by Mary Balogh
In a few moments more, the couple and their baby were going to be moving on to Freyja's group, and she was going to be called upon to admire the child. Judith was already beaming in happy anticipation of the moment and glancing a tender look at Rannulf.
Joshua got to his feet.
“Freyja.” He touched her elbow, and she jumped as if he were holding a branding iron. “I see that a few brave souls are strolling out on the terrace. Would you care for a breath of fresh air?”
“I would love it,” she said rather loudly. “I am going mad from inaction.”
The weather had changed overnight. Yesterday had been almost like summer. Today was cold and gray and blustery, more like November than September. They wore their cloaks outside. Joshua pulled his hat down over his brow so that it would not blow away.
“I hope,” Freyja said, “you are not expecting me to stroll with mincing steps along the terrace, Josh. I need to draw air into my lungs. Are not such gatherings unbearably insipid?”
She turned right to walk in the direction of the stables, and as soon as they were past the formal gardens before and below the house, she struck off across the lawn to walk parallel to the driveway. She moved along with her usual manly stride. Joshua fell into step beside her.
“Ah.” She tilted back her face. “This is better.”
He did not attempt to make any conversation, and she was clearly not in the mood. They walked until they reached the stone bridge that crossed a river and formed the boundary between the inner cultivated part of the park and the woods beyond. It must be later than he had realized, Joshua thought. Already early dusk was falling.
“What now?” he asked. “Back to the house?”
“Not yet,” she said. “That party will go on for hours yet. No one knows when to end events like this.”
“Where next, then?” he asked.
She looked about her. “There is the lake,” she said, pointing to it over to their right. “But I do not fancy a swim today.” She shivered as a cold blast of wind buffeted them.
“What?” he asked, waggling his eyebrows. “I do not get to see you in your shift again today?” More accurately, he had seen her in her wet shift yesterday, and it had been very akin to no shift at all. His temperature threatened to rise a notch at the mere memory.
“Let's go to the gamekeeper's hut,” she said. “It is through there.” She pointed into the woods to the left of the driveway. “It was actually more like a family retreat, since I can never remember any gamekeeper living there. But it was always kept in good repair. Perhaps we can light a fire there and be cozy for a while before going back.”
It sounded good to him, Joshua thought, leading the way across the bridge.
They wandered about in the darkening woods for a while since it seemed she did not remember quite where the hut was. But she cheered up considerably even while she was searching for it.
“I spent several hours of a hot afternoon there once,” she told him. “I was locked in and Jerome and Kit stood guard outside. They had kidnapped me. But the adventure got dismal for them when Aidan and Ralf refused to ransom me. When Kit finally went up to the house to try to steal some food from the kitchen, I yelled and swore so foully that Jerome let me out for fear that I would attract the attention of some wandering gardener. I dealt him a bloody nose, and then I went home and left a few bruises on Ralf and Aidan too.”
“And you were never kidnapped again?” Joshua said, grinning at her. “Sweetheart, kidnapped maidens are supposed to weep and wilt and make their captors fall in love with them.”
“Ha!” she said. “Oh, there it is. I knew it must be just here.”
It was locked, but he felt above the lintel and she lifted a few mossy stones beside the door until she found the key. It opened the door so easily that he knew even before stepping inside that the hut must still be used. The interior was dark, but he could see in the faint light from the doorway that there was a small table against the far wall, and on it were a lamp and a tinder box. He fumbled around for a few moments until he had the lamp lit.
There was a fireplace with a fresh fire laid in the hearth and a box of logs standing beside it. There was an old wooden rocking chair with a faded blanket thrown over the back and seat. There was a narrow bed against one wall, neatly made up with blankets and a pillow. Everything was clean, including the dirt floor.
This, Joshua thought, was definitely someone's retreat.
Freyja stepped inside and closed the door. She stood with her back against it while Joshua knelt and lit the fire.
“Yes, this is it,” she said. “My prison house.”
“But a prison no longer, sweetheart,” he said, straightening up and brushing off his hands before turning and stepping against her. He dipped his head and touched his lips to hers. “A haven instead. Soon to be a warm haven, I hope.”
It was also a very private, secluded haven. A dangerous haven for a man and a woman who were trying to avoid having their betrothal extended into the life sentence of a marriage. He stepped back and indicated the rocking chair.
She unfastened her cloak, tossed it over the back of the chair, and sat down. He set his hat and cloak on the table and took a seat on the edge of the bed.
“The big ordeal is almost over,” he said.
She laughed softly, her eyes on the fire. “It would serve you right if I refused to release you after all,” she said. “Am I really such a big ordeal? How lowering. You are, of course, but am I?”
“I was not referring to us,” he said. “Tell me about Ravensberg.”
“Jerome?” she said.
“Kit.”
She turned her head to look at him. “What do you want to know about Kit?”
“Were you in love with him?” he asked.
“With Kit?” She frowned ferociously at him.
“Jerome was not the only brother you were betrothed to,” he said, “or almost betrothed to. You were fond of Jerome. Were you fonder of Kit?”
She continued to glare at him. “It is none of your business,” she said.
“I am your betrothed,” he reminded her.
“You are not,” she said scornfully. “And you are not going to play the part of jealous lover now, Josh. The very idea! It is none of your business whom I have loved or whom I do love, if anyone. Kit is none of your business.”
“Did he know,” he asked, “that you loved him?”
“Of course he knew,” she said, turning her head back toward the fire again and then setting it back against the chair and closing her eyes. “He desperately wanted me to marry him. He wanted me to give up everything—all the expectations of his family and mine—and go follow the drum with him. I was everything in the world to him and he to me. But Wulf would not give his consent. I was one and twenty and did not need his consent. It was not that he forbade me exactly—Wulf rarely does that, and of course he knew that I would have fought to the death against any such attempt at tyranny. But there was a speech on family duty and I allowed myself to be talked into announcing my engagement to Jerome. Kit fought Ralf bloody when he came storming over to Lindsey Hall and was refused admittance. Then he went off back to his regiment in the Peninsula. Last year, with Jerome dead before our nuptials had been solemnized and Kit on his way home, his father and Wulf arranged for our marriage at last. But Kit had not forgiven me. He had his revenge on me by bringing home that perfect, insipid woman, Lauren Edgeworth.”
Joshua wondered if she had yet realized that even if it had started out as revenge—or simply escape—the marriage was now a love match. And he wondered how much real love Freyja still felt for Ravensberg, mingled with the very real hatred and bitterness.
“Poor Freyja,” he said softly.
She surged to her feet then and closed the gap between them in three strides. He clamped one hand about her right wrist when her fist was two inches from his nose, and about her left wrist as her fist brushed the underside of his chin. He came to his feet and bent her arms be
hind her back. He held them there by the wrists—her hands were still fisted.
Her eyes flashed at him. Her teeth were bared.
“Don't you dare pity me,” she told him in her coldest, haughtiest voice. “My story and my feelings are my concern and no one else's. Certainly not yours. We are not even really betrothed. We are nothing but strangers who happen to have been thrown together by circumstances. We are nothing to each other. You are nothing to me. Do you understand me? Nothing.”
He lowered his head and kissed her. He was taking a mortal risk, he knew—she might well take a chunk out of his lip with her teeth. But she needed comforting. Not that his motive was entirely selfless. Freyja Bedwyn in a raging temper was an infinitely exciting woman.
“Nothing at all, sweetheart?” he murmured. “You wound me.”
“What I will do is knock your head off your shoulders if you will just stop playing the coward and release my wrists,” she said, her eyes still flashing fury. “Are you afraid of facing the anger of a woman unless you have pinioned her arms?”
He grinned and released her. And chuckled aloud as he parried blows without grabbing hold of her again.
“Ouch!” he said as one of her fists connected with his ear.
But she was not finished with him and would not be, he suspected, until she had milled him to the ground and stamped him into the dirt with her heel. It was a good thing for him that she was not wearing her riding boots. To give her her due, though, he noticed that she did not attempt to use either her fingernails or her teeth. She fought fair.
There was only one course of defense open to him short of planting his own fist in her face. He caught her up in his arms, one about her waist, the other about her shoulders, hauled her tightly against him so that her fists flailed helplessly out to the sides, and kissed her again—open-mouthed.
“I dislike you intensely,” she said coldly when he lifted his head a good while later. The rage had gone from her eyes and the fury from her voice. “And you are absolutely nothing to me. Less than nothing.”
“I know, sweetheart,” he said, and kissed her again.
Her anger might have subsided, he realized during the next few moments, but her passion certainly had not. She opened her mouth beneath his, somehow got her arms about him, and pressed as close to him as their clothes and their anatomy would allow.
“Don't stop,” she told him fiercely when he lifted his head, desperately trying to hold on to his sanity. “Don't stop!”
“Freyja—”
“Don't stop!”
Who tumbled whom to the bed he did not know, but there they were moments later, wrestling and panting together in the narrow space, their hands all over each other in a desperate effort to find bare flesh. She pulled off his coat and waistcoat with a little cooperation from him, and she was tugging his shirt outside his pantaloons and sliding her hands underneath to press against his naked back while with his thumbs he hooked the low neckline of her muslin dress beneath her breasts and took them in his hands, rolling her nipples between his thumbs and forefingers. With his mouth he found the racing pulse at the base of her throat.
Somewhere sanity was trying to attract his attention. And another thought occurred to him too.
“Sweetheart.” He lifted his head and looked down into her face. “Are you a virgin?”
Perhaps she was not if there had been that passionate interlude with Kit Butler. If she was not . . .
“Lift your arms.”
He lifted them, and his shirt was off over his head and sailing over the edge of the bed to land in a heap with his coat and waistcoat.
“Are you a virgin?”
“Don't you dare stop.” With one hand she pulled his face back down to hers. With the other she fumbled at the flap of his pantaloons.
He took it that the answer was yes. If it had been no, she would have said so and dispensed with his scruples. His bare chest came down onto her bosom and he pressed his tongue into her mouth. She sucked it deep.
“Let me do this,” he whispered a few moments later, moving off her and undoing his buttons himself.
But she helped him remove the pantaloons after he had pulled off his Hessian boots and stockings. He drew her dress down her body, taking undergarments with it. Sanity, he half realized after he had pulled off her silk stockings too, had been stripped away with their clothes.
They came together again with fierce passion. If she was a virgin—and he would wager she was—there was no shrinking self-consciousness in her for either her own nakedness or his. But then he had known that being in bed with Freyja would be akin to lying with a pile of explosives with the fuses lit.
When he touched her between her legs, she opened to him, feverish and urgent. She was hot and wet and ready. He was hard and throbbing with need. He rolled fully on top of her, pushed her legs wide with his own, slid his hands beneath her to lift and tilt her, and mounted her.
She was a virgin. She was small and tight, and there was a barrier to impede his progress. She was also hot and wet, and her inner muscles were contracting about him and her hands were pressing down on his buttocks while her feet pushed her up from the bed. He pressed inward, heard her involuntary cry as he broke through, and embedded himself fully in her.
He might have taken her slowly and carefully after that, but she would have none of it. She was hot and fierce with passion, and he, God help him, felt an answering hunger that needed no further encouragement.
What followed was more like a wrestling match than lovemaking. He had no idea how long it lasted. He only knew that somehow he held on to some measure of control until she cried out and shuddered into a powerful release. Then he plunged toward his own pleasure and allowed his seed to spill into her.
They were both slick with perspiration, he discovered moments or minutes later—he had become strangely unaware of time—though the fire in the hearth had died down. They were also panting as if they had run ten miles apiece into a stiff wind. He lifted his head and looked down at her in the dim lamplight.
Her hair was in wild, wavy disarray about her head and shoulders. She was flushed. Her lips were parted, her eyes heavy-lidded.
“Well, sweetheart,” he said, “if we were not in a scrape before, we certainly are now.”
CHAPTER XIII
Freyja's legs were trembling as she dressed. So were her hands as she fumbled with her hairpins, dragging them all out and trying to tame and rearrange her hair without benefit of either a mirror or a comb. She was very thankful that Joshua had dressed faster than she and was at the moment kneeling at the hearth, cleaning out the remains of their fire and building a new one.
Glancing at him, she had a stomach-churning feeling of knowledge.
Gracious heavens, that splendid male body had just been naked and . . .
Well, never mind.
“This,” she said in a firmly practical voice, “was all my fault.”
He came to his feet and turned toward her, his eyes laughing, though there was a certain grimness about his mouth.
“Will you put a further dent in my self-esteem, then?” he asked her. “Have I just been seduced, Free?”
“You would not have done it,” she said, “if I had not insisted. I will never blame you. It was all my fault.”
Don't stop. Don't you dare stop.
How excruciatingly humiliating.
“If that were a bird's nest,” he said, nodding toward her hair, which she was holding on top of her head while she jabbed in hairpins to keep it in place, “it would be impressive indeed. But I would guess it is meant to be an elegant coiffure?”
He came closer, batted her hands away, and then, when the hair came cascading down about her shoulders again, he sat her down on the end of the bed and played lady's maid with surprisingly deft fingers.
“It was a mutual outpouring of lust, Freyja,” he said. “It was mutually satisfying too, though I cannot see that I did not hurt you rather badly. I daresay you would rather be stretched on t
he rack than admit to that, though, and so I will not ask. You do agree, I suppose, that we are now in a very serious scrape indeed.”
“If you mean,” she said, holding still as he anchored her hair in place with the pins, “that we are now obliged to marry, then of course you are speaking nonsense. Don't you dare propose marriage to me. I am five and twenty years old, and I imagine you are older. Why should we not go to bed with each other if we wish? I thought it was remarkably pleasant.”
“Pleasant.” He chuckled softly and stood back to admire his handiwork. “Remarkably chic, even if I do say so myself. Pleasant, sweetheart? You certainly know how to wound a man where it hurts. But I can answer your question in one word. Why should we not bed each other if we wish? Babies! They have an annoying and sometimes embarrassing habit of resulting from such activity as we just indulged in.”
How utterly foolish of her not to have thought of that—especially on the day of a christening.
“It will not happen,” she said briskly, getting to her feet and setting the bed to rights again.
“If it has happened,” he told her, “we have both of us acquired a leg shackle, sweetheart. For now we had better get back to the house and hope that no one has noticed quite how long we have been absent.”
They bundled up in their cloaks, and she waited outside, getting her bearings in the dark woods, while he extinguished the lamp, locked the door, and put the key back where they had found it. They walked back to the driveway and across the bridge without talking.
It was strange that she should feel so strongly opposed to marrying Joshua, she thought. It was not that she did not want to marry at all. She did. And she was five and twenty already. Joshua was handsome, charming, witty, and attractive, and he liked the same sort of vigorous outdoor activities as she. They had been to bed together and it had been a glorious experience.