And she wanted to see him, only him.
He’d shifted to his side, close, but not as close as she wanted him. “We shall not, lest I lose my last pretensions to honor. Close your eyes, Avie, and hold on to me.”
A few more moments of attention to her breasts, a few more of those shockingly pleasurable kisses, and a deft, determined exploration of what lay under her skirts, and Hadrian sent Avis’s world spinning.
All without removing a stitch of his own clothes and without letting her do more than kiss him.
When Hadrian rolled to his back, Avis tucked herself against his side. An echo of the dazed, detached, feeling she’d experienced right after her assault crept up on her, but the sunshine was warm, Hadrian held her, his scent enveloped her, his heartbeat thundered right beneath her ear.
Oh, God. God in heaven.
“I hope you comprehend now,” he said, “why a woman might allow a man, the right man, intimate liberties.”
He spoke so sternly, so disapprovingly, that the lovely haze of newfound knowledge thinned.
“You did find pleasure, didn’t you?” He might have been a schoolmaster scolding an unruly little scholar.
“I did.”
“Thank God for that.”
He was relieved, while Avis had, for a few lovely moments, been pleased—so pleased.
While Hadrian was disgusted? Or worse, disappointed—in her? The last of the warm, happy sense of well-being left on a spate of exasperation. What had she done?
Hadrian withdrew his arm and sat up. “We’d best be on our way. The clouds are gathering.”
“Hadrian?”
He busied himself finding his boots and passed her hers as well. Sometimes, he put them on her, but not today. Not ever again, most likely. With his face set in such harsh lines, he looked more handsome than ever, but also different. Not her Hadrian, but some angry angel, forced to sin.
“I’m not sorry,” she’d said, pulling on her boots.
“This wasn’t well done of me, or of you. I wanted—”
“I know what you wanted,” she interrupted, yanking on the second boot. “You wanted me to live the rest of my life in complete ignorance, with memories of Hart Collins all I had to sustain my interest in the opposite sex. You were very clear on that.”
“Avie, no.”
She glimpsed shame in his eyes, heard it in his tone, the one thing she’d never wanted to bring down on her only friend. Avie got up, shook out her skirts, and made him a stupid little curtsy.
“Good day, Hadrian. I wish you every success when you return to school.”
She’d flounced off, making it to the safety of the trees and their horses before she heard him behind her. Silently, he boosted her to her mount, and just as silently, he escorted her back to her own stable yard. Angry, disappointed, or even hating her, Hadrian would not let her come to harm.
“We have to talk, Avie,” he said before she dismounted. “Things today did not go as they should have.”
“No. They did not.” Though what had she expected? That Hadrian would tolerate her wanton inquiries without thinking less of her? Did he think less of himself?
He helped her to dismount, and she stood beside the horse, her hands on his muscular arms, just as she had many, many times before. His blue eyes held concern now, and Avis knew—she just knew—he was about to apologize for giving her the single glimmer of hope she’d found in an entire summer of lonely self-doubt.
Pride had her whirling away when what she wanted was to fall weeping against his chest. She’d done that before too, too many times to count, and her tattered dignity came to her rescue.
Off she stomped, refusing to be home to him for the next three days, and then he departed to Oxford a week early. When Harold told her a month later that Hadrian was studying for the church, she’d nearly spilled her tea.
And now, twelve years later, Hadrian was no longer a churchman, he was no longer a young man shatteringly disappointed in a friend, he was offering instead to be a fiancé.
“You’re awake.” His arms stayed around her, and his lips brushed her brow. “Have I learned anything worth knowing in twelve years?”
“Will you use my answer as a pretext to disappear for the next twelve years?”
A significant part of her feared he would.
“I will not.” He spoke easily and steadily, and this time he kissed her ear.
Avis nuzzled his collarbone. “Then I’d say you are more knowledgeable than ever.”
Hadrian gathered her closer without her having to ask. “Go back to sleep. We’ll talk when you’ve rested.”
Chapter Eight
They would talk, Hadrian silently promised Avie, when his raging case of frustrated lust subsided yet further, for Avie was apparently no more knowledgeable regarding male erotic functioning than either of them had been twelve years earlier.
What a scene that had been. Him, thinking on the strength of his strutting college boy’s experiences, he could pleasure a woman, and her, not even realizing what she’d asked of him. He’d ached badly that day and not only in the physical sense. He’d wanted to propose to her, but kept hearing her contempt for marriage at every turn.
Avis had wanted him for a lover but not for a husband. His overblown eighteen-year-old sense of honor and his delicate young man’s pride hadn’t been sophisticated enough to understand the time and trust she needed.
Still needed.
Thank God for the passage of the years.
The prayer was sincere, one of his first sincere prayers in weeks.
“I can’t sleep,” Avis said on a yawn. “Not any more. Neither am I in a hurry to scurry back to the dower house and oversee the work of the glaziers.”
“Harlan Danvers has been glazing windows since he was in short coats. He’ll manage. Would you like some wine?”
“I would, but I don’t want to move.”
“Alas, we did not learn when studying scripture how to make wine bottles levitate.” When she pushed off him and sat up, Hadrian got to his feet, discreetly adjusting his clothes while she fussed with her hair.
He kissed her shoulder, happy in the knowledge that he had more sense than he’d had at eighteen—he wanted to linger and cherish, not bolt off to commit the sin of Onan. “Leave that, Avie. I’ll see to your braid, but first, your libation.”
He retrieved the wine, poured her a glass, and then took up a position behind her on the blanket, his fingers tugging pins from her hair.
She plucked a clover flower from the grass. “I’m glad you’re not angry with me this time.”
Hadrian paused in his leisurely quest for hairpins. “I beg your pardon?”
“Twelve years ago. You were so wroth with me, I thought you would hurl thunderbolts because I’d importuned you, and you were such a decent young man.”
Hadrian hugged her from behind and dredged up the courage that was supposed to come with maturity. “Twelve years ago I was sexually frustrated, disappointed in myself, and hurt that you wanted me for a lover but nothing more. I was not angry with you, though I was an utter buffoon.”
Not the last instance of buffoonery on his part, but confessing to Avie eased his heart.
She shredded the clover, dusted her hands, then plucked another victim. “When you called the next day, you weren’t seeking me out to scold me and heap scorn on my head?”
Her question made his heart ache all over again. “I sought you out to propose, but with you, I didn’t even get as far as a rejection. I suppose you were my first, best failed proposal.”
Why hadn’t he seen that earlier?
She leaned back against his chest. “My poor Hadrian. I’m sorry.”
“I assumed you were wroth with me, thinking I’d used the same tactic as Collins had, or a version of it.”
“What on earth do you mean?”
Truly, this was a conversation they should have had years ago.
“He thought by despoiling you, you’d be forced to keep your engag
ement to him,” Hadrian said, drawing her hair over her shoulders. “I was determined to offer for you, but then realized you’d feel just as trapped, just as manipulated, and I wanted you to know, before I left for school, that I’d wait.”
Perhaps he was waiting still. Interesting notion.
“Then I didn’t receive you. What a tangled web.”
A tangled web that had led them back here, to a blanket shared amid the fresh air and sunshine of the Cumbrian countryside.
“Have you a pocket comb?” He drew his hands through the silky glory of her unbound hair again while his cock, which had been obediently subsiding, stirred back to life.
Exactly as if he were still eighteen.
She passed a small comb over her shoulder, and Hadrian focused on his task, despite having a few questions of his own.
“I wrote to you, my first term back at Oxford and then again in the spring.”
“I was off at Aunt Beulah’s in Scotland. Hers was not the most organized household, and the letters might not have received the attention they deserved. I could not write to you. Aunt would have forbidden such an impropriety.”
“I didn’t expect a reply,” Hadrian said, but he had hoped for one. He’d spent months hoping. “I wrote to you again before I married Rue.”
“How long ago?”
“Years.” He thought back, even as he drew the comb through her hair, something he’d never done for his wife. “Not quite six.”
“I should have received it, but the king’s mail is not as reliable as we’re supposed to believe. That feels good.”
“Better than good.” He swept her hair aside, to kiss her nape and turn the conversation from that long ago letter. His last epistle had been the most pathetic, baring his soul, begging, pleading, and promising with all the frustration and passion in him. What a mercy, in some sense, that the missive had gone astray.
“I wrote to you,” Avis said. “When Rue died.”
“I received that letter,” he replied, running his tongue over the top of her spine. She tasted of lavender soap with a touch of lemon. “Your kindness was a consolation, but this is a pleasure.” One that abetted his unruly manhood, so he forced himself to get back to work on her hair.
“What was your Rue like?”
A question to bring a fellow’s parts to heel.
“She was my escape route out of the frustrated ranks of young curates, and I was her escape from her father’s parsonage. She was the youngest of several sisters and at risk for being the one left behind to look after her aging parents.”
“The plain girl. I’ve envied a few plain girls. At least they have parents to love.”
Hadrian leaned in closer. “If you marry me, you can have babies to love, Avie. I’d thrive on giving you babies. Rejoice in it, exuberantly.”
“And you were being so good. I can accept the advisability of being courted by you to appearances, Hadrian, at least until we know what Collins is up to, but I doubt you’ll embark on the business strictly for show.”
“No, I will not. A vicar has ample opportunity to observe his flock making sheep’s eyes, Avie, particularly during his sermons. All and sundry will remark my callowness.”
“I don’t want to give you false hope.”
She was so good, so decent. “What happened on this blanket didn’t give you some real hope?”
“You gave me real pleasure.”
“That, my love, is a start.”
* * *
Never had a bridle sported such a shiny bit, never had the leather been so thoroughly cleaned and oiled. Fen was about to unbuckle the entire business and start back at the beginning when his favorite Choir Boy came sauntering into the stable yard.
His holiness had been getting some sun lately. Maybe a few kisses, too, judging from the state of his hair and neckcloth.
“Well, if it isn’t Bothwell the Younger, come to interrupt my work.”
“Fenwick.” Bothwell slid onto the bench beside him. “Haven’t you a pasture full of sheep to visit or some hay to scythe?”
“Give the hay another few days.” Bothwell bore more than a hint of Avie’s rose scent, too. “Soon we’ll scythe until we have blisters on our blisters. We’ll get through one more rainy patch, according to Sully’s lumbago, and then the sun will be out for a solid week.”
“Somewhere, maybe. Not here in Cumberland.”
“I listen to whatever guidance I can get when it comes to haying.” Fenwick set his bridle aside and resisted the urge to get off a bench that had grown uncomfortable an hour ago. “How did your discussion go with Lady Avis?”
Bothwell had warned Fen that the quarry pond was unavailable to staff, stewards, and meddling companions until further notice.
“I informed Lady Avis of Collins’s possible plans to turn up locally and offered her the protection of both my stout right arm and my name, should it come to that.”
“Fast work there, Bothwell. How did she respond?” Fen sustained a dart of jealously, followed by an equally sharp shaft of admiration. Bothwell grasped the magnitude of Avis’s problem and didn’t hesitate to take responsibility for its solution.
“Her ladyship tried to reject my suit out of hand, but has too much sense not to see the wisdom of it.” Bothwell shifted, crossing his legs at the ankle. “Why it is I can comfortably occupy a blanket on the hard, unforgiving ground of a Cumbrian hillside for better than an hour, but five minutes on a bench next to you and my backside protests?”
“Because you’ve a skinny arse.” And because Avie had occupied that blanket—those blankets—with him. “You’re rich as a nabob, already broken to the marital bridle, good-looking, pious to all appearances, and in line for a title. Poor Avie Portmaine will be reduced to becoming your viscountess.”
Bothwell let the pious-to-all-appearances jab pass, such were the reviving effects of time spent on blankets in the Cumbrian hills.
“Fenwick, you will not lecture her, you will not exhort her, and you will not offer her an alternative.”
Avie’s choir boy was turning up both possessive and protective.
“She hasn’t any alternatives,” Fen said, fingering the stout, dark leather of the curb reins, “unless she wants to summer down in London with Benjamin, and nobody in their right mind wants to do that.”
“You’ve spent summers in Town?”
He’d endured London, as young men from good families were supposed to. “I’ve spent time in London in spring, before the members of Parliament abandon weighty matters of state to shoot at hapless grouse with greater focus than they ever bring to affairs of state. I found the capital a pestilentially miserable experience.”
“One does recall the stench, even years later.”
“She’ll have you, Bothwell.” Fenwick looped the reins up through the headstall, the first step in tying up the bridle.
“Yes, I hope she does, but will she marry me thereafter?”
Bothwell rose and disappeared into the shadows of the stable, while Fen finished seeing to his bridle, then took out his knife, and once again polished the gleaming blade.
* * *
“I thought nothing could equal the ache resulting from shearing, but haying is an altogether hotter, itchier torment,” Hadrian said as he pulled on his second boot and straightened—carefully. The bank of the pond held lovely memories for him, but now it also qualified as the place where he’d nearly toppled into the water, so stiff was his back.
“Haying smells better than shearing,” Fenwick remarked philosophically as he slicked back his wet hair. “Haying doesn’t involve all that damned bleating and wailing for mama the livelong week. Then too, the quarry pond isn’t quite so frigid come haying.”
The pond was cold as the ninth circle of hell, which probably accounted for why Hadrian was still awake.
“I’m cleaner than I’ve been in two days. All I want now is my dinner.” Hadrian had left his shirt partly unbuttoned, his waistcoat as well, as had Fen. Their progress down the hillside
was as slow as a pair of old veterans heading from the alehouse on a moonless night, but as they approached the stables, Lily Prentiss caught sight of them, her lips turning down at the corners as she veered off toward the dower house.
“We’ve been found wanting,” Fenwick noted, alluding to a verse from the book of Daniel he’d cited on other occasions. “That woman could teach raisins to wrinkle.”
“She’s pleasant enough. Perhaps you’d like to teach her something?”
“How to decamp for distant parts,” Fenwick muttered. “She’s a blight on the landscape, and you would do well to watch your back around her.”
Lily Prentiss was also loyal to Avis and her only female friend, as Fen well knew.
“Fenwick, the woman has been nothing but pleasant to me, and she’s a spinster, for pity’s sake. Do you expect all women to embrace your flirting and irreverence?”
“If they won’t embrace me, then my larking about is harmless fun, so yes, I do.”
Damnably logical. In addition to the ache in Hadrian’s back and the misery that was his hands, his head also throbbed from too much sun, or perhaps too much of Fen’s company. “Will we have another party after the haying?”
“There is no life after haying,” Fenwick said as they thumped onto his back porch. “Haying goes on for two weeks at least, if the damned rain doesn’t spoil the crop. Then you’re too tired to sport about between the keg and the dance floor.”
“A party then.” Inevitable, much like village assemblies had been back at Rosecroft. “I am too old for the demands of country living.”
More and more, Hadrian understood why Harold, living alone at Landover year after year, had sought an escape.
“We’ll toughen you up, Choir Boy. The biggest celebration comes after harvest, but we do a sort of midsummer bonfire after haying. The solstice generally arrives as we’re putting up our hay forks.”
Pleasant memories rose from Hadrian’s distant youth as Fen led the way to the kitchen. “Naughty old solstice. Do the young people still sneak off after dark to make free with the ancient traditions?”
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