I have come to have a true fondness for the country.
Lord Marlowe
The Bachelor’s Guide, 1893
The following weekend, Harry finally got his way and taught Emma to swim. It took some doing, however. First he tried to persuade her by pointing out it was something everyone ought to know for reasons of safety. His concern didn’t seem to impress her.
“That’s sweet of you, Harry,” she answered, shifting beside him in the hammock to settle her cheek in the dent of his shoulder, “but unnecessary, since I’m not going anyplace where the water is over my head.”
He had no intention of giving up. “This isn’t at all like you. You enjoy learning new things. Besides, you’re a sensible person and refusing to learn to swim just isn’t sensible.”
“Sensible.” She lifted her head and made a face at him. “Horrid word.”
“It isn’t a horrid word.” He kissed her nose. “I like my sensible Emma.”
She still shook her head, and he frowned at her in puzzlement. “What is the real reason for this hesitancy? Tell me. Is it that you don’t trust me to teach you?”
“Of course I trust you. I just…” She gave an aggravated sigh as he continued to look at her, waiting for an answer. “All right, if you must know, I just don’t feel comfortable with taking off my clothes outside in broad daylight.”
“Wear something, a combination or some other undergarment.”
“Once you’re wet, that’s almost like being naked.”
“Yes.” He gave her a leer like some villain in a comic play. “Yes, it is.”
“Harry, I’m serious.”
He could tell that she was and sobered at once. “Shy, are you?”
“I’ve always been shy. Modest, I mean. You know that.”
“God, Emma, you don’t still feel that way with me, do you? I’ve seen you naked in daylight, and I thank heaven for it, too, by the way. Every time.”
“I don’t mind if you see me, but someone else might see me. I’d be mortified if that happened.”
“That’s why you won’t learn to swim?” When she nodded, he laughed and kissed her. “Woman, why didn’t you just say so straightaway? I’ll teach you at night.” He kissed her again. “Naked. Damn, that is such a ripping idea, I’m amazed I didn’t think of it to begin with.”
That night, Harry got his wish, Emma got her first swimming lesson, and when he had her floating on her back in the water, moonlight washing over her bare skin, with her lips curved in a relaxed half smile and her eyes looking up into his with absolute trust, he was heartily glad no one else had ever taught Emma Dove how to swim.
“Dogs are better.”
“Are not.” Emma took a blackberry out of the fruit basket that sat between them on the blanket, and popped it into her mouth.
“Are, too.” Harry reached into the picnic basket, pulled out a loaf of bread, and tore off a chunk. “Dogs are friendly and loyal.”
“So are cats.”
He made a sound of derision as he slathered butter on bread for both of them.
“Mr. Pigeon was very friendly to you,” she reminded him. “And how can you say he’s not loyal? He brings me birds.”
“Dead ones.”
“It’s the truest sign of cat loyalty.”
“Emma, he coughs up balls of hair. It’s disgusting. How can you possibly love any creature that coughs up hair?”
“How can you love any creature that drools?” she countered and began to eat her bread and butter. “I think I’ll bring Pigeon next time so you can get to know him better.”
“Absolutely not.”
“He adores you already, remember?”
“For your sake, my sweet, I’d like to say the feeling is mutual, but it’s not. Nothing against Mr. Pigeon, but I loathe cats.”
Emma didn’t respond to that, for her attention had been caught by something in the distance. “There they are again,” she murmured and gestured to an elderly couple, the same pair they saw at least once every weekend. Hand in hand, they were crossing the meadow about fifty yards away. “They always walk holding hands.”
“Do they?” Harry pulled a hunk of cheese and a pot of mustard out of the picnic basket. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“It’s very romantic.” She paused, struck by a thought. “We walk all the time, Harry, and we never hold hands.”
“Don’t we?” His voice was light. “How very British of us.”
What she’d said bothered him. She could tell, though she couldn’t fathom why. She thought about pushing the subject, asking him why he never held her hand, but something in his face made her decide against it. Instead, she ate the last of her bread, took another blackberry out of the fruit basket, and rolled over onto her back to stare at the clouds and sky overhead.
“Consuelo and I used to walk holding hands. It was the only remotely romantic thing we were allowed to do.”
Emma froze, the blackberry poised halfway to her lips. This was only the second time in all the years she’d known him that he had ever mentioned his former wife. She ate the berry, waiting for him to say more, but he did not, and after a few moments she spoke. “How odd,” she said in the most neutral tone she could manage. She rolled back onto her stomach. “Americans are usually much freer about the proprieties of courtship than we are.”
“Consuelo’s father was half Cuban. He was also one of those very strict, old-fashioned types, and her mother was that way, too.” Harry began to pare slices of cheese off the wedge in front of him without looking at her. “We were never allowed to be alone. All our conversations were in front of others, unless we were dancing. All so respectable, so proper. The only time I was allowed to speak privately with her before we became engaged was when I asked her to marry me. And even then, her mother was right outside the door, listening at the keyhole, I’m sure.”
Emma heard the contempt in his voice, and she didn’t know what to say.
“After we became engaged,” he continued, “we were allowed to hold hands, and we could walk ahead of the others in our party if we wished to converse privately. But how private can a conversation be when a couple is surrounded by people barely out of earshot who can see everything you’re doing? And as for anything like kissing, it simply wasn’t possible.” He paused and looked up. “The first time I was able to kiss Consuelo was on our wedding day.”
He gave a humorless laugh. “Is it any wonder our marriage was doomed? I was passionately, madly in love with a woman—girl—I knew nothing about, and I had no chance of getting to know her. Had I had that chance, I might have seen past my own infatuation and figured out the truth. But I was so young then, so stupid. I felt something was wrong, but I was only twenty-two, in a foreign country. I didn’t want to mess things up by offending her or her family. It didn’t help that we were constantly swarmed by the American press. They followed us everywhere, and most of them thought I was marrying her for her money and she was marrying me because I had a title and social position. They got it half right, didn’t they?”
His hands stilled. The wedge of cheese was in shreds. He looked up. “Consuelo never loved me. She was a seventeen-year-old girl who had been forced—bullied, coerced, what ever you want to call it—into marrying me by her parents. I think Estravados had me in mind for a son-in-law from the moment he met me. You see, unbeknownst to me, Consuelo was already in love with someone else, a man her family considered completely unsuitable.”
Emma nodded. “Yes. Mr. Rutherford Mills. I know.”
“She tried unsuccessfully to elope with him, and that was part of the reason they watched over her so carefully. They thought she’d run off with the fellow again. I wasn’t worth much more than Mills at the time, but Estravados liked me. More important, I had a title and an estate, and some powerful connections, and he wanted to do business in Britain. To him, I was a far better choice for his daughter than Rutherford Mills, who had nothing to offer her.”
Harry poured himself a glass of wine and down
ed it in one draught. “So, after a quick but carefully supervised courtship, an even quicker engagement, and a hasty society wedding, there you are with a viscount in the family, social entre in Britain, no unsuitable suitor hovering by to steal away your daughter, and everybody’s happy. Everybody except Consuelo, who proceeded to spend the next four years in abject misery, blaming herself when she wasn’t blaming me. I tried to make her happy. God, I tried—”
He broke off abruptly and stood up. He walked a few feet away, leaned his shoulder against a tree, and stared across the meadow, his profile to her. “But you can’t make someone happy. You can’t make someone love you. Frustration sets in, resentment, too. And pain, discovering that your feelings aren’t reciprocated, being made to feel like a cad for wanting to make love to your own wife, realizing you’ve been lied to.” He rubbed his hands over his face. “Consuelo and I spent four years making each other thoroughly miserable. Acting pitiful and laying blame became her weapons of choice. Avoidance, deflection, and biting wit became mine. It reached the point where we could no longer speak a civil word to each other. She kept shutting her bedroom door, and truth be told, I reached the point where I lost any desire to open it. It was hell.”
“I see,” Emma murmured, appreciating how lonely he must have felt in such a marriage. Loneliness was something she understood very well, and her heart ached for him.
“I didn’t know she’d begun to secretly correspond with Mills. Heaps of letters, pouring out stories of woe about what a nightmare it was living in En gland with me, assuring him that she’d always loved him, begging him to come and save her, take her away.” He paused. “Begging was one of Consuelo’s favorite tactics. She begged me for a divorce. I refused.”
Emma nodded with understanding. “Because of your sisters.”
“Even now, ten years after I first petitioned the courts, they still suffer society’s disparagement. My sisters, my mother, even my grandmother, are snubbed by many in society to this day, and it hurts them.” He looked at her with a flash of defiance. “Is it any wonder I have no patience with society’s rules? That I think them silly and pointless?”
She shook her head. “It’s perfectly understandable.”
He shrugged, his flash of anger dying as quickly as it had come. “The rest, as they say, is history. She ran off with Mills to America, and did it as publicly as possible, to give me ample grounds to divorce Consuelo for adultery and name him as correspondent. Estravados disowned her, she and Mills went off together. Last I heard, they were in the Argentine.”
“Why on earth didn’t she just tell you the truth before you married?” Emma asked, baffled. “Surely there must have been some opportunity. Why did she lie and say she loved you if she didn’t?”
“It’s clear you never met her parents. Estravados was a formidable man, and his wife equally so. Consuelo was no match for them. She just caved in under the pressure and did what was expected of her so she wouldn’t disappoint her family.”
Harry met her gaze, and there was something in his eyes that hurt her, bruised her deep down. “She was trying to be a good girl, to win her family’s approval. So she lied to me, and she lied to herself.”
Emma sucked in her breath. That hurt, to be compared to his former wife, especially in light of all the times in her life when she’d been dishonest with herself. She got up, walked over to him, and put her arms around his waist. “I have never lied to you, Harry, and I never will,” she told him. “And I’ll never lie to myself again, not even to be a good girl.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
“I’m hopeless at this,” Harry warned her and picked up the carving knife and fork. “I told you I always saw at the chicken,” he added, eying the bird before him with doubt.
Emma moved to his side of the worktable. She pointed to the place where he should cut away the leg. “If you angle the knife this way,” she added, gesturing with her hand, “you sever the joint cleanly and avoid sawing at the bone.”
Harry followed her instructions. “You see,” Emma said as the knife went straight between the bones with ease. “Carving’s easy. You just need to know where to place the knife when you cut.”
“Perhaps I have mastered this part, but what about the wings? I have to learn how to carve those.” He grinned at her. “After all, that’s the only part you’re allowed to eat.”
“I have come around to your way of thinking about chicken.”
“Have you?”
“Yes. Just eating the wing for the sake of delicacy is silly. Besides, I like the dark meat best.”
“It’s a thigh, Emma,” he said, laughing. “You still can’t say it, can you?”
“Thigh,” she said, laughing with him. “I like thighs.”
“Really?” He returned his attention to his task. “I’m partial to breasts myself.”
Even a month after beginning this affair, she didn’t always know when he was teasing, but she did know when he was making a wicked innuendo. A different inflection came into his voice, something sultry and provocative. She leaned closer, deliberately brushing her breast against his arm. “You think breasts are the sweetest meat, do you?” she murmured, becoming aroused.
“Why, Emma Dove,” he murmured and set aside the knife and fork, “are you trying to seduce me?” When he glanced at her, that special look was in his eyes, and her body began to burn in response.
“Yes.” She reached for him, fingers toying with the buttons of his shirt. “Let’s make love.”
“Excellent notion.” He kissed her. “We’ll eat afterward.”
She glanced at the food on the worktable, then back at him, struck by a sudden idea. “Why not do both at the same time?”
He gave a low, throaty chuckle. “Emma, Emma, how terribly dissolute you’ve become.”
“I blame it on your influence.” She reached for a grape from the fruit bowl and pressed it to his mouth. “You’re the one who said food was carnal.”
“So I did.” He took the grape into his mouth and ate it.
She began to unbutton his shirt, but to her surprise, he stopped her. “Go up and get the packet.”
She glanced around the kitchen. “You don’t want to take the food upstairs?”
“Too messy. And I don’t want to have to run upstairs and fetch the packet later. It would spoil the mood. Besides, once we get started, I might lose my head and forget.”
A vague uneasiness rippled through her at those words, and she couldn’t define why. The precautions they took were wise, the consequences dire if they forgot to exercise them. She went upstairs and retrieved the red velvet envelope from the bedroom, shoving the odd, uneasy feeling out of her mind.
When she reentered the kitchen, she saw that Harry had stripped down to just his trousers and was assembling several of the foods they’d intended to have for dinner on a tray. She watched as he placed bite-size chunks of bread, chicken and cheese on the plate, along with grapes, peach slices, and two small pots, one of mustard and one of honey.
“Honey?” she asked dubiously.
“Honey, Emma.” He gave her a wicked smile, and pulled the spoon up out of the honey pot. Emma stared at it, watching honey fall from the spoon, a stream of liquid gold in the late afternoon sunlight.
“Harry,” she breathed, realizing what he intended. She was so shocked, so excited, she could hardly breathe. She licked her lips. “You can’t possibly mean to—”
“Better get undressed,” he advised as he repeated the gesture with the spoon.
She watched his hand, mesmerized, lust pouring over her, lust that was as warm and sweet as the honey falling from the spoon. “But honey will…make me all sticky,” she pointed out even as she began to unbutton her shirtwaist.
He chuckled. “Getting sticky is the whole point, my darling. That’s why, when it comes to this sort of thing, it’s best if you’re already naked before you start.”
She was down to nothing but her combination before she reali
zed he was making no move to take off his trousers. Instead, he was still playing with the honey, but he was watching her. “Aren’t you supposed to be naked, too?” she asked as she unfastened the buttons of her last undergarment.
“It helps a man prolong things if he keeps his trousers on, and I want this to be a long meal. I’ll finish undressing a bit later.”
“Oh, no, you won’t.” She tossed her combination on the floor with the rest of her clothes and took the spoon out of his hand. “Strip off those trousers, Harry,” she ordered. “Now.”
“Getting awfully bossy, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” She laughed, rather amazed at that discovery. Amazed at herself for standing brazenly naked in a kitchen with her lover, amazed that she was thinking up wicked things to do to him with a pot of honey and a plate of food. “I like ordering you around.”
“Now I’ve done it,” he said as he unbuttoned his trousers. “I’ve let you see that I’m just putty in your hands. We’ll never do anything my way again.”
“Hurry up.” She leaned one hip against the table and lifted the spoon to her lips. “I’m starving.”
She licked the honey from the spoon with a lascivious boldness that she’d never displayed during their lovemaking before, and it seemed to amaze him as much as it did her, for she saw his eyes widen. She heard him catch his breath. She began to suck on the spoon.
He groaned and slid the trousers off his hips. “I wanted this to be a seven course meal for you, but there’s not a chance of it now.”
“As long as I can have dessert. You know my sweet tooth.” She set aside the spoon and lifted the tray of food from the table.
Naked, they both sank to their knees. Emma placed the tray on the wooden floor beside them, but she wasn’t quite certain what to do next.
He showed her. Taking a chunk of bread from the tray, he dipped it in the honey and brought it to her lips. She ate it. And then, remembering what he’d done that day at Au Chocolat, she licked the honey off his fingers.
“What happened to shy, modest Emma?” he asked, pulling his fingers back and reaching for a peach slice from the tray. He dunked it in the honey.
And Then He Kissed Her Page 25
