“Yes, England is full of sheep. But I’m looking for long-term commitment from sheep farmers I can rely on. If a man tells me he can deliver a certain quantity of washed, carded wool, or so many spools of a specific grade thread, or a specific number of bolts of a perfectly woven cloth, then I want to be sure he’ll deliver when he says he’ll deliver. I’m not looking for just anyone who runs sheep. If you want in on this—and you’d be a fool not to—you’ve got to convince me you can deliver.” Then with a curt bow he headed outside.
He’d been more forceful with the man than he intended, more passionate and more reckless. Some might even describe his behavior as rude. But Adrian didn’t care. He was tired of the British manner of always sidestepping the main issue.
And Hester was the worst of the lot.
He snagged a glass of wine on his way outside, then pulled a cheroot from his pocket, lit it on a flickering torch, and strode into the dimly lit garden. He inhaled and blew out. Once, then again. But it didn’t do much to calm him. Son of a bitch. He was acting like a madman.
But how else was he to act when one prissy prude of a woman turned him inside out the way Hester Poitevant did? Devil take her, she was leading him around by the balls and he didn’t like it. But how could he make it stop?
From inside came the glow of light and laughter, sending him retreating to a darker, lonelier spot in the garden. Not that it was much of a garden. More of a service yard, bordered with rhododendron in bloom. But by the light of the half moon he spied an airy white structure. A gazebo.
He headed toward it, only to realize that it was occupied. Inside the small wood structure someone was speaking and he stopped, glad for the silencing effect of the lawn.
Then it dawned on him that it wasn’t someone speaking, but rather someone weeping.
He dropped the cheroot and put it out with his heel. “Hello?”
The crying ceased at once. He heard someone fumbling around, a thud in the dark, then a soft, feminine cry.
Every nerve in his body went on alert and the hair stood up on his arms. He moved closer. “Hester?”
Another little cry, this time of alarm. Then, “Don’t come in here.”
The blood surged through Adrian’s body like a biblical flood. “Why not?”
“Because… Because I’m a mess.”
She couldn’t have lured him more effectively if she’d extended a bare leg from the depths of the gazebo’s shadows and waggled it at him. The composed Hester Poitevant a mess?
Then again, she wasn’t always composed. Certainly she hadn’t been composed yesterday afternoon. Nor now, it seemed. “Why are you a mess, Hester? And why are you out here crying?”
“Go away.”
Like hell he would. “I received your letter.”
This time his answer was utter silence. Another effective lure. With a renewed sense of purpose he placed one booted foot on the gazebo floor. He imagined her flinching at the firm sound of it.
“Please, Mr. Hawke. Allow me my privacy and just… just go away.”
“I can’t, Hester. You know that. You wrote me for a reason, so let’s discuss it.” He paused. “You can begin by explaining why you ran away from me just now, and why you’re out here crying.” Another pause. “I’m coming in.”
It took a minute for his eyes to adjust; the gazebo was even darker than the yard, and Hester wore a dark dress, unrelieved except for her pale face and hands. He reached out for one of those hands, bare and damp from wiping her tears. Her skin was warm.
He drew her nearer, acutely aware of his burgeoning desire for her. Against his thumb her pulse raced. His own pounded so fiercely he feared she must hear it. The whole world must, he was that much aroused by her presence.
“I don’t want you to run away from me anymore, Hester.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Not here, to cry in a gazebo.” He went on, his voice gruffer, angrier. “Nor to your ”friend‘ in Cheapside.“
“My friend?”
“Your housekeeper let it slip.” He jerked her up against him, too rough. But he didn’t care, for he was enraged. Jealous. Out of control. “It’s over between you and him. Do you understand? It has to be over.”
Hester did not know whether to laugh, to cry, or to rail at Adrian for his thickheadedness. He was jealous of a man who didn’t exist. Though she ought to correct his misconception—she should have done so yesterday— a part of her reveled in her ability to torment him so. A wicked part of her.
He deserved it, though, for he had a way of tormenting her. Like now, crushing her against him as if it were his right.
She forgot her tears, caused by her father’s appearance. Instead her every thought, her every sense, centered on the power generated between them. Like lightning, it was: white hot and more violent than it logically should be.
One of his arms circled her waist, keeping her flush against him. Though it was impossible to escape him, a proper woman would have stayed rigid and disapproving in that implacable embrace. But she was not proper. Not anymore. Maybe she never had been. For she was soft and supple against him. Accepting. Encouraging.
“Don’t ever run from me again,” he growled against her temple, and the words sounded as warm as his breath felt.
“I won’t.” She slid her arms up his chest to circle his neck. His free hand roamed up her side to her neck, and then into her hair.
“Wait—” She tried too late to stop him.
“But I must,” he answered as the twisted coil of curls came free in his clever hands. Ten minutes to properly dress her hair, yet it took only ten seconds for him to release it. A half hour to perfect her proper widow’s disguise, yet with one embrace he banished that as well.
Then he cupped the side of her face. “Tonight I will come to you. Tonight, Hester.”
Tonight. There was no mistaking his meaning.
Slowly she nodded. It was bound to happen with some man. She did not wish to live out the whole of her life as a virgin, did she?
The problem was, she might have to explain to him how a twenty-eight-year-old widow could be so innocent about the secret goings-on between men and women. And explaining about that might naturally lead to her mother and, thereby, her father. And her brother.
Oh, Lord, she needed to think longer about this.
Only she couldn’t think, not when he was holding her and touching her and kissing her…
“There’s… there’s just one thing, Adrian.”
He hushed her with a kiss. “Rest assured, I’ll be discreet.” He rubbed his thumb across the remnant of tears on her cheek. “I promise, you’ll have no cause to cry over me, Hester. Unless they’re tears of joy.” Then he kissed her again, a possessive, breath-stealing, mind-numbing kiss that melted her from the inside out.
She’d been supple in his embrace; now she went limp. She’d been accepting of his kisses; now she burned with want for more. She’d been encouraging; now she panted with urgent need.
He pressed a knee between her legs and she groaned at the rough caress. Tilted backward in his arms, she was open to his hungry kiss and the greedy roaming of his hands. Up her side, across one breast, then back again, thumbing the peak to agonizing pleasure until she sobbed into the dark, enveloping night.
His knee rubbed higher between her thighs, but not enough to appease her. She wanted his hand there. His mouth.
Her face flamed at such a shameful thought. When had she become so wicked? Oh, but she was most certainly her mother’s daughter.
As if to confirm that terrible admission, a voice flared from somewhere nearer the house. “Hawke. Hawke?”
It was her brother.
“I say, are you out here?”
Like ice water his words doused them, the voice of society’s conscience and of her own. Hester shoved Adrian just as he pulled back, causing her to sit down hard upon the gazebo’s bench seat.
“I have to go,” he whispered.
She nodded, her hair rippling about h
er shoulders. Though still somewhat dazed, she began to gather it up and somehow put it to rights. This was becoming a distressing habit of late.
He crossed to the entrance of the gazebo, standing there backlit by moonlight. “When you leave the party, I’ll follow you.”
She nodded again, afraid to speak. Saying the words out loud—“Follow me to my house where we can complete the intimacies we have begun here”—somehow that made it all too deliberate, too planned. How easy it was to become caught up in the passion of the moment. How much harder to arrange the secret details of so furtive a tryst.
But as she later made her way home, Hester could not hide from what she planned, nor what she’d already done. When he left the gazebo Adrian had joined Horace, distracting him so that she could return unnoticed to the party. She’d played one hand of loo, losing badly, before making her good-byes during the happy chaos that ensued when the elaborate desserts were brought out.
She would have left even sooner could she have managed it. After all, her father was circulating in the very same party as she, and he was the last person she wished to meet. Nor did she wish to explain why. Fortunately, in the crush Horace had not yet gotten around to introducing them, though she saw the man meet Dulcie and Lady Ainsley.
Adding to her distress, there was Adrian to avoid, which for some perverse reason she felt compelled to do. He didn’t play cards, nor did George Bennett, the third man she wanted to avoid. That one only drank and glowered at everyone, especially Adrian Hawke.
Such tension and secrecy in the room, she had thought, getting almost giddy at the idea of such a ludicrous scene. Now in the fragile privacy of her little gig she rubbed her temple. Shakespeare could have created such an entertaining farce from it all. A Midsummer’s Night Fiasco. Much Ado About Something No One Must Figure Out. The Taming of the Shrewish Virgin Widow.
She giggled, though it was more from nerves than humor. She liked that last one best. Though she might remain a shrew in some circles, and even a pretend widow, after this night she would not be a virgin.
She shivered and pressed her lips together. Was she being incredibly stupid?
Mr. Dobbs let her out at the front door, then went around to unhitch the horse and stable him. She dismissed Mrs. Dobbs before the woman could even rise from her rocker. Then alone in her bedchamber, as pristine and innocent as a girl’s, she made herself ready. Off came her tight cuffs, the dark dress, and the layers of smothering, restrictive undergarments. Then came the garters and stockings, and her stylish pantalets. If ever she’d been glad to have her aqua nightgown and wrapper, it was now. Would he like it?
Something inside her vibrated with the knowledge that he would.
She tiptoed to a back window and looked out to see the light wink out in the Dobbses’ room beyond the kitchen. Then she did the same at the front window, looking for her midnight caller, waiting for him on the window seat as she let her hair down and began to brush it.
A hundred strokes and he hadn’t yet come. She started a hundred more. At sixty-one she saw him. On a dark horse, clad in shadows and the disguise of the night, he might have been any solitary rider. But she knew him, and in every fiber of her body she reacted to him.
The world worked that way, she told herself. There was a natural order to things. Flowers opened to the dawn, birds migrated with the seasons, crickets sang as the sun went down, and she responded to Adrian Hawke. Through the window glass, through the dark of the night. It made no difference. He was the one her entire being responded to.
Why him? she wondered as she watched him dismount and tether his animal in the shelter of the side alley. Was it purely physical? Or was it because, like her, he was an outcast of society who’d found a way in? Was it because somewhere deep inside they were more alike than different?
It was a stunning thought. But Hester had no time for contemplation. She leaped up. He was here, and she’d been so enthralled by the sight of him she’d forgotten to unlatch the door.
He was waiting on the top step. Silently she let him in and silently he entered, but there was a wealth of conversation between them. A gaze, the shifting of a stance, the pace of their breathing. The anticipation in the air.
“Are you all right?” he whispered as she led him toward the stairs.
She nodded, though she wasn’t at all certain she was. Could plotting her own ruin ever be considered all right?
With one hand on her shoulder he made her turn to him. It was a possessive sort of touch, with his thumb and finger curving around the base of her neck as they stood in the dark of her little house. Despite all that had occurred between them, that warm weight of his hand on her barely clad shoulder seemed the most intimate touch of all. Hardly able to breathe, she looked up at him.
“Are we alone?” he asked.
“Yes. Sort of.” She swallowed and took a much needed breath. “Mr. and Mrs. Dobbs have separate apartments in the back. Beyond the kitchen.”
“Then why are we whispering?”
She didn’t know.
He laughed, then planted an abrupt kiss squarely on her mouth. A different kiss than the others, friendly and easy and, again, possessive and intimate in a wholly new way.
“I said I would be discreet, Hester, and I will be. But it’s good to know your servants are not under the same roof with us.” Then he caught her by the hand, palm to palm, twining their fingers together. “Lead on, my beautiful, mysterious Hester. I believe I would follow you anywhere.”
Propelled by his stirring words, Hester led him up the stairs to the tiny hall. At the door to her bedchamber, however, with its flickering lamplight and soft, beckoning bed, she faltered. He thought her a woman of experience. What if she did it all wrong? What if she fumbled or became afraid, or was unable to please him as he expected to be pleased?
She reached for the door latch but did not turn it. Instead she loosened her other hand from his and turned to face him. She must tell him. “Adrian,” she began in a voice that quivered.
“Shh.” His hand closed over hers on the latch, while the other braced against the door beside her head, trapping her between his big body and the unyielding door. But a trap was only a trap if the quarry did not wish to be caught. That was hardly the case in this situation.
“Don’t talk, Hester. Let’s just rely on instinct tonight. Pure animal instinct—”
She cut him off with a kiss. Her fingers knotted in his lapels and drew his face down to hers. Pure animal instinct. It was that and more. His full weight came against her, hot, full-blooded, male, ready to complete the act they’d been building to since their first confrontation at the Murchisons’ ball. It made her feel more completely alive than anything she’d ever known before. Like a hot, full-blooded woman.
Against her softer, thinly clad body she felt the hard maleness of his: the buttons of his waistcoat, the seam of his breeches, and everything male that lay beneath: muscled chest, ridged belly, powerful thighs. And especially the root of his maleness, the fierce, demanding arousal that pressed into the softness of her belly.
Good Lord, the very threat of it had her melting with desire!
Then from beyond the doorway came a scratching, a snuffling, whimpering sound followed by a sharp, plaintive bark.
The dogs!
She froze, her mouth still pressed to his, her legs parted over the angle of his hip. Her eyes opened and met his, open as well. She felt his lips curve in a smile— what a wonderfully odd sensation! “Were you planning an audience for us?”
She pulled her head back, bumping it against the door. Again Fifi barked. “I’ll put them in the kitchen.”
But she couldn’t do that until he moved, and he didn’t. In fact, he pressed his hips more heavily against hers and shifted in the most exquisitely erotic manner.
“Wait—”
“You wait,” he replied, burying his lips in her hair. “I’m busy.”
Busy thrusting rhythmically against her until she was panting and thrusting back. Bu
sy exploring the shell of her ear with his lips and the tip of his tongue. His hand still gripped hers over the latch, but elsewhere he used his body, his heat, and his mouth to caress her.
She felt that helpless tide of need rise up inside her, just like yesterday, and it made her frantic. “Let me… Let me get rid of the dogs.”
“Damn,” he muttered, thrusting so hard it ought to have hurt her. Certainly she would have bruises. But it didn’t hurt. What hurt was this waiting, this wanting.
Abruptly he pressed the latch down and they staggered backward into her room.
She never even saw the dogs, nor noticed when the door shut them out in the hall. If they whined or scratched, she didn’t hear. Adrian was in her house, in her room, walking her backward, falling with her onto the bed. The feel of his full weight pressing down on her was a revelation even more arousing than his pressing her up against the door, and that had been incredible.
How could she, who so valued her independence, take such intense pleasure in this primitive sort of manhandling? With every kiss, every carnal liberty he took, her pleasure increased until she could hardly breathe.
“You taste delicious,” he murmured, making a trail of kisses down her throat, across her shoulder, then farther down, to the upper swells of her breasts. He lifted his head and she groaned her protest. But he only shrugged out of his jacket, then returned to his task.
“Greedy little thing, aren’t you?”
“Am I?” She stared at him through heavy-lidded eyes and a haze of desire. She felt like another woman, the opposite of her true self. He, however, was everything she’d imagined and everything she should fear. With one foot on the floor and the opposite knee on the bed, he shed his waistcoat. With a tug of his cravat and another swift yank, his shirt slipped over his head and he was bare-chested before her.
A half-naked man in her bedchamber. Hester had never dared to even dream such a thing. Indeed, she’d convinced herself it was the very last thing she wanted.
But staring at him, at the lamplit curves of muscle and bone, the golden skin and ebony whorls of chest hair arrowing down into his breeches… She now knew the truth: she’d been waiting for this for ten years and more. Ten years of repressed yearnings and repressed emotions. She squirmed on the bed, burning with desire, twitching in all the hidden places of her femininity.
The Bridemaker Page 20