“Go up and see them in the morning, first thing,” Lucy said cheerfully. “They’ll be thrilled. We haven’t yet told them you’ve come. We wanted it to be a surprise.”
“I’ll do that,” Collin replied. “If that’s all right with you, Miss Stone.”
Erienne forced a smile to her lips. “Of course,” she murmured, but she couldn’t play this particular game any longer. She had to get away from this table. This dinner. She couldn’t pretend they were all simply old friends, catching up.
She stood and tossed her napkin to her chair. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll just go check on the children now. Thank you for a lovely dinner, your grace.”
She hurried from the room before any of them could make noises to the contrary. In her wake, she heard the screech of chair legs as the men stood, and no doubt that utterance of dismay was Lucy, whose matchmaking plans had been laid to waste.
Erienne breathed a sigh of relief when she reached the corridor. Her excuse had been a thinly veiled reason to flee, and the rest of the table knew it, too, but she didn’t care. She couldn’t sit across the table from Collin one more moment and listen to stories about how successful he’d become in a career that he’d chosen over her.
She hurried up the stairs to the children’s nursery. Anna was there, putting away some of the toys the children had used earlier. “They’re in bed, Miss,” she said to Erienne’s questioning look.
“Thank you, Anna, for watching them while I was at dinner.” She hung her head and left the room. The children didn’t even need her. What should she do with herself? She wandered back to her own room and opened the door. The bed had been turned down and candles were lit on either side of its curtained expanse. A soft glow came from both the sitting room and the dressing room.
She made her way to the dressing room and glanced around the space. Her trunk had been unpacked earlier by a maid named Millie, who Lucy had introduced as the one Erienne should ask for anything she needed. Her serviceable gowns, far different from the one she wore at the moment, hung in the wardrobe. Her three little reticules had been lined up on a shelf beneath the gowns.
She bent and picked up the little bag she used the least, pulled the string apart to loosen it, and fished her fingers inside until she located the tiny piece of paper with the smudged ink. She pulled it out and stared at it, a humorless smile touching her lips as she rubbed her finger across the too-familiar words.
Let me go.
The words Collin had written to her fourteen years ago. She’d kept the note all this time. She only looked at it at moments like these, when memories of him overwhelmed her. She’d been able to let the man go, but she’d kept the scrap of paper. How was that for irony?
Tears sprang to Erienne’s eyes, but she quickly blinked them away. She refused to cry—hadn’t cried since that summer, fourteen years ago. She’d arranged to take the position at the Hilltops’ without her mother knowing and had left her parents a note. Her mother had written her soon after, begging her to come back and choose from her suitors. Erienne needed to marry someone wealthy, her mother claimed, because her father’s business dealings had soured of late and while their name was reputable, their fortune was quickly dwindling. But Erienne couldn’t do it. She couldn’t pledge herself to a man she didn’t love, even after the one she did love had asked her to let him go.
Years later, when her brother had returned from war grievously injured, she promised to send home as much of her wages as she could spare to help care for Peter. It was her choice to remain a spinster that had caused her family further financial hardship, and she couldn’t bear to allow her beloved sibling to suffer as a result.
Erienne pushed the small slip of paper back inside the reticule and returned it to the shelf. Then she wandered back into her bedchamber and stared blindly at the bed for a few moments. She knew sleep would be a stranger tonight, but she refused to return to the dining room. Instead, she trailed her way down the corridor to the servants’ staircase at the back of the house, descended to the main floor, and slipped outside.
Slowly making her way around the side of the building to the manicured gardens outside the library, she breathed in the jasmine that filled the late-summer night air, and paused to revel in it as she passed beneath a trellis covered in the pungent vine. Moonlight glinted off the dark green leaves.
“There’s a sycamore tree by the lake.” Collin’s deep voice sounded from behind her in the darkness. “I’d invite you there, but something tells me you’d refuse.”
Erienne closed her eyes. Pain clenched her heart. He remembered the sycamore tree. “You’d be right,” she said without turning.
Gravel crunched beneath his boots as he came closer. “I hope you didn’t leave dinner on my account.”
What could she possibly say to that? She finally faced him and found him partially lost in shadow. “I ... needed some air.”
“Do you want me to leave?” he asked even as he drew nearer.
The question took her by surprise, but she shook her head curtly. “This is your brother’s house. I’d never be so rude as to ask you to leave.”
“I’d leave if you asked me to, Air.” His voice was soft, caring. Heartbreakingly familiar.
She couldn’t take it if he called her Air. She concentrated on breathing normally, in and out. “At dinner you asked about a viscount. What did you mean?”
“It doesn’t matter now. I realized that I’d been ... misinformed about your whereabouts.”
“Misinformed? By whom?”
His gaze captured hers, his eyes glinting in the darkness. “Does it matter after all these years, Erienne?”
She glanced away and kicked at a pebble on the path with her slipper. It did something to her middle to hear her name on his lips. “I suppose it doesn’t.”
He was close enough now that she could smell his cologne beneath the jasmine, the familiar scent of him she remembered from all those years ago. It catapulted her back in time. She clenched her jaw against the memories that threatened to overwhelm her, fighting to keep from turning to flee.
“I missed you.” The warm timber of his voice sent shock waves pounding through her body.
She wrapped her arms around her middle and swallowed hard. “Why would you say that to me, after all these years?” She could hear the anguish in her own voice, but there was nothing to be done. She’d never been anything but truthful with him.
He took a final step toward her, and the heat from his body warmed her cool skin. “Because it’s true,” he said softly. “Did you miss me?”
She didn’t want to answer him. It was unfair of him to ask. But to deny it would be a lie.
He swayed closer, his shadow enveloping her. He lowered his head and lifted her chin with his finger. Every brick in the wall that had surrounded her heart for so long seemed to fly away like so much dust in a brisk wind.
He searched her face in the darkness. “I hurt you, didn’t I, Erienne?”
She refused to answer that too. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing it for certain. “You asked me to let you go, and I did.” It was all she would give him, all she would admit.
“I’m sorry,” he breathed. “For hurting you, and I’ll probably be sorry for this.” He closed the few scarce inches between them and kissed her. His lips slanted fiercely over hers, and she clutched at the lapels of his coat to steady herself. They kissed like that, endlessly, before Collin pulled away from her, breathing heavily. He pressed his forehead to hers. “Come with me,” he said, tugging her by the hand behind him as he made his way toward the French doors that opened into the house. “I know somewhere even better than the sycamore tree.”
Erienne allowed herself to be led, unable—or perhaps merely unwilling—to say a word. They were going somewhere to continue kissing, and possibly to do more. She knew she shouldn’t want to, shouldn’t accompany him, and yet she couldn’t make her mouth speak a protest or her feet stop moving forward. It was if her mind had relinquis
hed its role in making her decisions. Clearly, her body and heart had taken over.
Collin pulled her into a room that a brief glance showed was a library and closed the door behind them. It was completely dark inside, save for the banked fire in the fireplace at the far end. The fire gave a soft glow to the large space, but did not illuminate it. He led her over to a wide leather sofa in the center of the room and drew her back into his arms to kiss her again before urging her down to the cushions. She found herself atop him. His body was hard and hot and he smelled so good. She couldn’t get enough of him. He sat up and wrestled out of his coat, never allowing their lips to part, and then he tugged her over him again, this time while he sat at an angle in the turn of the sofa so that she was half atop his lap. It was a most unseemly position ... and she loved every moment of it.
His lips moved to her ear and he sucked in the lobe. “God, Erienne, I missed you. I’ve wanted you all these years,” he whispered.
Oh, God. If only he wouldn’t speak, it would be easier to pretend that way. She pressed her mouth against his once more to silence him, so he spoke in a different way—a lover’s way. Without hesitation, his strong, rough hand moved to the hem of her skirt and lifted it. He maneuvered them so that they lay side-by-side on the sofa, and his hand made its way up to the juncture between her thighs. She should move away, ask him to stop, but she couldn’t force herself to. She wanted his touch, had longed for it for the last fourteen years. Erienne knew the basics of conjugal relations, but not the particulars—these lovely particulars she hadn’t imagined could be so thrilling.
“May I touch you, Erienne?”
“Yes.” She breathed the word and his fingers deftly pushed aside her shift and drawers. Cool air brushed across the damp, heated flesh between her thighs, and then his touch, and she jolted at that too-intimate, too-wonderful caress, at the circular dance of—was that his thumb? It played her like an instrument, inciting the most restless pleasure with each stroke, over and over.
Erienne wanted to cry out, to beg him to stop, and never to stop. Her head fell back against the side of the sofa and she clenched her eyes shut. Her thighs tensed and she sobbed in the back of her throat. Never in her life had she experienced pleasure like this, and the fact that it was Collin Hunt giving it to her made it all the more bittersweet. Then, somehow, his touch was within her too. One long finger perhaps, sliding inside her so easily, so sinuously, she bit her lip to stop her cry. How could this mad pleasure increase? It felt so wonderful.
His hand moved as if to withdraw, and she immediately clamped her thighs around it until it obediently regained its delicious, probing depth within her. She thought he might have released a huff of laughter against her cheek, but then he was whispering hot words in her ear, telling her how beautiful and soft and lovely she was, and she wanted to melt. No moment could have been more perfect, no delight more astonishing ... until his thumb found that other spot she'd forgotten about, and circled it, and stroked it, while inside her ... inside her, was it one finger or two that played the perfect notes and drove the music through her body until it was no longer her own? It was too much. The last thing she remembered was the tender press of his kiss on her bowed throat as she thrashed into a blind, mindless pleasure she never had dreamed existed.
A few minutes passed, during which Erienne got her breathing right once more, before she sensed the gentle withdrawal of his touch. Instantly, the insanity of what she’d just allowed whipped through her mind. What in heaven’s name had she just done?
She scrambled up from the sofa, righting her skirts and finding herself newly breathless, this time with humiliation. She turned to glare at Collin, though she wasn’t entirely certain he could see her face in the dim glow from the fireplace.
She wasn’t angry with him. She was angry with herself. How in the space of a few short hours had she allowed Collin Hunt to crawl back into her heart and touch her like that, so … so wantonly and … and deliciously? She wanted to sob with self-hatred. She wanted to scream.
Collin slowly rose to his feet and stepped close as if to touch her again. “Erienne, I—”
The crack of her palm striking his cheek was like a shot from a pistol.
He didn’t so much as flinch, as though he’d known it was coming, the explosion of rage she could no longer contain. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I shouldn’t have—”
“That wasn’t for tonight,” she retorted through clenched teeth. “That was for fourteen years ago.”
Chapter Fourteen
Erienne was sitting in the nursery with the children the next morning when Lucy came floating in. She hugged and kissed Mary and Ralph before turning to Erienne. “I do hope you’re not angry with me, dear, for suggesting last night’s dinner.”
“I’m not.” How could she be angry with Lucy? The least of the issues with last night had been Lucy insisting Erienne come to dinner.
“I’m so pleased to hear it,” the duchess continued. “Derek and Collin were up with the sun and went for a ride, but Collin intends to visit the children before noon.”
“Uncle Cawwin is here?” Mary asked, her dark eyebrows rising.
“Yes, darling, your Uncle Collin is here. You’ll get to see him soon.”
Smiling, Mary clapped her hands together.
“He’s only seen Ralph at the christening in London,” Lucy said, leaning over and picking up her son. “No doubt he’ll be shocked to see how big you’ve grown, Ralphie.” She hoisted the child onto her hip.
The toddler stuck his finger in his mouth and gnawed on it.
Lucy turned back to Erienne. “All that to say, you’re welcome to begin your lessons with the children this morning, and then perhaps take them outside for a bit before their visit with Collin. I hate to see them cooped up in the nursery all day, especially when it’s so lovely outside.”
Erienne nodded. “Perhaps we’ll go play by the stream.”
“That sounds like an excellent idea. Be certain to take Anna with you,” Lucy replied.
After Lucy left, Erienne spent the next two hours going over very basic French words with the children. They stopped for play breaks and to eat a snack sent up by Cook. At ten o’clock, Erienne decided Mary and Ralph had enough for children their ages.
“Pick a toy,” she announced. “We’ll go to the stream.”
Mary clapped her hands. “I’ll bwing my dollie.” She ran across the room to collect a rag doll that sat on a shelf, its hair a mess of yellow yarn.
Erienne chose some wooden blocks for Ralph and placed them in a basket along with a blanket. She called for Anna, and with the nursemaid leading, their little group left for the stream. They made their way around the side of the house and across the meadow toward a copse of trees that stood near the stream.
When they arrived at the creek, Erienne and Anna spread the large blanket atop the soft grass along the bank and placed the basket on one corner to moor it. The children plopped on the center of the soft quilt and happily played with their toys before Lady Mary asked if she might go to the creek’s edge to throw a stone. Apparently, her father had taught her how to do so the last time she’d been there.
“I’ll go with you, Mary,” Erienne said. She stood and took the little girl’s hand.
Mary carried her doll firmly under her other arm as they marched toward the edge of the water. Once they arrived, the child cast about for the perfect stone. Erienne leaned down to find a nice, flat smooth one to show Lady Mary how to skip. Erienne turned away for only a moment when a splash stole her breath. Horrified, Erienne quickly swiveled on her heel. Relief flooded her. Thank heavens, Lady Mary hadn’t fallen in. It was her doll.
The little girl pointed into the creek, tears of distress already shining on her cheeks.
Erienne spotted the doll being swiftly carried downstream, and didn’t stop to think. She shucked off her slippers and jumped into the ice-cold water. It was a shock to her body, but all she could think about was fetching the little girl’s do
ll.
She was a strong swimmer, but the current was stronger than she’d guessed. She stroked her way toward the doll. Fortunately, its gown had snagged on a tree limb that had fallen across the creek, or she never would have caught up to it.
“I’ve got it,” she called, springing from the water and waving the doll toward Lady Mary and the others, who waited on the far bank many yards away.
Erienne plunged under the water again to swim back, but her own skirt caught on the branch. She dove deeper to locate the snag and free herself, but the water was murky and she couldn’t see much. She tried to yank the fabric from the branches, but quickly learned there were many sharp, spiny branches beneath the surface that hadn’t been visible from the shore. Freeing herself wouldn’t be as simple as she’d hoped.
She tried to pop back to the surface to take a breath, but the branches had tangled with more of her skirts and yanked her short. She couldn’t reach the top. Panic began to set in and she desperately ripped at her skirt, trying to tear it with both hands, anything to free herself. The fabric was well-made and didn’t budge. Fighting her increasing terror, she tried to snap the limbs that were entangled in her skirts, but the moment her fingers closed around the nearest one, she realized they were too wide and strong to break.
Good God, she couldn’t possibly die this way, drowning in a creek that couldn’t be more than seven feet deep. Why she’d swum all her life! She and Peter had raced each other back to the shore from far out in the ocean, for heaven’s sake. She was no more afraid of water than eating.
But it was no use. She couldn’t free herself, and her lungs felt near to bursting from the effort to hold her breath. Frantic, she tried to divest herself of her gown. She’d got the thing nearly off her hips when she felt something large dive into the water next to her.
Strong hands encircled her waist and tugged her hard. Those same hands ripped at her gown, savagely tearing it away from the tree limbs. And then Erienne was free. She popped back to the surface and dragged heavy gulps of air into her starving lungs.
Mr. Hunt, I Presume: A Playful Brides Story Page 7