Chase the Dawn (24 page)

The afternoon and evening dragged interminably, and Bryony’s head ached with the need to stifle the questions that surged and tumbled. Why was he here? Who was he really? What danger was he in? The backwoodsman seemed to have disappeared entirely, a figment of her imagination. In his place was this suave, elegant aristocrat. The clean lines of his jaw and the set of his mouth were clearly revealed now that the curly, burnished beard was gone. She did not know which she preferred. Her eyes were continually riveted upon his hands as she remembered the feel of them on her body, the wonderful deftness as they tackled whatever task came up, the strength of them. The same hands that now held the heavy silver cutlery and twirled the delicate cut-glass stem of his wineglass, had gutted fish and skinned rabbits, had killed at least one man to her knowledge, and in her heart of hearts she knew that there had been others.

His voice, soft and carrying, was constantly heard during the long hours of dinner. Whenever he spoke, Bryony noticed, he commanded instant attention without once raising his voice. His political allegiances were assumed quite naturally to be those of his hosts—an assumption that, breathless at his mendacious audacity, she heard him confirm with every authoritative statement, blandly smiling, although the hawk’s eyes were flat and opaque.

Bryony shivered, realizing that she was seeing at work the Benedict whom she had known only infrequently—the man who had tied her to the bed an eon ago; the man who treated dead bodies and contemplated the dealing of death with a matter-of-fact, case-hardened indifference; the man who bore the marks of the whip upon his back and kept his own counsel; the man who carried a world of horror in the recesses of his mind, a world that could produce a terrifying transfiguration of the laughing, loving, gentle Benedict.

The moment came when trays of nuts and raisins, bowls of olives, and baskets of fruit appeared on the table, together with the decanters of port and madeira, bottles of sherry and sauternes. Bryony felt a great stillness enter her soul as she waited, her eyes on Benedict’s hands, her body sensitive to every ripple of the powerful one beside her. Decanters were passed and glasses filled. Sir Edward Paget rose from his great carved chair at the head of the long mahogany table, where candlelight gleamed. A sea of smiling faces, roseate with his bounty, turned expectantly toward him.

“My lords, ladies, and gentlemen, I give you the king.” He raised his glass.

“The king,” came the fervent response as chairs were
pushed back and the company rose to drink the Loyalist toast. Benedict Clare rose with them, his glass went to his lips, and only Bryony saw the white knuckles on his free hand, clenched against his side.
What was he doing here?

Laughing, mightily pleased with themselves, the company resumed their seats. The drinking of toasts was a matter both serious and amusing. The truly serious one having been attended to, they were now ready for amusement. Sir Edward glanced down the table and with a smile called upon Bryony.

“Daughter, a toast, if you please.”

Bryony nibbled her bottom lip for a minute, well aware that she was required to be both apposite and gracious if she was not to disappoint either her father or the company. She raised her glass. “When passions rise, may reason be the judge.” Her father’s eyebrows lifted with his glass, and she could read his mind without difficulty. While he could not fault her toast, he had expected something in a rather lighter vein. Bryony was not in general given to the pronouncement of precepts.

“A sentiment we must all carry in our hearts, Miss Paget,” declared Major Ferguson. “In such stirring times, passions may well run high to the detriment of good sense.”

“How very true,” murmured Benedict Clare, his eyes shaded with sardonic humor as they met those of his neighbor. “Passion makes a poor master, Miss Paget.”

“Indeed, sir, I believe it does,” replied Bryony with barely a flicker. “A most untrustworthy one, at least.” Then further exchanges became impossible as the round of toasts continued, and at its end the ladies left the table.

Bryony did not talk to Benedict again that evening. When the gentlemen were called to the drawing room for coffee and tea, he paid court to Eliza and offered gentle attentions to the matrons, rapidly earning himself the title of the most delightful addition to the county. Eschewing the pleasures of the billiard table and the card room, he remained in the drawing room, attentively listening to the various musical performances. On one occasion, to Bryony’s speechless amazement, he accompanied on the flute Miss Violet Drysdale’s indifferent playing of the pianoforte.

“What an accomplished gentleman is Mr. Clare.” Francis, soft-footed as usual, had come up beside her as she stood at the back of the room, listening and observing. “You look a little startled, Bri, at his accomplishments. It’s not very polite, you know, to appear quite so dumbfounded when someone comports themselves so well.”

Bryony flushed with an annoyance directed as much at herself as at Francis. “You must confess, Francis, that Mr. Clare does not strike one as a gentleman so at home in the drawing room,” she countered, opting for the near truth as being the safest with her uncomfortably perspicacious betrothed.

Francis smiled. “More of a warrior, I agree. There is a quality about him … a certain power, or do I mean ‘menace’?” He glanced at Bryony out of the corner of his eye. “He disturbs you in some way, doesn’t he, Bri?”

She tried for a light, dismissive laugh, but it sounded as hollow and unconvincing to her as it clearly did to her companion. “I find him interesting. But then, so does everyone else.” She shrugged carelessly. “You know how the county thrives on new blood, Francis.”

“I wonder if he intends to join Ferguson’s army,” Francis said thoughtfully. “I cannot imagine why else he would be a guest of Dawson’s, can you?”

“No,” Bryony prevaricated. “I cannot imagine why he should be a guest of Dawson’s.” That last was the absolute truth at least.

It was midnight before the evening ended. Lord Dawson and his party, together with Major Ferguson and his group, were escorted to the guest quarters in the separate house set some two hundred yards distant from the main house and furnished with the utmost luxury and elegance. Bryony finally reached the peace and solitude of her own chamber, having endured an hour on tenterhooks lest her mother suddenly decide that her daughter must sacrifice her privacy to the comfort of some young lady. However, either Sir Edward had stepped in or Eliza had decided that Bryony had done as much as should be expected of her for one day. At any event, all the guests were dispersed throughout the mansion, and none made an appearance in Bryony’s bedchamber.

Mary fussed over her for an unconscionably long time, it seemed to Bryony, whose muttered complaints at having her hair brushed the requisite one hundred times were completely ignored. At last she was tucked up in the poster bed among lavender-scented sheets and embroidered pillowcases. Mary blew out the lamp as she left the room, and Bryony lay for a minute in the darkness. Then she hopped out of bed and turned the key in the door before relighting the lamp and opening the casement, letting in the cool night air with its river tang. Propping her elbows on the windowsill, she gazed out
over the dark garden, where massive trees stood sentinel and not a shadow stirred.

She sat there for a long time, waiting as her eyes grew heavy in spite of mingled anxiety and excitement. The air grew chill, and she shivered beneath the thin covering of her lawn shift. It was not as if he had said he would come. All he had done was ask which was her chamber, and for some reason she had assumed that he would take the appalling risk of coming to her in the night, a reckless Lothario who would spring nimbly up the creeper that clung tenaciously to the brickwork, to drop into her waiting arms, as desperate as she to assuage the ache, to fill the void…. She was being ridiculous. Passion had obscured reason and common sense.

Bryony laughed in self-mockery, remembering her toast at dinner—one that had been intended as reproof to Benedict Clare lest he allow political passion to rule his head. Curiously, she had not then been thinking of this other passion that was threatening to deprive her of a night’s sleep. There was no reason, after all, to assume that Mr. Clare was a slave to it, even if she seemed to be.

Resolutely, Bryony went back to bed, for a second hesitating as she bent to blow out the lamp. Then, with a little shrug, she left it burning, flickering in the breeze from the open window, and snuggled down beneath the covers. Her eyes closed….

The dark-clad figure flung a leg over the broad sill and dropped soundlessly to the carpeted floor. He crossed to the bed and stood looking down at its sleeping occupant, a tiny smile playing over his fine mouth. He reached a hand to brush a tumbled lock from the wide, alabaster brow, and the thick dark lashes swept up, revealing a sleepy, startled pair of blue eyes.

“O, ye of little faith,” Benedict chided with gentle mockery, placing a knee on the high mattress beside her. “My pride has suffered a sore blow, Miss Paget. I had expected to find you barely managing to curb your impatience, not lost in the land of dreams.”

She smiled, wondering why she had ever doubted that he would come. “I left the lamp burning and the window open.”

“So you did.” He leaned over her, bracing his arms on either side of her body, and looked at her, the hunger of the long deprived glowing in his eyes as they explored her countenance. She reached up a hand to touch the burnished copper hair where the lamplight set a series of flickering fires, then her fingers stroked down the smooth planes of his face to trace his jaw. “Will you miss your hirsute lover?” he asked, turning his head so that his lips pressed into her palm.

“The backwoodsman of no name,” she murmured, reveling in this moment when they were barely touching, except with their eyes. The postponement brought a deep, wondrous tension coiling in the pit of her stomach, prickles of pleasure darting across her skin, her nipples straining against the softness of her shift. “Who are
you
, Benedict Clare?”

“For tonight, simply a man who once knew you in the ways of love and lust and wishes to renew the acquaintance.” He drew back, bringing his other knee onto the bed astride her, then slowly pulled down the covers. Bryony quivered, the shape of herself in familiar space dissolving under the radiant heat of fast-spreading passion. The crowns of her breasts stood out, dark and urgent beneath the near-transparent lawn, begging for the touch that was a long time acoming. Slowly, so very
slowly, he moved a fingertip to hover over the rounded silhouette, sketching in the air the contour and its keen peak. Her breath sped with longing; her blood ran hot in her veins under the swift rise of ardor; her body shifted slightly in an urgent movement beneath him.

Ben smiled, running a finger over her lips. “I am like a parched man at an oasis, sweeting. I must take my pleasure with care after such long denial, lest I founder and fail us both.”

“You will not founder.” She sucked his finger into her mouth, her tongue stroking, hot and sensuous. “No more than I shall.” Her eyes locked with his as she continued the wicked caress of his finger, a caress that danced with symbolic promise, until he could bear the suspense no longer and placed his hand along the fragile line of her jaw, lifting her chin as he took her mouth with his own, gently at first. But when she strained against him, her hands linking behind his neck, his tongue thrust within the warm, moist cavern, seeking her own to join in a dance of spiraling desire.

Her mouth burned, bruised beneath the demanding pressure, but she felt no discomfort, only the towering need to lose herself in his body. Utterly absorbed in the magic of this desperate compulsion to be one with the other, they lost all sense of the room around them, of the bed beneath them, seeking only the limitless rapture of the present.

Benedict, without loosing her mouth, slid down beside her, smoothing his hands over her back, spanning her hips as he pressed her to his lower body so that the hard throb of his need pulsed against her thigh. Bryony whispered her pleasure at the feel of him as she unclasped her hands from his neck and brought them
down to the waistband of his britches, sliding her flat palm within. She felt him draw up her shift, uncovering her knees, her thighs, then upward to raid the curves and hollows of her body, the deep secret places, with an inexorable trespass that sent shivers of fire and ice rippling across her bared skin. In her urgency, her fingers fumbled with the buttons at his waist, and he drew back from her long enough to rid himself of his shirt and britches before taking the hem of her shift and peeling it off over her head.

Bryony gave a deep sigh of joyous satisfaction as her nakedness at last met his and their tender explorations could continue unobstructed. They were revisiting each other’s body, rediscovering the pleasure centers, and finding that the long months of denial had sharpened rather than blunted the keen edge of joy. Her fingernails trailed over the hardness of his flanks as his tongue swept the curve of her breast before circling the hard, tight bud at its crown. She groaned, bringing her hand round to the front of his body, twisting in the crisp triangle of hair that snaked down from his belly to the point where sprang the silken shaft of his manhood. She took him between her hands even as her body arched upward to the caress of his roving tongue, and she heard his soft exhalation of pleasure, felt it as a zephyr undulating across her belly.

He swung astride her then, reversing his position so that they could both play freely, and for an eternity it seemed they cavorted in sensate bliss, running the gamut from savage delight to the most sensitive inventiveness. If Ben had been truly afraid of failing her, it had been a baseless fear. Buried in her sweetness, he took her from peak to peak, nibbling and probing at her
essence until tears of joy stood out in her eyes and she felt as if she had no more to give, and could receive no more. But she was wrong.

When at last his own need could no longer be delayed, Ben turned and moved over her, slipping his hands beneath her buttocks, lifting her to meet him as he surged within the moist, welcoming entrance to her body. His face melted with pleasure as her velvety softness tightened around him, and she curled her legs around his hips, pulling him deeper.