by Decca Price
The heavy scent of hops assailed Claire’s nostrils when the world rushed back in on her. Dreamily she called out for Rhys, but only a sigh escaped her lips. Course cloth met her fingers as she groped blindly for him.
She thought she’d never have the strength to move again. Her skin tingled like she had been rubbed all over with nettles, but the sensation was beyond delightful. She wanted to hum in tune with her thrumming body. The rain pounded on the windows and the ground outside, but all she heard was the blood singing in her ears.
From a far distant place, she felt him shift her body to elevate her hips on the edge of a thick hops sack. She waited, half-sick with anticipation, legs splayed on either side of his thighs. Then she felt his fingers part her folds and smear the sweet hot honey they found there. Something hard and slick pressed against, then into her.
“Claire,” he said in her ear, his voice a register deeper than normal. “Do you want me to stop?”
“No,” she moaned. “No, don’t stop! I feel like I’ll die if you stop!” She pushed up against him, and in a swift heartbeat, he thrust his full length inside her. The world stopped as he and she sucked in the hot air of the close room. She thought she heard a muffled, “Damn,” but her startled yelp of pain overrode whatever it was he had said.
Then, teetering at the cliff edge of passion, they tumbled over the precipice. Her cries came too rapidly to distinguish any beginning or end. She dug her nails into his hard back for purchase as the fury of his coitus drove her against the stone wall behind them. His sharp grunts matched the storm of his rutting.
She arched her back and clung tighter as he grabbed her buttocks in the final frenzy of their coupling. Deep in her center, she felt heat explode and fell limp, her body convulsed in rapture.
The emptiness he left when he abruptly pulled away from her brought a sob to her dry lips.
When he didn’t return to her immediately, she forced herself to lift her head and look for him.
He sat less than a foot away from her, staring out at the rain.
“Rhys? What’s wrong?”
“You lied to me,” he said through clenched teeth. “You’re a virgin. Or were.” He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth as though he had tasted something foul.
“I don’t understand.” She sat bolt upright now. “I never said—I never said anything that—”
He stood and glared down at her where she lay, the marks of passion easy to read in her eyes and on her rosy flesh.
“Christ almighty, Claire, I think you know by now what kind of man Joss was. And you can’t deny what’s been on both our minds every day we rode out together. What was I supposed to think?” His mouth crooked in a sardonic smile. “You certainly seemed to know what you were about here.”
Claire felt herself flame from the bottoms of her feet to the roots of her hair. Wordlessly, she scrambled awkwardly to her feet and glared at him.
He snorted. “You’ve nothing to say to that, do you? You may lack experience, but Joss had a real knack for spotting the ones who’d tumble, I’ll give him that.”
“Why are you so angry with me?” Claire said at last. “You got what you wanted. So did I.”
“You don’t know what you want,” he said with exasperation. “Have you thought about this at all, where it could end up? Where it won’t? I won’t marry you, if that’s what you’re after. It’s nothing personal. I won’t marry any woman again.”
His stony look frightened her.
“I killed my wife,” he said at last. “I murdered her just as surely as though I had pushed her down those stairs or shot her with a pistol. I knew she loved another man and I knew I didn’t love her. But we married anyway, and it nearly killed both of us in the end. I wish to God it had been me instead. Don’t you see, Claire?”
“Then…” Words died on her lips.
“Why bother at all?
“Yes.”
“I’m no coward. And day still follows night.” He reached for her hand but halted when he saw her begin to draw back.
“Claire, we’re two adults who obviously take pleasure in each other’s bodies. There’s no harm in that, as long as we agree that’s all it is. I’ve seen you at your window at night. Joss has been gone for two years, and I’m guessing that was a pretty lonely time for a woman like you. I’m saying forget that and live life however you can.”
“What do you mean, you’ve seen me?” she stammered. “Have you been spying on me? What,” she licked her lips, “what did you see?”
“I’ve seen evidence of a lonely woman, Claire,” he said softly. “That’s all. There’s always a light late at night, either in the library or one of the bedrooms. I suspect it’s yours, because it’s always just the one. That has to be you.”
She let him take her hand. “You’re too hungry for life to turn your back on it and follow a ghost, Claire. Ghosts can’t touch you—like I can.” He drew closer and leaned in to kiss her.
She snatched her hand back and tried to cover her exposed chest.
“Isn’t it a little late to be discussing terms, like we’re negotiating a contract? Are you expecting me to be your mistress now?”
“Lovers, Claire. We’d be lovers. You hardly need my financial support or protection,” he pointed out.
She grimaced. “So precise you are, Lord Montfort. You—you seduce me and now I’m supposed to pretend it was nothing but a pleasant way to pass a rainy morning.”
“Well, it was, wasn’t it?” he barked. “But don’t go making it into a grand seduction scene. We had some nice sport, but I left the final choice up to you.”
“Sport!” she shouted. “You call fornication ‘sport?’”
“Fornication?” He laughed and drew his shirt over his head. “My dear Miss Burton,” he said, as he began fastening its buttons. “You sound like my esteemed friend, the rector. I was going to suggest you give up your fantasies about Joss Carter once and for all and come away with me. I like your company and clearly we have other things in common. Italy, perhaps? You can’t imagine what a Herefordshire winter is like.”
He looked up to see a welter of emotions flit across her face, beginning with anger, racing through astonishment and revulsion and ending in the neighborhood of bravado.
What a beautiful mess she was! Dust streaked her dark skirts and the deep lace hem of her half-attached petticoat trailed on the floor, threatening to trip her if she moved carelessly. Her long, tousled hair concealed most of one naked breast, but the other peeped out from her bodice, a pink ribbon trailing across its alabaster expanse. Her lips, still crimson from kissing, were slack. Her eyes, in the too-white face, were as dark and stormy with passion as the sky outside.
Under his gaze, bravado crumbled into shame and she looked away.
“How dare you!” She cast about for her scattered garments. “How dare you! Think of the scandal.”
“Claire, you need to understand something,” he said quietly, all laughter gone from his eyes. “You are already beyond the pale. Joss Carter was a cad. He used women for his pleasure—all kinds of women—until he tired of them and then moved on. And he was a man who bored quickly. A parade of them came through Oak Grove when he wasn’t romancing someone’s wife in London or visiting his lady of the moment in a rural bower in the Cotswolds. All his servants knew to stay away from the summerhouse when he had ladies as guests. The only puzzle in these parts is why he chose you in the first place. Of course, everyone assumed—”
“I hate that word! Whatever happened to ‘judge not, lest ye be judged?’ You and Edward Latimer, too. Well, I’ve got a surprise for you. I am a lady, despite what any of you think. So pretend to be a gentleman—get out and leave me to pull myself together. I never want to see you again.”
“If that’s what you want, fine. But let me tell you something first. Joss was worse than a cad where you’re concerned. He played with your inexperience and your romantic notions until you can’t see the truth. He’s ruined you, all right, but not i
n the way society means when it uses that word.
“He’s chained you to a lie, and you can’t see it, you’re so wedded to that dream he conjured of what might have been—that never was going to be. You dress like an old Quaker woman, you moon around the countryside spouting your pieties of ‘Josiah said this’ and “Josiah said that.’ I’ll wager you never take that ring off. It’s sickening. Virginity! You may have been ‘intact’ before the law and the church, but Joss stole your soul as surely as he ruined your reputation.
“Josiah loved me!”
“What kind of love is it that doesn’t fight for itself? You say you loved each other, but at the first sign of trouble, you retreated to your books and he ran away.”
“Are you finished, Lord Montfort?”
“With you? Yes. I can’t stomach humbug.”
Rhys snatched his hat up from the floor, stalked into the next room and returned leading his horse. Claire, her back to him, heard him swear as he fumbled with the key in the door lock. Then a strong hand on her shoulder spun her around and inches separated their faces. She bit back a yelp, and he snatched up her left hand.
Glaring at Josiah’s ring, he snapped, “You are a fool, Miss Claire Burton.” He flung her hand down and stalked out into the light drizzle that lingered after the storm.
Off to the west, a pale rainbow shimmered above the horizon. He made a rude gesture at the sky, swung up into the saddle and gave his horse a savage kick.
Claire watched Montfort until he was out of sight, then studied her pallid reflection in the wet pane. Her hair was wild, her face unrecognizable. Groping for a word, the best she could come up with was “womanly.” Her eyes looked like the eyes of those girls from her ill-fated season who had found husbands.
When they came back from their honeymoons, they carried themselves differently and looked out at the world with a new, more confident expression. At social events, they sat apart from the unmarried girls, whispered behind gloved hands and glanced at them with pity.
But, young or old, only the married ladies in her circle exhibited that change. A spinster of any age could be spotted immediately, because she walked and talked and hesitated like a girl. So what did that make her?
Claire touched her cheek, traced the line of her lips, ran her fingers up through her hair, let her hand come to rest at the base of her throat. She knew what it made her. Montfort and Latimer were right. She had eaten of the tree of knowledge. She knew now what it was she yearned for in the night.
The word she sought to describe that pale, languid-eyed reflection was wanton. She burned with lust, she admitted, forcing herself to confront the word. She was lustful and unable to control herself. Instead of disciplining her flesh, she yielded to it. The sore ache between her legs removed any doubt. For part of her regretted only that Rhys had gone when they could have, she assumed, repeated their “sport.”
Montfort’s words stung, but not the way he intended. He shocked her into recognizing her carnal nature. Like a serpent in her heart, lust deceived her into thinking she understood love.
She groaned and covered her face, blotting out the image that wavered and japed before her as fresh rain ran down the glass.
Her anger extinguished by this appalling new understanding, Claire’s only thought now was to get back to Oak Grove as quickly as possible without being noticed.
Pinning her hair up under her hat was no problem, especially since the loosened corset allowed her to raise her arms more easily. But the corset presented a different challenge. With no one to help her, she couldn’t lace it tightly enough to close her riding jacket over it. Try as she might, couldn’t pull the laces tight enough.
In desperation, she undid the buttons on the jacket’s long cuffs and slipped the garment off so she could shed the corset entirely. But that left her with no way to hold up her petticoat, so that had to go as well.
She settled the jacket on her torso as best she could. Without the foundation garment, it still didn’t fit properly. Her breasts felt odd squashed against her body rather than supported high on her chest and the compression felt—well, she pushed that thought out of her mind as soon as it came. The jacket was buttoned and that was all that mattered.
Her stock lay on the floor in the corner where she and Rhys had “sported”—she said the word aloud this time—and she discovered that tying a tidy neck knot backwards was next to impossible. She began to wish she had been soaked in the storm. Explaining her disheveled appearance would be easier when she got home.
Finding both gloves took several minutes. One had landed behind a hops sack.
Wrapping the petticoats around the corset, she stuffed the large bundle under her arm and retrieved Dickon from his shelter. The small room reeked of steaming manure. He shied repeatedly when she grabbed at his bridle, and her boots were soiled before she caught him and led him out.
Mounting the uncooperative horse one-handed proved to be impossible. Had her legs been steadier, she might have managed it, but Rhys had loved her too well. Her flesh quivered like Dickon’s in the rain and she longed to lie down and sleep.
She tried standing Dickon next to a pile of sacks and climbing up on it to reach his back, but it was like trying to ascend dry sand. The soft, rustling crunch as the hops shifted under her feet gave Dickon a further excuse to pirouette away from her.
Extending her left arm and leaning as far as she could without dropping Dickon’s bridle, she stuffed the bundle of cloth behind the sacks closest to the wall, then scrambled onto the horse’s back. Ducking her head, she rode out into the wet air but got only a few feet before she pulled up, jumped to the ground, tied the reins to a bush and ran back inside to retrieve her undergarments, which she just remembered were monogrammed.
Resigned to walking, Claire led Dickon onto a narrow track across the fields that she hoped led toward home. She tramped nearly a mile, grateful for the high hedgerows, before she stopped at a small pond. Walking so close to the edge that ooze seeped into her boots and wet her hem, she pitched the clothing as far as she could over the water and watched it sink. It took forever, the petticoat unfurling across the surface like a monstrous waterlily. She thought she’d scream with impatience before it finally went under.
Disburdened, she easily mounted Dickon from a slope in the lane—the horse now placid as a lamb—and set his head toward home. Though it felt like a lifetime had flown by since she’d left the house that morning, it was barely noon, and it seemed to Claire that every tree sheltered a farm laborer pausing for his bread, cheese and beer.
The ones who saw her merely touched their caps and carried on with their meals, but at the turning in the lane between Oak Grove and Oakley Court, she thought she heard her name, followed by a burst of laughter.
“Oh, aye, that Burton woman’s a sly one all right,” she heard through the hedge. “But his lordship’ll get what he wants in the end, one way or another, mark my words. He’s not up at the crack o’ dawn every day for the pleasure of her company.”
Claire tugged back gently on the reins and strained to hear more.
“Now there you’re wrong, Alf,” a second man said. “I think there’s a deal o’ pleasure in it. These ‘projects’ between the two of them, the money’s no skin off his nose. He’ll knows it’ll all come back to him when he gets his hands on Oak Grove.” More laughter.
“And call her a sly ‘un?” the man continued. “What about him? I’d be up at dawn as well as him, if meant a good roll in the hay with that ‘un. She’s uppity, but fills the hands above and behind, know what I mean?”
“My missus’ brother’s lad works in his lordship’s stables,” the man called Alf said, “and he says that for being out ridd all day, his lordship’s horse is pretty fresh when he comes home at night.”
“I’ll wager there’s some hard riding goin’ on, but it don’t involve the horse,” the first man chimed in. “If his lordship can’t sweet talk Miss Burton into sellin’ up, he’ll no doubt get it out of her on her ba
ck.”
Claire flinched at the way he uttered “miss.”
“It’s how she got in the first place, so ‘twould serve her right!” Gales of guffaws followed Alf’s comment.
Claire spurred Dickon so hard she drew blood from his flanks. In a clap of thunder, rain began to fall hard again and she barely managed to control the frenzied horse as they galloped down the dark, overgrown lane. Dickon put a foot wrong on the sodden, uneven ground, and down they both went.
Stunned but unhurt, she fumbled to her knees and half-crawled to where the horse lay groaning, unable to rise. Her sure touch and gentle words were of no use now. After a moment, she stood and begun trudging back to where the men had laughed and joked at her expense. One, she remembered, had had a gun.
The men were gathered around the stable yard when Claire returned, but she managed to flee to the house unseen. She couldn’t look Tressel in the eye and was in no state to tell him what had happened to his prize horse. He and the others would find out soon enough they’d been right to doubt her, if they hadn’t already.
Claire was unable to concentrate. She transcribed a few lines from Josiah’s diary, then wandered down to the library in search of a better pen nib. From there, she wandered vacantly onto the terrace, to find the sky had cleared. She lingered among the rose beds in the garden until the afternoon heat and humidity drove her into the summerhouse.
What had Montfort said? “A parade” of Joss’s women. Claire eyed the opulent silken cushions, the shuttered windows, the winking golden birds. “More comfortable than hops sacks,” she muttered under her breath as she slammed the door behind her and went back to the house.
