moved toward amusement or pleasure, greed or fear. Fine feeling was something that was never sought in me by my nurses and tutors nor valued by my parents. I developed only those virtues that were desired of me—circumspection, dignity, deliberation, and an awareness of my place and duty.”
“It sounds like such a sad fate for a little boy,” Fern said.
Her observation took him unawares. “Sad? I was not sad. I was not happy, either. I was simply there. That was the sum of it.”
Fern lifted a hand to the place on his neck where she had bitten him. “And now you do feel.”
“It is like waking from a long dream,” Colin said quietly, “confused and uncertain.”
Understanding dawned in her eyes, clouded still but there. “That is what you meant by your talk of facades and escape. You wanted to discover what it was like being awake without the world looking on.” She gave him a delicately reproachful look. “You did not explain it very well.”
“I am not accustomed to explaining my actions to anyone.”
“I don’t think you’re accustomed to having actions that need to be explained,” Fern countered, though softly. She sighed, looking lost. “Where are we going, Colin?”
“I don’t know,” he answered. “But I think we shall both know when we get there.”
“I suppose that is enough to hope for right now,” she said.
Colin raised a corner of his mouth and turned toward the basin, wetting and wringing out a cloth. He washed his face, then moved to his shoulders. He could feel Fern’s eyes on him, and a rustle of cloth told him that she was finishing the process of undressing. He did not turn around, as much as he wanted to feast himself upon the sight of her bare flesh; he knew she would still be uncomfortable, and somehow, that now mattered to him for reasons other than how it would make her treat him.
He finished washing—Fern made a startled noise when he quickly scrubbed his genitals, and he knew that she had been watching—and wrung out the cloth and dried himself briskly. He took the washbasin and turned to empty it out the window.
Fern was standing with her back firmly to him, the soft, narrowing curve of her waist flaring to ample hips and buttocks brushed by the ends of her hair, her skin pink-tinged white except for the two red pressure spots that her corset had left high on her hips. He dumped the water out the window, and holding the dipping basin in one hand, he came up behind her. She stiffened as he approached, and he could feel the carnal tension running through her.
“Now it’s your turn,” he said.
She turned to face him, and he stepped forward again, pinning her between him and a dresser. Her nipples brushed his chest even as she tried to lean away. “No games?” she said, frowning at him.
“None that you won’t enjoy as much as I
do,” he promised.
“I doubt that,” she said even as her breath quickened.
He smiled. “I will take that as a challenge, mon ange.” He backed away, taking the kettle from the fire again and pouring its contents into the basin, adding the rest of the cold water from the bucket. He wet a fresh cloth. “Sit down,” he commanded her, nodding to the nearest chair.
She obeyed, wariness and expectation warring in her eyes. He wrung out the cloth and bent over her. She looked up at him. He caught her chin, holding it against her automatic recoil, and gently washed her face, pausing to smooth out the creases of surprise that furrowed her forehead.
“Why?” she asked as he dropped the cloth back into the basin.
“Because it pleases me. I promise that it will please you.”
She bit her lip but said nothing more.
Colin rinsed and wrung out the cloth again, turning his attention to her neck but stopping, decorously, at the point where her breastbone met her clavicle. Then he lifted her silky mass of hair.
“Bend over,” he said. She did, and he let her hair slide so that it streamed across the back and top of her head down between her knees, exposing the elegant line of her neck and back. He washed them slowly, thoroughly. Her skin pinkened in the trail of the steaming rag as he followed the delicate arch of her spine down to where it met her tailbone and traced the curves of her ribs, hard under the sweetly soft padding of her flesh. At first, she held stiff and motionless under his ministrations, but slowly, the knots of muscle on either side of her spine loosened, and her breathing began to match the slow, even strokes of the soft cloth across her skin. She gave a small shiver as he lightened his touch, moving into his hand, then sighed as he deepened the pressure, rubbing the muscles beneath her skin.
When he finally turned to rinse out the rag, Fern straightened slowly, her eyes half-lidded and her face flushed under the cascade of curls that clung to it damply. Her hair divided, covering her breasts in its brunette waves.
Colin looked consideringly down at her. “You look like a painting of Eve made for delicate tastes.”
“More like Susanna and the Elders,” Fern countered, her voice slightly hoarse.
“Am I an elder, then?” he asked. “How about Bathsheba instead?”
“Bathsheba must have been exotically beautiful to catch the notice of the king. I’m better fit to be ogled by a handful of dirty old men,” Fern said.
“You may not be exotic, but you are the near ideal of English maidenhood,” Colin said bluntly, raising an eyebrow.
She blushed even harder. “I am no maiden.”
He chuckled darkly. “No, you are not that.” He knelt and took one soft, warm foot into his hand and began to wash it. She gave a gasping giggle and jerked away.
“That tickles!”
“I’ll be more careful,” he promised, recapturing it. He washed slowly but more deeply, rubbing from her heel across the softness of the arch to the firmer ball, then took the other one and repeated the procedure.
“That feels amazing,” Fern said. “All of it. I thought—I thought it would just be strange, but this …” She laughed a little breathily. “You may bathe me any time you choose.”
“I might just do that,” Colin said.
Another rinse, and he moved to her calves, following their curve out from her small ankles and then back in again at her dimpled knees, first firmly and then softly, titillating. She had stopped smiling by then, her face drawn in concentration, and she gripped the arms of her chair with expectation as he refreshed the cloth and moved higher. He could feel the muscles tighten under the translucent skin of her inner thigh, and her reaction made his own pulse speed up in sympathy. But he stopped where her hair cascaded into her lap, mingling with the short curls at the juncture of her legs, and paused to get a fresh cloth.
When he turned back to her, her eyes were wide and deep in expectation and apprehension. He fed off it, bathed himself in the responses he invoked in her. Mutely, he pushed her hair back, first one side and then the other, revealing her generous breasts.
He pressed her back against the chair so that she was still sitting on the edge but leaning fully against the back. She resisted only a moment before giving in. He started at her collarbone and moved downward, slowly, thoroughly, teasingly. She stiffened as he neared her breasts, her hands tightening on the arms of the chair, but he made a pass of the cloth down her breastbone first, across the soft roundness of her stomach to the top of the dark curls that began below. He worked his way up, and even though his touch stayed light, she was now too taut with desire to find his touch ticklish. He skimmed up her rib cage and cupped one of her breasts in his hand, holding it there as she gazed at him, a mute plea in her eyes.
Slowly, slowly, he raised his cloth-wrapped hand toward her nipple, rasping it across the delicate flesh. Fern’s head tilted back, exposing the smooth line of her throat as her hips and back arched toward him. He did it again, and she moaned. He rubbed it then, gently, between his thumb and forefinger.
Her legs pressed hard against the arms of the chair, and he could not help himself any longer—he bent down and took her other breast in his mouth, enveloping it in heat. It was hard against his tongue, and he sucked it against the roof of his mouth. Fern’s hips pressed against his belly, her head thrown back, and he had to swallow a groan as he pulled himself away from her with a shudder.
“Don’t,” she said, her eyes wide with desire. “Don’t stop.”
“I am not done yet,” he said.
He dipped the cloth once more into the water and pressed it against her belly. He slid it downward steadily, moving between her legs.
“No,” he said when she started to straighten, putting a restraining hand on her knee. “Don’t move.” He took the cloth and passed it with deliberation across her flesh from the base of her tailbone and in between her folds to the hard nub at the front of her opening. She shook when the textured cloth passed across it, and he paused to rinse it one last time.
“No more,” she said, the words a low plea. “I need it now. I need you now.”
Colin simply smiled and took the cloth, still dripping with steaming water, and rubbed across the nub at her entrance again, with deliberation. She wriggled hard against the chair, but he used his weight against her leg to pin her against its arm. He rubbed her there again, and then again, until she was panting with the need for the release that he was denying her.
Only then did he move downward between her already slick folds. She made a choking gasp as the rough cloth met her swollen flesh. He passed over once lightly, and then again, the second time pressing deeper so that she whimpered. And then he shifted his grip so that it was not the cloth that was pressing against her but his water-slick fingers, and he pushed.
Her body opened for him as she cried out, clasping his fingers tightly, hotly. Her hips came up against his hand hard. Eyes screwed shut, she gasped for breath, her lips parted as she strained with the strokes of his hand. She shuddered once, her breath catching, and then again, and then her entire body began to move with the rhythm of his hand, and his own surged in sympathy.
She made another choked noise, and he knew that she was on the edge. He seized both of her thighs and, still kneeling, plunged into her, pulling her hips toward him. She cried out, but he was already half gone and scarcely heard her.
Alive, alive, I am alive. The words matched the rhythm of his thrusts, his heartbeat, his being. Without the pain, he was still alive, alive with her. Then Fern’s fingernails scored hot lines of pain across his shoulders, and he welcomed that, too. Alive, alive … He felt her peak a moment before he lost control, plunging through the deadening entanglements of his body into a realm of pure sensation as surges wracked it, pulling it apart.
He clung in that place as long as he could, but all too soon, it was over, and he returned to his ordinary senses. He slid back to his haunches, blinking the sweat out of his eyes. He could still feel that tingling sense of here-and-no
w, only muffled somehow in the background, and he nursed it like the first fire. It was over, and he was still … alive.
Fern lay collapsed and panting on the chair, her gray eyes dark with lovemaking. She opened her mouth to say something, shook her head, and then shut it, closing her eyes as she did so. Colin took the moment to discreetly clean himself before rinsing out the rag to hand to Fern when she opened them again. She gave him an uninterpretable look, and he did not know whether she understood the gesture until she stood and turned from him. He looked away, respecting her privacy, until he heard the splash of the rag in the basin.
When he looked back, Fern was already slithering into her nightdress. Colin took the hint somewhat reluctantly, finding his nightclothes and pulling them over his head.
Without looking at him, Fern padded across the carpet and slid into the bed. A distant roll of thunder rumbled across the countryside, and Colin realized that the plaster around the open casement was now being spattered with rain.
“Shall I close the window? The storm seems to be getting worse.”
“Whatever you wish,” Fern said with lingering traces of stiff formality, a contrary reaction to the intimacy they had just shared. “I wouldn’t mind some coolness even if it is a little damp. The fire has made the room into a steam bath.”
He left it open, slipping between the covers next to his wife. The heavy curtains above were gray with dust. He blew out the lamp, setting it on the seat of a chair. Darkness swallowed the room, except for the dull fire in the grate and the occasional spear of lightning from the storm.
“You were right.” Fern’s voice drifted out of the darkness, taking him unawares.
“About what?”
“I do think that I enjoyed your teasing at least as much as you.”