Finding Bliss

by B L Bierley

  “Unmarried girls do not attend gentlemen in private homes without proper escorts. What would my parents say?”

  This comment came from out of the blue as the woman appeared momentarily distracted by a thought. The next few moments were surreal. Eric had neither the will nor the common sense to stop what was coming.

  The woman leaned to her right ever so slightly, and took his face between her palms. With movements so small no instrument on earth could measure them, she pulled him toward her while staring into him with smoldering eyes. Licking her lips for moisture, he couldn’t pull away as she planted them firmly against his own.

  Time, air, wind, the ticking of the clock outside the room, all seemed to stop in that instant. Eric’s mouth pressed against hers for a moment longer than he realized before his willpower (to not give in to the temptation of such a willing mouth) shattered like broken sugar glass at his feet. He opened his lips and let his tongue come out for a taste of her.

  Wetting the seam of her closed mouth, he teased until she opened to him. Eric’s breathing became rough and tempestuous against her cheek. When the mysterious woman angled her body upward to gain more access to him, the change in her body positioning broke the connection between them.

  Eric jerked backward in surprise. He stepped down from the platform and began to walk behind the chaise. Turning toward her back to tell her the exam was over, he noticed something that stopped him abruptly as if he’d run into an imaginary wall.

  There on her shoulder he spied a mark. He leaned closer before he realized what he was about and tugged the loose neckline of her chemise downward to have a better view. The birth mark was a near perfect match to the shape of the South American continent! A wave of familiarity washed over him with sudden heat.

  “Bliss?”

  “Took you long enough, Eric,” Bliss said in dry nerve. Then she sighed. “I suppose that couldn’t be helped, though.”

  “What in the devil are you doing here?” Eric asked, not yelling but also not hiding the fact that her deception was clearly unfair.

  He stormed around the dressing screen and yanked her day dress from the coat rack. Snatching her slippers from the floor he marched out like an angry tyrant. Bliss watched him surreptitiously as he fiddled with the gown, turning it and gathering the skirt in such a way as to prepare to dress her like an errant child.

  This made her cross, but Bliss wasn’t prone to theatrics. Faking illness to get someone to do her bidding was one thing. But what they’d done … what he was nearly tempted to keep doing … that was … what was it? Eric shook off the naked desire silently warring within him a few moments earlier and placed the dress over her head without a care.

  Bliss sat and moved her arms to assist him in his attempts to get her sufficiently buttoned and covered. The patience of her acquiescence made him all the more disgruntled. The moment he put her second slipper onto her foot, he moved quickly to the door and yanked it open.

  “I’m summoning your maid. You shall leave this office at once, or I’ll personally write to your father and tell him what you’re about, young lady! What’s her name?”

  “Never mind Pauline. She’s having tea with your poor nurse. I have something to tell you.”

  The statement stopped him cold. Whenever Bliss said there was something to tell, it usually meant bad news. The idea that came next, to embarrass her like a juvenile, couldn’t be helped.

  “It’s kind of hard to tell anyone news with your mouth involved in slobbering all over them trying to steal kisses,” Eric said petulantly. Bliss rolled her eyes.

  “You’re going to be getting married very soon,” she said without ceremony. “I know who it is. It will be the result of a compromising situation you find yourself in. You know, you really should take care not to be so flippant with your affections, Eric.” Bliss told him with cool disdain. Then she continued without waiting for him to make a logical reply through his indignation.

  “I’ll be at Uncle Ozzie and Aunt Pen’s house for a while. Whisper Chase as it’s known. Feel free to call upon me if you like. Oh, and you will need to examine Aunt Pen. She’s going to have another baby—fairly sooner than she thinks.”

  Bliss dropped to her feet before Eric could formulate another coherent thought. Not looking at him, she strolled over to the open door and left the room without so much as a wave.

  Eric stood in the examination room for a full ten minutes. The pronouncement of his impending marriage was most upsetting. But why on earth did Bliss feel the need to come all the way to Bristol like this and tell him?

  Was she trying to protect him from an unfortunate match? The idea of marriage, good or bad, terrified him. He was young, barely twenty six, and willing partners for physical affection were in abundance these days.

  Many young widows sought him out for their medical needs, and he had no problem with their forward natures when it came time for their treatment period to end. It made him only a little uneasy since these same women paid him for medical care. But he always managed to forget the uneasiness whenever they were simply naked and pliant beneath his skilled hands in bed.

  Suddenly an involuntary shudder rocked him nearly off his feet. Bliss! What had he just done with her? They were kissing in his exam room! He kissed Bliss like a drowning man seeking air!

  Much as he wanted to be appalled by the notion, he couldn’t resist revisiting the kiss in his mind for a moment. The flavor of her warm mouth still on his tongue, Eric could feel stirrings of his own arousal pulsing in his lower veins. He clearly needed a cool bath to clear his forbidden feelings for a girl whom he’d known since she was in short dresses!

  There was really no harm in a physical attraction to her, though. Not now, anyway. Bliss had to be, what? About twenty? Twenty-one years old? She was five years his junior when they were little, so now she was definitely within the bounds of decency for him to consider.

  “What the hell am I even thinking? It’s Bliss for crying out loud!” Eric spoke to the empty room.

  “Sir?” Scarlet’s voice made him jump a foot off the ground.

  “Scarlet! You scared the starch out of me! I’m sorry to be so rude, but I’m afraid I need to leave the office today. I’ve got some important business to attend to, and since you’re obviously still suffering from your head cold, perhaps this would be a good day to close the office and take a rest.

  “Repeat the tonic every six hours and the steam treatment before you retire for the evening. Send word to any of my afternoon appointments, would you? Have anyone with an emergency directed to Dr. Stemley. I’ll be out of pocket for the remainder of the day,” Eric said.

  He tried not to look guilty as he slipped past the bewildered nurse. But the fact that he was suffering from a near painful erection was difficult to hide. To her credit, Scarlet said nothing of his uncomfortable state. She merely nodded absently and watched as Eric moved to his office, grabbed his satchel, and left as quickly as possible.

  Chapter Ten

  Bliss, Bristol, March 1811

  All in all the meeting went as Bliss expected, aside from the difficulty of discerning who would instigate the kisses. Bliss and Pauline hurried back to Whisper Chase intent on making it back in time to visit a little with Aunt Pen before she took off on her daily errands.

  Penelope was in the upstairs sitting room when they returned and invited Bliss to sit with her while she worked on her embroidery. Bliss was glad to have the time to wait with her. Instead of having lengthy conversation, however, Bliss was subjected to the light sound of a snore as Aunt Pen fell asleep over her needle work.

  It gave her a thrill of wonder at how easily a woman who had born two children could ignore the obvious signs of her pregnancy. Bliss used the time while her aunt dozed to reflect upon the meeting with Eric. Specifically she reviewed the kissing.

  Having absolutely no basis for comparison, Bliss was still rational enough to recognize the significance of the way it affected them both. Eric definitely responded to he
r physically. She could see it in his overall manner the way he had lost himself in the moments of heady affection.

  Bliss also wasn’t immune to the way his kisses turned her into a simpering nitwit! It had been so difficult to sit still and allow him to redress her and treat her like a naughty child when every fiber of her wanted to shed the dress, the chemise and stockings and make the blurry visions of her first sexual encounter come to life.

  Releasing a sighed breath she hardly knew she was holding, Bliss closed her eyes and tried to picture the grainy images of her wedding night. The vision was there, complete and unaltered in her memory. But the years and her maturity level still wouldn’t let the scene come into true focus.

  Bliss only knew, with absolute certainty, that it was her future. If it wasn’t, the vision would have changed and another face, another man, would be there in the room. Her unfortunate blindness to the actual act of making love left the view woefully chaste.

  The only part that was certain was the curve of Eric’s mouth as he smiled. She held on to that vision as tightly as possible.

  A minute later a new vision played for her. In it Bliss was in an unfamiliar house dining with unfamiliar faces. All save one. The woman who had invited her to brunch! And there was a flicker of something else in the vision. A child and … a feather?

  What was that about?

  Bliss rarely concerned herself with trivial mundane visions about people she recently met. She recognized the feather from a cap she bought before the St. Patrick’s Day Ball. It was in her trunk upstairs. But the reason why she would see the feather in connection with someone’s little boy wouldn’t gel for her.

  Another scene came and left with no explanation. She saw herself in a room. It looked like a dusty office somewhere. It made no logical sense. Before Bliss had time to vet the details, Aunt Pen dropped her embroidery hoop and woke with a start.

  “Wha … Oh, my goodness, Bliss! What a horrible host I’m turning out to be! How long have I been sleeping? Shame on you for letting me doze like that! We need to be more active and move around. Why don’t we take a turn in the garden and refresh ourselves? I’ll have the housekeeper send a tray of finger foods and lemonade out to the veranda for when we return,” Penelope said. Bliss could tell her aunt was embarrassed at her fatigue.

  They put on their walking cloaks and boots and met at the outer path that led through the garden. Penelope walked in a measured slowness that Bliss understood better than her aunt. Penelope colored and made excuses for her tiredness, stopping often to sit on a bench, unable to keep moving for getting too winded.

  Throughout the walk Bliss made several pointed arrow remarks about her mother’s pregnancies with Cori, Andre and the twins. Penelope shook her head and laughed each time without taking any of them seriously until Bliss pointed out that her own mother had been past forty when she had the twins.

  “Dear, you must remember that your mother also had several pregnancies since you were born, whereas I haven’t had any since Maxwell. And he’s just about your age. No, I think you must remember that this is just me getting on in years. Stop all that nonsense about babies and let’s return to the house. I’m extremely tired, and I believe I’ll need an early supper and turn in for the evening. I do hope you can forgive my inhospitable behavior,” Penelope sighed in defeat.

  “Of course, I don’t really mind. I have some letters to write anyway. And I expect a caller tomorrow. We should want to be fresh when the gentleman arrives,” Bliss remarked crisply.

  “A gentleman caller? Who is coming to call upon you in Bristol?” Penelope was suddenly more alert.

  “He is just an old friend, Aunt Pen. It’s no one to get upset over. He’s been acquainted with my family for years. You will likely not remember him. I don’t believe you ever had the pleasure of his acquaintance. He lives here in Bristol.”

  Bliss gave only limited details. Penelope continued to look intrigued as they walked a snail’s pace back to the house.

  Chapter Eleven

  Eric, Bristol, March 1811

  The long day plagued Eric with thoughts of Bliss’s message. That wasn’t entirely true. Some of the thoughts were distinctly of kissing Bliss, but Eric refused to let them invade his brain for longer than a few heartbeats before he shoved them out forcefully.

  Instead of being relieved by knowing his fate, as he’d often thought he would be, the very idea that forces outside his control would put him in the way of the vicar and vows made him nauseous.

  Most of his afternoon consisted of visiting with a few of his male shut-ins, checking gouty ankles and prescribing regimens of exercise to a few of his less-serious ailing complaints. When a messenger reached him in the middle of the street on his way to his favorite coffee house, Eric realized that being a surgeon didn’t stop merely because you had a personal crisis. Lady Normand was in need of his services.

  The young widow suffered no serious ailments that he could figure out. But she did have occasional bouts of hysteria, and he seemed to be the only one able to alleviate them with any consistency. She often said he reminded her of her poor Lord Normand.

  Her young husband was taken from her too soon by a reaction to a helping of clam bisque. There hadn’t been any way to save him when swelling had cut off his airway completely. By the time a surgeon, not Eric, had arrived there wasn’t anything that could have prevented his death.

  Lady Normand’s hysterical attacks usually came whenever someone inadvertently served anything remotely related to clams, bisque or soup. She had a morbid fear of soups of any kind. Usually Eric would be summoned to administer a dose of laudanum or talk her out of any irrational reaction to an unfortunate brunch where a hostess served a soup course.

  The attacks weren’t usually immediate, but when they set in, Lady Normand was a danger to herself and sometimes the people around her. Eric ignored the subject of his own troubles and hurried to do his job.

  At first it didn’t occur to him that there was anything unusual about the house-call. Usually there were four or five servants in the vicinity, shaking with the fear that they would be injured when Lady Normand hurled an oil lamp or some crystal or china decoration at them. But when Eric walked into the foyer, the butler seemed calmer than usual.

  “Dr. Benchley, good afternoon. Lady Normand is expecting you,” the man said frowning curiously.

  “I was summoned by a lad in your livery to attend to an episode of hysterics. Has she calmed down on her own this time?” Eric asked.

  “I am unaware that there has been any, sir. But Lady Normand is in the drawing room. Perhaps you would like to check in on her since you’ve come so far?” the man asked not meeting Eric’s gaze.

  “I’ll give her a quick look, in case she’s on the verge.”

  There was a queer sense of foreboding in the man’s behavior. But Eric was determined to make sure Lady Normand didn’t need medication. It would take much longer to get her calm if she were already in the throes of her reaction so to head the problem off preventatively seemed the wisest choice. Eric followed the butler up the massive stairway and into drawing room.

  “Dr. Benchley,” the butler announced as he opened the door.

  Lady Normand was in the room, seated on a sofa near the fire. Her eyes looked red-rimmed and it was apparent that she had been emotional sometime recently.

  Eric walked in and turned to the butler to request a maid or female servant to attend the exam. But the man had vanished without a sound. This didn’t really upset Eric. Most of the time butlers seemed to know what to do before being asked.

  Eric turned back to face Lady Normand.

  “How are you feeling this afternoon? I got word you were in need of a surgeon,” Eric replied, looking diagnostically at the woman on the sofa.

  “Dr. Benchley, do come in. Yes, I had a little episode a bit ago. It wasn’t soup related, though.” The woman gave a dramatic wince as though the word was too painful for her.

  “No, it was my mother-in-law’s f
ault. She brought me such dreadful news today. The new Lord Normand is planning to have the London house remodeled and orders me to remain here for the entire season! I won’t be able to visit my friends or have anything to distract me in my sad hours. It caused me such spasms and shortness of breath, I had to leave a morning visit to Lady Norfolk so abruptly I thought she might think I slighted her!” Lady Normand wailed.

  Tears were curiously absent from her face, Eric noted. Pursuant to his role as caregiver, he asked her if she needed a new bottle of laudanum.

  “I really don’t like to take it, you see. It makes me all muddled and lazy,” she said as she removed her lap throw and stood to walk toward the chair closer to Eric.

  Her gown was loose around her shoulders and a flash of a scandalously black corset appeared accidentally. Or so he thought. The minute Lady Normand was close enough she affected a very theatrical swoon. Eric braced his body so that he caught her from behind.

  Knowing, as any good surgeon would that this swoon was fake, Eric felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle. Lady Normand was a bit melodramatic, but she was genuinely distraught in all her previous episodes. This was nothing like her usual behavior. The memory of a rumor from one of his colleagues at the hospital came to the foreground of this thought.

  It was rumored that Lady Normand had a proclivity for afternoon sex and her lover, the current Lord Normand—her deceased husband’s rakish cousin, had recently become engaged to a wealthy baron’s daughter. A stab of recognition at the sound of Lady Lyle’s voice, Lady Normand’s mother, coming quickly into the room jolted Eric into action.

  He shoved Lady Normand to the chair so fast she gasped in indignation.

  “Lady Normand, I’ll leave you with a bottle of tonic. Take a tablespoon before you go to bed each evening until this unfortunate period in your life has passed. In future, you will need to seek treatment from Dr. Stemley. I’m no longer available for house-calls.