She missed them even less than she missed her father.
Loris made love to Thomas then, conscious all the while that he was being careful with her, mindful of her injury, and simply mindful. His caresses were deliberate, his pleasuring of her measured and relentless.
“I like this,” Loris whispered, as Thomas closed his hands gently over her breasts. She hadn’t taken off her nightgown, hadn’t had time to when joining their bodies was so much more urgent.
Thomas made the slide of fabric over tender skin a wicked education.
“You like being in charge,” he countered, closing his teeth lightly over a silk-clad nipple and arching into Loris’s heat. “Like being the one to say how fast, how hard, how—sweet saints.”
Loris experimented with inner muscles, with speed and depth, but in the end, she surrendered every pretense of self-restraint and let Thomas have all the passion she was capable of—kisses, sighs, groans, caresses, and her body, undulating in counterpoint to his with an abandon that shocked her.
Truly, she ravished him, taking for herself as much as she could endure and inflicting the same on Thomas, until they were both spent, and she was panting on his chest.
For a moment, Loris made herself face the notion that, like her father, she could be utterly selfish. Instead of explaining her worries to Thomas, she’d taken advantage of him and allowed the excuse of emotion to overrule the demands of common sense.
Selfishness was seductive in a way she hadn’t known. A bit of her anger at her father slipped away, but only a bit.
Thomas’s hands on her back were slow and warm, and sleep beckoned even before he’d slipped from her body.
“Marry me, Loris Tanner. Promise me you’ll be my wife, my baroness, my love.”
This was ravishment of a different order, of Loris’s heart, her hopes and dreams, and while she might keep secrets from Thomas—about Micah Tanner, about his possible role in all the difficulties at Linden—she would not lie to Thomas about marriage.
“You’ve had an awful day,” she said, kissing his cheek. “You’re disconcerted and not yourself. Propose to me another time, Thomas, and we’ll have a sensible discussion.”
His caresses paused, then resumed. “You are slow to trust. I understand that. I will ask again, because a woman doesn’t make love as you just did, without a thought to preventing conception, without a thought for anything save the passion of the moment, unless she’s in the arms of a man she cares for and knows she can rely on.”
Without a thought to preventing conception.
God in heaven, Thomas was right. He’d tried to withdraw, but Loris had not allowed him to.
She cast about for dismay, for self-recrimination, for any steadying shadow of a proper reaction to her folly, and found only a backward pride that she’d allowed herself this occasion of honest pleasure with Thomas.
A steward learned not to worry about the harvest until the crop was in jeopardy, or perhaps Loris had simply chosen an unfortunate time to adopt her father’s heedlessness.
“In this, I trust you,” she said. “I shouldn’t, part of me doesn’t want to, and it’s probably not wise, but you’re right. If you give your word, you’ll keep it. If you say you’ll come home for supper, then home you’ll be.” If I conceive a child, and you learn of it, you’ll insist on marrying me.
How had this happened?
“I’m as surprised as you are,” Thomas whispered, patting Loris’s hip. “I never expected I’d fall in love with my land steward, you know. Pass me that handkerchief, please.”
I never expected to fall in love… Pass me the handkerchief.
Thomas was being kind, slipping an earth-shaking declaration into the conversation between mundane intimacies. Loris let him deal with the inelegant realities following lovemaking, while she…
“My shoulder doesn’t hurt as much.”
“Fairly says affection is powerful medicine,” Thomas replied, tossing the handkerchief toward the vanity. “Lady Fairly agrees. I am becoming convinced of the same conclusion. Shall you sleep upon me, Loris Tanner?”
He’d have her become Loris, Baroness Sutcliffe, steward of Linden, even though she was first and foremost the daughter of a cowardly sot who was also a possible rapist-turned-arsonist.
“I will sleep beside you, sir, provided you absent yourself before you’re noticed,” Loris said, shifting off of Thomas and tucking herself along his side. Thomas was warm, though he took up rather a lot of room.
“I’ll scamper right back across the roof, and the dew-fall will make it only slightly damp,” Thomas said.
Loris kissed his shoulder. “You climbed across the roof to get to my balcony? With the rain making everything slippery and no moon worth the name? Thomas, do not tempt fate, please. Better my reputation be dragged through the mud than you fall from the roof.”
Tears threatened all over again, because whatever else was true—about Micah Tanner, arsonists, and other ne’er-do-wells—Loris could not be responsible for bringing harm to Thomas.
She would harm him, though. If she heeded a summons from her feckless father, she’d hurt Thomas terribly.
“Settle, madam. I’ve been traipsing across roofs since I was a boy. Sutcliffe Keep is mostly an old castle, with all manner of peculiar architecture. As a child I learned to climb up the very walls, and my sister did too.”
“No wonder you grasp my situation without having it explained to you,” Loris said, smoothing a hand over his flat belly. “You were left to raise yourself and did the best you could. One grows self-reliant, despite one’s fears.”
Thomas trapped her hand in his before she could explore in a more southerly direction.
“That’s why I might well answer Theresa’s letter.”
Theresa, Thomas’s only family, who had disappointed him bitterly. Truly, his situation was not that different from Loris’s, though she might well become another disappointment to him.
“You’ll answer her letter because she climbed stone walls with you?” Loris asked.
“Because I see in your situation what it can do to a woman when she’s abandoned by her only family and left to wonder, month after month, then year after year, how her errant family member goes on. Is he alive? Is he safe? Does he think of me? Why does he stay away if he’s free to come back?”
Loris was glad for the darkness then, glad Thomas could not see the pain his words brought her. Whatever she’d expected him to say, it hadn’t been… that.
“I wonder less and less, Thomas.” How she hated to lie to him.
“Theresa has written to me, time and again, and yet she doesn’t hear back from me. I’m not that little boy anymore, not that callow youth, bewildered at her choices or her selfishness. She was only a few years older than I, and yet, I attributed to her perfect adult judgment, perfect wisdom.”
As Loris had wanted to attribute the same qualities to her father, who had been—and still was—an adult. If he was alive.
“You should write to her,” Loris said. “You should invite her to visit, in fact.”
Micah Tanner could not remain in Sussex any longer than necessary to collect his daughter and leave England. Loris had no delusions about that. Thomas would need family around him if Micah’s plans bore fruit, and one estranged sister was better than nothing and no one.
“I might invite her to visit,” Thomas said. “I want her to meet my intended.”
“I am not your intended.” Though you are my beloved.
Thomas shifted, gently pushing Loris to her right side. “Of course, you’re not. We’re merely sharing a bed, in a house with seventeen bedrooms, because it makes less work for the housemaids.”
“You’re laughing at me, Baron.” Thomas was also wrapping himself around her, a blanket of warmth and reassurance Loris needed badly and deserved not at all.
“I admire you endlessly, and desire you almost as often. Do you ever think your father might come back here, Loris?”
The question was
devastatingly casual.
“I pray he does not, Thomas, for he left under a cloud of scandal, and to return might mean to stick his neck in a noose.”
Thomas wrapped an arm around Loris’s waist. “I’ll find him for you. You can have no peace until you know his fate, I understand that. Trust me, and I’ll get to the bottom of his situation, and then you’ll become my baroness.”
Thomas’s breathing became even, and when Loris sensed it was safe to do so, she used the edge of the sheet to wipe the tears from her cheeks.
* * *
Sailors were sustained in significant measure by their rations of grog. Thomas had known that, and had, from time to time enjoyed a tot of rum. When he and Fairly had boarded a vessel for the short voyage from Ceylon to the Indian mainland, the merest whiff of rum from the person of the English captain had, nonetheless, left Thomas uneasy.
With the whiff of rum troubling him, Thomas had noticed that ropes on the deck hadn’t been tidily coiled. They’d been piled in heaps. The mainsail had been much and haphazardly mended. From a distance the ship had looked seaworthy enough, but Thomas’s instincts had said otherwise.
They had sailed to within sight of land across the Gulf of Mannar, when a squall had erupted. As the storm had buffeted the ship, Thomas and Fairly had struggled alongside the crew to keep the vessel afloat. The entire time Thomas had battled the sea to get to shore, his sustaining emotion had been not fear for his life, but rage.
A sober crew, a sober captain, could have saved the ship. Thomas ought to have known better, ought to have seen the signs. He’d slogged his way to shore, furious with himself, with the captain, with the storm, and determined to locate Fairly, whom he’d last seen clinging to a floating spar.
The same sense of being surrounded by portents of doom dogged Thomas in the days leading up to the barn raising.
After rain drenched the remains the stable, hot weather blazed anew, tempers flared, and even the presence of the Viscountess Fairly didn’t seem to quell a growing tension between Nick Haddonfield and the viscount.
A commotion outside the library at mid-morning heralded the arrival of Thomas’s intended along with his stable master. Like everybody else, they seemed to be at daggers drawn, and the four small boys between them apparently sensed the tension.
“Baron, my apologies for disturbing you,” Loris began. “Your cheese cave was beset by thieves, though, and justice must be done.”
A scrawny lot of thieves. Thomas recognized Timmie, the smallest, though even in the few weeks since Thomas had last seen the boy, he’d grown. He was less a little boy, and more of a… problem.
“The children will apologize,” Nicholas said, arms crossed, which only accentuated his height. “And their parents will be notified. That should be an end to it.”
“We didn’t take anything, sir,” Timmie said. “We play in the cave because it’s cool, and we’re not supposed to go swimming without one of the older boys.”
Thomas had been totaling sums of supplies needed for the barn raising, everything from nails to kegs of ale to sheets of tin to the flowers Loris insisted ought to be planted around any stable yard. He mentally added a sum to put a gate over the mouth of the cave.
“Caves are dangerous,” Loris snapped, skirts swishing as she paced to the empty hearth. “Bats can attack, little boys can get lost. Caves are dark and damp, and crawling with bugs and poisonous snakes.”
The boys, who would probably go their entire lives without seeing a poisonous snake, were clearly fascinated.
“Adders are shy,” Thomas said, coming around the side of his desk, “but if cornered, they’ll bite, and their venom is noxious in the extreme. Miss Tanner is right to be concerned for you.”
For that’s what this was—concern that only masqueraded as outrage.
“If the cave is full of snakes, why do you put the cheese there?” Timmie asked.
“The snakes guard the cheese,” Thomas improvised, while Nick endured a coughing fit and Loris looked like she wanted to smack every male in the library with the fireplace poker. “Nobody in their right mind goes into a cheese cave without proper protection.”
One upset land steward probably sent all the snakes sprinting for their best hiding places.
“If the cave is dark, how do the snakes see you coming?” Timmie asked.
Bright lad. His mental nimbleness probably earned him frequent thrashing, for the same trait had seen Thomas’s little backside well acquainted with the birch rod.
“The snakes feel your footsteps,” Nick supplied. “They can hear your racket as you practice swearing with your friends.”
Several pairs of eyes took to studying the carpets, small bare feet shuffled about.
“We’re sorry, Miss Tanner,” Timmie said, clearly the fellow most used to dealing with upset females. “We won’t go in the cave again.”
“And we won’t use foul language again,” another fellow volunteered. “Not around a lady, anyway.”
“And we won’t eat any more peaches from the baron’s—”
Timmie’s elbow found its way to the third boy’s ribs.
“Well, peaches are the best,” the taller boy said, “and nobody else grows them. Pa says they’re from Cathay, and Ma likes them, too.”
“Thieves,” Loris muttered. “Trespassers. For all we know, they set fires in their idle moments, too.”
The silence in the library became deadly serious. Timmie took to staring at his own dusty toes.
“Mr. Haddonfield,” Thomas said, “perhaps you’ll escort Miss Tanner to the stable. She’ll want to assess the progress of the fellows clearing away the debris.”
Thomas himself had made that inspection not an hour earlier, surprised at how easily an entire building could be wiped off the property.
Loris preceded Nick from the room at a forced march, and in truth, Thomas could not blame her for being angry.
Or worried about children whose parents paid insufficient heed to their safety.
“You lot,” Thomas said, leaning back against his desk. “If you want to be able to sit down at any point in the next week, you will be dead honest with me. I need to know what you saw the day of the fire, and then I have jobs for you. Important jobs that you must not shirk.”
The three larger boys looked to Timmie, who met Thomas’s gaze squarely. “We didn’t take any cheese, Baron, and we don’t lie. Well, Harry tells a fib or two, but only to his ma and never on Sunday. What do you want to know, and what jobs do you have for us?”
Chapter Seventeen
By night, Loris clung to Thomas until he slipped from her bed before dawn, and then she clung to her endless list of duties. Jamie mentioned to her quietly that he might have seen a fellow in Trieshock who’d borne a resemblance to Micah Tanner, but concluded that Micah Tanner would never have ridden such a modest gelding, or worn such an old pair of boots.
And thus, when Thomas and Nick planned another outing to Trieshock to fetch the last of the supplies needed for the barn raising, Loris accompanied them.
“You’re quiet this morning,” Thomas observed as they rode along. This early in the day, the hedgerows provided some shade, but soon the air would be heavy with humidity and heat. Another storm was brewing. Loris only hoped it held off until the barn raising was finished the next day.
“Tomorrow will be busy,” she said. “I have much to think about. Will Lord Fairly and his lady depart once your new stable is built?”
Loris liked Fairly, but he missed nothing, and for all he doted on his viscountess, Fairly was also very protective of Thomas.
Fifteen yards ahead, Nick drew his horse to a halt in the shade of an enormous oak.
“Lady Fairly intends to accompany us to the assembly,” Thomas said. “Rather, she intends to accompany you. You have an ally, Loris, another ally.”
Another person who would be disappointed if they learned Loris had abandoned her post, and the baron, to take her father in hand. The reality was, Thomas would manag
e without Loris. He had friends, he had wealth, he had excellent judgment. Micah Tanner had only one daughter to keep him from folly, and her efforts hadn’t been safeguard enough.
“What I have is a list of dry goods,” Loris replied, “and you and Nicholas will be half the morning at the brewer’s. Did you ever write to your sister?”
Thomas drew Rupert to a halt next to Buttercup. The morning would be long, and horses needed the occasional chance to blow.
“I have a letter for Theresa with me,” Thomas said, “and I have a number of letters to post for Fairly as well. Nicholas, I don’t suppose you have any mail to add to the stack?”
Nicholas had reverted to the man Loris had met two years ago. Reticent, unreadable, and hard working. He’d overseen the clearing away of the burned remains of the stable, dirty, back-breaking work that Nick took on without complaint.
Loris was comforted to think she might not be the only person at Linden guarding secrets and regrets.
Even that thin consolation evaporated into the morning’s heat when Loris handed her reins off to a stable boy at the livery, and was slipped a note in return. She had to wait until Thomas and Nicholas had sauntered off to the brewery to unfold the scrap of paper, and what she read had her nearly fainting with frustration.
Passage to the New World awaits us in Brighton. Pack all of your belongings, attract no notice. Be ready to leave soon.
The note needed no signature, for Loris knew her father’s bold scrawl. His handwriting hadn’t changed, nor had his expectation that regardless of the inconvenience to her, regardless of her needs, regardless of obligations she might have to anybody else, his daughter would leap to his side, ready as ever to protect him from his own folly as best she could.
Before Loris had met Thomas, a man who respected her and offered her only honorable sentiments, she would have rejoiced to receive such a note. Her gratitude and relief would have lightened her every step, and she’d have lathered her horse getting home to pack.
Now, she stuffed the note in her pocket, and tucked away a good deal of resentment along with it.
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