The Vow (19 page)
“Will you stay?” Samuel’s low, soft, beguiling voice promised untold riches if she did.
“Lock the door.”
He closed his eyes and sighed, a mixture of wonder and relief. When he turned the key in the lock, the click reverberated through Hannah’s mind like a gunshot.
Samuel walked toward her. For the first time Hannah allowed herself to assess him as a lover, and she found him stirring indeed. Her fingers ached to stroke the springy softness of his dark, curly hair, and the thought of his sensuous mouth roving over her naked body left her knees weak and shaking.
She wanted to push his shirt open and feel the smooth, silky skin and hard muscles of his shoulders and chest beneath her fingertips. She wanted him. Oh, yes.
He grinned and drew her away from the window before some passerby could see them together. “My, my, what wicked, wanton thoughts you have.”
She blushed like a schoolgirl. “That’s not fair. You can read my mind.”
Samuel cupped her face in his hands, lightly stroking her cheeks with his thumbs. “No, only your beautiful eyes.” Then his fingers went to her chignon, pulling the offending pins from it and letting her glossy hair tumble down her back in sweet abandon.
When he kissed her, Hannah felt as though she had never been kissed before, an unrestrained, openmouthed, hot-tongued possession that left her dizzy and drowning.
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They kissed until kissing no longer aroused them. They needed more.
Samuel’s palm closed over Hannah’s left breast, caressing it through thin calico and thinner lawn, then teasing the nipple with his thumb until she gasped through clenched teeth.
He brushed his lips along the delicate shell of her outer ear, whispering, “Let me see your breasts.”
Hannah’s shaking fingers undid the buttons down the front of her dress, and when it spread gaping and inviting, he parted it farther and slid it off her shoulders and down her arms, where it gathered at her elbows, imprisoning them against her sides. Her chemise came down next over her breasts.
Samuel stared. “Ah, but you are beautiful.”
At his sweet, husky words, Hannah felt a clench of white-hot heat unfurl deep inside. Reiver never spoke when he took her, never complimented her.
Still staring, Samuel took several steps back to his worktable, picked up a large, dry paintbrush, and returned to her, his eyes sparkling mischievously. At Hannah’s puzzled look, he murmured, “I have the urge to paint you.”
He dipped the brush’s soft tip in the moisture gathering in the hollow of her throat, then slowly drew it down her chest in a seductive, voluptuous tickle.
“Samuel, you mustn’t.” She shuddered. “This is—this is—”
“Indescribable? And it’s only beginning.” He drew the brush down her right breast and traced the areola around and around before quickly flicking the soft bristles back and forth across one straining nipple then the other, teasing them.
Hannah’s knees buckled and she swayed. Samuel steadied her, and resumed stripping her with the attention and dedication of one performing a sacred ritual.
He knew just what to unhook and untie. Soon Hannah’s dress, corset, petticoats, and undergarments lay on the studio floor in a crumpled heap and she was standing naked before a man not her husband. Her lover.
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My lover.
How wicked that sounds.
She watched him undress with masculine grace, and blushed when his trousers and drawers slipped down over his narrow hips. She stared, for Samuel was larger than his brother.
He took her hand and led her over to the old settee standing against one wall. “It’s not as grand as I’d like, but it will have to do.”
Hannah lay down and prepared herself to accept Samuel’s weight, but he surprised her by kneeling on the floor and continuing his arousing caressing with hands, lips, and flicking tongue. He concentrated on her breasts, tugging and sucking until she groaned and writhed in abandon. When his palm cupped her most intimate flesh and his fingers explored her relentlessly, Hannah almost arched off the settee.
“Dear God, Samuel!”
He came to her then, parting her thighs and possessing her with one swift thrust. He felt so hot and hard, filling her to bursting. Hannah moved with him, compelled to reach for the ecstasy that often eluded her in her husband’s arms.
When it came, rising, rising, exploding like a Roman candle, Hannah finally awoke inside.
Then Samuel gave her another gift.
After his own shuddering climax that caused the settee to hop up and down, Samuel kissed her tenderly and murmured, “You are not a cold piece, Hannah Shaw, and you’ve given me more pleasure than a man deserves.”
Afterward, Samuel knew Hannah would be racked with guilt.
He saw it in the furrow etched between her brows as she cast darting sidelong glances toward the door, in the hurried way her nervous fingers 162
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smoothed her disheveled hair and arranged it back into its familiar chignon at the nape of her neck, in the way her gaze avoided him.
He helped her dress with the efficiency of a ladies’ maid, though he couldn’t resist kissing inviting patches of flesh before concealing them.
“I—I have to go,” she said, rubbing her wrists as if they’d been locked in a pillory for hours.
“I’ve stayed too long and Mrs. Hardy will wonder where I am.”
He caught her hand just as she was about to flee. “I want to make love to you again, Hannah. All day, every day.”
Panic and fear flooded those huge blue eyes. “We mustn’t! I—I’m a married woman. I have children. Someone will catch us.”
“No one will find out, if we’re careful. I’m alone here for most of the morning. James is always at the mill, tinkering with those damned machines, and the women don’t come to clean until later.” He smiled. “You don’t think this was a mistake, do you? A momentary lapse in sanity? Because it’s not, my sweet little Puritan. At least for me. And I don’t think it was for you, either.”
“No, it wasn’t. But I have duties. Responsibilities that must come before personal desires.”
“Forget about duties and responsibilities. Live for the moment because it will never come again.”
She gave him a curious look. “And what about you? Don’t you feel some shame for what we’ve just done?”
“For coveting my brother’s wife? No, because Reiver doesn’t deserve you. I want you so badly that I’m willing to risk everything to have you.”
Her brow furrowed. “But what if we’re caught?”
“Then we’ll beg Reiver’s forgiveness just as he begged your forgiveness for his affair with Cecelia.”
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His blunt reminder that Reiver had first wronged her brought Hannah up short. “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”
“No, but when I see you become the beautiful, sensual woman in the portrait I engraved when you first married, I know it’s right.”
Her hand flew to her abdomen and her eyes darkened in panic. “What if I conceive a child?”
“I’ll show you how not to. All it takes is a piece of sponge, vinegar, and a little care.”
She stared at him. Such forbidden, mysterious knowledge belonged to a Samuel she didn’t know.
He caught her hand and kissed her palm to allay her fears. “Come tomorrow.
Please. Take the risk. You have nothing to fear, I promise.”
Hannah drew her hand away and headed for the door. “I—I don’t think that would be wise, Samuel.”
And she fled.
Everyone will know
, Hannah thought on her way back to the house.
They just
have to take one look at my guilty face and they’ll know I’ve been unfaithful to Reiver.
All Mrs. Hardy noticed was that Hannah didn’t have the berries for the boys’
blueberry cobbler and went out in a huff to pick them herself. Later that evening at dinner, Reiver and James were too preoccupied with designing new looms to notice the “A” for adulteress Hannah had branded into her own forehead.
That night, when Hannah was alone in the heavy summer darkness, her thoughts invariably turned to Samuel, the only one to understand her lonely, wounded heart. Restless and unable to sleep, she rose and went to the window facing the homestead. Velvet darkness enveloped the house, except for one illuminated window in the upstairs studio. She saw Samuel’s familiar shadow 164
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limned by golden light, and felt his hot, hungry gaze on her bedchamber window.
She had to keep away from him. She had to.
Samuel stood before his studio window, staring moodily out at the morning drizzle graying the landscape. He resisted the urge to fling his engraving plate right through the glass.
Eleven days had passed since he had seduced Hannah, and still she hadn’t come to him. Oh, he saw her every day. He could hardly avoid her. But, to his surprise and chagrin, she acted as though nothing untoward had happened.
He ran his hands through his hair in frustration. How could she pretend that their union meant nothing to her? It meant everything to him.
Then he heard it, the pattering of light footsteps up the steep stairs.
He held his breath until he felt light-headed, not daring to hope.
The door opened a crack, then swung wide.
The breath he had been holding came out in a soft swoosh. “Hannah.”
She hesitated in the doorway, her ivory cheeks flushed with either shame or excitement. Fine beads of moisture from the drizzle outside clung to her smooth, straight hair like stars and dampened her blue calico dress so that it smelled faintly of dye.
“I wanted to stay away,” she said, resigned at last, “but I find that I can’t.”
Her hand dipped into the deep pocket of her dress and she pulled out a clear stoppered bottle and small sponge. “I suspect I shall be needing these.”
Vinegar and a sponge. A tangible but unspoken admission of surrender and premeditation, of sweet, illicit complicity. It had taken eleven days, but he had won. She was his at last.
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Reiver threw down another broken cocoon in disgust and stepped on it, grinding it with his boot. “How many does this make?” he snapped at Constance Ferry as if she were personally responsible for the catastrophe.
Constance sat at her table surrounded by the white mountain of cocoons that she was sorting. “At least a hundred in the last basket alone, Mr. Shaw,” she replied.
“Damn it, that’s too many! I don’t pay good money for broken cocoons!”
Constance’s long face puckered. “’Tain’t my fault, Mr. Shaw. They come that way.”
Reiver stormed off, oblivious to the young woman’s distress as he bellowed for James.
In the reeling room, the half-dozen looms hummed industriously, a sound Reiver usually found relaxing. Today their monotonous droning set his teeth on edge.
“James! Where in the hell are you?” He ignored the workers’ questioning looks as he went striding into the machine room and almost collided with James.
“What’s wrong?” James wiped his greasy hands on a towel.
Reiver glared at him. “Why haven’t you invented a machine that can use those damned broken cocoons? I’m damned sick and tired of throwing them away. It’s waste, pure and simple.”
“I’m trying my best, but inventing something takes time.”
Reiver lowered his head like a charging bull. “We don’t have time. We lose money every time we have to throw away a broken cocoon.”
James bristled, his eyes darkening in anger, for he was not used to being the brunt of Reiver’s temper.
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“What are you hollering at me for? It’s not my fault. I’m working as fast as I can.”
“Then work faster.”
A red flush crept up James’s cheeks. “You know, Reiver, I don’t think the cocoons are setting you off. You’re mad about something else and taking it out on anyone foolish enough to cross your path.”
“I’ve never heard anything so stupid in all my born days.”
James shrugged. “You think about it. I’m getting back to work.” His lanky figure drifted away.
Reiver had to get out of the mill before he exploded at all the incompetents around him. He whirled on his heel and stomped off.
Once he was outside, the soft September breeze fanning his cheeks cooled his steaming temper. His angry stride slowed and he considered what James had said.
Reiver jammed his hands into his pockets. James was right; broken cocoons were not responsible for his incendiary temper.
He missed Cecelia. He ached whenever he thought of her. He still wanted her.
Cecelia.
Reiver approached his brothers’ house just as Hannah emerged through the back door, several shirts draped over the crook of her left arm. In the crystal richness of an autumn morning, he mistakenly attributed her flushed cheeks to the invigorating air, and her sparkling eyes to some remembered sally of her children’s before they went off to school that morning. Today she wore a demure dress of soft blue wool, its white collar edged with a narrow border of black lace, a token bit of mourning for her Uncle Ezra, who had died just this summer of a bad liver.
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Hannah closed the door behind her, and when she turned and noticed him, she froze. The light in her eyes dimmed as it usually did whenever she looked at her husband these days. Hannah smoothed the shirts with a nervous hand and walked down the path toward him.
“Samuel had some shirts for me to mend,” she said, as if compelled to explain her presence in the homestead.
“It’s time my brother married and let his own wife mend his shirts.”
“I don’t mind.”
She walked back toward the house, and Reiver joined her. As usual when they were together, an uncomfortable, unforgiving silence rose between them like a stone wall.