by Lara Archer
He was a man. And men were mindless brutes when it came to female flesh. Even her flesh, meager as it was.
That was proved once and for all by John’s reaction to Mrs. Trumbull’s mouth around another man’s member and her wantonly spread thighs.
The older woman was an even less appropriate object for a viscount’s affections than a parson’s virgin sister. But the sight of Mrs. Trumbull’s flesh—even in the faint light of the moon, in the woods in the middle of the night—had been enough to make the viscount do just as he’d done with Mary herself on the forest floor that morning.
The sight of him pleasuring himself shocked her, she had to admit. She was shaken already, what with having to stop dead in her tracks to avoid crashing straight into the pair of lovers.
And then to see John, watching them as well from deep in the shadows of a pine. She could barely make him out—would not have seen him at all except that her mind was so attuned to his shape and form that the edge of his shadow drew her eye—but it was clear enough to her what he was doing. Stroking himself fervently, just as he’d done when he was with her this morning.
Pure lust incited him both times—nothing more complicated than that.
And lust was most certainly not a basis for marriage.
He’d feel the same way about one of the Lawton girls—no doubt he’d feel more entranced by their flesh, pretty and sweet and ample as it was. And in the daylight hours, when the pleasure of the flesh was not a man’s main motive for marriage, one of the Lawtons would be the sort of wife he needed. Fashionable. Tasteful. Able to plan soirees and play the pianoforte and laugh in a sweet and girlish way. Able to trim her own hats and move gracefully in silks. Pretty to look at, for a viscount to show off to his friends.
So it was really just as well things had gone as they had tonight. That she’d stumbled upon the two over-eager lovers and John as well in the woods.
All illusions were wiped away.
She’d been right, utterly right, to tell John no.
And she’d stick by that no, even if he came and begged her again.
If she still felt a sharp, hungry pulse go through her at the thought of saying yes, she would just have to find a way to kill that impulse.
John’s life would not be ruined just because a plain country mouse had let herself come halfway to falling in love with him.
Chapter Six
Mary was definitely avoiding him.
John tried to talk to her after church on Sunday, but she vanished into the sacristy with a mumbled excuse about hanging up vestments—though her brother was clearly still wearing his vestments, right there on the church steps, while the two elderly Dalton sisters pinned him down with a long story about their tabby’s new litter of kittens.
He stopped by the schoolhouse the next day, but Mary spied him coming up the walk and cued the children to sing a rousing rendition of “Jerusalem the Golden” in four-part harmony, with Mary singing loudest of all. All sixteen verses. And she no doubt would have told them to sing a reprise if he hadn’t eventually taken the hint and gone away.
He even sent her a note saying he’d gotten Mr. Dockett’s boy to climb the hill to confirm water was indeed streaming underground, just as she’d said, and he would have men begin the well the moment she gave him her opinion of the exact spot to dig.
Surely that would bring her running, he’d thought, for how could she resist? But she only sent back a hand-drawn map with a large X and the words “Just here, sixty-two paces east of the willow” as though she’d become a pirate after all.
Without him.
Maybe what they’d done together in the woods had truly been of no moment to her. She certainly didn’t seem to have been affected by it. She seemed her normal self—self-possessed, confident, briskly going about the business of the church and the school and the town, quite without the need of him.
Had it really meant so little to her?
The thought hung on his chest, a dull gray weight.
He’d been short-tempered and irritable for days. His housekeeper had set out blackberry jam for his tea yesterday, in a little dish hand-painted with blackberry vines, and at the sight of those green thorny twisting branches, he’d actually yelled at her to take it away. She’d scorched his beef for dinner that night, and he deserved it. And his valet wasn’t much happier with him. John kept shifting fretfully in his seat whenever the poor man tried to shave him, and that morning had tossed aside four different neckcloths because each one seemed tighter and more abrasive than the last.
He really couldn’t let things go on like this.
Sooner or later he was going to have to go to Thomas Wilkins and confess what had happened up on the hill, but he kept hoping Mary would come around on her own before that mortifying conversation became necessary.
Unless…she was right to be refusing him.
What if he was being foolish in this insistence that they marry?
Certainly, she’d been very clear—painfully clear— that she had no interest in becoming his wife, that she’d be quite miserable forced into the role of viscountess.
And he couldn’t imagine it any more easily than she could: Mary Wilkins frittering away her time in ballrooms, with ostrich feathers in her hair and the Parkhurst family rubies weighting her neck. Mary Wilkins standing for hours in full court dress to make her bow to the queen. Sitting with his mother in the evenings, embroidering pillowcases and gossiping about other women’s hairstyles and china settings and shoes.
It would be like...taking a wild deer and penning it up in city stables.
Unnatural. Even cruel.
It was far easier to imagine her fighting a bout of fisticuffs in Gentleman Jackson’s saloon, or arguing a bill in the House of Lords. She’d be quite impressive at those ventures, wouldn’t she? Fierce and agile and utterly inexorable both in landing punches and in her line of reasoning. But, alas, neither a boxing match nor a seat in Parliament were within his power to offer her.
He heaved a sigh.
Still...they had done what they had done, and the demands of honor on that score were perfectly clear. Of course, honor also demanded he marry one of the Lawtons.
If only honor permitted bigamy. He could marry both women, and the Lawton girl could serve as viscountess during the day, and Mary could share his bed at night.
Good Lord—that was not an appropriate thought. Appealing, maybe, but not appropriate.
Well, it was Tuesday now, and tomorrow would make a full week since they’d got themselves tangled in those damnable blackberries. They had to resolve this, and they had to resolve it soon.
Which would, of course, be far easier to do if he could get Mary to have a conversation with him.
So now he was skulking about the village green, restless as a schoolboy on the lookout for mischief. Mary had to show her face here sooner or later. Tomorrow was May Day, and she was, not surprisingly, head of the committee tasked with preparing the village festivities.
Men had been working all morning, pounding in the tall post for the May Pole—a huge thing hewn from the trunk of a pine tree more than a hundred years ago and stored in the Merchant’s Hall most of each year.
Ropes were strung between the living trees all around the Green. The last few nights had been unseasonably warm, and everyone hoped the evening dancing might be held outdoors by lantern light rather than up in the stuffy assembly rooms above the Hall.
He turned on his heel for what felt like the nine-hundred-fiftieth time to walk yet again up the path between the school and the church, when at long last, he saw Mary coming, leading a little group of ladies with long, brightly-colored ribbons draped across their outstretched arms. He was a mere ten feet from the May Pole for which those ribbons were intended, so Mary couldn’t possibly evade him now.
He stepped forward, trying to project a polite smile that would communicate to onlookers something like, “I’ve come to speak with Miss Wilkins about a matter of impersonal village business,” rat
her than, “Please Mary, let me make amends for debauching you the other day.”
Mary caught sight of him and blanched. She stopped dead, causing another lady behind her to plow straight into her back.
But a third lady, Annabel Lawton, did not stop; she weaved her way neatly past the others and swooped right in upon him with a smile of her own—one that said, “Here is the gentleman I intend to snap up in holy matrimony, and I know I will succeed, for no man can resist my personal charms.”
His throat constricted.
Miss Lawton stopped mere inches away from him, batting her soot-black lashes. Her armful of ribbon was held out imploringly, a clear sign that he should relieve her poor, weak, ladylike arms of the awful burden of those thin strips of cloth.
It would be a grave insult to refuse her. “Allow me to assist you with those, please, Miss Lawton,” he said dutifully, and took the ribbons into his own arms.
As he did so, Miss Lawton contrived to brush both his hands with hers, and then blushed prettily and glanced away with a little gasp, as though the contrivance had been entirely his.
Lord.
He had to give her credit for her skill.
With that distraction past, he looked around for Mary—who had already managed to climb a tall step-ladder and was balancing on her tiptoes, using a long stick with a hook on its end to thread the first of her ribbons through the round ring at the top of the May Pole.
The sight of her stretched out up there struck him with erotic force.
Damn.
Whether any of the good townspeople openly acknowledged it or not, May Day was part of pagan tradition, from long before the coming of Christianity, a true rite of spring. The May Pole was a spear thrust up to pierce the frosts of winter, a symbol of fertility, of the surging energy of the newborn earth.
The lithe line of Mary’s body made him want to see her stretched out naked on the grass. With his naked body stretched out over top of hers. He willed her to look at him, to see the heat she sparked in his eyes.
But she was paying no attention at all to him. Her gaze was solidly focused on her task.
Was it really so hard to guide a ribbon through a six-inch ring, or was she pointedly ignoring him?
His money was on “pointedly ignoring him.”
Miss Lawton, though, had no such compunctions. She tapped him boldly on the forearm to bring his attention back to her, gazed straight at him with her robin’s-egg-blue eyes, and twittered, “What do you think, Lord Parkhurst? Tomorrow for the May Pole dance, shall I choose a blue ribbon to hold or a pink one? Or perhaps yellow? My dress shall be blue, but I do love the freshness of pink, and the brightness of yellow. They put one in mind of azaleas and daisies, don’t you think? Most appropriate for the season. And one wishes to celebrate the coming of spring with the proper enthusiasm.”
“Indeed,” he said, having nothing else sensible to reply.
“And shall you join us around the May Pole, my lord?” Her lashes fluttered again. “To dance with the other young people?”
“I…I had not thought about it either way.” Oh, but if Mary Wilkins were going to dance, how could he resist? As they had from time immemorial, the unmarried men would face one way, the unmarried women the other, winding their long ribbons around the tall pole, drawing tighter and tighter until the dancers had no choice but to press up close to one another, sweated and laughing, their blood high and coloring their cheeks. The symbolic meaning was unmistakable, almost obscene.
Desire. Pleasure. Sex.
Heat washed upwards from his knees through his thighs, and all the way up to fume his brain. It made his loins feel heavy, and his head light.
Ah, but if he and Mary did join the dancers, she would probably slip by him each time without looking at him, avoiding the brush of his arms and shoulders. She would freeze him out.
The heat in his body chilled considerably.
“Oh, but you must dance,” chirped Annabel, startling him from his thoughts. “The lord of the manor should join his people in their festivities. It is an absolute duty.”
He managed to smile at her, but chanced another glance at Mary. She had three ribbons strung through the ring, and was reaching down for yet another. Most efficient.
A memory came to him suddenly, of Mary at perhaps seven or eight years old, daring him to race up the trunk of an enormous oak tree. They’d both scraped themselves mightily on the bark as they fought to gain the highest branches. And when they’d reached the top and looked out over all of Birchford and the surrounding countryside, they’d both gasped at the sight—all that rolling green stretched out beneath them, and the clouds looming huge and white, closer than ever. And there was Parkhurst Hall, its usual majesty reduced to dollhouse proportions.
Mary had sighed and said, “This is how giants must see the world.” They’d both been quite earnest about giants at the time.
And, eyeing his suddenly fragile ancestral home, he’d answered her: “A giant this tall could destroy all of Birchford with just a few stomps of his boots.”
“Oh, no!” she’d said. “It could be a kind giant, who’d give us rides, and plow all our fields with his hair comb, and build new stone cottages for the farmers using just his fingertips.”
He smiled to remember it now. That had been childhood Mary in a nutshell—daring and imaginative and immensely kind, all at once. Which, now that he thought about it, was still an apt description of Mary as an adult, though she hid all but the kindness from most people who knew her.
He couldn’t see her face now as she stood on the ladder, only the side of her head with its tight-coiled hair, and the length of her very serviceable brown frock. Funny how dull she could appear if you didn’t look beyond that illusion, if you never really looked into her eyes.
Miss Lawton, in contrast, was all vivid color and glow. The blonde curls, the blue eyes, the radiant rosy skin, the prettily sprigged muslin of her dress with its thousands of tiny pink and green flowers, and a glossy bright green ribbon in a bow just under her very full breasts.
By rights, Miss Lawton should be the object of his sexual fantasies. He should be thinking about lifting her skirts, looking his fill at her round tits, burying his mouth and nose between her soft thighs. She was the sort of plump, silken, scented, pliant creature most men wished to spend their lusts upon.
But his thoughts were much more powerfully drawn to the drab-looking young lady on the ladder. That pale little mouth and those small firm breasts and that spine stiffened by a rather prickly, stubborn sense of pride provoked him so much more intensely than Annabel Lawton ever could.
He’d let himself forget what Mary was over the years he was away from home; he’d let himself be fooled by his old friend’s surface plainness. But once they’d gone up that hill and gotten tangled in the blackberries, he’d caught sight once more of the bright flame that burned just beneath the surface.
Lord, his cock twitched just thinking of her.
Just watching her lean into that tall tree trunk.
If he moved just a bit closer to her, got just below her on the ladder, he could probably see up her skirts, at least to her ankles, perhaps a bit of her calves. She might ignore him now, but if he climbed up the ladder behind her, slid his hand up behind her knee, stroked his way up towards her thigh, he felt quite sure he could get her full attention.
His blood started beating hot again as he thought about it. If no one else were here, if no one could see them, what might he be able to do with her on that ladder? The possibilities were intriguing—if she faced the other direction, sat down on one of the steps, he could hoist her skirts and get his mouth on her in a way that would have her shouting with pleasure within a minute. And then he might turn her the other way again, climb a few steps higher, hold on the sides of the ladder to steady himself, and bury himself inside her from behind and….
He startled. Miss Lawton had tapped him on the forearm again.
“When you dance about the May Pole, my lord,”
said Miss Lawton, “you must hold a blue ribbon, and you must wear that waistcoat of yours with the blue stripe through the white cloth. The two blues are very like, are they not? You shall look quite sprightly. I daresay no man in the county shall look more like a proper celebrant of the spring!”
“I daresay,” he replied dryly. “Of course, you are quite wise in such matters, Miss Lawton.” He tried to smile, though his head was beginning to hurt. If he did as Mary insisted and married Annabel Lawton, conversations this inane would be his doom every remaining day of his life.
Surely he’d spent enough time mollifying the ego of Miss Lawton. He stepped up beside the ladder, his heart pounding as though he were the most callow of swains. “Are you quite all right up there, Miss Wilkins?” he asked, lifting his armful of ribbons in a helpful sort of gesture. “Perhaps I could assist you?”
Mary speared another ribbon through the ring. “Thank you, no, Lord Parkhurst. I am managing quite nicely.”
Of course she was. Mary managed quite nicely at everything. He was the one who was of no use to her.
His heart sank.
Damn it all, he wanted her to look at him. He wanted her to talk to him, not soldier on with her task as though he were an annoyance, a pestering mayfly.
Did she truly no longer see in him what she had seen in him when they were younger? Back then they’d been partners in all their adventures, and she’d trusted him implicitly to be as wild and brave and strong as she was.
Well, the years had passed for her, too. Perhaps she only saw the surface of him now—the civilized, privileged surface of a viscount who no longer climbed oak trees or wished to be a pirate. A gentleman, with all the qualities that term implied. And perhaps she had no respect for that, no reason to take him seriously.
A sudden wish to be back in the army swept over him. Back where the world was under his command. Where everyone knew his strength and skill and courage, and where he was unquestionably useful.
Where he knew from one minute to the next precisely what he wanted.
