In his imagination, Tess’s small hand touched his lips, as she had the other night, and his skin stung with the fire of it, with just the thought of it. Her fingers…perhaps touching his neck. Even—mentally, he consigned his neckcloth to perdition. He was almost shuddering
God! That was the carriage shuddering to a halt.
He opened his eyes and pretended that a nap of some forty-five seconds was an utterly refreshing and normal occupation for him.
His footman pulled open the door. Lucius handed out Tess, as perfectly attired and bonneted as she had been when she entered the carriage, and stepped out himself. He avoided meeting the footman’s eyes.
Footmen, of course, were free to kiss their brides at any time of day and in any situation. The man probably thought that his master wasn’t up to the task, a stone lighter than one could wish.
Another footman was standing to the side, holding what appeared to be several blankets. Dammit, Rafe must have ordered those. And since Rafe didn’t have a romantic bone in his body, Lucius could just imagine what he thought this picnic was all about.
A flare of disgust tasted bitter in his mouth. Could Rafe honestly think that he would deflower his new bride in a field where all and sundry, including a spare cow or two, might wander by?
Not he.
Lucius offered an arm to Tess. She smiled at him sweetly.
“Isn’t it a beautiful day?”
Lucius looked around rather blindly and nodded. Emerald green grass was appearing where Mr. Jessop had shorn his hay. The willow was beginning to shed yellow leaves onto the grass. It was all rather picturesque.
“Mr. Felton,” Tess said.
“Lucius,” he interrupted.
She looked up at him. Her face was an enchanting oval. He wrenched his mind away again.
“My name is Lucius,” he said, the strain shading his voice with a rather cool tone.
She colored and looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize—that is, my parents addressed each other formally.”
“Probably not when they were alone together,” he suggested.
She thought about that for a moment, while he considered the fact that his mother undoubtedly addressed her husband as Mr. Felton in every situation, including the most intimate. “I never wish to be addressed formally by you,” he added.
“Of course,” she said. “Lucius.”
It sounded wonderful on her lips. The footman spread the blankets under the willow and put the basket down, and then stood looking at him in an extremely annoying fashion. Lucius sighed. He might as well live up to everyone’s vulgar expectations.
He stepped to the side and ordered the men to return to the carriage. “Go back to Silchester and find your own meal,” he told them brusquely. “You can return in a few hours.” Damned but he hated the insinuation in their eyes. He may be a gentleman who—as his parents said—dirtied his hands by working, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a gentleman.
Tess was waiting for him, kneeling on the bright red blanket and opening the basket. She seemed entirely happy. Likely a cheerful picnic was a much more pleasant idea for her than an excessive junket of sexual enthusiasm about which (Lucius was fairly certain) she knew nothing at all. In fact, he was being a damned thoughtful husband. Somehow the idea was unpleasing.
The willow was the silvery kind. Long tendrils draped themselves over the crimson blanket, and even Tess’s hair, making it look tobacco brown in comparison. A glorious, velvety brown…
“Would you like to walk to the ruins first?” Lucius asked abruptly.
Tess looked up at him. She was beginning to think that she had married a very moody fellow. One couldn’t tell from his face, of course. It was impossible to read anything from Lucius’s face. But she could have sworn that he was looking at her in the coach, and then that he wasn’t, and then she had decided…well, it was impossible to know. “Of course,” she said, rising to her feet. “Let’s go around this way, shall we?” To be honest, she had no particular desire to stumble again over the ruins of the Roman villa.
Rather than setting directly across the field toward the little uneven mounds in the near distance, Tess wandered off to the left. Beyond this hayfield was another one. And beyond that what looked to be a little straggling stone fence, and then a sycamore standing just on the mound of a little hill so that the sunlight turned its leaves golden.
“Look at that,” she said softly. “Like the apples of Atlas.”
“You’re a font of classical knowledge,” Lucius said with some surprise. “Did Atlas have a golden tree with a partridge in it?”
“No,” she said, with a gurgle of laughter that delighted him. “Perseus found a garden with a golden tree that shaded golden apples. And—”
“I remember!” Lucius said. “He whipped out the head of Medusa and turned Atlas to stone, didn’t he?”
“Exactly.”
“So you and your sisters must have read as far as the O’s then?”
“No. For a short time the local vicar paid some interest in our education, and it was he who introduced Ovid’s Metamorphoses.”
“That seems a very odd choice for a vicar.”
“He was an odd vicar. Unfortunately, he began to have strong feelings for Annabel, and my father had to write the bishop and have him sent to another parish.”
They had reached the golden tree now, which turned to a rather stately, but obviously unmetallic, sycamore up close. Nestled under the tree were two tip-tilted little graves. Tess immediately knelt down in the grass and rubbed the leaves and grimes off the headstone of the one.
“Emily Caudwell,” she read softly. And: “Oh, Lucius, she was only sixteen years old. Poor thing. And here’s William.”
“The husband, one presumes,” Lucius said, bending down to peer at the old stone.
“He didn’t die for twenty-four years—or possibly twenty-five, I can’t read it clearly.”
She was pulling the weeds in front of Emily’s tomb-stone and staining her gloves. Not that it mattered much, since Lucius had already decided to toss out every stitch of clothing belonging to his wife so that he could buy her new, from head to foot. Still, he bent down and pulled a weed or two from William’s grave. The poor old sod.
“Don’t pull that one,” she said, putting a hand on his arm as he was about to jerk up a great clump of wildflowers.
“Why not?”
“It’s heartsease. He must have planted it when she died. See—it’s all over her grave, and has spread to his.”
“Heartsease?” he repeated, looking down at the sprig of fragile-looking blossoms in his hand. They looked rather weedy, although the violet petals with lemon yellow hearts were charming.
“They can’t have been married long, since she was only sixteen. Heartsease was a lovely thought on his part. It’s also called Love-in-Idleness,” she said.
“I prefer Love-in-Idleness,” Lucius said, a smile playing around his lips. “Does it have any other names?” Strands of red-gold silk were beginning to fall from her poke bonnet, so, without thinking too much about it, he untied the ribbons under her chin and pulled it off.
More hair tumbled from the pins that held the heavy mass of it at her neck. He picked a tiny spray of yellow flowers and tucked it into her hair.
She was definitely blushing now. How many men were lucky enough to marry a bride who blushed?
“Another name?” he prompted.
“Kiss Her in the Buttery,” not looking at him.
He picked three more sprays and tucked them into her glowing hair. “Kiss Her in the Buttery. What about Kiss Her Under the Sycamore? I swear I’ve heard that name somewhere.”
There was a smile trembling on her lips. “I suppose it could be a name.”
He came to his knees before her; her lips were as silken as his feverish imagination had remembered them. He slipped his hands into the sleek hair, the perfect shape of her head making his fingers tremble, the little sigh of breath against his lips makin
g him ache.
At first he kissed her as if she were a blushing bride and he an affectionate husband: gently, sweetly, and with an eye to innocence. But gradually the roaring in his blood began to beat back the gentleman in him, and he started to taste her rather than kiss her. And tasting her—tasting Tess, his wife, his own wife—that was like an intoxication in which every touch made him hungrier.
His fingers curled possessively into her sweet-smelling hair, and he bent his head, taking her mouth, that unbearably desirable mouth, with a growl that had nothing to do with gentlemanlike behavior.
If Tess had but known, her husband had just turned into one of those uncultivated men who rip their wife’s clothes off their body, who fling themselves on the poor female in a carriage, in a garden…under a sycamore tree…
But she was drowning, her mind whirling. His mouth was hot on hers—hot! How could it be hot? She felt as if all her most important senses were lost, whirling around her so that all she could do was clutch his shoulders and hang on, fighting the strange sensations that kept sweeping over her body, making her knees tremble and an unwonted heat grow between her legs, and her forehead feel feverish—in fact, her whole body feel feverish.
It was alarming at the same time it was enthralling. It was frightening, as if some animal part of her wanted nothing more than to clutch Lucius by his neckcloth and pull him closer and closer. And yet they could hardly be closer; her body was pressed up against his in such a fashion that her breasts were positively squished by his chest, and she could feel—could feel—
Tess began to feel more than a little dizzy. Her hair was all down her back, and his hands were moving over her. When he was kissing her, she couldn’t think, but then his lips moved to her throat, and suddenly her mind burst with questions.
“Lucius,” she said, her voice quavering into the quiet heat of the afternoon. Nothing answered her but the song of a drowsy grasshopper. But she couldn’t be mistaken. Everything that she and Annabel knew about men and women suggested that Lucius was planning to do more than kiss her under the sycamore tree.
“Lucius,” she said again. And: “Lucius!” He was caressing her neck, whispering something against her skin, and his great hand was sweeping up her back, caressing her so tenderly that she began to tremble, and a bewildering sweep of heat broke over her body, following the track of his wandering hand, which was—which was—
“Mr. Felton!” she gasped.
He jerked away from her immediately. “Don’t ever call me that!” he said, his voice a growl.
“Why not?” she said shakily, trying to concentrate on anything other than the hunger in his eyes and her violent wish to curl her fingers into his hair and pull him back to her.
“My name is Lucius,” he said, standing up and helping her to her feet. “Shall we walk to the ruin now?”
It was just the surprise of his kisses that had her heart bumping in her chest like a drum, the shock that was making her feel desolate.
“Well, here we are,” she said calmly, as they approached the tumbled-down walls. “What part of the ruin in particular so interested you that you wished to revisit it?”
Lucius could hardly say that there was nothing interesting about a pile of moss-covered rubble. Nor could he say that he’d instigated the picnic for one reason only: to provide a decoy so that his wife would think that he wasn’t a ravening beast, wishing only to pull her into his bed.
Which he was.
“I found that bathing room extremely interesting,” he answered calmly. “If you would not object, I would be glad to take a second look at the pipe system leading to the bath. I’m thinking of putting in a plunge-bath myself.”
He carefully supported Tess down the fall of rocks in the corner. But the bathroom was manifestly uninteresting. After poking at the hole for a moment, he couldn’t think how to carry on a pretense of interest.
“This must have led to a cistern,” he said.
His wife was looking straight up into the sky, so he looked as well. A few drunken-looking birds were whirling and swooping after each other.
“From Latin, cisterna,” she said agreeably, not taking her eyes from the starlings.
“Exactly,” he said, rather taken aback. “You have some unusual bits of information, Tess.” He tipped his head back to watch the birds in flight, as she was doing.
“They’re mating,” Tess said, turning to look at him. She was feeling suddenly daring, and older, and married.
“I doubt that, at this time of year,” Lucius noted.
But Tess was having a rush of joy, and it was going to her head: a rush of joy that she’d married this big, dazzlingly elegant man who looked at her with such hunger. He didn’t flatter. And he had none of Mayne’s flummery.
The sky was high and blue, her husband was standing beside her looking confused and hungry, and she was married. Married! Married women could do anything! They could kiss under a sycamore and not lose their reputations. They could—
She turned slowly toward her husband.
They could do precisely as they wished. They didn’t just observe life. They—they reached out and grabbed it.
For the rest of his life, Lucius Felton never forgot the next moment. His blushing, virginal bride disappeared. He found himself facing a woman whose mouth suddenly took on a tilt that could only be described as lustful. That smile was not that of an innocent…
She reached out to him, and he blinked, holding back.
“Lucius,” she said. Her fingers curled into the hair at the nape of his neck, and she was on her tiptoes, must be on her tiptoes. “Lucius.” And since he couldn’t get his frozen body to move, she pulled his head toward hers and plastered her lips over his, and what she lacked in the way of experience, she made up for in raw, native talent.
He groaned, and the last threads of his control slipped away.
They were there, the two of them, in each other’s arms in a place that may well have seen many an embracing Roman.
But, as Tess had noted during her first visit, the Romans were interested in more than grapes and aqueducts.
Chapter
28
In his adult life, Lucius had never given a second’s thought to the idea of deflowering a bride. For one thing, he hadn’t planned to have one. And for another, a cynical side of him had the idea that there weren’t so many virgins waiting about anyway. And the whole idea of virgins was tedious. What could be more uninteresting than a woman who not only didn’t know what she liked, and might well take a dislike to the whole business, but didn’t know how to please you either?
No, virgins held no appeal.
Until now.
Because Tess was a virgin likely to win him to the sport in one fell swoop, except that he was quite aware that after making love to Tess, there was no second virgin possible.
She was cheerful, for one thing. Her voice was husky, desire-filled, joy-filled. She didn’t tremble from fear, but from excitement. And her eyes weren’t bright with terror, but with interest. Curiosity. And her curiosity! She had a wish to kiss the inside of his wrist, and then wondered what the inside of his elbow tasted like. He had to pull off his shirt to satisfy her curiosity, and then the feeling of her slender fingers running all up and down the furring on his chest was enough to undo him. There he was, an English gentleman, bare-chested in the outdoors. It was a curious feeling: rather liberating.
But he kept enough fragile control that he allowed her fingers to sing on his skin, but he didn’t touch his breeches. And she, for all her shining eyes and laughter, didn’t touch him below the waist.
They ended up, naturally enough, on the moss-covered bench that lined the room. At first they sat side by side. Then she found her way onto his lap.
He didn’t know how long she sat there, the curve of her bottom against his legs, his arms tight around her, lips roving over her cheeks, and then returning to her mouth for more aching kisses. They were the kind of kisses from which there is no return. The kind o
f kisses that drive the blood into a muffled thrum that beats through the body and clouds the mind and finally makes the very idea of gentlemanly behavior an aberration. For wouldn’t any man on God’s earth, looking at Tess’s eyes shining with sensual pleasure, understand that civility was rot? That the restrictions of genteel behavior were rot as well?
The only thing that mattered was making his new bride sigh as his hand shaped her breast. Sigh? Tess didn’t sigh: she squeaked his name and closed her eyes, as if what she couldn’t see wasn’t really happening. But it was. They were both there, outdoors; he needed her eyes open, her—without a second’s thought he wrenched her bodice down and curled his large hand around the soft weight of her breast.
Her eyes flew open, and she opened her mouth to protest. So he crushed his mouth against hers. It wasn’t a gentle kiss, or a kind kiss, or a sweet kiss. It was a demand. The moment he pulled away she opened her mouth again, but:
“Your breast is exquisite,” he told her, and whatever she meant to say was swallowed into a sharp cry as his thumb rubbed across her nipple, a cry that shuddered through her body and made her shift closer to him.
“Lucius,” she said, and her voice quavered. He rubbed her nipple again, and she collapsed against his chest, eyes closed again.
Lucius couldn’t look away from her, from the rosy cream of her lush breast in his hand and the way she arched into his touch, breathing so quickly that every breath was like a cry. He was on fire, every inch of him on fire, and yet some fugitive part of him kept noting that he hadn’t crossed all the bounds of propriety yet.
Not yet. Not when he could pull her bodice back up at a second’s notice, if he heard voices coming across the field. True, her hair tumbled like molten bronze down her back, and her lips were swollen from his kisses, and she was shuddering.