by Mary Balogh
His hand slipped behind her neck and drew her head toward his. Their lips met in a warm, sun-bright kiss.
“Mmm,” he said, rubbing his nose across hers.
“Mmm,” she sighed simultaneously.
Their lips met again, parted this time, teasing, searching lightly. He licked her lips with his tongue. She did the same to him. His tongue slid into her mouth and curled up to stroke the sensitive roof. She felt raw desire tighten her breasts and stab downward to her womb.
He came up off his elbow then, tossed her straw hat away, and gathered her into his arms. She was aware of summertime and sunshine and nature—and of the man she wanted more than anything else in life, it seemed. Foolish, foolish woman.
She was lying flat on the grass then, not quite sure how she had got there, reaching up her arms to draw him down with her. And passion flared. He kissed every part of her face, including her eyes, her ears, her earlobes. He kissed her throat and her bosom above the low square neckline of her dress. And while her fingers tangled in his hair and she lifted herself to rub against him, he lowered the neckline so that her breasts were exposed. He caressed them with his hands, rubbed his thumbs lightly over her nipples until she was all raw need, and then suckled her until she moaned with mingled pleasure and pain.
“Mon amour,” he murmured, returning his mouth to hers. “Je t’adore. Je t’aime.”
“Gervase,” she whispered back to him. “Gervase.”
When he raised himself to slide both hands up beneath the skirt of her dress, it did not occur to her to stop him. This had happened before between them, but so urgently and so hastily that she had longed ever since to have it happen again so that she could savor the process. With him. With Gervase. She would not think of all that had happened since then to make it undesirable. She would not think.
His hands stripped her of undergarments and stockings and shoes and himself of coat and waistcoat and shirt. And then he lifted her skirt, and one hand caressed its way up her inner thighs while he propped himself on the other elbow again and looked down at her with half-closed eyes. He was beautiful—broad-shouldered, his well-muscled chest lightly dusted with hair. She could smell his soap, his body heat, his masculinity.
He kissed her again softly, almost lazily, as his hand found the core of her and teased its way through folds to stroke her, to enter her with one finger and then two. She could feel her own wetness. She could hear it, and understood that the wetness was her body’s response to him, her invitation to him. She slid one bare foot up along the soft, warm grass, bending her knee and dropping it outward as she did so. His fingers pressed deeper, and she heard herself moan as her inner muscles clenched about them.
“Chérie,” he murmured. “Mon amour.” And he withdrew his hand to undo the buttons at the waist of his pantaloons and came over her to lie on top of her, his legs coming between hers.
She braced her feet against the supple leather of his boot tops and lifted her hips when his hands slid beneath her. She felt him, hard at her entrance, and tilted herself as he came into her with one firm stroke.
There was no pain, she discovered, only a lovely stretching and sense of being deeply occupied. She would have held on to that moment forever if she could, she thought, suddenly very aware again of sunshine and birdsong and the sound of water splashing into the river from the fountain. But need, an ache of longing, a demand for some completion, drove them beyond the moment.
He withdrew to the brink of her and then entered again—and repeated the motion over and over again until she could hear the smooth, liquid rhythm of their coupling. It was very different from last time. It lacked the frenzy and the sense of urgency. This was slow and thorough and engaged all the senses. And she was very aware of it as a shared experience. She was not just a woman engaged in a carnal act with a man. He was not just a man taking his pleasure from a willing woman’s body.
She was very aware that he was Gervase, that she had loved him almost from the first moment. He was aware—he was surely aware—that she was Morgan. He lifted his head while he worked in her and while she answered his rhythm with her own and watched her for a while, his eyes heavy-lidded with passion. He murmured to her in French.
They were a man and a woman making love.
But physical love was not something that could be observed for very long from inside the mind. It was an experience of sensation, of shared need and pain and excitement and pleasure. Morgan discovered that when, after a few minutes, the raw ache she had felt earlier spread to every part of her until it seemed that she could bear it no longer. She broke her own rhythm and strained up against him, reaching for something she could not even identify.
But instead of stopping as well, his hands came beneath her again, and he held her firmly while he thrust harder and deeper into her. And then, just as she cried out, convinced that she really could not bear it one moment longer, the ache, the need, burst into something quite different, something so unexpected that she could only cling to him and fall into a new place, one she had never entered before.
He moved in her again, once, twice, three times, and then he held deep in her and sighed, and she felt heat at her core.
He came down heavily on top of her after that, relaxed and panting and smelling enticingly of soap and sweat.
“Ah, mon amour,” he murmured once more against her ear.
She must have fallen asleep, she realized some time later. He had moved to her side, one of his arms beneath her head. Her skirt was covering her legs again, and his shirt was draped loosely over both of them to shield them from the burning rays of the sun. Her straw hat was shading her face.
She turned her head to look at him. He was gazing back.
“That was not well done of me, chérie,” he said.
“Of you?” She raised her eyebrows. “I thought it was mutual.”
“Ah, and so it was, then.” He moved his head forward and kissed the tip of her nose. “We will set a wedding date. Perhaps for the early autumn? I am not sure I can wait much longer than that.”
She smiled slowly at him.
“Mon amour. Je t’adore, Je t’aime,” she said softly, quoting him. “I am not sure I can wait much longer than that. You disappoint me, Gervase. Have I so easily succeeded?”
She sat up, tied the wide ribbons of her hat beneath her chin, and pulled on her discarded undergarments and stockings and shoes. She was relieved to see that her hands were not shaking.
When she got to her feet, she could see that he was lying on his back, his shirt still over his torso, though his arms were bare, his hands clasped beneath his head. He was smiling lazily at her.
“Behold me abject and defeated, utterly annihilated,” he said. “But admit one thing, chérie. You enjoyed every moment.”
She raised her eyebrows haughtily. “But of course I enjoyed it,” she told him. “Did you not enjoy every moment with every one of the women you knew on the Continent?”
He chuckled.
“Mon amour,” he said, “je t’adore.”
She picked up all her painting supplies except the easel and newly painted canvas and with her chin elevated scrambled up the bank and down the other side onto the path of the wilderness walk.
She had won that battle, she thought, by the skin of her teeth. But the war was not over yet. She had come here to Windrush intending to tease and torment him before showing her disdain for him by ending their betrothal and thus embarrassing him before all his family and friends and neighbors. But she certainly had not intended that to happen.
Her legs felt slightly unsteady. Her breasts felt tender and she was sore inside—rather pleasantly so, perhaps, though she would rather not have had the feeling at all.
But she certainly could not accuse him of seducing or ravishing her, could she?
She was rather surprised—and perhaps a little disappointed—when he did not come along behind her. When she looked back to the trees across open lawns after reaching the house, he was nowhere in
sight.
He was probably sleeping outside the grotto.
Enjoying the slumber of the smugly just.
It was a good thing he was not within reach. She would have been tempted to slap his head right off his shoulders.
GERVASE HAD LEFT ALL THE PLANNING FOR THE fete and ball to his mother and sisters and cousin. All his laborers, all the villagers, and all the lower classes for miles around had been invited to the fete, which was to take place in the park of Windrush and was to include cricket and races and other competitions and lavish amounts of food and drink. The ball that was to take place the same evening was for neighbors and tenants of a higher class. Everyone had accepted the invitation, his mother assured them all at breakfast the morning after the visit to the grotto. There would be quite enough people to fill the ballroom though it would not, of course, rival a London squeeze.
Gervase made the mistake of asking to see the guest list, and his mother sent a servant to fetch it from her private sitting room right then. He sat at the head of the table running his eye down the list while Cecile came and looked at it over his shoulder.
“I was out with the children when Maman and Monique and Lady Aidan wrote the invitations,” she explained.
Gervase was less concerned with who was on the list than with who was not on it. He had not mentioned to his mother that she was not to be invited under any circumstances, but of course it had been unnecessary to do so. The name was not there, he saw with considerable relief.
“Well,” Cecile said, altogether too loudly, “I see you have not invited Marianne Bonner, Maman. And a good thing too. It is a wonder to me that she has the gall to make her home so close to Windrush.”
Gervase set the list facedown on the table while his own family members looked uncomfortable and the Bedwyns looked politely mystified.
“I thought she should be invited, Gervase,” Henrietta said. “It is time the past was forgotten about. Besides, no one in this part of the world knows what happened. But they will surely notice and start guessing when it is seen that Marianne is the only one of our neighbors for miles around who has not come.”
“You surely cannot be serious, Henrietta,” Monique said.
“Well, I am,” their cousin said, her voice shaking slightly.
“I think this conversation will terminate right here,” Gervase said firmly, “after I have explained to Morgan’s relatives that the lady in question offended me years ago before I left England and has not been forgiven.”
“I always consider other people’s family skeletons a dead bore,” Freyja said. “When are we to begin the ride you promised us today, Gervase? Josh says I must on no account jump any hedges, so I suppose you are going to have to choose a route that provides a few challenging fences instead.”
“I believe, sweetheart,” Joshua said as Gervase shot her a grateful glance, “I said hedges and fences, but you must be fair. My exact words—you will correct me if I am wrong—were that I supposed if I forbade you to jump any hedges or fences you would deliberately seek out both.”
“I’ll be a little more plainspoken, Free,” Aidan said. “If you so much as cast a longing glance at a hedge or fence—or gate—between now and sundown I will personally wring your neck.”
Virtually everyone at the table laughed—Freyja included—and the uncomfortable moment passed.
But it was not over.
“I suppose,” Morgan said to him later, when they were riding across country side by side, “you plan to live here for the rest of your life not five miles from Marianne without once seeing her.”
“I do,” he said quite decisively. “It may not be something a Bedwyn would do, chérie, but it is very definitely something an Ashford intends doing.”
“But Henrietta is right,” she said. “Word will soon spread that there is a quarrel between the two of you, and the whole thing will never die.”
“If she does not like the gossip,” he said, “then she may move away from here.”
Harold Spalding, his brother-in-law, rode up on her other side then and engaged her in conversation, and Gervase moved between Becky and Davy, the two children, both of whom had joined the ride. He set himself to amusing them for a while before moving up beside Freyja and making himself agreeable to her.
“I always did despise the notion of crawling over the countryside on a horse’s back,” she told him with a sigh, “and I have never yet been tossed from the saddle. But life becomes tedious when one is in expectation of a happy event, Gervase. And is that not a ridiculous euphemism? Life becomes tedious when one is expecting a baby. Tedious and infinitely exciting,” she added with a laugh.
He was reminded of what had kept him awake half the night—that he might well have impregnated Morgan yesterday afternoon. Not that he would particularly mind having to rush into marriage with her and having a child in the nursery in nine months’ time. But she might mind. It was impossible to know for sure. She certainly had him guessing.
He was not even sure that a pregnancy would force her to marry him. It might simply make her stubborn. The very idea was enough to cause him to break out in a cold sweat.
He found himself beside her again before they rode back into the park, a good three hours after they had left it. And she had not forgotten.
“Gervase,” she said, “do you not think you ought to call upon Marianne? Confront her? Ask her why she did what she did?”
“No!” He looked very directly across at her. “You had your way with the churchyard. You will not have your way this time.”
“But you are glad you went there,” she said. “You made your peace with your father. You do not have to hate him any longer.”
“There is no peace to be made with Marianne, chérie,” he told her. “And that is my final word.”
She opened her mouth to say more but thought better of it. She merely nodded instead. But she was silent for only a minute or so.
“It is not my final word, though,” she said. “My brother suffered from that incident too.”
He did not comment.
IT WAS NOT IN MORGAN’S NATURE TO LET SLEEPING dogs lie, especially when people she loved were involved—or a person she loved. She loved Wulfric.
And something had been niggling at the edges of her mind for a while. It had become persistent since that scene at breakfast.
One table of cards was set up in the drawing room during the evening. Conversation among everyone else was lively. Henrietta sat at the pianoforte half a room away from everyone else, playing quietly. Morgan joined her there and stood behind the bench looking at the music until she had finished playing that particular piece.
“Henrietta,” she said then, keeping her voice low, “you were there the night my brother’s betrothal to Lady Marianne Bonner was to be announced, were you not?”
Henrietta looked back over her shoulder, instantly wary.
“Yes, of course,” she said. “We were neighbors—that is, the Marquess of Paysley used to spend a part of each year at Winchholme. It was natural enough that he invite all of us to the ball—Uncle George and Gervase and me, that was. Monique and Cecile were still in the schoolroom, and Aunt Lisette had been called back to Windrush because Cecile was indisposed. Aunt Bertha, Uncle’s sister, was my chaperon.”
“It must have been dreadful for you,” Morgan said, perching on the end of the bench. “What happened at that ball, I mean.”
“Yes.” Henrietta closed the music and clasped her hands loosely in her lap. “It was. Dreadful.”
“How did they know where Marianne and Gervase had gone?” Morgan asked, leaning forward slightly to look into the other woman’s face. “If it was a large squeeze of a ball, how did they even know the two of them were together? And what made them think that they were in her bedchamber? Why did they go charging in there—apparently without even knocking on the door first? Why all three of them—Wulfric, Gervase’s father, and Marianne’s?”
Henrietta stared blankly back at her. “I do not
know,” she said.
“But did you never wonder?” Morgan asked her. “Did you never ask your uncle?”
“No,” Henrietta said. “I never did.”
“Do you wonder now?” Morgan gazed intently at her. Surely she must.
“I suppose I do,” Henrietta said, running one hand along the keys though she did not depress any of them. “Someone had seen them go upstairs together, I suppose. Some servant.”
“Henrietta.” Morgan moved to the edge of the bench. “Do you believe that Gervase did what they said he did? Do you believe he betrayed my brother and then stole a priceless heirloom from Marianne?”
Henrietta’s eyes were clouded with something that looked very like grief when she looked up. “No, of course not,” she said. “Of course not.”
“You believe, then,” Morgan said, “that it was Marianne who was the betrayer? That she drugged Gervase and got him into her bed and had someone send up Wulfric and the two fathers—all because she did not have the courage to tell Wulfric in person that she would not marry him?”
“Courage had nothing to do with it,” Henrietta said, “or cowardice either. You did not know the Marquess of Paysley, Morgan. You did not know what a tyrant he was. And you did not know the Duke of Bewcastle and what a tyrant—” She clapped a hand to her mouth when she realized what she had said and flushed scarlet. “I do beg your pardon.”
“I do know Wulfric and his tyrannical ways,” Morgan said. “But he has a sense of fairness for all that, Henrietta. I know he would never force any lady into marrying him against her will. Why should he? He would have to live with her all the rest of his life. You have spoken of these things with Marianne, then, have you? Gervase says she is still your friend.”
“We have not spoken much on the topic,” Henrietta said. “It is too painful to us both.”
“And yet,” Morgan said, “knowing what she did and what the terrible consequences were to your cousin—and perhaps guessing the humiliation my brother must have suffered—you continued your friendship with her?”