A Lady Awakened (35 page)

“You were an excellent friend.”

He twisted his mouth and shook his head once. “I shrank from broaching the subject on which you could surely have used some sympathy.”

“We both did. We both chose propriety over an unseemly intimacy. You’ve nothing to regret.” And propriety had gentler claims now. They could converse with more openness hereafter. “I’m sorry for what you must have suffered. Have you ever spoken of it to anyone?” So had Mr. Mirkwood asked her, to little avail.

“My brother and I speak of it when we see one another.” He brought up a hand and pushed back the hair that always would fall forward. He’d left off his hat. “From the distance of years we can even laugh at some things, truth be told.” With his other hand he wielded the shears again, bending to trim the grass at the gravestone’s edges. “Our mother had ways of managing. My brother wished for an Oxford education, though every Atkins man had been to Cambridge. On his own he should never have brought Father round. In fact he didn’t.” He told the story with the same meticulous care he employed to clip the grass. “One day Mother simply told Father he’d agreed to Oxford. And his memory was such that he never knew he hadn’t.”

Her gloves might split along the seams, she was clenching her fists so hard. Her heart might crack her ribs. She would be candid now. They would build a better friendship, a real one, with truth and forthrightness where deceit and evasion had been. “Mr. Atkins.” Her voice vibrated with hope.

“Mrs. Russell.” His hand came up, palm toward her. His face didn’t turn her way. “I cannot know. You understand, do you not? I cannot know.” Gradually, in response to her silence, his hand slid back down to the grass as the shears snipped on.

But he did know, obviously. Perhaps she’d never deceived him at all. And the message was plain: openness between them could go only this far.

Disappointment swirled round her insides like the muddy bed of a stream stirred up. For no good reason. Reticence was proper. One couldn’t go about like Mr. Mirkwood, saying every forward thing that came into one’s head.

Her fists uncurled and she laced her fingers, letting the shears and the distant converse of sheep fill the pause until he spoke again.

“You ought to know I think of leaving the Church. As a profession, I mean,” he added hastily in response to what must have been her astonished look. “I find I want to give more time to the school.”

“Teaching suits you.” Yes. They could speak freely of this.

“I’ve been lucky enough to find the work for which God created me.” A mischievous smile blossomed on his countenance. “There is my answer to anyone who disapproves of this step. Rather difficult to dispute, isn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t dare try. But will you manage?” She inched to the left, to see him better round Mrs. Richard Russell’s marker. “I shall certainly increase your stipend if I can, but until the succession of Seton Park is settled, I haven’t that power.”

“It won’t be necessary. Mr. Mirkwood has been most generous. If you’ll let me a cottage at the rate the other tenants enjoy, then between the stipends from Seton Park and Pencarragh, and a bit of farming, I shall make do.” With the satisfaction of a man who knew his future, he went on trimming the grass.

When had Mr. Mirkwood offered a stipend? He must have called without her, or had private correspondence. At all events it was handsome of him. She would tell him so. He was coming to visit this afternoon, on some pretext of dairy business, and she would see to it he knew how he’d pleased her.

*  *  *

N
O LUST
, it developed, was so gratifying to a man as the lust that blossomed only after esteem had taken root. He might have gone his whole life without finding this out, if he’d never been exiled to Sussex. Now, in stray moments, he allowed himself to imagine enjoying this delicacy for the rest of his days.

She’d like Lincolnshire. There she would find all the amenities of Seton Park—crops, stock, tenants, a living to bestow—and if she ever felt nostalgic for the Sussex landscape, they need only come for a stay at Pencarragh. She might even like London, with its lectures and libraries and great pockets of poverty just waiting for industrious, noble-minded women to push up their sleeves and set things right.

Over the top of his pamphlet describing symptoms of cowpox in unfortunately vivid detail, he eyed her. Round the corner of her
Communications to the Board of Agriculture
, she was just as often eyeing this or that part of him. His call had taken a most agreeable turn, and now he sprawled naked atop the covers of the blue-room bed, his pillow propped against one of the bottom bedposts. She sat up against the headboard, counterpane tucked high under her arms. A smile hovered perpetually at her lips these days, as certainly it ought.

She hadn’t cared for the sight of him, in the beginning. There was another triumph. She might forgive a bit of gentle gloating. “Do you see something that catches your fancy?” he said, turning a page in an offhanded manner.

She colored. “Your body is so unlike mine.” Her eyes came to his face. “I thought you strange at first. But now I discern a certain logic to your form.”

“Glad to hear it.” He lowered the cowpox pamphlet an inch or two. “Did your marriage not acquaint you with the masculine physique?”

“Indeed it did.” He could see by the pursing of her mouth how she felt about that. “But I find one man might differ in significant ways from another.”

“One might have a larger appendage, you mean.”

“That’s not at all what I meant.” The corners of her lips twitched nonetheless. “Though I’m sure you’ll be gratified to know you do best my late husband in that arena.”

“Darling, I best most men there.”

“My felicitations.” She put her reading down altogether. “What I mean is more to do with a woman’s response. How a set of limbs may be plain or handsome depending largely on who inhabits them.” Her eyes strayed briefly to the counterpane. “How certain … acts … might seem distasteful with one man, but not wholly unreasonable with another.”

“Acts.” He cleared his suddenly dry throat. “What acts would those be, exactly?”

“Ask your appendage.” Impishness sharpened her face. “It seems to have a few ideas.”

Indeed his blood was racing now, on a mission to converge where it could be of most use. “My appendage always has ideas, and has never met an act it didn’t like.” Carefully he set the cowpox pamphlet aside. “I remain in suspense.”

Her gaze held every womanly secret the world had ever known. Her lips played at smiling but didn’t quite give in. Without hurry she pushed her shoulders off the headboard and sat up straight. The covers swished beguilingly as her legs swept round to one side and bent under her. She was kneeling. Providence be praised.

She glanced down and up. “You bathe it sometimes, I hope.” Mrs. Russell to the core.

“Daily. With precisely this purpose in mind.”

“Because at any time you might meet a lady who wants to put it in her mouth?”

“I’m of a hopeful disposition.” He put out a hand to touch her arm. “Have you done it before?”

She nodded.

“But not with any relish, I expect?” When she shook her head he flexed his fingers to grasp her arm. “Martha, don’t do this if you think it disagreeable. I don’t need it.”

Her brows edged together. She stared at him for a moment, the familiar severity in an unaccustomed context. Then she leaned low, the counterpane still pinned under her arms, and pressed her lips to his most susceptible skin.

Hell. “Martha.” She turned her head, still bent low, looking up at him like some supplicant conjured out of his untidiest dreams. “I won’t want you to stop, if you begin this.”

“I imagine not.”

“But you must. If you find it unpleasant you must stop, even if I’m begging you to keep on. Promise you will.”

“I promise.” All soft-eyed, naked obeisance, his supplicant. Counterpane clutched to her front but the splendid curve of her back laid bare to his view.

“Well, then.” He sank a little farther into his pillow and closed his eyes, listening with his whole body for the exact instant when she—
there
. Her lips, halfway along his length, brushing over him and leaving a trail of sparks under the skin. Then a narrower touch that could only be the tip of her tongue. Then nothing at all. Her breath. He could feel her breath, quiet and warm, where her tongue had dampened his skin.

He waited. “Is it—?” The words came out of him jagged and untidy. “Have you decided you don’t want to?”

She answered with her tongue. He jerked, under her. Then he slid down the bedpost until he lay flat. Again she stopped, and breathed.

Good Lord. She’d kill him with this. “Please,” he whispered. Ha. He hadn’t expected to be begging quite so soon.

Her breath fell on him unevenly. Laughter. “Is that a command?”

“Woman, it’s whatever will get your mouth back on me the soonest. I had entreaty in mind. But if you prefer command, then yes. Please me without further delay. I command it.”

He didn’t need to say more. Still as still water he lay and felt the touch of her mouth, here and there, like sparse raindrops on a pond’s smooth surface, the gentle beginning of what would end as a deluge. “It’s best on the end,” he muttered. “Where it’s rounded, there. Especially on the underside. That’s where it feels the best.”

“Patience.” She spoke against his skin, so he felt the syllables. Idle and unhurried, she worked her way from the base of his cock to the head, exploring him with her lips and her tongue. Patience, indeed. Already his body was beginning to seethe in the middle, arching that scant inch or so to find her mouth again every time she was so cruel as to take it away.

He wouldn’t last. He’d be undone the second she took him inside her mouth—or—ahh—maybe not. He might stand it a few seconds longer. Bloody hell. Had Mr. Russell taught her this? These quick, wicked patterns her tongue inscribed? The way her lips closed over him and welcomed him in? He’d have to thank that man in the afterlife. Of all things.

He lifted his hands and wove his fingers into her loose hair, his fingertips playing over her scalp in the way she liked. She’d have more pleasure than this, a few minutes hence. He’d see to that. She couldn’t refuse him now.

One more second, he could hold out. No, two. And three. And—No. Here was his limit. His hands slipped down to cup her jaw and push her face away, then settled on her shoulders. She blinked at him, all confusion, as he scrambled to get her on her back; to yank off the counterpane; to fumble his way to the right place. “Seed,” he explained hoarsely, and gave it to her, half a second before he must have given it to the sheets.

Strange images came and went on the long slide back to consciousness. A child. More than one. Taking after him and her in every possible combination. A boy, tall and fair-haired, but with coffee-colored eyes. A girl of impeccable posture, her stern countenance marred by a mouth shaped for laughter. Child after child, each one more beautiful than the last.

He pushed off her and sank to the mattress at her side. One hand lifted to stroke her cheek and put a loose lock of hair behind her ear. He had something to say to her. But first, he had something to do.

Her brow quirked when he sat up and sent his arms to gather her, one behind her shoulders and the other under her knees. Her forehead furrowed in earnest when he stood and lifted her, but she made no sound. Only when he set her in the armchair, and dragged it up before the room’s largest mirror, did she speak. “What are you doing?” Yes, that, for the rest of his days, would be the only reasonable response from a woman surprised.

“Watch and discover. Hook your leg over the chair’s arm. Either leg.”

A tremor went through her. “I don’t want to. I don’t care to look.”

Less command. More coaxing. He modulated his voice. “I’ll give you something worth looking at. I promise. But meanwhile let me look at you.” He stood behind the armchair, one arm resting atop its back, and leaned down to speak close to her ear. “How imperious you look, sitting there. Keep your eyes on your face. Or mine.” In the mirror he loomed over her, one hand snaking down the back of the chair, along its arm. He leaned round to the left, reached farther, got hold of her knee. Her mouth tightened. “I wish I had a crown to put on your head. I think you must imagine yourself a queen now.”

“And are you my king?” Her eyes, in the mirror, stayed trained to his.

He shook his head. “Stablehand.” She didn’t resist as he brought her knee up; draped her leg over the chair’s arm. “Great strapping stablehand who’s caught the queen’s eye and been summoned to service her in her chambers.”

“That’s very shocking of me.” Another tremor went through her; a better one this time.

“You’re a shocking, shocking queen.” He let her see his eyes travel down her reflection, down her naked body to where she was most naked of all. “Every man in the palace, from the prime minister to the rat-catcher, knows your habits and lives in hope of being chosen one day.”

“I’m not sure I approve. Am I married?”

Too much thinking. As always. “Nominally.” He pressed his mouth to her shoulder, to the sensitive skin of her neck. “The king minds his own business, as long as you don’t give him any bastards. And we won’t.” Out again to her shoulder, and down her arm he set kisses as his body twisted from behind the chair, advancing with devilish grace toward its purpose.

“Here comes the bit you’ll want to watch,” he said, and sank to his knees before her. Back and forth her eyes went, from his face to the mirror. She’d gone pale with some emotion only she could name. Paler still were the inner sides of her thighs, where he set his splayed fingers. And between them, of course, the flushed pink of her sweetest flesh.

He bent his head, and put his mouth on her. She sucked in a startled breath. Good. Then he was the first. “Shame on your negligent husband,” he drew back just far enough to say, and after that there was nothing to do but drive her mad while losing himself in her, in these soft parts, so secret, so exquisite, so clearly made to be a match for his tongue.