Elias In Love

by Grace Burrowes

  Violet knew she liked him, respected him, and wanted him. Then too, he’d soon get on a plane, and what law said a hardworking farmer wasn’t entitled to a little frolic in spring?

  “What should I know, Elias?”

  He kissed her nose and pushed off the bed, shutting out the lights when he reached the door. “I’ll tell the dogs you wished them sweet dreams. I’ve recently discovered that a shy woman makes me hot, that’s what you should know.”

  * * *

  Violet’s arms were freckled, but the tops of her breasts were not. Elias wanted to kiss his way across the transition between the two parts of her—farmer and lady, and he wanted to throw his phone out the nearest window.

  Jeannie had left two messages and sent three emails, all under the subject line, “Castle renovation,” and the last one marked urgent. Not good news.

  Angus Whyte detested email, but then, he detested the telephone as well, preferring snail mail, of all the quaint eccentricities. His call was likely bad news as well.

  Niall Cromarty, the cousin who’d thought opening the fourteen-thousandth golf course in Scotland was a fine idea, had also sent an email, as had Dunstan.

  It could all wait until morning—preferably late morning.

  Elias set the phone on mute then used it to light his way through the darkened house. He called the dogs in—why were dogs such relentlessly cheerful beasts?—and closed up for the night. On impulse, he filled a glass of water and took it with him upstairs.

  Outside Violet’s room, Elias took emotional inventory, knowing he was running on false energy. Casual sex had become a rarity at some point in the last few years, in part because Elias’s tastes had become more… refined?

  Finicky? Or maybe he’d grown tired of being kilted arm candy. Violet was a departure from his usual encounter, and he was doubtless a few yards from her beaten path as well. Novelty had an appeal for them both, apparently.

  He rapped on the door again, and waited for Violet’s permission to enter. Moonlight streamed in the window, and she was still sitting up in bed, her hair arranged in a long, loose braid over one shoulder.

  Elias set the glass of water beside the box of condoms then crossed to stand in the moonbeams.

  “I had an idea,” he said, unzipping his jeans the rest of the way. He turned to step out of them, which left him in black briefs. “I wondered if even a shy woman might enjoy the sight of her lover unclothed.”

  Maybe that was Violet’s appeal. She was reserved, unlike the women Elias usually consorted with, and yet, Violet was both confident and competent in her own world. She knew chicken breeds by personality, coloring, egg production… practical information that Elias found charming.

  He slid his briefs off and laid them with his jeans on a chair, then faced the bed.

  “Moses in the bulrushes, Elias Brodie.” Violet might be blushing, but she was definitely looking. Elias stretched, his hands bracing flat on the bedroom ceiling. He was pleasantly aroused, and yet Violet had forbidden him to enter into the usual, “tell me what you like,” discussion. No tabs and slots, she’d said.

  “I have rules,” he said, climbing on the bed. “Maybe you do too?”

  “Protection,” Violet replied, scooting to one side. “Every time, no matter what.”

  Elias stretched out on his back, which was a moment of sheer bliss in itself. “Protection, of course, but in the event the protection fails, I’d like to be a part of any subsequent discussions.”

  “Of course.”

  The bed bore the fragrance of lavender, the sheets were cool, and Violet had put aside her pup tent, though she’d tucked the covers up nearly to her chin.

  All was by no means right with the world, but the evening was off to a lovely start.

  “My other rule is unenforceable,” Elias said. “I suppose that makes it more of a request.”

  Violet slid down next to him, got an arm under his neck, and tucked her cheek against his shoulder.

  “Let’s get the public service announcements over with. I have plans for you, Mr. Brodie.”

  Elias was actually Lord Strathdee, when the occasion was formal. He’d pass that tidbit along some time when his cock wasn’t trying to steal all the blood flow from his brain.

  “My request is that you don’t… that you give me honest responses. Don’t fake, Violet. A passing encounter this might be, but it can be a genuine passing encounter.”

  “No faking,” she said, wrapping her fingers around his erection in an exquisitely snug hold. “I like that request, provided it goes both ways. Any more edicts, pronouncements, negotiating points, or final requests?”

  How lovely her calloused grip felt. “Just one more request: Make love with me, Violet.”

  She did better than that. She stroked Elias to a raging arousal, then kissed him as if she’d recently invented the undertaking and was trying to perfect her craft. Sweet, teasing, searing… all the while, Elias lay on his back feeling oddly unmoored from himself.

  He was thirty-odd years old, had, to use Zebedee’s terms, frolicked with women on four continents—five now—and other than handsomely framed academic degrees, his sole accomplishment was looking good in a kilt.

  Violet bit his earlobe. “Jet lag catching up with you?”

  Years of it. He wrapped his arms around her. “Holding you feels lovely, Violet. You are a talented kisser.”

  She was, in fact, a talented lover. Her touch had a presence, a sensitivity that made Elias want to roar and purr at the same time, made him want to lie still lest he do anything to distract her from her plundering, but also to rise over her and join his body to hers.

  Perhaps hours of flying over water had turned him daft, but it needn’t have made him lazy.

  Elias went exploring. With both hands, he learned the contour of Violet’s back, the flare of her hips, the muscular fullness of her backside. She was just the right combination of sturdy and shapely, fit and feminine.

  All woman, all the time, everywhere. Her breasts were surprisingly full, and she liked—very much—having them caressed.

  “Elias, about that protection?”

  Hell, yes. “The protection sitting on the night table?”

  “The protection I’m ready for you to put on—right now—that protection.”

  He got his mouth on her nipple, and she took to sliding her lady bits over his gentleman bits, until the boundary between plunderer and plundered blurred wonderfully.

  “Now, Elias. Please.”

  He reached for a condom without taking his mouth from her, not as a display of any particular skill, but because Violet was delectable, and he didn’t want to let any part of her go, ever.

  She took the condom from him and sat back. “I can do this part, if you want me to.”

  She wanted to. Elias’s shy, temporary neighbor was as passionate about her lovemaking as she was about her chickens and strawberries and vegetables. The secret to her touch, he realized, was that she enjoyed getting her hands on him.

  “I want you to,” Elias said. “But take your time.”

  Who knew if they’d end up in bed again? Tomorrow, Elias would be mired in emails and phone calls, and then Monday began a round of meetings with real estate attorneys. At some point an electrician would have to be fitted into the schedule, and—

  A combination of resentment and sadness filled him. All that busyness and productivity could not possibly be as important or precious as making love with Violet, and yet, a castle that had been crumbling for centuries did not repair itself.

  “You’re dressed for the party,” Violet said, tossing the torn foil onto the nightstand. “Now what?”

  She had no artifices, no technique—only passion and honesty. Elias nearly loved her for that.

  “You’ve been in the driver’s seat enough for the present,” he said, sitting up. “Get comfortable, Violet. The wild rumpus is about to begin.”

  She wiggled onto her back, her smile approving and shy in the moonlight. “That’s f
rom a children’s story.”

  “It’s from the bottom of my heart, too,” Elias said, positioning himself over her on all fours. “You seem to enjoy a bit of kissing.”

  If she’d been enthusiastic before, she was positively fiendish now. Her ankles locked at the small of Elias’s back, and her hands went a-Viking over every inch of him.

  “And here, I thought you were shy,” he muttered, nudging his way into bliss.

  “I’m reserved. That’s dif—oh, Elias Brodie. I can’t… That’s….” A great, eloquent sigh went out of her, and Elias knew from what she didn’t say that joining their bodies pleased her as much as it pleased him. Some part of him rejoiced to be with her this way, not simply to get his ashes hauled, but to be intimate with Violet Hughes.

  “You all right?” Elias whispered, pushing deeper.

  “I’m…” Another soft exhalation breezed past Elias’s ear. “Talk later.”

  He spoke to her in easy rhythms and soft kisses, in occasional pauses to marvel at the pleasure, and to catch his breath. Violet let go with all the glory of a healthy female yielding to nature’s greatest joy, and she held Elias so tightly his own satisfaction threatened to swamp his self-restraint.

  All three times.

  “I’ll be sore if I don’t stop being so greedy,” Violet said, brushing her hand over Elias’s flank.

  He felt that caress in wonderful, too-long-neglected places. “You sound pleased.” She sounded smug, satisfied, and happy—with herself, with him, with life.

  “I’m acres past pleased. I forgot how good lovemaking can feel, or maybe it hasn’t felt like this before. I’m babbling. I’m happy-babbling. Yum.”

  She kissed him witless, then kissed him beyond witless, until the pleasure took him, tossed him high, and left him in a panting, contented heap at her figurative feet.

  “Lovely,” she said, kissing his cheek. “Lovely, lovely, lovely. No wonder Scotsmen wear nothing under their kilts. Your womenfolk probably won’t hear of it.”

  Elias did not want to move, but being a gentleman wasn’t entirely a matter of holding doors. He extricated himself from Violet’s embrace, tended to the practicalities, then returned to the bed and spooned himself around her.

  “Thank you,” he said, kissing her shoulder. “I can take myself back across the road if you’d like to sleep in peace for the rest of the night.”

  “Don’t you dare run off now, Elias Brodie. The fun and games are delightful, but the cuddling matters too.”

  Mattered a great deal, in the right company. Elias drifted off, happy to oblige a woman who had her priorities in such fine order. His last thought was a wish that Violet could buy his property from him. She might not be able to offer as much as a developer could, but with her own farm as security, she might be able to pay enough to cover the castle renovations.

  He liked that idea. Liked the notion that a property of his could pass into her capable hands rather than be turned into cookie cutter yards separated by privacy fences and privet hedges.

  Maybe Violet would like the idea too.

  * * *

  Elias Brodie was a perilously generous and talented lover. Had Violet met him ten years earlier, she would have been ruined for most of those self-important college boys and their equally clueless grad school successors. She’d awoken to the caroling of the robins in the pre-dawn gloom, and to Elias kissing her nape.

  What a lovely way to start the day, and then Violet’s morning had grown lovelier still.

  She was dozing blissfully when Elias returned carrying a tray with three steaming mugs. His hair was damp and he smelled of lavender soap, suggesting he’d grabbed a shower while the coffee brewed.

  “I didn’t know if you took tea or coffee in the morning,” he said, nudging the door closed with his foot. “I brought both. The dogs are fed and sniffing around the side yard. I didn’t see any cats.”

  Violet struggled to sitting, though her hair wasn’t cooperating. At some point in the middle of the night, Elias had unraveled her braid and teased her with—

  Maybe she’d dreamed that part?

  “Good morning,” Violet said, tucking the sheets under her arms. Elias wore a pair of blue turquoise board shorts.

  Violet wore an idiot grin.

  “I’m a tea drinker in the morning,” Elias said, sitting on what had been Violet’s side of the bed before she’d scooted over to wallow in sheets warmed by his body heat. “Black first thing in the day, green tea in the afternoon, herb concoctions in the evening. I didn’t know how you preferred yours.”

  For a man who’d been God’s gift to a single lady farmer an hour ago, he was studying a plain mug of tea almost bashfully.

  Violet added milk and sugar to hers, and wished she had the next eternity to get to know Elias Brodie better.

  “I don’t care for coffee,” she said, “but I’ll resort to it during lambing season, or when the tractor has turned up contrary the day before the combine is supposed to come through. Needs must when the devil drives.”

  Elias set his mug on the nightstand, among the foil wrappers left over from their lovemaking. “How are you, Violet Hughes?”

  Dandy came to mind.

  “Half in love with you,” Violet said, setting her tea aside and curling along his side. “Don’t get your manly commitment phobias in a bunch. I can fall half in love with a seed catalog or a freshly stacked mow full of first-cutting hay.” She hadn’t though, not for a long time.

  Elias’s arm settled around her shoulders, the embrace so natural Violet would have started purring if she’d been able.

  “Only half in love? My technique is in want of polish, apparently. I can claim a similar affliction where you’re concerned. You are a wondrously passionate woman.”

  If Elias Brodie had manly phobias about anything, they were apparently kept in check by a roundtrip plane ticket, damn the luck.

  “What are you passionate about?” Under no circumstances would Violet pass up an opportunity to cuddle with a man who’d brought her hot tea and fed her dogs without being asked. Her mood was beyond rosy, and thank God and the Farmer’s Almanac, the hay needed another day to dry.

  The day’s plans included changing the oil in the tractor, scrubbing out the sheep’s water trough, sweeping the hay mow in preparation for the wagonloads coming off the field…

  And eighteen other pressing, important, demanding chores Violet couldn’t recall when Elias was tracing her eyebrows with one finger.

  “You ask about my passions, but I haven’t many. I’m decent at any number of peculiar sports—skeet shooting, for example, polo, shinty, curling—and I like fast cars and the smell of engines. I enjoy seeing a charitable institution thrive if it has a true sense of vocation—many don’t—and I’m competent in several languages. That’s not unusual where I come from. I’d have to say Brodie Castle is about all that qualifies as a passion.”

  He sounded as if this was a recent realization and not a particularly happy one.

  “My dad was the same way,” Violet said. “He could fix anything with his hands, played a mean harmonica, knew Beatles trivia inside out, could shear the most ornery sheep without a nick, and could predict the weather ten days out with 90 percent accuracy, but all he cared about was this farm.”

  And his family. Violet had taken years to figure out that for her father, caring for the farm amounted to caring for the family and for humanity as a species.

  Elias pulled her closer, close enough to kiss her temple. “This was your father’s castle. I wish Zebedee had been a bit more respectful of the family seat, and not quite as avid about collecting his single malts. I suppose every one of the earls of Strathdee has inherited something of a work in progress.”

  Violet sat up to take a sip of her tea, though she didn’t want to leave the bed. This was what a morning after ought to be like—a lovely, cuddly, extension of the previous night’s intimacies, not an awkward parting that both parties intended to be permanent.

  She paus
ed, the mug half way to her mouth. “Did you just tell me you’re an earl?”

  “Elias, Earl of Strathdee, at your service, not that that title means anything.”

  The sun was clearing the ridge to the east, bright streaks banding the white coverlet. The light was clear, suggesting the humidity would stay low for the rest of the day, which was a gift to every farmer in the valley who had hay down.

  “The title is part of you,” Violet said, rather than admit to a goofy pleasure at having gone to bed with what had to be one of very few earls on the face of the earth. “I suspect the title is wrapped up in your castle too. I own only part of this farm. My mom owns the rest.”

  Elias stretched out his arm, a silent invitation for Violet to resume her place at his side. She complied, reveling in the sheer bliss of a day starting out with affection and companionship rather than hard work and worry.

  And loneliness. Mustn’t forget the loneliness that no chickens, dogs, or quilting projects could ever address.

  “Where is this mother of yours, Violet?”

  “In Florida with husband number three. He’s a big improvement over husband number two, but if I want to see my mother, I go there. She loved my father, she did not love this farm.”

  “That was Zebedee. He loved the family, right down to the drooling babies and contrary aunties, but not so much the family seat. He loved me, too, so I won’t criticize him for leaving me a castle to put to rights.”

  How many men spoke this easily of love? “You loved him,” Violet said, thinking of her father. God-damned lousy business when a farmer dropped over from a heart attack. “He raised you?”

  “The Brodie heir is traditionally sent off to a properly snobbish public school—boarding school, you’d call it—so off to boarding school I did go. Headmaster called me into his office one day and said I was to leave school a few weeks ahead of the other boys. I was overjoyed. Most of the other lads were English, and I hadn’t really made friends among them. Then Headmaster told me my uncle was waiting for me in the chapel. One look at Zeb’s face and I was certain nothing in my life would ever be the same.”