A Wild Pursuit (26 page)

Fanny blinked at her. “Not until I was quite certain that you had reformed, my dear. I would never risk my reputation merely on dear Honoratia's assurance, although of course I took her advice quite seriously. No, indeed. I will admit that I had quite given up hope of your reformation, as I believe I mentioned in my letter. I always thought you took after my sister, although naturally I am pleasantly surprised to find you so much changed.”

Esme's jaw set. I will
not
scream, she thought. She felt her face growing red with the effort of not lashing out at her mother. Lady Bonnington seemed to guess, because she quickly turned to Fanny and asked her if she would like to stroll among the roses in the conservatory.

“Only if I need not step a foot outside,” Fanny said. “I'm afraid that my poor departed angel, Benjamin, inherited his weak constitution from me. I take a chill at the slightest
breath
of wind. I am virtually housebound these days, if you can believe it.”

Esme curtsied to her mother, walked up the stairs to her chambers, and jerked the cap off her head so harshly that hairpins spilled on the floor. Throwing the cap on the floor didn't help. Neither did stepping on it. Neither did ripping off that horrible gray dress with its foolish little lace tippet that worked so well to give the wearer a nunlike air. None of it helped. She stood in the middle of her bedchamber, chest heaving with tears and pure rage.

She had achieved it all: the Sewing Circle, the respectability, her mother's approval, Miles's wishes—why did success make her feel so terribly enraged? And so terribly, terribly afraid, at the same time?

T
he irritating man hadn't left Shantill House, even after Bea had begged him. He stopped opportuning her and made no seductive moves. Instead he played duets with Helene, which left Bea embroidering on the other side of the room and trying not to think about the Puritan. She stayed away from him. No more flirtatious glances. No more flirtation, period. Certainly no more failed seductions.

It was late morning, and they were gathered in Esme's morning parlor. Arabella and her sister were conducting a genteel squabble; Esme was presumably in the nursery. Naturally, Helene and Stephen were practicing the piano. Bea sat by herself, stitching away on her tapestry.

When Slope arrived with the morning post, Bea looked in the other direction. It was foolish of her to wish that one of her sisters would write. They had never answered her letters, and she was fairly certain that her father was intercepting them. Surely Rosalind would have written. They were only separated in age by a few years. Rosalind was to make her debut next year, and Bea wanted so much to tell her—

Well, to tell her not to make her mistake. Or did she mean to tell her to follow her example? Bea kept thinking and thinking about it. On the one hand, it was grievously hard to turn down Stephen's marriage proposal on the grounds that by accepting, she would ruin his career. On the other hand, had she married whomever her father had seen fit to select as her husband, she would still have fallen in love with Stephen at some point, she was sure of that.

So Bea bent over her tapestry and surreptitiously watched the way Stephen leaned toward Helene, the way their shoulders touched as they played. What would it mean to him, to no longer be the estimable Member of Parliament? Would he be happy? If he were married, would he give up his mistresses, not to mention his supposed fiancée, Esme?

Helene received a letter. “I'm going from pillar to post,” she told Stephen. “This is from my friend Gina, asking me to visit her during her confinement.”

“I gather you refer to the Duchess of Girton?” Stephen said. And at her nod, he added, “Cam, her husband, is my cousin.”

Wonderful, Bea thought sourly. Splendidly cozy.

“She and the duke returned from Greece a few months ago,” Helene was saying, “and now they are living on their estate. Apparently Gina will be having a child this summer.” She made a funny, rueful face.

Bea bit her lip as Stephen put a comforting arm around Helene. They had the intimacy of an old married couple.

“I can't even bear to look at William. Although I love him.” The agony in Helene's voice mirrored that in Bea's heart. Nothing more was said, and after a moment Helene and Stephen returned to playing a Turkish march for four hands. Bea was sick of pieces written for four hands. She was sick of everything that had to do with one prim countess and one proper politician.

Abruptly she got up and walked out of the room. She might as well visit the goat. She still kept a daily pilgrimage to the ungrateful beast, although she hadn't encountered Stephen again in the lane. He seemed to be avoiding the goat, as well as her.

As she tramped down the lane, regardless of the mud clinging to her boots, Bea was actually beginning to think that perhaps she
could
live in the country. Some sort of wild rose grew over the hedges in the lane. They were pale pink and hung down like faded curtains. For the first time in her life, she had a sense of what happened in spring. A scraggly tree next to the road had broken out all over in white buds. They stuck out from the branches like the knotted ribbons on debutantes' slippers.

And there were daisies growing all up and down the lane. Impulsively Bea started gathering them. Finally she took off her bonnet and filled it with daisies. It hardly mattered if her skin colored in the sun. She could powder it white, or powder it pink. The sun felt kind on her cheeks. Finally she reached the end of the lane and leaned on the pasture gate. He was there, of course, the old reprobate. He trotted over and accepted a branch Bea gave him to chew. Bea even walked in his pasture sometimes; he had never again tried to chew her clothing. She pushed open the gate and headed for the small twisted tree in the center. There were no daisies in the pasture, of course. The goat presumably ate them the moment they poked up their heads. But the tree was in the sun, and surrounded by a patch of grass.

It was when she was sitting against the tree that she realized what she had to do. She had to go home. Go home. Back to her irate father, who wouldn't throw her out again if she promised to be a model of proper behavior. And back to her sisters. She missed her sisters. She didn't want to play the voluptuary role anymore, not after meeting Stephen. He made her games seem rather shabby and hollow, rather than excitingly original.

Without really thinking about it, she picked all the daisies from her bonnet and braided a daisy chain, a rather drunken daisy chain that had a few stems sticking out at right angles. It was just the sort she used to make for her little sisters. Perhaps she would ask Arabella to send her home tomorrow morning.

He was there, in front of her, before she even noticed his arrival. “How you do sneak up on one!” she snapped.

“You are the very picture of spring,” he said, staring down at her.

Bea allowed him a smile. She rather fancied that compliment, since she was wearing a horrendously expensive Marie Antoinette–styled shepherdess dress that laced up the front and had frothy bits at the sides. Suddenly he dropped onto his haunches in front of her, and she blinked at him. His eyes were dark and—

She reached out and touched his cheek. “What's the matter, Stephen? Are you all right?” She forgot they weren't on intimate terms and that, in fact, she had hardly spoken to him in virtually a week.

“No, I'm not,” he said, rather jerkily. “I've made rather a mess of my life.”

“Why do you say that?” Bea asked, taken aback.

“Because I asked a lady to woo me,” he said, and the look in his eyes made her knees weak. “Because I asked a lady to woo me, and she very properly refused. I was unfathomably stupid to ask such a thing.”

Bea bit her lip. “Why?” Don't say that you never wanted me, she prayed inside. But there was that something in his eyes that gave her hope.

“Because I should have said, ‘Seduce me. Take me.
Please
.'”

Bea supposed that was her cue to leap on him like a starving animal, but she stayed where she was. Her heart was beating so fast that she almost couldn't feel her own disappointment. Wasn't this just what she wanted? Of course it was.

“You see, I need her any way she'll have me,” Stephen said. His voice had lost all those liquid rolling tones he used so well. It was almost hoarse. “Any time she'll give me. I don't care. I won't make any demands.”

Bea couldn't quite meet his eyes. She fidgeted with the ribbon on her parasol, tilting it slightly so that she couldn't see his face. “I've decided to return to my father's house,” she said almost inaudibly. He was silent, and all she could hear was her own pulse beating in her throat and the goat ambling away to the other side of the pasture.

“Am I too late, then?” he said finally. There was a bleakness in his voice that wrenched her heart.

She took the parasol and neatly closed it. He would always have a patrician's face. It was the face of an English gentleman, long chin and lean cheeks, laughter wrinkles around his eyes, tall, muscled body. He would wear well. She raised her eyelashes and gave him the most smoldering look she had in her repertoire.

He made a hoarse sound in his voice and pulled her into his arms so fast that her parasol flew into the air.

“Will you, Bea, will you let me…” He was plundering her mouth, and he couldn't seem to finish the sentence. Finally he raised his mouth a fraction of an inch from hers, so close that she was almost touching his lips. His voice was husky. “Will you seduce me, Bea? Or let me seduce you?”

She strained forward, trying to catch his mouth with hers, but he held back.

“Please?” The urgency in his voice awed her. “I was a fool to refuse you. I'll take anything, any little bit you'll give me. Of course you don't wish to woo me, marry me. But I'll take whatever you give me, Bea. Please.”

She closed her eyes. One of the proudest gentlemen in the kingdom was literally, as well as metaphorically, at her feet. “I didn't mean that,” she whispered, clutching his shoulders as hard as she could. “It's not that I don't wish to marry you—”

“Hush,” he said, rubbing his lips across hers. “I know you don't want to marry me. I was a conceited fool to think you'd even consider me. But I don't care, Bea. Just—just seduce me, Bea.”

She could untangle this later. At the moment she unwrapped her arms from his neck and smiled at him with the slumberous smile of Cleopatra. “But what if I lead you to do things that are less than gentlemanly?”

“You already have,” he said. “This is absolutely the first time in my life that I have begged a young unmarried woman to seduce me.”

“Oh, well, in that case,” she said, with a gurgle of laughter. Then she settled back against the tree trunk and, looking at him, very, very slowly raised the ruffled dimity of her skirt. She was wearing gossamer silk stockings, with clocks, and her slender ankes were crossed. She pulled her skirts up just past her knee, so that Stephen could see the pale blue stocking, and its darker garter, and then the pale cream of her thigh.

She saw him swallow. “Bea, what are you doing?” he said, and the rasp in his voice was a warning.

“Seducing you.” Her smile was blinding. He didn't seem to be able to stop staring at her legs.

“What if someone comes?”

“No one ever comes down this lane,” she said blissfully. “It leads nowhere except to the goat. And you and I, Stephen, are the only persons who have ever shown interest in the goat.”

Just as deliberately she uncrossed her legs and drew them slightly higher. Her skirt fell back against her thighs.

“And where is the damned goat?” he said hoarsely.

“The other side of the field.” Her knees came a little higher, and her skirts slid farther down, exposing smooth, milky thighs.

“If I touch you, Bea, there's no stopping this,” Stephen said, meeting her eyes.

Her heart tumbled in her chest. “I wouldn't want to stop you. I never have.”

He put his hands gently on her ankles. “Last chance, Bea. Are you sure you wish to make love in a goat's pasture?” But she was laughing, and her eyes were shining. There was desire there, so that was all right. And obviously, she didn't mind the goat's pasture. So Stephen let his fingers wrap around that delicate little ankle, slide up the faint softness of her stockings. He stopped at the garters and untied them. They left angry red marks on her skin.

She was watching him with a half smile, but there was something uncertain there too, for all she was such an accomplished seductress. He smoothed the red marks with his fingers. “Why so ruthless with your poor skin?” he said, as he lowered his head and ran his tongue along the groove in her leg.

She gasped and squirmed in his hands. “It's particularly difficult to keep stockings this flimsy from collapsing around my ankles.”

“Ah.” He had his hands on both her knees now, and he pulled them apart. She resisted for a moment and then gave in. She was wearing some sort of fluttering gown that obediently fell back, as if it had been designed for outdoor games. Stephen ran a finger down the inside of her thigh. He stopped at a burst of lacy cotton, then ran his finger over all the fabric.

She visibly shuddered and reached for him. But he pushed her back against the tree and knelt in front of her, between her raised knees, and pressed his lips there, on the inside of a quavering knee. And then let his lips drift down, down smooth, ivory flesh.

And all the time his finger was running inquisitively over the white cotton between her legs, dancing a little surface dance that made her hips jiggle a bit. He could hear her uneven little
whoosh
of breath, and it made him feel a steely wave of triumph, and then a wave of lust so pure that he almost wrenched that cotton down—

“What do you call this?” he asked, and his voice came out hoarse. He put his hand between her legs, firm, and rocked forward.

“Oh,” she said, and her voice seemed very small.

He ran his thumb under the frilly border. “This?”

“Pantalettes,” she said, quivering all over.

He leaned foward and put a leg over her left knee so he was straddling her, and then he let that thumb sink, fall into sleek, hot folds. She had been lying against the tree as if she were too shocked to move, but that shudder woke her up; she reached out and pulled his head toward her.

Her lips trembled under his, and opened, and Stephen let his thumb take on the same rhythm as his tongue, although his chest felt like bursting for lack of air, or for the thumping of his heart in his chest.

Her eyes fluttered open, and she was beautiful. This close, her eyes had the green of a rock glimpsed at the river bottom, greeny blue, with small specks of light. All the more beautiful for being slighty glazed.

Suddenly she focused on him. “You seem to have forgotten that this is my seduction,” she said. Her voice was such a deep purr that he almost didn't catch her meaning. But with one flip of her hip, she pushed his hand away and came up on her knees. Alas, her skirt fell down and covered her legs again.

He reared up so he was facing her. Then he very, very deliberately took his thumb and rubbed it over his lips. She gasped in shock, and he felt a throb of pleasure. She wasn't so jaded then. He licked his lips, enjoying the faint taste of her.

“Stephen!” she said. He grinned. But she was pulling at his neck cloth. She seemed to have some trouble undoing it, so finally he tossed it to the side and undid the placket on his shirt.