Laura Kinsale (28 page)

It was a whisper, a little shy. If it had not been shy, he would have turned and run.

He heard her moving, coming closer. When she spoke again, she was so close that he jumped.

“I’ve seen you. Goin’ about quiet-like.” She paused, and then said wistfully, “I think you’re beautiful.”

Arden had turned his head slightly, barely daring to look at her. Her face was flushed, her hair falling down. She held her dress up with her arms crossed and pressed against her, but it gaped in front, and he could see her breasts pushed together. His heart was beating so hard that he was afraid he was going to pass out.

“Beautiful eyes. Too beautiful for a girl like me,” she had said, with a touch of regret.

She had turned away then. And to this day, he did not know if he had been deliberately lured by that strategic retreat or not, but as she started to go, he turned skittishly and said, “I’ve never—”

That was all that came out of his paralyzed throat. She looked back, and a knowing smile, age-old, had given her face a subtle glow. He had thought she was the most splendid female in the known universe.

“‘Tisn’t hard. I’ll show you. But I think you peeked already!”

She came back, and took his hand, and leaned forward, placing a little kiss at the corner of his mouth.

“You’re married,” he said desperately, through the feel of her and the scent of her and the soft, soft touch of her fingers as she carried his hand up to cup her breast.

“Mmm. And I’m going to have a baby.” She touched his lips with her tongue. “My ma says that makes a girl get peculiar. I always want it, you know? And Harvey’s working. I wouldn’t do it with nobody else, but you’re the young lord. Real quality. Are you afraid of Harvey?”

He was terrified of Harvey. All he could see was the size of Harvey’s hand on her breast; all he could feel was her nipple swelling between his forefinger and his middle one. He pressed them together, and she made a sound deep in her throat, her breast rising beneath his hand.

She reached down for his trousers. He grabbed her hand, mortified beyond speech, hysterically sure he was going to go off if she touched him.

“You afraid of Harvey?” she had asked again.

“No,” he croaked.

She had pulled him toward her, taking him with her to the grassy, sunny patch. He was trembling all over. And he had fumbled and gone to his knees behind her and slid his hands up beneath her skirt when she knelt, and done what Harvey had done, and in his adolescent excitement and degradation he had gone all odd and ill and strange, unable to move or breathe without being sick.

He could still remember the way she had wiggled against him and said, “Go on.”

He hadn’t; he’d said nothing, only pulled away and buttoned himself up and sat down with his face in his arms. And to his eternal shame he had shed tears of frustration.

“It’s all right,” she said, patting his foot. “It happens that way sometimes, Harvey says. That a man can’t.”

He could hear the disappointment in her voice. “I’m sorry,” he said to his arms.

“Oh, well,” she’d said.

He had thought she would get up and leave. He still didn’t know why she hadn’t. He’d waited, his head in his arms, desperate for her to go away and leave him to his mortification; still desperate to feel her again.

Finally, he had looked. She was lying in the grass, only having moved as far as rolling over onto her back. Her eyes were closed in the dappled summer sun. The dress was fallen down from her breasts and hiked up above her waist, showing everything. Her stays were loose—he vividly, vividly remembered the small bulge of her early pregnancy, emphasized by the way she lay flat on the ground.

He had stood up, looking down at her. His blood rose, a deeper, more powerful surge, as if it came from somewhere inside himself that he had never known existed.

He lowered himself onto the grass beside her, touching her, kissing her, his body leaning over hers. She’d opened her mouth to him, arching upward; he had no memory of how he had discovered her place, only that they had moved together, and he was on top of her, and she was panting and gasping, making sounds of surprise and delight and demand. She had clutched frantically at him. And it had gone on and on, until he had thought he was going to die if he could not reach the culmination of it; he was going to die of agonizing, blinding sensation-—until at last, at last, her peak had released his, his muscles and his breath and his mind exploding, and then they had lain there winded, witless, both of them shocked by the power of it.

“Oh, my,” Grace had whispered. “Harvey never done it that way!”

Long afterward, when Arden was considerably more enlightened about women, he deduced that it had been her first climax. Perhaps she had taught Harvey “that way.” Or perhaps she had preferred after all not to be crushed under eighteen stone, and left things the way Harvey liked them in his own bed. At any rate, she had always shown a particular warmth for her shy and fervent young lord.

For several sensational years, until Arden’s father took him up to London on his eighteenth birthday, he had lived in a haze of lust for Grace and a sweat of fear over Harvey. He could count on his hands the number of his sexual encounters in the affair. Precisely eight, though he had probably fantasized eight thousand, and he knew the place and context of every one of them. Grace had been an honest strumpet. She was always safely with child before Arden was allowed to touch her, much to his burning frustration. Harvey’s children were authentic little Herrings.

Even so, Arden still was not entirely sure that he cared to have Grace cooing over him quite so openly in the Swan. But the big man leaned on the bar, smiling benignly at his silly and cheerful wife: an entirely innocuous cuckold.

An apple-cheeked girl bounced down the stairs, calling, “Ma—Jenny won’t leave my ribbons—” She stopped and cast a wide glance at Arden.

“Make your curtsy,” Grace said, standing up suddenly and wiping at her skirts with a quick embarrassment. “This is Martha, my lord—our oldest—you won’t remember her but as no more than a scrap of a baby girl.”

Arden rose, making a bow that brought deeper roses to Martha’s cheeks. She was sixteen or so—and he smiled, remembering that charming belly dappled in the summer sun. He took her hand. “Miss Herring.”

“La!” Martha said. “You’re Lord Winter! Ma told me all about you!”

She was every bit the natural flirt that her mother had been, lifting her lashes at him speculatively. Arden leaned back against a heavy post and took a deep swallow of ale. As he lowered the mug, he caught Harvey’s eye.

The tapster’s genial expression had vanished. He looked at Arden with a cold, steady warning.

Arden bowed his head slightly, acknowledging the caution. Harvey watched him bleakly for another moment, and then turned to draw a glass. Miss Martha was babbling comments and questions about His Lordship getting himself killed in Ethiopia, a naive monologue that suggested her mother had not told her quite all about Lord Winter. Arden let her babble on. Grace gave him the trademark look under the lashes that had once consumed his reason and made him toss and dream and strangle his pillow at night.

She seemed older beside her breathless daughter, but not nearly so old that the village siren she had been was vanished. Remembering their first time had roused the heat in him to a sharp burn. But with a deep sense of dislocation and stress, he realized that it was not Grace that he wanted now. Or even pink-cheeked and rather willing-looking Miss Martha—eighteen-stone father or no.

Shortly after Arden had finished his mug, he bade the Herrings a good night, much to Miss Martha’s disappointment, as he did not stay to see the retrimmed bonnet that she was about to model. Grace followed him onto the step. Their breaths mingled in the cold air.

“I was that glad, m’lord, to hear you was still among the livin’,” she said, with the unexpected wistfulness that sometimes hushed her voice. “That glad.”

He shrugged. “I’m quite all right.”

She put her hand on his arm and said suddenly, softly, “You know that I can’t anymore. Not with the girls all grown up. It wouldn’t be—right. Do you think?” She glanced up at him anxiously.

He smiled. “No.” He touched her cheek. “Besides, I think Harvey has my number.”

“Harvey!” she snorted. Then she said, “He’s been awful, awful good to me.”

“And I prefer to avoid having all my bones broken.” He smiled crookedly. “I’ve got a family now myself.”

She looked a little brighter. “So you do, m’lord. So you do!” She patted his arm. “I feel better then.” When he raised his eyebrows at that, she said, “You looked so dreadful lonesome when you come in. But you got a wife, and up at the big house they say that she’s pretty enough to keep the cows in milk.”

“Is that what they say?” he asked, bemused.

“A beauty,” she said solemnly. “Not a candle to me, o’course.”

“Of course not.”

She giggled and poked him. “ ‘Ain’t you Grace Herring’s daughter?’“ she mimicked him in a high voice. “Old cheek! You always was the cunning quiet one.” Then she squeezed his arm and leaned up suddenly to kiss him on the mouth. “Real quality,” she whispered. Before he had a moment to register the first female form pressed against him for more than two years, she had left him and run inside.

As he turned up the collar of his coat and walked down the street, the last leaded-glass window of the Swan squeaked open. “And you make sure she treats you proper, m’lord,” Grace hissed, “or bless me if she won’t answer to me and Harvey too! I can’t have you in here makin’ them fine sheep’s eyes again. My Martha ain’t got a particle more sense than me, m’lord, and I know just how much
that
is!”

It was hours after midnight when Arden lit a candle in the room he had been relegated to. He undressed himself, having yet to engage a manservant, and tossed his clothes and damp greatcoat over the chair beside the crib. It was warm in the room, the fire kept up on Beth’s behalf, he supposed.

Better if it had been cold. He opened the window and stood before it in his trousers, with the chill air flowing past his chest.

Oh, yes, I have my own family now.
His lip curled derisively.
What a cozy little group we are.

He rubbed his hands over his face, moving restlessly away from the window. He sat down on the cot. He’d slept on far worse. For a few moments he gazed at nothing, lost in an erotic reverie, mixing up Grace and the elegant dasher that the earl had arranged, three years too late, to put an end to his son’s virginity—the Earl Belmaine desiring as always to take no unnecessary risks in any part of his heir’s education or experience—and a few other females worth remembering, though not for their clever conversation. He found himself staring at the door to the next room.

She had looked less frosty in her gown and robe. Warmer. Her hair had been tucked up under a cap, but it would come down so easily.

He saw the plate lying beside the door. For an annoyed instant he thought of ringing for whatever careless maid had left it and delivering some pointed remarks on the folly of encouraging vermin in a house of this size. Then he knelt abruptly and picked the dish up.

He stood holding it. His mood rose—and then he thought it was an amazingly absurd thing, to read meaning into an empty plate. He pitched the crumbs out the window and set it down.

He sat on the cot again, slumped against the wall, his legs stretched out. He turned a red-and-yellow building block over with his toe and wondered why it wasn’t so difficult to talk to someone like Grace.

Because there was nothing to talk about, of course.

Ah, simple lust.

He was much in favor of simple lust. He grew more in favor of it by the moment. So much so that he got up, blew out his candle, and very, very slowly tried the door handle.

It was unlocked. He had not expected that. The door opened silently, emanating warmth to the cool air behind him.

He could hear his daughter breathing, soft little baby snuffs. Nothing else. His eyes adjusted, picking out the black mass of the bed in the dark.

She might be awake. She might have heard him come in, seen the light of his candle beneath the door. He moved softly into the room. Everything was in its place, so familiar that he did not need to see it even after thirteen years.