by Mary Balogh
“It must be strange,” she said, “being that wealthy.”
He raised his eyebrows at the vulgarity of the comment. Well-bred persons did not talk about money. But it would be strange not to be wealthy. She was evidently poor. It must be strange to be poor. It was all a matter of perspective, he supposed.
“I hope, Mrs. Derrick,” he said, “that was not a question.”
“No.” She chuckled, a low, attractive sound. “I do beg your pardon. It was not a well-mannered observation, was it? Is not this a charming alley? The whole of the park is quite, quite lovely. I once asked Bertie, when I was still married, why he did not open the park to the public so that all the people from the village might enjoy strolling here, at least when the family is from home. But he rumbled and laughed in that way he has, and then looked at me as if he thought I had uttered a great witticism that did not require a verbal response. Does Lindsey Hall have a large park? And your other estates?”
“Yes,” he said. “Most of them do.”
“And do you allow the public to enjoy any of them?” she asked him.
“Do you allow the public into your garden, Mrs. Derrick?” he asked in reply.
She looked up at him once more. “There is a difference,” she said.
“Is there?” It was the sort of attitude that irritated him. “One’s home and one’s garden or park form one’s private domain, the place where one can relax and be private, one’s own personal space. There is no essential difference between your home and mine.”
“Except for size,” she said.
“Yes,” he agreed.
He resented people who put him on the defensive.
“I believe,” she said, “we must agree to disagree, your grace. Otherwise we will come to fisticuffs and I daresay I will get the worst of it. It is a matter of size again.”
She was laughing at him once more—and perhaps at herself too. At least she was not one of those disagreeable crusaders who must press her argument to the point of offensiveness, especially if there were any suggestion of aristocratic privilege and injustice to the poor involved. Actually, all his homes except Lindsey Hall were open to any traveler who cared to knock on the door and ask permission of the housekeeper. It was a common courtesy extended by most landowners.
Light and shade played over her form as they walked. She was pleasingly formed, he noticed again. She had a mature woman’s body rather than that of a slender girl. He tried to verbalize in his mind what exactly it was about her that was attractive to him. He knew many women who were more beautiful and more elegant—including several of their fellow guests. Certainly her slightly sun-bronzed skin and those freckles made it impossible to call her a true beauty. And her hair was short and frequently looked rumpled. But there was that energy about her he had noticed from the start, that vitality. There was a sense of light and joy about her. Certainly she appeared to light up from the inside when she was animated—and she frequently was. It appeared that she loved people—and most people returned the compliment.
But he would not have expected to be attracted to such a woman. His tastes, he would have thought, ran more to quiet refinement and sophistication.
“You did not care to join the ride?” he asked her.
She flashed him a smile. “You ought to be thankful that I did not,” she said. “I can ride, in the sense that I can scramble onto a horse’s back and remain there without falling off—at least, I have never yet fallen. But no matter what horse I am mounted on, even the most docile, I invariably lose the battle for control within a few minutes and find myself on a prancing, sidling course, being led in every possible direction except the one I wish to take or the one everyone else in my party is taking.”
Wulfric did not comment. All true ladies were accomplished equestrians. Most were also graceful, elegant riders. He was indeed thankful that Mrs. Derrick had chosen to remain behind this afternoon with her letter.
“I rode in Hyde Park once with Oscar and Hermione and Basil,” she said. “But only once, alas. We were riding along a narrow path as a whole host of other riders approached from the opposite direction. Oscar and the others moved obligingly off onto the grass to allow them to pass, but my horse chose to turn sideways, blocking the whole path, and then to stand stock-still. It stood there like a veritable statue. My companions were full of apologies to the other group, but all I could do was laugh. The scene struck me as enormously funny. Basil explained later that the other riders were all important government officials and the Russian ambassador. They were all good sports about the incident, though, and the ambassador even sent me flowers the next day. But Oscar never invited me to go riding again when we were in London.”
Wulfric, looking down at her bonnet, could just imagine the embarrassment of her party. And she had sat there and laughed? But the strange thing was that picturing the scene, imagining her sitting helplessly atop her statue of a horse, laughing gaily and attracting the admiration of the Russian ambassador, made him want to laugh. He should be feeling disdain. He should be feeling confirmed in his conviction that she did not know how to behave. Instead he wanted to throw back his head and shout with laughter.
He did not do so. He frowned instead and they proceeded on their way.
They were coming to the end of the alley, he realized after a while. They had been walking for the past few minutes in silence. It had not been uncomfortable—at least not to him—but there did seem to be a certain tension in the air about them suddenly, a certain awareness that must surely be mutual.
Was it possible that she was attracted to him as he was to her? She certainly had not gone out of her way to entice him. She did not flirt. She was not a coquette. But was she attracted? Women did not as a whole, he believed, find him attractive. His title and wealth, perhaps, but not him. Perhaps she was merely embarrassed by the silence.
“Shall we continue?” he asked her, indicating the upward flight of stone steps at the end of the alley. “Or would you prefer to return to the house? I believe we are in danger of missing tea.”
“One eats and drinks far too much at a house party,” she said. “There is a rather splendid maze up there. Have you seen it?”
He had not. He could not imagine finding a maze amusing, but he did not want to turn back yet. He wanted to spend a little more time in the aura of her light and vitality and laughter. He wanted to spend more time with her.
From the top of the steps he could see a wide, tree-dotted lawn stretching away into the distance. But not far away was the maze she had spoken of, its seven-foot-high hedges carefully clipped to look like green walls.
“I’ll race you to the center,” she said as they approached it, turning to look at him with a sparkle in her eyes. Actually, she did not just turn her head. She turned her whole body in front of his and kept her distance by taking little backward running steps.
“Indeed?” He raised his eyebrows and stopped walking. “But I daresay you know the way in, Mrs. Derrick.”
“I did once upon a time,” she admitted. “But it is years since I have done it. You must count slowly to ten before coming after me, and I shall count slowly to ten when I reach the center. If I can count any higher than ten, then I am the winner.”
She did not give him a chance to refuse to participate. She whisked herself through the narrow opening in the outer wall of the maze, turned to her right, and disappeared from view.
He stared blankly at the hedge for a moment. He was expected to frolic through a maze? And he was going to do it? But he did not have much choice, did he, short of leaving her stranded in the center, counting slowly to three thousand or so.
One . . . two . . . three . . .
Would he have refused?
Four . . . five . . . six . . . seven . . .
He never played games like this.
Eight . . . nine . . .
He never played any sort of game.
Ten.
He set off grimly into the maze. The hedges, he found, were all
neatly clipped. They were also all high enough and thick enough that they afforded no glimpses of the center or of the path farther in. One might wander here, hopelessly lost, for some time, he guessed. Around one corner he thought he spotted her striped skirt, but a white butterfly fluttered across his line of vision instead and soared over the hedge to his left. Around another corner he did see her, but with a light laugh she whisked herself out of sight, and by the time he reached the gap through which she had disappeared, it was impossible to know which way she had gone.
There was an air of marked seclusion in here, he discovered, as if the world had been left behind and nothing existed but trees and grass and butterflies and sky—and the woman he pursued.
He took several wrong turns, but eventually he figured out the pattern of the maze. Wherever there was a choice of path, one always took the left-hand one alternating with the right-hand one. It did not take him long after that to reach his destination, though he did not catch up with her on the way.
“Fifteen,” she said aloud as he stepped out into the clearing at the center of the maze ten minutes or so after entering it.
There was a stone statue of some Greek goddess in the middle of the clearing, with a wrought-iron seat off to one side. She was leaning back against the statue, a living, vital goddess or nymph, looking flushed and bright-eyed and triumphant. He walked toward her.
“We could sit down and rest if you wish,” she said. “But the view is not spectacular.”
“No, it is not,” he agreed, looking around. “Was there to be a prize? You did not mention it after issuing your challenge.”
“Oh,” she said, laughing, “the triumph of being the winner is enough.”
And then they were stranded within a foot of each other with nothing else to say, it seemed, and nowhere else to look except at each other. The sense of seclusion deepened. Somewhere not far off a bee droned.
The flush of color in her cheeks deepened and her teeth sank into her lower lip.
He possessed himself of one of her hands and held it between them with both his own. It was warm and smooth-skinned.
“I will simply concede defeat, then,” he said, and raised it to his lips.
His heart for some reason was pounding hard enough in his chest to make him feel slightly dizzy. Her hand trembled in his own. He held it to his lips far longer than was necessary.
But would even a single second have been necessary?
Or wise?
She was gazing at him with wide eyes and slightly parted lips, he saw when he raised his head. She smelled of sunshine and woman again.
He leaned forward and set his lips to hers.
And felt an instant shock of intimacy and desire.
Her lips were warm and soft and inviting. He tasted her, touched her with his tongue, probed the soft flesh behind her lips, breathed in the warmth of her, drugged his senses with the essence of her. He held her hand between them and felt as if some core of ice that had always held his emotions safely imprisoned was dripping warm melted water into his veins.
He did not know if she slipped her hand from his or if he released it. But however it was, her arms twined about his neck, one of his circled her waist, the other her shoulders, and they came together in a close embrace, her soft, warm, shapely body arched in along the length of his.
He teased her mouth wider with his own and pressed his tongue deep inside. She touched it with her own and sucked it deeper.
It was a lengthy, heated embrace. He did not know how long it lasted or what brought it to an end. But it did end, and he lifted his head from hers, released his hold on her, and took one step back.
Her eyes, huge and blue as the summer sky, gazed into his, so open and so deep that he might well lose himself in them, he thought. Her lips looked rosy and moist and just-kissed. If ever he had thought that she was not the most incredibly beautiful woman he had ever set eyes upon, then he must surely be blind in both eyes.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, clasping his hands behind his back. “I do beg your pardon, ma’am.”
She continued to look at him just so.
“I do not know why,” she said softly. “I did not say no, did I? Though I suppose I ought to have. And I definitely ought not to have challenged you to come into the maze with me. I do not always think before speaking or acting. I am famous for it, in fact—or notorious, I suppose I should say. Shall we go back to the house and see if there is any tea left?” She had recovered her poise, it seemed. She smiled brightly—a little too brightly—at him.
“How long has Derrick been dead?” he asked her.
“Oscar?” The smile faded. “Two years.”
“You must have been lonely during those two years,” he said, “and unhappy at being forced to return to the village of your birth to live with your mother and your spinster sister.”
She had ended up no better off than she had been originally. Perhaps worse. She now knew what she missed.
“We all have our own separate destinies to live out,” she said, putting her hands behind her to rest against the statue. “Mine is not intolerable.”
“But you could do better,” he said. “I could offer you better.”
He heard his own words as if a stranger spoke them. He certainly had not planned them. And yet he would not unsay them even if he could, he realized. He had himself under control again, but he was still stirred by her.
Their eyes clashed and tangled. There was a lengthy silence, during which he listened to the bee droning away near the hedge and wondered absently if it was the same one as before. Her eyes, he noticed, were more guarded than they had been a minute ago.
“Oh, could you?” she said at last.
“You could be my mistress,” he said. “I would set you up with your own home and carriage in London. You would lack for nothing by way of clothes and jewels and money. I would treat you well in every conceivable way.”
She continued to stare at him for several silent moments.
“And I could earn all this,” she said at last, “by being available to you at all times? By sleeping with you whenever you wished to sleep with me?”
“It would be a position of considerable prestige,” he told her, lest she think he might be offering her the life of a common courtesan. “You would be well respected, and you could have as active a social life as you chose.”
“Provided,” she said, “I did not choose to have you escort me to any ton event.”
“Of course.” He raised his eyebrows.
“Well, that, at least,” she said, “would be an enormous relief.”
He stood looking at her. He had not mistaken the nature of their kiss, and neither, surely, had she. There had been nothing innocently romantic about it. She was no maiden. She had been married for a number of years. There had been quite open sexual awareness—and hunger—in her embrace. She must know that he was not a man to dally lightly with any woman, no matter what her station in life.
Had he offended her?
Her life would be infinitely better as his mistress than as the village schoolmaster’s assistant, who was forced by widowhood and poverty to live with her mother. It would be better in material things. It would also, surely, be better for her sexually. A two-year celibacy was probably as irksome for a woman as it would be for a man. But he could not read her expression as she gazed back at him.
Surely she had not expected a marriage offer?
“A home of my own,” she said. “A carriage. Jewels, clothes, money, entertainments. And, best of all, you to bed me regularly. It is an almost overwhelmingly flattering offer. But I really must decline, you know. It has never been my ambition to be a whore.”
“There is a world of difference, ma’am, between a whore and a duke’s mistress,” he said stiffly.
“Is there?” she asked him. “Merely because a whore ruts in a doorway for a penny while the mistress performs between silk sheets for a small fortune? Yet each one sells her body for money. I will not sell
mine, your grace, though I thank you for your kind offer. I am honored.”
Her final words were spoken, of course, with clipped sarcasm. She was very, very angry, he realized, even though she showed no outer signs beyond the tone and the slight trembling in her voice. He was somewhat shaken by the vulgarity of her words.
“I beg your pardon.” He made her a stiff bow and gestured with one hand to the opening in the inner wall of the hedge. “Allow me to escort you back to the house.”
“I would prefer it if you would remain here and count slowly to ten after I leave,” she said. “The charm of your company has worn thin, I am afraid.”
He walked around the statue and stood with his back to it until he was sure she had gone. Then he went to sit on the seat.
He had totally misread the signs. She had been willing enough to indulge in a lascivious embrace but not to enter into any prolonged relationship with him—not as his mistress anyway, and that was the only position he was willing to offer. He was sorry about it. She had stirred his blood, and he had felt as if a vast, long winter were approaching the thaw of spring.
He had not expected that she would refuse. She was obviously attracted to him—that had not been feigned. And it was a good offer that he had made, considering her social status and financial circumstances. Of course, she had once married a viscount’s son, albeit a younger son. And so, even though she was now an impoverished widow living with her mother and sister in a country village, she probably expected more of life than to become the mistress of a duke. She might be disappointed that he had not offered more—but that was hardly his concern.
This already tedious house party had just taken a turn for the worse, he thought. He had not needed this. He really had not.
But it was entirely his own fault, of course. His mind had jumped from a mild attraction and a hot embrace to something altogether more serious. Hers had not made a similar leap. It was quite unlike him to speak so impulsively without first thinking through all the implications of any new idea. She was, after all, Elrick’s sister-in-law, though neither Elrick nor his wife appeared to have much use for her. And she was the daughter of a gentleman, even if the man had been forced to become a schoolmaster.