The anticlimax brought her back to the here and now. “So this is a peacock pavilion,” she said dubiously as she looked around. “I always thought pavilions were luxurious and well-appointed.”
Barnes laughed. “This is luxurious and well-appointed, if you’re a peacock,” he said. “It’s got warmth, food, protection from predators, and the companionship of other peacocks. Do you think they’d ask for upholstered furniture and electric lights?”
Lady Georgiana laughed in turn, and looked up at him, almost relieved that the tension between them seemed to be dissipating. But with one step, Barnes brought it once more to bear. That step took him so close to her that only inches separated them. He seemed to be forcing his presence on her, but he didn’t touch her. He looked at her, and she heard his breath and smelled his smell again. He stood so very close that she felt his heat, yet he didn’t touch her. It was as though he were waiting for her.
Her eyes were level with his chest, and she saw the red-tinged hair that showed where the first two buttons of his shirt lay open. It was dense, curly hair, with none of the silky smoothness of Jeremy’s. It covered a chest that was tanned and hard. His outline was clear through his thin cotton shirt, and Lady Georgiana could see that it wasn’t quite symmetrical. His right side—shoulder, chest, arm—was perceptibly more developed than his left, the result, she assumed, of the work that he did.
And those hands! Even as they hung relaxed at his sides, she could sense their power. Here was a man whose body was built not by lawn tennis and riding to hounds, but by good, honest work. His was strength that came straight from the land, strength he built establishing his mastery over it. No man had ever seemed more virile, more genuine to her. He made the men she was accustomed to meeting in society look effete and ineffectual, hothouse plants beside the oak that was Bruce Barnes.
He stood so close to her, and she ached to close the gap, to cleave her small body to his large one. She felt as though her desire could be quenched by his merest touch.
But something stopped her, and she didn’t quite know what. Perhaps it was simply the suddenness of it all that prevented her. Two hours ago, she hadn’t known this man. Two days ago, she’d been in the arms of a very different man. She’d come to Penfield resolved on asserting her freedom, but freedom thought of in the comfort of her bedchamber at Eastley seemed different from freedom standing in front of her in firm flesh and hot blood.
When she’d walked down the hill to the pavilion, she’d told herself that there was no danger in this man. And there wasn’t, not in the sense that she’d thought of it then. Now, though, she saw that there was danger, but the danger was in her, not in him. It was the danger of passion, the danger of unbridled animal attraction. The thought of it kept her from closing the gap between them at the same time that it intensified her desire to close it. She looked up at him, willing her gaze to stay steady and her pulse to stay calm.
Almost before she realized she had decided what to do, she took a step back. Barnes didn’t move. His gaze held her eyes, and she knew that she was still in his thrall. To break the spell, she would have to break the silence.
“We should get back before luncheon,” she said a little haltingly. “I don’t want to be missed.” Still, she couldn’t look away from him, and he didn’t answer. What was it about this man? Finally, she looked down at the floor and the spell was broken at last.
“You’re right,” said Barnes, “we should.” He said it cheerfully, as though nothing had passed between them, and for a moment Georgiana thought she might have imagined their connection. But then he held the door open for her, and she had to pass in front of him to go out just as she had passed in front of him to come in. Once again, her skirts brushed his boots. And again, his scent of the soil and all that grew from it suffused her senses. As she walked past him the feel of his eyes on her back was as real, as tactile, as the feel of his hands would have been. It had been real, she knew. It was real.
They walked up to the house together in silence. Lady Georgiana didn’t even attempt conversation; she was entirely focused on being able, once they reached Penfield, to appear as though this had been an ordinary garden tour.
This she was able to do, and, when they got there, she thanked him prettily for his time.
“It was my pleasure,” he said, and watched her go up the stairs.
As she went up to her room to gather her wits and change her clothes, both of which had been more than a little disordered by her morning’s activities, he went back outside and around to the kitchen garden in the back of the house. He slipped through the back door that led into the scullery. There, a buxom, strapping, red-cheeked girl of about nineteen was ironing and folding freshly laundered sheets.
“Ah, Maureen,” said Barnes. “I thought I might find you here.”
“Ah, Bruce,” said Maureen, echoing his tone with a subtle but discernible Irish brogue, “you can find me here most times, as you well know.”
“I do,” he said, as he walked up behind her. “But I never know if I’ll find you alone.” As he said it, he swept her auburn hair away from the back of her neck and kissed her just under her left ear.
Maureen put her iron down and leaned into his kiss. She was a smart, resourceful girl, and until she met Bruce Barnes she’d managed to keep clear of the men of Penfield and their guests, some of whom thought it was their God-given right to have their way with any scullery maid who struck their fancy. Barnes, though, struck her fancy, and when he had first appeared at Penfield the previous year, she had decided that he would be the one she’d let have her. She’d never regretted it.
Maureen closed and bolted both the door to the garden and the inner door to the kitchen, and then walked behind Barnes just as he had walked behind her. She put her hands on his shoulders, and then traced the contours of his back down to the waist of his pants. She slipped her hands under the waistband, and then circled them around to the front so her arms were around him and she gripped his already erect penis.
He had both hands on the table she’d been using to iron the sheets, and he bent over at the waist. He stretched his left leg behind him and she straddled it, rubbing herself against the back of his thigh as she stroked his cock and felt it grow harder in her hand. The suddenness of his appearance, the lack of any preamble to their sex, and the insistent throbbing of his penis in her hand set her on fire. She moved her hands back to his waist and turned him around to face her. They didn’t kiss; they seldom did. Instead, she unbuttoned his shirt and pressed her mouth against his bare chest, hard.
Her mouth moved to his nipple, and she took it in. Her teeth played along the edges of the areola, hard enough almost to bruise. Barnes was breathing deeply, holding her hips hard against his. As she bit, she circled her tongue around his nipple, feeling it firm, yet strangely yielding in her mouth. And then her teeth closed and clamped on, and she worked his nipple slowly back and forth, all the while keeping her tongue on its tip. He let out a cry that was part pain, part pleasure.
She stopped abruptly. “Hush!” she said. “Cook will hear you.”
He could only grunt in reply.
He took her by the waist, lifted her off the floor, and turned to put her on the table. He made short work of her apron, dress, and drawers, and pulled her to the very edge of the table. He took his cock out of his pants, stepped between her legs, and with one motion was inside her—deep inside her. She gasped. It almost hurt.
She moved even closer to the edge of the table until her thighs were completely off it and she could straighten her body at the hips. Only then did she feel the full, explosive power of his contact with her. She wanted him ever deeper, to feel him reaching to her core, and to feel the lips of her pussy pulling him in.
He took her firm young ass in both his hands so he could push deeper, and he squeezed the two muscles of her buttocks, hard enough to leave marks—he’d left them before. The harder he gripped her, the more the pressure intensified her pleasure. She was tight to him, a
nd she felt her clitoris graze the base of him every time he moved into her. Every thrust seemed just a little deeper than the one before, and every thrust brought her closer to climax.
Together they rose to that climax, and together they reached it. Just as she turned liquid, she felt him shudder and pull her to him. The liquid turned to fire as she succumbed to her orgasm, and she held him close as he tightened, tightened, and then slowly relaxed.
She released him, and they smiled at each other conspiratorially as they rearranged their clothes. She watched as he tucked the instrument of her satisfaction back into his trousers, and gloried in the afterglow of her animal excitement.
For his part, Barnes gloried in the idea that an earl’s daughter might be within his grasp.
FOUR
The Loughlins’ dining room, small for the house, sat twenty comfortably. When more than that number were to dine, Lady Loughlin preferred laying the food out in a buffet to converting another, larger room to accommodate the crowd at table. She had always preferred the ad hoc to the formal, and enjoyed letting her guests spread out through the various drawing rooms and parlors, with groups forming as they would.
There was still the best part of a week to go before the masquerade, and the party at the house was still small. It was nevertheless too big to sit in the dining room, and the evening after Georgiana’s excursion to the peacock pavilion, Lady Loughlin watched with interest to see how the guests would divvy themselves up.
Lady Loughlin’s taste in people was more varied than that of most others of her class. She took pleasure in populating her house with men and women who interested her, regardless of rank or background. When she was younger, she tempered this inclination in the interest of her own social mobility, but now that she was secure in her position she felt free to indulge it.
The eclectic, almost haphazard mix of people didn’t always put her guests completely at their ease, but the mistress of the house found that a bit of social friction made for a much more interesting assembly. Her husband had, on more than one occasion, expressed concern about the jumble of humanity his wife liked to bring together under their roof.
“Oh, rot,” said Lady Loughlin. “Are our friends so fragile that we risk their well-being simply by putting them in a room with people who don’t see the world quite as they do?”
“It’s not their well-being I fear for,” said Lord Loughlin with equanimity. “Only their comfort.” Although he was loath to admit it to his wife, he also enjoyed the sparks that flew when like met unlike, and he lodged his mild protest more for form’s sake than out of any genuine anxiety.
When her guests didn’t seem able to arrange themselves in a satisfactory way, Lady Loughlin intervened, and on this occasion that was exactly what she did. It started with the Sheffields, who were always a problem. Although Mrs. Sheffield was exactly the kind of woman Lady Loughlin disliked most, her husband was genial and sociable—as well as being one of her father’s oldest business associates. The combination of Mr. Sheffield’s trade associations and Mrs. Sheffield’s manners tended to keep other guests at bay.
But Paulette Loughlin wouldn’t have it so, and she scooped up three other guests as they were leaving the buffet with full plates and deposited them on chairs next to the sofa the Sheffields were already occupying.
“I don’t believe you are acquainted with the Carlisles,” she said to Mr. and Mrs. Sheffield. “They’re our neighbors in London, and this is the first time they’ve been down to Hampshire with us.” The two couples nodded to one another as Lady Loughlin went on.
“And this,” she said, holding the arm of the third guest she’d commandeered, a round-faced, cheery-looking man who appeared to have already had several glasses of Lord Loughlin’s excellent burgundy, “is Alphonse Gerard, but everyone calls him Gerry.”
“Hullo!” said Gerard with more enthusiasm than the situation seemed to warrant. “I’m pleased to know all of you.” He sat down and immediately went to work on a very large veal chop.
The Sheffields and the Carlisles began exchanging the usual pleasantries, inquiring about the nature of the others’ connection to their hosts, and their lives when they weren’t visiting Penfield. This led to a discussion of Penfield itself, which the Carlisles were seeing for the first time that day, having arrived only a few hours before dinner.
As they were talking of the house’s beautiful exterior, its modern improvements, its convenient layout, Mrs. Sheffield saw Bruce Barnes heading toward the buffet. Lady Loughlin made a point of having him eat with the family and the family guests, and not with the servants, but the sight of him doing so surprised Mrs. Sheffield enough to make her break off almost in midsentence.
“That’s Bruce Barnes,” she said generally to the company. And added, after a pause, “I wonder that he eats with the guests.”
“I shouldn’t wonder in the slightest,” said Alphonse Gerard through a mouthful of veal, put out by Mrs. Sheffield’s obvious disapproval. “The man’s a genius.”
“But he’s a gardener,” protested Mrs. Sheffield.
“Certainly he knows how to tend plants,” responded Gerry. “And I know how to saddle my horse. Does that make me a groom?”
“Of course it doesn’t. But if you earned your bread by saddling other people’s horses, you would indeed be a groom.” Mrs. Sheffield was rather pleased with her own quickness on the subject.
“Fiddlesticks,” expostulated Gerry. “Barnes doesn’t earn his bread tending plants any more than I earn mine by saddling horses. He earns his bread designing the most astonishing gardens in England, and I’m more honored than otherwise to share a meal with him.”
At that moment, Barnes’s entrance into the room stopped their conversation. He took a seat in the corner farthest from them, on a chair grouped with several others around a low table. He didn’t betray the slightest discomfort at being alone, but then, he wasn’t alone for long. As if to confirm Alphonse Gerard’s view of the man, three other guests entered the room and made straight for the empty chairs around Bruce Barnes. Two of the three were Robert Loughlin’s cousins the O’Maras, and the third was one of the most beautiful girls in England.
She was tall. She would have been too tall had her perfect proportions not turned her height into an asset. She had dark, rich hair pulled up and back, but with gently curling tendrils escaping at her nape and temples. Her shoulders were perfectly straight across, strong and broad enough to support the perfect body that hung from them. Her brimming bustline tapered to a waist so neat and narrow that it led every man she met to wonder whether his two hands could span it. Her eyes were wide-set and so dark a brown as to be almost black, and their color was set off by that of her lips, which were an arresting sepia-tinted red with a soft matte shine. If she had a flaw, it was that her face and figure were too perfect, without the interest of any blemish or asymmetry.
“Who’s the girl?” Gerry asked his dining companions, staring at her openmouthed, his disagreement with Mrs. Sheffield instantly forgotten.
“That’s Alexandra Niven,” said Mr. Sheffield, whose appreciation of the girl’s radiance matched Gerry’s own, although his expression of it was necessarily more muted. “She’s the ward of Lord Bellingford, who was due to come with her but was laid up with gout, so she’s here with her companion, Miss Mumford.”
“A beautiful young girl with a gouty guardian and a companion named Mumford?” said Gerry with a laugh. “It sounds like something out of Dickens. No doubt this Mumford is a dried-up old crone.”
“On the contrary,” said Henry Sheffield, who knew the details of the story from Lord Loughlin. “She’s not yet thirty and attractive in her own right. But she’s had to make her way in the world and worked as Miss Niven’s governess since the girl was eleven or twelve. But when the girl got too old for a governess she couldn’t bear to see Miss Mumford go and asked her to stay on as companion.”
“And where is she now, this companion?”
“She has an acute sense of
her own position and generally remains in the background. She prefers that Miss Niven go out in society unfettered.”
“By Jove, this is shaping up to be an interesting visit!” said Gerard, with a sideways glance at Mr. Sheffield. It was the kind of glance that ordinarily wouldn’t elude the watchful propriety of Mrs. Sheffield, but she missed it entirely, absorbed as she was in the drama of Alexandra Niven talking with Bruce Barnes.
“Henry,” she said, elbowing him in the ribs. “Will you look at how that gardener is talking to that girl?”
Mr. Sheffield knew from long experience that the nuances of how people talked to one another and how people looked at one another, so clear to his wife, were opaque to him. Where he saw only a man and a woman conversing, his wife saw impropriety and even scandal.
“They seem just to be talking, my dear,” he said to his wife.
“Talking!” exclaimed that lady. “He’s looking at her exactly the way he was looking at the Vernon girl this morning.”
On hearing this, Alphonse Gerard turned toward Mrs. Sheffield. “Lady Georgiana Vernon?” he asked. “Here?”
She answered in the affirmative, and told Gerard of their tour of the grounds. “He spoke to Georgiana the same way he’s speaking to Miss Niven over there,” she said indignantly. “He leans in too close, and he speaks very softly. And then he touches her arm—see! Just like that!”
Gerard did see, but was more inclined to admire the man’s technique than to share Mrs. Sheffield’s disgust. “And what is wrong with an unmarried man talking softy and touching the arm of an unmarried girl?” he asked. “Are young people to court by shouting at one another from across the room?”
Mrs. Sheffield’s already sour expression turned sourer still. “You know perfectly well that there are ways of doing things that are proper, and ways that are not. And making love to two girls in the space of a few hours is most certainly not.”
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