Dismayed at this display of genuine grief from such a sunny girl, he passed her his handkerchief and waited out the storm.
As quickly as she could, she choked back the weeping. “I’m sorry. That was uncalled for, especially after you’ve been so kind.”
“It’s not easy being the object of so many suitors’ attentions, especially men such as those.”
She peeked over the top of his handkerchief, and he could tell by her reddened eyes that she was trying to smile. “You’ve rescued me twice now, which is probably more than I deserve, and I must proclaim you my hero.”
“I think not. I’ve rescued you both times by damaging your reputation, and I’m afraid the last time rather badly, for I couldn’t threaten Mr. Murray as I did Jenour-Redmond.”
Dropping the handkerchief, she groped for Harry’s hand, grasped it, and raised it to her cheek. “You’re modest as well as kind.” She kissed his fingertips, then in imitation of his action the previous afternoon, she bit his fingertip.
His body jolted with the little shock of pain, and he watched with absolute astonishment as she swirled her tongue around the abused finger and briefly, with an innocent eroticism that brought him to immediate and desperate need, sucked the tip.
Grasping her shoulders, he swept her to her feet and into his arms. In the broad light of day, in the middle of the dining hall, he kissed her. Not as he had done the day before, with care for her inexperience, but with all the desperate need of his hungry body and his benighted soul.
She didn’t recoil. She didn’t complain. She embraced him with all her strength and answered him, taking his tongue within her mouth, allowing him to thrust again and again in a froth of madness and desperation. The delicious scent of her intoxicated him. Her body pressed against his made him vibrate with a boy’s eagerness. The way she answered him, with small moans and desperate writhings, gave him the strength of ten men. His manhood rose in reckless urgency, and it seemed as if he must have her, now, today, tonight… for always.
But he couldn’t. Jessie deserved more than a man torn between his duty to his country and to his family. More than the danger that trailed his every movement. As suddenly as he’d clasped her, he set her away. “Get away from me. I’m not a hero. I’m not who you think I am. You deserve better than me.”
She laughed, a clear peal of amusement that dismissed his warning. “Actions speak louder than words.” Her cheeks were rosy with excitement. “I have only one suitor left, and he more repulsive than the rest. But I doubt he’ll arrive until tomorrow. Will you spend the day with me, Mr. Windberry?”
“No. Absolutely not. We must never be alone together again.”
“I thought I would faint from merriment when that rock gave way and you slipped halfway down the cliff toward the sea.” Jessie grinned at Harry, taking the same delight in poking at his dignity as a boy stirring an anthill. “Your arms flailed like a fish’s gills.”
“Sophisticated of you.” Harry crossed his arms over his chest. “The whole incident would never have happened if you hadn’t been convinced that that fledgling would fall from its nest.”
“It was dangling precariously. When the slope collapsed and the bird flew into your face…”
“So apparently the bird could take care of itself.”
“If you hadn’t landed on the path below, you would have skied all the way to the beach on a tide of dirt.” She burbled with laughter.
Harry frowned. “You don’t need to announce it to the whole inn.”
She glanced around the long, candlelit veranda. Insects buzzed around the flames. Outside, the night was rich with stars, the kind of stars that bedazzled with their brilliance. They spangled the sky down to the unseen horizon, then dove below the inky ocean, extinguished by the depths. “There are only two other couples out here, and they don’t care a fig what we say or what we do.” They didn’t, either. One was an old married couple who didn’t have a speck of dignity and held hands between courses. The other couple, the maid had whispered, was on their honeymoon. The groom leaned across the table, speaking earnestly. The bride was blushing like a…well, like a bride, and she couldn’t meet his eyes. “Harry, aren’t they sweet?” Jessie had started calling him by his first name that day. One couldn’t speak formally to a man whose bottom one had dusted and whose trouser knee one had mended.
Harry didn’t even glance at the honeymooning couple. “Sublime.” He looked only at her, so intent, she might have been the only woman in the world.
A footman stood by the door to the dining room, ready to serve the guests as needed. The innkeeper brought forth the courses, one by one, filling the night with the scents of rare beef, succulent vegetables, and fabulous desserts. Now they lingered over a cheeseboard and two glasses of wine, listening to the roar of the waves and never wanting this day to end. Or at least… Jessie didn’t want it to end. She couldn’t speak for Harry. As bedtime approached, he grew more and more quiet, more watchful, as he wished for things he could not have.
But he could. She had made up her mind. “I’ve never had such a lovely day. You don’t really care that I laughed at you for falling down the slope, do you?”
“I wouldn’t mind… if I knew I could get my revenge later.”
In a voice as low and seductive as she could make it, she asked, “Is it revenge that you want? Really, Harry? Or is it something else entirely?”
She must not do seductive well, for he scowled. “Where’s your chaperone?”
“Miss Hendrika? She’s asleep.”
Harry started to stand. “I’ll see you to your room.”
“No!” Jessie caught his hand. She’d been as bold with him today as any wanton, and he’d kissed her as if he wanted nothing so much as to take her. And on the cliffs today, she’d caught him watching her, a predatory expression in his marvelous eyes. But tonight…he was resisting. If only she could make him stay for a little longer …She searched her mind for a topic of conversation. “You never told me why you’re here.”
He hesitated, then slowly seated himself again. “My mother sent me.”
“Your mother?” She knew how to do a conversational tone, and she put her heart into it now. She sounded interested, alert, fascinated.
“I went home to recuperate from an injury—”
“How were you injured?”
Again he hesitated. “It was nothing.”
She didn’t believe him, but she was not going to chase him off by calling him a liar. Nor would she betray her rather reckless need to comfort him. He didn’t seem the type of man who wanted to be cared for, but since the first moment she’d seen him, she’d felt a loneliness about him, a wildness that defied taming, like the wild bird they’d tried to rescue. She thought if she reached out her hands, he would fly away with the same strong, serene soaring that that hawk had shown them. And while she couldn’t deny—didn’t want to deny—the passion, with him she experienced an affinity of being. They laughed at the same things, they spoke of the same matters, they kissed…with an ardent obsession.
“Rather than letting me recover at home, my mother rather forcefully suggested I needed a holiday and arranged for me to come here.”
Feeling sorry for him, she said, “Your mother sounds just as eager to have you home as my stepmother is to have me.”
“Actually, Mother’s quite fond of me and complains I don’t visit often enough or for long enough.” He frowned as if his mother’s behavior puzzled him.
“Perhaps you arrived at a bad moment.”
“Perhaps…” His attention focused on Jessie once more, his blue eyes gray in the dusk of candlelight.
The illumination put part of his face in shadow, and that seemed right. He seemed a man of shadow to her, someone who, when she turned around, would disappear, never to be seen again. She had to snatch this time with him.
A smile played around his handsome lips. “So. Tomorrow we have our third and last suitor. Will you accept this one?”
“How can
I? To marry a stranger, sans affection or desire.” She didn’t want to talk about the suitor. “If I were courageous, I’d run away.”
“Run away? No, not you. You’re young and soft.”
“I am not soft.”
“As butter left in the sun.”
She gurgled with laughter. “Nor am I runny.”
He smiled, a hard slash of amusement. “It’s a hard, cold world out there.”
“Hence the need for courage.” Picking up a narrow slice of a pale, mild Swiss, she nibbled the edge. “But I know my father. If I ran away, he would never forgive me.”
“How would you support yourself?
“Without my fortune, you mean? The usual way that impoverished gentlewomen support themselves. I would become a governess.” She smiled woefully. “I wish I could find a way out of my circumscribed life, one that didn’t involve a repulsive man, and one that wouldn’t completely cut me off from the past.”
Harry watched her lips, her teeth, her fingers, so closely, she could only imagine what he was thinking—and she knew what she was thinking. She was thinking that she would not waste herself and her body on a pathetic, unwanted bridegroom. Schooling herself to look and sound sensible, she said, “I do understand, you know. What’s involved in mating.”
She took his breath away with her combination of boldness and innocence. “It’s not every young lady who would confess to that.”
“That’s because most young ladies don’t know about mating. They live circumscribed lives, managed by a governess, two parents, and possibly older siblings. My governess left as soon as my father deemed my education finished, my mother is dead, I had no siblings until my stepmother delivered of a son two months ago, and I’ve done what I liked.”
Harry lifted his eyebrows high.
“No, not that. I know better than that. What I mean is—I run Papa’s farm when he’s not there. Actually, I run it all the time, but I don’t tell him. So I’ve observed the cows and the sheep.” She scowled. “Although I suspect humans go at it differently, for sheep don’t kiss.”
He was almost faint between the desire to laugh and the desire to…just the desire. “No, they don’t, and I can safely promise you they don’t baa, either.”
“Or butt each other.” She ran her finger around the rim of her glass. “And from the conversations I’ve overheard among the servants, I believe mating among humans to be congenial.”
He scarcely knew which part of that speech to address. Taking the coward’s way out—although he preferred to call it the wise man’s—he said, “Overheard?”
“I was hiding in the pantry, eating jellies.” She waited as if he would scold her.
He was breathless, trying to keep his unruly body under control.
She straightened her shoulders and used a lecturing tone. “I suppose you’ll say it’s not right for me to give my maidenhead to a chance-met stranger when I’ll be married before the summer’s out, but I ask you—why is it right that I should never know the pleasure a man can give me? Never, in the whole of my life?”
He thought he understood her, but he had to ask. “What are you proposing?”
“You kiss very well.” She looked him over with an air of mingled defiance and interest. “I presume you do other things well, too.”
Wanting her, watching her, imagining her in her bed—that had been gut-wrenching. He had known he could never have her, yet at the same time he’d felt alive as he had not for too many years. Now she offered herself, and the primitive in him surged to the forefront, struggling against the feeble bonds of culture. “I may, but I don’t debauch virgins.”
“Think of what my life will be, married to someone like Lord Jenour-Redmond or Mr. Murray.” She caught his hand.
The warmth of her palm, the clasp of her fingers weakened his resistance. “Perhaps the suitor tomorrow will turn out to be your true love.”
“No, he won’t. I haven’t seen him since I was twelve, but a more self-conscious, righteous prig I never met.”
Harry couldn’t imagine a man like that with this creature. “Is he wealthy?”
“Very rich. And titled. And old. He is probably ten years older than I am.”
Harry didn’t like that little whiplash of scorn in her voice. Harry was almost ten years older than she was.
“He disapproved of my every frolic. He was hard, cold, and indifferent, and he grew a stupid little beard, like a goat’s, only sparse and blond. I wager he dyed it, for his hair was quite black.”
Harry stirred uneasily in his seat. “Where does he live?
“His largest estate is in Somerset. He’s by far the worst of all my suitors, and he is …Edmund Kennard Henry Chamberlain, Earl of Granville.”
Five
Harry choked on his drink, coughed. He stared at Jessie, feeling as if she’d buried an ax right between his eyes. His head throbbed, his jaw stood askew.
Jessie anxiously examined him. “Are you all right?”
Taking his first clear breath, he managed, “Edmund Kennard Henry Chamberlain, Earl of Granville?”
“Yes.” She looked even more anxious. “Do you know him?”
“Know him? Know him?” He was him. But he didn’t remember this young lady. He swore he did not.
She took his incoherent amazement as confirmation of her own beliefs. “You do know him, and think him as obnoxious as I do.”
Obnoxious? Him? He was not… He had never been…well, perhaps there was that brief period when he was young, but he didn’t remember Jessie.
Yet it was no accident he was here. At the resort. Now. When she was also in residence. Slapping his palms on the table, he placed the blame squarely on the one woman who deserved it. “Damn you, Mother!”
Jessie inched her chair back just a little. “Excuse me?”
The other diners stared, examining him as if he’d quite lost his mind. The young groom looked nervous, as if he knew very well he was unable to fight Harry, yet equally unable, as a gentleman, to stand by when a lady was abused.
As if Harry would ever hurt a hair on Jessie’s head. Harry shot the groom a killing glance, and lowered his voice. “You’ve met Lord Granville?”
“I said I had.”
“Ten years ago. I doubt you’d recognize him after so long.”
Jessie straightened indignantly. “I would so! I’ll never forget that scowl. He always stroked his beard, like this”—she did a savage imitation of the younger, pompous Harry—“and he wore a stupid cap. He hadn’t a care for his dress, and even came to the dinner table with mud on his boots!”
Harry made a weak clucking sound. Yes, there had been a time…but he still didn’t remember this lush maiden with lambent passion in her eyes.
“Papa said the young lord had picked up stupid affectations while at school.”
He had. “It happens.”
Jessie didn’t care. “But just last week, when Papa said that Lord Granville was one of my suitors and I reminded him of his disparagement, he claimed Lord Granville was undoubtedly older and wiser now. I don’t want to destroy any illusions you may have about your gender, Mr.Windberry”—she called him “Mr. Windberry” again—“but in my experience men do not get wiser, they get more eccentric and spoiled as the years progress.” She leaned forward with fire in her eyes. “Until by the time they are forty, they have raging gout and big bellies and false teeth and baseborn mistresses spread halfway across England.”
“That’s quite an expectation from a simple hat,” Harry pointed out feebly. He wished he could somehow justify his early foibles, but they had been nothing but the posturings of a spoiled lad. Jessie had apparently received the brunt of them.
“Granville always hurried off as if he were too important to have anything to do with such a drab as me.”
He tried to reply to that, but she was in full sail.
Resting her elbow on the table, she gestured grandly. “All I wanted was a little attention, just someone to think I was pretty instead of a short
, pudgy, yellow-haired schoolgirl with spots. How was I supposed to know that that branch would break right when Lord Granville was standing beneath it, and how was I to know he was attempting a seduction of Miss Jones? It was just a broken nose, but the way he carried on you’d think I had ruined a classic countenance, which I assure he did not have!”
Harry stiffened. Now he remembered! At the house party at his estate, to celebrate his successes at Oxford. The little girl, Jessica, had come with her father, and she had mooned after him until he was ready to roar. She followed him everywhere—in the library, on the horses—and he just back from university and believing himself a man of the world. Then, just as he had finally lured the delectable Miss Jones into the apple orchard and taken her into his arms to press an ardent kiss on her luscious lips…Jessica had fallen out of the tree above, right between them, and broken his nose.
He took a long breath. He definitely remembered the ramshackle girl Jessie had been.
Looking across the table, he scrutinized the woman she had become. Once again, a little more softly, he said, “Damn you, Mother.” For his mother knew him only too well. She had known he would be intrigued by the adult Jessie just as he had been annoyed by the adolescent Jessica. Mother had set the trap well.
Forcibly he brought his attention back to the young lady sitting across from him who confessed in quivering indignation, “He was bleeding into that stupid goatee, and I tried to help him, and he…he cursed me. He yelled at me! And told me I was a nasty girl who deserved a hiding. Then Miss Jones, who had been passing him handkerchiefs and cooing in a most nauseating way, got irked with him for talking to me so and escorted me to the house, and Papa took me away—”
“—And you have never seen Lord Granville again.”
“No.” Jessie shuddered. “Blessedly, I have not. He’s always gallivanting about in foreign countries, seeking God knows what kind of dissipations and leaving his poor mother bound to care for his estates and fortune.”
Hero, Come Back Page 21