They’d reached the main hallway, where Hungerford’s hat, gloves and riding crop sat on the sideboard and his great coat hung from a peg. The footmen had been pressed into service making ropes of greenery, and yet, Penelope did not want to put Franklin down so she could assist her guest.
Hungerford was a widower—he at least knew how to put on his own coat. He tapped his hat onto his head and cast a stern glance at Franklin, then an equally stern glance at Penelope.
“If there’s anything you need, madam, you must not hesitate to apply to me. I realize your mourning has not yet run its entire course and the holidays can be lonely for those of us who’ve known the loss of a mate. I am ever your servant.”
He bowed smartly, a bodily salute, though Pen was glad her arms were full of Franklin, lest she suffer the tickle of Hungerford’s blond mustache against her knuckles.
“My thanks, Mr. Hungerford, and I’m sure Diana will be very pleased to know you’ll join the family gathering.”
Then he was gone, thumping down the front steps, riding crop thwacking against his boots.
“Thank you,” Penelope said, cradling Franklin close. “I thought I’d be trapped in the parlor until spring, listening to ‘by Firebrand out of Windylegs.’ I don’t suppose you care if it’s a dog or a hound when it’s trying to put you on the dinner menu, do you?”
If Franklin had one shortcoming, it was that he didn’t purr. He was a very good judge of character, though, and a sumptuous pleasure to pet.
“We have a note to write to Mama,” Penelope said, “and then we’ll see how matters are progressing below stairs.”
She’d barely begun the note when Bella, her under-housekeeper, tapped on the door.
“Morning, mum. Sir Leviticus Sparrow has come to call.”
Bella hadn’t finished her recitation before Levi wedged himself through the door past the servant. He set his hands on Bella’s shoulders and moved her a step to the left as easily as he’d move a coat rack.
“One hardly needs to announce me, I hope. Penelope.” He bowed gracefully, no hurry to his civilities. “And Franklin. Good morning.” He didn’t quite bow to the rabbit, but he acknowledged the beast with a sort of half nod between the fellows. “I hope I’m not intruding?”
“Of course not. A tray, please, Bella.”
He held up a hand, and Bella stopped mid-turn. “No tray for me, Bella. Shall we instead inspect the troops, Penelope?”
The day was cold, sunny, and breezy. Nobody in her right mind would consider it weather for strolling the barns when she could instead spend yet another interminable hour talking to her rabbit in a nice, boring parlor.
“Brilliant notion. We’ll have chocolate when we come in, Bella, and tell somebody to man the front door, please.”
Levi was still peering at her. “You look like you could use some fresh air, and as if Hungerford overstayed his welcome.”
“Franklin put him to rout.”
“Good man, Franklin. Now go stop the draft coming in through the French doors. There’s a lad.” He scooped the rabbit from Pen’s grasp, petted the beast briskly, and set him on the floor. As if Franklin understood his orders, he lippity-loped over to the terrace doors and did indeed stretch himself against the base.
“The house is hot for him,” Penelope said.
“The floors are plenty cold. Now let’s be about our errand, shall we?”
Five minutes later they’d traversed the frozen yard to the small barn that housed the rabbit hutches.
“These have to be the happiest rabbits in the known world,” Levi remarked. “Also the furriest.”
The barn was chilly—angora rabbits were well protected against the cold—but it was sheltered and bore the good scents of straw and clean livestock.
“They make me happy,” Penelope said. “I wonder why that should be.”
Arms linked, Levi took her up and down each aisle, his steps matched to hers.
“They make you happy because this is your enterprise, your project, and it has turned out quite profitably. When clients ask me how they can help their tenants generate cottage income, I always suggest your rabbit scheme.”
“It’s old-fashioned,” Penelope said, bending down to touch the inquisitive nose of a dun-colored doe named Bathsheba. “The women and children can manage it, the manure is useful, the fur is quite valuable, the spinning can be done at home, or the wool can be shipped north for blending.” She caressed the rabbit’s velvety ears. “How fare you, my lady?”
“That’s the doe who has the big litters, isn’t it?”
He would recall such a thing. Penelope straightened. “Sheba’s a good mother, but lately she’s been getting out. We haven’t figured out how, and she always comes hopping home. I have a list of bachelors, Levi.”
His expression didn’t change, but the feel of him beside her changed, became less the family friend and more the reserved man of business.
Drat. Why couldn’t he offer her an alternative?
“A list? Was Hungerford on that list?”
“He was. He is not. He threatened to shoot Franklin. Now I ask you, what woman needs to be defended against a bunny?”
A hint of humor threatened in Levi’s eyes, then faded. “Franklin ought to chew the blighter’s boots to ribbons for such an insult. Who is on your list?”
Who wasn’t? She’d considered every unmarried male over the age of eighteen, because Levi had had months to intimate that his friendship had marital potential, and he’d never so much as twitched his nose inappropriately. A woman had to be practical—and ruthless. Sixtus had insisted this was so.
Pen rattled off the top ten names. As she continued her tour of the barns, Levi’s arm was no longer twined with hers. That was better, more businesslike, less of a strain on her composure.
“So render your opinion, Levi.” Of the bachelors, please, not of her.
“These are boys, Penelope. Young fellows of good name who won’t know a thing about managing your business, nor about”—he waved a black-gloved hand in spirals—“how to go on with a lady wife. Are you seeking a manageable spouse?”
She didn’t answer immediately, but rather, paced down the aisle with him, past the bachelor bucks. Their lot was largely to grow fur and look handsome. Could she tolerate such a husband?
Did she have a choice?
“Penelope?”
“There’s a method to my list.” This was part of what she’d wanted to tell him three days ago, but hadn’t found the words. She still hadn’t any words. “How does a man kiss his wife, Levi?”
Levi sauntered past a row of empty cages. He was tall, unhurried, exquisitely turned out in his riding attire, and to appearances not the least taken aback by her question.
“I had only the one wife, and I can’t say managing business affairs has equipped me to answer your question. Could you explain yourself?”
No, she could not. “How did you kiss Ann?”
“With my lips?” He glanced over at her and probably saw that his jest was not appreciated. “Very well. I kissed her differently depending on the occasion. I often kissed her precisely as I kiss you.” He brushed his lips over Pen’s cheek, a fleeting, friendly warmth, nothing more.
“That’s not what I mean. I mean, how did you kiss her as a husband?”
His gaze made a circuit of the barn, past piles of clean straw to fluffy rabbits hopping about in spacious, comfy pens.
“We’re quite alone, Penelope. Profuse discourse on such a topic is not in my gift. Shall I show you how I kissed my wife?”
Penelope managed a nod while Levi removed his gloves. If a man kissed with his lips, then he should have no need to take off his gloves—
Warm male fingers slid along Penelope’s cheek until they cradled her jaw.
“After a long day of listening to my clients whinge and whine about every conceivable topic—their investments, their gout, their intimate associations, their lack of same—I would find my lady at her account books or her co
rrespondence. Perhaps she was in deep discussion with the housekeeper over the menus, or planning some entertainment. Ann worried that I did not get out enough socially, and she had ambitions for me.”
A second hand cupped Penelope’s jaw. “I’d see her, the woman I loved, and thank God that I had a means of providing for her and keeping her safe. She’d look up, her expression would lighten at the simple sight of me—me—and she’d drop what she was doing and offer me her embrace. I would kiss her, thus.”
His hold on Pen became firmer, but no less gentle. He tipped her face up and settled his lips over hers like a benediction, like a prayer of gratitude and gladness. He took his time, acquainting their mouths, lingering, greeting with touch what gave him joy.
God in heaven, he had loved his wife dearly.
Levi’s hands drifted down, over Pen’s shoulders and back, making her wish she wore naught but a chemise—not even a chemise—the better to absorb the warmth in his caresses.
“Put your arms around me, Penelope. A man greeting a woman he’s cared for, worried over, and missed wants to feel her embrace. He needs to know he’s welcome, even in his own home.”
Levi was welcome. Pen slid her arms around his waist, let herself lean against the muscular bulwark of his chest. Ann Sparrow had known years of such embraces, such kisses. Years of Levi caring for her, missing her, and worrying over her.
“You would hold each other, simply hold each other, like this?”
“Not often. Holding Ann was like holding sunlight. She had great energy and much enthusiasm for her tasks. Fleeting hugs, always heartfelt but never prolonged, were more the norm. I was the one—”
He paused. Not his usual pause, either.
Penelope rested her cheek against the wool of Levi’s coat, wondering how any woman could have danced out of such an embrace.
“Do I take it, Penelope, that Sixtus was a reserved husband?”
She eased away, and he let her go. “You raise a difficult topic.” Particularly when a woman’s wits had gone haring off. She crossed to the bachelor bucks, took off her gloves and lifted a fine young fellow with luxurious gray fur. “This is Casper. I’ve considered him for the breeding pens because of his excessively agreeable temperament.”
Casper was a slug in rabbit fur. He got along with everybody, like a tame buck ought to.
“Sixtus never discussed the private side of his marriage with me,” Levi said. He spoke from where they’d kissed, several yards away. Wise of him. “I concluded there wasn’t much of a private side, particularly once you became settled in the marriage.”
His inquiry was quiet, as if considering a point of history, which in fact, he was.
“Not much of one in the sense you allude to,” Penelope said. “I asked Sixtus about it several months after the wedding night. He assured me that were he fifteen, even ten years younger, he’d make a regular nuisance of himself—those were his words—but time had taken a toll on his manly humors. I was free to entertain myself however I saw fit, provided I did not get with child or cause scandal.”
Levi took out his gloves, refolded them, and stuffed them back in his pocket. “This has to do with that old barony, doesn’t it?”
To the point, that was Levi. That he could kiss her like that one moment and discuss business the next had to go under the heading of Unendearing Traits.
“The barony and simple marital decency. If either Sixtus or his cousin had a male child, that child would likely win a petition to bring the baron’s title out of abeyance. Sixtus thought Cousin Joseph was the more deserving resource. Joseph did not agree, and thus—”
Thus, she had hundreds of rabbits, the most fecund species on the planet, to comfort her in her widowhood, but not one child. She set Casper back where he belonged, among pens where all was domestic harmony and security, provided one was a buuny.
“So why the kiss, Penelope?” Levi spoke from very near her. She turned and leaned forward, resting her forehead against his chest.
The kiss had been because she was desperate, and Levi wasn’t making overtures, and contingencies could all too easily become reality.
“They’ll know, Levi. Any widower who weds me will know I’m a complete tyro as a wife. I was married for six years, and Sixtus hardly ever—” She couldn’t finish that thought out loud. “I don’t want to embarrass Sixtus’s memory, I don’t want to embarrass myself, and I do want to make a wise choice, but I’m choosing blind.”
“Close your eyes.”
What was he about? She closed her eyes, and Levi shifted so their bodies were quite proximate, to the point that he’d insinuated a leg forward, pressing himself against her even below her waist.
When his mouth touched hers this time, the kiss was a different beast entirely. No tame bunny of a kiss, this was a ravening predator intent on investigating every corner of her soul. She tasted him—lemon drops and cinnamon sticks—as his hand wrapped around the back of her head, preventing her from dodging or ducking.
As if she could have, or would have. His tongue seamed her lips, teasing, tasting.
“Open, Penelope. Open your mouth for me.”
Not a man of business making a suggestion; but rather, a freelance knight come to storm her defenses. She complied, enough for him to convey to her the role a tongue might play in a kiss.
Or two tongues. Penelope’s wits scattered like March hares, until she was clinging to Levi and learning the shape of his teeth with her tongue.
“That,” he said, taking her hands in his and stepping back, “is how you might expect your husband to kiss you when his intention is to take you upstairs.”
Levi’s voice had changed, gone from the clipped, topiary accents of the well educated solicitor, to the soaring, tangled mysteries of the forest primeval. Levi knew much more than he’d just shown her.
Much, much more, and he’d never even hinted that Penelope tempted him to share that knowledge.
She dropped his hands. “You see my dilemma.”
“I see that you’re making the simple complicated, my dear. May we sit?”
Penelope didn’t want to sit, she wanted to dash up to her room and cry—and not particularly for Sixtus.
“Are you about to lecture me, Levi?”
He waited while she took a seat on a bench near the feed room. “I’m about to talk with you and to provide reassurances on a matter I hope we need not discuss again.”
He softened his words by taking her hand when they sat. She wished he’d do only that—hold her hand—rather than provide a legal sermon on some other topic.
“What is this dilemma you think you face, Penelope?”
Calm, maddeningly calm, but he was trying to be helpful, too, and for that she loved him—that, too.
“If I marry one of the younger fellows, the boys, as you call them, they’ll want children and expect me to have knowledge of matters of which I am ignorant.”
“Not an outlandish surmise. And the widowers?”
“They want a mother for their children, which is quite understandable, but they’ll expect me to have even more familiarity with marital matters, having already had wives themselves.”
“I see.”
“No, you do not. I’m a widow, Levi. I can’t go around sampling the kisses of every prospect to ensure his intimate attentions will be bearable. I have no time, my reputation will be in shreds, I know next to nothing of the wedding night, I have no—”
A husband apparently learned an entire arsenal of kisses. When Levi took her mouth this time, he was telling her quite clearly to cease and desist, and offering a strong incentive to do so. His kiss took the wind from Penelope’s sails and the thoughts from her mind.
When he withdrew, and they were again sitting side by side on the bench, hands joined, Penelope slumped against the sturdy boards behind her.
“You do understand the mechanics of copulation, Penelope?”
He would explain compound interest to her in the same inflections. “I breed rabbits, Levi.
”
“Just so. Then you comprehend enough. No man with any sense will expect that Sixtus was in a position to teach you the habits of a houri, so to speak. As for the rest—” His hold on her hand became more thoughtful. More personal. “Ann was very unimpressed on our wedding night.”
What? “With you?”
“I was young, hardly more experienced than she, and she was not raised to place much value on passion in a marriage. Few ladies are.” He sounded wistful, but did he miss Ann, or miss the years during which he might have encouraged her marital passions?
“I’m sorry, Levi. You’ve been so understanding of my situation all these months, and it never occurred to me your own grief is what makes you such a good friend.”
He eased his fingers from hers and put on his gloves. “Do you kiss all your friends like that, Penelope? I can’t say I’d advise it.”
She had learned to know him a little better, maybe as a result of having kissed him. He was teasing her, mostly.
“I’ve never kissed anybody like that. Do husband and wives really kiss so enthusiastically?” So passionately.
“Some husbands, some wives. Not all the Puritans emigrated, certainly.”
When Penelope and Levi emerged from the rabbit barn, the day seemed more temperate, the sunshine brilliant on the remaining patches of snow. Penelope shaded her eyes and regarded her escort.
The man who’d kissed her as if he cared for her, worried over her, and missed her.
“Will you stay for chocolate, Levi?”
“Chocolate would be agreeable. If there are more names on any lists, Penelope, I’d like to hear those too.”
Of course. She’d hoped to review her lists with him for two reasons. First, he’d know the gamblers, rogues and heavy drinkers in the local surrounds; second, she needed to find a way to ask him if he’d represent her in any settlement negotiations.
Though what she really wanted to ask him was to kiss her again, because she absolutely lacked the fortitude to ask him to marry her.
*
“She wants me to advise her in the damned settlement negotiations. Wants me to suggest terms so some spotty boy can waltz off with her fortune and more spotty boys can waltz off with her sisters.”
Christmas in The Duke's Arms Page 3
