by London Casey
His words sent a lump into her throat, a warming beneath her left breast.
He put his lips to her temple. “A very good girl.”
“But I displeased you.”
“No, you didn’t. You’re wonderfully responsive, you lose yourself so beautifully.”
“But you’re leaving.” She clamped her mouth shut before she could add the ‘me’ to the end. Sudden melancholy crashed upon her, leaving her cold. Gooseflesh rose over her body.
He caressed her arms. “Are you cold?”
She nodded.
He pulled the heavier blanket up from the storage bench at the foot of her bed and covered her. In the firelight, she thought she saw tenderness in his eyes as he bent and kissed her. But she felt numb beneath the gesture.
He was leaving her.
After the door closed behind him, she lay there feeling more alone than she had since her girlhood. Cold dread filled her belly. That feeling of aloneness, of loss simply because he had left, was just what she had feared. He would get under her walls of protection and leave her vulnerable.
The memory of her complete loss of control, the way she had humbled herself, caused alarm to pound through her now. But there were more interesting aspects of the evening to consider. Events that had proved a far greater threat to her self-defences.
He had allowed her to serve his pleasure and to watch him come. It had been a very educational experience. How very powerful the process was for a man. But even more so, sharing in his enjoyment, so openly displayed, had been wildly thrilling. It had brought her close to him in a way no one else had ever done.
And to have had him touch every part of her with his hands and then his mouth. Oh God, the intimacy. The delicate, exquisite intimacy. He had made her come. And come again, harder and deeper than she’d ever come in her life. Despite all his confidence and assurances that he would, it still seemed a rather incredible occurrence. She’d never, ever been so emotionally open with anyone before. No one knew her like that.
No one had ever touched her on the inside, behind her walls, as he had.
She might never be the same. How was she to get close enough to him to learn from him and yet not so close that she would lose herself? She didn’t know. She wasn’t experienced at games of love.
Fear tasted metallic on her lips as she lay awake for a long time.
“Lord Ruel left early this morning.” The short, thin, neatly dressed man regarded Anne with kind eyes. Behind him, inside the bedchamber, she could see two trunks open and full of folded clothing. This must be Toby, Ruel’s valet.
She breathed an internal sigh of relief. How fortunate that Ruel hadn’t been here. She had proved herself a ninny, coming here to see him like some pathetic, infatuated schoolroom chit.
Yet Toby would surely tell. Ruel would know. A prickle of discomfort settled in the pit of her stomach.
“My lady, he said to give you this.” Toby walked over to the sideboard and came back with a folded note. He handed it to her. She took it and thanked him, feeling as she did the same uncertainty she always had with people, servant or not. What level of friendliness was needed to make others feel respected? She was never sure. Outside the freeing influence of spirits, she remained a prisoner behind the wall of her reserve.
She hurried away to her chamber and, once behind the closed door, she tore the note open.
He’d gone back to London to settle his affairs. He would arrange everything and send word when the time came for their rendezvous.
Living with Ruel, totally alone… Her heart beat faster at the thought. Last night, she’d been so anxious about the bedchamber part. But now, in the light of day, away from his intoxicating presence, she realised it was a mere game. A heady, pleasurable game. One could shed the masks worn during lovemaking as easily as one tossed aside a domino after a masquerade.
What a liberating realisation.
Of course, a little voice niggled at her; he would find it just as easy to shed the effects of one night with her. Easier. He was older, jaded by experience, a man. He would be in London, with all its seductions for a man of wealth and power. Surely he kept a mistress. A pang of hurt throbbed in her chest. Would he visit her? Irritation at her wayward heart made her ball her fists at her sides.
Of course he would visit his mistress. And it wouldn’t matter to her. She would not feel hurt over this. Theirs was a practical arrangement. His help in return for her…her submission, as he put it. It was sexual. It was took her break away. But it was just an amusement.
That was all she could allow it to be.
Anne had pictured something more substantial than the small stone cottage, with its crumbling walls and untamed covering of ivy and moss and its overgrown garden. The inside must be primitive and damp at nights. Perhaps even filled with vermin and pestilence. She suppressed a shudder of revulsion.
“Ought to be up by now, I think.”
“Ruel?” Anne asked, hoping her face wouldn’t flame under Mr Kean’s regard. It was still rather unsettling to have him know that she had come here to be alone with Jon. They had conspicuously avoided the subject until now.
This morning Kean had been waiting for her at the servant’s entrance at around three. She’d been dressed in a plain morning dress and cape with an ugly poke bonnet of slightly tattered straw that hid her face well. He had escorted her on foot all the way here.
Kean had accompanied her instead of Ruel on the small chance that someone might come upon them and recognise Anne. Kean was her neighbour. It would be easy to say she was accompanying him to help someone on his estate. What would she have said if she had been caught in Ruel’s company?
Kean was knocking on the door. As she approached the entrance, he turned. “He must be out riding. Come inside, you are probably tired, are you not?”
She nodded.
He opened the door and they entered. To her relief, the inside was properly whitewashed with polished wooden floors covered with several luxurious carpets.
“Welcome to Applecroft House,” Kean said with smile and a flourish of his hand, then he went to sit on a blue settee by the large, unlit stone hearth surrounded by several copper pans.
Restless, Anne couldn’t sit. Goodness, it was so small. And it would be her home for the next month. She spotted the sideboard. Yes, she was dying for a long, soothing drink on her parched throat. She hurried over and opened the doors to find it well stocked with claret. Well, at least they had the essentials. She poured herself and Kean a glass. While she was taking a drink, a grey stripy cat came running down from the loft. He looked quite fat. Thank God. Hopefully there would be no mice.
“I suppose Nellie left without a hitch,” Kean said, as someone speaks just to fill the silence.
Nellie had left in the carriage with her older sister, dressed in Anne’s clothes, before dawn. They would travel to Norfolk to visit their mother for the month. All the subterfuge had Anne’s nerves stretched tight the night before. Ruel had told her not to worry. He had thought of all the details and she need only carry his plans out.
Now she shrugged. “Nellie would have already sent a message if there were any difficulties.”
“Good, good—” Kean’s voice broke off as the door opened.
The door opened. She whirled.
Ruel stood in the doorway, his azure eyes focused on her so intently that she sucked in her breath and held it.
Chapter Ten
Anne drank in the sight of Jon. He was dressed in nankeen breeches paired with a shallow cutaway, charcoal wool jacket and a pale grey waistcoat that had broad lapels. Both were quite out of fashion and slightly shabby. He could easily have been a common country squire.
She’d heard the gentlemen exchanging greetings, yet comprehended nothing they’d said. Then he turned back to her, smiled with a wink and held out his arms to her.
She wanted nothing more than to run to him and throw herself into his embrace. To press herself against his tall, hard body. However, she resist
ed. And not just because Kean sat there watching.
In Jon’s absence, it had been easy to rationalise that her intense emotional reaction to him in her chamber had simply been a game. Now, with every particle of herself attuned to him, it seemed something deeper.
Grinning, Jon came to her and took her by the waist. One quick jerk forward and she found herself crushed to his firm midsection. Her breasts brushed his broad chest. For a moment, he looked down at her, the skin taut over his cheekbones, his eyes glittering with desire. Then he pressed her head to his shoulder. His wool coat scratched her cheek. He smelt of cigars and horses and leather.
He bent his face into her neck.
“I missed you, wench,” he whispered in her ear, a faint chiding note to his voice, as if it were somehow her fault that his feelings had inconvenienced him. Then he nipped at her earlobe, none too gently. The sudden sting made her gasp. His tongue, hot and wet, flicked the lobe. The easing of the pain sent a shudder through her and, forgetting herself, she giggled. Heavens, she never giggled.
“Well, sounds like that’s my cue to leave,” Kean said.
“Close the door on your way out,” Jon said. He had just closed his lips over hers when she heard the door shut.
It seemed terribly rude, letting Kean leave like that with no words of farewell. But she couldn’t find the will to care for long. The two weeks apart had passed slowly—far more slowly than she’d like to admit.
A love affaire. What a heady business.
He lifted his head. “You must be tired and hungry.”
Heavens, she was. Her legs felt like they were made of lead.
With her avid agreement, they shared a simple meal. Cold chicken, cheese and bread, washed down with Madeira. They spoke of mundane things. Afterwards, she was yawning and having trouble holding her eyes open.
“You’d probably like a bath,” he said, his voice all consideration.
“Yes, that would be lovely.”
He stood and walked towards the door. At the sight of her trunks, he paused and turned back to her. “I was surprised when Kean brought these yesterday. I told you that you need only bring yourself.”
The slight chiding note in his voice made her catch her breath. “Those are my books.”
His face lit with amusement and he laughed. He looked a decade younger. “You brought your books here, to a rendezvous in the woods?”
Heat washed over her face. She glanced down, a smile tugging on her lips for no reason she could fathom. “It’s just a few books.”
“A whole trunk full, my lady? Do you think I shall leave you that many idle hours?”
At his inflection, she blushed. He chuckled softly. She felt foolish and twisted her napkin in her hands. “I need my books.”
“All your dead philosophers. Your friends.”
The smile pulled harder on her face. She couldn’t resist it. He was laughing at her, yet she couldn’t help joining him. “They comfort me. They help me understand.”
His boots sounded on the hardwood floors. He crouched beside her. Her heart began to flutter and she had to look down at the table. He reached up and touched the coiled braid of her hair. “And you must always understand, eh?”
Expecting to see him still laughing at her, she whirled to face him. His expression was tender, his eyes full of sympathy. “Why are you so afraid of that which you cannot understand?” he asked.
Her heart fluttered all the harder. She wanted to turn, to hide her fear from him. Yet he cupped the side of her face, preventing her movement.
“Tell me. Share your fear with me.”
The gentleness of his tone compelled her. “When I cannot understand something, I feel helpless. I do not like feeling helpless.”
“Not everything can be understood. Some things can only be experienced, felt.”
“That’s a very defeatist and bleak outlook.”
His brows lifted. “Defeatist? How?”
“You are suggesting we ought to just submit to being helpless.”
“You don’t understand. Sometimes the way to take control of a situation is to feel your way through it.”
“The endeavour to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.” She quoted Spinoza. “Only through proper understanding can we find ourselves free.”
“We feel and know that we are eternal.” He intoned the words as if they were a quotation.
“Whoever said that?”
He looked at her blandly for a moment. “Spinoza.”
“I don’t remember that quote.” She couldn’t help the sharpness in her voice.
“I am not surprised.”
“But I have read those books over and over. I know everything they contain.”
“Your memory is selective.”
She frowned. “Wait…You’ve read Spinoza?”
“I did. Back at Whitecross. I wanted to see what your favourite book was.”
“How did you know my favourite?”
“It’s very easy to see. It is the one with the most wear and has the most folded pages.”
Of course—she should have thought of that.
“Reason is not more important than instinct and our senses, Anne. You should read The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and Beautiful Lily.”
Coldness settled over her. “I’ve read it. I don’t think very highly of Goethe and his idol, Friedrich von Schiller, and all their vain, vapid emotionalism.”
“You should broaden your intellectual horizons, my lady.” He stood and left the cottage.
She didn’t know whether to feel invaded or touched that he had investigated her books like that.
She watched, amazed as he hauled in and heated her bathwater without blinking an eye. She couldn’t imagine her father or William ever stooping to such a menial chore. They’d practically refused to pour their own drinks.
He presented her with a soft, thick flannel wrapper dyed a rich crimson. “The nights are promising to get cooler now.”
“Yes.” She clutched the flannel bundle tight, suddenly shy.
His eyes softened and he leant down and kissed her, gently and lingeringly. Then he left her alone in the cottage again.
He returned when she’d just come from the tub and insisted on towelling her dry, as if he were Nellie. Only he wasn’t. The act seemed somehow too intimate. Having a lover was certainly more invasive than having a husband. She wasn’t sure what to think about it and she was bone-tired. Therefore, she stopped thinking and gave herself up to the rhythmic motions of the fine linen towel brushing over her skin.
Afterwards, he carried her to the huge bed that dominated the bedchamber. All her muscles felt so heavy that she lay limp against his hard body. As they moved through the cottage, she took in the pleasant, slightly rustic flavour of the décor. It occurred to her that he’d somehow managed to have this abandoned cottage cleaned, painted and furnished in a fortnight.
Once she was on the bed, he massaged her feet and legs with oil.
His large, long-fingered hands manipulated her muscles with supple skill. It was heavenly. Too fatigued to feel anything but the warmth of relaxation, she seemed to sink deeper and deeper into the bed.
“What is that delicious scent?” she asked drowsily.
“It’s coconut oil. I developed a partiality to it when I was in Jamaica.”
“When were you in Jamaica?”
“On the way to New Orleans, with my regiment.”
“I didn’t realise you’d fought in New Orleans as well.”
He laughed softly. “It’s not something one tends to dwell on. The Americans beat us to our knees.”
His history fascinated her. “How many years were you in the dragoons?”
“Thirteen years, love. I enlisted when I was seventeen.”
“Goodness, so young.” She recalled herself at sixteen, perfectly petrified by all the staring eyes in her first season. She couldn’t imagine facing battle at just a year older.
“My grandfather, the old earl, had cu
t off my allowance to force me into divinity school. I had other plans.”
“But how could you afford the commission if he controlled your funds?”
“His wife—my dear grandmother—provided me with a purse, to gamble on cards, and I was lucky.” He laughed, this time a hollow sound without humour. It sent chills down her spine. “You see, he had put her to no small amount of public humiliation over some comely little baronet’s wife he’d been frigging. Therefore she hit him where she could. They were unfailingly polite at the dinner table and, under the surface, constantly at war. And that, my dear, is the ugly truth of marriage—especially for those at our rank.”
Anne hugged her pillow tighter. “My parents didn’t even communicate enough for arguments or wars. I rarely saw my father except when they trotted me out on those occasions when they wanted to show the duke as a loving father. After he lost interest in the horse farm, I saw him hardly ever at all.”
Jon dropped a kiss on her neck and made a sibilant sound, as if to quiet her.
However, she couldn’t stop the flow of words. “With his guinea-gold hair and patrician handsomeness, he was quite regal. He frightened me when I was little. As I grew, I learnt not to take him seriously. Mama explained how dukes were different from the rest of humanity. How they are raised so abnormally that they cannot be expected to be able to relate to life and other people in the same way as others do. Eventually, I learnt not to think of him as anyone really connected to me.”
He resumed massaging her back, the circular motions lulling her into silence. “It’s all in the past now, Anne. You’re wealthy, you have rank. You may live as you wish but you must learn to stand up in Society. You are not to kneel to anyone—I mean anyone.”
“I knelt to you.”
He gripped the back of her neck. “Yes, you did and you shall again, very soon. But that’s different and you know it. You know what I mean. Now get some sleep. Tomorrow, in the morning, we start accustoming you to horses once more.”
Upon rising, Anne found a chest full of simple muslin and wool dresses that buttoned down the front. Ruel had provided for all her needs for the month, all of it very practical, right down to woollen stockings and a pair of sturdy women’s leather boots.