A Warriner to Tempt Her

by Virginia Heath

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes what?’

  ‘Yes. You can kiss me.’

  ‘Excellent news.’

  He tugged her close and sealed his mouth over hers gently. Only when he sensed she was done with the soft, chaste kisses did he deepen the kiss, but when he did Bella forgot about her shameful staring and her ugly, scarlet blush and she certainly didn’t allow any negative memories to cloud the moment. Joe’s lips had a way of making her forget everything except him. At some point, he must have lifted her to sit on the kitchen table and her hands must have gone wandering of their own accord, because when he eventually lifted his head, her palms were burrowed under the linen and pressed flush against his bare chest and his body was stood between her thighs. Not touching, but close enough she was aware of his desire.

  Beneath her fingers his ribcage rose and fell in time with his laboured breathing. Those intense blue eyes swirled with longing. He wanted her. Like a man wants a woman, yet she instinctively knew he wouldn’t take. Bella saw the truth of that, too, in his eyes. Instead, he placed a light kiss on her nose and then decisively stepped away. ‘Time for that tea and toast, I think. I’ll go cut some bread.’

  Bella watched him go, a little incredulous at both what had just happened and at her earthy reaction to it.

  Well, that was nothing like Vauxhall Gardens!

  At the unwelcome memory, she wrapped her arms tightly about her middle and the magical euphoria Joe had created was gone.

  Chapter Twenty

  Charlie was crotchety. He wasn’t delirious or in agony or so ill he couldn’t talk, he was complaining about his itching spots, the uncomfortable cot and the beeswax ointment Bella was applying to help alleviate his discomfort. Her eyes locked with Joe’s across the mattress and he smiled. He didn’t need to tell her Charlie’s foul mood was a good sign. The guard had been the first to succumb to the illness and had suffered the most. Blessedly, the rash had avoided his eyes, although Bella would have been hard-pressed to put a pin between the rest of the oozing spots. Spots which thankfully had now formed scabs. Charlie would be horribly scarred, but nothing more. His baby would grow up with a father. The rest of their small group of patients would also walk out of the infirmary alive. In a few more days they would no longer present a danger to society either. Both achievements made her proud.

  ‘Be careful!’ Charlie snatched his arm away and glared. ‘I’ve had enough of your pawing.’

  ‘Would you like something to help you sleep?’

  He nodded belligerently and she smiled in sympathy. She went to the table and poured him a cup of the warm sleeping draught she had prepared earlier and brought it back to him. ‘Tomorrow I will draw you a special bath which should help to soothe your skin.’ Joe’s concoction of burdock root and other soothing herbs mixed with a generous dash of vinegar was proved to ease the dryness of some of the other patients’ skin, but poor Charlie had had too many weeping sores to allow him it before.’

  ‘When can I go home?’

  Another good sign. ‘If you continue to recover as well as you are now, you can go home on Friday.’ They all could. Whilst Bella was looking forward to seeing her family again and sleeping in a comfortable bed, another part of her was sad to be leaving Joe. They had lived hand in glove for nearly three weeks now in the confined walls of the infirmary and, aside from the few hours she got to spend asleep in the girls’ dormitory and the few minutes stolen here and there alone in the kitchen, they had not been apart.

  The stolen minutes were the best part of her day. For over a week now they had taken to meeting late at night in the kitchen, where they chatted over tea and toast. More often than not, Joe turned the conversation towards the future, their future together, and Bella allowed herself to go along with the optimistic fantasy he painted. They were going to live happily ever after and work side by side in his surgery. Joe was going to train her to be a doctor in all but name, until the idiots in Parliament caught up and changed the law, allowing her to qualify properly. They were going to have an armful of children, boys and girls, all dark haired obviously like their parents and all would be brilliant scholars.

  They never spoke about how they would make those children and she was stupidly grateful he hadn’t yet proposed. Whilst Joe appeared to be highly confident of her miraculous mental recovery, Bella didn’t have the heart to tell him she didn’t share his certainty and would adamantly not agree to any proposal while she remained broken. Because every night, after he had kissed her thoroughly and scandalously—a little more thoroughly and scandalously each night—the old memories would soon creep back to haunt her. Once they returned, banishing away all the warm feelings of desire he had skilfully created minutes before, they forced Bella to go to bed a little bit scared about their future after all. The wall in her head barricading her from physical intimacy was the tallest and strongest her mind had created, and while the others now lay in ruins, that last barricade blocked out all the daylight.

  Behind her, Joe dimmed all the lamps in the ward. ‘I’ll go and put the kettle on.’ Her pulse quickened at the promise of yet another thorough and scandalous kiss. ‘Don’t be long.’

  ‘Can you bring me my tea before you two do whatever it is you do in the kitchen?’ Jake was taking the watch tonight and was already lying awkwardly sprawled across two chairs he had pushed together to form his bed for the night. ‘Last time it came tepid and I hate tepid tea.’

  Bella instantly began blushing, but Joe brazened it out. ‘Count yourself lucky you get any. You don’t bring me tea when I’m on watch, tepid or otherwise.’

  ‘That’s because Bella brings it to you and the pair of you cosy up like two lovebirds, staring at each other soppily over the rims of the cups.’ He batted his eyelashes, clutched his heart and sighed loudly. ‘It’s nauseating.’

  Joe shrugged, refusing to be baited, and disappeared out the door, leaving Bella with his brother while she finished up for the night. Jake was watching her thoughtfully as she made a great show of writing up Charlie’s notes.

  ‘I’ve never seen my brother so besotted. I think the pair of you make a fine couple. Both studious. Both selfless. Both cursed with enormous brains filled with knowledge which would make my eyes water. There’ll be no banal chitchat about the weather at your breakfast table. It’ll be all science and medicine. Remind me never to have breakfast with Dr and Mrs Dr Warriner.’

  Bella didn’t want to talk about the possibility of a breakfast table. ‘If Charlie has a restless night, you can give him a few drops of laudanum at around three o’clock in the morning—but not before.’

  ‘Will you be having a summer wedding, do you think?’

  She shot him a warning look. ‘We have not discussed weddings. It’s far too soon to discuss weddings.’

  ‘Is it? If history repeats itself, then I’m sure he’ll march you up the aisle as soon as possible. Both Jack and Jamie met and married their wives in weeks and both by special licence. Which I suppose the pair of you will have to do, won’t you? Seeing as there’s not a cat’s chance in hell the pious Reverend Reeves will allow one of the spawn of Satan to marry in his church. The Bishop of Nottingham married Jamie and Cassie...’

  ‘Can we not talk about this, Jake?.’ Talk of weddings conjured up images of wedding nights and Bella could feel herself getting tense.

  ‘But I’m going to need to have a rough idea of the date, seeing as I’ll be the best man, and at some point I need to head back to London. If you want the banns read, I suppose you could always get married in Little Gringley—but then you’d be for ever having to tell people you got married in a quaint little place called Gringley...’

  ‘You should head back to London, Jake. If there is going to be a wedding, it’ll be months away. Maybe even a year.’ Or two, or ten. ‘We are not in any rush. Goodnight, Jake.’

  Good lord, would Joe wait ten years? Was she being fair by allowing him to wax lyrical about their future together when Bella couldn’t think beyond the
here and now? Probably not. No matter how lovely it was to hear and no matter how much she wanted to believe him, she owed it to Joe to set his expectations. On Friday, when they left the otherworldly bubble of the infirmary, they would return to the real world and in the real world Bella was still—what? Broken? She didn’t feel broken any longer. Most of the time she felt much like her old self. Driven. Inquisitive. Logical. Only when she thought about the physical did all logic evaporate as soon as it hit that enormous wall. The wall she couldn’t seem to demolish even with kissing.

  * * *

  By the time Bella got to the kitchen, Joe had filled the kettle and set it to boiling. ‘There you are.’ He stepped towards her, his bright blue eyes filled with longing. His fingers found the waistband of her apron and he tugged her into his arms. ‘I’ve been waiting all day to kiss you.’ His gaze dropped to her lips and his head bent.

  ‘Wait.’ Bella used both her hands against the hard wall of his chest and tipped her chin to look at him. ‘We need to talk.’

  ‘Let’s talk after I’ve kissed you.’

  ‘I’d rather talk now. I want to be fair.’

  ‘Fair?’ She had his attention, even though he was smiling at her choice of phrase. ‘Fair about what?’

  ‘Fair about what is realistic...in view of my mental situation.’

  His hands left her hips and lightly locked behind her back, gently anchoring her in place. ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘I want you to stop talking about the future, Joe. I’m not ready to think about one yet...not when I can’t bear the thought of the physical.’

  His dark head tilted to one side as he considered her words. ‘If you don’t mind me contradicting you, all of this kissing and canoodling we have been doing is entirely physical. Things between us have got quite heated at times and at your instigation. You certainly don’t kiss me like a woman who finds kissing me a great chore.’

  ‘But that’s just kissing. Kissing isn’t intimacy.’

  ‘On the contrary. Kissing is entirely intimate.’

  Bella stepped out of his arms and put some distance between them. ‘I simply think it’s fair to tell you I might not be ready for more than kissing for years.’

  ‘All right.’

  His calm patience grated. ‘No, it’s not all right. We can’t continue talking about children and growing old together, when the original purpose of marriage is...is...’

  ‘Sex.’

  ‘Yes. Sex. I can’t face the idea of that yet.’

  ‘I don’t recall asking you to. Nor do I recall proposing. I know that part of things might take time and I respect that.’

  Because she didn’t know what to with her hands, Bella crossed her arms and stood stiffly. ‘I feel like I am leading you on, when I still have this big wall in my head.’

  ‘Hypothetically speaking, if we can demolish the wall, are you opposed to the idea of marrying me?’

  ‘No, of course not, it’s just...’

  ‘Do you like it when I kiss you?’

  ‘Well, of course I do, I wouldn’t let you kiss me if I didn’t enjoy it, but...’

  ‘There is no but, Bella. Stop overthinking things and, in time, that wall will fall exactly like the others.’ In three quick strides he closed the distance between them. ‘In the meantime, let me kiss you. That’s enough for me.’

  * * *

  An hour later, and her body still hummed from the kiss. The more he kissed her, the more intense her reaction to it, which she assumed was progress. The last one had been spectacular, so spectacular Bella had stumbled to bed on very unsteady legs, her body humming with needs she didn’t fully understand and couldn’t help fearing. One day, perhaps, she might even allow him greater liberties. Just as soon as she no longer kept thinking back to Vauxhall Gardens and that other man’s vile touch, or the dreadful violations she had been powerless to stop him doing to her body. Instantly, Bella’s flesh prickled and she found herself scowling in distaste. His hands had pawed at her breasts and groped between her legs. His hands had been nothing like Joe’s. Where Joe was gentle and appealing, that man had been rough and abhorrent. That man still made her body cringe. Joe made her body hum.

  Joe made her body hum.

  He also spoke a great deal of sense about facing her fears and rationalising the nonsense her mind kept conjuring. Each fear she had faced head-on, all bar one, had crumbled to dust in the last few weeks. A few seconds ago she had been daydreaming about a perfectly lovely kiss, her body had heated and hummed with need and then she had allowed her mind to wander. In fact, it suddenly occurred to her, she had practically dragged the memory of Vauxhall Gardens back to the forefront of her mind as a way to justify her own irrational fears.

  Joe wasn’t him.

  She loved Joe. Trusted him implicitly. He put no pressure on her, nor forced her to do anything she didn’t want to. Even when she was in the grip of irrationality he was always patient. He loved her and was prepared to wait.

  Face your fears head-on.

  Could she? If she stopped approaching her fear of physicality emotionally and faced the fear logically, then this final barrier would also dissolve and Bella would be free and normal again. There would be no more walls, just clear sky. Instead of regarding the sexual act through the eyes of a damaged girl, she should examine it entirely scientifically. Exactly like the kiss, or her fear of talking about it, or her discomfort amongst crowds. Her fear of all men. Exactly as Joe suggested.

  There’s a practical solution to this and you’re tired of being broken.

  * * *

  ‘Joe! Wake up.’

  He felt her hand nudging his shoulder and forced himself to stir. ‘What’s wrong?’ His jaw hadn’t woken and the words came out garbled. He opened one eye and instantly closed it as the brightness of the single candle was too offensive in the pitch-black darkness. Joe rubbed his eyes and shuffled to sit, wishing his sleep-scrambled brain would focus. He’d been in a deep sleep and being dragged from it was a shock to the system.

  He cracked open his eyelids again and suffered the discomfort of adjusting to the light. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Don’t panic, this isn’t an emergency.’

  ‘Then why the blazes did you wake me?’ The flash of temper was justified and he didn’t care if he sounded sulky. ‘There had better be a good reason.’ She’d scared him half to death.

  ‘Now that you’ve put it like that I feel bad. It can wait.’ Her downcast face made Joe feel guilty. Bella wouldn’t have woken him unless she thought it was important.

  ‘No, it can’t. I’m awake now. What’s wrong?’ He patted the edge of the mattress and she dutifully sat down.

  ‘I’ve been thinking...’

  ‘About?’

  ‘Us, actually, and me in particular.’ The way she was staring down at her lap made him uneasy. Earlier she’d been worrying about fairness and forcing him to wait and for a moment he had been convinced she might terminate their romantic relationship indefinitely. He’d distracted her then with a kiss which had left them both breathless. The temptation to do that again was overwhelming, but impractical. If she had something burning to say, she had the right to say it.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, you know how I’m scared of...of...intimacy?’ Unsure where this conversation was going, he simply nodded. ‘Well, I’ve decided it’s time to face my fears head-on and smash down another wall.’

  Was she suggesting they be intimate? Now? His mouth went to speak, then he stopped himself when he assumed he had misunderstood and huffed, ‘Go on.’

  ‘The thing is, it has occurred to me that since I came to Retford I have overcome many of my issues, and in the main I have you to thank for that. You let me work here at the infirmary, where I felt safe and found the courage to be myself again for the first time in a year. Because of that I can walk across the square and talk to people normally and usually without panicking. I’ve spoken about what happened, confided in both you and my parents, and you were right.
Talking helped and now the whole incident is out in the open and people have been so nice about it, it’s given me the strength to move on. I was frightened of kissing. Partly because I had no experience of it... He’d never kissed me, so I forced myself to give it a go, in the name of science, and I think you’ll agree, the kissing part of our relationship is very nice. I’ve even stopped being bothered when you hold me, because I rather like that, too. With you, I mean. I doubt I’d like it if any other man held me. The thought holds no appeal.’

  ‘That’s good...for the record, I would have a problem with another man kissing and holding you, so I am selfishly rather pleased it holds no appeal.’

  Her eyes lifted from looking at her lap for a second and she smiled shyly, then went back to staring at the riveting spot on her skirt. ‘I didn’t come here to talk to you about other men, Joe. The thing is...in view of the success of the other things...and because I would like to have that future with you...I think it best if I continue to approach my fears rationally, using logic rather than emotion... As this is the last wall left in my mind, I was wondering—I’m really not sure how to say this next bit...’ She was blushing. Good lord, she was blushing and he was coming to suspect he hadn’t misunderstood at all.

  ‘Straight out is usually best.’

  ‘Well, seeing that he never completed the act itself and my irrational emotions linked to the incident are clouding my judgement concerning the...um...sexual act itself, logic dictates I complete the act with you and, in doing so, banish him from the equation.’

  There were no words. His brain had stopped working completely. Joe felt his jaw drop and he blinked. Repeatedly. She saw his reaction and her next words tumbled out in a rush.

  ‘I know it’s an odd request and it has come completely out of the blue, but I wondered if you would be intimate with me. Now, if at all possible.’

  ‘I’m not sure it is possible. A man needs to be in the mood.’ His head was spinning, although his groin felt odd. He was astounded to realise he was very much in the mood. ‘Good grief...er... Bella, I don’t quite know what to say.’