Sharon Sobel (13 page)

“Now your eyes see what can never be healed,” he said slowly, and his eyes were closed as if he would not bear the sight himself.

Claire was not a surgeon, but she knew something of healing. She pulled his shirt down his arms to where his hands were pressed into the grass and, while doing so, brought her lips to his wounded flesh.

“Claire,” he protested again, but she knew there was little he could or would do about it. His hands were tangled in the white linen, nearly tied to each other.

His skin was warm and tasted of salt and his bay rum soap. Her tongue felt the contours her fingers had not, and lingered on every slight ridge of skin and whorl of hair. One hand, running a separate course, ran over the muscles he managed to hide so well, but which revealed dedication to sport and physical activity. He was a man who did not spend as much time in his library as he professed.

“You can open your eyes now, my lord,” she said.

He said nothing for what seemed like an eternity. And then he surprised her with his words. “I am afraid that if I do, I will discover I am dreaming.”

“Does this truly feel like a dream?” Claire asked, and kissed him on the lips. His burned with the heat of his body.

“It cannot be anything else,” he said.

“I am sorry I have not been able to convince you of the fact that this is all real. That I am here, with you, on your beautiful lawn, on your even more beautiful body.”

He laughed, and she heard no humor in it.

“Oh, yes. As beautiful as a parched patch of earth, disfigured and unnatural, and defining no one’s vision of what is desirable.”

“You insult me, then,” Claire said, frustrated. She did not know what else she could do to seduce this man who wrongly overlooked his own assets. “Do you think me an innocent, who takes pleasure in what she sees because she has not seen anything else?”

“You are thinking of my sister, then,” he said, opening his eyes.

“No, I am thinking of no one but you and me, sitting alone in the grass while you are half undressed and I am sitting on your lap, quite aware that you are not indifferent to that fact.” She shifted, for emphasis, and got the response she desired. “This has only to do with us.”

He made a noise low in his throat and pushed her down into the grass. He ripped off his shirt and was on her in a moment, pulling up her grass-stained skirts and kissing her until she no longer could speak any words of reason. But then, she had no desire to do so.

***

Max lay on the soft, gentle earth, where he had once played with his toys and learned to ride his pony, Rembrandt. His father presented him with the pony one fine day, but his mother named the little fellow, reflecting how the animal’s dark shades reminded her of the Dutch master. Later that day, she showed him several of the painter’s works in Brook Hall, including one of a very common-looking man who was Rembrandt himself. Max did not truly see the connection between his brown and black pony and a portrait of a man in an odd cap, but he understood that his mother appreciated beautiful things.

She thought her paintings and china clocks quite beautiful, and by the way she looked at Max’s father, he knew she thought him beautiful as well. She called Camille her beautiful, fair girl, and laughed at Max when he asked if he was beautiful, too.

“Of course you are,” she said as she hugged him. “Those we love are most beautiful in our eyes.”

Now Max looked down at the woman who slept against his bare chest, one of her hands cupped over his damaged nipple. He pulled his shirt over her pink shoulder, guessing she did not know what it was like to be burned by the sun, and feeling a need to protect her from all harm. It was, quite unexpectedly, a feeling so different from what he felt towards his sister, that he was nearly crushed by the enormity of it.

She told him he was beautiful. It was truly absurd, for he knew beauty when he saw it.

And here she was, with her glorious hair tangled all around her head, and her dark eyelashes casting crescent shadows on her cheeks. Her nose did not have the pertness of other women he had known, but was one of distinction, a little long and slightly off-centered. Perhaps she had had an accident. Or perhaps that bastard Glastonbury flattened it for her.

Whatever else went on between them—and it pained him to think of it—he now knew she never pleased Glastonbury as a wife might be tempted to do. For, though Claire initially startled him with her brazenness, when it came to what truly mattered, she responded to him with a sweet sense of discovery. It was no wonder she slept beside him, utterly spent. For, having made that discovery, she was quite willing to continue her journey of exploration.

She was beautiful, very nearly perfect.

And he most definitely was not, but somehow she did not see what was too obvious. The bright blue eyes of Lady Claire Glastonbury gazed upon unique truths and reflected different facets of light. In all these years he never considered such a strange possibility, and wondered what he ought to do about it.

Well, he knew what he ought to do. Even though she was a widow, he thoroughly compromised her, and rather spectacularly so. He did not need his Aunt Adelaide to tell him he should marry the lady. But why would she wish to marry him? And what if it was pure curiosity and not desire that drove her to undress him here on this bright, open field? What if she only wanted to see his freakish scars?

So, he was back where he started, but for the pleasure they briefly shared. Well, it was not all that brief.

“What are you thinking?” Lady Claire asked. “Am I proving to be tiresome company, sleeping away the afternoon on your shoulder?” Once again, she trifled with the line of his collarbone, pausing for just a moment on a ragged scar bisecting it.

“Not at all. You can sleep on my shoulder anytime, my lady.”

“Yours is a tempting offer, though I imagine the situation might become a bit awkward. Whatever I imagined for this afternoon, it was not to find my arms and legs entangled with those of a naked man.”

Max took several deep breaths. This lady knew how to provoke him with nothing more than a few casual words.

He brushed her hair back from her forehead.

“Whatever else comes of this day’s adventures, you need not fear that we have been observed. The areas around the Hall are quite abandoned, and have been for years.”

“They most certainly are not, Max.”

“I do like the sound of my name on your lips, dearest Claire.” He pulled her closer and she stretched along the length of his body.

But she would not be distracted. “Lord Wentworth,” she said, quite intentionally. He was beginning to understand her moods very well. “Do not deny what is patently obvious. The grass has been cut, the fruit trees pruned and the flower beds weeded. There is a fairly new rowboat sheltered by the lake. We know Camille comes here, and I doubt she is the one with the pruning shears.”

“It seems I have a most disloyal staff,” he said, knowing what she would say to that.

She did. “It is quite the opposite. Because they love you and Camille, they are protecting your property as you protect her.”

“It appears I have not been very successful in that, either,” he said.

Claire raised herself on one elbow, and her breasts pressed again his shoulder. “Is it not possible to spend one blessed afternoon without covering yourself in a hair cloth? Must your guilt about nearly everything put a damper on all that you do and say and feel?”

“Yes, it must,” he said, and wondered if he had gone too far. Her blue eyes gazed into his for a moment before she abruptly pulled away. With her back to him, she started pulling on her garments, saying nothing. He suddenly felt ridiculous, exposed and vulnerable, so he sat up as well. Their afternoon idyll was over.

Claire turned suddenly and caught him as he was pulling up his smalls. She glanced at his midsection, and looked away. “I am returning to London. I have said as much before, but this time I intend to make good on it. Your sister may wish to accompany me.”

“And if I accompany you both?”

She took in a deep breath. “Then your sister will not need me.”

“You are wrong about that. Camille needs you.” Max could not bear the thought of Claire with anyone else, apart from him. “I need you.”

She looked back at him in an oddly threatening way, her arms uplifted as she stuck pins in her hair, creating something that looked as fashionable as a bird’s nest. He thought she was splendid.

“You can prove that by doing something for me,” she said appraisingly.

“In a heartbeat.”

“Get dressed . . .”

“Is that all?” he asked, feeling some of the tension leave his body. “Though I quite prefer things as they are at the moment, I can easily oblige.”

“And come with me,” she added.

He knew what she wanted then, and the tension returned in an instant. She did not speak metaphorically before, when she mentioned revisiting places in one’s past. She truly meant it. Max glanced across the great lawn, to the ruins of his old home, and felt the terror return.

But still he dressed until he looked as rumpled and disheveled as the lady. It did not matter what story they concocted upon their return to Brookside Cottage, for everyone would know precisely what they had done, and possibly where they did it.

“Come,” she said simply, and held out her hand. “I am curious about several things.”

“Were you also curious about my scars and injuries?” he blurted out, unable to contain himself.

Her hand moved from his and traveled up the sleeve of his jacket.

“Oh, yes,” she admitted and then smiled. “But not nearly as much as I was curious about everything else.”

***

Claire held out her hand to Max and saw the deep lines of worry scoring his cheeks. She asked a lot of him, but she believed he trusted her as he might not have trusted anyone in years, and the time had come for him to open his eyes to the truth. He smiled briefly when she made light of his scars, and she knew she had already convinced him, in the most intimate ways, that they mattered little to her.

Pulling him along the great drive towards Brook Hall was another matter altogether. Indeed, it might not yet be her place to bully him into confronting his demons, but she hoped some day it might be. She decided she wanted this man, and she wanted him whole.

“I suppose carriages would come up this drive to the front door? The beech trees must have been half their size twenty years ago,” she said.

“My grandfather planted them after a disease ravaged the row of oak that once stood here. When the beech did not grow fast enough to suit him, he alternated them with white pines. You can see several near the kitchen garden, where they were transplanted once the beech took hold. Some were too large to transplant, and were cut down; one was used to make a cradle when I was born,” he said. And something subtly changed in his manner, for he was now pulling Claire along, and growing more animated as he spoke.

“A simple pine cradle for a future marquis?”

He glanced down at her. “Oh, I was not to be the marquis, you understand. Camille and I had an older brother, who died soon after she was born. But, in any case, there was nothing simple about that cradle, as I recall.”

“Your family has had a sad history,” she said cautiously. “Though not more so than others. When one considers the lost branches of the family tree, with some transplanted, and others cut down before their time, it remains for us to recall them with affection to preserve their memory.”

“You cannot make me philosophical about all that has happened here. My family has been trying to do so for many years, and my uncle has included a theological explanation, as well. But I know that what happened here is neither an act of God nor of nature. It is an act of man.”

“But you are not necessarily that man,” Claire said.

“My dear lady, please allow me some ownership of this dreadful business. I am that man.”

“You were a boy.”

“Boys of such an age are sent off to school, are sold off as apprentices to trade, go off to sea and are employed in great houses as this once was. Surely, I was old enough to be responsible for what happened.” Max paused and picked up a shiny disk embedded in the gravel. He rubbed his hand over it before pocketing it. “What do you know of it? Did my presence at Armadale’s ball presage a new round of gossip?”

“Not at all,” Claire lied. “I asked your sister.”

“I am sure her view holds no prejudice,” he said sarcastically as he stopped in front of what was once the grand entrance. It still was grand, though spots of peeling paint clung to the marble centerpiece over the lintel, where a coat of arms announced that this was a place of pride. “Two rampant lions and a justifiably terrified unicorn,” he said, reading her mind.

“Of all people, she would have the most reason to be prejudiced, one way or another. And yet, I believe she told me a cool and rational story. The only point on which she was a bit vague was why you were so indebted to a servant, you had to do his job for him.”

“And neglected to do it. Well, it hardly matters now.” He narrowed his eyes, studying a window on the second storey. “It wasn’t until years later that I fully appreciated how stupid it all was.”

Claire said nothing, for she was nothing if not experienced in the art of conversation, and knew a prologue when she heard one. But Maxwell continued to gaze at the window, though whether it invoked a memory or he just watched a starling return to the nest there, she could not guess. Finally, she ran a gentle hand along the length of his arm to his shoulder, where she knew a white scar cut across his muscle.

“Have I not given you reason to believe you can trust me?” she asked quietly. “Have you not already revealed so much, knowing I will never share it with anyone else?”

“Yes, that was very much the matter at hand, twenty years ago,” he said. “I saw something that was intended to be private.”

“Did you know what you witnessed?”

Surprisingly, Max laughed. “Oh, yes, did I not already point out how mature some young boys can be? I lived on a large estate, and knew my way around the stables and tenant farms. I knew what animals did, and I recognized what one of our servants was doing to a lower maid on the billiards table.”