Instead, she forced her eyes to return to the diagram, to the wreaths that must be spun from branches and tied just so with twine. To the work that was more real and urgent than the surging feeling in her belly.
It was growing late. There would be time to consider why those prints had made her hands shake, made her breath catch in her throat. For now, she must return to work.
She picked up her chalk.
The door opened, rustling the papers on the table.
She turned around to find Westmead staring at her.
Poppy sat at a round table in the corner, surrounded by piles of drawings. She still wore her gardening clothes, and her eyes were heavy lidded. She looked intense and flushed and disheveled.
Beautiful.
No. He must stop doing that. Must chasten his reactions to her.
Hardworking. She looks tired from her labors.
He cleared his throat. “Poppy. You’re still awake.”
She looked up at him with a guilty expression. “Yes. And it seems I have invaded your study—I’m so sorry. The others were playing whist in the library and I thought to finish my work in the quiet. I’m just finishing—I’ll leave you.”
“Never mind. Stay. Please. Show me what it is you’re sketching.”
She hesitated. He felt her eyes linger on his face, like she was trying to discern something about him. No doubt, her downcast expression had something to do with his invasion of her bedchamber the previous evening. He needed to address that. No woman who’d been raised in Grove Vale would be ignorant of the stories about his father. He could not have her think that he expected similar liberties of her. He had taken far too many as it was.
He stepped closer to speak discreetly and saw that she had been drawing diagrams. Each page began with a sketch of a finished design—a garland of white lilies to hang from the ceiling, a wreath of greenery to be woven through trellises—followed by steps indicating how flowers should be attached to threads and wires.
They were ingenious.
“These are for the kitchen maids?”
“Yes. There are so many designs that I won’t be able to demonstrate each one myself.”
Her voice was tired but satisfied—the tone of someone who took pleasure in her work.
“You’re looking forward to it,” he observed.
“I am. I have felt unduly idle these past days, sketching and planning in this grand house. I rather miss the feel of leaves beneath my fingers.”
He smiled at this, remembering the day he had found her in her greenhouse, her arms wrapped around a plant. He liked how she did not shy from the vitality of her body—used it to cut branches and rake fields and enjoy the sun on her back as she worked the earth. It was so different from his own work—the gray light of the counting-house, with its ever-present swish of papers and scratch of quills. All at once he wished for a different kind of labor. A physical kind, something vigorous, into which he could pour the restless, pensive memories that had left him nearly sleepless since he’d arrived from London.
“I find I am envious of your employment,” he said. “Perhaps the weeks would pass faster if I took up the floral arts.”
She turned her full attention to him.
“You grow restless, away from London?”
“Immeasurably.”
She cocked her head to the side. “You long for your … work … there?”
“I do. You’d be pressed to find a peer who wouldn’t jeer at me for keeping my own counting-house, and yet I cannot think of a single place I’d rather spend an hour.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “I often find my mind is most at peace when I am at my most frightfully busy.”
He threw back his head with recognition, grateful she understood.
“Indeed. This is the first time I’ve been away in months, and the first time at this estate in thirteen years. You, of all people, must understand that I am unraveling.”
“Thirteen years,” she marveled. “How have you managed to run an estate without setting foot on it for thirteen years?”
He clucked his tongue. “Do I need to repeat for you my sister’s lesson on stewards?”
She gave him a sly smile. “Well, Your Grace, Maxwell’s men will be out foraging in the parklands for the next few days. If you are lacking in employment, perhaps he could be persuaded to take on an extra man.”
He chuckled. “I suppose you would enjoy that, Cavendish. The duke reduced to doing Maxwell’s bidding once again.”
“Perhaps I would.” She smiled. “Perhaps it is your turn to be embarrassed.” She wiped her hands on a cloth and began to pile up her papers.
Embarrassed. That word again. She said it lightly, but he hated the idea he had caused her distress. And he still had not apologized.
“Poppy, last night—I hope I didn’t alarm you. I apologize for intruding. I would not normally disturb a lady’s privacy, and I hope I gave no offense. I was concerned. You seemed quite distressed.”
Her face flickered. “It was only a nightmare,” she said finally. “I shan’t disturb you again.”
“I was not disturbed,” he said quickly.
She studied his face. “When I awoke this morning, I wondered if I had dreamt you.”
“No,” he said, drinking in her languid eyes.
She reached up and touched his face above his cheekbone. “No,” she agreed. “Here you are. Real indeed.”
Damn him, but he caught her hand and dragged it down to his lips and placed a kiss inside her palm.
Her mouth parted. Perhaps in shock. Perhaps in something closer to the feeling surging behind his sternum, overriding his judgment, his propriety, his will to be the kind of person he had spent a decade refashioning himself into.
“Forgive me. I am not myself tonight,” he forced himself to say, releasing her. He looked into her green eyes and told her the truth of it: “You should leave me.”
He meant it.
And yet.
And yet.
He hoped she wouldn’t listen.
Chapter 10
His eyes on hers were a warning.
A warning that he was in search of some unnameable thing. That he was looking for something—some kind of solace—and if she stayed in this room, she would be what he found.
That, Poppy knew, was dangerous.
She had seen his book. There was no illusion that what he wanted would be innocent.
It would be, God help her, exactly what she wanted.
Leave him? She met his eyes and slowly shook her head. A minute gesture. A tiny rotation of the neck, left, then right.
And then, before she could lose her nerve or think too much about the thousand reasons she should not do what she wanted, she raised her mouth and brushed his lower lip with hers.
That was all it took.
In an instant he was lifting her onto the table, his forearm pushing her drawings to the floor, his mouth ragged on her jaw, her lips, her eyelashes. His kiss was not a feint or a flirt, but the confession of a body that was ravenous, starved, for another’s. For a moment she was limp in his arms, stunned at the sudden revelation of how badly he wanted her. Tentatively, she put a hand on the nape of his neck, drawing him closer. Beneath her fingers, his onslaught stilled. He shuddered at her touch.
She had done that, she marveled. She. Her power to provoke such a reaction emboldened her. She nipped at his lip and, when he responded with his tongue, gave him her own. The growl he made in his throat nearly undid her.
“I have wanted to touch you,” she whispered, “for quite some time. I wonder if I might …” She dragged her hand down the front of his chest, letting her fingers graze the soft fabric of his shirt.
A corner of his mouth quirked up, and he leaned back to give her more of him. “By all means.”
She brushed her hand down farther, over his hips and thighs, and in answer he gripped her buttocks and drew her hips against his body, where a throbbing hardness beat intently with a pulse that matched the
flame burning low, so low, in her stomach.
She had never before touched a man in such a way, and the botanist in her was suddenly at full attention, rapt with the project of matching the contours of his sex to the drawings she had seen in books. Her fingers moved to feel him, grazing his erection through his breeches until he gasped.
She withdrew her hand. “That hurts?” she asked.
“No, Cavendish,” he said wryly, a sheen of pleasure cast about his eyes.
Oh.
For a moment they both paused, laughing. He gripped her thighs and wrapped her legs around his waist and pulled her with him to the sofa. She felt him pulsing against her as his hands slipped inside her bodice.
He paused, his eyes a question. “Stop me if I—”
She didn’t want to stop him. She did not want caution. She wanted to be consumed.
She placed her hands on his over her aching breasts, urging him onward, hoping he could sense what was inside of her, that he would know how badly she wanted this, how little she cared for proprieties. That she trusted he would know just what to do, because she didn’t, and she wanted to.
“I want to feel you,” she whispered. “Everywhere.”
She felt him throw off hesitation like a cloak. He buried his face in her hair and breathed her in, molding her breasts out of her stays until the nipples rose above the sober gray ribbon of her neckline. They were hard and pink in the firelight, and the sight of them, feverish in his large hands, puckering for his attentions, made her feel like a rod of lightning.
She lost all thoughts of science. She instinctively pressed herself against him until the juncture of her thighs came flush with his erection. The pressure of it against her own sex was a revelation, and she gasped and moved closer, wanting to feel the shock of it again, wanting to feel the parts of him that were hard and rough against the parts of her that were soft and pliant. “Please,” she whispered mindlessly, not quite sure what she was asking for.
His hand found its way beneath her gown and petticoats, until it rested on her chemise, his fingers grazing her through the linen. The feel of his hand against the juncture of her body was nearly shattering. She rocked against him, abandoning herself to the lovely pressure of his palm.
“I want to look at you,” he murmured in her ear.
“Yes,” she whispered. She wanted to be seen.
He grabbed fistfuls of her skirts and bunched them around her waist until she was exposed, the dark heart between her thighs bare to him. He spread her legs and sighed.
“Fuck,” he breathed in softly. A declaration that should not have melted her. But did.
His gaze fell back upon her face. “So beautiful,” he murmured. And indeed, she felt beautiful. Desirable and lush, an orchid blooming for the sun. Like the lady in the plate, aroused and queenly in the warmth of her lover’s gaze.
He slowly stroked along her thigh, brushing his fingers up, up until they dipped inside her. She gasped. His hand lingered just below the swollen nubbin at her center, teasing it until he had her shaking. She wanted more—to be full of him. She pressed herself up against his thighs, searching for the pressure of his cock.
“Yes, move against me,” he moaned, encouraging her with his own movements to follow her instincts. She opened her thighs to clench him as his hands brought wave after wave of sensation, turning her into something slick and molten and thrumming. She arched her back as the pleasures began to rise into something combustible.
But at the critical moment he lifted himself off her and pinned her hands above her head. “Not yet, Cavendish. First I want to taste you.” Before she could think to be shocked, he shifted so that his mouth was at the edge of her thighs. “May I?”
His breath on her flesh dissolved anything but the desire for more of it. “Please.”
He parted her, running his hand along her sex with reverence, his eyes dark with desire. Rapt, he traced the wetness there with his tongue. And then his mouth was on her fully, urging her to be wanton, to breathe him in, to use him to take what her body wanted.
The room went white. This man must have indeed spent a great deal of time studying that book.
She writhed against his lips. He took his mouth away for a searing instant and looked into her eyes. “Come for me, Poppy,” he whispered. “I want to feel you.”
His mouth closed around her bud and his tongue spread softly, softly, and with a mind-shattering clench, sucked right where she pulsed most desperately. She exploded, a pang spreading into a wave and cresting higher and higher until she was underwater, gasping. She buried her face into the sofa and allowed herself to moan with pleasure, heedless of passing ears, bucking against his face with each tremor, clutching at his hair. He encouraged her cries with his mouth, nuzzling gently, helping her return to herself as the waves slowed and she came, finally, apart.
Slowly, she opened her eyes. He was sultry and beautiful, his glossy hair dark and shimmering in the firelight, his eyes drinking her in from beneath his lashes. She was transfixed by him, his male beauty, his sorcery over her body. She pulled him toward her to kiss him and could taste the salt of her desire on his lips.
The luxury of holding him, with his heat and linen crispness and that way he had of trembling when she touched his skin, made her feel rich.
Curiosities she’d pondered in the dark for years flooded her head, and she scarcely knew which parts of him she wanted to linger over first. She ran her hands down his broad chest and back over the fine snowy fabric of his shirt. He was so much larger than her, and yet, in her arms, she sensed a shyness—he held himself back like he thought he might crush her. Tentatively she ran her hands over the place where the long length of his shaft announced itself. Beneath his shirt the velvet tip of it had pushed out above the waistline of his breeches, where it strained against the trail of hair at his belly. At its tip, a tear. All at once she was wild again, her hands searching for the placket to unleash him. His cock jumped at her touch. She ran her hands around it, enjoyed his gasp in response, then dragged her fingers up over his flat belly and into the hair beneath his shirt. Her hands grazed something cold.
“What’s this?” she asked, finding a rather intricately wrought iron key on a leather cord beneath his shirt. She lifted up the linen farther to investigate.
His hand clamped down over hers so quickly it startled the breath from her. “No.”
She dropped the key and placed her hands back on his hips, but he jerked away from her.
“Stop,” he ordered. His voice had lost the husky tone of arousal. It was ice.
He moved out of reach. A tendon in his neck twitched.
She drew back, alarmed. She had never been intimate with a man in this way. There had been only the one half-permitted, oft-regretted fumbling moment in the woods with Tom. This had all happened so suddenly, a blinding burst of wanting falling upon her like drunkenness or a fit of madness. Had she been too forward? Done something to cause him offense?
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
Archer turned away from her and adjusted his clothing in silence.
She sat up. “Archer?”
He shook his head, not looking at her.
A cold wave of embarrassment was wrapping around her, but she tried again. “I’m sorry,” she said to his back. “I meant no harm. I hoped to please you, as you did me.”
He turned back to her, fully dressed now, the key tucked back beneath his shirt.
“You should return to your room,” he said.
She stared at him. “Why?”
“Because,” he drew out slowly, “I am not the kind of man with whom there is a future for you.”
Her blood ran cold.
Suddenly she could see herself the way he saw her. Her breasts pushed up above the bodice of her tired, shabby dress. Her skirts bunched around her waist. Her legs open and slicked with what she’d let him do to her.
Not a goddess.
Just a spinster who forgot herself.
Hot shame
came rising through her bones, and she moved urgently to cover herself, to protect her body from his eyes.
But there was no need.
He turned his back on her again and left the room.
Chapter 11
Poppy sat at the head of the long table as Maxwell’s crew brought in another dozen sacks of foliage clipped from the grounds. It was a honey-gold Wiltshire morning, the mists burning off in amber rays as carts loaded with lilac, Madonna lily, larkspur, and spirea were rolled into the kitchen yard.
Inside her workroom the maids gossiped as they sewed. The room smelled of the outdoors. No one who entered it could help but be charmed by the odd creations that were beginning to take shape here. There were long, green strands of ivy and leafy willow fronds woven around sticks and wire to form dramatic bowers that would rise from urns like treetops. Thorny, fragrant bags of heather, lavender, and gorse were being tamed under nimble fingers into vibrant orbs, to be suspended in the air around glass globes lit with wax candles. Tufts of downy white bedstraw and meadowsweet were being sewn with thread into long, delicate garlands, single strands of which would hang at various lengths across the expanse of the atrium like an ethereal rainstorm of flowers, frozen in midair.
For days, Poppy had poured her anger into the making of these dreamlike shapes. She infused it into the thorns and brambles she whittled away from stalks, into the blossoms and leaves she bent to her will until they became something grander and more unsettling than nature. Not the romantic gossamer vision of her early sketches, but something more dramatic and occult.
She did not allow her mind to drift to the man, ever awake and restless, who left his fire burning through the night in the next room. She knew he did not sleep. When she retired at the end of her exhausting days, long after midnight, his room still flickered with lamplight and she heard him pacing. When she awoke, she would often see him already up and working with Maxwell’s crew, hauling branches in the coarse linen of a laborer. Often she heard him leave the house in the middle of the night, slipping out onto the terrace and into the dark woods on foot. Where he went, she did not know.
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