by Mary Balogh
She drew her head back from its warm burrow and kissed him on the mouth. He had a lovely mouth, wide and firm, with the promise of all sorts of delights within.
“Mmm,” he murmured. “Keep thinking.”
It was not just his physical appeal, she thought, though there was tons and tons of that. But today she had discovered wit and humor and intelligence in him with the result that she had been able to rather like him as a person as well as to admire him as a man. They could perhaps be friends under different circumstances, if only there were more time. But time was something they did not have. Not much time anyway—only the rest of tonight.
She lifted herself on one elbow in order to kiss him more thoroughly, but suddenly two strong hands grasped her by the waist and lifted her bodily upward while he turned over onto his back and into the middle of the bed, and then deposited her right on top of him.
“That is better,” he said. “You make a nice warm blanket.” He pulled the rest of the covers right up over their heads and kissed her with lingering thoroughness, his tongue circling hers, exploring the inside of her mouth and then simulating the sexual act.
Ah, yes, there was still the rest of tonight.
She drew her head free and nuzzled the side of his neck with her lips and teeth and splayed her hands over his shoulders so that she could lift herself sufficiently to rub her breasts and nipples over his chest.
“Mmm,” she said.
“You took the words right out of my mouth,” he told her.
She spread her legs wide so that she could kneel astride his body and thus have greater freedom to move, to touch him, to caress him, to explore his body with palms and fingers and nails and lips and teeth and tongue. He lay still and let her do it, responding for a while only with low, appreciative little grunts. And then she felt him grow large and hard against her abdomen and rubbed against him until she felt that someone must have lit a dozen fires in the room.
It was marvelously exciting to feel her power over him, to know that they would make love again, that she led the way.
But finally he took charge, spreading his hands over her hips, drawing her into position over his hard erection, and pulling downward. Though that last was not necessary. She pressed down onto him until once more she was filled with him.
Gloriously, wondrously filled.
She leaned over him, her hair falling about them both, and gazed into his eyes, just visible in the faint light coming through the window. She lifted some of her weight onto her knees again, spread her hands over his chest once more, and moved, lifting and pressing, creating again the heady rhythm of love.
“Ah, yes,” he murmured to her, “ride me, then, Frances.”
It was a startling and erotic image. But she did indeed ride him over and over again until she could ride no more but only surrender to his hands that came back to her hips to hold her steady as he pressed up hard into her and held there while something at the core of her burst open and blossomed into perfect pleasure—and then perfect peace.
She knelt where she was until he had finished, and then she lay down on him, her legs stretched on either side of his, while he drew the covers warmly over her again and wrapped his arms about her.
They were still joined.
This, she thought drowsily, was what happiness felt like. Not contentment, but happiness.
And tomorrow . . .
But mercifully she slept.
6
Peters and Thomas had both gone out by the time Lucius appeared downstairs the following morning, even though it was still well before dawn. They returned soon after he had gone out to the stables himself, bringing with them the news that the snow had melted considerably and that the road was already passable, provided one proceeded with extreme caution. Miss Allard’s carriage, though, was still firmly stuck in its snowbank. It would take assistance and the best part of the day to haul it out and dry it off and look it over to ensure that it was roadworthy.
“Though it might be said, guv, that it never was that anytime during the last thirty years or so,” Peters could not resist adding.
Thomas muttered darkly to the effect that there would be nothing wrong with his carriage if a certain impudent young ’un, who would remain nameless for the sake of peace, had not passed it when he didn’t ought and then stopped dead in front of it in the middle of the road. And in his day, he added, carriages were made to last.
If Thomas’s coach had not been moving so slowly that it was almost going backward, Peters retorted, and if at that pace it could not stop behind another carriage without slithering into a snowbank, then it was high time a certain coachman who would remain nameless was put out to grass.
Lucius left them to it without attempting any mediation and went back inside the inn and into the kitchen. Frances was in there, busy getting breakfast.
Knowledge hit him like a fist to the stomach. He had been holding that slender body naked in his arms not so long ago.
“If you wish,” he said after giving her the bad news about her own carriage, “we will both remain here another day. It will surely be rescued and roadworthy by tomorrow.”
The suggestion certainly had its appeal—except that the world would find them sometime during the course of the day even if they stayed here. Villagers would come for their ale. The Parkers would return from their holiday. There was no way of recapturing the charm of yesterday’s isolation—or the passion of last night’s.
Time had moved on as it always and inevitably did.
She hesitated, but he could almost read her mind as it turned over the same thoughts and came to the same conclusions.
“No,” she said. “I must get back to the school today somehow. The girls return today, and classes begin tomorrow. There is so much to do before then. I will see if a stagecoach stops somewhere in the village.”
She was not quite looking into his eyes, he noticed. But her face was flushed, and her lips looked soft and slightly swollen, and there was something more than usually warm and feminine about her whole demeanor. She looked like a woman who had been well and thoroughly bedded the night before.
He felt partly aroused again by the sight of her. But last night was over and done with, alas. It ought not to have happened at all, he supposed, though of course he had gone to some pains to see that it did happen. And to say that he had enjoyed the outcome would be to understate the case.
It was simply time to move on.
“There is none,” he said. “I have asked Wally. But if you are willing to leave Thomas here to take your carriage back where it came from tomorrow, you may come with me this morning. I’ll take you to Bath.”
She raised her eyes to his then, and her flush deepened.
“Oh, but I cannot ask that of you,” she said. “Bath must be well out of your way.”
It was. More than that, since yesterday could not be recaptured, he did not really want to prolong this encounter beyond its natural ending. It would have been best this morning if they could simply have kissed, bidden each other a cheerful farewell, and gone their separate ways. It would have all been over within an hour or so.
“Not very much out of the way,” he said. “And you did not ask it of me, did you? I think I ought to see you safely delivered to your school, Frances.”
“Because you feel responsible for what happened to my carriage?” she asked.
“Nonsense!” he said. “If Thomas were my servant, I would set him to digging about the flower beds in a remote corner of my park, where no one would notice if he pulled out the flowers and left the weeds. If he ever was competent at driving a carriage, it must have been at least twenty years ago.”
“He is a loyal retainer to my great-aunts,” she said. “You have no right to—”
He held up a staying hand and then strode toward her and kissed her hard on the mouth.
“I would love to have a good scrap with you again,” he said. “I remember you as a worthy foe. But I would rather not waste good traveling
time. I want to take you to Bath in person so that I do not have to worry about your getting there safely.”
The roads might be passable, but there was no doubt that they would be dangerous. Snow, slush, mud—whichever they were fated to encounter, and it seemed probable that it would be all three before the journey was ended—the going would be difficult. He would worry about her if he knew she was alone with the elderly Thomas driving her more-than-elderly carriage. Even tomorrow the roads would not be at their best.
Good Lord! he thought suddenly. He had not gone and fallen in love with the woman, had he? That would be a deuced stupid thing to do.
He had just promised his grandfather that he would begin seriously courting a suitable bride—and a suitable bride in his world meant someone with connections to the aristocracy, someone who had been brought up from the cradle to fill just such a role as that of Countess of Edgecombe.
Someone perfect in every way.
Someone like Portia Hunt.
Not someone like a schoolteacher from Bath who taught music and French.
It was a harsh reality but a reality nonetheless. It was the way his world worked.
“I would be very grateful, then,” she said, turning away to finish cooking their breakfast. “Thank you.”
She was cool and aloof this morning—except for the flushed cheeks and swollen lips. He wondered if she regretted last night, but he would not ask her. There was no point in regretting what was done, was there? And she had certainly not been regretting it while it was happening. She had loved with hunger and enthusiasm—a thought he had better not pursue further.
He wished there were a stagecoach coming through the village. He needed to get away from her.
But less than an hour later, having eaten and washed the dishes and left money and instructions with Thomas and a generous payment with Wally for their stay at the inn, Lucius’s carriage set out on its way to Bath with Frances Allard as a passenger.
There had been some argument, of course, over who should make the payments. He had prevailed, but he knew that giving in had been painful, even humiliating, to her. If his guess was correct—and he was almost certain it was—her reticule did not contain vast riches. Her pride was doubtless stung. She sat in stiff silence for the first mile or two, looking out through the window beside her.
Lucius found himself wishing again that they could relive yesterday—just exactly as it had been except perhaps for the afternoon, which they had wasted by spending apart in a vain attempt to avoid what had probably been inevitable from the moment of their meeting. It must be years since he had frolicked as he had with her out in the snow just for the simple enjoyment of frolicking. It was years since he had danced voluntarily. Indeed, he did not believe he had ever done so before last evening. And he still felt relaxed and satiated after a night of good, vigorous sex.
Damnation, but he was not ready to say good-bye to her yet.
And why should he say it? The Season would not begin in any earnest until after Easter. There was not much he could do about fulfilling his promise until then. And despite what his mother and sisters seemed to believe, he had not yet committed himself to Portia Hunt. In fact, he had always been very careful in her presence and in that of Balderston, her father, and most especially in that of Lady Balderston not to commit himself in any way, not to say anything that might be construed as a marriage offer. He had not even promised his grandfather that she would be the one.
Honor was not at stake here, then. Not yet, anyway. He had not been unfaithful to anyone last night.
Why should he say good-bye?
He was rationalizing, of course. He knew that. There was no realistic future for him and Frances Allard. But he went on trying to devise one anyway.
He had little experience with not getting whatever he wanted.
Why could there not have been a stagecoach passing through the village?
Or why could she not simply have said that she would wait alone for her great-aunts’ carriage to be ready tomorrow? But he would not, she was sure, have been willing to leave her alone at the inn. And, truth to tell, she could not have borne to be left alone there, to watch his carriage drive away from the inn and disappear to view. The emptiness of the inn, the silence, would have been unbearable.
It was what would happen in Bath, though. The thought caused a painful churning of her stomach that made her sorry she had eaten any breakfast.
The best solution, of course, would have been to say good-bye this morning after breakfast and to have both left in a different carriage—to go in the same direction for a while. His carriage would soon have outpaced hers, though. Anyway, that had not been an option.
Ah, there was no easy way to say good-bye.
What on earth had possessed her last night? She had never come close to giving in to such temptation before.
She had given herself to a stranger. She had made love with him and spent all night in bed with him. They had coupled three separate times, the third time hot and swift and wonderful just before he got up and left her room, wearing only his pantaloons and carrying the rest of his clothes.
And now she was going to have to suffer all the considerable emotional consequences. She was already suffering them even though she was still with him. She could feel his body close to hers on the carriage seat. She could feel his body heat down her right side. But it was the end. Soon—at the end of this slow, dreary journey past snow fields that looked gray rather than pristine white today—soon they would be saying good-bye, and she would never see him again.
And as if depression and grief were not enough, there was her nervousness every time the carriage wheels slithered on the slushy road surface—and they did so almost constantly during the first few miles until Lucius Marshall slid his hand beneath her lap robe, drew her right hand free of her muff, and held it firmly in his, lacing his fingers with hers.
She could have wept at his warm, assured touch.
“Peters is not the most subservient of retainers,” he said, “but he is the finest driver of my acquaintance. I would, and do, trust him with my life.”
“I think,” she said, “that the feeling of slithering then sliding backward right off the road and finding myself submerged in a snowbank will live in my nightmares for a long time.”
“But if it had not happened to you,” he said, “you would not have met me.”
He was looking down at her, she knew, but she would not turn her head to see his expression. He had said the same thing on that very first day—was it only the day before yesterday?—but he had been being nastily ironic on that occasion.
“No,” she said. “I would not, would I? How dreadful that would have been.”
“There, you see?” He chuckled. “You forgot your nervousness for a moment in order to be spiteful. Or do you mean it?”
She laughed too despite herself.
Her nervousness largely disappeared after that, and so did the tension there had been between them ever since he walked into the kitchen this morning. They continued to hold hands, and after a while she realized that her shoulder was resting against the heavy capes of his greatcoat. She could feel the warmth and strength of his arm beneath them.
She would have her classes write an essay—no, a story—within the next few days, she thought. Not the dull topic of how they spent Christmas that they might expect, but something more creative—“Imagine that as you returned alone to school after Christmas, you ran into a snowstorm and were stranded at a deserted inn with one other person. Write the story . . .”
Marjorie Phillips would dip her quill pen in the inkwell and bend over her paper without further ado and would not straighten up again until she had scribbled a dozen pages of closely packed writing. Joy Denton would do almost as well. Sarah Ponds would put up her hand and remind Miss Allard that she had not left the school before Christmas and therefore did not return to it after Christmas. The rest of the class would sit with furrowed brows and inactive or even nonexistent im
aginations, wondering if she would notice if they wrote large, widely stretched words on widely spaced lines and made their stories one page long.
Frances smiled fondly at the thought. All the girls were very precious to her.
But her thoughts were not easily diverted during that long day of travel.
They stopped a few times for changes of horse, and once for almost a full hour to dine, but for the rest of the time they sat together in the carriage, not talking a great deal, their hands clasped, their thighs and arms touching, her head sometimes tipped sideways to rest on his shoulder. Once she dozed off and, when she woke up again, she found that he had laid his cheek against the top of her head and was himself asleep.
Again she felt like weeping. Her chest was tight and sore from the necessity of holding back her tears.
It was sometime after that, when it seemed to her that they must surely not be very far from Bath, that he set one arm right about her shoulders, turned her to him, lifted her chin in the cleft between his thumb and forefinger, and kissed her.
His mouth felt shockingly warm in contrast to the chill of the air. She heard herself utter a low moan, and she wrapped her arm about his neck and kissed him back with all the yearning she felt.
“Frances,” he murmured after a long, long while. “Frances, what the devil am I going to do about you?”
She drew away from him, sat back in her seat, and eyed him warily.
“I think,” he said, “we ought to ask ourselves if it is really necessary to say good-bye to each other when we arrive in Bath.”
His words were so exactly what she had been dreaming of hearing all day that her heart lurched with painful hope.
“I teach school there,” she said. “You have your own life elsewhere.”
“Forget about teaching,” he said. “Come with me instead.” There was a reckless intensity in his eyes.
“Come with you?” She frowned, and her heart raced enough to make her breathless. “Where?”
