Hadrian (9 page)

“You rode out without a groom, Avie.”

She let her horse walk on, knowing damned good and well the point Hadrian ade, but being him, and fearless, he had to put it into words.

And call her Avie.

“You left your grooms at home,” he went on, “in case you found me in an embarrassing state, having parted from Harold this morning. You were protecting my dignity at the cost of your safety and peace of mind.”

She turned her horse to walk off at a slight angle to his.

“Avie?”

Just her name, spoken gently, and a lump rose in her throat. She brought her horse to a halt, lest he come after her.
It’s me, Avie, Hay Bothwell. We danced a ländler. You’re scaring a fellow here…

“Thank you.”

Avie heard him over the clamoring of the voices in her memory, though he spoke quietly. She nodded, then turned her gelding, to head back to Blessings. Hadrian kept pace beside her to the property line then he let her go on alone. He remained on the rise, watching until she descended the slope to the stable yard, where she could again be certain of her safety again.

“Mr. Bothwell, you are quite the topic of conversation among the shearing crews.”

Lily Prentiss scolded Hadrian, all smiles and patient condescension as she wielded her verbal birch rod. The damned woman should have been married to a bishop.

Damned woman
. Shame on him, though Hadrian relished every curse and profanity that tripped through his head.

In the past week, there had been more than a few. Shearing had put calluses on his calluses, seen him kicked in unmentionable places, and sent him naked into the frigid waters of the quarry pond and grateful for the cold. The gathering of neighbors marking the end of shearing was simply a social endurance test on top of the physical trials.

Now he was to put up with a gratuitous scolding. A quote from the book of Job sniffed at the edge of the conversation.

“I insist we talk of something other than shearing, Miss Prentiss,” Hadrian said, his best churchyard smile nailed into place. “Not sheep, not wool, not crews, nor shears, nor lambs even. Let us talk, say, of desserts. Which among these do you recommend?”

“Every one is good,” she replied, as they neared a long trestle table laden with sweet bounty. “I’d leave the strawberries and cream for those who haven’t access to the hothouses, and suggest the éclairs.”

“Excellent choice. May I fetch you an éclair on a plate?”

Hadrian kept up the polite chatter and stayed by the lady’s side while she nibbled her way through a treat that wanted devouring. Perhaps a week among the shearing crews had taken a toll on his manners, but then he overheard Avis, laughing with Fenwick and his crew chiefs by the barrel of ale.

“She doesn’t understand how that looks,” Lily Prentiss said in low, unhappy tones. “Swilling ale and laughing with them like that.”

“I believe she’s serving the ale,” Hadrian replied. “If you’re concerned about the appearances, I’ll intervene and the gentlemen can serve themselves.”

He was off, happy to seize any pretext to leave Miss Prentiss to her fretting and nibbling, and more than ready to pry Avis from Ashton Fenwick’s side. The week had been grueling, exhausting, and satisfying in some way, but in other regards, the work hadn’t been nearly exhausting enough.

“Lady Avis.” Hadrian held up an empty mug. “When the server is so pretty, the ale must taste ambrosial.”

Fenwick thumped him on the back. “Well said, Bothwell. I suppose now you’ll ask her to dance?”

Avis took Hadrian’s mug and held it under the barrel’s tap, though Hadrian had had enough ale in the past week to float the Danish navy. “For shame, Fen. Hadrian can hardly move thanks to your slave-driving, much less dance.”

Hoots and catcalls greeted her taunt, and Hadrian set his full mug aside untasted.

“You really ought not to have said that, Lady Avis.” He winged his brutally sore arm. “After the week we’ve put in, you have to know I won’t back down from a challenge.”

“Challenge me, Lady Avis,” one fellow called.

“You’re challenged simply to remain upright,” Fenwick countered to his fellow. “Go ahead and dance with young Bothwell, my lady. We’ll guard the ale in your absence.”

“I’m not that sore,” Hadrian lied as he and Avis moved in the direction of the temporary dance floor.

“I’m not that inclined to dance, but thank you for retrieving me from the tap. The men were getting boisterous.”

“Lily Prentiss put me up to it. She’s protective of you.”

“Sometimes too much so. She means well. Where are we going?”

The road to hell was where well-meaning people belonged. “We’re off to enjoy your gardens by evening, if we’re not to dance.”

Hadrian dearly hoped they would not attempt the makeshift dance floor, lest he fall on his tired, aching arse before Avis, the tenants, neighbors, and local gentry. Avis let him lead her way from the noise and exuberance of the assembled crowd, around to the back of the house, where the soft light of gloaming spread over the gardens.

“When was the last time you danced, Avie?”

“Not recently. I don’t miss it.” Her tone was clipped, almost afraid.

“You loved to dance.”

Hadrian enjoyed it too, which was one of the reasons he’d never been drawn to highly visible, politically important church posts. He liked to dance, to consume good liquor, to play cards, and otherwise flirt with the behaviors the strictest churchmen frowned upon.

He also, lately, liked to air his naughtier vocabulary.

“Dancing is for girls and their swains,” Avis said tiredly.

“Shall we tell that to Gran Carruthers?”

“She was dancing?”

“She danced Young Deal under the table. It’s often that way, at the weddings, anyway. The grannies can dance all the callow swains under the table.”

While the old men were too wise to enter the affray.

“The grannies can hold their liquor, maybe.”

“Dance with me, Avie.”

“Hadrian, you needn’t.”

“Wrong,” he countered, stopping their progress near the back terrace. “If I sit, I’ll seize up like a plough horse after Sunday rations. Take pity on an aging swain, Avie, and dance with me. Nobody has been willing to approach Mr. Bothwell to allow him such a

plebian pleasure at even a simple shearing party.”

Hadrian sensed both longing and sadness in her gaze, but no relenting.

“Please.” He held up his hand, escort fashion, and waited, and waited, until her bare fingers slipped over his knuckles. MOUSE HERE

“I would be honored,” she murmured when he’d led her to the terrace. As the makeshift orchestra gave the introduction to a slow, triple meter, he bowed, she dipped, and they took up positions appropriate to a
ländler
.

In silence they stepped through the dance, a partner dance related to the waltz, but older, more gracious and less vigorous. Hadrian was drawn back, across years and years, to the last time he’d danced this dance with her—with anybody.

She’d been barely seventeen, and gloriously blooming with newfound womanhood. She’d been innocent and so in a sense had he, and that innocence had been taken from them both.

He stepped closer and she looked away as the dance prescribed, but when the music died, and he lifted her from her final curtsy, he didn’t step back, but rather, dipped his head and brushed a kiss to her mouth.

She might have hurried off, but instead, she leaned in, and Hadrian took the opportunity to put his arms around her.

Just to hold her.

“Thank you,” he said, “Anything more vigorous, and I’d have been unable to creak my way through it.”

“Hush.” She stayed tucked against him, and he shut up, concentrating instead on the feel of her, warm, soft and yielding in his embrace. His hands relearned the elegant, sturdy contour of her back, and inside him, something finally, finally came to rest. Exhaustion hadn’t done it, cold plunges hadn’t done it, swilling whiskey with Fen hadn’t done it, but holding Avis, simply holding her, brought him peace.

“Thank you for the dance,” Hadrian said, stepping back to consider her. “Though the sun is fast waning, and I don’t want you to take a chill.” He had his coat off and snugged around her shoulders in a moment, then slid an arm around her waist as they turned back toward the gardens. “What are you thinking?”

“You are so kind.”

“To inveigle you into dancing? To dragoon you away from your guests and steal you a while all to myself?”

She shook her head.

“What then?”

“Nobody touches me, Hadrian.”

Well, of course. Old people could touch others, probably had to, when their spouses were gone and their children were grown. Gran Carruthers was a clutchy little thing, but one expected that. As a widower, Hadrian knew what it was to be beyond the limit of human touch, to drift along in the bubble of his own skin, lonely in ways the mute beasts never had to suffer in their barns and byres. He already knew that kind of isolation well, though he’d lost Rue only a couple of years past, while for more than a decade Avis…

He settled his arm around her shoulders and walked with her along the pathway.

“The lack of familiarity from your servants and neighbors is out of respect,” he suggested.

“Not respect. I’m contaminated by my unfortunate past, and you need not pretend otherwise.”

“If you’re lonely,” he said slowly, “why not get out more, call upon the occasional neighbor, attend services?”

“Don’t be an idiot.”

He puzzled over that as they wandered past the daffodils, though the flowers were spent, with only the occasional late bloomer still bobbing over its fallen comrades.

“I’m an idiot to suggest you socialize?”

“I’ve tried socializing, Hadrian.” She pulled his coat more closely around her. “I’ve hauled Lily around the parish to every neighbor and tenant in the shire, and it’s always the same. Some might be willing to overlook my past, but others will not, and I come home feeling more angry and—why are we talking about this?”

“Angry and what?”

She paused amid the forlorn beds. “Crazy,” she said very softly. “As if I’m turning invisible, my skin becoming transparent, or I’ve magically leapt over what remains of my youth, to be an old woman in a young woman’s body.”

“You are not old, you are not invisible, you are not crazy, and neither am I.”

He kissed her again, not a gracious gesture offered at the end of a gracious dance. He tasted her, the soft, sensitive fullness of her lips, the intriguing corner of her mouth with that small, barely noticeable scar. When she only burrowed closer and threaded her fingers into his hair, he seamed her lips with his tongue, slowly, exploring contour and response, until she opened for him and he had to pause.

“Assure me, please,” he said, resting his forehead against hers, “that I do not take advantage. I could not live with myself—”

She fused her mouth to his, and Hadrian’s gentlemanly restraint went creaking off into the undergrowth at the feel of her lush breasts against his chest and deft feminine fingers tracing his ears.

“Again.” She breathed her command against his mouth, her tongue seeking his, and Hadrian fell into the kiss like the starving man he’d become. He tucked her against the crook of his shoulder, bracing her for a kiss that became voracious and mutually exuberant.

“Avie.” He drew back long moments later. “We have to stop.” He was supposed to say that—he’d panted it, in truth—though his mind was stingy with the reasons.

“More.” She rose up on her toes and moved her mouth over his jaw, his cheeks, the sides of his neck. “Hadrian, I want—”

“Hush, love,” he chided, for a reason had kicked him hard in the shins. “Anybody could come along here, Avie, and neither one of us wants that.”

The eager, happy light in her eyes died, and she tried to move away, but Hadrian prevented it, taking her by one slender wrist and tugging her to a bench.

“That isn’t what I meant.” He sat and settled her beside him, still holding her hand.

“You can’t be seen kissing me,” she agreed all too crisply. “You’ll need to marry, and dallying with me won’t help toward that end.”

“Avie, I’ll not be marrying anybody for some while. I’m only two years past Rue’s death, and I’ve much to learn about Landover before I can consider a bride.”

She nodded, the movement jerky, brittle, and very much at odds with the lyrical, joyous feel of her in his arms moments before.

“I’d feel better if you slapped me,” he said. “Do you suppose you could oblige?”

Her lips quirked, apparently despite her mood. “I might kiss my brothers, or Lily, or Harold’s puppies, or my horse, but nobody kisses me, Hadrian—nobody. Do you think I’ll slap you for being the first to even try?”

“We ventured a bit past trying, Avie.” He was supposed to sound displeased with himself, but he simply could not. He and Avie had shared one glorious hell of a kiss, not like the kisses he’d shared with Rue, and as for the other women in his bed, well, they hadn’t been the kind who appreciated much kissing.

Avis wrinkled her nose. “A pity kiss. That’s worse than being ostracized.”

He sat beside her in the soft, slanting evening light and felt something shift at her words. He’d left behind friends, familiars and church and thrown himself into Harold’s scheme, as if someday, Landover and its title might truly be his responsibility. He wasn’t the same old Hadrian, and for the first time, he didn’t want to be.

The old Hadrian would have reasoned with her, offered philosophy and platitudes.

This Hadrian slid her hand down to his falls. “That was not a pity kiss, dear heart.”

Rather than pull her hand away in horror, she shaped the length of him, closing her eyes and leaning her head back. “This is not pity.”

“You mustn’t be too offended.” Hadrian moved her hand, capturing it in both of his lest that hand get to wandering on its own. “I’ve had limited congress with women since taking holy orders, and unlike those with a true vocation, I do not view the bodily urges as welcome opportunities for restraint.”

“Put away your book of sermons, Hadrian. What does that mean?”

“I enjoy satisfying my lust with willing parties,” he said, impressing himself with his directness. “Since Rue died, I haven’t been entirely a saint, Avie. I can’t be a saint where you’re concerned, and you deserve saintly behavior.”