The Maiden's Hand (21 page)

“You’re sure?” he asked.

“Quite sure. I must have been overtired from traveling. That’s all.”

“Completely recovered.” He stroked his chin and eyed her with a frank lust that brought a jolt of heat to her loins. Without even touching her, he had the power to rouse her ardor. To make her want him with an intensity that frightened her. All her life she had been taught that base yearnings of the flesh detracted from her devotion to God. She had learned the truth of that firsthand. She wanted to explain her feelings to Oliver, but she could only stare at him, helpless and spellbound, a victim of his smoldering, suggestive stare.

“You have no shame, my lord.” Her cheeks burned with color.

“I should hope not.” He used one hand only, reaching around behind her and sliding his hand down, teasing, his eyes laughing at her. He did this often and with startling inventiveness, whether he was chastely pressing her arm during morning devotions or snatching her into the shadows of the hall and kissing her deeply and seductively while musicians played.

“Oliver, please.” She tried to keep the smile from her voice.

“Then let’s go,” he said at last. “I want to show you something.” He put his fingers to his lips and whistled. A
pack of graceful borzoya hounds came streaking across the freshly scythed yard. As the tall animals streamed through the gate, Oliver stroked their silky coats.

“My first real friend was a windhound,” he said, half to himself.

Lark stepped through the gate, pausing to look up at him in surprise. “A dog? Didn’t you play with other children?”

The merest tinge of bitterness hardened his smile. “Sweetheart, I did not even know other children existed.”

Finding that difficult to believe, she moved along the path, flanked by a low, well-tended hedge.

“This used to be a maze,” Oliver said, tucking her hand into the crook of his elbow. The dogs leaped the hedges at will, eventually disappearing into a profusion of woods. “For years, no one save my father even knew this garden existed.” He gestured upward. “The hedges were tall, touching like archways at the top. Very few who blundered in were able to find their way out.”

“It sounds rather dangerous. Why would your father cultivate a maze like that?”

“To keep this part of the estate separate. Secret.”

He came from a family of eccentrics, she reminded herself. A father whose odd inventions made Lynacre a place of wonder, a stepmother who had lived with Gypsies, brothers and sisters who pursued unusual vocations. Inadvertently, she touched her stomach and wondered, for the first time, what her child would be like.

“You’re certain you feel up to a walk?” Oliver said.

Though flustered, she managed to nod—thinking of the babe as a
person
had a profound effect on her. Soon she would tell Oliver. Part of her dreaded that. Although he had spoken of children from the very start, it had been teasing, abstract. He had no real desire to take responsibility for a child.

She feared, too, that he would make her stay here with his family through her confinement. She did adore his parents, but she did not want to spend so many idle months in the countryside when there was important work to be done.

She told herself not to worry. Wynter had disappeared to London. She and Oliver had brought Richard Speed to Wiltshire without incident. When they lay in each other’s arms at night, nothing in the world seemed amiss.

And so she kept her secret locked in her heart, just for a little while longer, she told herself. Just until she was certain Oliver would not run from the responsibility or leave her to bear it alone.

They wended their way along the path, and at the end, stepped beneath an arbor.

Lark gasped and squeezed Oliver’s arm. “What an extraordinary garden.”

“Isn’t it?” They passed a line of wych elms and arrived at a fountain. Winged fish and carved dragons spouted water into a basin of blooming yellow brandyball lilies. All around them grew a menagerie of topiary, giant ivy lions, gryphons and mythical beasts with wings and horns.

“Your father’s doing?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“And who lives in that cottage?” She pointed to the snug, half-timbered building all draped in morning glory.

“I used to live here.” He spoke without his usual jaunty, devil-may-care attitude.

There it was again, that shadowy anguish, hinting at a darkness he kept hidden from her and from the world. “Oliver—”

“Come.” He took her hand and led her to the house. “When the Gypsies pass through on their wanderings, they often stay here.”

He pushed at the door and let her into a small, sun-flooded hall. The cottage smelled of dried herbs, which hung in ribbon-tied bunches from the rafters above the hearth. The furniture consisted of a trestle table and benches, a box chair and a wooden settee.

“I don’t understand,” said Lark. “Why did you live here and not at the manor house?”

Oliver spun a geared iron device attached to a quern, and the round stones grated against each other. “I was ill and not expected to live.”

“What?”
She wanted to run to him, but he was withdrawn now, half turned from her.

“Sickly children die.” He shrugged and stopped working the quern. “It happens. My father thought it best to keep me away from the perils of everyday life.”

He spoke matter-of-factly, yet the revelation chilled her. At last she began to understand why he seemed to live his life so recklessly, so voraciously. “What illness was this?”

“Asthmatic fever. An inflammation of the lungs.” He walked to the hearth and fingered a bundle of greenish twigs hanging from the rafter. “The attacks of breathlessness came and went. Nothing seemed to help until Juliana arrived. The Gypsies brought this herb with them from the distant east. It’s called ephedra. Boiled in tea, it eases the breathing.”

“Then you recovered,” she said.

He looked away. Just for a moment, just for a heartbeat, his face went dark and unreadable. Then he grinned and spread his arms. “Tell me, do I look like a man about to keel over of a mortal illness?”

She could not help but laugh. “Marry, my lord, you are the picture of health.” Yet she could not forget that, for a moment, he had not met her eyes.

Discomfited, she strolled through the hall, pausing to examine a few books stacked in a cupboard. Books on gardening and husbandry, a child’s hornbook on a paddle, religious tracts.

“We both had rather strange, sheltered childhoods,” she said.

“Aye. Yours turned you into a sober, solemn woman dedicated to doing the Lord’s work, and denying herself anything that might smack of pleasure.”

She flushed. His summation was correct. She felt compelled to reply. “And you turned out to be a rogue who would not dream of denying himself any amusement.”

“Touché, sweetheart,” he said in a low voice. “I am a vain and shallow man. No doubt I’ll suffer the torments of the damned one day.” He crossed the room and pulled her against him. “All the more reason to take pleasure where I find it, eh?”

Despite what he had said about her piety, Lark felt anything
but
pious when she was in his arms. To distract him, she indicated a narrow, winding set of open wooden stairs. “What is up there?”

“I thought you would never ask,” he said with a wink. He brought her up the stairs to a narrow gallery with a ceiling so low that he had to stoop. He ducked into one of the two rooms, and she found herself in a tiny bedchamber with a low bedstead and a basin on the windowsill. Once again, she saw a shadow pass over Oliver’s face as if he were the sun with a cloud briefly obscuring his radiance.

Then he grinned in that way of his that made her melt inside. “The sight of a bed always has such a profound effect on me.”

She shivered.

“You, too?” He lifted her coif and removed the pins from her hair. “Did anyone ever tell you that you have the most lovely hair?”

“No. Of course not.” She knotted her hands in front of her and stared at the warped wood of the floor. “It would be immodest for me to listen to such talk. “Woe unto them that draw iniquity with cords of vanity.”

He walked in a slow circle around her like a warden unsure of what to do with a recalcitrant prisoner. “‘If a woman have long hair,’” he countered, “‘it is a glory to her.’” He brought the heavy masses of her hair down around her shoulders. “Isn’t that how the proverb reads? “For her hair is given her for a covering.’ That said, my darling,” he whispered, freeing her of oversleeves and bodice at the tug of a lace, “what need have you of clothes?”

“I had no idea you could quote scripture.”

“Your virtue is rubbing off on me.” There was magic in his touch, she thought, and she had no power to break the spell. God help her, she wanted to resist him. Somewhere deep in her mind, a voice cried out that she should not allow desire to rule her will.

But the voice was very faint, quickly drowned by the roar of passion in her ears.

And so she stood unresisting as he removed her clothes, item by item, setting the garments on a box chair. His leisurely pace nearly maddened her. She wanted to tear at her stockings, her chemise, her shift, urging him to hurry before she burned to ashes.

But she bore it all, endured his tender ministrations because he had taught her that anticipation only honed the pleasure later. They had never made love in so private a place before. The little cottage was an intimate bower deep in a forest where no one could reach them.

He took both her hands in his and pulled her toward him. She came willingly, expecting him to crush her in an embrace. Instead he bent slightly and pressed a chaste kiss to her brow. There was a strange, golden purity in the moment, and she had a fearful thought. To Oliver, this seemed a certain form of worship.

“I cannot help but feel afraid sometimes,” she said.

He lifted her hands and pressed her palm against his chest. “Afraid? Of me?”

“Of everything
but
you.” The pounding of his heart beneath her hand raised an answering pulse deep within her. “I worry that we won’t be allowed to stay like this. Content. Free of worries.”

He threaded his hands through her hair and took her mouth in a kiss that was decidedly unchaste. “My dear, the only people I know who are free of worries are dead.”

He laughed at her expression and kissed her again, deeply but not as hard as she wanted him to. With a faint whimper in the back of her throat, she tiptoed high and crushed herself closer. She dared to look upon him with a bold, exploring eye. Dared to mold her hands to the shape of him—arms and shoulders, hips and buttocks. Dared to touch her mouth to his and slip her tongue inside.

A groan of pleasure rumbled from him, and he fell back on the bedstead, bringing her with him. The bedclothes were soft with age, faintly perfumed with lavender. Their kiss was the sharing of one breath, one heartbeat, one moment in time. It was a wordless, intimate communion, and although she never consciously formed the thought, her heart told her the truth.

She loved him.

The shattering certainty urged her to boldness; she wanted to devour him, to inhale him, to show him that her
robust hunger matched his perfectly. Their warm breath mingled and fused, and her heart rose, for she felt a magic in the moment. Their souls were merging, becoming one; she was losing a part of herself yet at the same time gaining something precious and new.

“Come to me, Lark,” Oliver whispered in her ear. “Be with me.”

She lifted herself above him and for a moment, let the exquisite torment of anticipation linger. Radiance bathed the room, the bed, the moment, and at last she joined their bodies with a slow, settling movement of her hips.

She cried out, feeling his touch in places he wasn’t even touching. She was in control, and yet she was not. With his hands and mouth he took her will from her, and she surrendered it willingly, voluptuously, wantonly.

Though it was too soon for Oliver to notice, her breasts were heavier. More sensitive. When he fondled them, she moved restlessly until a rhythm began.

And there, bathed in glowing afternoon light, on an old bed that smelled of autumns past, Lark discovered a new side of herself. She broke free of the bonds of her upbringing, the tenets and strictures that condemned her to feeble obedience. Oliver coaxed the aggressor from her, and she was soaring at last, exactly as he had once promised she would.

Afterward, she felt sweetly drowsy and lethargic, lying in his arms, her chin propped upon his chest as she studied his face.

He sent her a smile, one of the soft ones that touched her heart. “You seem different.”

She forced herself not to look away. “In what way?”

He toyed idly with her long hair, spreading it out across his chest and stroking it with his open hand. “You seem
less worried. Less trussed up by ideas of what’s proper. Less
old.”

“Less
me,”
she said, trying to hide her relief.

He misinterpreted her wandering gaze, and with his fingers under her chin he brought her back to him. “That’s not true,” he said, his voice uncharacteristically fierce. “You are becoming more like yourself each day, and less like the gloomy and bitter little creature you used to be.”