by Darcie Wilde
“Thank you,” she whispered. “For giving me this moment.”
He caught her wrist before she could lower it, and planted a soft kiss against her fingertips. “I would give you so much more if I could.”
Leannah shook her head. “No. You’re right. It’s too dangerous.”
She meant to turn away, but he put his hand on her shoulder. “Only here, only like this. When we get back to London, we can find each other then.” He smiled and to Leannah it was as if the ground shifted beneath her. “I can even come calling if you like. You might not believe it, but I look very fine seated in a front parlor, and make excellent conversation with ladies of all ages.”
Leannah could not help but smile herself at this. “I believe you, but it wouldn’t be advisable.”
Consternation knit his brows. “Are you promised to someone?”
“No. Not yet, anyway.”
“I don’t like the sound of that, Leannah.”
She couldn’t look in his eyes. She looked at her bandaged hand where it rested against the lapel of his coat. She didn’t even remember placing it there. It seemed her traitor body was not ready to leave off touching Mr. Rayburn.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
“Tell me what’s wrong, Leannah. Perhaps I can help.”
But she shook her head and she stepped away. She had to put at least some distance between them. The echo of the passions they’d raised still rang in her blood and bones. He’d called it madness and that was the right word. But it was more than that. When he held her, Harry made her feel she could trust him, and she wanted that trust as much as she wanted his touch. There had been so few people in her life on whom she was able to depend.
But trust and dependence were both dangerous. Trust could be betrayed, even when it was knotted up with bonds of blood and duty, never mind the flimsy ties of mutual need.
Leannah glanced over her shoulder. The moon had almost set. The last rays tangled in Harry’s fair hair and his blue, worried eyes. She’d meant to say something, but the sight of him—her hero, her mad and dangerous lover—robbed her of speech. She took a trembling step forward and another. She waited for him to shy away from her. But he did not. He stood still, waiting for what she would do. She lifted her face to his, and brushed her lips against his mouth.
Then she grabbed up the hem of her nightdress and fled back to the safety of the house.
* * *
Harry watched the inn door close behind Leannah as she fled from him. He waited, to be sure she wasn’t coming back. Maybe there was still hope. Maybe she wanted to come back. Maybe she wanted his determination to fail him so he would push her up against the wall again, and take her in his arms, plunder her mouth, suck on her breasts, finish what they had begun.
Only when he was positive that damned door wasn’t going to open again, did Harry stride away. The inn’s yard was not a big one, but there were several outbuildings, as well as a chicken house and the stable with its small forge and anvil. He was almost running by the time he ducked behind the farthest shed he could find. Utterly ashamed, but driven by pain and pure brute need, Harry undid his breeches fly as quickly as his trembling fingers could manage. He plunged his hand into his small clothes, grabbed his member and started to masturbate.
He pumped himself ruthlessly, angrily. In his mind, he saw Leannah. He felt her, with every fiber of his being. He smelled her scent on the wind, felt the silk of her hair and the satin of her skin. His palm held all the memory of the hot flesh of her thighs as he caressed them. In his mind, he pressed her up against the wall again. He fondled her breasts, sucked her tight, responsive nipples, squeezed her lovely, full derriere. But this time, he didn’t stop, he didn’t come to his senses and tear himself away. He grabbed her legs and raised her up so he could plunge his aching, swollen member inside her.
She cried out. She wrapped her thighs around him as her sheath surrounded him, hot and tight and wet. Yes, Harry! she moaned. Like that. I like that. Harder! Harder! She’d tighten around him, dragging him deeper in, demanding he surrender his body entirely to her pleasure . . .
Harry’s release came suddenly, in a series of crude, violent jolts. He stayed as he was for a long time, doubled over, braced by one arm against the wall of whatever shed he was hiding behind. As soon as he could make his shaking body move, he shoved his now flaccid member back into his smalls and buttoned up his breeches tight. Then, Harry put his own back to the wall. He let his knees buckle so he slid slowly down until he was crouched almost to the ground. He wiped his streaming face with his sleeve, and began to curse.
He cursed slowly and thoroughly. He cursed moonlight and rain and thrown horseshoes. He cursed the club’s whiskey in four different languages, along with whatever insanity drove a man to try to be a hero. When he’d exhausted this subject, he cursed his member for not understanding that when a lady closed the door, it was past time to stand down. It was not right to be in the back of a stable yard easing his lusts with the memory of Leannah Wakefield. It seemed utterly crude and distasteful to him.
As if almost fucking a woman he didn’t know against the wall of a public house was refined. Harry hung his head and rested his forearms on his knees. He could barely believe it, let alone understand it. In the space of a few short hours he’d jumped aboard a careening carriage, been knocked down, aided a woman in distress, gotten into a brawl. Well, “brawl” was a bit much, considering Dickenson hadn’t even raised his hand. But he had knocked a man down over that woman and her sister, come within an inch of brutalizing him, and then come within an inch of fucking himself and that same woman into delirium in the open air.
Harry knotted his hands in his hair. He wanted to blame the drink, or the blow Agnes Featherington had dealt to his pride. But that wouldn’t be the truth. The truth was there was something about being near Leannah that drove him clean out of his mind.
God, but she was magnificent! From the moment his lips touched hers, it had taken every ounce of his self-possession not to fall on her immediately and ravish her. Not, he smiled, that she would have protested. She had made it clear she wanted him and he knew for a fact she was as strong in her passions as she was willing and eager. She’d be as wild a lover as she was a driver. He’d put her on top of him, slap that magnificent derriere of hers to take them both into a gallop, and she’d like it. He was certain she would.
His member twitched. Harry started cursing all over again. His rude little session of self-pleasuring had cured the immediate pain and pressure in his body, but that was all. It had done nothing to ease the aching desire he felt for Leannah.
Slowly, Harry realized it was no longer quite so dark. He pushed himself to his feet and tried to smooth his hair down with his clean hand. The landlord and his wife would be about soon—that is assuming they’d ever gone to bed. He moved out from behind the shed to where he could see the inn, and the window beneath the eaves on the second story. Was Leannah asleep up there? Or was she awake like he was, thinking of what they had done together, wishing it hadn’t ended.
Why didn’t she want to see him in town? Was she ashamed of the heated moment they’d shared? He didn’t think that could be it, but it was so hard to be sure. Society winked and joked at the desires of men, but it frowned hard when those same passions found a home in women.
Perhaps it was the fact that he was a merchant’s son. It was plain from Leannah’s speech and bearing that she was gently bred. Perhaps she had a position to maintain that did not easily admit a man of his birth. At the very least, she must be her sister’s chief guardian. He wondered about their parents and if they were living or dead. He wondered what was behind the “not yet” she’d spoken when he asked if she was engaged. Who was the man who earned a “not yet” from Leannah? Where was he now, while she was out here in trouble and alone? Any such man deserved to have his woman stolen out from behind his back.
A chuckle rose in his throat and Harry shook his head. Then, he did the only
sensible thing he could. He strolled around the front of the inn to the horse trough. There, he plunged head and hands straight into the icy water.
The shock of it hit him at once and Harry welcomed it. He held himself under the water until he felt his lungs would burst. When he did allow himself to come up, he whooped and gasped. Great gouts of water sluiced off his scalp. Someone, Martin, probably, had hung a cloth on the pump and Harry used it now to dry himself, only to find it was soaking wet from the rain.
The sound of a bolt being drawn jerked him around. Leannah? Light glinted behind the shutters, and his mouth went instantly dry. Leannah, you came back!
But it wasn’t Leannah. The flickering lantern was held by none other than the importunate Mr. Dickenson. Harry let himself fade back against the inn wall and held his breath. Dickenson didn’t see him. He just stumbled across the yard, making for the stables.
Well, well. Once again, Anthony Dickenson was showing his true colors. Harry heard the hoarse sound of that man’s voice issuing orders, which was followed by Martin’s mumbling. There was a long pause, with much noise from the horses and, Harry suspected, a certain amount of cursing from Mr. Dickenson. Before too much longer, though, the landau, with its lanterns lit and its chestnut bay horses walking dutifully in step, came around the yard. Mr. Dickenson sat on the box with the ribbons in his gloved hands. He paused the horses by the inn door. Harry decided now was the time for action. He stepped out of the shadows, and tipped Dickenson a salute.
Dickenson started as if he’d seen a ghost. In answer, Harry folded his arms, and waited to see if he would dare to climb off his perch on that ridiculous high-flyer of a carriage. But Dickenson did not so much as waste breath on a curse. He just snapped the reins, whistled up the horses, and set their heads toward London without a backward glance.
Well, that was one problem taken care of. Now what in God’s name was he going to do about the other?
Harry glanced up at the window, only to see that it was open, and that Leannah was staring down at him.
Twelve
What is the matter with me?
It was still full dark, and Leannah sat in the chair beside the last glowing coals of the fire, trying to brush her hair, and to find some way to calm down after having so unceremoniously fled from Harry Rayburn.
What is the matter with me? Each syllable was accompanied by an angry jerk of the stiff-bristled brush. It hurt her hands, but Leannah didn’t care. The pain helped remind her who she really was and how many responsibilities she had.
The brush tangled in her curls again. It took several hard yanks to work the implement free. Her hair, as she had predicted, had knotted into a solid mass. She’d probably have to resort to shears to take care of the worst of the snarls.
Which would be appropriate, Leannah thought grimly. Don’t they shave the heads of the deranged? If she was not truly deranged, she was certainly giving an excellent imitation.
But who could know that insanity came with such a brilliant smile, such fair hair and blue eyes? Or that one kiss could make her forget who she was?
Leannah gave the brush another vicious jerk. The tangle she’d been working on abruptly freed itself, and sent the brush skittering across the room. Genevieve rolled over in her bed but did not wake. Of course not, Leannah thought as she stumped across the floor to retrieve the brush. The only two people awake in this world are myself and Harry Rayburn.
She was certain he was awake. The thought of him being able to go calmly to sleep after driving her so far into pleasure and longing was insupportable. It made him into a calculating libertine. She did not like picturing Harry Rayburn in this fashion. She should not be picturing him in any fashion at all. That way lay not only madness, but genuine danger.
Leannah was intimately familiar with the power of fantasy. Mr. Wakefield had been sixty-five when they were married. It was Elias’s hope to get an heir on his blooming, healthy, nineteen-year-old bride, but he was the first to admit he was no passionate lover. She’d never betrayed him, but she had spent a great deal of time with other young wives on the edges of ballrooms, watching other men. She’d discovered there was a form of pleasure in imagining that they were the ones touching her, coaxing her, rousing her. When she’d been widowed and lay alone in her bed, she continued to dream about such men, just as she’d continued to stay away from them. By then she knew how to manage enough of her own pleasure to ease the basic physical craving. It had not been perfect, but it had seemed like it would be enough.
It wasn’t until she’d moved her family back to London last year that she’d begun to feel something genuine lacking in her life. She was no longer among familiar countrymen and their fathers, all of whom she knew so well that they aroused nothing in her beyond friendship. It was in the glittering ballrooms, among crowds of officers and the gentlemen, sports, dandies, lords, and wealthy tradesmen that longing woke in her. A part of her that she thought she’d packed away long ago wanted to be asked to dance. She wanted to look up into a pair of fine eyes and feel the press of a man’s warm hands. She wanted to be talked with and called upon. Flirted with. Seduced.
If nothing else, this encounter with Mr. Harry Rayburn was a reminder that one should be very careful what one wished for. She could not get herself and Genevieve away from here quickly enough. She would take them straight home. The moment she had locked Genevieve in her room, she would write to Mr. Valloy and let him know she would be at home when he called and that she was ready to accept his offer. He did not engage her heart, but the heart was a willful creature. This last night was proof enough of that. From now on, she would have as little to do with its undisciplined tricks as possible.
The sound of hooves and wheels clattered through the window. Leannah nearly dropped the brush as she sprang to her feet. All her sensible resolve of the moment before fled, driven out by the idea this sound might signal Harry’s departure.
I’ve offended him, repulsed him. She barely remembered she must not jostle Genevieve’s bed as she threw open the window. He’s going before I can explain . . .
But no. That wasn’t Harry. Dawn’s pearl gray light showed her Mr. Dickenson’s landau, and Mr. Dickenson himself, turning the team toward the highway. Harry Rayburn simply stood by the inn, and watched him go.
Leannah moved to close the window, but she wasn’t fast enough. Harry turned his head, and looked up. The sight of him there, waiting for her like Romeo waiting for his Juliet with the first rays of dawn lighting up his curling hair took her breath away.
For his part, Harry Rayburn smiled his brilliant smile, and bowed. Despite her agitation and confusion, Leannah could not help but smile herself, and wave her own hand in imperious salute.
Then she did close the window. Forgetting the brush and her hair, she let herself fall back onto her bed.
What is happening to me? she thought, blinking up at the ceiling. And what on earth am I to do about it?
Leannah was still groping for some sort of answer to either question when she drifted into sleep.
At least, she did until the door banged open.
Leannah lurched upright, blinking stupidly. Warm daylight streamed through the window. Genevieve stood beside her bed, fully dressed, her hands on her hips.
“What have you done!” she demanded.
“What are you talking about?” Leannah groaned and brushed her hair back from her face. The details of the previous night roused themselves to some sort of order, and it occurred to Leannah that Genny had somehow managed to dress herself without needing help, or being heard.
“Anthony! He’s gone! Without a word. You must have done something.”
“I did nothing,” she answered honestly, but her thoughts leapt to Harry Rayburn, standing down in the yard. Had he run Mr. Dickenson off? If he had, it was yet one more thing she had to thank him for.
Apparently, Genevieve’s thoughts were running along a similar, but far less grateful, course. “If you didn’t do it, you must have put that Mr. Ray
burn up to it.”
“As far as I am aware, if Mr. Dickenson left, the decision was entirely his own.”
For a moment, it looked as if Genevieve would argue the point, but in the end she just plopped herself onto the edge of her bed. “Well, it’s all ruined anyway, even if Uncle Clarence does still turn up.” She paused. “Do you think something could have happened to him?”
“Other than that he may have met someone on the road who either needed help or salvation? No.” Leannah kicked her way out from her covers and crossed the room to sit beside her sister. “I know you were acting out of good motives, Genny,” she said as she took both Genevieve’s hands. “But this isn’t the way, and Mr. Dickenson has just proved more than amply he’s not the man for you.”
“Then what am I to do?” whispered Genevieve. “We’re in so much trouble, Lea. I have to do something to help.”
“We’re not in that much trouble,” Leannah told her, and she strove to mean it. “It’s nothing we can’t work our way through, as long as we keep our heads.”
“Like you’re keeping your head with Mr. Rayburn.”
“Mr. Rayburn is not the subject of this conversation.” This declaration probably would have had more force if Leannah hadn’t also at that moment gotten to her feet and gone to the small table to adjust the position of the brush and the hand mirror.
“He should be,” said Genevieve to her back. “Considering you were making calf’s eyes at him and then running after him into the dark—entirely unchaperoned, may one add.”
“Genevieve!”
“Well, you were. And that was after he knocked poor Anthony down.”
“We are finished with this,” Leannah said firmly. “I am going to get dressed, and find out how soon Gossip can be reshod.”