“This.” She bent down and kissed him. As their lips touched she felt a current pass through her, the smallest bolt of lightning. The surface of her skin crackled with excitement. She stood back up.
“That was a foolish thing to do,” Edwin said. Now that she’d kissed him, she could only think of him as Edwin.
“Was it?”
“Yes.”
“So I shouldn’t do it again?”
“I didn’t say that.”
Smiling, Gwen returned to her seat and her dinner.
They ate. They talked. They mostly stayed on subject. Unfortunately. Gwen wanted to know everything about Edwin Yorke, but the one thing she was learning about Edwin Yorke tonight was that Edwin Yorke did not like talking about himself.
Must be a British thing.
“So I get nothing?” she asked after they’d finished their second glass of wine.
“What exactly is it that you want from me, Miss Ashby?” He set his now empty glass aside and studied her from across the table.
“Well…for starters. I want you to call me Gwen.”
He sighed heavily. So heavily she had to laugh.
“Gwen,” he said once and only once.
“Now that didn’t hurt, did it?”
“I wouldn’t say it hurt.”
“Good.”
“It might have chafed, however.”
“Edwin.”
He glared at her.
“You called me Gwen. That’s tacit permission for me to call you Edwin.”
“Very well. But only until this wine wears off.”
“While the wine is wearing on…tell me about yourself. Please?” She added the please at the end so it would sound more like a humble request and less like an order. She didn’t want to push her luck here.
“What is it, precisely, that you want to know about me?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I live here, Gwen.”
“You know what I mean. What’s a man from England doing living in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains?”
“Working.”
“You’re not going to give up anything to me here, are you?”
“This was supposed to be a work dinner. You should limit the scope of your questions to matters school-related.”
“Tell me about the school’s headmaster then.”
“You’re insubordinate.”
“It’s one of my better qualities.”
Edwin narrowed his eyes at her across the table. Four feet of table lay between them and it was four feet too many.
“Fine. Fine. Fine,” she said, raising her hands in surrender. “Tell me this then. Why did you say there are sixty students here? I only counted thirty. Are they on some kind of break?”
Edwin looked to the side. It was the first time she’d seen him refusing to make eye contact with her.
“Edwin?” Gwen prompted. “What happened to the other students?” His unwillingness to answer made the question all that much more important.
“I did something last year that caused a few parents and guardians to remove their children from the school. It’s been difficult to accept their loss.”
“You did something? What on earth could you have done to scare off thirty students?”
“I assure you the students wanted to stay. To say there was wailing and gnashing of teeth when they were taken away would be only minor exaggeration.”
“Then what did you do to make the families pull their kids out of the school?”
“I integrated Marshal.”
Gwen only boggled at him for what must have been a full thirty seconds.
“Samuel,” she said.
Edwin nodded.
“Thirty students left the school because you let in Samuel? What the fuck?”
“Gwendolyn!”
“Sorry. No,” she said, slapping her hand on the table. “I’m not sorry. That’s worthy of an f-bomb.”
“Thank God the children aren’t here.”
“They aren’t children. They’re teenagers. I’m sure they’ve heard and said worse. Now tell me you’re joking.”
“I wouldn’t joke about such a thing. Ever. But I wish I could say I was. Samuel wrote the school last year asking if he’d be welcome here. His IQ is off the charts and he was having trouble at his high school in Alabama. Not enough stimulation. Too much tormenting. I sent him an entrance exam. He passed with the highest scored in the history of the school. I offered him a full scholarship. He arrived and…”
“I can’t believe this. I know North Carolina isn’t a mecca of liberalism, but I didn’t think it was stuck in the 1950s.”
“Samuel offered to leave. I told him I would shut the school down before I would allow that. He stayed. Thirty students left. In the end, perhaps it was for the best…”
His voice trailed off and he glanced away once more.
Gwen sat in silence and let the reality of what Edwin had done sink in. Half the student body gone in one stroke. And he was right, he’d made the only choice he could especially for a man with his inherent sense of fairness and integrity. He’d done the only thing he could do. And now she would do the only thing she could do in response.
Gwen stood up, walked around the table, bent over and kissed him quick on the mouth.
Again.
She stood up straight and waited for a response.
“That was a shameful display,” Edwin said, throwing his napkin down on the table.
“Was it?” she asked, suddenly nervous.
“Worst kiss in the history of kisses.”
“What? You think you can do better?”
“With my eyes closed.”
“Isn’t that how everybody—”
Edwin rose, cupped the back of her neck, and kissed her right into the history books.
It was a deep kiss, a hard kiss, a strong kiss that made her weak. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and pressed her breasts to his chest, a move that sent a soft moan escaping his lips. Or hers. She couldn’t tell and certainly didn’t care. How could she care now that Edwin was pushing her back against the wall. A man so reserved, so buttoned-up and aloof, had to have a breaking point. Thank God she’d finally found it.
“Edwin,” she whispered against his mouth, feeling a jolt of pleasure into her stomach at merely saying his name. He said nothing in response. Nothing would distract his lips from hers. She raised her head to give him better access to her neck. He took it, dropping a line of kisses that left her shivering from her jaw to her ear. He nipped at her neck and she gasped from the pleasure of his teeth against her skin. “More,” she begged.
He pulled away a few inches and grasped her waist with both of his large hands. She arched her back and he kissed her across her chest under her collarbone. She wanted him to strip her naked, put her on the table, send the dishes flying and bury himself inside her. How desperately she wanted him inside her…but Edwin held back and merely teased her with his hands over her dress and not under it where she wanted them.
She gasped as he pulled her sweater down her left arm and kissed her bare shoulder. But it wasn’t enough to let him kiss her. She dug her fingers into the knot of his tie and loosened it. If she didn’t get to his neck soon she would die. With a fierce pull his tie was off his neck and on the floor where it belonged. She unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt and buried her lips in the hollow of his throat. Her pulse beat hard and fast. She felt his incredible hardness pressing against the center of her stomach as she kissed his neck and chest. Gwen pushed her hips into his and Edwin grunted softly in her ear. She’d never heard a more erotic sound than that tiny, uncontrolled release of pleasure. His finger tightened with bruising force on her back. How could mere kissing feel this good, this powerful? She would come apart in his arms any moment now.
“Make love to me, Edwin,” she whispered in his ear.
And just like that, the spell was broken. The kiss ended so quickly she nearly fell to her knees when she l
ost the support of his arms. She grasped the wall for support. Edwin took another step back.
“What?” Gwen asked, panting. “What is it?”
“I apologize for my behavior,” he said, and buttoned up his shirt.
“Apologize for kissing me?” she asked, still too shocked to think clearly.
“I think it would be best if you leave, Miss Ashby.”
She stared at him, utterly flabbergasted and deeply wounded.
“My name is Gwen,” she said.
“I think you should leave, Miss Ashby,” he said again. “I am the headmaster of this school. You are a teacher here. At least for this week. We should behave accordingly.”
Gwen adjusted her sweater to cover herself up again and took a deep steadying breath.
“I was joking before when I said I didn’t like you. I’m not joking now. You won’t even talk to me about this?”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“You had your tongue in my mouth thirty seconds ago and now you’re telling me to leave.”
“I apologize for that.”
“This…this was ungentlemanly of you,” she said and knew from the look in his eyes that her insult has struck deep.
She turned her back on him and walked out. On the third floor she was mentally listing all the reasons she hated him. On the second floor she started berating herself for kissing him first. On the first floor she had to stop in the bathroom to wipe the tears off her face.
For a miserable half hour she lingered in the bathroom until she’d achieved an approximation of composure again. She had a feeling several of the boys had seen her walking to the headmaster’s. If they saw her leaving with her lips swollen and tears on her face, they might assume he did something untoward to her. As angry as she was at him, she didn’t want anyone thinking he’d harmed her. No harm at all. He’d only crushed her pride with his sudden coldness. She asked him to make love to her, and he’d pushed her away as if she’d confessed to a murder. He’d even apologized for kissing her, which was the cruelest blow of all. A man only apologized when he thought he’d done something wrong, something he regretted. It had been the most passionate, sensuous and carnal kiss of her life and he’d apologized for doing it.
Once she was entirely certain that she could pass for calm and rational, Gwen left the bathroom and walked back to her cottage. She brewed a pot of tea and sat at the kitchen table pondering what had gone wrong. Edwin was divorced and over forty years old, so she knew he’d been with at least one woman in his life. As obsessed as he was with gentlemanly conduct and propriety she might have guessed he was a virgin had she not know about his previous marriage. Before this evening she’d found his old-fashioned manners charming and eccentric. Now they hurt and infuriated her.
Gwen did her best to focus on her work that night. She read, she made notes, she thought of interesting topics of discussion for class the next day. That night she barely slept and she had no mysterious bride to blame.
Her mood brightened when she got into her classroom the next day. The boys were ready to talk. Every last one of them had read the chapters she’d assigned and all ten boys participated in the discussion. Laird thought it interesting that Pip loved someone so coldhearted as Estella. Gwen posited that people tend to want what they can’t have even if it’s bad for them. Laird nodded sagely.
“Like me and dairy foods,” Jefferson said. “Not a good combination.”
“Tell us about it,” Laird said and pinched his nose.
Gwen kept waiting for Edwin to show up and observe her class like he did yesterday, but he never once showed his face. Not for her first period, her second period or her afternoon class. Long after the last boy had shuffled out of her classroom, she sat at her desk going through her notes. An apple suddenly appeared on her desk.
She looked up and saw Laird smiling kindly down at her.
“For you, Miss Ashby,” he said. “There’s an orchard behind the school. Thought you needed a smile.”
“Thank you, Laird. I appreciate that.” She held the big red apple in her hand.
“Give him time,” Laird said in a low conspiratorial tone. “He’s out of practice.”
“You’re playing matchmaker again.”
“They say every Adam needs his Eve,” he said with a wink and left her alone with her apple. She took a big bite out of it and pretended it was Edwin’s heart.
After her final class on Wednesday, Gwen headed out the back door of Hawkwood Hall. She needed to walk, to stretch her legs and to think. She and Edwin hadn’t spoken since Monday night when they’d shared that life-altering kiss. She knew she was a sensible soul, always had been. She had to stay calm and rational as the world fell apart around her after her father died. But now one kiss had been so powerful she was considering staying at a school out in the middle of nowhere with no internet access, one phone and a headmaster who made her every kind of irrational, imprudent and insensible, especially when he kissed her. But she couldn’t make decisions with her heart and her body. She needed to use her brain. And her brain told her that she shouldn’t stay at a school where she had such strong feelings for the headmaster.
And yet, here she was…
She walked along the perimeter of the school right inside the wall. For such a small school, it boasted a large campus. The five buildings stood on a square quarter mile of land. It took twenty minutes simply to walk the full stretch of the wall. While she walked, she studied the ground. She’d seen The Bride walking on top of the wall but surely she’d started somewhere on the ground. Gwen checked for footprints but saw nothing but large shoe prints that surely belonged to the boys. They played too hard on campus for her to find anything but disturbed dirt and grass everywhere she walked. Some of the ivy on the walls looked torn but that was the beginning and end of her evidence.
At the third turret, the one that faced east, Gwen discovered a narrow staircase built into the wall. She carefully walked up the stone stairs and discovered a small room inside what she’d assumed had been a merely decorative feature. It had a narrow opening that she slid through sideways. Inside the turret she discovered nothing but some dust and bits of paper. Apparently the boys liked to do their homework out here. She found some equations, a few Latin quotes…
But what was this?
Gwen unfolded a sheet of notebook paper.
Saturday night. Usual place. Please, I want you.
Gwen grinned as she read the note. Steam practically rose off those four little words—“Please, I want you.” Gwen’s theory that one of the boys had a secret girlfriend who was sneaking onto campus didn’t seem so farfetched now.
For two whole seconds, Gwen considered taking the note to Edwin. Surely sneaking a girl onto campus was a huge violation of the rules. But she was no snitch, and Edwin had already chosen to turn a blind eye to The Bride for whatever reason. She tore the note into tiny pieces lest anyone else find it.
The week that followed washed over her like an ocean wave. The joy of teaching buoyed her. The anger and hurt at Edwin sent her sinking into the heavy sand. So she focused on her work, on her classes, on teaching thirty teenage boys about the Victorian class system and leading discussions on the concept of nobility. Was it inborn? Or was it earned? Or was the entire idea of the “gentleman” a farce?
Friday came around and Gwen delivered her last lecture and had her last discussion on Great Expectations. The boys had enjoyed the book, they’d said. They only wished Dickens hadn’t written two endings. They had no idea which one to consider the “real” ending—the quiet philosophical one or the happier one where Pip ran off with an older and wiser Estella?
Gwen only saw Edwin a few times that week, and even then it had been at dinner in the dining hall with all the boys present. Thank goodness she had Mr. Price and Mr. Reynolds to talk to, or she would have packed her bags and left right away. Or would she? As much as Edwin had hurt her, the students had healed her. Teaching them was such a pleasure, it hardly felt like
work. Their questions surprised her, opened the book up to her in new ways. As boys about Pip’s age, they had their own take on his motivations that were different from her adult woman’s perspective. She learned as much from them as they learned from her.
At the end of each class on Friday she thanked all the boys for giving her such a wonderful week at William Marshal Academy. She said she wasn’t sure if she’d be back next week as that was the headmaster’s decision. But whatever happened, she would treasure her week among them as one of the best of her life.
The boys filed out of the room and Gwen sat at her desk for a long time before working up the courage to leave it. She didn’t want to leave Marshal. She didn’t want to stay either. Not after what happened with Edwin and that terrible, wonderful kiss. She didn’t know what to do—stay or go—so she would leave it up to the Fates. And by the Fates she meant she would leave it up to Edwin.
After her last class Gwen went for another walk. Laird hadn’t been lying. At the back of the school, a rusty-hinged wooden door led into the wild apple orchard behind the school. She gazed out at the patch of apple of trees, at their bent and bowed limbs hanging heavy with red September apples. Reaching out, she plucked an apple from the tree and took a bite of it. The tartness of it set her teeth on edge. The juice wet her fingers. Her mouth burst with the bright flavor. She wanted to stay. There and then she decided it. Life was here. Learning was here. Whether or not she and Edwin would work out their differences…it didn’t matter. Laird was sweet, but he was also wrong. Eve didn’t need Adam as long as she had her apples.
Gwen stepped onto the dirt path behind the school but she paused when she saw two figures moving through the trees. One she recognized immediately. It was Christopher, Laird’s best friend and partner in rogue-welcoming-committee activities. Next to him stood an old man who had to be in his seventies or eighties. Despite the age difference between the old man and Christopher, Gwen could see a family resemblance. They were nearly the same height and walked with a similar long-legged gait. Both of them held their shoulders a certain tense way and had the same tilt to their nose and jawline.
The old man and Christopher didn’t speak. Why were they walking side-by-side in total silence? And who was the older man? Christopher’s grandfather come to visit him? That would explain the family resemblance. But it didn’t explain why the old man wept as he walked. Christopher had apparently given up trying to console the man. All he could do is walk next to him keeping him company and saying not a word. The old man paused. He laid a hand on the nearest tree and swiped at his face with a handkerchief. No, not a handkerchief. A white napkin. White napkin with a red border. He must have been to the same diner in town where Gwen had stopped.
Harlequin E Shivers Box Set Volume 4: The HeadmasterDarkness UnchainedForget Me NotQueen of Stone Page 7