Sleeping with the Enemy: Lords of Lancashire, Book 4

by Barbosa, Jackie

  The small building had two shuttered windows, a pot-bellied stove for heat, and four narrow beds, one of which belonged to Joseph. The existence of the three additional beds and associated furnishings—trunk, chair, and small wardrobe—indicated the typical crew for harvest season was four able-bodied men. This year, there would be just two, and Geoffrey wasn’t entirely sure he would count as a full one. He had lost a considerable amount of weight and strength before regaining consciousness, and he rather suspected that apple-picking was likely to be a strenuous activity.

  After selecting an empty bunk, he stowed the few items of clothing he currently possessed in the corresponding trunk, and then made up the mattress with the sheets and blankets that had been piled at one end. When he was done, he sat down heavily in the chair, more tired than he should have been after so little exertion. He had been quite capable of marching thirty miles in a day before his injury. Now it seemed that for each day he’d spent lying on his back—and on his face, apparently—he would need three or four days on his feet to recover.

  Geoffrey glanced over at the bunk that Joseph Robinson occupied and noted that, in addition to the bed and trunk, the foreman had a desk with several locking drawers and a bookshelf that contained a series of large, bound but otherwise unmarked volumes—ledgers, he fancied—and a handful of smaller texts with titles printed on their spines. Though Geoffrey could not read the book’s titles, he fancied he recognized one of them as the same edition of Robinson Crusoe he had read in his teens. He wondered what Joseph, a man of African descent, made of the story’s plantation- and slave-owning protagonist.

  When Geoffrey had met Joseph for the first time, the possibility that he might be a slave had crossed Geoffrey’s mind. Slavery was still legal in New York state, although the practice was rarer here than in the states to the South. But after a few conversations with various members of the household, Geoffrey came to understand that Joseph had been born free in Vermont—a state that had outlawed slavery upon its founding in 1777—and that his position on the farm was more like that of a land steward in England, with all the skills and duties that implied, than a common laborer. This explained, in part, why both Farnsworths treated the foreman more as a member of the family than as a servant, but then, they exhibited the same familiarity toward Abigail, whose duties were those of a maid-of-all-work and as such, back home, would have branded her very clearly a member of the servant class.

  The answer, he supposed, was that on a holding as small as this one with only two employees, the very notion of servants as he understood it made no sense. At Barrowcreek Park, the servants were strictly separated from the family for meals, but here, there was one kitchen and one dining room. Where would the servants eat but with their employers? And while the English aristocracy afforded their servants the time to attend church, they would never have countenanced traveling to and from that edifice together, let alone sitting side by side with their cooks and footmen and scullery maids. Here, however, the church was both so far away and so small that demanding such a separation would have seemed bizarre.

  “I hope you don’t mind having to share your quarters.” Laura Farnsworth stood in the open doorway to the barracks, leaning against the doorframe. The bright morning sunshine lit her from behind, casting her face into shadow but creating a halo-like corona around her dark hair.

  His angel. And the notion that angels had to be male could go straight to the devil.

  “On the contrary,” he responded, rising in the presence of a lady as etiquette demanded, despite the lingering weakness in his legs. “After a quarter century in the army, I’m quite accustomed to such arrangements. Sharing a room with just one other man is rather a luxury, in fact.”

  “Ah, I hadn’t thought of that.” Her face shadowed as it was, he could not make out her expression, but he could hear a smile in her voice. “Daniel complained so bitterly about the lack of privacy and Joseph’s snoring that I didn’t consider you would be accustomed to such annoyances. Nonetheless, it was good of you to agree to trade places with my son. I am afraid he is rather spoiled.”

  Geoffrey waved a hand to dismiss her gratitude. “If I am going to behave as a laborer on your farm, I cannot very well go on sleeping in the main house. And, as I said, this arrangement suits me admirably.” Better, at any rate, than going on sleeping in the same house with her would have done. Even if he had traded places with her, moving out of the bed that was properly hers and into the one upstairs, he would have been too tantalized by continuing to share a roof with her.

  Ever since she had given him the most unforgettable shave of his life, he’d been finding it increasingly difficult to be near her and keep certain parts of his anatomy from reacting. Even now, with five feet of rough-hewn plank floor separating them, his blood rushed to his loins at the sight of her. He ached to pull her into his arms and kiss her, longed to peel off all her sensible clothing—the white apron, the dark-colored dress, which in this light could be gray or brown or even a dark blue, and whatever undergarments lay beneath—and make love to her until they were both insensible. It was a mad, extravagant desire, utterly out of character for him, and that made it even harder to resist.

  He was not aware of swaying on his feet until he heard her sudden, startled intake of breath. She crossed the space between them so quickly, she might almost have materialized in front of him out of thin air. Before he could protest, her arms encircled his chest, steadying him in what any onlooker would certainly interpret as a torrid embrace.

  And once she was there, he did not really want to protest.

  The last time she’d been this close to him, his face had been covered in shaving lather, and he had only been able to smell the sharp, astringent scent of the soap. Now, he could smell her—warm and buttery, like bread fresh out of the oven, but with a hint of sweetness and spice underneath that put him in mind of the mince pies he’d loved as a child and had all but forgotten as an adult. He inhaled her fragrance as if his life depended on it.

  Maybe it did.

  “You had better sit down before you fall down,” she scolded, though not at all sharply. “Yesterday’s excursion must have taken more out of you than I thought. If you don’t pace yourself over the next few days, you will be right back where you started, flat on your back, and of no use at all to me.”

  He could not argue with her on that point. Well, except that he could think of a way he could be of use to her if he was flat on his back. He could do it right now, in fact. Something he did not think she could fail to be aware of, given that the evidence of his preparedness for that activity was pressed solidly against her abdomen.

  It was kind of her to pretend not to notice.

  “You're right, of course,” he said, but when he would have lowered himself into the chair again, she shook her head and maneuvered him through subtle pressure so he collapsed onto the bed instead.

  And dragged her with him.

  That part had not been intentional. At least, he had not intended it. He could not say what her intentions had been. But he doubted she had meant to wind up sprawled atop him, her legs straddling his thighs, her arms still wrapped around him.

  Their faces were inches apart. Her eyes met his, wide and surprised, and her lips parted as a gasp escaped her. They stared at one another for what seemed a very long time, the air between them thickening with heat and promise, and then, as if gravity had suddenly become too much to bear, her mouth crashed into his. Or his hurtled into hers. He didn’t know which, and he didn’t much care. The collision was as perfect and inevitable as the laws of nature, and he could no more have stopped himself from taking advantage of physics and kissing her than he could have stopped the sun from rising or the stars from twinkling.

  If she had pulled away or expressed the slightest indignation, he would have released her. But she did nothing of the sort. Instead, she melted against him with a sigh of pure surrender. And yet, her response to the kiss was more pitched combat than capitulation, more count
er-assault than retreat. She matched every stroke of his lips, every scrape of his teeth, every thrust of his tongue with her own, ferocious forays, and he reveled in the onslaught, both given and received.

  He cradled the back of her head in one hand while using the other to keep himself upright on the narrow cot. Her dark hair, pulled up into its customary, sensible knot at the nape of her neck, was nonetheless as soft as satin, and his fingers itched to find the hairpins that confined it and pull them free.

  The desire that flared in his loins was as fierce and carnal as he’d ever felt, yet the sensation was so different from simple lust that he was nearly as bewildered as he was aroused. Her kiss, for all its ferocity, was like every wish he’d ever made, every prayer he’d ever prayed, every hope he’d ever harbored in the secret depths of his battle-hardened heart. Like welcome, like dreams, like belonging.

  Like something that could become love.

  No, that was wrong. Love was for better men than he. For gentle men, not to be confused with gentlemen, who were often coarser and crueler than those who could not claim that social distinction. He should know.

  With a groan that was half regret, half self-loathing, he tore his mouth from hers. She made a low sound of protest in her throat and blinked down at him in confusion, her irises shrunken to mere rings of bright blue around her dilated pupils. They were both breathing rapidly and he wondered, abstractedly, if his cheeks were as flushed and his lips as swollen and red with kisses as hers.

  Geoffrey wanted her more than he had ever wanted anything in his life. Perhaps that was a mean compliment, though. The only thing he had ever really wanted with any serious urgency until now was to stay alive. The simple act of kissing her made him realize why staying alive had been worth accomplishing in the first place. This was what life was for. But he would be cruel to pursue it—to pursue her—when he had nothing to offer her but a few hours, a few days of pleasure.

  “The door,” he managed to croak. “’Tis open. Anyone could walk by. Or in.”

  That observation seemed to jolt her out of her passion-glazed disorientation. “Oh!” she breathed, and her cheeks flushed an even darker crimson as she scrambled off his lap. “I had… That is… I mean, I don’t know—”

  He shook his head. “You needn’t apologize. The blame is entirely mine, Mrs. Farnsworth.”

  She backed a safe distance from him, smoothing her hands over her apron. “And you needn’t apologize, either. Doing so implies I was not a willing participant, which we both know is untrue. I just—” She worried her still-puffy lower lip with her teeth as she considered her next words. “I just did not mean for anything like that to happen right now.”

  His own wits were still addled enough that it took him a few seconds to parse out the import of her last sentence. “Meaning you intended something like it to happen later?”

  Her shoulders rose and fell in a helpless gesture. “Meaning I did not intend for it never to happen.” She cleared her throat and stiffened her spine. A tremulous smile dashed across her kiss-ripened lips before she added softly, “Meaning I hoped it might happen…eventually.”

  Geoffrey digested this admission as dispassionately as his current condition allowed, which was to say, not dispassionately at all. She was all but offering herself to him for…what, exactly? As a bed partner, certainly, but in what precise capacity? Laura Farnsworth was a widow, and he would have understood such an invitation, had it been made to him by a woman of his own social class in England, as a request that he take her as his mistress.

  But Mrs. Farnsworth was not a wealthy, aristocratic widow whose affaires du coeur would be overlooked by society; on the contrary, she was a respectable businesswoman who could hardly afford to have her reputation sullied by engaging in a temporary liaison with a laborer—assuming they could maintain the pretense that he was nothing but an ordinary laborer, which he doubted. And in a household this small and tight-knit, he saw no possible way for them to carry on without being discovered. She had to know that as well as he. And if it was marriage she hoped for…well, he could not give her that, could he?

  But the objection he made was the simplest, most incontrovertible one. “I don’t belong here.”

  A shadow flickered across her features, dimming her bright eyes. “Perhaps not,” she said on a sigh. “But I wish you did.”

  Chapter Ten

  The kiss lingered on Laura’s lips for days, like the residual tenderness of a bruise. Just a little bump of the affected area, so to speak, and the sensations came rushing back, quickening her breath and weakening her knees.

  She had forgotten—or at the very least, had suppressed—what it was like to be held in the passionate embrace of a man to whom she was wildly attracted. Likely, she had done so for her own good; if she had remembered how glorious it was, she would have found the last ten years of her life nearly unbearable. Because the days since the kiss had certainly been something akin to torture.

  When he’d arrived at the dinner table that evening—and for every meal thereafter—Mr. Langston had been unfailingly polite and cordial, but he’d done nothing that acknowledged what had passed between them. He hadn’t caught her eye and smile or lingered after eating in the hopes of getting her alone for a few moments. And though they had each other several times during the course of each day as he’d offered his assistance to Joseph and Daniel in the regular chores as well as in preparations for the harvest, he had only smiled and nodded in passing before he’d gone quickly about his business.

  She’d thought she had made her desires clear, but perhaps she had misinterpreted his response and he did not actually reciprocate her interest. The hard ridge of his erection pressed against her abdomen and the enthusiasm with which his lips and tongue had explored her mouth during those few, frantic seconds had seemed unambiguous, but perhaps they had been merely the involuntary reactions any man would evince if a woman shamelessly straddled his lap and attempted to kiss him senseless.

  It was a humiliating thought.

  Worse yet, however, she felt guilty. Not that they had kissed. Never that. She would do that and more a thousand times over, given the chance. No, what troubled her was the secret she had been keeping from him since the preceding Sunday. Since the kiss, she had gone over and over her reasoning in her mind, and each time, she came back to the same answer. If she warned him that she planned to introduce him to Macomb and why, his reaction would not be unplanned or unrehearsed.

  He had said he was still her enemy. What he did not fully appreciate was the degree to which she was still his. Not because she wanted to be, but because she could see no other option.

  Now, as Abigail finished setting the table for Saturday night dinner, Laura did her best to quash her misgivings and mortifications, because this was her best chance to help him. And she had to get him to agree without explaining all her reasons for asking it of him.

  Daniel was the first to arrive at the table by virtue of having moved back into his room upstairs in the main house. He scented the air and raised his eyebrows as he seated himself. “You roasted a whole chicken? What is the occasion?”

  Laura should have known her son would notice she’d prepared an unusually lavish meal for a typical Saturday night. Butchering a chicken and cooking it all at once rather preserving the meat first was a potential waste if it wasn’t all eaten within the next twenty-four hours. But President John Adams had once observed that the way to a man’s heart was down his gullet, so it might be the way to his cooperation, too.

  Especially when the man in question was obviously accustomed to much finer fare than she could provide. Although the lieutenant colonel had said very little about his family back in England, Laura could tell from the crispness of his accent and his command of grammar that he must come from a wealthy, possibly aristocratic background. A man like him would be raised on sumptuous dinners with multiple courses, not cornmeal porridges or bean and sausage stews.

  But Daniel didn’t need to know any of that. So w
hat she said in answer was, “We will start the harvest on Monday if the weather holds, despite the battle and everything else that has happened. I think that is reason enough to celebrate, don’t you?”

  Before her son could respond, Joseph and Mr. Langston entered the dining room. Her eyes lingered for several heartbeats too long on Mr. Langston’s face, which was beginning to lose its hollow-cheeked appearance as he put back on the weight he had lost during his convalescence, and on the thick hair that brushed the back of his collar, evidencing his need of a haircut. The trousers and waistcoat he wore—cast-offs of Daniel’s—were a trifle too big for him and would be until she could alter them for a better fit, for although Langston was tall and broad by comparison to most men, her son still possessed several more inches of both height and breadth.

  Their eyes met and held for a second before his gaze slid away from hers to the platter Abigail was placing on the center of the table.

  “A whole chicken?” Joseph breathed.

  Blast, but it would be nice if her family didn’t behave as if this were manna from heaven. Though perhaps that was the wrong metaphor, given the Hebrews had gotten so accustomed to manna from heaven, they’d begun to complain about it. “Yes. To celebrate the coming harvest. And how lucky we are that Mr. Langston is able to help us.”

  “We will still be hard-pressed to bring in most of the apples with only one extra pair of hands,” Daniel observed as the other two men took their seats on either side of him. “To be honest, I don’t see how we will manage it before the fruit begins to fall.”

  Laura set a bowl of freshly shelled and blanched peas in front of Joseph’s place, then returned to the kitchen to fetch the squash. “Abigail and I will have to help with the picking,” she said as she settled onto the bench at the end of the table nearest the kitchen.