Mystified

by Renee Bernard

  “No, you have not,” Claire countered, looking over her shoulder at him. “You said it was reckless of Mama to have it made, and that she should have used the weavers in Spitalfields. Then you delivered a ten minute lecture about the deplorable conditions those poor people in the rookeries are forced to live in.”

  “Hmm,” was the only suitable reply Teddy could come up with, and he appeared properly contrite. “That does sound like something I’d say. But never you mind, Claire, for I am on the road to becoming a new man.”

  “Oh?” This had her curiosity, so much so that she took a seat on the bench, when she had meant to scurry away from him.

  So it was between them: she stayed when she ought to leave, for the very idea of being apart from Teddy for long sent her nerves aflutter, no matter how sensible it was.

  He did not sit beside her. Instead, he strolled a bit down the path, still within hearing range. His gangly, lanky frame had become lean and athletic in the last few years. She followed the line of his navy blue coat down to where it met with his buff breeches, his delectably rounded arse so well displayed that warmth lapped at her core, her body begging her to cup his firm buttocks in her palm.

  Wantonness, they said, was another sign of madness.

  The longer she was left relatively alone with Teddy, the closer she came to being admitted to an asylum like Mama.

  She couldn’t bring herself to care, not when he spun around, merriment dancing in his dazzling green eyes. “We should take a walk.”

  “It is supposed to storm.” She tilted her chin up toward the graying sky, eying the darkening clouds. There was a quietness to the air, as if the weather was marshaling all its strength for a great siege later. She wondered if that was how it would be in her mind—perhaps this was the peace before the war. “You hate being out in the rain.”

  Teddy shrugged. “That was the old me. Now I laugh in the face of rain. I have conquered at least one of my fears recently.”

  “Which one?”

  “You are the smartest of women. I should think you could guess, based on where you saw me yesterday.”

  She tapped her thumb to her chin, thinking back. “You were in the second floor hallway. Which leads to the parapet walk.” Her jaw dropped, and she quickly closed it, lest she resemble a gulping guppy. “Teddy, did you go on the wall-walk?”

  He nodded. She supposed this was the adult equivalent of getting high marks from a tutor, for pride over his achievement splashed across his face as it had when they were children.

  “Why ever would you do such a thing?” She didn’t even like to go on the parapet walk, and she did not have his pressing fear of heights.

  “Because I can,” he said. “I am not the scared little boy you used to know, Claire.”

  “I quite liked that little boy,” she reminded him. “He’s been my best friend for many years. I won’t have you quizzing him.”

  He grinned. “Think of me as an improved version, then. One who takes risks.”

  Though he did not say so explicitly, she knew this was another vow—one in the same vein as his earlier promise. Teddy had always been dangerous to her, but this version of him, so determined to fight her battles, was nearly impossible to refuse.

  Nearly.

  “Risks are overrated.” She did not believe her own words, for by God, all she wanted was to take a risk with him.

  “Says the woman who once galloped her pony into the dining room of Brauning Manor.”

  “And Papa smacked my bottom so hard I couldn’t sit for a week.”

  “But it was worth it, wasn’t it?” He did not wait for a response, knowing that it had been to her. She’d crowed at the feat for at least a month afterward.

  A gardener emerged from the hedge maze in the distance. Teddy waved at him, and the man picked up his pace until he came to a halt in front of them. “Yes, milord?”

  The old Teddy would have protested such a title, claiming that no matter what Society said, they were all members of the same British race and ought to be treated as such. It usually made the servants dreadfully uncomfortable.

  But this Teddy, who apparently could now add, “understanding social cues” to his list of new accomplishments, simply smiled broadly at the man, putting the gardener at ease. “Could you take Lady Claire’s artist bag inside and have a maid bring it to her room?”

  “’Course I can.” The gardener gave a swift nod, eager to please the man who spoke with casual friendliness instead of hauteur like so many of the other guests.

  “Thank you,” Claire said. The gardener headed off with her bag, leaving her little room to refuse Teddy’s offer of a walk—even if she’d wanted to, which she most certainly didn’t, even though she most certainly should. She picked up her parasol, opening it. “Well then, my roguish friend. Where to?”

  “I rather like the looks of that hedge maze.” He held out his arm to her, eyes narrowing as he examined the maze. “Beck said on his last visit to the estate, it took three hours to find his way out. I bet I can do it in one.”

  Some things never changed.

  Chapter 5

  Teddy may have underestimated the difficulty of the hedge maze. A half hour and ten turns later, he lamented the ingenuity of the architect, who apparently never had a lady they wanted to impress with their strategic escape from the labyrinth. The architect’s purpose must have been to ensure that fools who boasted of their wits were supremely humiliated, a fate that awaited Teddy if he could not get them out of this maze in time.

  “I think we’ve gone this way before,” Claire said, pausing to examine their surroundings.

  She no longer rested her hand on his, as she had done when they’d first entered. That was why he’d been so distracted, he decided. He couldn’t get his bearings when Claire was touching him so, her pale skin so light against the navy kerseymere of his coat. She had the most delicate touch, born out of years of drawing and piano playing. Her fingers were long, thin, and graceful—he shivered to think what those fingers would feel like on the other long, but definitely not thin, parts of his anatomy.

  And that was how he’d ended up in this right mess. He was a man of logic and scruples, damn it, not an animal concerned only with rutting.

  He hazarded another glance at Claire. God, she was so beautiful. Maybe he could be both a man of science and an animal.

  But not until they broke free of this blighted maze.

  He ran a hand through his hair, telling himself to pay more attention to the layout than to Claire, as impossible as that seemed since she looked ravishing in a pastel spotted muslin gown with a blue ribbon that cinched right underneath her breasts. As if he needed another reason to focus there.

  “You may be right,” he admitted, frowning at the bank of hornbeam trees, grown to a height well above their heads and planted so close together there was no way to see between them.

  She grinned. “Still going to get us out of here in an hour?”

  He regretted this endeavor a little less when she smiled like that. It had been so long since he’d seen her happy. “I am a man of my word.”

  “I know,” she said, so solemnly he wondered if there was a deeper meaning behind that acknowledgment. She reminded him of a pot of water set to boil, her truths just below the surface, waiting to be brought out like the bubbles in the water. “It is my favorite thing about you.”

  He could not disappoint her, not now. Teddy stuffed his hands in the pockets of his coat, for then he would not be so tempted to touch her distractingly soft skin. He searched his mind for what he knew about labyrinths. Not much. Aside from the few mentions of this particular maze at Castle Keyvnor in the texts he’d read before coming here, he knew exactly two things about hedge mazes. One, the architect should have been executed for this rampant tomfoolery. Two, every time he looked around he saw more and more bloody green. He was reminded why he preferred adventure between the pages of a book, where there was no risk.

  He tilted his head up toward the darken
ing sky, as if it would have answers. The storm colors had been ominous before, but now they were particularly lethal shade of gray, like the steel of a blade that lacks shine. Rainfall would be imminent, most likely while they were still in this damned abyss.

  After this was over, he was done with nature for at least six months. Probably a year. A man had to take time to recover.

  “You’re trying to think of some obscure fact about mazes now, aren’t you?” She knew him far, far too well.

  “Possibly.”

  Claire laughed. “Certainly.”

  He had forgotten how magnificent she looked when she laughed. She was always beautiful, of course, but when she laughed she became radiant. Her cheeks were flushed a pretty pink, and her eyes were royal blue, clear and shining with a light he had not seen in two years.

  Fine, he decided. If being outdoors gave her joy, he’d suffer through his nose running and the oppressive heat and the bitter cold and that weird way trees smelled, all crisp and fresh. He much preferred the mustiness of a book.

  She arched a brow at him. “You’re halfway to cursing your education, which favored mathematics over landscaping.”

  “I just don’t see the need for such large gardens,” he replied automatically, the response more rout than impassioned opinion nowadays.

  She pitched her voice lower, as she always did when imitating him. It was irritating how much she sounded like him, the impertinent chit. “So many gardeners needed. And no one ever plants food anymore. No, it’s all plants. Plants take and they take, and what do you get back? Pollen.”

  “Pollen is ridiculous,” he said, with half of his usual enthusiasm, for his mind was fixed on what she’d said earlier. Mathematics—of course! The entrance and exit points to the maze were not the same, but he could use an algorithm to predict where the end would be. “You’re a genius, Claire!” He patted her shoulder before he remembered his resolve not to touch her until they were out of this maze.

  “Why, thank you, but I’m not sure why—” She broke off with an expectant look at him. “You’ve figured it out, have you?”

  “With your help,” he said. “What we should have done from the start was follow the walls with our hands. As long as we had one hand in contact with the maze, theoretically we shouldn’t have been able to get lost and we’d arrive at the exit.”

  Her forehead crinkled. “But we didn’t do that.”

  “No, we didn’t. It doesn’t matter, though. Both the entrance and the exit to the maze are on the outside. We simply need to pick a direction, and when we meet with an obstacle, we keep one hand along the obstacle while we count the angles. As soon as we’re facing the same direction again, and the angular sum of the turns is zero, we’ll leave the obstacle and proceed in the same direction.”

  She blinked. “That makes no sense.”

  He waved off her confusion. “It’ll be fine. I know, so I’ll show you.”

  “Well, whatever your method is, I hope it’s fast.” She cast a glance up to the steadily blackening sky. “Storm’s coming.”

  Bollocks.

  He had the worst of luck. He’d lied when he said before that he didn’t mind being outside in inclement weather. His childhood governess Miss LeRoot would have claimed he deserved his fate for boasting untruthfully.

  But Claire put her hand on top of his arm again, leaning in to him as they walked down the path, and he began to think that rogues really did profit in the end.

  A quarter of an hour later, Teddy was relatively certain that they were almost out of the maze. He might even get them out early, if everything worked out to his advantage. Claire had laughed four more times, and she’d smiled through their whole journey.

  He was clearly on his way to becoming a practiced rake with this success. Gerry would have been so proud.

  He was feeling so triumphant, in fact, that he’d promised Claire they could even take a hike around the grounds later. So far, it was nature: zero. Teddy: one. They stopped in front of the next turn, and he placed his hand on the wall and began to calculate the angles with a smug smirk.

  Then the sky opened up and rain poured onto them as though a full bucket of water had been upended on their heads.

  Fate was a capricious beast.

  “Come on, Teddy!” Claire grabbed his arm, taking off at a run and pulling him with her.

  He might have marveled at how fast she could run—one hand holding up her skirts so she wouldn’t trip, the other firmly gripping his coat sleeve—if he could see more than a foot in front of him without struggle. In the two minutes since the storm had started, the rain had coated everything in sight. Water streamed down from his hair, onto his coat, onto his breeches, onto his now-muddy top boots as he sprinted after Claire. Every blasted inch of him was wet.

  He had been mistaken before. This was hell. Being stuck in the maze while functioning as a sopping wet sponge was so much worse than being trapped with overcast clouds.

  And to top off his hell, Claire was pulling him further into the maze, not out of it. Now that he’d realized their direction, he planted his feet firmly in the muck. His quick stop brought her to a halt too, so fast she skidded in the slippery mud. He grabbed for her just in time, steadying her.

  “What are you doing? Where are you going? We need to leave, not go further into this hellhole.” His voice sounded a little more irritable than he would have liked.

  So much for being that new man.

  Claire barely paid any attention to his anxiety, responding to him in a calm, even tone while she untied her bonnet, the fabric so thoroughly soaked it no longer shaded her face and instead dumped more rain onto her skin. “We passed a folly a few turns back. It’ll take us less time to get there than to the house.”

  He blinked. “Oh.” He remembered the folly, a white wooden building with a domed top that would provide some shelter in this chaos. “Carry on, then.”

  She rolled her eyes, but took hold of his arm and they were off again, sloshing through the mud. The rain continued relentlessly, making the short trip back twice as long. But soon they broke free from the endless green to a small grove, where a folly emerged like a godsend. Because the folly had a high stone base lifting it several feet above the ground, stone steps set off to the left needed to be used to enter. Stone balustrades with intricate floral designs interconnected to make the main circular structure, with three columns of stone set atop the railings rising high, as tall as the hornbeam trees of the maze. Sitting atop the columns was a moss-covered domed gable, with a cross atop the roof.

  It was the most beautiful folly Teddy had ever seen.

  It was he who led Claire now, racing toward it at breakneck speed. He took the steps two at a time, surging into the folly. No rain made it through the stone roof.

  He swept a hand through his soaked hair, drops of water falling to the ground from his fingertips. There was little he could do about the rest of him. His once stiff Mathematician-tied cravat resembled a limp dishtowel, and his coat was a shade darker.

  Claire followed him into the folly, setting her bonnet down on the ground. She reached up, plucking the pins from her hair, drawing his attention first to her face and then lower. Her pastel gown was slicked with water until it was almost transparent—oh God, he could clearly see the outline of her stays beneath the thin gown and even thinner chemise. And beneath those stays would be her plump, round breasts. Would her nipples be hard from the cold? He’d lost the ability to think of anything else.

  He ought to look away. But he couldn’t, especially when her golden curls fell loose around her shoulders. For a minute, she was the living embodiment of his most sinful dreams, with her hair wild and unbound, the luscious curvature of her perfect hips visible, the rounding of her pert breasts calling for him to cup them in his hands. His breeches became uncomfortably tight, his cock growing harder with each passing second.

  She squeezed the water from her hair, the movement bringing her breasts up higher, and he forgot how to breathe. His
cock twitched, eager for so many things he had never experienced but desperately wanted to with her. Never mind that he was an amateur who hadn’t even had his first kiss. At that moment, the lower parts of his anatomy were quite certain he could take her in a rakish fashion until she cried out his name in euphoria.

  She pinned her hair back up, but that did nothing to cool his raging desire. Without the help of a maid, she could only manage a haphazard, tousled bun, and some flaxen strands slipped out to caress her cheek.

  He suddenly thought rainstorms were the best thing in the world.

  Claire gave him a quizzical look. “Teddy? Why are you staring at me?”

  “I, ah, uh, nipples.” No, no, no, that had not been what he meant to say at all! His cheeks now burned with the rest of his body.

  Her brows furrowed. “What?” She glanced down, her cheeks pinking as fiercely as his own did. “Oh. I see.”

  “I, ah, beautiful. I, uh, you, wow, perfect.” He’d been reduced to one adjective per statement, apparently. “I—”

  She cut him off before he could deliver another awkward pronouncement. “Would you mind handing me your coat?”

  “Ah.” He should have thought of that. All the blood had unfortunately flowed from his brain to his cock. “Of course.”

  He unbuttoned his coat in a flash, handing it over to her. She pulled it on, covering from sight her wonderful breasts, and he had never regretted lending an article of clothing so much in his life.

  “Well, that was…” She paused, a thoughtful look on her face, as if searching for the right term.

  “Magnificent? Marvelous? Dare I even say majestic?” Now that her chest was covered, he’d regained the power of speech and set out to prove how many adjectives he knew.

  She pulled her bottom lip between her teeth, chewing on it. She wouldn’t look at him now, her focus firmly on the ground. “I was going to say embarrassing.”

  “Oh, God, no,” he declared, too loud and impassioned. “You have splendid breasts. The best of all I’ve seen. The only ones I’ve seen, mind you, but the best nonetheless.” He should really learn to stop talking, but the words just kept spilling out, as if he’d kept them corked for so long he couldn’t possibly put them back in the bottle now. “If anyone should be embarrassed, it’s me, for admitting that. I’m hopeless.”