Slightly Scandalous (37 page)

This time it was he who watched her face while she watched what they did together, her eyes observing what her body felt with such sweet, almost painful intensity. It was all almost unbearably erotic.

"Sweetheart," he said at last, his voice husky and breathless, "a gentleman cannot go riding off into the sunset and leave his lady behind. If I concede defeat, will you let go and allow me to follow you?"

She looked up into his eyes, lost her rhythm, her slender hold on control, and was suddenly defenseless against the firm pounding of his body into her sweet pain. She cried out again and shuddered about him.

He was still deep inside her, she realized a few moments later, and still large and rock-hard. She opened her eyes and he smiled into them. He brought his hands to the blanket on either side of her shoulders and shifted his position without withdrawing from her. He came down flat on top of her, covering her from shoulders to toes, his weight bearing her into the ground. He found her mouth with his and kissed her, not deeply, not passionately as she expected, but with infinite tenderness.

And then he set his head beside hers, his face buried in her hair, and moved in her again with long, deep strokes, covering her so that she felt strangely cherished, strangely loved. Sexually sated as she was, it was an extraordinary sensation, emotional more than physical-and yet she was very much in the body too. When he went still, he was tense for a moment and then relaxed all his weight onto her with a deep sigh. She could feel the hot flow of his release deep inside. She wrapped her arms about him, feeling both giver and gifted.

His breathing was labored against her ear. They were both hot and slick with perspiration. Seagulls were crying overhead. There was the eternal, elemental flow and suck of the sea against the sand. There were the smells of salt and sand and ocean. There were sunlight and sun heat and the welcome coolness of the breeze.

The earth slowed beneath them.

Ah, yes, the memory of this would always remain with her. And she would not allow future pain to sully it. She would not.

He reached for the spare blanket as he rolled off her, and she turned onto her side facing away from him as he spread it over them and then slid an arm beneath her neck and curled in behind her.

She gazed at the rocky cliff that formed one side of the cove and at the dark green water beneath it. A white gull was perched on top of a rock, gazing out to sea, opening its beak to cry out. She felt warm, languorous, very aware of every sensation impressing itself upon her memory.

Judging from his breathing, Joshua slept for a while. She was glad. She did not want to talk. Not yet. She did not want to listen to his light teasing or to hear him tell her that they were in a scrape again.

She did not want either to laugh or to fear. She simply wanted to be in this endlessly present moment. And when she must move on into the future-well, then. She would never forget. She would never allow herself to deny that for one glorious afternoon she had been not just in love. She had also loved. Loved with her body and loved with her heart.

Fool, Fool, fool, a faint inner voice tried to tell her. But she drifted off to sleep rather than listen to the voice warn her that she would live to regret this day and this falling over a precipice into love itself.

CHAPTER XX

Remind me, sweetheart," Joshua said, his eyes squinting against the glare of sunlight on the water, "why it is we are not going to marry."

She was sitting across from him in the boat, her narrowed gaze on the shoreline, her expression uncommunicative. Since making love for a second time and dressing and returning to the boat, they had exchanged scarcely a word.

She transferred her gaze to his face.

"Don't you dare feel obliged to act the gentleman and offer for me," she said, sounding genuinely angry. "What happened was my fault. It was not done to trap you into marriage."

"Fault?" He grinned at her. "Yours again? I am beginning to feel like a puppet on a string."

"Which is exactly how I felt at the beginning of our acquaintance," she said. "Now we are even."

"Marriage with me would be a trap, would it?" he asked her.

"Of course it would," she said impatiently. "We have been aware of it and wary of it from the start. It would be a horrible mistake for both of us."

He was no longer sure why. She could not mourn her lost love forever, could she? But then he would hate to be married to a woman who felt even leftover traces of such a mourning.

"Why has this afternoon happened, then?" he asked her. "We do not have the excuse of having been swept away by passion, do we? This was planned quite deliberately yesterday-by both of us."

She did not answer him immediately. She stared out over the sea again.

"I am Lady Freyja Bedwyn," she said. "I am the daughter and sister of a duke. Though I have always been known as bold and unconventional and occasionally even rebellious, I am expected to behave in all essential ways with the strictest propriety-both in public and in private. Gentlemen have no such restrictions on their private behavior. All my brothers have had mistresses or casual amours. Wulf has had the same mistress for years without any breath of scandal touching his name. I choose not to marry-not yet, at least, and not unless I meet someone for whom I would willingly sacrifice my freedom. But I am five and twenty and I have all a woman's needs."

"You have used me, then, sweetheart," he asked her, "as a . . . casual amour?"

"Don't be absurd," she said, looking at him again with cold disdain. "You can be remarkably tedious at times, Josh. Change places with me. I want to row."

He grinned at her. "We are not on a lake," he said. "Rowing on the sea takes far more strength and skill. Besides, you would have to get up from your place and maneuver around me in order to get here. I daresay the boat would rock abominably."

"If you fall overboard," she said, "I will stop the boat and rescue you."

One had to admire the woman. All the way across to the island earlier he had been aware of her terror though she had given no outward sign of it. Yet now she was willing to move around in the boat, somehow shift places with him, and then row them back to the harbor? He could almost smell fear in her arrogant, nonchalant stance.

"That is reassuring, at least," he said, securing the oars and getting to his feet, holding to the sides as he did so. The boat rocked from side to side. "I will do the same for you, Free, though I seem to recall that you can swim like a fish. I only just beat you in our race at Lindsey Hall."

He thought she was going to change her mind when she did not immediately move, but as he approached her she stood up-straight, without clinging to the sides. She held herself upright and balanced as the boat swayed and as he squeezed past her and sat down where she had been sitting. He watched appreciatively as she moved along the boat, keeping perfect balance, before turning and sitting and taking the oars in her hands. Her chin was up, as he had expected, and she was viewing the world along the length of her nose.

She had accused him of wearing a mask, of hiding either his real self or nothing at all behind it. She was no different. Behind the cool, haughty, bold front she displayed to the world was a woman who had been hurt, a woman who was lonely-yes, Prue had been quite right about that-a woman who was perhaps afraid to love again.

He might have guessed that she would row the boat like an expert. She did not expend energy by digging the oars deep and trying to displace the whole ocean with every stroke. They were soon moving along at a steady clip.

So she had not changed her mind about marrying, had she? It was a shame really, as he was beginning to change his mind about marrying her. Actually, the thought of saying good-bye to her-probably quite soon now-was one his mind shied away from. His life was going to seem very empty indeed without Freyja in it. And now to top everything off he was going to have the memories of this afternoon to live with.

For all her boldness and passion, she was really still a sexual innocent. She probably did not recognize the difference between having sex and making love. They had been making love this afternoon-or at least, he had been even though he had been careful not to utter one word of love.

She had wanted him only for the experience, for the satisfying of her feminine sexual hunger.

It was a humbling thought.

He chuckled.

"I should be wielding a whip in my right hand," he said, laying his arms along the sides of the boat. "This scene would look far more impressive from the harbor if I were."

There were indeed several villagers standing still on the front road or down on the sand among the boats, all watching in curiosity as the Marquess of Hallmere's betrothed rowed him to shore.

Joshua jumped out when they were in shallow water, risking his valet's wrath when he saw his Hessian boots. He dragged the boat up onto dry sand and lifted Freyja out even as Ben Turner came running to haul the boat higher. Someone up on the road whistled shrilly, and there was a burst of good-natured laughter.

"Ah, Ben," Joshua said, "just the man I want to talk to."

Ben looked warily at him and reached into the boat to take out the blankets.

"I understand," Joshua said, "that your mother has been kind to Lady Prudence. She is at your cottage door, I see. Shall we go up?"

He took Freyja by the elbow and indicated one of the cottages on the front road above the harbor. Mrs. Turner was standing in the doorway, her arms crossed over her bosom. She watched them approach before bobbing a curtsy. Ben trailed along behind.

"If he was making you row that boat, my lady," she said, chuckling, "I would give him his marching orders if I was you. Or lay down the law as it is going to be for the rest of your life."

"But she insisted," Joshua protested. "How was a gentleman to say no?"

Freyja, he realized, found this all very strange-this way he had of fraternizing with ordinary folk and their way of being at ease with him. But he had been one of them just five years ago. She stood silently beside him.

"I have heard of all your kindnesses to Lady Prudence," he said to Mrs. Turner.

He had had a lengthy talk with Miss Palmer during the morning while Prue was out walking with Eve and the children. Prue was very much confined to the nursery at the house. Miss Palmer took her out as much as she could. More often than not they walked into the village or took the gig if it was available. Prue had developed a deep attachment to the Turners, who treated her with warm affection. Indeed, Mrs. Turner often suggested that Miss Palmer leave her there for an hour or two and have some time to herself-she often called upon Miss Jewell, she had explained.

Mrs. Turner looked instantly wary.

"She is a sweet child," she said, "and not an imbecile, even though her mother seems to believe she is, begging your pardon, my lord. I know she is Lady Prudence, and therefore I ought not to encourage her to set foot over my doorstep, but someone has to love her, and Miss Palmer is not always enough."

"I am not here to scold you," Joshua said, clasping his hands behind his back.

"I would think not," she said. "She loves this house. She has her own apron behind the door, and the first thing she does is reach for it and put it on. She sweeps the floors and shakes the mats and washes the dishes and pegs out washing and makes me and Ben tea and is learning how to cook. She even does some mending when she sits down. She brings sunshine into this house."

Joshua looked at Ben, who flushed and dipped his head and worried at a stone buried in the road with the toe of his boot.

"She does that," he said. "And she is not a little girl no longer neither." He looked up into Joshua's face with something like defiance in his own. "She is a woman grown."

Miss Palmer had voiced a concern over the number of times Prue declared that she loved Ben Turner. She said it of everyone, of course, and meant it of everyone. But there was a way she had of saying it with regard to Ben, Miss Palmer had said, that she could not quite explain in words.

"You love her, do you, Ben?" Joshua asked quietly.

Ben's flush deepened, but he did not look away. "It is not my place to love Prue-Lady Prudence," he said. "You need not worry about me, my lord. I will not forget my place."

His title was spoken with slight emphasis and some bitterness, Joshua noticed. He sighed.

"No, I did not expect you would, Ben," he said. "I wanted to thank you for befriending her. I do love her, you see."

"I have never left her and Ben alone together," Mrs. Turner said. "Nor ever would. I know better than that, though I know Ben wouldn't never forget himself."

Joshua smiled at them both, nodded genially, and offered Freyja his arm. They walked back in the direction of the inn, where they had stabled their horses.

"Strangely," he said, "I had never considered the problem of Prue's growing up. Because she will always be a child in many ways, I suppose I had expected that she would remain a child in every way."

"It is a mistake often made of women in general," she said, "the assumption that they do not have needs to match those of men. Prue is not a child, is she? She is a woman. And Ben Turner has seen that. Probably she has seen that he has seen, and the attraction of the cottage is more him than his mother. What will the marchioness do if she discovers the truth?"