by Carrie Lomax
Chapter 12
For weeks, Harper drifted through her days in a haze of desire stoked by Edward’s constant proximity and the perfect self-control required of them.
“How are your sums coming along?” She glanced up. Edward watched her with frank interest. Harper returned her eyes back to her work, though her attention remained riveted on Edward. Though she was not trained as a teacher, Harper had little more to do than direct him where to look. Edward’s curiosity and unexpected discipline made this aspect of her job simple.
“I haven’t solved a single problem. Reading is similarly futile. I find myself watching you as you pretend to write,” Edward confessed.
“Yes, well, this doesn’t strike me as the most productive use of our time,” Harper declared. Briskly she swept her writing implements into the small case, a distraction that prevented her from dashing across the library and flinging herself into his arms. The room was warm, and she felt restless. Confined. She glanced sideways at Edward’s long form, properly shod legs splayed out in gray woolen trousers. If anything, the garment emphasized the strength of his muscles, the way a sheath both conceals and emphasizes the lethality of a sword.
She had to get out of the room—now.
“Why don’t we take a break?” she suggested, certain that he would jump at the chance.
“And do what?”
“Why don’t we walk out into the fields? It’s too nice a day to be shut up in a stuffy old library.”
“It’s hot. We’ll be cooler indoors.”
“You, of all people, wish to remain inside? I can scarce believe my ears.” Harper sniffed. She couldn’t prevent the peevishness of her tone. The tension between them had her strung as tightly as a tent wire.
“I made a statement of fact, not of preference,” Edward replied slowly, pushing himself out of his chair and rising to his full height. “By all means, let’s walk.”
Harper eyed his dark hair, already in need of another trim. No matter that she preferred the way it curled around his ears to the close crop his father had insisted on.
She sighed. If only she didn’t like him so well, just the way he was, her job would be so much easier.
Edward was right about the weather. Even clad in the lightweight calico dresses she had had made, Harper quickly felt her body dampen beneath the sun. As soon as they were out of sight of the manor house, Edward shrugged out of his jacket and waistcoat and left them draped over a fence post. He shot Harper a sidelong view as she watched.
“Enjoying the view?” he asked pointedly. Harper examined a stone a few inches from her left shoe.
“What’s over there?” she asked, by way of distraction. In truth, she knew perfectly well what the building was, or at least could guess its purpose. Judging from the half-empty hay cart standing outside, it was an ordinary outbuilding.
“That is the threshing barn. Shall we take a look?” Edward sent her an unreadable sidelong glance. Over the past few weeks his voice and diction had lost some of their feral growl and acquired a thin veneer of upper-class drawl. He plucked a length of tall grass and played with it as they walked. Harper self-consciously reached up to check her hair. She still wore it braided and tucked around her head, concealed beneath a dowdy bonnet. If anything, she took even less care of her appearance than was her general habit. Edward didn’t seem to care what she looked like.
Sweat tickled the back of her neck. Perhaps it was only the warmth of the afternoon that made her feel so uncomfortable in her own skin. More likely, it was Edward.
“I don’t know,” she said even as she stepped toward the outbuilding. “Will it be cooler inside?”
“Probably. Dustier, though, too.”
She could feel his every movement as they made their way along the dirt path. Two huge doors were open at the center of the building, but there was no activity inside.
“Where is everyone?” Harper asked.
“Probably in the fields harvesting the grain.”
“Ugh. Imagine working in this heat.” In deference to the earl she had dropped her insistence that her patient work with the field hands. Instead, she’d sentenced Edward to morning rides and nominal care for the horses in the stable, followed by an hour of weeding in the garden. After luncheon, they studied in the library. After tea, they walked, or Edward went out on the grounds alone.
“I can. You’ve made me do it.”
“It was for your own good, Edward.”
Harper fanned herself as her eyes adjusted to the darkness. The barn smelled of wheat and dust and stale air.
“Harper, no one can see us in here. You can remove your jacket if you would be more comfortable. I won’t look.”
It was hot, even in the depths of the gloomy barn. Harper fiddled with the buttons on the placket of her dress and imagined how much cooler she would feel in just her soft cotton chemise. True to his word, Edward deliberately turned his back and walked away. Before she could reconsider, Harper slid the buttons through their holes and shrugged out of the garment, rolling up her shirtsleeves for good measure.
It felt infinitely cooler with fewer clothes on.
Her vision sharpened in the gloom. Harper made out Edward’s form as he crouched slightly and leapt straight up toward a large hook hanging impossibly high off the floor. She watched in astonishment as he caught it in one sinewy grasp and began to jackknife his lean body back and forth, building momentum. A moment later, he was swinging high and wide across the open room. Just when Harper thought he would hit the ceiling, he let go and flew into the air.
“Edward!” she gasped, fear sharpening her voice. Like a circus acrobat, he twisted his body and landed easily in what was apparently an open hayloft. The hook bounced and swung aimlessly in his wake.
“There’s an easier way to get up here. The ladder is just behind that wall.” Edward gestured to an alcove a few feet away from her and turned away.
“Showoff,” Harper muttered. Where Edward was concerned, there was always an easier means of entrance or egress. She stepped onto the rough wooden ladder.
The loft was covered in hay. A large pile of bales lay haphazardly in the back. Stepping onto the wide rough-hewn planks of the floorboards, she sneezed. Immediately she felt Edward’s presence behind her. If she leaned back a fraction of an inch, he could take her in his arms. Harper’s eyes closed, and she inhaled the scent of his skin. How she wanted to touch him. That she dared not only made her desire more insistent, like a vibrating hum along her nerves.
“There’s nothing up here,” he said, his voice low against her ear. Harper felt his breath on her skin and her body responded with a surge of desire deep in her belly.
“Are we nothing?”
His hand landed on her shoulder, and Harper jumped.
“We are everything. You are my world, Harper.” Edward clasped her left hand and raised it. “I asked you once before. I’m asking you again. Will you marry me?”
She had made a huge mistake in coming here. It was easy to be vigilant in the library. They were watched by a silent, efficient army of household staff. Yet it had been her suggestion that they come to the barn. Here, the only thing stopping her from making her heated fantasies a reality was her own splintering resolve.
In that moment, she wanted his touch more than she wanted anything else in the world. More than she wanted to be respected as a doctor. More than she wanted to be regarded as an honorable woman.
He watched her silently, waiting for her decision.
Did she have the courage to what she wanted?
“Yes,” she whispered, but she’d hesitated too long. Harper felt his disappointment as he stepped away and picked up a bent stick. He used it to pull the writhing hook close enough to grasp.
“Would you like to try it?” he asked.
“Edward. Of course not. I’d fall.”
Edward was not laughing when he replied, “You won’t. I would never let you fall.”
Harper shook her head, but her lips contradicted
the sentiment.
“Ever?” she asked, almost flirtatiously. Her voice sounded breathy even to her own ears, and she felt her self-control slipping dangerously.
“Ever,” Edward replied. “Try it. It’s the closest you will ever get to flying.”
Flying was for birds and insects and other winged things, not for humans. Nonetheless, Harper found herself approaching the unguarded edge of the hayloft.
“How does this work?” she asked skeptically.
Edward had discarded his shirt somewhere between landing in the hayloft and her arrival there. Despite the dimness, she could see every line of his muscles where they rippled beneath his skin. He was just as gorgeous as he had been the time she had found him swimming naked in the waterfall, without an ounce of fat to conceal the lean muscles of his chest, his arms, even his stomach. She had never seen a man fill out a jacket the way Edward did. Just seeing him in his semi-naked glory made her cheeks flame no matter how insistently she reminded herself to be impartial.
She was skidding over the edge of impropriety and did not know how to stop.
“Step into the hook and hold onto the rope.”
Edward’s rumbling voice floated to her in the gloom.
The hook dangled over the edge of the loft. Experimentally, Harper placed the ball of her foot into the device and peered out into space. Edward was unwrapping a coil of rope from a mount on the wall.
“Do you trust me?” he asked.
“Yes.” They were no longer talking about ropes and swinging from the rafters of a threshing barn. Harper tightened her grip on the rough rope. “Yes, I trust you.”
“Then lean forward.”
She did. For a sickening moment, Harper felt herself careening toward the floor, then with a thrilling sensation her body lifted. She spun. Her skirts whirled out like petals of a blooming flower. Back and forth she flew over the barn with dizzying speed.
Slowly she lost momentum until she was only swaying a few feet in either direction. Edward lowered her carefully to the ground.
“You see?” he asked from the loft. “All you had to do was let go.”
Letting go. What would it be like to let go of her ambition? To forget the goals that she had set for herself as a child, to grasp at a new life with Edward? It would never have occurred to her to leap from a hayloft and go swinging about a barn. She didn’t even like heights, particularly since her unfortunate fall from the roof.
Yet this had been thrilling. Fun. Exciting.
And while her life thus far had had its interesting moments, mostly it had been a monotonous grind of work, work and more work. Twelve hours, fourteen hours a day she had devoted herself to improving the lives of people she barely knew. She felt suddenly sad as she realized how isolated she had been, contained in her own little world. She had wasted so much of her youth.
She weighed her options on a knife’s blade of indecision.
Temptation. Eve had had an easier time resisting the apple and the snake. Maybe it was possible to taste the fruit of desire and not fall. He said he would never let her fall. She had trusted him, and she would a thousand times over.
“Did you like it?”
Harper started. It was hot in the barn, and she slipped three buttons on her shirt free of their holes, leaving the edge of her corset exposed between her breasts. It was hardly the mark of a temptress, but she felt her heart thrill in her chest as she smiled into the darkness. “Yes, Edward, I liked it very much. If I come up, will you do it again?”
“Anything you wish, Harper,” came his response.
What did she wish? They were no longer talking about leaping out of haylofts. Harper’s heart hammered as she climbed the ladder. At the top she stood there, knuckles white.
“I would marry you, Edward,” she whispered into the stillness. Her trip through the air had shaken loose the pins holding her hair in place, and it fell in a damp, clinging mass around her neck. She could not know the future. She could read people and make guesses about what they might do, but people surprised her all the time. The morose found pleasure in strange places or people. The kind were sometimes revealed to be cruel. The wicked could be capable of baffling acts of kindness. Some of the most horrible acts she had witnessed had been performed by the families of the supposedly insane, usually in the name of protecting their loved ones. Even the most rock-solid of people were capable of surprises.
Harper tilted her chin, raised herself upon her toes and gently pressed her lips to Edward’s, as he had done too long ago. Edward went perfectly still. One large hand landed on her waist. He pressed Harper to open. She willingly acquiesced. Edward and slid his tongue along her teeth, tasting, taking. Harper didn’t pull back. Instead, she invited him in, making her own tentative foray to meet his tongue.
For long moments, they simply kissed, his arms sliding around her waist to pull her hard against his body. Nothing she had imagined came close to the tactile warmth of his skin. Harper ran her hands boldly over his broad shoulders, twined them around his neck and buried her fingers in his hair to pull him closer. Abandoning her lips, Edward kissed a path along her jaw and down her neck. There was no oxygen in the air. Harper gasped raggedly.
When he moved to lay her down on the hay, Harper was so weak from desire that she could hardly support her own weight.
Harper didn’t protest as he ever so slowly and carefully loosened her chemise to the waist and trailed lazy kisses along the hollow of her throat. She writhed as Edward slipped his fingers beneath her stays and nudged one budded nipple into the warm air, arching her back to meet his touch.
“Oh, Edward, yes. Do that again,” Harper breathed, her words giving way to gasps as he palmed her breast and took her mouth with all the pent-up desire she’d been holding back since Harper had sat staring at him wide-eyed in his father’s parlor so many weeks before. Edward laughed and kissed her, their bodies parallel, his jacket protecting them from the itchy hay as they explored one another’s bodies with slow, sensuous movements. Harper discovered thin bands of scars tracing his stomach.
Harper drew one shuddering breath. “Edward. We have to stop.”
Chapter 13
Edward froze. Harper couldn’t be serious.
Harper shook her head, her blonde hair rubbing over her round shoulders and breasts and driving him wild.
“I’m not selfish enough to risk losing your freedom for one afternoon with me,” she said. “Though I am selfish enough to demand this.”
“I don’t want just one afternoon,” he told her hoarsely. “I want every afternoon for the rest of our lives.”
“We can’t have that. All we can have is today, and then…” she trailed off.
“You said you would marry me. We are as good as engaged,” he insisted, fumbling in his pocket, confused but pleased with the general direction of the afternoon. He very much desired to get back to what they’d been doing. Harper snorted.
“I said I would marry you, in theory, Edward. I didn’t mean we should rush straight to the wedding night. I wanted to know what I was giving up if I turned you down. This is why I stopped. I am not being altogether fair to you today.”
“No, you aren’t,” Edward growled his agreement. Still, this was the further than he had ever imagined that she might let him go. She wasn’t the only one burning with curiosity to find out how they would feel together.
“Give me your hand,” he demanded, coming onto one knee. Harper held out her right hand as if expecting him to pull her into a standing position.
“No, Harper, your other hand.”
Warily, she lay back on her right elbow and offered her left hand. Edward measured the length of the grass braid he’d woven during their walk and tied it in a knot. He slipped it over the knuckled of her ring finger.
“With this ring, I thee wed.”
She gaped at him, her eyes wide circles of disbelief.
“This is not a wedding ceremony, Edward.”
“It’s a promise. I will secure my place a
t Briarcliff, and then I shall come for you, Harper.”
He resumed brazenly tasting every corner of her mouth. Harper arched and met him with her own little purr, fingers tangling in his unkempt hair. Edward could not have pulled back even if he had wanted to. He would respect her wishes to stop short of consummating their promise. He could find a way to give her a taste of the pleasure she desired in equal measure.
For long moments, he trailed kisses down her neck, reveling in her responsiveness. The lightest touch of his fingers to her velvety skin made her move until his rough palm was hard against her body. It was as though she had been starved for touch. She screamed a little as he sucked the nipple and bit down gently. He pulled back, thinking he had hurt her.
“Do that again,” she begged, eyes wide with wonder and arousal.
Edward complied. Then, Harper discovered that she could do the same things to him. Her lively hands running over his body was the best thing he had felt in a long, long time. When they were both drunk with lust he pushed back.
“What is it?” Harper asked, sitting up.
“I need a release.” Edward held her eye. “I would like it if you watched me.”
Harper shook her head a little. He skimmed out of his smallclothes and took himself in one large hand. Slowly he moved his hand up and down, testing Harper’s reaction.
“Edward—”
“I’d like it even better if you touched yourself.”
Harper’s face, already flushed, went beet red. Edward had long ago learned to feel comfortable with his naked body. Although Harper had learned to deal with the sight of naked bodies, she was clearly unaccustomed to nudity herself.
“Really?” she squeaked.
“Yes,” Edward said gruffly. “Very much.”
“Why?”
“You can’t take your eyes off me. Do you like seeing me pleasure myself?”
Harper’s face went from beet red to volcanic. “Yes,” she whispered.
“I’d like to see you do that, too.”
