by Eloisa James
She wasn’t quite certain what he was referring to, but she didn’t inquire. Obviously, haste was an undesirable quality in the bedchamber.
The carriage was drawing to a halt for luncheon when Ewan had his idea. “The goal of this journey is to come to know each other better,” he said, a wicked grin in his eyes. “So I suggest that we make a more concerted effort in that direction.”
“Certainly,” she agreed.
“We’ll ask each other questions.”
“But we already do that,” she objected.
“Difficult questions. And every question that’s answered truly and openly, with honesty here”—he put his hand on his heart—“earns a kiss.”
“So if I don’t answer a question honestly, then there’s no kiss?” she asked.
“None. But you have to ask me questions as well.”
“Who decides whether an answer was honest or not?”
“The person who gave it, of course. I’ll start. Now, Miss Annabel Essex, imagine you’re before the mighty recording angel himself. What is your worst fault?”
“I have none,” she said flippantly.
The footman cast open the door and Ewan handed her out. “And were you honest?” he asked, when she was squarely on her feet, to the side of a charming meadow.
“No,” she said. “Oh, Ewan, isn’t this lovely?”
Mac was there, bowing and clutching a sheaf of papers. “Lord Ardmore, your picnic is set up in the glade just beyond those trees, if you and your ladyship wouldn’t mind walking through the meadow. It is quite dry.”
“Mac, this is lovely!” Annabel said, beaming at him.
“And yourself and the men?” Ewan said.
Mac nodded across the road, quite in the other direction. Annabel could see a rough table set up in the sunshine, with what looked like a keg of ale next to it. “Since we have a long drive before we reach Witham Common, I thought it best if we take a comfortable pause here and perhaps an afternoon rest before continuing. We won’t supper until ten or even later.”
A slow smile spread over Ewan’s face. “Mac, remind me that I am doubling your salary,” he said. And then he offered an arm to Annabel.
For early May, the weather was utterly lovely. The sky was a high, pale blue, like faded linen hung in the sun. Just a few clouds floated high in its arch. The meadow itself was littered with cow parsley whose white flowers stood vividly against new grass. They crossed the meadow and entered a line of alders that divided the meadow from a little glade. Under the alders were bluebells, dark blue, blue flowers hanging their little heads from the beauty of their blossoms.
“Oh, look,” Annabel cried, sinking to her knees and gathering bluebells. “There’s so many of them, I’ve never seen so many!”
Ewan crouched down beside her. “They’re almost the color of your eyes,” he said, holding one up next to her cheek. “No, not quite. You have extraordinary eyes, do you know that?”
She caught a smile back, but it trembled in the air between them. “You’re a flatterer,” she said severely. “I shall ask you for your worst fault, and then be able to judge the truth of your answer for myself.”
He smiled at her, a crooked smile, and didn’t answer. And she had a lap full of bluebells, so she pulled up her skirts before her to hold them and they walked over to the blankets Mac had laid out in the shade of a oak tree. The sun danced through the small leaves of the oak, turning them saffron and dappling the blankets with the ghosts of baby leaves. Ewan very seriously filled all the glasses with bluebells, and gave them water from the stream, so the picnic turned from a very formal affair, all heavy silver and starched linen, to a child’s tea party.
And then he stretched out across from her and Annabel realized that he had hardly said a word since she said she had no faults.
“What is your greatest fault?” she asked him.
“My faults are legion,” he said. “And I think I may be in the process of changing the king, as it were.”
“Oh,” she said, rather disconcerted to find him so serious on the subject. “And what is your newest fault, then, pray?”
“Lust,” he said, and grinned wolfishly at her. “I’ve earned myself a kiss for my honesty.”
She could feel laughter bubbling up in her chest. “That’s a short-lived fault,” she said. “From all I heard from the wives in the village, lust is something a man feels for his wife only briefly, if at all.”
“Not I,” Ewan said, ignoring her jesting tone. “I expect I’ll be lusting for you to the day I meet my Maker.”
Annabel raised an eyebrow, but somehow Ewan seemed immune to sarcastic comments. It was hard to be cynical around him; the words just seemed to die before they could be spoken. So she picked up a dainty cucumber sandwich and ate it.
After a while he still hadn’t said anything, and she was beginning to feel the silence was oppressive, so she said, “I’m not sure that lust even counts as a sin when it’s between a man and his wife. Not that I’m your wife, but—”
“But you will be,” he said. “I was just thinking of the same thing. I’ll have to ask Father Armailhac that.”
“You take the question awfully seriously,” she said.
“We’ve no glass,” he said, handing her an open bottle of white wine.
She looked at him in astonishment. “I can’t drink without a glass.”
“Can’t you? Why not?” He took the bottle back and swung it into the air.
She laughed. “I can’t drink that way.”
“Ladies have a tiresome number of restrictions,” he said, pulling bluebells out of a wineglass and stuffing them into a water glass with a number of their brothers. Then he poured her a glass of wine. “And I do take those questions seriously.”
“Why?” she asked. The wine was lightly sparkling and slipped down her throat with a smell of flowers.
“Why? Because I care for my soul,” he said, drinking from the bottle again.
She stared at him, trying to figure out exactly what he meant. But it was hard to keep her mind on the task. Now she knew how soft his hair felt against her fingers, and the way it curled at the nape. And she knew the feeling of his face when a beard was just beginning, as it was now. And the softness of his lips, the way they turned her weak at the knees and made her collapse into his arms. And his eyes—
“If you look at me like that, lass,” her husband-to-be said quietly, “we’ll have to rely on God’s grace to forgive us for disregarding our vows.”
She blinked. “I was only trying to decide what you meant by your soul,” she said, but she could hear how her voice seemed to have turned husky.
“I meant that I care about my soul,” he said. “There’s no other way to put it, that I can think of. ’Tis a valuable thing God gave me, and I’ve no mind to mar it.”
Annabel frowned and absentmindedly drank the rest of the wine in her cup. “Are you saying that you’re—you’re religious?”
He looked mildly surprised. “I’m not entirely sure what you mean by that, but I suspect the answer is yes.”
Religious? She and her sisters had gone to church every week of their lives, but she would never call herself more than observant. She had hardly exchanged more than a word or two with their priest in the past few years; their father had said that he was a dagger-cheap beggar, and left the church before the organ quieted. Which meant the priest had made the mistake of asking her father to tithe part of his income.
Once they moved to England, Rafe rarely made it out of bed in time to join them on Sundays, and although Griselda had her own little pearl-encrusted prayer book, when she returned she talked of friends she’d seen, and never of the sermon.
Ewan drank again. “My revelation seems to have halted the conversation,” he observed. “You’re looking at me as if I’d grown an extra head. I shall count myself as having earned another kiss; after all, you asked me the question.”
Annabel tried to figure out what to say. Of course there was nothing wr
ong with being religious. She knew that perfectly respectable men often went into the church and became archbishops. But that was because they were second sons. And of course she knew that laborers often practiced a kind of superstitious piety. It was an excellent thing for a child to believe in heaven, and she’d found it quite helpful when her mother died. But since then…
“I take it that you would not describe yourself as religious,” Ewan said.
“No,” Annabel said, “although of course I have no concern with the fact that you are—I mean, I’m glad that—” But she got tangled in her sentence, and couldn’t think what else to say.
“So do you think I answered you honestly?” he asked, rolling over so that he was quite close to her.
“What? I suppose,” she said, still flustered.
“Since I was the one answering the question, I can tell you that I did. Answer honestly.” He looked at her expectantly.
“Oh,” she murmured, “a kiss. Well.” And she leaned forward and pressed a small kiss on his mouth. The kind of thing you’d give to a man who has kept his childish beliefs intact.
Then she pulled away, but he followed her. “An English kiss was not in order,” he growled, and suddenly she found herself tipping backward and there she was, like a floundering fish on the riverbank, and this great Scotsman looming over her.
But there was a look in his eyes that made Annabel forget all about the question of churches and priests and belief in general.
“You owe me a kiss, Miss Annabel Essex,” he said to her, his breath warming her cheek. “Two, if my counting is correct.” The very nearness of him was making her heart thump in her chest. Yet at the same time, she felt a lazy peace creep over her, the feeling of calm that she always had when she was near him.
He was braced on his elbows now, and leaning over her. Then his head descended and Annabel closed her eyes, blotting out the faint blue of the sky, and the sheen of his hair, and simply allowing her world to become his lips, and the touch of his hand on her cheek. His mouth was warm and persuasive, shaping her lips slowly, patiently, asking a silent question until she opened her mouth and welcomed him.
“You like to keep me out, don’t you?” he whispered in a husky murmur.
She couldn’t help smiling with the pure glee of it. “Only for a time, so that—”
But she gasped. His mouth had locked on hers, and her cry was unheard. His kiss was scorching in its possession, arrogant in his dominion…and all she could do was tremble, and then run her hands into his hair and kiss him back.
It was an eternity later, when her whole body felt ablaze, that he wrenched himself away and said in a growl, “We’ve one kiss left.”
Annabel smiled at him, laced her arm even tighter around his neck and arched up to meet his mouth. “Then come back to me,” she breathed.
This time her mouth met his openly, with a wild sweetness that made both their breathing ragged within seconds. She heard a little breathy moan and knew it was hers. She couldn’t feel the hard curves and ridges of his body, so she tried to pull him down to her.
But he laughed at that, though the sound caught in his throat, and said, “Nay, not on a kiss.”
But then one of his big hands suddenly touched her waist, and she shook with the pure pleasure of it. His mouth came away from hers, but she didn’t open her eyes. Because if she opened her eyes, he would take away his hand, and it was inching higher and higher…
For a moment, a blissful moment, a large hand cupped her breast and she instinctively arched into it, a cry torn from her throat. A thumb rubbed across her nipple. Annabel had never felt such a thing, as if that small motion scorched her whole body. He did it again, and her eyes flew open, seeking his face. He was leaning over her, his jaw hard, and then just as their eyes met he rubbed across her again and she cried out, pulled his head to hers and pulled him down to her in the process. So then there they were, his lips ravaging hers, and his hand trapped between them.
And then Ewan wrenched his mouth from hers and rolled away. She heard his ragged breathing over the thumping in her ears.
Finally she opened her eyes and stared at the bleached sky. She wasn’t sure what to do. She’d behaved like a wanton. And wouldn’t he be horrified, a man of God as he was? “That kiss is over,” she said finally.
A feeling of shame was creeping over her. She knew well enough what she’d been wanting. She’d wanted him to pull down her bodice and touch her naked breast with his hand. And if she hadn’t been so embarrassed, she would have asked him to do it. Shameful. She bit her lip and wished she never had to open her eyes again. Wished she could just pretend that this all never happened.
“I think,” he said, and his voice sounded almost normal, “that we should pretend that never happened.”
He agreed with her! Annabel felt a flash of acute shame, and then shook it away. What was done was done.
She sat up, avoiding his eyes, and fussed with her hair. Then she saw her wineglass and reached for it, appalled to find that her hands were shaking. She drank the whole glass and it helped, some. Its faint flowery bitterness was cool on her throat. But she couldn’t meet his eyes.
He poured her another glass of wine. “You’d best eat something before drinking more wine,” he said, sounding amused again.
It was rather tiresome, how he always sounded amused, Annabel decided. Finally, she looked over at him. Naturally, he looked as calm as if nothing had happened. She was beginning to think that nothing rattled Ewan’s calm. She cast around in her mind for a nice, innocuous question to ask, one that would show that she too was utterly unconcerned about—about that.
“How many days would you estimate are left on our journey?” she asked, and then realized her mistake the moment he laughed.
Her cheeks stained scarlet, but Ewan only said, “Eight.”
She nodded and ate a cucumber sandwich.
“Now I’m afraid to ask you any questions,” he said conversationally.
“Go ahead,” she said. “I won’t answer with honesty, and then there’s no call for alarm.”
“Very well, then,” he said. “Did you like my kiss, Annabel?” The very sound of his lazy voice sent tingles down her spine. It was maddening.
“I think that you are improving. Lord Simon Guthrie was strong competition, but you are quite good as well.”
He gave a shout of laughter. “The only good news about your answer is that I don’t earn another kiss.”
She bit her lip and tried not to feel stupid.
“I couldn’t take another kiss like that. I’m not answering a question, so I don’t mind telling the truth. I’ve never felt like that while kissing a woman, and I never thought to. And,” he added, “I’m rather worried that when we finally get that blasted set of vows out of the way, we’ll suffer spontaneous combustion. I’ve heard it can happen.”
A smile prickled at her lips but she couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t.
“Since I’m being so honest here,” he continued, “I’m also a bit worried that you hate me now that I touched your breast. I didn’t mean to do it.” And then he wasn’t sitting on the other side of the picnic cloth, but kneeling just before her. “Forgive me, Annabel? I know I should never have touched you in such a fashion before we were married, let alone in the out-of-doors. I—I lost control and you’re likely thinking it’s because I’m an uncouth man but—”
There really was anguish in his voice. “Ewan,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Do you like kissing me?”
“In God’s truth, lass, it’s the only thing I think about from morning till night.”
“I just won a kiss,” she said achingly, finally meeting his green-flecked eyes. What she saw there made her smile tremble with the pure force of it. Then she reached out and pulled him toward her and fell backward, and his heavy body followed hers. It was as if they had never stopped kissing, that’s how fast the heat returned. In less than a second, she couldn’t catch her breath,
and she couldn’t think, but she did do just one thing.
She took his hand from her cheek and she moved it.
He groaned aloud when his hand cupped her breast, shaped it as if it were made for no other purpose. But he didn’t touch her nipple again. He just kissed her, all that wild hunger sweetened with a promise, and the truth between them.
And when he pulled back his head this time, she smiled up at him.
“I think my hand is frozen in place,” he said to her.
“Mac will be very surprised, then,” she said, gurgling with laughter.
He reluctantly rolled away and sat up. “No more questions.”
“None.”
“At least not today,” he amended. “Would you like a piece of chicken?”
Perversely, the only things that came into Annabel’s mind were questions. She ate an apple, and eyed Ewan, and all the questions she had in mind had to do with whether his chest was truly as muscled as she remembered, and whether it was a golden color, or whether that was just a trick of her memory. The rest of her questions couldn’t even be put into words.
The wine tasted like clear water spiced with flowers; it was making her feel uncivilized and free.
“Of course,” he continued, “you do have one question, so to speak, left to you.”
“And that is?”
“You won the archery contest. You won a forfeit of me. Remember?” His eyes were dark and shamelessly seductive. “You could ask me anything, Annabel, and I’d have to do it for you.”
In one smooth motion, Annabel slid down so that she was in a most unladylike pose, lying on her side just as he was, her head propped up by an elbow. It was scandalous. She grinned at him with the pure pleasure of it.
“You’ll have to give me some suggestions,” she said, and her voice poured out like slightly burnt honey. “You know, Lord Ardmore, that I am not as experienced in these things as you are.”
