‘I shall pay no attention to that last remark.’
‘Do as you please. It’s true. I only dole out kindness as I do to my horses, as an inducement for something I want or as a reward for something I’m given, not as largesse to those who’d take advantage, as she most certainly would. So there you have it.’
It was not so much the sentiment alone that shocked me, for that was a typical response from the wealthy land-owning aristocracy who rarely saw the need to part with anything unless there was a sound reason for it. But to apply that to friendship did strike me as odd. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I never heard anything quite as cynical as that in all my born days, my lord. So am I to take it that the only reason you’ve ever had to offer me kindness is because you expected something in return? Never kindness for its own sake?’
‘For both reasons I’ve just stated. You have what I want, and you’ve given me something too.’
‘So if that were not the case, I take it you would have no other reason to offer me kindness.’
‘But it is the case, Miss Follet. I cannot imagine seeing you without wanting you, nor can I forget what you once gave me.’
‘This conversation is shocking,’ I whispered, pushing it to its limits. ‘And what happens when…if… you get what you want? You revert to unkindness, do you? Thank you for the warning.’
‘No. When I’ve got what I want, I shall want more. I shall never stop wanting more.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘How do I know, woman? Do you need to ask? We—’
‘Shh! No, don’t say it. I don’t need to ask. Nor do I need to ask you about charity, or compassion, or pity. Clearly you don’t deal in those, either.’
‘If we’re talking about our mutual friend again, charity she gets from her father by the cartload, compassion is for women to give, and pity she’d not thank you for. Or me. I know what she needs, and she’s looking in the wrong direction for it. I offered to help, just now.’
‘Yes, by stepping on her pride, before her friends. By being facetious at my expense. That was not well done, my lord,’ I said, angrily. ‘She was hurt by it. You understand little of women’s needs, in spite of what you say.’
His reply came after a long silence during which he watched my anger simmer and my eyes avoid his. ‘I understand your needs,’ he said, softly. ‘But I was taken once before in a direction I didn’t want to go, and I’ll be damned if I’ll do it again. Yes, I have grown cynical, and perhaps unkind too. And I could have taken her at any time these last six years, Miss Follet, and landed myself high and dry for my kindness. For that’s all it would’ve been.’
‘I didn’t mean that sort of kindness,’ I said. ‘And what do you mean about a direction you didn’t want to go?’
‘Remind me to tell you one day. It’s a long story.’
I knew that it concerned me, but I would probe no further. ‘I think,’ I said, ‘that we are talking about two different things. A woman’s view of kindness has other connotations. Men calculate the cost beforehand. Women calculate afterwards, if at all.’
‘By which time it’s usually too late.’
‘Yes. That’s the nature of it.’
The strains of a gavotte from the ballroom signalled the end of the interval and our eyes held, in remembrance of another time when we had lost ourselves in our own and each other’s needs as if differences did not exist. He had become hardened, unsympathetic, and I had grown wary and resentful, and now we needed to find a way of moving on without causing more pain.
‘Dance with me,’ he whispered.
My eyes must have reflected my doubts, but he did not accept my refusal. Standing abruptly, he held out a hand and raised me to my feet, leading me like a sleepwalker into the ballroom where we joined the end of the line, moving into the steps as we went, turning, parting, closing, balancing.
If there were stares of disapproval, neither of us noticed, only the slow and stately steps that moved us apart and together again, our bodies and hands just touching, like those six years condensed into six minutes. His eyes were brazen with desire, and mine were speaking of I know not what, except too much of my feelings. He was a superb dancer, bending and graceful, concentrating totally on his partner as if she were the only one, while other dancers glanced through their eyelashes and turned pinkish after being held by him. I knew then that I was losing control, that I was showing him what was in my secret heart because, with his outspoken talk of wanting me, he had found a way in.
The slow seductive ritual ended and, after that, we seemed to be marking time until we could catch a mutual signal to end the charade and go home. We talked again with friends, we drank more punch and ate more apple pie and cream, we laughed at poor jokes and came together again with Medworth and his fecund wife, and the desire to be like her in that one respect burgeoned within me again, as I believe it had with Veronique too. Inside me, I quivered and sobbed with the effort of constraint while outwardly I displayed the ice-cool front that deceived everyone. Everyone, I think, except him.
Finally, when my almost frantic glance connected with his lazy blink, he made our excuses, found my cloak and his hat, and carried me over the muddy cobbles to my home, ignoring the smiles and stares of those who passed by. His taciturn silence warned me of what was on his mind, but it was on mine too, and past the stage of discussion.
* * *
‘Lock the door and go to bed,’ I told the astonished footman.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
Thinking I would be late, I had told Debbie not to wait up, but she had left a single candle burning in my room where chocolate-brown shadows wrapped us in a blanket as dark as the lust that spilled over, even before we had pressed the door closed with our bodies, our mouths and hands already seeking. The room was warmed by a low fire, but neither of us noticed it in the heat of our desire, in the relief of being alone with our craving where no polite preliminaries were expected.
I have no notion how long before we paused, but by then his hands were slipping softly over my gown, his mouth lifting from my bare shoulder to whisper commands against my face, and I knew by his tone not to expect the same restraint this time from one who had waited over-long for what he wanted. I would not plead for either gentleness or consideration after my own enforced celibacy, for I was no inexperienced girl with unrealistic dreams of tenderly sighing lovers. The desires of my heart owed nothing to all that.
My expectations were not far wrong.
‘Take it off,’ he growled.
‘Help me.’ I was breathless, trembling.
‘Where…how?’
‘At the back. Hooks and eyes. And a tape inside.’
Turning me round, he snapped the fastenings apart like the rattle of a drum, sliding it off my shoulders and over my feet, flinging aside my work of one week while shaking off his own tailcoat to keep it company. I have never in my life seen a man remove his own tailcoat so quickly.
I stood with my palms pressed to my breasts, a natural reaction, in the circumstances. But he took my wrists and slowly eased them apart, holding them wide against the door panel, and I could not help but turn my head aside as he leaned away to scrutinise my body, as a sculptor would. My eyes closed, and his lips awakened my breasts to his warm hungry wanderings until they closed over the nipples, engorging them, forcing a cry from deep in my throat.
‘Untie my cravat,’ he whispered.
‘Let me go, then.’
His hands needed that excuse to explore my waist and hips, caressing while I struggled blindly with the knot at his throat. Eventually, my fumblings produced an end, which he pulled, throwing the long thing on to the growing heap with a laugh before taking my mouth in a kiss that made me reel, reminding me again of his words earlier that evening, uncompromising, almost vengeful. ‘Look at me, Helene,’ he whispered to my closed eyes.
High up on the chest the candle flame wavered beside us, illuminating his face like the setting sun on coastal rocks, deep shadows and rugged sur
faces sloping to granite throat and shoulders. His eyes were more intense than ever I’d seen them, but when had he ever allowed me to see what he was thinking, until now?
‘Don’t hate me for this, as you did before,’ he said. ‘You were willing then, and you are willing now. But don’t reward me with your hate.’
‘I don’t hate you,’ I replied, taking his face between my hands. ‘I’m being given the choice, this time. That’s all I ask, to be given the right to choose. This night, I’ve chosen to take whatever you have to give, kindly or not, and to give as much in return. I shall not hate you for that.’
‘Then that’s all I dare hope for, sweetheart,’ he said, blending the last word seamlessly into a searing kiss that sent me spinning into another kind of darkness. I felt myself being carried and laid upon the cool sheets of my bed where the long curtains blocked out the wavering light, but not the sight of a broad torso being revealed, like the muscle-bound marble of a Greek god. He was more perfect than my imagination had drawn him, more gracefully vigorous in movement, his bared legs more robust, his back rippling with manly strength, his deep chest just as my fingers remembered it, wide and downy in the centre. Half-intoxicated, I watched him blow out the candle flame, heard his soft movements, felt the mattress dip and then the wonderful soft warmth of him, setting me on fire with his first touch.
Somewhere at the back of my mind, I wondered if he might intentionally be recreating the sightless soundless anonymity of that first time when our senses had blended on another level. On that occasion, I recalled, I had tried to fight him off, though not with half the effort I might have done. Then, he had gentled me and led me, half-swooning, into hours of loving that had ebbed and flowed on a tide of sensations, dazzling and seducing me with skilful wooing. He had been passionate then, but I had known nothing of his reasons except, perhaps, as a solace for my unhappiness. I learnt that it was not the case.
This time, knowing him just a little better, knowing myself even more, my desire for him had grown so great that I was ready to close my mind and to respond without the restraints of reason or preference. Even ungentleness, I felt, would be preferable to the last four years of emptiness.
His hand swept over me from throat to groin and my body responded like a wild thing, uncontrolled, fiercely demanding the attention it had lacked, arching into him to know the touch of his skin upon every surface. My lips opened upon his face to feel with my teeth and tongue, to fill all my senses with his taste and scent. My fingers raked deep into his hair, letting the thick silk slip through them like water, and my thighs yearned and opened for him as his kisses reached my throat.
He made me wait, holding my pestering hands away with a deep laugh. ‘Not yet, my beauty. Not yet,’ he whispered. Tracking downwards, he nudged and licked, knowing that I would soften and wait, though I doubt he knew how his leisurely suckling would make me weep, and beg him to take me. He changed to the other breast, teasing the deserted one with tenderly milking fingers. But I could bear it no longer, letting out the wail held too long in my lungs. ‘Burl…please!’
As if he’d been waiting only to hear me call his name, he placed an arm beneath my hips, holding me as he’d done that first time to feel the hard throbbing length of him before slipping wetly inside, dilating me with each slow and powerful thrust that changed my tears to panting sighs and moans of ecstasy. Then, I was neither Helen nor Helene, but the primitive spirit of womanhood, earth and growing things. My womb was greedy for him, inviting and fruitful. My hands caressed, urging on his teeming virility. He was everything I remembered. And more.
I think we had both expected…wanted…it to last longer, but we had failed to take into account the tensions of the evening and all that had gone before under cover of our animosity. Neither of us could delay the growing thunder that roared through our beautiful rhythm, and Burl’s response owed something to that ungentleness I’d been prepared for which, when it came, brought quivers of delight from deep down in my roots.
‘Sweetheart…hold on!’ he gasped, thinking that I might protest.
My fingers dug into his back as he bent deeper into me, though I had not intended the damage to his skin to be as noticeable as it was, later. ‘Yes,’ I told him, ‘yes…oh, yes! Go on!’ Flying along with my body, my mind rode the storm, plunging and surfacing, clinging to the calm that followed, floating with him upon that delicious pulsing beat that always fades too soon.
Like babes, we slept in each other’s arms, spooning back to front with his hand between my breasts and his face in my loosened hair and a tangle of pearls. Hours later, I think, I woke to hear the wind howl and gust at the windows, to feel a warm body at my back just as it had been that first time. His hand was stroking my thigh, slipping down between them, fondling.
We might have recreated that original scene, but now we were strangers no more, our appetites renewed by sleep and no impediments of kinship to add guilt. He must have been awake some time for he was impatient, already pulling me roughly under him without preamble. I felt justified in making a sharp protest, feeling that some wooing would not come amiss at this stage, even from a lover hungry for consummation. So I bit the nearest part of him, which was his chin, making him rear back and give me a chance to roll away, squirming and flailing my arms, doing no damage whatever.
Following me across the bed, he swung his feet to the floor with a purposeful thud, swept me round by the legs to face him and placed himself between them, quite out of reach of my arms. Until then, I must admit it had not occurred to me that there were other ways of doing this, but he taught me something that night about how, if lovers are of the same mind, enjoyment can be taken how, when and where they will.
Naturally, I refused to make it easy for him at first, protesting that a February night calls for some form of covering if one is not to suffer from exposure. But that problem was soon solved and my protests curtailed, for it was the most exciting and unique experience that ended very suddenly in an explosion that left us both gasping and laughing. He pulled me upright, cradling and rocking me while he knelt between my knees with his head on my breast and my hair covering his face. ‘My fierce beauty,’ he whispered. ‘I think I can just about handle you. Eh, lass? After a few battle scars.’
‘Brute,’ I murmured. ‘Mannerless brute.’
His arms tightened, and I felt the deep chuckle within his chest.
But I was far from serious, for laughter was also new to me in this context. It had never been a laughing matter with his brother, a solemn, silent and usually hasty affair, more like, with politeness and reserve followed by instant sleep, no talk, no aftercare, no banter, compliments or approval. Now, in the space of one night, I had wept and laughed, retaliated with my own kind of manhandling, and experienced more joy and pleasure than in all those years as Linas’s mistress.
Inevitably, in the langour that follows exhaustion, there was teasing mixed with the adulation; accusations from me of smugness, counter-accusations from him of impetuosity, then the half-expected mention of marriage which, he suggested, would tame me. Another bairn was what I needed, he said, yawning and pulling my hips closer to his.
We lay together, wrapped against the howling gale, me with my face beneath his chin. ‘Is that what this is all about?’ I said. ‘Getting me with child again?’
‘You are remarkably innocent, Miss Follet. What did you think this was all about? Not for our mutual enjoyment, surely?’
‘You know what I mean. This night. Coercion, is it?’
‘Don’t spoil it, sweetheart.’
‘All right. I agreed not to blame you. So three months from now I’ll ask you again.’
‘You won’t need to. Three months from now you’ll be my wife.’
‘No, I won’t.’
‘Little goose. Go to sleep.’
I did not sleep immediately, as he did, but lay thinking how easy it had been for me to overturn all my intentions to keep him at a distance. Now, despite my impassioned contradiction, I kn
ew that I was committed, that it was only a matter of time before I would be obliged to agree to his proposal, if one could call it that. The only card I had left to play concerned the timing, for I was sure that tonight’s loving would be as potent as the last. Well, I would make the next few months spread out until I could keep him guessing no longer, having little reason to agree with him there and then.
Other concerns plagued me too. Although I realised that women married knowing much less about their husbands than I did about Burl Winterson, it was what I knew about him that made me think I was heading for disaster. The evening’s talk about the way he limited his kindnesses should not have surprised me as it did, for until recently his uninterest in me had been a prime example of it, as had his visit to me that one night. He had wanted something, and got it. Now, he wanted Jamie and me to make an instant family, hence the sudden revival of interest of which this lovemaking was a part. He had admitted it without batting an eyelid. Was I supposed to feel flattered? Gratified? Piqued? Insulted? Would it all grind to a halt when it was accomplished, or would he keep on wanting more of me, as he’d said? It was a gamble, but was I really in a position to care as much as I did? If I had cared less for him, perhaps I would have reached a decision more easily.
* * *
The following morning I was woken before Jamie’s habitual assault by a large figure in dark silhouette whose arms were braced on each side of me, his voice softly whispering. ‘I don’t want to leave you without a word, sweetheart, as I did before,’ he was saying. ‘Wake up and listen.’ He was dressed and ready to go.
‘Mmm? Yes?’
‘I must go. My parents are at Abbots Mere and I want to be there before they’re up. I’ll send a carriage for you and Jamie.’
‘No need. I can drive the phaeton.’
‘It’s blowing a gale. You can’t ride out in this.’
‘But I must go to Prue’s first.’
‘On a Sunday? Why?’
‘She’s in a fix. Both her parents have the dysentry.’
Marrying the Mistress Page 14