Her pulse started to race. What did that mean? Did she dare make certain assumptions? She opted to keep her cool. She took a sip of her wine. “Where will you go?”
“Nowhere. I would like to stay here. With you.” Hayden gave a small chuckle. “Obviously, with you. For you. There’s not much else I could do here that would keep me here otherwise.”
“Not much else you can do here?” Jenna gave a tiny smile and watched him wince. He gave a sheepish grin, looking entirely boyish and irresistible. “That came out wrong. Can you help a poor soul out and tell him you know what he means?”
“Yes.” Her response came out a bit hoarse, a bit choked as it the reality set in. He was going to stay for her. Her heart turned over and it was all she could do not to launch herself across the short distance and throw her arms about his neck. But tonight she needed a little restraint. This had been their pattern, rushing too quickly to the victory celebration with nothing significant resolved. Then again, resolution had never mattered before. This was supposed to end, there’d been no need to plan, no need to resolve any concerns that might lie between them, the end would take care of that. Now there was no end pre-determined by the thaw of the ice or a date on the calendar.
“What does this mean, Hayden?” She asked cautiously. “I think you have to know there is a limit to how many times I can slink up the backstairs.” Once Carrick and Logan left, it would be obvious he’d stayed for her if it wasn’t already. People were used to seeing them together during the day. People knew he dined at her house most evenings with her family. Hayden’s status in town made it impossible for his days to go unnoticed. She thought every unmarried woman in town knew how he spent his days.
“We’ll have to figure that out as we go.” Hayden forced a grin that didn’t stay on his face and her nerves returned, overriding the brief rush of euphoria. “Starting with an answer to a question you once asked me. After you hear the answer you may not want me to stay.”
“What question was that?” Jenna asked quietly, although every nerve she possessed was raw with anticipation. The tension in the room was acute, each of them perched on a precarious edge of their own.
“Why I no longer do investigatory work.”
Oh. That one. Jenna waited, unsure what that had to do with them. Hayden rose from his chair and pulled his shirt from the waistband of his trousers. He slowly unbuttoned it, the firelight outlining the muscled planes of his chest. It was a most unorthodox way of answering the question. He tossed the shirt to the bed and turned down the waistband of his trousers, revealing the white line of a scar low on his hip. It trailed below the beltline. She’d seen it before. Jenna wet her lips. “I always assumed you’d gotten that from an accident on the ice.”
“No.” Hayden shook his head. “This is from my last investigation, courtesy of the Baroness St. Martin, who, if she’d had slightly more prowess with a knife, might have ended me altogether.”
Jenna swallowed. Her hand reached out reflexively to trace the line at his waist. “Did it hurt badly?” What a stupid question. Of course it did.
He tolerated her touch, her finger tracing the scar. She could feel his body tense. “It didn’t hurt as much as my pride.” He stepped out of reach and reclaimed his seat. “She stabbed me while we were, um, in bed. I was investigating her husband’s murder and she’d played the grieving widow, the innocent wife, so perfectly that I’d never once seriously suspected her of doing the deed.” He pursed his lips. “It’s hardly an appropriate story to tell you, Jenna, but you should know what sort of investigator you hired. I was quite good at my job up until then when I let emotion and ‘impossibility’ guide my decisions.”
A rather blunt story, but it explained certain mysteries, as it were, about him, Jenna thought; the desire to seek out shallow women, seducible women who would fall at his feet. He liked to happen to them, before they could happen to him. He gave them no chance at weaving any true intimacy with him. He feared that intimacy and its potential power to blind him to reality.
There was another fear too and she spoke it out loud, rising and going to him, kneeling before him to take his hands in hers. “And you fear that you no longer have the capacity for true intimacy?” Was that one of the things he was testing with this desire to stay? Did he have the capacity any longer to experience true intimacy, to give himself over to it? Her heart broke for him in those moments. His laughing eyes were somber and shuttered. She ached for him, ached to relieve his fears, his vulnerabilities. All this was kept inside him, behind his laughter and easy smiles and insouciance. She had her own armor against the pain of Adam Grantham’s heartless betrayal. Was the laughter and the flirting, Hayden’s armor?
Hayden didn’t answer her immediately. “I was distraught, wounded, and sick, for a long time. Months. Even when I was technically well, I couldn’t rouse myself.”
“Like my father.” Jenna breathed, hardly daring to interrupt.
Hayden nodded. “Only, I drank far too much. I tried to forget. I couldn’t, so I drank some more. Logan pulled me out of it and helped me put this ice racing idea together. It was the perfect remedy. It keeps me engaged, body and mind. I’m too busy to brood.”
Except at night, Jenna thought. No wonder he couldn’t sleep.
“And it keeps me moving.” Hayden added tentatively, letting the implications seep in. Staying with her would change that. He would be in one place. He would have time on his hands. She understood his anxiety. Not only was he worried about her reaction to his request to stay, although why he should be was still beyond her. Surely he knew she held him in regard? That seemed to put it mildly. He was worried too over his ability to successfully stay. She couldn’t do much about alleviating the latter, those were primarily his ghosts to manage. But she could do something about the former. She could show him how much she wanted him to stay.
Jenna rose up on her knees and reached for the fall of his trousers. “We’ll work through it together. I’ll keep you too busy to wonder.” She promised with a coy smile, her hand seeking him through his smalls, but his hand closed over her wrist, halting her.
“Jenna, wait. Before you touch me, you have to know something else. I never should have been with the baroness. I have no excuses, she was beautiful, I was attracted to her, she seemed to need me and I wanted to be needed, but I should have resisted and in my weakness, I failed my family. The baroness was my uncle’s wife, his second wife, although that hardly matters. What does matter is that I bedded the woman who killed my uncle and never once suspected it of her until it was too late. I don’t know what sort of man that makes me.”
Their eyes locked and she saw in that moment all the vulnerability he carried within himself, all the ways in which he tried to outrun it. What a terrible amount of regret to carry. “Only a man who cares so deeply for his family would feel enduring regret. Family is important to you. It is there in the stories you tell of your childhood, in the way you behave with Daniel and my father.” He’d taken an enormous risk in telling her this.
He’d understood full well it might be grounds for rejection. It encouraged her to take a risk of her own. Perhaps he needed to know how much he’d come to mean to her. Jenna used her other hand to gently pry his fingers from her wrist. “I think above all, it makes you a man of conscience.” She wet her lips. “It makes you a man I could love.”
Her hand closed over the length of him, her words a seductive whisper, “Let me love you, Hayden.” She kept her eyes on him, her gaze meant to reaffirm the quality of her words. There was a guarded wonder in his face as if he didn’t dare believe it. She slid her hand along him, her thumb running over the tender head of him, the bead of moisture coming to her as if summoned by her touch. She felt the hot ridge of him. Her hand knew the geography of him well. But her mouth? Now that was a different story. She sat back on her heels, giving him a mischievous smile that started in her eyes.
“What?” Hayden’s voice was hoarse with anticipation. That look promised all sorts of ple
asurable trouble especially when it was tossed from between a man’s legs where the possibilities for mischief were definitely available if not infinite.
“Shh. Don’t talk.” She wrapped her hands around his ankles and tugged. He slid down in the chair, letting her guide his trousers around his hips, under his buttocks, down his legs and off, his body aroused at the erotic hint of roughness in her touch as she worked.
Whatever part of him wasn’t hard already, went positively rigid as her eyes roamed his nudity, her pupils dark and wide in approval at what she saw. Then she went to work. Her hands ran up his legs, spread his thighs wide and took him in her mouth.
Hayden didn’t think he could speak, even if he’d wanted to. The moment he felt the wetness, the heat of her mouth around him, he was lost… lost to guilt, lost to self-recrimination over a bad decision made years ago, lost to the fear that he was not worthy, lost to all of it. In these moments, those things had no hold on him. This was the release he sought.
Jenna’s tongue teased the tender head of him, caressing its under-rim. He gripped the arms of the chair. A groan welled up his throat, pleasure wracked him, making this far more than the seeking of release. This was freedom in its entirety. The freedom to indulge his senses, his passions to their utmost, without restraint, with this woman. When he was with Jenna he was naked in all ways. She demanded it of him.
He bucked beneath her, his balls tightening in prelude to his climax. His hands anchored in the chestnut waves of her hair, urging her to bring the completion — a completion he understood better now. Before, she’d freed him with her touch, her body. It had been there the first time they’d come together. When they were in bed, his guard was down and hers was too. It was a start for them both and maybe more as his choices tonight indicated. Tonight, she’d freed him with her words. A man of conscience, she called him. A man she could love.
She put her hand on his balls, cupping them, massaging them into the exquisite point of no return. He called her name, hoarse and desperate as her mouth took one last, long hard pull on him, her teeth nipping ever so slightly over his cap, bringing in its wake, the explosive force of climax, and the powerful, earth-shattering knowledge that he was wanted. She wanted him, body and soul. The risk had paid off. Logan had been wrong. Sometimes Logan was an ass.
Chapter Twenty-two
Sometimes waiting could be a pain in the, um, backside. Jenna let the lace panel of the curtain drop. She could try reading once more to pass the time but she didn’t think she’d meet with any more success than she had the first two times she’d tried it.
“Is Mr. Islington expected back today?” her father asked from his chair by the fire. He looked up from his reading in casual inquiry. He’d been coming downstairs a little bit every day even if it was just to sit and read. Jenna thought he too was anticipating Hayden’s return.
“Yes, Daniel couldn’t stand it so I let him go down to the King’s Arms to see if he’d returned.” She gave a small smile to hide her worry. It was Daniel she was waiting for, in truth. She’d sent him down to the inn almost two hours ago. She hadn’t the heart to keep him cooped up any longer and he’d been given strict instructions to come directly back.
“I’ve been thinking about Mr. Islington’s situation.” Her father began. “I’m wondering if he would be interested in staying beyond the season if he had a business to look after, perhaps a riding school? Daniel needs lessons and there are a few other boys his age who come to mind. It would be enough to start on and who knows who else might fancy learning to ride?”
Jenna schooled her features, careful not to give anything away. What did her father suspect? “What makes you think he wants to stay?” Inside, something hopeful bloomed. A riding school! Hayden would be brilliant at it.
Her father smiled broadly. “I’m not blind, Jenna. I see how he looks at you. I think he’d be interested if you gave him a bit of encouragement.”
Perhaps not blind but a little myopic, thank goodness. Jenna breathed a private sigh of relief. She wasn’t sure how much more ‘encouragement’ she could give Hayden. “Perhaps.” she replied blandly. “You should put the idea to him when he comes for dinner.” The clock chimed in the hall and Jenna set aside her book. “I think I will go down to the King’s Arms and see what has become of Daniel. Maybe Hayden has been regaling him with tales of the race.”
It was what she hoped as she made her way through the falling dark, slipping and sliding on the wet mush of the streets. February was nearly done. The next turn of the calendar would bring March, the month of mud, not nearly as pretty as the white blankets of snow.
She reached the inn and stepped inside, scanning the interior for Daniel, expecting to find him seated with Hayden and Carrick. The taproom was full but Hayden wasn’t there, neither was Daniel. She approached the innkeeper with a growing sense of urgency. “Did Daniel come in? He was looking for Mr. Islington.” She tried to keep the concern out of her voice. There was no need to raise an alarm. Yet.
The innkeeper set down his towel. “No, haven’t seen either of them.” He glanced outside at the fading light. “Islington should be here soon, though. There’s not much travel time left in the day.”
Jenna pitched her voice low. “My brother was supposed to have been here two hours ago. He hasn’t come home.”
“I wouldn’t worry, Miss Priess.” The innkeeper picked up his towel and went back to wiping the glasses. “Boys his age get up to all sorts of things and lose track of time.” But his movements told a different story. They were jerky, apprehensive.
“Not my brother.” Jenna fixed him with a stare. When he looked back, she saw the same fears in his gaze, the same thoughts. This was a poor time for the fourteen year old son of a mill owner to go missing especially when that mill had been plagued by disappearances of boys the same age.
Jenna made an impulsive decision. “Mr. Frye, can you bring me something to write with? I need to send a note to my father, and I need a horse.” She had an approximate idea of where Hayden had seen the sled marks crossing the lake. If something foul had befallen Daniel, she would find him at the cottage Hayden had described. Surely, it wouldn’t be hard to find once she made the woods. If not, no harm done. The cottage would be deserted.
What if she did find him there? More to the point, what would she do if she stumbled upon a veritable den of thieves? “On second thought, Mr. Frye, could you also see if you could find me a firearm?”
Twenty minutes later, Jenna was mounted on a sturdy mare from the livery, a note on its way to her father and a holstered gun slung over her saddle along with a lantern for the woods. She shot an anxious look at the sky. Daylight lingered but barely.
Common sense urged her to wait for Hayden, as did her heart. She wanted Hayden with her desperately in this hour of panic. But what if he’d stopped for the night? What if he’d been delayed? She couldn’t risk it. If Daniel was out there in trouble, hurt or heaven forbid, captured, she couldn’t wait for Hayden’s return. She had to cross the lake before the light faded entirely.
She kicked her horse forward, a prayer of pleas running through her mind; please let Daniel be safe, please let this be no more than a curious boy’s adventure, please let Hayden return soon, please let there be enough light to cross the lake at the right place, and perhaps above all else was her most immediate plea: Please let the ice hold.
Perhaps the one benefit of worrying over the ice was that it took her mind off worrying over Daniel and worrying about what she might find once she crossed to the other side. Worry over the ice led to other distractions; she remembered the poem Hayden had recited. She could better understand now why the rider had fainted dead away at the end. This was nerve wracking. Her horse slipped once. It was almost enough to convince her to turn back. She should wait for Hayden, wait for reinforcements. But she had no guarantees Hayden would be back today. The roads could have held him up and Daniel was out here, somewhere.
There was also no guarantee Daniel had crossed th
e lake. She might be doing this for nothing. Her intuition didn’t think that was the case. He was out here, likely in danger. She hoped the only danger was from the elements. Perhaps he’d gone out exploring the grooves he and Hayden had seen and fallen, turned an ankle and couldn’t walk. That was the best scenario. Jenna thought about the pistol in the saddle holster. She didn’t think the odds favored the twisted ankle scenario any more than they favored the idea that Daniel was out here on his own voluntarily exploring.
Jenna tightened her grip on the reins as the far shore loomed. Two more steps and her horse’s hooves sunk into the crunchy snow at the lake’s edge. She’d made it. That crossing had taken forever, each step taken gingerly and with trepidation. It made what Hayden and Guerre did on the ice positively genius. To think they could race and jump fallen horses on this stuff was amazing. She had scoffed at him that first day, now she saw first-hand how much skill he required.
It was fully dark and Jenna made full use of the lantern even though she realized the light risked giving her away. If Daniel had been abducted, his captors might still be nearby. The lantern would be a veritable beacon, giving advance warning of her approach. It was hardly subtle, but without it, she couldn’t advance at all. The path from the shore narrowed as it wove through the woods, the tall trees absorbing much of her light. The path was wide enough to accommodate a rider but just barely. Jenna opted to get down and lead the horse through the narrow woods. It was warmer too down at the horse’s shoulder. She was dressed well enough for the cold night but even so, she was starting to chill.
People had definitely passed this way. She didn’t have to be an expert tracker to notice the signs. Footprints riddled the snow and the snow itself was more like packed ice from the constant repetition of feet. Now, new worry took her. The lake was conquered but what lay ahead? What would she do when or if she faced Daniel’s captors? The reality of what she’d undertaken settled about her for the first time. Could she shoot someone? She’d probably have to if there was a confrontation. They wouldn’t simply let her take Daniel back.
Reckless Rakes - Hayden Islington Page 19