A few men made chicken noises or called out the dangers of a shrewish wife as Dominic retrieved his coat and followed Mia back towards the road, sweeping the box of spoons back up as he went. Dominic ignored their antics and waved them off good naturedly, not pretending to be hen-pecked as so many men did.
“Wait! My son, Howard, is going in that direction if you wish to share the cart with him!” An older woman, her red hair liberally streaked with silver, called out as she hurried towards them. “He can take you for nearly four miles before he turns off the main road.”
Mia and Dominic readily agreed after they both took an uneasy glance at the sun steadily sinking towards the horizon. They’d be lucky to get to the cottage before dark and neither had thought to bring a lantern.
As they waited for the wagon to be brought round to the road, Dominic was pulled into another argument over who had the best county cricket club and Mia was left impatiently standing with the dawdling Howard’s mother.
“You’re lucky to have found him.” The woman nodded her head towards Dominic who was nearly doubled over with laughter as the argument turned into a shouting match between two red-faced and slightly swaying men who looked so similar that they had to be brothers...though their close relation didn’t appear to stop them from being ready to pummel each other.
“Yes,” Mia agreed with what she hoped was a doting fiancée’s smile, but it wasn’t hard to force such an expression. She imagined this was how Dominic was among his own family and friends, not so haughty or concerned with people’s perceptions. But then, maybe it was the lack of societal structures at this party that made him act so freely…perhaps among his own kind, their rigid rules would force him back into that unlikable creature she had first met.
“Don’t be too insulted by my girl.” The woman sighed after Adelaide stomped by them, obviously irritated at the world in general and Mia in particular. “She had her pick of men a few years ago but wasn’t sure of any one of them. And now they’ve all moved on and married and she’s scrambling for a husband before she gets any older. She’s nearly twenty-three. She had her head turned at the fair by your man – and who could blame her? – and when she saw you two on the road, she just had to give herself one more chance. He’d be one to parade around with pride. And I can tell he’s enamored of you after the way he threatened to pound poor Matthew.”
“Oh.” Mia blushed and tried to ignore the singing of her heart. She glanced towards Dominic again, but he had somehow slipped away from his cohorts who now were busy picking up baskets and babies, blankets and cups so they could start for home as well.
“Being a mother is hard. You want your daughter to find a husband but then, you don’t want her to make a terrible mistake with the wrong man. But life is like that,” the woman mused, staring with concerned love at Adelaide’s retreating figure. “You have to take chances on marrying a man, on having a child, on leaving your parents’ house to find work. At every turn, you have to sacrifice safety and routine in hopes that the place you land is better. It’s terrifying but most often rewarding. You can’t stay still.”
She patted Mia on the shoulder encouragingly though her eyes were focused on Adelaide begrudgingly picking up someone’s baby as the mother wrestled with a toddler who roundly refused to cooperate. The woman murmured farewell as she moved towards Adelaide’s group, intent on helping both women with their charges and leaving Mia alone by the side of the road.
It was a feeling she was used to…being alone, the only unattached person looking around at the pockets of families, whether it be at a fair or at church or even shopping in the village. Lonely despite having dozens around her.
The rumbling of wagon wheels on the road shook Mia from her thoughts and she turned to see a farmer’s cart rolling to a stop, but it was already filled shoulder-to-shoulder with people. Children hung over the sides while parents held firm to the backs of girls’ dresses or the waistband of boys’ trousers to prevent them from tumbling to the ground entirely.
She made her way to the back of the wagon, glancing about and curious to where Dominic could have disappeared. A creak made her turn, and, from the wagon bed, he stood. The setting sun blazed directly behind his head, making his blond hair appear on fire and shadowing his face so that, with the contrast, his features nearly disappeared. Mia was temporarily blinded as she looked up at him and used her hand to shade her squinting eyes.
As if the devil himself had come to take her home.
He leaned over and held out a long-fingered hand to assist her up into the wagon bed.
She took it.
Chapter 13
Carrying the box of silver spoons under her arm, Mia glanced at Dominic one last time before he disappeared around the corner on his way to check on Monaco before retiring for the night. She had been silent for nearly the entire ride home, the jostling of the wagon making her shoulder brush against Dominic’s firm bicep repeatedly - an electric jolt to her senses every time. More than once, a rut in the road had been so jarring that she had grabbed hold of the closest object for an anchor. That happened to be Dominic’s thigh and her resulting stammered apologies had sent the inebriated woman seated across from her into peals of laughter.
“She’s only apologizing for not aiming higher. She’ll do better next time!”
After that, the woman’s cringing husband had clamped a hand over her mouth after every bump in the road.
She knew Dominic had sensed her preoccupation. Luckily, their fellow passengers had still been drunk and kept his attention, sometimes through banter, sometimes with a rousing song. Mia had first thought it odd that Dominic knew most of the words but then realized that bawdy, drinking songs were universally enjoyed no matter a man’s social station. Dominic had carried the conversation for the remainder of the journey, the last two miles going quickly even as the sky changed from pink and gold to pearly gray to indigo.
With a shake of her head, Mia forced herself forward again, the dark cottage looking even more forlorn in the fine streams of moonlight than it did in the day. A crunch under her foot made Mia lose her balance and, with irritation, Mia picked up the offending object and realized it was a horse chestnut conker. Its spiky shell was easily discernable by touch even in the dark, and she wondered how it had traveled nearly to the cottage door when she couldn’t think of a chestnut tree growing within a mile.
Mindlessly, she slipped it into her pocket before she opened the cottage door and set Traversley’s spoons on the kitchen table. With a flick of her wrist, Mia lit two candles with a match, its familiar sulfurous aroma wafting about the room. Dominic always complained about the smell, but Mia had encountered too many people who had worked in match factories and claimed they had been made ill by the odorless matches. She too was sensitive to the odor, but she preferred the stomach-churning smell over the threat of having her teeth and jaws abscess from the odorless matches’ chemicals. Dominic would just have to suffer through the stench.
She left one candle on the table so Dominic wouldn’t stumble around in the dark and carried the other to her room, its cramped little quarters seeming more pitiful than usual after an entire day in the outdoors. With a sigh, she set the candle on one of the stacks of Dominic’s travel trunks and began to get ready for bed, but her mind still churned over the words Adelaide’s mother had said – that life was being brave enough to take steps even when there was a chance, maybe even a likelihood, of being hurt.
She had tried that once…though her steps had not been all that courageous. They had been puny steps, steps that barely took her away from safety but had still cost her a desirable position, even a bit of her self-respect. The latter was the harder blow. She had always been proud of her poise and her sense of self-worth, even when the rest of the world thought she was little more than gutter trash. She had always considered herself smart, resourceful, and courageous even when others couldn’t see those qualities, but her ego had taken a beating when she found she could be manipulated as easily as
any love-blinded dairymaid.
She pulled off her dress, now wrinkled and smelling like wood smoke and hay, and tossed it onto her sagging bed before flinging her corset on top of it and following both with her pink silk stockings. She trudged over to her bedside table where one of Dominic’s hat boxes now balanced her hairbrush and a surviving piece of a broken mirror and pulled hairpins from her coiffure before setting them carefully next to the brush. As she loosened her coiled braid, her reflection caught her eye, and she held up the mirror, the size of a card deck, and examined her face critically.
Wide blue eyes and a complexion that could induce envy but nothing much else to be noted. Her hair was a common brown that had the tendency to wave but would never hold a curl when the weather was damp. She’d never been creative with hairstyles and had never held a pair of curling tongs. The annoying widow’s peak of her hairline made it impossible to even part her hair in the middle as fashion currently demanded. Her figure was even less interesting…if not for the “bosom friends” she had sewn into her corsets, she wouldn’t have a figure at all. Though Mrs. Marwood’s larger dinner portions had helped a bit in that department lately.
A dull wren. Certainly not someone who could hope to catch the eye of a bird as rare as a peacock, no matter how strong her song.
She set the mirror back down on the hat box and slumped on the bed, irritated at herself for being filled with both self-pity and self-loathing and disgusted with life in general for being so unfair. Picking up her hairbrush, she roughly combed through her long brown hair. She intended to rebraid it again as she did every night but instead, she tossed the brush aside and, with a hint of rebellion, decided she’d leave it loose like some…some…slatternly woman. With a wiggle, she pulled her corset and crumpled dress out from under her derriére and attempted to throw them both at the row of pegs set into the wall and then watched with disinterest when she missed. Both garments slid down the wall, causing the conker to fall from her gown’s pocket and roll back across the warped wood floor to settle at her feet.
With disinterest, Mia picked up the conker, its familiar little green spines like pin pricks on her fingertips. It was far too early for conkers to be falling – they were a sure sign of autumn’s chill and the impending bitter cold of winter. It was only now August and should be a few more weeks before the oaks and maples would be shedding their flame-colored leaves into a crackling blanket before they turned to slippery sludge in the endless autumn rains.
But Dominic would never see the glory of the Lincolnshire when the leaves changed or its sleepy solitude when the gray of winter hushed both man and beast. By mid-September, he would back in London with his elegant friends and dazzling lovers, endless parties and decadent dinners.
And she would still be here, a little brown wren cleaning little gray houses for other little colorless people.
She closed her eyes and squeezed the conker tightly in her hand so the spikes bit sharply into her palm, the pain almost welcome against the thought of the endless dreariness of her future.
She heard the cottage’s front door open and close and Dominic’s booted feet walk the few steps to the kitchen table – he was likely picking up the candle she had left – and then retreat to his own room. She could picture each of his movements easily, the light of the candle illuminating his handsome face, his golden hair.
Why shouldn’t she reach out and taste a moment of sunshine and warmth even if she knew it was fleeting?
He had no wife, no sweetheart waiting for him in the south. She would likely never marry. The only person she could hurt – most certainly would hurt – was herself.
With an unsteady gulp, Mia shook off her wayward thoughts and blew out her candle, intent on changing from her chemise and drawers to her practical cotton nightgown under cover of modest darkness as she had every night for the past ten years. But her limbs seemed to make the decision that her more sensible head couldn’t, and she found herself crossing her bedroom floor and wrenching open her door with a force born of recklessness and determination.
Her bare feet padded across the floor of the now pitch black kitchen and she took a deep breath, willing herself not to be ill, before reaching out to knock firmly on his bedroom door.
It was too late to turn back now.
His door opened, the flame from the meager candle sitting by his wash basin causing one side of his face to glow though it was not strong enough to penetrate the darkness where Mia stood rigidly still, the conker’s points still pressing sharply into her palm.
“Is something wrong?” Dominic asked concernedly as he peered past her into the darkness. “Did you hear something?”
Mia took in his disheveled appearance, his hair mussed and the barest of stubble apparent on his cheeks and chin. He had already begun to undress for bed, his shirt open at the neck and untucked from his trousers. Mia stared at his large bare feet for a moment, marveling at how even they could be intimidating, and she nearly latched onto his suggestion, that yes, yes, that she thought she heard a noise, perhaps a frightening intruder was about to storm the cottage. He would give a cursory look outside, pat her on the head for her foolish female fears, and they could return to their separate, lonely beds.
But a phrase came to mind, a phrase her father used often, usually when he was giving a precious item to someone who needed it more than he did or when he was about to rush headlong into a dangerous situation without any promise of a positive outcome.
“Oh, the devil with me,” Mia muttered as she threw the conker to the floor and stood on tiptoe so she could enthusiastically kiss Dominic Attwood, a man who socially stood so far above her that she couldn’t reach his heights even if she had wings.
And it was immediately like the kiss behind the cottage…all fiery flames and frantic hands and lips and tongues and Mia wished briefly they could remain locked like this forever, never going farther into something she might regret but never stopping so she’d feel the loss of him again.
Eventually Dominic pulled his lips away, but Mia determinedly set her hands against his chest and urged him steadily backwards towards the bed that nearly filled the room. She didn’t quite have the courage to look him in the eye. When the back of his thighs met the bed, he sat down with a creak and Mia immediately grabbed hold of the tail of his shirt, intent on pulling over his head but his hands caught hers, catching them against the warm skin of his stomach. Mia reluctantly looked up at his face, afraid that she wouldn’t see a yearning like the one that now filled her own being, terrified that she’d only see disgust or, even worse, pity.
“Mia, are you certain?” he asked softly. His expression betrayed a concern that she would have terrible regrets afterwards but also an intense hunger in his black eyes that hoped that she would continue on this seemingly inevitable path she had willingly chosen.
His conflicting thoughts made her own doubts disappear, and she nodded and let her smile widen so he could see the honesty of it in the deep dimples that he claimed he couldn’t resist earlier.
She didn’t want either of them to resist anymore.
And those dimples seemed to be the sign he was waiting for because he easily lifted her off her feet and spun her so that she landed with a gasp on the soft feather mattress. There wasn’t even a moment to think before his body was on top of hers, hip to hip and breast to chest, and it was the most thrilling feeling in the world – exciting and comforting and terrifying all at once.
Mia sternly reminded herself that the point of this was not to think…to steel herself from the what-ifs and maybes and enjoy this moment…probably the only moment of pure selfishness she would ever have in her whole life. She was going to savor every kiss, the glide of the muscles under her fingers, the hard ridge pressing against her thigh as unmistakable proof that he wanted this desperately too.
Dominic made it astonishingly easy to be overwhelmed. He seemed to know exactly what to do to weaken her natural prudishness, to make her believe that flinging her chemise aside was n
ot only permissible but it should be followed immediately by her drawers and his own shirt and smalls so that all clothing fell in a hedonistic pile on the floor.
Mia let her eyes drift shut when Dominic eased down her body, kissing her collar bone before leaning down to trace each one of her ribs with his tongue. Distracted by his lips now teasing her nipple, she startled when she felt his large, warm hand abandon its comfortable resting place on her knee to make a steady course up her thigh. Her breath hitched in her throat when his clever fingers began to brush against her core and she threw her head back, trying to keep her body still when her hips desperately wanted to rise from the bed and uncivilized sounds kept trying to sneak past her clenched teeth.
His fingers were moving faster now. Mia heard herself panting harshly and then was astonished to realize one of her hands was clenched in Dominic’s hair and the other was wrapped around his relentlessly working hand, urging him on. Her heels pushed against the down-filled mattress, her body straining for some unknown height that seemed just out of reach.
But there was no time for embarrassment because she was nearly there and her whole body tensed just when she felt Dominic’s mouth, resting against her breast, widen for a moment in a grin against her skin and she could almost feel how pleased he was with himself, how smug he was for bringing her to that point – his own body still under control, his breathing barely unsteady.
She wouldn’t wonder any longer why women found themselves pregnant and unwed or having a tenth child when they struggled to feed the nine extra mouths they already had. It was for those earth-shattering moments of pleasure that numbed all reason.
Dominic was running his palm up and down her thigh soothingly and Mia realized that she had fallen back to the bed heavily, her hand no longer locked on his wrist but limp beside her. She took a deep, steadying breath before reaching out again to wrap her fingers around his still swollen shaft, but he shook his head.
One Enchanted Summer Page 14