Marrying Mr. English: The English Brothers #7 (The Blueberry Lane Series Book 11) (13 page)

And the lusty ploughman breaks the sod,

And the grass sings in the meadows,

And the flowers smile in the shadows,

Sits my heart at ease,

Hearing the song of the leas,

Singing the songs of the meadows.

“Who wrote that?” she asked, grinning at him with delight. “You?”

“No, sunshine,” he’d replied. “Robert Louis Stevenson, though it’s sometimes credited to D. H. Lawrence.”

“Do I know anything he wrote?”

Tom chuckled softly. “Lawrence? He wrote a very naughty book called
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
.”

“How naughty?”

“
Very
.”

“Tell me some of it.”

“How about I
read
you some of it?”

“Tonight?” she’d asked.

“Tomorrow night,” he’d bargained. “I’ll have to dig through the boxes to find it. And anyway, wife, you need some sleep tonight.”

He’d made love to her only once last night in their motel room bed, and the rhythm of their bodies moving together echoed in the squeak of the box spring.

“Well, this is romantic,” he commented at one point, and they both started laughing, despite the fact that he was deeply embedded inside her. Somehow their giggles turned to happy kisses to heat to now to more to yes, and suddenly, she didn’t heard the squeaks at all. She heard only his breath against her neck, the pounding of her heart in her head, and felt the clenching and writhing and stream of liquid heat on her skin as he pulled out of her at the last moment and came beneath her breasts.

She would never get enough of him. Never.

“Here we are,” chirped Gladys. “The smallest house in Weston.”

Eleanora looked up at a small white house, neat and tidy, with a front porch big enough for two rockers. An expanse of white fields spread out behind the house, with nothing troubling her view of the Berkshire Hills beyond. Windows flanked a black-painted door, whose brass knocker glistened like gold in the light of the setting sun. The house smiled at her in its own way, and she smiled back, thinking,
I’m home
.

“We’ll take it,” she murmured.

“You haven’t even seen it yet,” protested Gladys.

“How much is it?” asked Eleanora, without glancing away from her house.

“Six hundred a month.”

“We’ll take it,” she said again.

***

Meeting her back at the hotel late that afternoon, after spending some time at the local library, Tom shared the good news that he was the newest faculty member of Kinsey Hall, and Eleanora shared the good news that they now had a six-month lease on a tiny house in nearby Weston.

They celebrated by having dinner in the motel restaurant and splitting a hot fudge sundae before trudging back through the snow to their room. Once inside, Tom turned up the heat, and produced a shabby paperback from his jacket pocket.

“That,” said Eleanora, toeing off her boots and hanging her coat in the closet, “looks like a
very
naughty book.”

Tom fairly hummed with anticipation. “It is.”

Despite the fact that he’d be bringing home only about a thousand dollars a month after taxes, he felt buoyant tonight—excited, even—as he faced the prospect of a life with Eleanora. She was resourceful and plucky, supportive and enthusiastic, and he would work as hard as he needed to, to keep her happy . . . starting with a memorable fucking orgasm tonight, after introducing her to D. H. Lawrence’s insanely erotic novel,
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
.

“So?” she asked, turning around and giving him a slow, saucy look. “Do you want me to sit on the bed while you read? Or . . .?”

“I was thinking we could read back and forth,” he said. “And while one person reads, the other . . . strips.”

“Inventive. Strip reading instead of strip poker.”

He grinned at her, shrugging out of his overcoat and taking off his boots. “Now we’re even.”

She sat down on the bed, looking up at him. “Start reading.”

Tom opened the old book, turning to one of several dog-eared pages to comply with her demand.

“
His body was urgent against her, and she hadn’t the heart any more to fight . . . She saw his eyes, tense and brilliant, fierce, not loving. But her will had left her. A strange weight was on her limbs. She was giving way
,” read Tom, his eyes flicking up near constantly to watch his wife slowly, so slowly, pull her sweater over her blonde hair and drop it on the floor.

She reached out her hand for the book. He handed it to her, pointing to where he’d left off.

“
She was giving up . . . she had to lie down there under the boughs of the tree, like an animal, while he waited, standing there in his shirt and breeches, watching her with haunted eyes . . . He too had bared the front part of his body and she felt his naked flesh against her as he came into her. For a moment he was still inside her, turgid there and quivering
,” she finished, her voice lower and more gravelly than it had been when she started.

Tom’s sweater lay on top of hers.

“Your turn,” she said.

He took the book, watching her as he recited from memory, “
Then as he began to move, in the sudden helpless orgasm, there awoke in her new strange thrills rippling inside her. Rippling, rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance, exquisite, exquisite and melting her all molten inside.”

Eleanora’s turtleneck shirt joined their sweaters on the floor, and Tom dropped his eyes to her breasts, watching as her nipples puckered, pushing against the material of her bra, straining and hard. His blood surged, and his cock swelled behind his jeans.

“You have it memorized?” she asked, holding his eyes.

“We weren’t allowed to have porn at Kinsey. This was the closest we could get.”

“So you all read it a million times.”

“A million or more,” he said, holding out the book to her, “dreaming about a girl like you.”

She licked her lips and took the book from him, reading, “
It was like bells rippling up and up to a culmination. She lay unconscious of the wild little cries she uttered at the last. But it was over too soon, too soon, and she could no longer force her own conclusion with her own activity. This was different, different. She could do nothing. She could no longer harden and grip for her own satisfaction upon him. She could only wait, wait and moan in spirit as she felt him withdrawing, withdrawing and contracting, coming to the terrible moment when he would slip out of her and be gone.”

He tore his turtleneck over his head, glad that his T-shirt hitched a ride, baring his chest to her.

“This is,” she said, raising her eyes to his, her breathing shallow and audible, “hot.”

“I told you,” he said.

She dropped her gaze to his bare chest, then quickly reached behind and unfastened her bra. “New rule: two pieces of clothing each time.”

“Whatever you want, baby,” he said.

“I want you to read,” she murmured, handing him the book as her bra whispered down her arms and slipped to the growing pile of clothes on the floor.

Tom’s mouth watered, and he had to swallow before dropping his eyes to the text. He took a shaky breath, feeling his cock twitch as she unbuttoned and unzipped her jeans.

“Read, Tom,” she said, pushing the denim over her hips.

“
Whilst all her womb was open and soft, and softly clamouring, like a sea-anemone under the tide, clamouring for him to come in again and make a fulfilment for her. She clung to him unconscious in passion, and he never quite slipped from her, and she felt the soft bud of him within her stirring, and strange rhythms flushing up into her with a strange rhythmic growing motion, swelling and swelling till it filled all her cleaving consciousness . . .”

He looked up, and she was lying naked on the bed, her head braced up on one elbow so that she could watch him.

“Jesus,” he murmured, clenching his jaw. She was every teenaged boy’s—every man’s—

erotic fantasy come true. And she was his.

She grinned at him like she could read his mind, then licked her lips, holding out her hand. “Give it to me, husband, and finish stripping.”

He placed the book on the bed beside her, then reached for his belt buckle.

Her voice, dulcet and low, thick with passion, picked up where he left off, “. . .
and then began again the unspeakable motion that was not really motion, but pure deepening whirlpools of sensation swirling deeper and deeper through all her tissue and consciousness, till she was one perfect concentric fluid of feeling, and she lay there crying in unconscious inarticulate cries.”

She had flipped to her back while reading, drawing her knees up and open, and now Tom knelt between them, his cock standing tall and proud, pulsing and twitching with arousal. He cut his eyes to hers, and found them dark and drugged, soft and waiting.

“Make me cry in unconscious, inarticulate cries, Tom,” she said, her lips tilting into a sexy grin as she stared up at him.

This girl.

This woman.

His
woman.

How she embraced life. How she rolled with its punches, forever leaning into it and never away. In such a short time, she had become his coconspirator and helpmate, his cheerleader and lover. His friend. His partner. His wife. His . . . beloved.

“Eleanora,” he said, savoring her name against his lips as he positioned the tip of his sex at the entrance of hers.

“Mmm?”

“I love you,” he said, surging forward to merge his body with hers.

Her lips parted in surprise—half from his unexpected admission and half from the perfection of their joining—and she gasped, her eyes fluttering closed as he pushed forward. When he was fully sheathed within her, his pelvis flush with hers, she opened them again. They sparkled like sapphires, shining brightly amid an ocean of unshed tears.

“Tom,” she whispered, reaching for his face and pulling him down to her. “I love you too.”

He kissed her madly, rocking into her, faster and faster, promising her with his body that his words were true.

Her cries and moans overtook the squeaking of their motel room bed, the walls of her sex tightening around him, pulsing in waves, until he could barely endure the sweetness. He forced himself to withdraw at the last possible moment to spend himself on her belly.

And then he clutched her to his body, the heat of their lovemaking binding them flesh to flesh, the power of their new love binding them heart to heart.

Eleanora had worked every New Year’s Eve since she was fourteen years old, slinging pitchers of beer at a bar in Romero and, once she’d gotten to Vail, working the all-night shift at Auntie Rose’s because she hoped the tips would be good. And they were—last year’s New Year’s Eve tips had paid her rent through February.

She’d never had someone special with whom to celebrate New Year’s, no one to dress up for, no one she’d want to kiss at midnight. The couple of no-account boys she’d dated in high school hadn’t been worth losing her tips for, and she’d worked too hard, between Auntie Rose’s and community college, to date anyone seriously in Vail.

So this year was new territory for Eleanora: for the first time in her adult life, she was going to celebrate New Year’s Eve,
and
she had someone special to kiss at midnight. And she greeted the holiday with excitement and anticipation.

Tom had been spending every day at the Weston Memorial Library. Eleanora dropped him off at ten o’clock so she would have the car all day, and picked him up when the library closed, at five. He was creating the syllabus for the freshman and sophomore English classes he would be teaching, rereading books and stories to gauge their appropriateness, and coming up with study plans. Every evening, as they ate breakfast-for-dinner, he’d tell her about his progress, and she’d listen with enthusiasm and approval, before telling him which parts of their little house she’d scrubbed clean, and what frugal purchases she’d made to feather their modest nest.

But today, New Year’s Eve, she wouldn’t just drop him off at the library before heading home. No. Today Eleanora Watters English was on a mission, and it required her sneaking into the library after dropping Tom off, and somehow evading him as she hunted her quarry.

“I love you tons,” he said tenderly, leaning over the car bolster to kiss her good-bye, as he did every morning.

Her toes curled as he kissed her. Heat, never absent for long, pooled in her belly. “I love you back.”

“See you at five?”

She nodded, grinning at him. “I’ll be here. And no flirting with the librarians.”

He picked up his satchel off the floor and winked at her. “Didn’t you ever hear what Paul Newman said about philandering?”

“Educate me.”

“He said, and I quote, ‘I have steak at home. Why should I go out for hamburger?’”

She chuckled. “Did you just compare me to meat?”

“You’re filet mignon, baby.”

“You better believe it,” she said, grabbing his neck for one more kiss before letting him go.

He hopped up the steps of the library, but just before stepping inside, he turned around and grinned at her, pursing his lips into one more quick kiss before disappearing inside.

Eleanora sighed happily, pulling away from the curb in front of the little brick building and circling the block. When she approached the building again, she pulled into the rear parking lot and cut the engine.

She took off her coat and threw it in the backseat, then pulled on an old brown sweater and tied a scarf around her hair. Donning Jackie O–style sunglasses she’d picked up at a pharmacy in Vail, she checked her reflection in the rearview mirror before heading into the library via the back door.

Walking with her head down, she desperately hoped that she wouldn’t run into Tom and ruin the surprise. After a week of breakfast for every meal, she was going to make dinner tonight. A
real
dinner.

The problem? She had no idea how. Her mission was to find a cookbook, check it out of the library, choose a recipe in the car, and head straight to the Davis IGA and get everything she needed. When she left to pick up Tom, she planned to have the table set, an elegant dinner warming in the oven, and chilled white wine ready to be enjoyed the moment they arrived home.

After all, it felt like the least she could do. Tom was working so hard for both of them, having insisted that he wanted to support her. She would use her savings to treat him to a little celebration tonight. Besides, they’d been married for exactly ten days today, and if that wasn’t something to celebrate, Eleanora couldn’t think of anything that was.

Sliding into the first row of books she saw, she peeked through two stacks and found Tom sitting at a table not from her. He had his back to her and his shoulders hunched forward as though reading. His blond hair was shiny from the sun billowing in through the windows in front of him and a little long in the back, she noticed, the waved edges brushing the collar of the crisp blue shirt that she’d successfully ironed for him this morning. Her fingers twitched because they knew so well the feel of those strands threaded between her digits. Soft and downy and—

“Tom! Is this where you’ve been hiding?”

Eleanora jolted forward against the stack of books before her, watching as a tall, classy blonde woman wearing a black cashmere coat and holding a black fur muff sidled up to her husband’s table.

Moving as stealthily as possible, Eleanora slipped to the end of one stack of books and inserted herself into the next, now concealed by only one stack as she spied on her husband. She lowered her sunglasses as the woman sat down on the edge of the table, her coat falling open to reveal long legs and high-heeled shoes.

Tom half stood, but the woman placed her hand on his shoulder familiarly and pushed him back into his chair.

“My view from up here is smashing,” she gushed, giggling. “Don’t ruin it by standing up.”

Eleanora’s eyes narrowed. This woman was pretty. No, she was beautiful. And she was obviously wealthy, judging from her clothes. And she definitely knew Tom.

“Good morning, Charity.”

“Good morning, Tom,” she said, putting on a deep and serious voice before giggling again. “We have to lighten you up a little!” Her hand, which had lingered on Tom’s shoulder, slid down his arm in a caress. “Trouble with the little woman?”

The little woman?
Huh!
This woman, this
Charity
, with whom my husband is so familiar, is talking about
me, she thought, which raised the question, If Charity knew about Eleanora, how come Eleanora didn’t know about Charity?

“No,” said Tom, who didn’t remove Charity’s offending hand.

“She
did
get you disowned.” Her hand squeezed, and her voice dripped with sympathy. “Poor baby.”

Eleanora’s face fell. How did this woman know so much about her? About
them
?

“I need to get back to work, Charity.”

“You work too hard!” exclaimed Charity, who slipped her hand into Tom’s. “Have lunch with me today.”

“I can’t,” he said, looking up at her. “Too much to do.”

“All work and no play, Tommy.”

Tommy?
Jesus!
Tommy?

Tom cleared his throat, finally taking back his hand to run it through his hair, then folding it with his other hand on his lap.

Eleanora was seething by now, her breath coming in fast, furious draws as she hid behind the tragedies of Shakespeare.

Meanwhile, Charity showed no signs of leaving.

“Can’t wait to see you tomorrow,” she purred in a low, sexy tone.

Tomorrow? He was seeing her tomorrow?
Eleanora held her breath, her chest burning and painful as she waited for his reply.

“Oh, that’s right.”

“Did you forget?”

“Of course not,” he said. “I’ll have to, uh—”

“Good! I can’t wait,” she said, reaching out to tousle his hair. “Know what I was thinking about this morning?”

“Nope,” said Tom.

“Remember the time we went skinny-dipping in Weston Falls?”

Eleanora gasped, her arm jerking forward and shoving
Macbeth
right through the stack, which knocked the book behind it to the wood floor a few feet away from Tom’s table. Eleanora crouched down as it thudded loudly to the floor. From behind the lower shelf, she saw Tom and Charity look quickly in her direction, but she was concealed behind the lower shelf of books, and they went back to their conversation.

“Remember?” said Charity again, slapping Tom’s shoulder playfully.

“Um,” he said. “Yeah. Long time ago.”

“Not
so
long ago,” she said, swinging her leg back and forth.

How
recently
? Eleanora wondered, watching Charity’s leg brush against her husband’s thigh.

And suddenly, a terrible lump rose in her throat, sidelining her anger and giving rise to fear. Who was she? An ex-girlfriend? For God’s sake, the way she was behaving, it seemed more like she was a . . . a . . .
current
girlfriend. Eleanora’s heart clutched as her eyes watered painfully.

“Miss? Miss? Did you knock down that book?” Eleanora looked up to find a gray-haired lady contemplating her from the end of the row with bushy, furrowed eyebrows and a deep, disapproving frown. “Are you hiding back here knocking books over?”

“Shhh!” whispered Eleanora, popping up so fast, her elbow caught
King Lear
and
Hamlet
, knocking them to the floor.

“That’s it!” said the old librarian, hustling down the row, waggling her finger at Eleanora. “You can’t come here and hurt the books!”

“I’m going!” she snarled in a loud whisper, adjusting her askew sunglasses and feeling like a hybrid of an idiot and a chump. “Just stop yelling! Shhhh!”

“You shhh!”

“You shhh!” she whisper-yelled back, making her way quickly back down the row before they drew an audience.

She peeked out between some books at the end of the aisle to see Charity’s head thrown back, giggling at something Tom was saying. Taking a deep, ragged breath, Eleanora lifted her chin, took a right toward the exit and slammed the library door shut behind her as hard as she possibly could.

***

It has not been a very good day
, mused Tom, who trudged home on icy, snow-covered sidewalks in the cold dark.

Oh, it had started off auspicious enough: sunrise sex with his gorgeous, amazing wife, another delicious breakfast, and the sweetest-ever kiss good-bye as she dropped him off at the library this morning. But it had all gone downhill from there.

First of all, Charity Gordon, who couldn’t take a hint if the word
hint
was flashing neon in her face, had wasted almost half an hour of his time this morning, bothering him about going out to lunch, reconfirming dinner for tomorrow—which he’d forgotten to mention to his wife—and reminding him of stupid boarding school shenanigans. No, he hadn’t gone skinny-dipping with her, he’d wanted to say.
She’d
gone skinny dipping with Geoffrey Atwell and Trent Hughes. Tom and Van had happened upon them and had a good laugh stealing their clothes.

The thing about Charity, however, was that, as forward and annoying as she was, she was also Dean Gordon’s daughter, and Tom needed to keep things friendly with her father. He needed the job offered to him at Kinsey. So he wasn’t anxious to insult Charity by telling her to bug off. But, it made him feel funny to be seen in public with Charity, like he was somehow betraying Eleanora, even though the sun rose, set, and shined in his wife’s eyes.

Second of all, the librarian—the older, graying lady whom he sometimes found cooing to the books or petting them like kittens—had come over to see him around four fifty-five to say that his wife had called to say the car wouldn’t start. He’d need to walk home.

“Walk home?” he asked, sure he’d misunderstood her. It was four or five miles.

“Shhh! It’s a library. Lower your voice!” the older lady whisper-yelled. “Yes. Walk. Car won’t start.”

“Are you sure she called for me?”

“You’re Thomas English. I see your library card at the end of every day.”

His shoulders had slumped, and he sighed. Not only would he have to walk home with five or six books weighing down his satchel, but it would take over an hour to get there, and he hated waiting that long to see her. Not to mention, they didn’t have the money to fix a broken starter, which worried him as he slipped and slid down the frosty New England sidewalks, heading out of the well-lit village.

“Not a very good day at all,” he grumbled, thinking about the call he’d made to his father while he took a half-hour break at lunch time.

He’d used the pay phone in the basement of the library, feeding it dime after dime until his father’s apartment phone had rung.

“Hello, Bertram English’s residence.”

“Flora, it’s Tom,” he said, greeting his father’s maid.

“Mister Tom! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!”

“To you too. Is my father there?”

“Yes, sir. Hold the line, please.”

A moment later, his father picked up. “Tom?”

“Father.”

“Have you come to your senses?”

Tom flinched, his nostrils flaring as he took a deep breath to swallow the words he wanted to say,
Fuck you, sir
holding a place of pride at the top of the list.