by Lara Archer
“Before that happened, John. Did you have the slightest thought of choosing me for a wife? Be honest with me.”
He stiffened his posture, pure gentleman and officer. “I have always liked and admired you.”
“But did you ever once think of marrying me?”
He glanced up, considering, and then an impish look crossed his face. “Well, I do seem to remember a scheme to run off and sail a pirate ship together.”
A short, pained laugh escaped her. She’d forgotten about that. Long ago, they’d given themselves bloodthirsty pirate names, made buccaneer hats out of paper, even drawn up maps of all the coastline they planned to terrorize. “That was when we were ten years old.”
“It counts.” His eyes twinkled, just for a moment—the first sign of light in them she’d seen all evening. A tender ache filled her heart.
Oh, he really wasn’t making this easier for her.
But she shook her head. “As I recall, our only concern about how we’d live together was which of us got to be captain.”
“Mary,” he whispered. His expression had gentled and grown sad. “Be sensible. This isn’t a game.”
“Precisely. It’s the rest of our lives we’re talking about. So I’ll ask you again: would you ever have asked me to marry you if we hadn’t gone out in the woods this morning? Tell the truth.” She did her best to smile at him, trying to keep her mouth from wobbling. “I know it already anyway.”
He looked down. “Well…no,” he admitted at last. “I can’t say that I did.”
“That’s all I need to hear.” She swung herself back into efficient action, moving past her erstwhile suitor to retrieve her dustpan and broom to sweep up the broken teacup. If she could just get the shattered bits cleaned up, she could put everything else back in order, too. Back the way it should be. “I will not saddle you with a wife for such a small indiscretion. Not a wife like me. We would be miserable together.” She looked up into the sudden shock in his eyes, and softened her words. “I would not do that to someone I call a friend.”
John drew in a slow, deep breath. There was resignation in it, but also pain. He was an honorable man, and she was forcing him to compromise what he saw as his honor. “This isn’t over,” he said. “You will be convinced.”
“That’s not possible.” The china shards tinkled as she swept them together and poured them into the bin beside the door. “I think things through carefully, and once I’ve come to a decision, I stick to it. I’m stubborn, and you know it.”
Setting down her broom, she picked up her lantern again and walked briskly to the front door, shepherding him along with her. “It’s time you left now. You are my friend, John, always. But it’s not proper for you to be here any longer, and we will not discuss this again.”
Chapter Five
John took the long route home through the woods, trudging along, his head aching, and his chest feeling oddly sore and hot as well. Thankfully, enough moonlight streamed through the trees here and there to let him pick out his path, for he couldn’t have borne the revealing light of a lantern. Shame weighed heavily on his shoulders.
He’d felt enough of that emotion on his walk to the vicarage tonight—shame at his own impetuous behavior up on the hill that morning, shame at the dishonor he’d visited upon a decent girl like Mary, shame at the idea of jilting the Lawton girls he’d kept waiting for so long. And, most of all, shame at having to break his solemn promise to his father to align the Parkhursts with the Lawtons.
But when he arrived at Mary’s door, and saw her in that little circle of lantern light, her skin going pink, then pale, then pink again, he discovered a whole new sort of shame awaiting him, a shame he hadn’t even been expecting. He’d assumed he’d talk to Thomas Wilkins first, and that the vicar would ensure his sister’s cooperation in the marriage. He hadn’t expected Mary to be alone, and free to speak entirely for herself.
And he certainly hadn’t expected her to say no.
At least not to say no quite so unequivocally. So forcefully, in fact.
He rather thought he’d been tossed out on his ear.
As he made his way home, he kicked at rocks and stamped on dry branches with considerably more aggression than those objects deserved.
True enough, he’d never considered marrying her before—which was hardly unreasonable, given the difference in their stations, and how far their lives had diverged since childhood. But he’d been quite sincere when he said he’d always liked her, liked her very much indeed.
There was truly no one else with whom he’d rather embark on a life of piracy.
And he did admire her, genuinely so. Since he’d returned home, he saw how much she did for the good of the village and all his tenants—organizing events, teaching the children, making improvements for everyone’s health and happiness. She was the heart and soul of the place. A person whose work mattered.
Unlike an idle viscount, he supposed.
He stopped dead in a deep patch of shadow in a dense stand of pines. A little clearing stood before him, brightened by a shaft of moonbeams, but he was all in darkness. It seemed an appropriate place for his mood—still and heavy and out of the light.
Was that what Mary meant when she said they didn’t belong together?
She’d spoken of suffering in marriage to him, for pity’s sake.
Did she really think him such a useless prat?
Damn it. She’d only seen him surrounded by luxury here at Parkhurst Hall—sitting in upholstered armchairs or atop a thoroughbred horse in spotless buckskin pantaloons his valet had brushed clean for him, with piles and piles of money to fall back on.
If she could have known him when he was a soldier—if she’d seen him on the battlefield, streaked with soot and blood, barking orders to his troops, charging at the enemy....
Well, it didn’t matter what she thought of him.
He’d compromised her. A gentleman and gentlewoman just shouldn’t do what the two of them had done and act as if nothing had happened. Maybe Mary could be that pragmatic, but he couldn’t. Where virtue was concerned, intangibles mattered, rules mattered, and if everyone ignored them, where would civilization be?
His mind flashed on the image of Mary laying on her back on the forest floor, her thighs spread for him. Oh, yes, he liked her. He certainly liked her thighs. And her scent. And the way she writhed beneath his mouth as he’d pleasured her with his tongue.
How might she writhe when he got his cock inside her? How might she moan?
She’d liked what he did to her, he was sure of that, at least.
Yet she was refusing to marry him.
Damn. This was a mess.
A sudden snapping noise startled him from his reverie. Something was moving, something fairly large, crackling through the underbrush.
With a soldier’s instincts, he stepped even deeper into the shadow of the pines.
A cold weight dropped through his stomach: what if it was Thomas Wilkins coming home early from tending the drunkard? He’d come all this way to talk to the man, and yet just at the moment the thought of facing him made John’s limbs turn to lead.
What was he to say? “I had your sister on her back this morning, with her skirts around her waist, and my tongue in her slit, but apparently she’d rather die than let me make an honest woman of her”?
No, he had to give Mary some time to see reason on her own. If she didn’t come around in a week or two, he could go to Thomas then. But marriage was for life, and Thomas would be his brother-in-law. He’d prefer not to have to avert his eyes in embarrassment every damned time he saw the man.
John pressed his way deeper into the cover of pine branches and squinted into the darkness. Shadowy shapes moved through the trees on the other side of the clearing. Two shadowy shapes.
So not just Thomas Wilkins, then.
The shapes stumbled into the clearing. Two people.
A man and a woman.
They appeared to be having some sort of silent alte
rcation—pushing at one another, struggling.
Was the woman under attack?
He was just bracing himself to spring into action when he recognized the pair: the sexton Mr. Bassett, and Mrs. Trumbull, who ran the Fox & Crow. And they weren’t fighting, they were pulling at the fastenings of one another’s clothes.
Mary must have been right about the frequency with which others in the village misbehaved. He certainly knew misbehavior was the wont of soldiers, but somehow he’d assumed it was different with decent country people.
He was on the verge of calling out to make his presence known when Mrs. Trumbull apparently succeeded in loosening the bit of Mr. Bassett’s clothing she was most eager to get out of her way—the closure of his breeches. She sank instantly to her knees, and drew out his cock with both her hands. She stroked and squeezed it for a moment, then took nearly the whole of it into her mouth.
Good Lord. John had no choice now but to stay hidden where he was.
Mr. Bassett grunted. He seized the innkeeper’s head in both hands and began to work in and out between her lips, building to solid thrusts.
John knew he should at least look away, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the pair. His own cock stirred—and immediately he thought of Mary.
And that was the wrong thing to be thinking.
He mustn’t think of Mary, not right now, not this way. He’d done enough wrong by her already, and he needed to keep his head as clear as possible about her.
Instead, he tried to imagine the eldest Miss Lawton on her knees, taking him in her mouth. Just a thought experiment. To see if he might be able to muster the same enthusiasm for her that apparently came so easily to him with Mary.
Hidden in the shadows, he made quick work of his trouser buttons, and took his own burgeoning shaft in his hands. He focused on a mental image of Annabel Lawton kneeling before him in some frothy Parisian frock, the top of her plump bosom bared like the swells of two ripe peaches, her lovely golden curls loose about her shoulders. Her pretty pink bow of a mouth sliding along his shaft, her moist lips opening wider to take him deep…..
He tried to imagine it. Got as far as her tongue stroking the seam of his cock.
And then the image dissolved.
It was impossible to sustain.
Any of the Misses Lawton would refuse to get on her knees in the first place—it would wrinkle her dress. And surely the idea of putting her lips around a man’s bared appendage would horrify her ladylike sensibilities.
Even with the sight of the fornicating pair in front of him, his cock began to flag.
Marriage to a Lawton girl would probably mean a lifetime of separate chambers, of creeping in to her bed at midnight, more like a thief than a lover, touching her as little as possible while she gripped the bed-sheets and said her prayers, her face turned away in disgust as she wished him done with his vile manly business.
A deplorable thought.
Not that he’d expected anything different as late as when he rose from bed this morning. He’d been resigned to it then, bound by the demands of honor. But then he hadn’t yet seen Mary Wilkins with her hair wild and her eyes gleaming with desire.
That image in his head, and the thought of the smell of Mary, the taste of her, her smooth legs spread open before him, her chest heaving with her desperate breaths, the sweet moans coming out of her mouth, had his cock rock-hard again in an instant.
Mary.
He gripped his swelling shaft and began to pump it with his palm. A new image took form in his mind, unbidden: Mary Wilkins on her knees before him, those clever gray eyes focused on his face as she took him into her mouth, smiling as she did it. Her tongue whipping over his cock, laving it around and around, her excitement growing every second right along with his. That image was vivid, enduring—and arousing beyond belief.
He closed his eyes, thrusting his hips against the grip of his palm.
And then he heard Mr. Bassett cry out, “Damn me, woman! Don’t stop now.”
John’s eyes flew open. Mrs. Trumbull was still on her knees but only her hand held the man’s stiff cock now.
The woman laughed, quite wickedly. And then she rolled down onto her back on the carpet of leaves and mosses and drew her skirts up around her hips, spreading her legs wide to show him what awaited him there. “I don’t mean to stop,” she purred, and rubbed one hand lasciviously along the cleft between her legs. “I just mean to offer you another chamber for your pleasures.”
The sexton roared like a bull, pulled his breeches down until his buttocks were exposed, and fell atop her. Immediately, he was pumping into her again, the muscles of his arse clenching with each thrust, groaning over and over again, “Hot and wet. Always hot and wet.”
“And you’re hard—so hard and rough.”
The sexton plowed her fierce and fast, the wet sound of their rutting audible even from this distance away. The woman wrapped her legs around him, her heels pressing his buttocks, urging him on.
John remembered the slickness of Mary’s juices that he’d applied to his cock that morning. He wished he had that pleasure again.
Now Mrs. Trumbull began to mewl and moan, her hips lifting to answer the thrusts of her lover.
John thought of Mary on her back, of what it would have been like had he not just used his hand this morning, but climbed atop her and pushed himself inside, as the sexton was now doing to the moaning woman beneath him.
Mary, he thought, would welcome him, wrap her legs around him with fervor, give as good as she got. No turning her head aside and wishing for it to be over.
From the cries she was emitting, Mrs. Trumbull was very close to her climax.
Lord, if he could have Mary underneath him, he’d make her come again, even harder than before….and then again, and again, and again.
Her thighs had tensed while he licked and sucked her. Her hips had lifted, offering her soft, slippery, fragrant core, yielding every inch of it to him. She’d grabbed hold of his hair to push his tongue deeper, and writhed and clenched and spasmed beneath him….
The blood had been drumming in his head, through his belly, but now it all seemed to gather in a fierce, blunt flood into the region of his cock. His balls tightened rock hard, squeezed, and his cock pulsed almost painfully as he thought of coming inside Mary.
It took just one more thought, the thought of Mary moaning as he fucked her. And he came hard, shooting in thick hot spurts, so hard and far he heard it spatter against the dry leaves. The sound surely would have attracted the attention of the pair coupling on the ground, had they not also reached their conclusion at nearly the same moment, and were lost in ecstatic shouts of their own.
The air seemed to echo with the noise of pleasure—and at the peak of it all, what sounded like a second female voice. A gasp.
He looked to the other side of the clearing, and caught a sudden glimpse of a pale white face peeking out from behind another tree.
Dear Lord—Mary.
He could barely make her out, hidden as she was, but there was no mistaking her, or the fact that she was looking straight at him.
How long had she been standing there? What all had she seen?
She saw him catch sight of her, and disappeared behind the trunk, as quick as if she were a sylvan nymph indeed.
He couldn’t see or hear her retreat—now that her pale face had vanished, her dark clothes made her invisible even under the moonlight.
Instinctively, he moved to try to run after her—and ran smack into a bush. It rustled loudly, and he hastily drew back away from it, concealing himself behind another tree.
He heard Mr. Bassett’s voice, sounding suddenly alarmed. “Did you hear something, Dinah?”
“It was an animal in the bushes, Joe, nothing more.”
An animal. Yes, he was an animal indeed.
What had happened to him today? He was an honorable man. Had been an honorable man, just that morning.
Now he was skulking in shrubberies, watching other peop
le copulate, getting himself off quite spectacularly fantasizing about the vicar’s sister sucking his cock—and had done it where that very girl herself had been able to watch him.
It was a good thing the path in front of him hadn’t been clear. If he had been able to run after Mary, if he had been able to catch her, what on earth had he been planning to do?
He liked to think it would simply be to beg her once more to marry him, but he suspected that would have come somewhere down the list after trying to rip the clothes off of her.
Damn.
His whole world had shifted straight off its axis, and he didn’t know if he could ever set it right again.
* * *
Mary fled through the woods as fast as the moonlight would permit her, stumbling over rocks and roots and still not slowing.
Why had she come out here at all? It was just that the air in the vicarage had seemed unbreathable after the viscount left. The thought of the woods and the dark and the cool air had called to her, and she’d come out, thinking only to walk for a time to clear her head and soothe the aching pulses of her heart.
Even then, it had been clear to her she’d done the right thing in turning down the viscount’s proposal. Duty alone had compelled him to ask for her hand. Lord knows he’d looked so ill at the prospect she’d thought one of his loved ones must be dying.
So what if some deep-buried part of her clawed at her brain with the thought that she could just say “yes,” and have him with her, have him share her bed and her body forever.
She would never listen to that voice.
John was her friend, and she’d never let his small lapse in judgment in the woods make him miserable for the rest of his life.
And now—well, she was more sure than ever that a marriage between them could only be a mistake. His desire for her was as thoughtless and base as the sexton’s lust for Mrs. Trumbull.
If she’d harbored even the slightest hope that his behavior in the woods had had something to do with her in particular rather than with circumstance—the vines that had exposed her legs, the thorns that had pulled his head against her bosom—well, that hope was utterly dashed.