The Courtship

by Grace Burrowes

  Most of all, though, she was aware that two days after promising to teach her how to kiss—and two long, restless nights—he most assuredly had not kissed her again.

  “I have a question for you, your lordship.”

  “Percy will do, madam. You are quite forgetful about my request that you abandon the formalities.”

  He sounded amused, while Esther wanted to grind her teeth. “I named a boon to you when we visited your family plot, and you agreed to grant it. Do you consider the obligation discharged, or have you forgotten my request?”

  Without any change in his lordship’s posture, the quality of his presence beside her shifted, as did the nature of the darkness surrounding them. The moon was a thin crescent in the sky, and the night was mild. From beyond the walls of the kitchen garden, an owl hooted, making Esther think of all the mama mice grateful their children were safe in bed.

  Bed, where she ought to be.

  Though not alone. For once in her sensible, lonely, pragmatic existence, Esther Himmelfarb did not want to go to bed alone. This realization had come to her as she’d sat in Lady Pott’s tiny dressing room, mending a hem at Zephora Needham’s request. Lady Pott had been snoring off her brandied tea in the next room, and the billowing ball gowns on their respective hooks had felt like so many cobwebs clinging to Esther’s life.

  Percival’s fingers, strong and warm, closed over Esther’s hand. “If you think for one instant I could forget either kissing you or the prospect of kissing you again, Esther Louise, you are much mistaken.”

  I want to see you naked, but for this glorious, silky hair, Esther, and a smile of welcome for me. She recalled his words, and they made her brave—or reckless.

  “I want to see you naked, sir.”

  He went still beside her then drew her to her feet. “Not here.”

  If not here, then somewhere—anywhere. She did not care, provided he granted her this wish, because a man in want of his clothing was often a man in want of his wits—her grandmother had told her that, and with a wink and a laugh too.

  “Where are we going?”

  He tugged her along a path that led away from the house. “Somewhere private, safe from prying eyes and gossiping tongues. If you’re to make free with my person—and I with yours—I want there to be no hurry about it.”

  And yet, he was hurrying. Hurrying Esther toward the dark expanse of the home wood, a tangled, overgrown place she’d ridden through with Lord Tony just yesterday. A nightingale started caroling, or maybe Esther was simply noticing the birdsong as they traveled into deeper shadows.

  “How can you possibly see where we’re going?”

  “I have excellent night vision, and I scouted the terrain last week.”

  He’d been thinking of trysting places even a week ago? The notion brought a serpent into the garden of Esther’s anticipation. She shook her hand loose from his. “Have you—?”

  He rounded on her and linked his arms over her shoulders. “Of course not, not with anybody else, nor will I.”

  She prepared to launch into a lecture, a stern description of what she expected of him during the remaining days of the house party, but he drew her into his embrace. “Do you think I could share a kiss such as you bestowed upon me two days past and then casually dally with another? Do you think I’d wait in the garden, night after night, hoping for another quarter hour’s conversation with you, then turn easily to the likes of the Harpies and Hair Bows lurking in the alcoves?”

  He sounded a touch incredulous, maybe even exasperated. Esther tried to tell herself his sentiments were superficial gallantries.

  Herself wasn’t inclined to listen. She leaned into him. “I want to make love with you.”

  His hand on her back went still, and Esther felt his chin resting on her crown. “My dear, there are consequences to such decisions, potentially grave consequences.”

  She might conceive, though the timing made that very unlikely. “I am prepared to accept those consequences.”

  “Are you?” Had his embrace become more snug?

  Was he arguing with her? The darkness prevented Esther from reading his expression, so she gave in to an impulse—one that would inspire him to put his lovely mouth to ends better suited to her plans than arguing.

  She slid her hand down the muscular plane of his chest, over his flat belly, down to the gratifyingly firm—dauntingly sizable—bulge behind his falls. “Enough talk, Percy. Make love with me.”

  He pushed into her hand for a moment, once, twice, then led her farther into the woods, to a clearing lit with the meager moonlight. In moments, his cloak was spread on the soft grass and Esther was flat on her back, while he loomed over her, blocking out the stars.

  “You must be sure, Esther. There can be no undoing what happens now, no regretting it.”

  So earnest, so unlike the shallow cavalier she’d seen across the room not two weeks ago.

  He would not be earnest and careful like this with other women. As he untied the bows of her dressing gown, Esther knew the relief of certainty. He would be charming and lighthearted, tender even and generous, but he would not be so… serious. For that, she loved him—loved him a little more.

  She trapped his hands in hers. “You first.”

  He sat back on their makeshift blanket and had his waistcoat unbuttoned in seconds. “You want to see the goods, do you? Ought I to be flattered or nervous?”

  His shirt followed, drawn right over his head.

  “You ought to be neither. You ought to be naked.”

  “We ought to be naked. I would never have taken you for pagan, my dear. It’s a fine quality in a woman, a latent streak of paganism.” He sat back to tug off his boots. Esther hiked herself to her elbows and wished she hadn’t wasted the full moon on proprieties and insecurities.

  “I’m nervous, if you must know.”

  He left off unbuttoning his falls to peer over at her. “You will enjoy this. You’ll enjoy me. That’s a vow, my lady. You may say good-bye to your maidenly vapors. They have overstayed their welcome.”

  He sat back and worked his breeches over his hips, moving without a hint of self-doubt. Moving as if… he might be concerned she’d change her mind.

  What a cheering thought. When he prowled over to her side, naked as the day he came into the world, Esther had cause to regret that she hadn’t scheduled this coupling for the broad light of day.

  “You are a beautiful man.” She ran a finger down one muscled bicep. “Beautifully strong, beautifully smooth and warm to the touch, beautifully brave…”

  He caught her hand and wrapped it around a part of him Esther hadn’t had the courage to examine yet. “Beautifully aching for you.”

  And for all his swaggering and social nimbleness, Percival Windham was also a man capable of patience. He let her explore with her fingertips, with her palms, with eyes and nose. Let her consume him with her senses, until Esther was again flat on her back, this time with a naked Percy Windham crouched over her and her nightclothes frothed around her in the moonlight.

  “We either turn back to our separate paths now, Esther, or we forge ahead together. The choice is exclusively yours.” He laced his fingers with hers where her hands lay amid her unbound hair on the cloak. The feel of that, of his hands linked to hers, was both a portent and a reassurance.

  “Together,” she said. “Now, let us be together.”

  She braced herself to feel him probing at her body, but he surprised her with lazy, sweet kisses, teasing kisses and big, manly sighs, until she was a mindless puddle of female wanting beneath him.

  “Percival, please.”

  “Soon.”

  His idea of soon was maddening. “Now.”

  He nudged about, in no hurry at all. Purely at her wit’s end, Esther lunged up with her hips and found herself… fo
und herself a lover. The sensation was wonderful and strange, and yet when several moments of silence and immobility went by… “Percival, will you move?”

  His hand came around to cradle the back her head. “You’re all right?”

  Only a few words, but so tender.

  “I am mad for wanting you,” she began. “You have no sense of dispatch, and I am relying on you entirely to know how to go on, as difficult as relying on anybody for anything is for such as I, but I take leave to doubt whether—”

  He laughed—a low, happy chuckle signaling both affection and approval—and he moved, a lovely, sinuous undulation that soothed as it aroused as it fascinated.

  “You can move too, love. Move with me.”

  Esther’s body had a sense of dispatch, a sense of soaring, galloping pleasure in the man she’d chosen for her first intimate encounter. She moved as he’d suggested, and found he knew things, marvelous, subtle things about how to leave a woman breathless with wonder and panting with ecstasy.

  Percival Windham knew that a woman’s ears were marvelously sensitive. He knew that patience on a man’s part was an aphrodisiac. He knew exactly when to increase the tempo and depth of his thrusts, when to cradle Esther’s head so she could cry out softly against his throat. He knew to hold her just as closely as her pleasure ebbed, and to hold her more closely still when an urge to weep tugged at her happiness.

  For the rest of her life, Esther would treasure—and miss—Percival Windham and the things he knew.

  And yet… Percival braced himself over her, giving her just enough of his weight that the night breezes cooled her skin without leaving a chill. She took a whiff of cedar and spices and stroked her hand through his unbound hair.

  “What about you, Percival? Are you to have no pleasure for yourself?”

  “If I endured any more pleasure, my love…”

  She stopped his inchoate blather with her fingers over his mouth. “No flatteries, no prevarications, Percival. I have withheld nothing from you. Nothing. I only wish…”

  He snuggled closer, a large, fit man, to whom Esther was sure the term “sexual athlete” might be accurately applied, and yet he’d been so careful with her.

  He shifted, so his lips grazed her neck. “What do you wish?”

  His hair was so marvelously soft, as soft as moonlight. “I wish I knew how to render you as witless and befuddled as I am, as…” in love. That would be trespassing against common sense, so she compromised. “As helpless.”

  A beat of silence went by, while Esther feared her limited disclosures had overstepped whatever the rules of dalliance permitted, but then Percival began to move, slowly, powerfully.

  Intimately. “My love, you already have.”

  Hours later, when the crickets had gone quiet and the nightingale no longer stirred, Percival retied the bows on Esther’s nightclothes, wrapped her in his cloak, and put himself to rights while Esther watched through slumberous eyes. He carried her—effortlessly—through the gardens and up three flights of steps to deposit her onto the little cot in the little garret.

  He sat at her hip then leaned down to kiss her on the forehead.

  “I will see you in my dreams, my lady, and they will be sweet dreams indeed.”

  She murmured something about cracking the window—she was already half dreaming herself—felt a cool, sweet breeze waft into the room, and heard the door latch click shut in the darkness.

  When she rose in the morning and went to down to breakfast, eager to see by daylight the man with whom she’d shared such wondrous intimacies by moonlight, she learned that Percival Windham, along with his brother Anthony, had quit the premises entirely.

  Four

  “Do I take it you’re jaunting into Town with me to ride chaperone on any trysts I might stumble into?”

  Anthony sounded put out as only a younger brother can when saddled with the unwanted company of an elder sibling. Percival tossed a coin to the coaching inn’s stable lad and swung up onto Reveille before answering.

  “I have pressing errands in Town, and the last thing I want is to be a party to your amorous endeavors.”

  Anthony considered him from Anthem’s back. “Are you perchance going to pay a call on the O’Donnell creature? Get the manly humors back in balance?”

  The very idea had Percival aiming his horse away from the inn yard at a brisk trot. “The O’Donnell creature and I are not now nor were we ever an item of significant interest, I’ll have you know.”

  Anthony’s gelding easily kept pace. “You were of interest to her, or it certainly seemed that way last month.”

  “My wallet was of interest to her, until some general offered her a more lucrative arrangement. I wish her well.” He also spared a thought for the general, because the poor fellow was taking up with the most mercenary female Percival had ever made the mistake of allowing into his bed.

  “I rather like Mrs. St. Just.” Anthony rather liked everybody, including attractive, friendly Dublin-born redheads of easy virtue.

  “You are trying to get rid of me, Anthony, but you need not bother. I will not be your duenna for any passionate interludes you have planned with Miss Holsopple, nor will I be calling on the fair Mrs. St. Just. She departed for Ireland prior to the Heckenbaum house party, and while her charms were considerable, our liaison is at an end.”

  And what an odd relief that it was so. Both Mrs. St. Just and Cecily O’Donnell were beautiful, intelligent, sexually experienced, and worldly wise—also interested only in exploiting a man’s base urges for financial gain, though the St. Just woman seemed to genuinely enjoy Percival’s company. No matter how generously Percival reimbursed them, neither lady would ever demand kissing lessons from him; they would never listen to his memories of service in Canada; they would never understand—he, himself had not understood—that for Her Grace to send sons into the cavalry had to have been particularly difficult.

  “I’m going to ask Gladys to elope with me.”

  Percival brought his horse back to the walk. “Why in blazes would you tell me such a thing? Am I supposed to stop you or abet you?”

  “Both. Neither. I got a note from Gladys, you see, and it’s confounded complicated.”

  Anthony was cheerful by nature, but this plan of his had him sounding morose.

  “Are you sure she’s the one, Anthony?”

  “Yes.”

  Anthony was also not decisive by nature, and yet, Gladys Holsopple had his unequivocal allegiance. What was it going to be like, to know Esther Himmelfarb had granted to Percival the same, immediate, unquestioning devotion? To know she accepted it from him?

  “Why not honor your Gladys with the usual approach? You ask her papa for permission to court, you ask her, you set a date, the ladies make a great fuss, you wait…”

  “That waiting business can be problematic.”

  Percival digested that for about a quarter mile. “How far along is she?”

  Anthony heaved the sigh of unmarried prospective fathers the world over. “That’s part of the confounded problem. She isn’t sure she is, she isn’t sure she… isn’t. Not all fillies are the same, and we only had three occasions, so to speak.”

  Three? “Fast work, Brother, and once is enough.”

  Though if Anthony’s situation with Gladys bore any resemblance to Percival’s with Esther, once would never, ever be enough.

  “She’s all up in the bows over this, and it tears at a man, to know his lady is upset and he can do nothing to comfort her.”

  It tore at a man simply to be parted from his lady. “So you will comfort her now and hatch up desperate plots. I hope you do not have need of them, but I will do all in my power to aid you.” The words should not have been necessary—Tony was his brother—but the relief on Tony’s face suggested the assurances were appreciated.


  “And you too, Perce. If you and the Himmelfarb girl need reinforcements, we’re here for you, Gladys and myself.”

  “My thanks.”

  Except Gladys was under her mother’s watchful eye in Town, an elopement would see both parties haring off to Scotland, and winning the Himmelfarb girl’s heart was an uncertain undertaking, regardless of how passionately she’d shared her body.

  ***

  “You look as tired as I feel.” Michael tugged on Esther’s sleeve and led her to a dusty little room full of guns, game bags, and other hunting accoutrements. “Are you getting any rest at all?”

  Esther glanced around, her gaze landing on a stag’s head mounted on the opposite wall. The animal’s glass eyes stared at a preserved hare crouching on a set of quarter shelves in a corner.

  “House parties are fatiguing,” Esther said. “In your case, I’d say they’re impoverishing as well.”

  Michael’s gaze narrowed as he pushed the door closed with a booted foot. “I’m trying to express concern for you, and your response is to nag? Even a cousin finds that tiresome behavior in a female.”

  Was he concerned? Esther gave herself leave to doubt that. “Lady Morrisette remarked last night after dinner that she will make it a point to oppose you at whist, because she’s sure to increase her pin money that way.”

  “Women’s gossip. She opposes me at whist so she might make free with her hands on my person under the table, while our partners likely do the same across the table.”

  Esther thought back to the previous evening, when Sir Jasper and Charlotte Pankhurst had completed the foursome at Michael’s table.

  “You might well be right, but, Michael, I am worried for you. These people are above our strata. We’re tolerated here to make up the numbers, and they are not our friends. Your folly would provoke their amused scorn, not their sympathy.”