“So did I,” Greymoor said on a frown. “Do you suppose that’s the point of Douglas’s letter, to let us know Gwen is without a chaperone?”
“That is exactly the kind of self-defeating thing he would do,” David said, nuzzling the wee bundle on his shoulder. “Alerting us to the situation with Rose seems to be the more apparent agenda. What a prince old Douglas is.”
Greymoor let his chair come to rest. “Douglas is an odd duck. You like him?”
“I don’t know him well enough to really say. I think I would like him, were he to allow it. I can admit to respecting him.” And to worrying about him. Any man who’d buried two brothers in the space of a year deserved some worry—a lot of worry.
“I can admit to respecting him as well, as can Heathgate.” Greymoor’s dark brows drew down on this uncomfortable admission. “We’re half hoping Amery and Gwennie take a liking to each other. They’re both… a bit lost. The ladies endorsed this scheme wholeheartedly.”
David suspected his sisters had, in fact, come up with the idea, and deftly allowed the menfolk to think the notion their own.
He pressed a kiss to the baby’s downy crown. “Amery is so damned alone, he provokes one to protectiveness. His mother is said to be enjoying a permanent if dramatic decline out in Kent, and his late brothers were a pair of useless, barely decorative ciphers. How they both managed to come to grief by virtue of misuse of firearms is a damned unfortunate mystery. I admit myself pleased that you, Heathgate, and my sisters have taken him in hand. He has no people left worth having, and I know how that feels.”
Greymoor slouched lower in his chair and propped his chin on his fist. “But your sisters married brilliantly, so Heathgate and I can now keep you from the worst of your follies.”
David ignored that small, familial jab, bloody true though it was. Why did babies always smell so good—except when they didn’t? “This prevention of folly works in both directions, Greymoor.”
“So you’re off to Sussex to look after Douglas? He won’t appreciate it.”
More to the point, Douglas wouldn’t recognize caretaking, though perhaps Gwen Hollister might introduce him to the concept. “I’ll look after Douglas, Gwen, and Rose. I shall be an honorary relative to all and sundry. And I must say, Greymoor, my dear little niece seems to be thriving. I do think she’ll keep the fair good looks she no doubt inherited from her uncle David.”
David gave the child’s fuzzy head one more nuzzle, put the baby back in her crib, and turned to Greymoor, who watched him silently from the rocking chair.
Which had the unusual result of provoking David to a spate of quiet babbling. “You might at least wish me safe journey, tell me my sister will miss me, or offer some familial sentiment to keep me warm as I slough through the autumn downpours.”
“I might, but instead I’ll warn you to keep your hands off my cousin,” Greymoor said, getting to his feet. “Gwen has been unwilling or unable to journey from Enfield for years, and she doesn’t need you meddling with her newfound courage. Do not tempt Douglas to reckless imbibing, and don’t you dare risk your horse trying to make time on the muddy roads.”
As familial sentiments went, that would have to do. David blew a kiss to the sleeping baby and preceded his host out of the nursery.
***
“Rose seems to be settling in nicely,” Douglas remarked as Gwen’s daughter went shrieking past them down the banister.
Rather than reply to that helpful observation, Gwen stomped down the stairs, just as another little girl went hurtling past on the banister, landing on a giggling Rose at the bottom of the steps. Two more little girls joined the tangle of arms, legs, and laughter, leaving a horrified Hester at the top of the stairs.
“Oh, dear me,” Hester muttered, bustling down the steps past his lordship. “Oh, dear goodness… ma’am, milord, I am so sorry. You girls!” Douglas stood silently by as Gwen took turns with Hester, scolding and fussing over the four little girls who had found such hilarity in disobedience.
“But, Mama,” Rose protested, “you never said we couldn’t slide down the banister.”
Douglas sauntered down the steps, hands in his pockets, and drat the man if his expression didn’t reflect curiosity as to how the ever-competent Miss Hollister—his latest sobriquet for her—would handle this situation.
“I am telling you now.” She was nearly bellowing it, in fact.
“And I,” Hester added, shaking a finger at her younger sisters, “have told you and told you not to slide down the banister at the rectory.”
“But this isn’t the rectory,” one of the twins pointed out.
“Barristers, the lot of them,” Douglas muttered loudly enough for Gwen to hear. He sank onto the bottom step rather than take his observant self elsewhere. “As I recall, sliding down forbidden banisters is thirsty work, though it does leave such a nice polish on the wood. Of course, once one knows a banister is not for sliding upon, one would never, ever again make the same mistake, would one?”
“No, Cousin Douglas,” Rose said, sneaking a measuring glance at Gwen.
“Miss Hester,” Douglas said, “if you take the miscreants off to the kitchen for some cider, I’m sure they’ll be much better behaved in future.”
And off they went, a band of small female rogues beaming smiles over their shoulders—at Douglas.
Gwen sat on the step beside him as the girls departed, drew her knees up, and dropped her forehead in defeat. “Sometimes, the hardest thing about being a parent is not laughing.”
Douglas slipped an arm around her and squeezed her shoulders. “If you say so, though from what I hear, motherhood doesn’t exactly start with a walk in the park.”
“No. That would be fatherhood.”
“Temper,” Douglas remonstrated. “Having quelled the native insurrection, shall we get back to those inventories?”
Drat the blasted inventories, the natives, and the humor in Douglas’s blue eyes.
Gwen nodded, but made no move to return to the library. After several days inspecting Linden on horseback, she was confident the estate had much to recommend it. The stables were nothing short of lovely, and the other outbuildings in good repair.
But problems lurked, as well. The home farm was small, the home wood, by contrast, large and overgrown. Little of the land was under cultivation, most of it having been overgrazed by the ubiquitous sheep. Fencing was an issue, as was irrigation. Both were expensive and necessary, as Gwen had gently indicated to Douglas.
Douglas huffed out a sigh and lifted his arm from Gwen’s shoulders. “I am usually good at following figures through a transaction, but with the accounts we’ve seen, I am flummoxed, for there’s no telling if this estate is profitable or not.” He rose from their step and held out a hand to assist Gwen to her feet.
She did not glare at his hand, did not drop his fingers as if they were unclean, and did not sniff her grudging thanks—wasn’t even tempted to, come to that. She let him haul her upright and tuck her hand over his arm.
When and how had his civilities become charming? When had they become endearing? For she would miss them when she was back at Enfield, riding acres that did not belong to her, keeping a house she would never own.
“Linden is profitable, Douglas,” she assured him as they moved into the library. “These books do not show any large disbursements to Greymoor’s accounts. The money is here somewhere, we just have to find it.” And she badly wanted to find it for him.
“Perhaps. Or perhaps we have to admit the books are rotten, the land is tired, the house an expensive little jewel I do not deserve, give up, and go back to Town.”
He settled beside her on the sofa, and Gwen thought, not for the first time, she was coming to be at ease with, even to like his proximity.
Not simply like his probity and mannerliness, but to like him.
“Guinevere?” Douglas
regarded her, his expression puzzled. “Where in the world did you get off to?”
She’d drifted, caught up in the memory of Douglas grabbing her bare hand when they’d shared lunch the first day she’d met him; of him holding her, tired and weepy, in the bedroom upstairs; tucking her hand around his forearm as they went in to dinner; and gently interrogating her while deftly dodging her own queries.
Douglas had asked her something, but Gwen was distracted by an abrupt physical awareness of him, sitting so close their thighs touched. So close she could catch a whiff of sage and cedar over the scent of the wood fire in the hearth. “You were saying?”
“Nothing of any moment, apparently.” He sat back and stretched his arm along the back of the sofa.
Which left Gwen with a dilemma. If she sat back too, his arm would be almost around her shoulders, but she couldn’t exactly hunch away from Douglas or stand up without appearing rude.
Nor did she want to.
“You are still shy of me.” Douglas was not happy about this, but Douglas-fashion, he was not angry, either.
Gwen smoothed a hand over the blue brocade of the sofa, a lighter blue than Douglas’s eyes. She was shy of him. Also… curious. “Shy is an improvement over unnecessarily anxious.”
“It is at that.”
Douglas’s hands settled on Gwen’s shoulders, tugging her back against him. She resisted mostly for form’s sake, but allowed herself to be tucked against his side, his arm coming around her. This was not so very different from a tired embrace at the end of the day, a chaste kiss to the forehead or the cheek.
“So tell me, Guinevere, what your impressions are of intimate relations between a man and a woman.”
Her heart sped up, and her stomach felt as if it were taken over by a flock of hummingbirds. Even so, were she to bolt off the couch in horror, panic, or sheer surprise, Gwen knew Douglas would escort her in to dinner that night with the same manners he’d shown her for the past week. All he’d done was put an arm around her and ask her a question. A simple, direct question.
And she was not horrified. Not horrified at all—though she should be. Horrified and mindful of all the risks that had lurked as close as London since the day Rose had been born.
“In truth, I have few impressions of those relations you allude to. My experience was the minimum needed to result in… Rose.” Also in years of rustication, in shame and ruin.
Douglas drew a pattern on her arm with his elegant fingers, and the quality of his touch warned Gwen his intent was not strictly to comfort or to offer mere affection. The hummingbirds flew upward, creating havoc in her lungs.
“Should I be sad for your sake,” Douglas mused, “because you have paid such a high price for so little pleasure?”
“For no pleasure whatsoever.” Not even the pleasure of a soft, sweet caress on her arm or a good-night kiss to her cheek. Not the pleasure of arguing over the best use of a fallow field, or the pleasure of a quiet, shared meal at the end of the day.
“No pleasure whatsoever? Now that is unfortunate.” Douglas’s voice took on an edge. “Were you at least willing?”
“At first,” Gwen said, closing her eyes. He was doing it again, pulling confidences and confessions from her without her intending to part with them—and without her objection.
“But then it hurt,” Douglas surmised, “and your lover would neither stop nor discipline himself to see to your comfort, much less your pleasure.”
Gwen did not move, despite the havoc Douglas’s quiet conclusion wreaked with her composure. In six years, not one person had raised with her the topic of that bewildering encounter, not one person had intimated that Gwen might have been ill-used. “He stopped eventually.”
“And a few weeks later you realized you had lost more than your virginity and your innocence.”
The edge in his voice was at odds with the gentle stroking of his hand along her back, neck, and shoulders. Gwen did not want to contaminate that welling, stealthy pleasure with more words, and certainly not with more old memories.
“I lost my ignorance.” But she’d lost those other things he’d named too, and they had been precious.
“I would like to discuss a transaction with you, Guinevere, but if you find the topic distasteful, we will drop it and forget I ever mentioned it.”
So beguiling were his caresses, Gwen had to concentrate to grasp the meaning of his words: he wanted to talk business.
“I’m listening.” To his hand, to the warmth of him beside her, to his lovely, woodsy scent. To the soft roar of the fire and the ticking of the clock.
And to hummingbirds, soaring about inside her in anticipation of what, she dared not guess.
“You have mentioned that on occasion you will consign goods or products into the keeping of a trusted merchant. You handle wool this way and firewood. If your bailiff cannot find custom willing to pay the price you set, your goods are returned essentially undiminished, and you’re free to offer them elsewhere.”
“I insist on a contract when dealing on consignment,” Gwen managed. She picked up a small green brocade pillow and traced its fleur-de-lis pattern, lest she yield to the desire to apply her hands to Douglas’s person.
“I seek a sort of contract with you,” Douglas said. “A consignment of nonperishable goods, on a temporary basis, for your inspection and possible use.”
His fingers on her neck were exquisitely pleasurable, warm, sweet, and unhurried. Douglas was never in a hurry, and yet Gwen had failed to appreciate that a measured, deliberate approach to life’s pleasures might have intimate appeal.
“Can’t this consignment wait until our task here at Linden is done, Douglas? I’m sure Greymoor or Fairly would be happy to entertain commercial negotiations with you.”
His finger traced the curve of her ear, and Gwen shivered.
“That will not do. The goods I have to offer would have no appeal to your relations. I hope they have unique appeal to you.”
She should pull away. She should ring for the blasted tea tray. She should… keep her eyes open. “Douglas, what are you doing?”
“Indulging myself, which is part of the bargain I envisage, but by no means all. And the door is locked, Guinevere. Mrs. Kitts is off at market, and it’s half day for the footmen. We will not be disturbed.”
Douglas and his details. He rubbed her earlobe between his thumb and forefinger, slowly, which was not a detail when Gwen had never experienced that particular sensation before.
She rose off the sofa on shaky knees, the hummingbirds having migrated to her limbs and even her earlobes. She moved a quartet of candle holders on the mantel so they were evenly spaced. “What goods are we discussing, Douglas?”
He stood as well and prowled toward her, but she did not turn. The heat of the fire was before her, and Douglas stood immediately behind her.
“I am the goods in question. Myself, Guinevere. I offer myself into your temporary keeping.”
Gwen had to brace herself with a hand on the mantel as Douglas’s breath fanned over her neck. “You offer yourself on consignment?”
His lips touched that vulnerable place where her shoulder and throat met, the softest, most tender caress Gwen had endured in her entire life. When his arms slipped around her waist, she was grateful for the support.
“I offer my body for your delectation and pleasure,” Douglas said. “I have something more to offer you as well, Guinevere Hollister.”
Two thoughts collided in Gwen’s brain, the first being that she should stop him soon. He was presuming, and his civilities had shifted to improper advances, and those… they led to places Gwen ought not to be so interested in. Places she had not admitted to herself she might go with this man.
With any man, ever again.
The second thought was pernicious and wicked—also irresistible. Douglas would be a thorough, considerate, even lav
ish lover. He would attend to every detail, spare no effort, his discretion would be faultless, and his hands—
“What else do you offer, Douglas, that I haven’t been offered a hundred times before?”
The question she’d intended as starchy came out woebegone. His embrace became more snug, though surely Gwen imagined its protective quality.
“Firstly, you know I would marry you, were you to conceive my child.”
She did know it, but that mattered not at all, for she would never marry him. “Marriage is no inducement to me and never will be.”
“Secondly…” He paused and nuzzled her hair. She hadn’t known grown men suffered the urge or had the ability to nuzzle. “I would never, ever cause you discomfort or awkwardness, Guinevere. Copulation is supposed to be pleasurable for both parties, and I would do my utmost to share that pleasure with you.”
Douglas Allen’s utmost was tempting argument in itself.
“How often do you suppose a man has said words like that to me? Many men, for that matter, because they all seem to think I want to hear them.”
“But this man,” Douglas said, widening his stance, “is promising you pleasure and something else, Guinevere.”
Douglas’s promises were trustworthy. Even regarding this unexpected, dangerous, alluring topic—especially regarding this topic—his promises would be trustworthy. “What else do you offer?”
The part of her lost to caution wanted him to touch her breasts—ached for it, and yet Gwen knew Douglas would not presume that far without her permission.
“I would promise you control,” Douglas said, his voice dropping to a purr. “When we couple, if we couple, it will be on your terms or not at all.”
His promise was dazzling, the secret wish Gwen did not voice even to herself: to have an intimate companion, somebody who knew her but did not ask her to sacrifice what remained of her reputation, her freedom, her privacy. Somebody she could spend time with far from the prying eyes of family and Polite Society—somebody safe.
She brought his hand up to cover her breast. “And if I do not find the goods to my standards?”
Douglas: Lord of Heartache (The Lonely Lords) Page 8