Desired

by Nicola Cornick

  “You flatter me,” Tess said drily, aware that Margery had not had time to curl her hair and that it was plaited into one braid and pinned under her bonnet so haphazardly that strands were already escaping.

  “I never flatter,” Rothbury corrected. Their eyes met. His were such a clear, expressive green, so perceptive, so compelling. “You’ll get no false compliments from me,” he said. “I never learned the art of dissimulation and cannot see a use for it anyway.”

  The hot, giddy, tumbling feeling in Tess’s stomach intensified. “I do believe I need breakfast before we depart this morning,” she said, turning away from him so that she did not give away too much of her feelings.

  Instead of visiting the Tower of London, they went to see the exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

  “Because you like paintings,” Rothbury said smoothly when Tess asked him why. “Often when you talk you use very visual imagery and when we are out I see you looking at things with an artist’s eye.” He smiled. “You have a lot of talent.”

  “I have a little talent,” Tess admitted warily. She thought of the political cartoons she’d recently completed and felt a pang of guilt. The previous afternoon she had taken three of them to the printers in Cheapside and this morning they were on sale on the streets for a penny each. The one depicting the government seated around the cabinet table like a line of fat suet puddings whilst the people outside the window starved was proving particularly popular.

  Rothbury’s smile broadened at her qualified admission. “You are too modest,” he said. He helped her down from the carriage and guided her into the gallery with one hand on the small of her back. Even through the thickness of her pelisse Tess could feel his thumb moving gently along her spine. It was distracting, as was the scent of him. As he moved she caught a hint of it, of cold fresh air and clean linen. She was accustomed to men who were polished and pomaded to within an inch of their lives. They smelled so strongly of cologne that it walked into the room before they did. Rothbury, in contrast, smelled of masculinity and the outdoors, exactly as she would have expected him to do. At the same time there was something knee-weakeningly familiar about his scent. Her body seemed to respond to it and the knowledge made Tess feel hot and aware.

  Fortunately, once they were inside Rothbury released her and so she was able to concentrate on the collection rather than on his proximity. The elegant rooms of the Picture Gallery housed some marvellous Dutch landscapes and English portraits, and Tess was soon engrossed, wandering from room to room, discussing light and style with the curator, who was only too happy to have a knowledgeable visitor. Even so, she was very conscious of Rothbury watching her as she viewed the paintings.

  “I’m sorry,” she said at one point. “I am taking so long and I am sure that you must be bored.” But Rothbury only smiled.

  “It is reward enough for me to see your pleasure,” he said, and Tess blushed as she felt the happiness slide through her in response to his words.

  Eventually she was obliged to admit that her feet were too sore and that she was too tired and hungry to stay a moment longer. It was only when Rothbury commented that the gallery was closing in ten minutes that she realised how late it was.

  “I liked all the collections except the still-life paintings,” she said, as Rothbury handed her up into the carriage.

  “Too many dead pheasant and rabbits?” he said quizzically. He was still holding her hand, looking up at her, the wind disordering his hair and the pale late-afternoon sun striking across his eyes. “I said you had a soft heart,” he said, “though you pretend otherwise.”

  Tess blushed again. It was becoming a bad habit. She felt quite ridiculously gauche.

  “I like being able to put you to the blush,” Rothbury said, swinging up into the carriage beside her. His eyes were warm as they dwelled on her face. “You give the impression of being such a sophisticate, Teresa. It is good to know that there is some vulnerability in you.”

  As far as Tess was concerned she was a mass of vulnerabilities, never more so than now when her hand was resting in his and his touch was insistent and called to something in her that Tess neither recognised nor understood. She withdrew her hand from his with rather more haste than finesse and saw him smile as he recognised her susceptibility. He looked damned pleased with himself, she thought, yet she was powerless to cut that satisfaction down to size.

  Rothbury took her to the Fountain Tavern on the Strand for dinner and they ate mutton pie and drank warm beer.

  “Goodness,” Tess said as she took a seat in a booth tucked at the back of the inn, the table bare wood, the floor stone strewn with sawdust, “you do know how to show a lady a good time, Lord Rothbury.”

  Rothbury grinned. “I think that as we are betrothed, you should start to call me Owen,” he said. “I am not a great one for formality and have no desire for my wife to sound like my butler.”

  “Our mother always called our father Lord Fenner,” Tess said, giggling. “We did not realise he had another name until we were well into our teens.”

  She looked around at the clientele. “I do believe this is a Whig tavern.” She cocked her head. “An interesting choice for one of Lord Sidmouth’s men.”

  “I like to live dangerously,” Owen said. His eyes, brilliant with challenge, mocked her and Tess felt her heart flip.

  “Don’t you?” he added softly.

  Tess almost choked on her beer. She met the dazzling demand in his gaze and felt a strange, heated sliding sensation in her stomach. She did not understand how Owen could tempt her so close to confession. Each day they spent together built the intimacy between them and with it her instinctive desire to trust him. But it was all an illusion. Just as she was using him, so he was trying to entrap her into indiscretion. She knew it. That was the game between them.

  She gave him a cool little smile. “I think,” she said deliberately, “that the real reason you chose to dine here is because you cannot afford better.” She raised the beer glass in ironic toast. “I have not forgotten that your pockets are to let.”

  Owen gave a crack of laughter. Tess could see admiration in his eyes for the way she had so skillfully evaded his trap. She smiled demurely.

  “Have you ever been rich?” she asked.

  His eyes were still bright with amusement. “A few times,” he admitted.

  “What happened to the money?”

  “Gambled away or spent.”

  He was certainly spare with the words, Tess thought. But always direct. She found it so attractive. She had to remember it was all part of the armoury he was deploying to make her fall.

  “How odd,” she said, cutting into the pie crust and inhaling the fragrant steam. “You do not strike me as a reckless spendthrift.”

  “When I was younger I did all manner of reckless things,” Owen said. “Violent, even.” There was a shade of something in his voice that Tess could not place. It sounded like regret, or bitterness. She was not sure. Owen was always so considered, so controlled. It made him very hard to read. He paused and for a moment Tess had the conviction that he was about to confide something in her. Then he shrugged. The moment passed. His throat moved as he took a long draught of the beer. “I was careless then,” he said, “and I never thought of the future. I lived for no more than the moment and the next adventure.”

  The idea of a heedless young adventurer appealed to Tess. “Tell me about that,” she said.

  To her surprise, he did tell her, in more detail than his usual terse style. He told her all about his youth in Georgia and his family of two brothers and three sisters, and his father’s business and the way that they had all gone without so that there would be enough money to buy him a commission in the American Navy.

  By the time he was twenty-five he had sold out, bought his own ship and was his own master, and so it had stayed until he had received the letter that changed his life.

  “The whole concept of inheriting wealth and title is foreign to me,” he confessed. “
I never sought to be Viscount Rothbury, never even imagined it.”

  “Yet you did not refuse the title,” Tess said.

  He looked at her, putting down his tankard with slow deliberation. “Can a peer do that? Damnation, I had no idea.”

  Tess burst out laughing. “You would not have done!”

  “And disappoint my mother?” Owen shook his head. “No, you are right, I would not have done.”

  “Not just for your mother’s sake,” Tess said. “You are not a man to abandon your responsibilities or shirk the demands made on him.”

  Owen looked at her for such a long time that she started to feel uncomfortable. Once again she had the strangest feeling that he was about to say something important, something that was not a part of this game of bluff and double bluff between them but was a real insight into his soul. Then he smiled, that long slow smile, and Tess felt hot and giddy, as though she had drunk too much ale. His hand covered hers.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” he drawled, and Tess thought she would melt into a puddle right there on the stone floor. She snatched her hand away.

  “Don’t practise that Southern charm on me,” she said. “I’m too old a hand to be seduced like that.”

  Another smile. “Are you sure?” Owen said. There was a light as bright as a flame in his eyes and Tess felt as though she was dissolving in the heat of it. In that moment she was not sure of anything other than the fact that he was at least ten times more dangerous to her than she had imagined.

  She cast around hastily for something else to say to cover her embarrassment. “You cannot be a Yankee if you come from Georgia,” she said.

  His mouth twisted. “The British tend to call all Americans Yankees,” he said. “They are not particular, especially if they mean to be insulting.”

  His tone was mild but Tess sensed something deeper beneath the words, an edge of anger that he had found hard to forget. “I imagine you suffered a great deal of that when you were a prisoner of war,” she said.

  He nodded. His face was shadowed now. “It was no more than I expected.”

  Tess reached out impulsively across the table to touch the back of his hand. “Was it very bad?”

  He stilled for a moment. His gaze was on her slender fingers as they rested against the tanned skin of his wrist. Tess realised with a little shock what she had done; normally she never touched anyone spontaneously. Then Owen looked up and, as their eyes met, she felt dizzy, as though she was falling. She wrenched her gaze away from Owen’s and snatched back her hand.

  It seemed a long time before he spoke.

  “Physically I was well treated,” he said, as though nothing had interrupted their conversation. “But I hated that I was not free. I cannot bear to be confined for long.”

  “Yes,” Tess said. For a man accustomed to the high seas and wild empty spaces, to be penned in a parole town or locked in a gaol would have been near intolerable, his every move watched, all his activities circumscribed.

  “I don’t know how you could bear it,” she said with a little shudder.

  His eyes gleamed with amusement. “I’m a very patient man,” he said. He shifted one booted leg across his knee. “I am always prepared to wait for the things I want.”

  For some reason his words sent another ripple of emotion—anticipation, nervousness—skittering down Tess’s spine. She took a hasty gulp of her beer.

  “I spoke to Corwen last night,” Rothbury continued. “He should not trouble you again. I hear he left early this morning for an extended stay on his Herefordshire estates.”

  Tess looked him in the eye. “What did you do to him?”

  Rothbury shrugged. There was a shadow of a smile about his mouth. “I spoke to him,” he repeated.

  “Is that all?” Tess said. “You spoke to him and he decided to leave London for his estates?”

  The smile deepened. “What else?” Rothbury said. He lounged back in his chair, his body relaxed but his gaze cool and watchful.

  “I don’t know,” Tess said. She felt confused. She had asked for Owen’s help and he had given it freely. She had drawn on his strength and he had not failed her. Suddenly she was deeply ashamed of her deception. More than ever she wanted to trust him, to beg for openness between them. But it was too late. She was too frightened, in too deep. She hated the thought that Owen’s help might have been calculated, nothing more than another step on the path to lead her to trust him. The web of deceit was getting so tangled and she could not bear it.

  She felt the prickle of unexpected tears in her throat.

  “Thank you,” she said. Her face puckered. “I…I am truly grateful.”

  Owen took her hand and kissed the palm. “My pleasure,” he said. His lips were warm against her skin, sending all kinds of ripples of sensation to the core of her. He sounded so sincere.

  “I have the special licence,” he added. “We may marry whenever you choose.”

  Tess jumped, snatching her hand from his. A tremor of disquiet shook her. “Marry?”

  “It tends to follow a betrothal,” Owen pointed out. He was watching her, his green gaze lazy but still very acute.

  “I need time to buy my trousseau,” Tess said quickly. She knew she was prevaricating. The idea of actually marrying Owen still disturbed her and she was not sure why.

  “A week?” Owen suggested.

  “A week to do my clothes shopping?” Tess was horrified. “Certainly not! I need a month at least.”

  “Too long,” Owen said. “Ten days.”

  “Two weeks,” Tess said.

  “Ten days,” Owen repeated.

  This time, Tess did not argue.

  She slept surprisingly well that night and woke the following morning just as Margery was drawing back the curtains. She joined Owen downstairs thirty minutes later. They went to the Monument to the Great Fire of London and climbed up to the top to see all of London spread out below them, the smoke from a thousand chimneys lying across the cold city like a veil.

  “You are such a tourist,” Tess complained, as she tried to catch her breath from the three hundred and eleven steps. She had been appalled to discover that Owen actually expected her to join him on his ascent. “No one who lives in London bothers to climb up here.”

  “Then they are missing a wonderful view,” Owen said, taking her hand and drawing her over to the rail. “Only see how beautiful London looks from here.”

  Tess leaned one hand on the rail, trying not to pant with the exertion. Owen, she noticed, was not even breathing hard, as though the exercise had been no more than a walk in the park to him. The wind was cutting and cold but she had to admit that the view was stunning. The breeze threatened to pull her bonnet right off, teased her hair into knots and stung her cheeks bright pink. She could feel them radiating like beacons.

  “You look lovely,” Owen said, as she put up a hand to catch the wayward bonnet. “Tousled and ruffled and nothing like a lady of fashion.” The expression in his eyes was warm and, despite the coldness of the day, Tess felt as though she were standing near a furnace. This tendency she had to feel heated was starting to worry her. She had wondered the previous day if she had been developing an ague from going out so much in the cold weather.

  “You can descend first,” she said, “so that if I trip you will break my fall.”

  “It would be my pleasure to have you land on top of me,” Owen said very gravely.

  The following day he took her to the British Museum. “All shrunken skulls in boxes,” Tess said, though she found it fascinating. In the evening they joined Alex and Joanna, Garrick and Merryn at Vauxhall Gardens for a winter concert. It felt odd to be part of a couple. Owen paid her the ultimate compliment of focussing his entire attention on her; he did not doze over his wine as Darent would have done, or watch other women like many of the rakes and bucks who ogled her from the boxes opposite whilst their wives sat ignored. It felt as Tess imagined a proper courtship might feel, though of course she had no real idea, never having ha
d one.

  That night Tess sat in front of her mirror and wondered what it might be like to kiss Owen, to kiss him properly without the shadow of fear that hung over all her thoughts of intimacy. She pressed her fingers to her lips and felt a little sensual quiver run through her and a heat in the pit of her stomach. She was so enrapt that she did not hear Margery come into the room to help her undress and jumped almost out of her skin when the maid spoke to her.

  That night she could not sleep for hours, and when she did, her dreaming was feverish and full of strange images. She was dancing with Owen, waltzing with him, but the music was muted and all she could feel was the heat of his hands on her through the thin silk of her gown and the brush of his thigh against hers as their bodies moved against one another, and all she could hear was the thundering of her heart. Owen’s touch and the slip and slide of the silk on her skin made her feel heavy and lush with a curious sensation of excitement. Then she was running with him out of the ballroom and out into the night, where they tumbled over into a yielding pile of snow as soft as a feather mattress. Then it was a mattress and she sank deeply into it, Owen beside her, and he kissed her and she felt blinding pleasure, a pleasure that dissolved all fear. She had a sense of knowing him down to his soul and a wrenching desire to know him more deeply still.

  In her dream he stripped the clothes from her with sure hands and she felt the tug of his mouth at her breast and her whole body rose to meet his, and she woke up abruptly, hot and panting, to find the sheet wrapped tightly about her. She felt ripe and full with wanting and for a moment she lay unmoving in the darkness, her senses dazzled by such strange and unfamiliar sensations. It was extraordinary to her that in her dreams, in her fantasies of Owen, she could step beyond the painful memories that were an absolute barrier to physical intimacy in real life. She had felt no fear or revulsion. There had been nothing but pleasure and deep, sensual fulfilment, and now she wanted to cry because she reached after that satisfaction only to feel it leach away as the familiar terror took its place, filling all the dark corners of her mind.