by Lenora Bell
For some reason admitting that brought her perilously close to tears.
For the past two days, she hadn’t been herself at all. She’d been playing a role, and here she was in a space that was entirely free from her mother and the weight of all that pretending had crashed into her chest, just like Wright’s hammer into plaster.
“So you’re not a wallflower anymore.”
“Regrettably. I preferred reading books behind the potted ferns. I hate being the center of attention.”
“Why is that?” He regarded her steadily, his question asked in earnest, as if he truly wanted to know the answer.
She’d noticed that about him. When he asked her a question, he was genuinely interested in her response. There was nothing blasé or disinterested about him.
She was accustomed to speaking with wealthy lords and beautiful ladies who always appeared to be looking for someone more interesting to talk to.
Wright’s conversation, while teasing and often infuriating, was directed wholly at her, and he listened to her when she talked. He was right there with her, not waiting for something better to come along.
It made her want to tell him the truth.
“The Earl of Mayhew is taking an interest in me when he never even knew I existed before now.” She scuffed the toe of her boot against a pile of plaster chunks. “We’ll be together at the opera house tonight, and I’ll have to pretend to hang on his every vainglorious word. The entire world revolves around him, to hear him tell it. I have to listen to his self-aggrandizing stories and pretend to enjoy them because of the bargain I made with my mother, and I loathe myself every second I’m with him. I can’t believe my mother wants me to marry the man.”
A shadow passed across his face, or maybe it was just a smudge of dirt she hadn’t noticed before.
“I’ve come here to escape lecturing mothers and pompous earls, if only for a few hours.”
“Here.” He held the wooden handle of the hammer toward her. “Take a swing. It’ll make you feel better.”
“I can’t lift such a heavy hammer, I’m too small.”
“You can lift a sledgehammer and you can swing it. Trust me.”
He lifted her hand and wrapped it around the handle of the hammer. A tremor began in her belly like the fronds of an ostrich feather waving atop a bonnet.
He wrapped her other hand over the top until she held the hammer with both hands. It was warm from his touch and solid in her grip.
He moved behind her and his arms bracketed her elbows, positioning her grip lower on the hammer. “Widen your stance. Bend your knees slightly.”
Now she really wouldn’t be able to lift it—not with his arms hugging her and turning her knees to jelly.
He removed her spectacles and set them high on a nearby shelf. “You don’t need these. It’s a large target and I wouldn’t want your spectacles to fly off and be damaged.”
He stepped away. “Now, aim for the wall.”
She swung the hammer at the wall and only made the smallest of dents.
“Is that all you’ve got? You won’t achieve much if you hit like a lady.”
Like a lady.
She’d been behaving like a docile and decorous lady for three days now, and she was sick to death of the deception. She hefted the hammer and heaved with all her might. A chunk of plaster flew into the air on the other side of the large gash in the wall.
If her mother could see her now, her mouth would gape open. Lady Beatrice, wielding a hammer is not a suitable activity for a lady. You’ll damage your gown. You’ll damage your reputation.
“I don’t care,” Beatrice said aloud, answering the voice in her head. “I don’t care about my reputation.” She swung with everything in her soul. A larger chunk of plaster disintegrated beneath the blunt iron of the hammer.
“I’m not docile, or decorous, or obliging.” With each word she blasted the wall.
“That’s better. Now you’ve got the swing of it,” Wright said.
Sweat dripped down the back of her gown. It would be ruined but she didn’t care. All she wanted to do was obliterate her mother’s voice in her mind. Drown it out forever.
“I’m Beastly Beatrice.” She slammed the hammer into the wall again and again. The hole grew bigger. She blew her hair away from her forehead and redoubled her efforts. “I hate balls.” She smashed another chunk. “And ball gowns. And puffed-up pillocks of earls.”
“That’s right. Break free and live a little!”
She raised the hammer again, pretending that she was one of the mighty Amazon warrior princesses that the Duchess of Ravenwood had given a lecture about to the League, and brought it down so forcefully that she stumbled backward.
He folded his arms around her, taking some of the weight of the hammer in his hands. “Easy there, tiger.”
“I’m not a well-behaved lady,” she said forcefully. “I’m prickly, bookish Beatrice.”
“My friends call me Ford,” he said, his voice rumbling low in her ears.
She rested against his solid chest. Were they friends now? They were certainly in intimate proximity. “I find that I like hammering, Ford. It’s very freeing, isn’t it?”
“Try doing it for a whole day. You might think otherwise. But, yes, smashing things can be liberating. That’s why I gave you the hammer.”
Did he know what his touch did to her? His breath tickling her neck, his arms around her. The heavy hard hammer in her hands and the large solid man behind her, cradling her gently.
Her breath coming in gasps from the exertion and from his nearness. She wasn’t thinking anymore, only feeling.
The excited, hopeful feeling returned, fizzing in her chest like bubbles rising in a glass of champagne.
The joy of his solid arms around her, encouraging her to bring the walls down and do something for herself. Something to break away from her mother’s control.
He smelled like sweat and the chalk-scent of plaster, with an underlying hint of evergreen cedar, like the scent of the hope chest that contained her wedding trousseau.
She’d watched him working, so strong and so free, and she’d wanted to possess that confidence, nurture it in her own heart.
All summer long she’d dreamed of kissing this man. She’d been thinking about kissing him for so long—her whole life, it seemed.
She’d seen him as an object, as a beautiful sculpture, bursting with muscles, bursting with life. Something completely beyond her reach, beyond her window, behind glass and at a distance.
He was within her reach now. He was right here, holding her, urging her to live a little.
She wanted to live a lot.
And so she dropped the hammer, turned to face him, and plastered her lips to his.
Chapter Thirteen
Only . . . he dipped his head at the same time she was reaching for him, and so she missed his lips and planted a kiss on his nose instead.
Yes. She, Beatrice Bentley, imaginer of extraordinary kisses, completely missed the mark and smacked her lips against his nostril.
It was definitely one of the more humiliating attempts in the history of kisses. What had she been thinking?
The answer to that question was that she hadn’t been thinking at all. She’d allowed herself to be carried away by his strong arms and his exhortations to do something unladylike.
She squirmed with embarrassment, attempting to extricate herself from his grasp, but he held her firmly about the arms.
“What was that?” he asked, his blue-and-gold eyes all confusion.
“Never mind what it was, I was . . . mistaken. I’m going to go upstairs now.”
“Did you just try to kiss me?”
She struggled to free herself. “I was carried away with lifting hammers and smashing down barriers and I . . . I . . . oh.”
Her last words were swallowed up by his lips descending and claiming hers in a kiss so devoid of awkwardness that it melted her knees like sealing wax.
His lips were gentle,
yet firm, as he folded her more forcefully into his embrace, kissing her with sensual skill.
Here was the sunrise she’d imagined, her body heating from the inside out, the warmth spreading along unfamiliar routes: from the pit of her belly to the peaks of her breasts, and from the corners of her lips down her limbs to the tips of her toes.
Warm in strange places and cold in others. Her hands were cold. She had to warm them against his chest, slip them under his shirt collar to feel the beating of his heart.
He held her as if he’d never let her go, kissing her so long and so well that all of the clocks in England must have frozen, for time had stopped.
It was sweet, so very sweet.
And then it became something less controlled, something more wild than sweet.
His tongue slid along the edge of her lower lip, nudging her to open her mouth. He slipped his tongue inside her mouth and the warm places in her body caught fire, blazing into new awareness.
His hands reached for her hips and pulled her flush against him.
Kissing him was everything she’d imagined it to be and more.
She wanted more.
He broke away and put her at arm’s length. “Now you can go upstairs.”
“Oh. Er.” She dropped her gaze to his boots. “Yes, quite. Upstairs.” Where she had crates to open and new words and worlds to discover.
“Now that you’ve been properly kissed, you’ll be forced to concede that kisses are far more scintillating than archaic words.”
Was that all this had been? A rogue proving a point, nothing more. “Ha!” She knew her smile was wobbly, but she couldn’t let him see how shaken she was by the kiss. “I’ll concede nothing of the sort.”
He gave her a smoldering look. “Then you want more kissing? I thought I’d been hired to make renovations, but if it’s kissing you want . . .”
“No, no, it’s renovations, nothing more. Carry on, Wright.” She waved her hand at the wall and backed away swiftly. Too swiftly. She stumbled against a chair and nearly toppled to the floor.
He was at her side in seconds, spectacles in hand. “You might need these.”
“Thank you,” she said briskly, donning her spectacles and clinging to the shreds of her dignity. “About what just happened . . .”
“Nothing happened. I was proving a point.”
“Precisely.” She laughed, but it sounded hollow and forced. “It didn’t mean anything. It was merely a question mark and there’s nothing left to discover. Full stop. Carry on with the renovations. You’re doing God’s work. Helping bookish ladies and bluestockings for decades to come.”
She made an awkward exit and hurried upstairs.
Inside the reading room she inhaled deeply of the scent of scholarly tomes and unfinished dictionaries.
What in heaven’s name was the matter with her? Here she was surrounded by a carefully curated selection of ancient manuscripts and books, and all she could think about was kissing Ford, when she should be reveling in the freedom to be as scholarly as she pleased.
She also meant to reexamine her aunt’s letter. She felt certain that there was a hidden meaning she hadn’t uncovered yet. Her aunt had been trying to tell her something about her inheritance.
Ford. She tasted his name on her tongue. The Old English noun meant a shallow place where water could be crossed. Used as a verb, if one forded a river, one crossed a body of water by walking along the bottom.
Either way, the diminutive of his name denoted a passage, a crossing from one shore to another.
A transition.
She knew what his name meant, but what had the kiss meant? When presented with an unfamiliar word, Beatrice always broke it down into small increments, searching for the Latin, French, Greek, Old English, or Germanic roots in order to piece together an educated guess as to the meaning.
She had no educated guess about what the kiss had meant. It hadn’t been a frivolous or meaningless moment for her.
It had been a whole new vocabulary. A new language.
And it meant nothing to him. He kissed women all the time.
These alarming sparks of desire that he ignited in her were wholly uncharacteristic and should be dealt with immediately. She couldn’t ignore them, because they kept returning, growing stronger and more heated every time they met. She must deliberately stamp them out, douse them with cold water, until all that remained was a lingering scent of smoke.
There could never be a conflagration.
Ford felt like smashing something so it was a good thing he had a sledgehammer in his hands and a wall to bring down.
What the bloody hell had just happened?
He’d never meant to kiss her. Yes, he’d been thinking about kissing her, but he was always thinking about that when she was around. She was such an alluring combination of primness and passion.
Tension coiled in his body. Desire. The memory of her soft backside against his groin. The way she’d turned in his arms and tried to kiss him.
She was just so damned tempting. He kept catching these glimpses of the sensual woman beneath her proper facade. Today he’d caught more than a glimpse. He’d seen her hammering down walls like a warrior princess.
He’d liked that glimpse of her power.
He liked the lady far too much.
She was this creature fashioned from silk and lace and ambition. A lady whose determination bolstered a soaring intellect, like a flying buttress supporting the spires of a cathedral.
He was a man who swung a hammer.
They were from disparate worlds. Kissing was off limits. Anything beyond kissing was never even to be imagined.
He’d given her the hammer as a way for her to vent some frustration.
And then she’d kissed him. Her kiss had been surprising, inexpert, and electrifying.
All it had taken was one application of her soft pink lips and she’d obliterated his restraint.
He swung the hammer so hard that plaster flew against the far wall.
She was a highborn lady, sister to a duke.
A duke whose good opinion and trust he required. Giving in to the desire to kiss her back had been wrong. And bad.
Bad and wrong and . . . glorious.
He dismantled the wall blow by blow, stopping only to wipe dust out of his eyes. When it was finished, he scrubbed his fist across his brow.
Stick to the plan. It was simple enough. He fixed up her property and left England on his new ship, knowing that he’d not only obstructed his grandfather’s plans, but had made enough money to purchase a plot of land in the process.
When she got under his skin, he’d have to work harder to keep her out. And if she ever kissed him again, he’d remember all of the reasons why intimacy with the duke’s sister was forbidden.
No more untying of ribbons and removing of bonnets.
No more holding of sledgehammers.
He’d like to show her how to hold other hard, solid things.
Mother of God . . . he needed a drink. The wall was gone, only jagged edges remained, rather like his state of mind.
He’d accomplished enough for the day. It would be best if he were gone when she came back downstairs.
“I could use a pint. Or three.” Ford settled onto a stool next to Griff at the Captain’s Choice pub near the docks.
Griff caught the barmaid’s eye and gestured toward Ford with his head. “Not going so well with your new employer? Should have stuck with me, lad. I may not be pretty, but I’m far less complicated and less likely to work you into knots.”
There would be less peril involved in working for his old friend. They’d work hard until the task was complete, and then go out drinking.
End of story.
“I taught Beatrice how to use a sledgehammer today.”
Griff nearly snorted ale through his nose. He wiped away the foam coating his bristly white whiskers. “Did you now? And did she enjoy holding your hammer?”
“Not that kind of hammer.”
“What happened to the lady?”
“She smashed some plaster.”
“No, I mean what happened to Lady Beatrice. Holding your hammer made her your special friend?”
Ford gulped his ale. Griff didn’t miss a trick. “Not exactly.”
They’d shared only one very long and scorching hot kiss.
He gazed into his mug, and all he saw was the moment when she’d pressed up against him and he’d nearly lost his damned mind with longing.
“Something happened. I can tell.” Griff sipped his beer. “You’ve a guilty, tortured look on your face.”
Ford swallowed half his ale in one long swig.
“Out with it,” said Griff.
“We kissed.”
“Oh ho! Gave her a good tongue lashing, did you, lad?”
“She kissed me first. I know.” He hung his head. “That’s no excuse. She’s the duke’s sister. I have to talk to him about the embezzlement on his estate—I don’t want my father being blamed for timber going missing or profits disappearing. The last thing I need is for the duke to catch drift of me kissing his pampered sister. I’m an idiot.”
“A blithering bilge-drinking lug-headed idiot. Next you’ll be falling in love with the lass. Ahoy, Peg! Bring my friend another one to set his head on straight.”
The buxom barmaid poured another for Ford, giving him a flirtatious smile along with the ale.
“I’m not falling in love with her.” Ford pounded the ale and slammed his glass on the bar top. “Love is a choice, not an uncontrollable slide. There’s no falling happening here. I’m standing firm and heading back out to sea.”
“Sure you are.”
Ford gave him a sidelong glance. “My parents talk about love that way.” He stared at the scarred wood of the bar. “‘We tumbled madly in love at first sight. My eyes met hers and I knew she was the one.’”
“Now isn’t that sweet? My parents hated each other, far as I could tell.”
“If my father had made a different choice, he would have continued as a respected builder in London, made a decent living, married a woman of his own class. My mother would have married well, someone of her higher station in life. Perhaps she wouldn’t have loved the man, but she would have had all the comforts and luxuries she was entitled to from birth.”
