“Allow me,” Thomas said, rising and stilling her hands. He had her bodice undone in a moment and drew the dress over her head. She wore neither corset nor jumps, but stood barefoot in only a summer-length shift.
Honeysuckle and the tang of lightning scented the night air, and when Thomas tossed his breeches, waistcoat, and shirt aside, the breeze was cool against his skin.
“We should go in,” Thomas said, because the thunder was coming closer, and inside, with no storm to harry them, he’d have a chance of untangling what drove Loris to take this final step in the lovers’ journey.
Loris’s answer was to draw her shift over her head, a flash of pale cotton revealing a paler swatch of woman in the dark garden. Then she was wrapped around him, shockingly warm, her mouth hot on his.
Her kiss tasted of determination, of too many long, hot days and cold winter nights spent in solitude, of passion too long focused on wringing sustenance from the land.
That Loris sought intimate union was beyond doubt. Some overly cautious part of Thomas wondered why now, but the rest of him was swept into desire and pleasure.
The wind picked up just as Thomas laid Loris in the cool grass and came down over her.
“Is this what you want, Loris? Here? Like this? A pagan rite for two, all of heaven looking on?”
“I want you,” Loris said, wrapping one leg around his flank.
Thomas braced himself on one forearm and glided a palm down her midline. She was slim and sturdy, both, and she moved beneath his hand like water beneath moonlight.
“You’re trying to rush me,” Thomas said, combing his fingers through her damp curls. “This is not the time to rush, Loris.”
“I’m trying to love you,” she said, arching into his hand. “Do that again.”
A cold drop hit Thomas’s shoulder as he glossed two fingers over the seat of Loris’s pleasure.
“Lightning,” she whispered. “Inside me. More, Thomas.”
He brewed a tempest for her, until she was writhing beneath him in the grass, her fingers manacled around his wrists. When she would have kissed him, Thomas used his mouth on her breasts instead.
Another cold drop landed on the back of his neck. “Do we go inside?” Thomas asked, bracing himself on straight arms.
“Love me,” Loris growled. “All I want—please, Thomas.”
Some men enjoyed making women beg. Thomas was not one of them. He took himself in hand and stroked his cock against Loris’s sex, slowly, until she quieted. As he began a slow, careful joining, Loris’s sigh fanned across his chest and tension seemed to drain from her.
As if that, the first increment of a lover’s union, was all she sought.
On a hard gust, the rain started, needles of damp so fine as to be more mist than rain, but Thomas’s course was set.
Love her, he would. Slowly, inexorably, until they were moving as one, and the scent of wet flowers and thirsty earth filled the garden.
Loris welcomed him with the same ardor the garden welcomed the rain, the same driving, mindless passion. A limb cracked in the woods nearby, but Thomas could not have stopped if the very cottage itself had been struck by lightning.
While the sky raged above, Thomas made slow, sweet love to the woman who loved the land. The air cooled, the rain coalesced into a steady, wind-driven downpour, but for Thomas, all was heat and pleasure.
Thunder shook the earth, as if the storm inside them was immediately above them too, and Loris began to thrash. She bowed up, pressing her teeth to Thomas’s shoulder as pleasure overcame her, and lightning turned the world momentarily brilliant.
Boundaries blurred for a progression of instants, as if Thomas made love with the storm itself, as if Loris were some pagan goddess, one with the power to command the elements and transcend time.
The last of Thomas’s self-discipline slipped from his grasp, and sheer animal ecstasy shuddered through him. He could no more have denied himself satisfaction than the earth could have refused the rain.
For long moments, he simply held Loris, used his body to shelter her from an increasingly intrusive cold. She was a pool of warmth beneath him and around him and made no move to leave his embrace despite the chill, despite the certain knowledge that their clothes, strewn about on the grass, were getting soaked.
Loris patted his backside.
“Don’t move,” Thomas said, shifting up the few inches necessary to unjoin them. He scooped her up against his chest and carried her into the cottage, not stopping until he could lay her on the bed and fold the quilt around her.
“I’m fetching our clothes and lighting a fire,” he said. “Stay right where you are.”
“You’ll come back?”
Thomas sat on the edge of the bed, felled by an insight. I know you will come home when you say you will. For most of Loris’s life, the man responsible for her welfare had not come home when he’d promised he would.
“I’ll come back,” Thomas said. “You dry off and get warm.”
She kissed his knuckles, and Thomas made himself leave the bed and return to the cold, wet garden. He gathered up their damp clothes and brought them inside, lit a fire in the hearth from the single candle burning in the window, and spread the clothing around on chairs near the fire to dry.
He’d come to see Loris this evening intent on talking, on sorting out her restless, unhappy mood, on consoling himself for an afternoon wasted with neighbors given to tedious drama.
He’d spend the night, mostly in hopes of accomplishing in the morning what he’d failed to achieve in the evening. He made sure the fire was blazing cozily, set his boots on the mantel rather than before the heat of the flames, used a kitchen towel to scrub himself dry, and rejoined Loris in the bedroom.
She was beneath the covers, apparently asleep. When Thomas climbed in beside her, he was grateful for her heat and FOR the way she wrapped herself around him in sleepy welcome.
Loris’s embrace was lovely, and yet, Thomas knew that when he awoke in the morning, his first conscious thought would be: What the hell had happened?
Chapter Thirteen
Thomas awoke in his own bed, though he’d dreamed of Sutcliffe Keep and of his grandfather. Not nightmares, precisely, but unhappy recollections and family history, like the list of begats that opened a book of the Old Testament.
Rather than try to sleep despite bright morning sun, Thomas rose and took himself down to the library. As luck would have it, his gaze landed on the unopened letter Fairly had brought down from London. Typically, Thomas would have tossed it into the fire within moments of reading the direction, but the weather had been so hot, no fires had been lit.
The summer Thomas had left Sutcliffe Keep had been blazingly hot. The summer he’d been banished. Theresa had told him to go, told him to leave her in peace, to stop nattering at her like a worried granny.
Told him that if she wanted to drink, whore, and game herself to death, that was none of his concern.
So Thomas had made her none of his concern, ever again, but now she was writing to him, writing every two months or so, if she could find him. Writing to say what?
He ran a fingertip over the tidy address.
Loris had endured two years without a word from her father, and Thomas knew the burden that had put on her. She worried for Micah Tanner, she bore invisible wounds that could not heal because Micah Tanner had left without a word to her. He suspected those wounds had been what had driven her into Thomas’s arms last night.
Loris wanted a man who’d keep his word, the most basic requirement of gentlemanly honor. A man who didn’t turn his back on his obligations, despite all temptation and human failings to the contrary.
Thomas might well have created a new life with Loris in the midst of a coupling he found unnerving in hindsight. A child, innocent and deserving of every advantage in life.
Including legitimacy.
Thomas took Theresa’s letter out into the cool early morning light and slit the seal.
* * *
Despite the violence of the storm, despite the inches of rain that had fallen the previous night, the weather had not broken.
Loris had wanted a day to ponder, to plot and plan, and even marvel a little, for Thomas Jennings’s lovemaking was worth marveling over. Had he been with her when she’d awoken, she’d have made love with him again, this time in a bed, for pity’s sake, with sunshine illuminating his every feature and expression.
Instead, she was riding into Trieshock, between Nick and Thomas, trying to pretend that she hadn’t sunk her teeth into Thomas’s shoulders and her fingernails into his muscular fundament.
Trying to pretend she didn’t dread the next time somebody saw a man who resembled Micah Tanner.
Nick had discommoded her with those confidences, had discommoded her right into Thomas’s arms, and Loris’s only regret was that she hadn’t found her way there sooner, and hadn’t awoken in the same happy location.
And as for Papa… Loris wished him well. She simply wished him well, and left it at that.
“You’re both quiet,” Nick said. “The rain made the heat worse, and I didn’t think it could get worse.”
“Some limbs came down in the home wood,” Thomas replied. And then, one heartbeat too late, “I could see them from my balcony. Oak, which we can use.”
He’d doubtless seen the storm damage when he’d left Loris’s bed at daybreak.
The men argued in desultory fashion about lumber that had been set aside to rebuild the dairy barn, and about whether to offer to buy Mrs. Pettigrew’s poor stud.
Loris let their talk wash around her, though even the sound of Thomas’s voice tickled her awareness.
So that was lovemaking. That indescribable intimacy, that shared pleasure, that tenderness without limit. For a span of time, making love with Thomas, then curled in his arms in the bed, no worries had touched Loris, no anxieties, no fears.
No awful questions about what to do if Papa returned, or sent for Loris to join him in Brighton—one of Britain’s busiest ports.
Nicholas had knocked on her door and conveyed Thomas’s invitation to make this provisioning trip with him, and Loris had abandoned her plans to stay home and marvel in solitude.
Rumors were not worth panicking over. Papa’s looks were common—some height, graying hair, blue eyes. Many men answered to such a description.
Evan shuffled to a halt, for Thomas and Nick had argued right to the door of the Trieshock livery.
“I’ll not be long at the apothecary,” she told them, swinging out of the saddle.
“We’ll not be long,” Thomas said, handing Rupert’s reins to a groom. “Haddonfield, we’ll meet you here in an hour. I’d like to be back at Linden before the worst of the day’s heat.”
Nick strode off to the dry goods mercantile, where he’d place a substantial order, while Loris wanted to replenish a list of medicinal stores that a winter outbreak of influenza had depleted.
Thomas took her arm uninvited and directed her toward the village square. “Well, Miss Tanner?”
Well , Loris loved the scent of him, the feel of him, the mischief that lurked in his polite address.
“Sir?”
“I hadn’t the heart to waken you, you were sleeping so soundly. You’ve been working too hard, and I’ll not have your health on my conscience.”
They were to acknowledge last night’s intimacy, then. “I did wonder what one says. Afterward. None of your lectures on manners or deportment covered this topic. You seem well rested yourself.”
Thomas tipped his hat to a pair of beldames clad head to toe in black. What a cruel custom, in this heat, and on this lovely, lovely day. Loris wanted badly to kiss her escort right there in the street.
“Where is this apothecary?” Thomas asked. “I’m having impure thoughts and might need to dunk myself in a horse trough if I must continue striding about in proximity to your person.”
Thomas was wearing his usual exquisitely tailored riding breeches, poor man.
“Don’t you dare look,” he muttered, just as Loris might have assayed a surreptitious peek at his falls.
“I’m having impure thoughts, too sir. Of you, in the rain, in my bed.”
Another pair of ladies went by, a mother and daughter from the looks of them. Thomas again tipped his hat, while Loris felt an urge to… laugh.
“I will have my revenge,” Thomas said when the ladies were past. “When you least expect it, I’ll remind you what it feels like to have my mouth on your breasts, my fingers slick with your desire.”
“Thomas.”
His expression was utterly composed, but for the devilment in his eyes. “My dear?”
“The apothecary. This is it. I might need some time here.”
He lowered his lashes, and Loris felt the sweep of them against her naked breasts, a tactile caress of memory.
“You may have all the time you need, Miss Tanner. A woman ought never to be rushed when she’s about her pleasures, and surely shopping qualifies. I’ll be lounging beneath that tree, in the cool of the morning shade until you’re ready for me.”
“You are naughty,” Loris said, and that was a marvel too—a lovely marvel.
She was glad to have business to transact in the apothecary, also glad Thomas had taken himself and his bold innuendo across the street. Loris purchased a quantity of pennyroyal tea, though she didn’t particularly care for it, then went down the medicinal list: willow bark tea, feverfew, valerian, comfrey, mallow… She could have harvested many of these from Linden, but simply hadn’t the time.
“Do you need any ginger, Miss Tanner?” the little fellow behind the counter asked.
Ginger, for the bilious stomach that Papa’s overindulging in spirits caused.
“Thank you, no, Mr. Breadalbane. This is the lot of it, for now.”
Mr. Breadalbane pushed half-glasses up a narrow nose. “Mr. Tanner was looking much better when I saw him last week, much more the thing. Will you be taking this with you, or shall I hold it until you can send somebody?”
Loris kept a faint smile on her face and closed her reticule with a stout tug on the strings.
“I can take it with me. We’ve been without for too long, and I don’t want to tempt fate.”
She wanted to cry, to wreck the apothecary, to smash every jar and crock on the premises. A braver woman could have asked Mr. Breadalbane where he’d seen Micah Tanner, but Loris hadn’t the courage.
She already knew what she needed to know.
For the first time in memory, she’d awoken happy, eager to see what the day held, resolute in her determination not to let a mere rumor snatch joy from her grasp. So, of course, Papa must destroy her new-found hope and toss any chance she had of happiness down the nearest well.
The door pushed open, the bell tinkling merrily.
“Miss Tanner,” Thomas said. “If you’re finished here, I’ll escort you to the livery.”
Breadalbane fussed and muttered and peered over his glasses, but he eventually wrapped up Loris’s purchases and passed them to Thomas.
“I see you bought pennyroyal tea,” Thomas remarked, no hint of teasing in his tone.
He’d managed a brothel. No point dissembling, and yet, Loris did. “Pennyroyal settles a bilious stomach, and the heat can put my digestion off.”
Thomas was silent for a few paces. “You might want to find another remedy for digestive upsets. Pennyroyal can bring on menses, even after conception.”
And thus did Loris resume lying to protect her father. Had Micah Tanner not come back into the area, she’d become Thomas Jennings’s lover, maybe his fiancée, possibly even his baroness.
But Micah Tanner’s daughter knew better than to hope, ever. Loris had forgotten that lesson, and like the morning’s heat, it pressed in on her now from all sides and made even breathing a chore.
“Miss Tanner, are you well?”
“A little tired.” Loris was exhausted by years of worry, years of self-reliance and unacknowledged ra
ge. “I’ll be glad to get back to Linden.”
She’d almost said she’d be glad to get home, but thinking of Linden as home had become a presumption, for without even letting her know he was alive, Papa had put her in an impossible situation.
Loris could either lie to Thomas about her father’s return, and allow a man accused of rape to continue to dodge the law, or she could betray her father, and very likely see him hanged.
Chapter Fourteen
Women were prone to moods. Men were too, but Thomas could usually trace a man’s moods to an obvious motivation. Fairly had been downcast because no letter from his wife had come in the morning post. Nick was quiet because Chesterton was still in the area, and nobody knew how he supported himself.
Thomas had started the day in a thoughtful frame of mind that had brightened at the sight of Loris’s shy smile in the stable. He’d wanted to kiss her, with Beckman and Jamie looking on, but refrained because Loris was owed utmost respect.
Now more than ever.
“Damned if we’re not in for another storm,” Nick said, scowling at the sky. “We’ll doubtless broil all afternoon first. At this rate the chickens will stop laying, and the cows stop giving milk.”
Loris said nothing, her silence reminiscent of the young woman Thomas had met on his first day at Linden—self-contained, full of repressed emotion, and pent-up energy.
She was again a storm about to break. Not an hour earlier, Loris had been flirting with Thomas on the village street.
“Settle, you,” Thomas murmured to his horse, who also appeared to be in a mood. Rupert tossed his head, and Nick’s mare did likewise.
“They don’t like the heat either,” Nick said. “Or maybe the rain will come sooner rather than later.”
For another half mile the horses plodded on, occasionally whisking a tail, or snatching at the bit.
“They weren’t acting like this on the way to Trieshock,” Loris said, the first words she’d offered in nearly three miles. “Something isn’t… I smell smoke.”
Thomas Page 20