“Andrew,” she said, tears gathering, “how will I ever go on?”
She didn’t elaborate—she didn’t have to elaborate—but buried her face against his shoulder and bowed her body up into his. He settled a little of his weight on her, even as she felt him slipping from her body. He offered no words to comfort her, no glib answers to her question or her inconvenient emotion.
He tasted her tears with his tongue, then kissed her closed eyes and tucked her face against his shoulder until she quieted.
“Astrid, I would not cause you tears,” he said, rolling to his back. “I want to bring you pleasure, dear heart, not heartache.”
“I am simply emotional,” she said, resting her cheek on his chest. “You need not depart again for the Continent merely to escape my tears, Andrew. I will cope.”
He need not escape to the Continent again. That thought was too sad even for tears.
“Let me hold you.” His request—despite grammar to the contrary—was silly, when his arm was already around her and her knee across his thighs. But he scooted up, to rest his back against the headboard, and bent his knees so his feet were flat on the mattress. He hauled Astrid into his arms and tucked covers around her and himself both.
She curled up in the shelter of his body and took what consolation he offered in the simple—and temporary—animal comfort of his embrace.
Six
After stealing away from Astrid’s room, Andrew spent the balance of his afternoon working with Magic, patiently starting the process of gaining the horse’s trust.
“You’re not wasting any time with him,” Gareth observed when he wandered into the stables as shadows lengthened and the air grew brisk.
“He doesn’t have time to waste,” Andrew said as he drew a soft brush over Magic’s neck. “Every day he has to shift for himself in a world where he doesn’t feel safe, he becomes more convinced it’s the only option he’ll ever have. But he’s a good fellow,” Andrew concluded, thumping the horse on the shoulder. “Aren’t you?”
Magic gave Andrew a disconcerted look and raised his head anxiously, but he stood his ground when he could have broken from the cross ties in an instant.
“Say, yes, Andrew, I’m a good boy,” Gareth told the horse. Magic flicked an ear but kept his focus on Andrew. “And what about you, Andrew? Are you convinced shifting for yourself is the only option you’ll ever have?”
Older brothers never stopped being older brothers. This was as much irritant as comfort. “I beg your pardon?”
Gareth settled himself on a trunk, much like the stable cat might settle itself outside a promising mouse hole. “At breakfast today, Astrid suggested you had always wanted to travel, but you were prevented from doing so because you were too busy keeping an eye on your errant older brother.”
So they were going to air this old linen? Andrew would have to discipline himself to come down to breakfast and ensure Astrid’s opinions were limited to the weather. “Is there a specific question on the floor?” Andrew asked, shifting to brush the other side of the horse.
The brush box was at Gareth’s feet. He rummaged around until he found a hoof pick, and used it to scrape some dirt off his boot heel. “Is Astrid’s conjecture accurate?”
“Gareth, by your own admission, until you married Felicity, you were behaving like an ass. You had no one besides me to watch your back. And I have not always wanted to travel. The thought of crossing the Channel makes me ill.”
He should not have admitted that, but Gareth was winding up to some sort of display of fraternal pique, and Andrew was not in the mood to humor him.
“Then why the hell did you go?” Gareth asked, his sharp tone causing Magic to once again toss his head and roll his eyes.
“Not in front of the children,” Andrew warned, patting the horse reassuringly. He unhitched the gelding from the cross ties and led him to his loose box. After making sure the horse had hay and water, Andrew took off the halter and bolted the door.
Gareth tossed the hoof pick back into the brush box—fired it, more like—and remained enthroned on the trunk, an inquisitor who’d chosen his moment well, for no one would interrupt.
So Andrew cast around for a suitable version of a suitable truth.
“I needed to get away,” he said, busying himself with tying up Magic’s bridle. “If anything, I told myself I was keeping an eye on you because it kept me from my own worst impulses. When you married Felicity, it became obvious you were no longer in need of my support, and travel seemed like an adequate choice.”
“What aren’t you telling me, Andrew?”
Worlds, and he never would tell his brother, either. More half-truths were in order, though, because Gareth would sense outright prevarication easily.
Andrew sank down onto the trunk, feeling abruptly old, wicked, and tired. “As long as you were cutting such a wide, scandalous swath through Polite Society, then you were also taking care of my need to be upset—about the boating accident, about the ways it changed our family, and the ways it changed things for you and me. When you found your peace with Felicity, the upset came to rest more fully on me. I do not find it a comfortable burden, but I cannot seem to escape it.”
Not across twelve countries or several substantial bodies of water.
“Andrew, that boat went down thirteen damned years ago,” Gareth said, clearly bewildered.
Andrew scuffed an infinity pattern in the dirt with his boot heel. “For you, perhaps, but I was on that boat, Gareth, and for me, the accident is only as far away as my last nightmare.”
Gareth nudged the brush box away with a toe, out of kicking range. “Still?”
“Not as frequently as when it first happened. The fellows at school got so tired of me waking up screaming, they petitioned the master for me to have a private room. I’m better, but I will never be free of it.”
Not free of the nightmares or the guilt, though his unease around expecting women seemed to have receded substantially—around one particular expecting woman, anyway.
Gareth hunched forward, his shirt and waistcoat pulling taut across broad shoulders. “I had no bloody idea. Is this why you’re so determined not to marry? You think the occasional nightmare unmans you? If that’s the case, then half the fellows serving on the Peninsula wouldn’t—”
Andrew interrupted him with a shake of his head, and took a deep, unsteady breath.
They were to graduate to three-quarter truths.
“I watched our father drown.” He’d never said those words aloud before. “I got the dinghy into the water and could throw the rope either to him or to Mother. Mother was hampered by her skirts, and Father was the worse for drink. The seas were rising all around us, and all I could hear over the wind was the screaming of the others.” The ladies’ distress had been particularly audible. “I saw that Papa understood the choice I was facing. He swam away from the boat, Gareth. He goddamned swam away from the fucking boat.”
Gareth swore viciously as he wrapped an arm around Andrew’s back. This reaction was so… unexpected, such a relief, Andrew dropped his forehead to his brother’s shoulder—for the rest of the truth would remain forever unspoken.
For a small, painful eternity, the only sounds were made by contented horses, safe and comfortable in their stalls.
Though Andrew heard not his mother’s screams, but those of Julia Ponsonby, shrill, desperate, and piercing even above the roar of the storm. Julia had cried out not only for her own life, but for that of an innocent who’d had no hand in the sins committed by its mother or father.
Andrew moved away from his brother to stand where he could watch Magic munching hay.
“I have not shared that unhappy vignette with Mother,” he said. “I don’t know how much she recalls. She lost consciousness the moment I got her into the boat, and she would not be comforted to know Father gave his life for hers.”
/> “I won’t be telling her,” Gareth said, keeping his seat on the trunk. “Is there more, Andrew?”
Oh, damn him. Before Felicity had gotten her mitts on Gareth, before he’d become a father, Gareth would never have known to ask such a thing.
“That’s bad enough, don’t you think?” Andrew said, but even to his own ears, he’d failed utterly to lighten the tone of the exchange.
Andrew heard his brother march across the barn aisle. “There is no memory you carry,” Gareth said, “there is no act you’ve committed or omitted, no decision you’ve made or failed to make, no thought you’ve had, no impulse you’ve indulged that would make me love you any less.” He stood beside Andrew and brought a hand to the back of his brother’s neck, as if he’d shake Andrew by the scruff. “I mean this, Andrew. I cannot—I cannot—lose you too.”
Andrew nodded once, willing the lump in his throat to subside, but keeping his gaze fixed on the big black horse.
Gareth could make such declarations, because he made them in ignorance. When Gareth withdrew, Andrew felt both relief and desolation. His brother had found a rare moment to invite honesty, and Andrew had declined the offer because no other option would serve either of them—not now, not ever.
***
Andrew and Gareth were both quiet through dinner, so Astrid made a bid to hold up her end of the conversation as the ladies worked out the menus for the weekend. When that topic ran thin, she engaged her sister in the entertaining pastime of listing the symptoms of advancing pregnancy before the menfolk.
“If I get much bigger, one of us is going to have to use another bed,” Felicity remarked, while down the table, her husband devoured a serving of roast fowl.
“There’s no possibility of twins, is there?” Andrew asked.
Felicity put down her fork. “Cousin Callista was a twin, but her sister died in infancy.” She looked down at her tummy, then at her husband’s face. “I had forgotten there are twins in the Worthington family.”
As had Astrid. Her hand went to her belly, while her gaze was on Andrew, who’d had the boldness to raise such a potentially worrisome topic while peering so casually at his wineglass.
“Twins can be dangerous to the mother,” Gareth said, scowling.
“That’s not often the case.” Andrew buttered a roll, all casual unconcern. Astrid focused on his hands rather than the butter. “The babies tend to be smaller, and are thus more easily delivered, if I might mention such an indelicate topic. The difficulty comes in the burden of carrying them and caring for them. The babies can be sickly because they also tend to come early.”
The entire table gaped at him for a silent moment, until Astrid asked the obvious question. “And how did you come to be such an expert on this?”
“Yes, Brother,” Gareth echoed. “Have you firsthand knowledge of siring twins?”
Andrew examined the roll, which had acquired something like a landscape of butter. “I have firsthand knowledge of birthing twins, well, secondhand knowledge.”
“About which,” Gareth said, “you will now enlighten us, within the limits of the ladies’ sensibilities.”
Andrew left off sculpting the butter, but kept the knife in one hand and the roll in the other.
“The Order of Saint Bernard maintains hostels for travelers who find themselves in the high passes of the Alps,” he said. “Some of these hostels are quite comfortable, like mountain spas, but most are rustic: a single room, simple beds, fuel, basic provisions. They have saved many a life, nonetheless, including my own. I tried to make the trip through the mountains from Bavaria to northern Italy at a time of year when that was a chancy undertaking.”
Across the table, Felicity and Gareth exchanged a look of concern while Andrew added yet another dab of butter to his roll. “I found myself in one of these hostels, keeping company with an Italian couple and the wife’s old granny. The wife was quite, quite near her time, but hoping to return to Italy before the babies came. Suffice it to say, she was not successful, and somewhere in the north of Italy, there are two little fellows named Andrew and Alex, who look nothing like me whatsoever.”
Gareth’s expression was pure consternation, Felicity went back to staring at her stomach, and Astrid… wondered why a man purportedly traveling for leisure would attempt to cross the Alps when it was a chancy undertaking.
“Someday,” Gareth said, “you should write down the memoirs of your travels, Andrew. If this is just one example of the situations you found yourself in, then the whole must be fascinating.”
Andrew set what remained of the butter aside. “Lots of lumpy mattresses, boiled cabbage, and stinking cities, but some nice scenery as well.”
Was scenery worth four years of exile?
Astrid did not add that question to her list when Andrew joined her in bed several hours later. She instead kept their conversation to safer topics.
“Screw, swive, fuck, roger… How many naughty words are there for it?” Astrid asked, exasperated.
“Lots.” Andrew was curled behind her, lazily moving his hips to rub his erect cock against the tops of her thighs. If he changed the angle, he could join them in sexual union, but he apparently wasn’t in a hurry.
“I dreamed of you,” he murmured into her ear. “Almost made a mess of my sheets.”
“Why should a dream mess up the sheets?”
And so he explained about nocturnal emissions, about the suspected causes of orchitis, and about how cold affected an erection. Her questions were avid and endless—nothing she asked shocked him. He described different positions and the diseases of vice that could bring permanent and tragic consequences, also bordellos and how multiple partners could enjoy one another at the same time.
“And you’ve done this, with two other men and one woman?” Astrid asked, agog.
“I have,” Andrew answered through a lazy yawn.
“Did you enjoy it?”
“It was years ago, Astrid, and at the time, I fancied myself some kind of connoisseur of exotic pleasures. On my end, it was an inventive use of a woman’s mouth, nothing more. As for the rest of it, I got the impression that keeping one’s elbows and knees out of the other fellows’ way was more of a challenge than actually screwing the wench—that and finding some leverage.”
“Oh, you wicked, depraved, hopeless man.” And how bored had he been to seek adventures like this? “Mind with me you don’t attempt your depravities.”
“I would not hurt you, you know. I would be careful with you,” he said, holding her against him.
She let him make his naughty pronouncements, curiosity and trust turning her up tolerant. He would never hurt her, not bodily, they both knew that. He hinted and teased, and gently threatened, but in the end, slipped himself exactly where, in Astrid’s opinion, he belonged.
“Shall you come, sweetheart?” he asked, his warm hands palming her breasts. “A sweet, easy pleasure at the end of your day?” He teased at her nipples, kissed her shoulders, and rocked himself slowly in and out of her body as if they had years, not mere days to enjoy each other.
“Andrew, I’m going to… Andrew—”
“Let me love you easy this time,” he murmured. “You relax. I’ll bring it to you.” He set up a slow, deep thrusting; maintained a steady, gentle rolling of her nipples; a patter of words and kisses and nibbles that, indeed, brought Astrid’s pleasure to her.
Andrew’s loving was profoundly sweet, also heartbreaking—for her. She had no notion how it was for him, and that was yet another heartbreak.
***
When ladies fainted in stuffy ballrooms, a bit of drama always ensued. The nearest pair of debutantes often took to shrieking, while the dowagers bellowed for their hartshorn and the hostess sent the footmen scampering to open windows that had been opened hours previous. How could passersby appreciate the spectacle of Polite Society dressed in its finest unl
ess the windows were open and the drapery pulled aside?
Some gentleman would gently deposit the afflicted lady on a chair, and she’d flutter gracefully back to awareness, certain her loss of consciousness would be the butt of gossip and speculation for at least two entire days.
Astrid fluttered back to awareness, certain that cat breath had to be the worst scent a lady was ever subjected to.
“I’m fine,” she told her rescuer, who sat back on his tabby haunches and closed his yellow eyes. “I simply left the bed too quickly.”
The beast hopped onto the bed, curled up in the warmth Astrid had left behind, and went about dreaming his feline dreams, while Astrid donned riding attire and hoped a fainting spell was not something Andrew might divine by inspecting her.
By the time she had purloined raspberry jam and toast from the kitchen, she’d concluded that the fainting spell had been an aberration, and nothing to be alarmed about. She munched her toast on her way to the stables and promised herself nothing was going to spoil her last day of freedom before her in-laws appeared on the morrow.
She found Andrew currying a tall, black gelding. A petite mare, already under saddle, stood sedately in her stall, lipping at hay while she watched Andrew with the other horse.
“I don’t think the mare likes the thought of sharing you,” Astrid observed, biting into her toast.
“Possibly, but more likely she doesn’t like the thought of sharing Magic.” He came around to Astrid’s side of the horse, kissed her nose, and stole a bite of her toast.
How casually he charmed, and how thoroughly.
“Besides,” he went on as he resumed grooming the gelding, “she knows better than to be jealous of me, for I love her dearly, don’t I?” He blew a kiss to the mare, who didn’t so much as pause in her chewing.
“I don’t think she doubts your love,” Astrid said, walking up to the gelding and reaching out a hand toward his great Roman nose.
“Of course she doesn’t,” Andrew said quietly. “She’s a smart lady and knows I give her every bit of myself I can.”
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