“Must I? I was rather enjoying—”
He kissed her. “Glories, Charlotte. Plural. We have many more to sample.”
She slipped to the side, brushing her sex over his rampant cock in the process. The haste with which she scooted away confirmed that the caress had been inadvertent—this time. Give her a week, and with any luck, she’d be driving him mad.
Sherbourne fixed his figurative eye on that prize and began rearranging pillows.
“What are you doing?”
“Embarking on an experiment.” He propped himself against the headboard, spread his legs, and patted the mattress. “Let me hold you.”
Charlotte had the covers drawn up under her arms. “You want me.…?”
“Between my legs, using me as your personal chaise. Your back to my front.” And my hand between your legs.
She remained right where she was. “Why?”
“So I can worship you to the utmost.”
Her expression turned mulish. “When do I get to worship you? The vows were reciprocal, you know.”
“Next time, Charlotte. If you want to worship me by taking a riding crop to my bare bum, or licking every part of me while I’m bound hand and foot, we can negotiate that later. This time is just for you.”
She crawled over his leg, her breast brushing his thigh, then curled against his chest on her side. “You say the most outlandish things.”
Sherbourne put his lips near her ear. “You’re interested in that bit about the riding crop, aren’t you?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, and I don’t see the point of binding you.” She flicked her tongue over his nipple. “The licking has possibilities. You taste like lavender.”
Rather than let her tangle him up with more words, Sherbourne cupped her chin and kissed her while he used his free hand to caress her breast. Her weight pressed against his erect cock, a sensation he tried to ignore.
By stealth, degrees, and determination, he eventually got Charlotte positioned where he wanted her—sprawled with her back against his chest, arching into his touch as he pleasured her breasts.
“You like this?”
She closed her hands around his, asking for more pressure. “I haven’t made up my mind.”
“Then I must try harder.” He trailed his fingers lower, until he was stroking through her curls. “Relax, Charlotte. We’re getting to the interesting part.”
“This has all been very—gracious everlasting powers.”
He’d found the seat of her pleasure, and possibly a way to have the last word at least some of the time. Charlotte squirmed, she wiggled, she sighed, she spread her legs over his, and reached behind her to grab Sherbourne’s hair.
He found a rhythm and a pressure that she could follow, and when Charlotte’s hips were urging him faster, he resisted. Pleasure delayed was pleasure intensified.
“Mr. Sherbourne.…”
“Lucas.”
Silence for a few moments, while she probably fashioned an argument, and he added more pressure without speeding up.
“Mister…oh, ye gods, Lucas. Lucas, Lucas, Lucas.…”
Sherbourne cupped her breast and drove a finger into her slick heat, giving her some part of him to seize around. Her pleasure was intense and protracted, while Sherbourne’s was vicarious and bound in frustration.
When he withdrew his hand, Charlotte curled sideways on his chest, her sigh fanning across his heart. His cock throbbed, his balls ached, his back wasn’t exactly comfortable and the room was gradually cooling.
“Charlotte?”
She nuzzled him. “Hmm.”
He tucked the covers up over her shoulders, cradling her close. Sherbourne cast around for the right words, the right question.
Charlotte had given him her trust in a way that mattered, and he wanted to tell her…something. When she’d recovered, he’d make sweet, slow love with her, and ease her the last distance down the path to marital intimacy. They’d fall asleep entwined and in the morning, share smug smiles over their tea and toast.
For the rest of their lives.
Tenderness pushed arousal aside an inch or two. “Charlotte? Did you find it…pleasant?”
Her breathing was regular, and she was a warm bundle of wife against his chest. Sherbourne waited for her answer—doubtless something honest, original, and accurate—but still Charlotte remained silent.
“Charlotte? Mrs. Sherbourne?”
Sherbourne fell asleep, waiting for his wife to wake up and answer a question that mattered to him far more than he’d thought it would. When he did awake, weak sun was filtering through the curtains, he was spooned around his wife, and some fiend was rapping incessantly on the door.
“Sir, you must wake up,” Turnbull shouted.
Sherbourne forced himself to awareness, because Turnbull never shouted.
“Sir, you must wake up. There’s been an accident at the mine.”
* * *
The colliery looked the same from a distance. Only as the landau wheeled closer could Charlotte make out men digging at a huge heap of hillside that had come slouching over the retaining wall. The wall was no more, buried under tons of mud.
The neat rectangles of twine that had marked out the longest row of houses had been obliterated as well, while the rest of the site remained unchanged.
The sun chose now to shine so brightly as to hurt Charlotte’s eyes, though the breeze was cold. That chill reinforced a sense that she should not have come, should not have intruded into matters she knew so little about.
“Pull up next to the large white tent,” Charlotte said. “The one all the shouting is coming from.”
In the privacy of their domiciles, Windhams occasionally raised their voices, though Charlotte did not deal well with being shouted out. Sherbourne had left the house within ten minutes of waking, Turnbull at his side, while Charlotte had stood about in her husband’s dressing gown and worried. An hour later, somebody had sent a note: No fatalities, extensive damage.
Charlotte thought she recognized Sherbourne’s handwriting, but the only time she’d seen it previously had been when he’d signed documents following the wedding ceremony.
An hour more of pacing and fretting, and Charlotte had made up her mind to cease dithering and do something.
“Heulwen, you and Morgan see to the food.”
One of the tent flaps had been tied back. Inside, Mr. Jones was marching about and waving his hands, while Sherbourne stood with one shoulder against the central tent pole. He wore no cravat, no top hat, and his boots were caked with mud.
“Hillsides do as they damned well please,” Jones said. “We build walls and God laughs. If I’m tempted to skimp on materials, I’ll skimp on the materials for the damned palaces you want to build for your workers, not on the simplest wall ever to be overcome by mud.”
Sherbourne visually tracked Jones’s peregrinations while Charlotte slipped into the tent. The piles of paper she’d tidied and organized on her last visit were once again in disarray, with stacks held down by rocks, a pen tray, an abacus, and other makeshift paperweights.
“If that wall had chosen to give way later this autumn, a dozen households would have been buried in mud,” Sherbourne said. “How can I trust you to build a safe mine when you can’t manage a single retaining wall?”
Jones strutted up to him. “I told you when I signed on here that I’m a mining engineer, not a perishing architect. I deal with the insides of the hills, not a lot of bloody landscaping.”
Charlotte let the foul language go unremarked, for at some point in this altercation, Mr. Jones had unearthed the calculations upon which the construction of the wall was based. While Jones ranted about timbers and cross-stabilization, she took a seat and studied the figures she’d found under an unlit carrying candle.
“The men can live in damned tents,” Jones went on. “You don’t need to build the houses before you sink the shafts. What kind of businessman builds a village before his colliery is making any money?”<
br />
“One who wants his mine to attract only the best talent, the hardest workers, the most trustworthy crews in Wales. Why should any competent miner bestir himself to leave his post and join my crew, if I’m offering him less protection from the elements than I expect for my horse?”
“Why should he expect any different?” Jones stuck his nose in Sherbourne’s face. “You can find an experienced miner a whole lot more cheaply than you can a well-trained horse. A simpleton can work the mines.”
“The men might disagree with you,” Sherbourne said with ominous quiet, “though the next thing to a simpleton should have been able to design a retaining wall that held up for more than a few months.”
Sherbourne’s words lashed the air. For the first time, Charlotte glimpsed why people gave her a husband a wide berth. The view was intimidating.
Also impressive.
Chapter Eleven
To Charlotte’s relief, Mr. Jones had the sense to take a step back. “I checked my calculations, Mr. Sherbourne. I don’t do shoddy work. I measured the land, did the math, and made allowances for the soil containing a disproportionate share of rocks, and then I used only sound timbers in sufficient quantity for the mass involved.”
A silence stretched, as Jones produced a flask and tipped it up to his mouth.
“You did not account for the weight of the water in the soil,” Charlotte said. “Your figures for the soil were likely correct, but water weighs on the order of 1,674 pounds per cubic yard. Mr. Sherbourne’s treatises all more or less agree on that figure. Your wall held up until the rains came in quantity.”
Both men stared at her. Mr. Sherbourne in particular did not look pleased to see her, though if he intended to upbraid her for intruding into his business, he’d apparently do so at home behind a closed door.
Which was in a way worse. Charlotte held the calculations out to Jones. “You made no allowance for the incessant rain.”
Jones snatched the papers from her. “The water doesn’t stay in the soil. It percolates, drains down deeper into the earth, or evaporates.”
“With as much wet weather as we’ve had,” Sherbourne said, pushing away from the support, “the soil hasn’t been draining. The lanes and pastures are full of standing water. Mrs. Sherbourne’s explanation makes sense, and rain water probably isn’t a factor in most of your subterranean calculations.”
Jones set the figures aside. “I am a mining engineer, and I stand by my figures. Why have those men stopped digging?”
Across the expanse of supplies sitting under tarps, beyond the muddy lane, the men had jabbed their shovels into the great heap of earth and left their work.
“I brought food,” Charlotte said. “Hot soup, bread, butter, cheese, and ale. I suspect you both could use some sustenance.”
“I could at that,” Jones said, slapping a hat onto his head. “A pint or three of ale won’t go amiss either.”
He stormed past Charlotte, and she was abruptly alone with her muddy, scowling husband.
“How do you know what a cubic yard of anything weighs?” Sherbourne knelt by a parlor stove at the far end of the tent and tossed more coal onto the flames. “I barely know what a cubic yard of dirt weighs, and I own this colliery. Such as it is.”
He wasn’t shouting, wasn’t castigating her for her presence. He also wasn’t convinced by her assessment of the calculations. Charlotte was confident of her explanation, even if her marriage was feeling a bit tentative.
Or more than a bit.
She kept to her seat, a lesson she’d learned from Aunt Esther. Kings and queens ruled from their thrones, not that Sherbourne was Charlotte’s subject.
“I like numbers,” she said, “and weights and measures don’t change. If I have occasion to learn one, it sticks with me. According to the treatises in your library, the weight of soil can vary greatly, depending on rocks, as Mr. Jones noted, or how much sand is in the earth. Water is always water.”
Sherbourne shut the parlor stove door and stared at the flames dancing behind the glass. “This entire project turns on Jones being as competent as his reputation suggested. I’m paying him a fortune, though all I do is argue with him, and now this.” Sherbourne rose stiffly and stood in the middle of the tent looking weary and lost in the thought.
Brooding, which would not do. This bewildered, angry specimen was the same man who’d been so patient with Charlotte last night, so generous, and intimate. She untied the tent flap and put her arms around her husband.
“The rains have been severe,” she said. “Mining engineers probably design many retaining walls, but not above ground. Shall I have a look at his other calculations?”
“He’ll quit on the spot, and I’m tempted to let him go.”
“Then you’ll get an undeserved reputation for being difficult to work for,” Charlotte said. “May I bring you some lunch?”
Let me help. Let me matter to you. She would not beg, neither would she give up.
Sherbourne smelled of wet earth and coal smoke, a far cry from the freshly bathed, scrubbed, and shaved husband Charlotte had shared a bed with last night. His shape was the same, all lean muscle on long bones.
“You are cosseting me,” he groused, propping his chin on her crown. “You need not have come, Charlotte.”
As scolds went, that hardly qualified, and relief had Charlotte sagging against her spouse.
“I’m your wife. One wants to be useful.” Useful was a reasonable aspiration. Charlotte had long ago given up on many others—popular, liked, accepted. They’d been the pointless longings of an awkward girl. She was good at numbers, she was useful to her various Mrs. Wesleys, and she could learn to be a good wife.
The figures covering half the papers Charlotte saw called to her, though an assistant could check the math. Nobody else could hold Lucas Sherbourne when he was plagued by frustration.
“You took no food with you when you left the house,” Charlotte said, “not even a half-full flask. Regular sustenance is not cosseting, it’s necessary for survival.”
Outside the tent, men laughed and joked as they waited for a turn at the keg of ale. Some teased Heulwen, another asked Morgan if he was handy with a shovel. Spoons scraped against bowls, and somebody complained about another fellow stealing too much cheese.
“Now that I can smell food,” Sherbourne said, “I’m hungry.”
“Then let’s feed you. I’m surprised you’re not letting the earth dry out before you set the men to excavating.”
Sherbourne peered down at her, his expression disgruntled. “Jones had them digging before I arrived, but you’re right, a few days to dry out will make the work go more quickly, assuming the rain is done with us for a while.”
Which, in Wales, was not likely. “Food,” Charlotte said. “Before the men eat every last crumb.”
When she emerged from the tent with Sherbourne, she found a group of rough, muddy fellows gathered around the back of the landau. Every male present yanked his cap from his head and ceased eating.
“Mrs. Sherbourne, I have the honor of introducing to you my masons. Gentlemen, Mrs. Sherbourne.”
Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. One fellow near the keg chewed slowly, then swallowed. The same awkwardness that had plagued Charlotte from childhood threatened to silence her, but Sherbourne apparently expected her to know what to say.
My gracious, that mud does stink.
“A pleasure to meet you all,” Charlotte said, trying for the kind of smile Aunt Esther wore so easily and often. “I hope the soup was still hot?”
She was earnestly assured the soup was quite hot and very good.
One youth with white-blond hair aimed a shy grin at Heulwen. “I could do with a bit more in fact, if there’s enough.”
“We brought plenty,” Charlotte said. “Please do save some for Mr. Sherbourne. He’s easily annoyed when peckish.”
Well, he was. Wasn’t everybody?
“Oh, he is that,” said the man near the keg. “Meaning no disrespect.
”
The grinning lad accepted a spoon and steaming bowl of stew. “Perhaps you’d like some bread and butter, Mrs. Sherbourne?”
He got cuffed for his forwardness, but good-naturedly, and Charlotte was soon sitting on a stack of timbers beside her husband, holding his buttered bread while he devoured his stew.
“Is this a serious setback?” she asked.
“Yes and no. This is good cheese.”
“You buy it from Haverford.”
“On second thought, it’s overripe.” They shared a smile, though Sherbourne’s contribution was wan. “The problem is time, Charlotte. Once the ground freezes, we can’t lay foundations. If we can’t lay foundations, then we can’t raise houses, and we can’t bring in full crews. If I can’t bring in crews, sinking a shaft is pointless, and this whole exercise has been an example of how to spend a fortune and have nothing to show for it.”
Charlotte huddled close to her husband, who made a fine windbreak. “You have three empty tenant cottages. Knock them down and build a dormitory.”
Sherbourne finished his soup and set aside the empty bowl. “A fine idea, but the only crew I have now are my masons. Jones wants them to build his tram line, I want them to build houses, now you want them to build a dormitory. If I hire more workers, I spend more money without having any revenue coming in, and at some point, I must show a profit. I took on a partner of sorts, and he expects a return on his investment.”
Charlotte passed over the buttered bread. “Brantford?”
“Yes, Brantford. I owe him regular progress reports, and I’m loath to send him word of this development. That retaining wall took weeks of labor, and that was before the hillside decided to relocate itself where front parlors and kitchens were supposed to be.”
Seagulls strutted around at the top of the glistening mud heap, pecking the earth, then flapping about to land a few feet away. In the sharp midday light, they put Charlotte in mind of carrion crows, feasting on the remains of some huge mythical beast.
“Why put houses where a retaining wall was required?” she asked.
Sherbourne tore the bread in half and offered her the larger portion. Charlotte took a bite, and got hints of coal and dirt with her bread and butter.
A Rogue of Her Own Page 15
