A Fresh Perspective, A Regency Romance (15 page)

Gussie stopped her pacing.

“He had every opportunity. We were quite alone.”

She sank down on the settee. “I am relieved.”

Megan wistfully traced with her finger one of the needlepoint patterns in the upholstery. “You need never fear for my honor or virtue in Reed’s company. He does not love me in that way.”

“But you do. You are still in love with him, are you not? I thought you had long since outgrown the infatuation.”

Pressing lips together, Megan fought the impulse to weep. “Yes, well, I have tried very hard not to love Reed. It has been my intention from the beginning that our time together here at the Lakes should be my farewell to such feelings. And yet, I am a miserable failure, Gus. You see, I wish he would touch me, or kiss me--something--just once, before I put all such thoughts and feelings behind me.”

“Poor Meg.” Gussie opened her arms.

Megan fell against her sister’s shoulder. Augusta smelled of warm muslin and Tom. “Oh, Gussie, I have never been more miserable, and without the slightest notion what to do about it.”

“I know.” Gussie rocked her in her arms.

“Do you?” Megan moaned. “Can you? You have Tom.”

“I did not always have Tom. In fact, I made myself quite miserable over a lad in London who cared nothing at all for me.”

Megan drew back to stare at her sister in surprise. “Did you? Who? What did you do about him?”

Gussie smoothed Megan’s hair away from her face.

“He was a handsome and personable young man I met at the very beginning of my Season. I have never mentioned his name to you, or to mother and father. In fact, I have not mentioned him to Tom.”

“Did it end badly then?”

“It ended with a kiss.”

“A kiss?”

“Yes. My first. A dreadful kiss. I knew after that one kiss that there was nothing between us and never would be.”

“A kiss can be that telling?”

“Absolutely. Perhaps all that is needed to end your infatuation with Reed is to ask him to kiss you.”

“Gussie!” Megan was shocked.

“Megan!” Gussie smiled mischievously. “You will not be ruined by a kiss, anymore than by sleeping in Reed’s bed as long as he is not in it.”

Explanations and awkward apologies made and accepted all around, the truth of the bed business unraveled itself. Reed was not thrown from the house. He could not even leave for home on his own accord, as had been his intention. The rain continued unceasingly to fall, making a muddy mess of the roads. It was noon before the skies began to clear. Reed postponed his plans to leave until the following day and it was decided that there was no better opportunity for viewing Stock Ghyll force, than in the rain’s aftermath.

Megan and Reed set out together on rented hacks to have a look, Gussie convincing Tom the two should have this opportunity to say their farewells.

“Is it to be India, or the Americas?” Megan had to ask. She kneed her mount up beside Reed’s, troubled by the idea that he meant not only to leave her, but to go so far away.

He looked puzzled by her question, as if the matter had slipped his mind entirely. “What? Oh. I have yet to decide. I must say, I am surprised your sister chose not to come with us. After this morning’s contretemps I had the feeling she would never allow us another moment alone together.”

Megan nodded, mind still caught on what Gussie had said, gaze irresistibly drawn to Reed’s lips. “She feels guilty about the awful things she said to you.”

Reed shifted his weight. The saddle creaked. “Really! But I understood completely how the wrong impression was to be had. Why should that keep her and Tom away?”

“They mean to prove to you their restored confidence in your honorable intentions.”

“Oh!” From his expression it was clear he had never anticipated their distrust. “A pity really, that they decided not to come.”

“Oh?” Did he not care at all to be alone with her? Did it mean nothing to him? Did the thought that he must one day leave her never trouble him?

“I would imagine we are going to see Stock Ghyll Force at its very best today.”

He was right, of course. The best of Stock Ghyll Force could be heard long before they saw it--water hurling itself with resounding force over stone. The sound drew them, demanding their attention the closer they got, filling their ears with the rush, rush, rush of what would seem to be an endless source of water. Megan’s worries were drowned in the noise. The Force completely captured her imagination.

On foot, horses tethered at a nearby inn, they saw it piecemeal through the trees, a flash of boiling white among the green. The rain fed trickle had become a force to be reckoned with, a force of romantic proportions. Water foamed and sparkled, churned and pulsed over the top of the hill above--throwing itself three times down the incline and over dark boulders, like wet whalebacks, before it plunged into a pool at the base of the ninety foot tumble and becalmed itself.

They stood a moment, oblivious to the drizzle of rain, staring.

“Marvelous!” Reed peered through his spattered Claude glass, shouting to be heard above the water’s noise.

Speechless, she nodded.

“Care to have a look?” He offered the glass. “Puts a whole new perspective on things.”

She shook her head and began to say something he could not hear. When he did not understand a word of it, and begged her to repeat herself, she grabbed his lapel, leaned close and cupped her hand about his ear. “Your glass tends to distance and dwarf everything.” Her breath was hot against his skin. The tilt of her bonnet sent a chill dribble of rain down the back of his neck.

She smelled of tuberose, damp tuberose.

She spread one arm toward the waterfall, as if to embrace it and draw it near. “I have no desire to distance myself from this.” Her breath tickled his ear. He closed his eyes, losing himself in the fervor of her words. “The Force fills me: eyes, ears, lungs. My very heart is touched by the essence of waterfall. I feel wet, and wild and reckless. Do you feel it?”

Her question held an unexpected urgency. Reed opened his eyes. Megan possessed a wild and natural beauty in this moment--beauty he had never recognized in her before. Hair and skin, eyes and lips, all seemed touched by a glistening feral sheen.

She lifted her face to the drizzling rain and let it kiss her cheek. Reed felt awed witnessing such abandonment, then a trifle panicked, and jealous. He had never experienced the merging with nature she described, no matter how beautiful the scene spread before him, and there had, in the course of his travels, been beauty beyond measure offered up to his eyes. He had framed all, tamed all, in his Claude glass. She was right. It made manageable raw beauty that might otherwise overwhelm. Without the glass setting boundaries, he had the feeling he might have been swept away any number of times by beauty. He was a gentleman, an English gentleman. He had never allowed himself to succumb--to what he was not sure, but like the helpless, tumbling splash of the water before him, he felt he had no control over where such passion might take him.

“How wonderful to be a waterfall,” Megan let go his lapel, but made no move to step away from him. He could count the very beads of moisture on her eyelashes. Eyes, hair, lips--all of her damp. By God, she was beautiful! He would like to capture her in conte crayon and vine charcoal.

“We will not be able to draw or paint today. Far too wet.” His voice sounded unused--rusty.

She seemed not to notice. “Perhaps that is a blessing. We are forced to enjoy the very ephemeral nature of beauty. There is an added piquancy by its very transience.”

He could not agree with her more. For the moment they shared, the sounds, sights and smells, the very closeness of their stance. It was a moment that would pass. He did not want it to pass. He wanted to hold onto it, to hold onto the beauty of her. She would be gone from him soon. She might be gone forever.

“Shall we look for cover?” she asked.

For an instant, her words made no sense to him.

She tipped back her head to gaze at the ceiling of leaves above their heads, mouth twisting in the impish manner that he found so endearing. “It sounds as if the rain has begun to fall harder.”

She was right. The rain fell in earnest, threatening to soak them to the skin, even as she spoke. With a squeal, she grasped his damp hand in hers. Together they ran for the nearest cover.

Chapter Sixteen

T
hey found shelter beneath a sprawling, open-sided coppice barn attached to a mill. Several mills took advantage of the tumbling power of falling water that Stock Beck gathered in the heights of Red Scree Fell. This particular mill made bobbins. From its doors spilled light, noise, sawdust and the faintly astringent odor of freshly cut wood. In unspoken agreement, Megan and Reed skirted the doorway and headed away from the noises of sawing and drilling, away from the rumbling vibrations of the line shaft with its rows of flapping belts. They chose, instead, to wind their way through birch, ash, sycamore and hazel wood. Stack after neat stack, varying sizes of the same sort of straight, limbless, coppice wood they had watched being cut only a few days prior. They came to a stop in a dripping corner where they could watch the mill wheel and listen to its soothing, sluicing creak.

In the turning wheel, in the fall of the rain, Megan saw time passing. Life, like the river, rushed past her with every breath she took. Did a life beset by troubles, she wondered, speed up like the flow of the river beset by rain?

The door to the mill creaked open, thrown wide by two men laden with baskets, piled high with finished bobbins.

“Come!” Reed grabbed her arm, pulling her into the narrow space between two stacks of stripped poles, his finger to his lips.

The space was tight. Megan found herself pressed against Reed, staring at the beat of the pulse in his neck. With every breath she took her breasts grazed against the lapels of his coat. With every breath he took, the hair on her brow was stirred.

The mill door creaked again. The men left, task finished. Reed released her, pushed past her, bringing them for a moment, hip to hip, knee to knee, his chest to hers. It was now or never, Megan thought. She must, in some way, convince Reed to kiss her. But how to do so, when he did not seem to notice the touch of their bodies? He stared toward the mill door.

“They would doubtless have assumed we required a tour of the mill,” he said. “I would much rather stay here, watching the rain. I thought you would agree.”

She did agree. There was much she would discuss with him.

“What do you see when you look at me?” she asked.

He tried to laugh away her question. “What do I see? Whatever do you mean?”

“What do you think I mean? You have, over the past few days, expounded at length on what you see in the landscape. Please turn the same discerning eyes on me and tell me what you see.”

They still stood almost on top of one another between the piles of wood. Too close, perhaps, for such a question. He would not look at her other than in uneasy sideways glances. “This is silly.”

“Indulge me, please. I must know.

He faced her abruptly. “What would you have me see, Nutmeg? I see you.

“What about me do you see?”

An unusual tension built between them. Perhaps he felt as trapped as she by their close proximity now that he looked at her. Stepping free from their cramped hiding place, he dipped his hand into his pocket. Pulling out his folio of Claude glasses, he turned to observe her from a distance.

“Without benefit of the glass, if you please.”

He pocketed the glass, brow furrowed. Without it, he seemed unable to gaze at her for any length of time. He did in fact seem embarrassed by her question. “I see the imp--the girl I grew up with, the young woman I enjoy painting with as long as she does not trouble me overmuch with absurd questions.”

“Is that all?” She was disappointed.

He stopped looking at her, concentrating his attention instead, on peeling bits of bark from one of the poles that protruded a little from the nearest stack of birch. “I’ve no idea what else you want me to say.”

Megan emerged from their hiding place. “I do not want you to say anything in particular. I just want to know that you see me, that you have scrutinized me with the same intensity and concentration that you devote to the landscapes you paint.”

He abandoned his bark picking with a baffled look. Uneasily he shifted stance and ran his hands through damp hair.

“Shall I tell you what I see in you?” she asked. 

“A sadly rain-drenched fellow with muddy boots and bark bits in his hair?”

She smiled and shook her head. “Nothing of the kind. It is my dearest friend I notice, not the condition of his boots. I see, too, an obedient son, a well-mannered English gentleman, an intelligent, orderly thinker, a quiet, reserved young man with an eye for beauty and both the talent and desire to collect and record his interpretation of that beauty. I see the boy I grew up with, when you smile. You should smile more often, Reed. You have the most delightful dimples. I see, in your eyes, a kindred spirit. I see hidden sadness too, behind the smiles and beneath your quiet reserve--and now worry--which I have never known to trouble you before. I see Reed Talcott, a young man whom I admire, trust and care for, whom I. . .”

Love
, she would have said, but he interrupted. “Stop! Stop! My head is so big by now that I will require a wheelbarrow to trundle it home again if you add so much as another thimble full of praise. I had no idea there was so much to see in me.”

“You do not know yourself as well as you should then.” Her words seemed to have impact. He made a face.

“Perhaps not.”

He seemed prepared to look at her now, but so intense was his gaze, so complete his perusal that she had trouble maintaining eye contact. She could think of nothing but Gussie’s talk of kisses when she did, so she studied her shoes instead. They were muddy, as was the hem of her gown.

She could not recall a time when Reed had examined her so keenly, his eyes passing over her slowly from head to toe. The intensity of his unswerving examination unnerved her.