by Mary Balogh
“Owen?” he said.
Her face, distraught one moment, was blank the next. “Nothing,” she said. “It does not matter.”
She turned to leave, but he caught at her arm and held it. “Your lover?” he said. “He has influence with the Scotch Cattle?”
Her eyes widened and he glimpsed fear in them for a moment. “I have no lover,” she said. “And I know no one who has influence with them. I know no one who knows any of them. No one knows who they are or where they come from.” She shivered violently.
She was not wearing her shawl tonight, he noticed for the first time, but only the thin, shabby dress that she was always wearing when he saw her. He picked up his cloak from the ground and threw it about her before she realized his intent. He gathered her to his side with one arm about her shoulders and held her there.
“You will catch your death dressed like that on a night like this,” he said. “Come along, I’ll escort you most of the way home and see you safely there.”
Her teeth were chattering. He was aware of her body pressed to his side, her breast against his chest. Her leg brushed his own as they walked. He felt warm suddenly despite the fact that he was not wearing his cloak. He had no idea what time it was. Well past midnight at a guess.
“You are fond of the boy?” he asked. “How old is he?”
“Seventeen,” she said. “He was twelve when I married Gwyn. I loved him almost as if he was my own.”
“Where does he work?” he asked.
“In the mine,” she said, “just like his father and Huw and Gwyn. And me.”
“How did your husband die?” he asked.
“A roof cave-in,” she said. “He was careless. It is quite common, you know.”
No, he did not. He knew nothing except for the fact that he had been glibly drawing income from Cwmbran for the two years since he had inherited it.
“You were fond of him?” he asked. A foolish question.
“He was my husband,” she said, “and just my age. You would not believe how pale a man can look when he is dead, even when his face is blackened with coal dust.” She shivered again.
“Pardon me,” he said. “I know so little. I am learning, but with painful slowness. I am trying to learn.”
She looked up into his face with—incredulity? Curiosity? He could not read her expression. But he saw anew how very beautiful she was. And her face was only inches from his own.
“Which is your house?” he asked.
She pointed to a terrace of attached houses just below them. “The end one,” she said. “I can go alone now. Thank you.” She turned inward against him as if to shrug free of the cloak. But his arm anchored it too firmly to her shoulders. She looked up at him again, dismay and something else in her face.
He could feel the blood pulsing through his temples. His arm held her to him involuntarily. It did not occur to him to release her. He touched the fingertips of his free hand to her cheek.
“It was a severe beating,” he said, “but he took it bravely and has nothing to be ashamed of. Scotch Cattle, I take it, are content with one punishment and do not press the point?”
“No.” She swallowed.
“Stay off the mountain when this sort of thing is going on,” he said. “It is not safe for a woman. When men’s passions run high, they are not always answerable for their actions.”
She stared mutely at him, and he realized that his words applied more to himself than to anyone else this night—and on the last night he had encountered her up here.
“Thank you for going to help Iestyn,” she whispered. “You heard Huw say that he had signed the Charter. You will not punish him again?”
“I see no wrong in the Charter,” he said. “Only perhaps in what its rejection might lead to. If it is rejected. I have no intention of punishing any man I know to have signed it—or any man who went to a meeting at which it was being discussed.”
“Then you are very different from Mr. Barnes and all the other owners,” she said. She was breathless suddenly and lifted her hands to his shoulders as if to push him away. “Good night.”
“Good night, Siân,” he said. “It is a pretty name. I have not heard it before.”
“It is Welsh,” she said foolishly.
He smiled. And could not after all resist. He should have released her as soon as she said good night. Or as soon as she tried to release herself from his cloak. He should have wrapped his cloak about her and allowed her to hold it herself. He should have kept three feet of space between them as they walked. Now he could no longer resist. He closed the distance between their mouths and kissed her.
They were standing, he thought immediately, in perhaps the same place as she had been standing with her lover when he and Verity had looked down on them. He had felt slightly envious then and lonely. Now he was in the lover’s place. He found the thought arousing and drew her closer. Her arms, he noticed with some surprise and interest, had come about his neck.
He opened his mouth and licked at her lips, but she kept them closed and trembling. It seemed she was unaccustomed to such kisses. Or unwilling to allow the greater intimacy of them to him. He moved his hands hard down her sides, past warm, full breasts, in to a small, firm waist, over shapely, feminine hips, and around to equally shapely buttocks. His hands followed the curve of her spine as they came back up her body. It was arched. She had put herself against him from shoulders to knees—or he had put her there and she had stayed.
She could certainly be in no doubt about the extent of his desire for her—especially through her thin dress. She was one of his workers. The teacher he wanted for Verity. The Welsh puddler’s woman. He ended the kiss with reluctance, withdrawing his mouth from hers, moving her away from him with his hands at her waist. Her eyes opened and gazed, bewildered, into his.
He inhaled slowly. It was the look a woman beneath him on a bed would have.
“Go now,” he said. “I’ll watch you safely home.”
Safely! There was only one danger to Mrs. Siân Jones on the mountain—the one that was going to watch her home.
She continued to stare at him before biting her lower lip and turning abruptly away.
“Siân,” he said, and she stopped without looking back. “I will still be expecting you to call at the castle with your decision.”
She lowered her head and he was afraid for a moment that she was going to give him his answer there and then. But after a silent pause she continued on her way down the hill.
He drew cool breaths of air into his lungs. He wondered if he could have had her there on the ground if he had so chosen. He would be willing to bet half a fortune that he could have. Under different circumstances he would have put the matter to the test. But under these particular circumstances it had been impossible.
Governess and mistress, he thought. He wanted her as both. He wondered if she would take the one post and if he could then persuade her to accept the other. And if he wanted to so complicate his life and so compromise his principles. He had always chosen his mistresses from outside the ranks of those dependent on him.
But Siân Jones was uncommonly lovely and alluring. Something inside himself yearned for her. Not just to mate with her body, though that was definitely a part of it. He could not put the rest of it into coherent words in his mind. She somehow seemed to represent a world he had glimpsed so fleetingly that he could not even recall the image of it to his mind. A sweet and wonderful world that he wanted to inhabit.
“Hiraeth.” Yes, in his mind he could hear the aching beauty of the song again. The song about the sort of longing he felt.
She had disappeared from sight. He turned his steps homeward. He had better hope, he supposed, that she put temptation beyond his grasp by refusing to be Verity’s governess.
God, what a night. What a strange world it was that he had stepped into quite unwi
ttingly by deciding to pay his Welsh property a visit.
* * *
Iestyn was at work the next day, pale but smiling at Siân as usual when she deliberately made a detour to the seam at which he was working. He had not removed his shirt, she noticed, as he usually did and as all the other men had done.
He was one of the fortunate ones, if there had been any good fortune in his experience. Two other men had been visited by the Scotch Cattle the night before, men who had neither been to the meeting nor signed the Charter nor joined the Chartist Association. Unlike the others who had been given warnings, they had remained obdurate, for reasons of their own. Both had had all the furniture dragged out of their houses and chopped to pieces. And both had been given twenty lashes up on the mountain. The one who was a miner was not at work today.
Siân waited all day to see Owen in the evening. It was a strange, unreal day. Life just could not seem to get back to normal again. She just could not seem to get back to normal. She dared not think about the night before. And yet she could think of nothing else.
They went walking again, though they took a different route from the one they usually took, wandering through the town past the chapel and past the ironworks and the gates into the park of Glanrhyd Castle in order to stroll on the hills beyond, the hills that led within a few miles to Penybont.
They held hands and talked about trivialities while they were still in town. And as luck would have it, they ran almost directly into the Marquess of Craille and his daughter as they were coming through the gates from the park, obviously intent on their own evening walk. He seemed unavoidable. Siân nodded to them both, unsmiling, and continued walking. He touched the brim of his hat and inclined his head.
Siân was very aware suddenly of the fact that her fingers were laced with Owen’s.
“Mrs. Jones,” Verity called cheerfully. “Bore da.” She laughed gaily, then clapped one hand over her mouth. “Oh, no, that means good morning.”
“Nos da,” Siân said. “Good night.”
She felt thoroughly disturbed as they walked on. She followed Owen’s lead without question as he turned up into the hills beyond Glanrhyd and led her higher. She felt horribly guilty. She felt as if she should be making a confession to him. But he was not her husband or even her fiancé. Besides, it had been only a kiss.
Only! It had been a lot more than a kiss. She had felt against her abdomen his readiness for more. And she had wanted more. She was still not sure that she would not have gone the whole distance with him if he had not pulled back for some reason. She grew hot and uncomfortable at the very thought. And she remembered Ceridwen’s crude words about going up the mountain with the marquess—for a good go, as she had put it. Siân felt wanton, dirty. That was precisely what she had wanted and almost got. A good go. Her cheeks burned.
“He has asked me again to take that job,” she said. “I saw him outside chapel the other evening after practice. He gave me a week to decide.”
“You are wavering, then?” Owen asked. “Take it, Siân. You deserve better than you have. It would be a thumb of the nose to old Barnes, anyway, wouldn’t it?” He laughed.
She could not believe she actually was wavering. It would be asking for trouble. For undoubtedly she found him almost irresistibly attractive—she had not really admitted that much to herself until last night. More attractive than she had ever found any man—Owen included, God help her. But she was a cart girl in a coal mine and her mother’s bastard daughter. He was a marquess. It would be funny if it were not also frightening. Perhaps this was the way things had been with her mother.
She did not want to be like her mother. She did not want her mother’s life. The prospect was horrifying—cut off from her family and her people and her chapel, totally reliant for support and emotional satisfaction on a cold lover who saw her only as a body to be used for his lust and his pleasure.
Oh, no!
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know if it is what I want or not, Owen.” And yet her words showed that she was still wavering.
“I don’t like you looking weary every night,” he said. “And she seems a cheerful enough child.”
“Lonely too,” she said. “I expect she is lonely. She is an only child, and she can hardly mingle with the children of Cwmbran, can she?”
“Not when she is his nibs’s brat,” he said. “Do children who have everything feel lonely, Siân?”
“Yes,” she said with conviction. She had had almost everything she could possibly have needed as far as material possessions went. Sir John Fowler had been generous in that way. But she had had no friends with whom to play. She had been an outsider as surely as Lady Verity Hyatt was. “They need the companionship of others as much as other children do, Owen. Things cannot take the place of people.”
“Well, then,” he said, bringing them to a stop and drawing her down to sit beside him on the heather, “take the job, fach, and make her a little happier. And yourself. And me too. I’ll be happier thinking of you there than down the mine.”
Would he, she wondered, if he knew why she really wanted to take the job? But that was not quite true, either. She wanted to be Verity’s governess. Yes, she did. It was the girl’s father who made her hesitate. He was the reason she did not want to accept the job.
He was the temptation.
“Perhaps I will, then,” she said, drawing her knees up and wrapping her arms about them. “Yes, perhaps I will. I really would like to, Owen.”
She noticed suddenly how high up on the mountain they were.
7
THEY sat in silence for a while, Siân gazing down into the valley, Owen, propped on one elbow, gazing at her.
“Oh, I don’t know what to do,” she said. “You tell me, Owen.” But she laughed as she said so. In some ways it would be reassuring to be a child again and be told what to do, but she knew she would never easily give up control of her life to any man. There had been a few battles with Gwyn . . .
“Tell you what to do? All right,” he said, pushing himself into a full sitting position beside her. “Lie back in the heather and let me love you.”
She felt a lurching of alarm. “Oh, no,” she said. “No, Owen.”
He set his mouth to hers and let it rest there for a few moments. “Gentle I will be,” he said. “It is because I am big and Gwyn was smaller, Siân? But you are not a maid and it will not hurt. I will worship you with my body, cariad.”
Cariad—love. It was the first time he had used such an endearment. And she wanted it suddenly. She wanted something to block out last night’s uncomfortable memories. Owen was her own kind and she was fond of him. He was attractive and had great strength of character—she knew that there were many girls and women in Cwmbran who envied her because Owen was stepping out with her. She would belong again as Owen’s woman, as she had belonged all too briefly as Gwyn’s.
But it was a step she could not take lightly. “Just kisses,” she said, lifting her face. “Just kisses, Owen. Please?”
“A man needs more than kisses,” he said. “Especially when it is the dusk of evening and he is up on the mountain alone with his woman. It is inside you I need to be, Siân.” He took her hand and brought it against him, palm in, so that she could feel his need, his readiness.
She was no maid, as he had said. But even so she snatched her hand away in some alarm. Two nights, two different men. She wanted to get up and run suddenly. Run away. But from what? From herself? Was she a wanton that she had aroused need like this in two very different men in such a short interval?
“I don’t want to do it, Owen,” she said. “I would be sorry tomorrow. Let it be kisses. I like your kisses.”
They were warm and firm. She always felt the strength and dependability of Owen when he kissed her. She wanted his kisses now to blot out the memory of those others. She did not like the Marquess of Craille’s kisses. She did
not want to remember them. He used the inside of his mouth as well as his lips. And his tongue. She could remember it licking against her lips. And she could remember the raw feelings of sexual desire it had aroused in her. She wanted Owen’s kisses again. Warm kisses of affection. But if only Owen could kiss like that and make her feel like that . . .
“Just let it be kisses,” she said softly.
“You are afraid I would take my pleasure and not pay the price?” he said. “Married we will be, Siân. We both know that.”
“Do we?” she said. He had never mentioned marriage before.
“I have been courting you since last winter,” he said.
“You started walking me home from chapel during the winter,” she said. “Was that courting?”
“You are a beautiful woman, fach,” he said. “Has any other man asked you to step out since last winter?”
“No,” she said. “Only you.”
“Last summer,” he said, “they were about you like flies. Since winter they have known that they would face the fists of Owen Parry if they came near. They have known that we are courting.”
It was a pleasing idea. The idea that he considered she belonged to him, that everyone else believed it too. And the idea that he would protect her, with his fists if necessary. And yet it somehow made her feel like a piece of property to be guarded by force. What if she did not want to be Owen’s woman? What if she wanted the attention of one of those other men who apparently did not dare approach her now?
“You would not really fight for me, would you?” she asked him. “I mean, if any other man asked me to step out?”
“I would,” he said, tightening his arm about her. “Everyone knows I am not a man to be crossed. And you are my woman, cariad. You will be my wife. Next summer, is it? In chapel with all the valley in the pews?”
