Bared to the Viscount (The Rites of May Book 1) (8 page)

He heard Mr. Bassett’s voice, sounding suddenly alarmed. “Did you hear something, Dinah?”

“It was an animal in the bushes, Joe, nothing more.”

An animal. Yes, he was an animal indeed.

What had happened to him today? He was an honorable man.
Had
been an honorable man, just that morning.

Now he was skulking in shrubberies, watching other people copulate, getting himself off quite spectacularly fantasizing about the vicar’s sister sucking his cock—and had done it where that very girl herself had been able to watch him.

It was a good thing the path in front of him hadn’t been clear. If he had been able to run after Mary, if he had been able to catch her, what on earth had he been planning to do?

He liked to think it would simply be to beg her once more to marry him, but he suspected that would have come somewhere down the list after trying to rip the clothes off of her.

Damn.

His whole world had shifted straight off its axis, and he didn’t know if he could ever set it right again.

* * *

Mary fled through the woods as fast as the moonlight would permit her, stumbling over rocks and roots and still not slowing.

Why had she come out here at all? It was just that the air in the vicarage had seemed unbreathable after the viscount left. The thought of the woods and the dark and the cool air had called to her, and she’d come out, thinking only to walk for a time to clear her head and soothe the aching pulses of her heart.

Even then, it had been clear to her she’d done the right thing in turning down the viscount’s proposal. Duty alone had compelled him to ask for her hand. Lord knows he’d looked so ill at the prospect she’d thought one of his loved ones must be dying.

So what if some deep-buried part of her clawed at her brain with the thought that she could just say “yes,” and have him with her, have him share her bed and her body forever.

She would never listen to that voice.

John was her friend, and she’d never let his small lapse in judgment in the woods make him miserable for the rest of his life.

And now—well, she was more sure than ever that a marriage between them could only be a mistake. His desire for her was as thoughtless and base as the sexton’s lust for Mrs. Trumbull.

If she’d harbored even the slightest hope that his behavior in the woods had had something to do with
her
in particular rather than with circumstance—the vines that had exposed her legs, the thorns that had pulled his head against her bosom—well, that hope was utterly dashed.

He was a man. And men were mindless brutes when it came to female flesh. Even
her
flesh, meager as it was.

That was proved once and for all by John’s reaction to Mrs. Trumbull’s mouth around another man’s member and her wantonly spread thighs.

The older woman was an even less appropriate object for a viscount’s affections than a parson’s virgin sister. But the sight of Mrs. Trumbull’s flesh—even in the faint light of the moon, in the woods in the middle of the night—had been enough to make the viscount do just as he’d done with Mary herself on the forest floor that morning.

The sight of him pleasuring himself shocked her, she had to admit. She was shaken already, what with having to stop dead in her tracks to avoid crashing straight into the pair of lovers.

And then to see John, watching them as well from deep in the shadows of a pine. She could barely make him out—would not have seen him at all except that her mind was so attuned to his shape and form that the edge of his shadow drew her eye—but it was clear enough to her what he was doing. Stroking himself fervently, just as he’d done when he was with her this morning.

Pure lust incited him both times—nothing more complicated than that.

And lust was most certainly
not
a basis for marriage.

He’d feel the same way about one of the Lawton girls—no doubt he’d feel more entranced by their flesh, pretty and sweet and ample as it was. And in the daylight hours, when the pleasure of the flesh was not a man’s main motive for marriage, one of the Lawtons would be the sort of wife he needed. Fashionable. Tasteful. Able to plan soirees and play the pianoforte and laugh in a sweet and girlish way. Able to trim her own hats and move gracefully in silks. Pretty to look at, for a viscount to show off to his friends.

So it was really just as well things had gone as they had tonight. That she’d stumbled upon the two over-eager lovers and John as well in the woods.

All illusions were wiped away.

She’d been right, utterly right, to tell John no.

And she’d stick by that
no
, even if he came and begged her again.

If she still felt a sharp, hungry pulse go through her at the thought of saying
yes
, she would just have to find a way to kill that impulse.

John’s life would not be ruined just because a plain country mouse had let herself come halfway to falling in love with him.

Chapter Six

Mary was definitely avoiding him.

John tried to talk to her after church on Sunday, but she vanished into the sacristy with a mumbled excuse about hanging up vestments—though her brother was clearly still
wearing
his vestments, right there on the church steps, while the two elderly Dalton sisters pinned him down with a long story about their tabby’s new litter of kittens.

He stopped by the schoolhouse the next day, but Mary spied him coming up the walk and cued the children to sing a rousing rendition of “Jerusalem the Golden” in four-part harmony, with Mary singing loudest of all. All sixteen verses. And she no doubt would have told them to sing a reprise if he hadn’t eventually taken the hint and gone away.

He even sent her a note saying he’d gotten Mr. Dockett’s boy to climb the hill to confirm water was indeed streaming underground, just as she’d said, and he would have men begin the well the moment she gave him her opinion of the exact spot to dig.

Surely that would bring her running, he’d thought, for how could she resist? But she only sent back a hand-drawn map with a large X and the words “Just here, sixty-two paces east of the willow” as though she’d become a pirate after all.

Without him.

Maybe what they’d done together in the woods had truly been of no moment to her. She certainly didn’t seem to have been affected by it. She seemed her normal self—self-possessed, confident, briskly going about the business of the church and the school and the town, quite without the need of him.

Had it really meant so little to her?

The thought hung on his chest, a dull gray weight.

He’d been short-tempered and irritable for days. His housekeeper had set out blackberry jam for his tea yesterday, in a little dish hand-painted with blackberry vines, and at the sight of those green thorny twisting branches, he’d actually
yelled
at her to take it away. She’d scorched his beef for dinner that night, and he deserved it. And his valet wasn’t much happier with him. John kept shifting fretfully in his seat whenever the poor man tried to shave him, and that morning had tossed aside four different neckcloths because each one seemed tighter and more abrasive than the last.

He really couldn’t let things go on like this.

Sooner or later he was going to have to go to Thomas Wilkins and confess what had happened up on the hill, but he kept hoping Mary would come around on her own before that mortifying conversation became necessary.

Unless…she was right to be refusing him.

What if he
was
being foolish in this insistence that they marry?

Certainly, she’d been very clear—painfully clear— that she had no interest in becoming his wife, that she’d be quite miserable forced into the role of viscountess.

And he couldn’t imagine it any more easily than she could: Mary Wilkins frittering away her time in ballrooms, with ostrich feathers in her hair and the Parkhurst family rubies weighting her neck. Mary Wilkins standing for hours in full court dress to make her bow to the queen. Sitting with his mother in the evenings, embroidering pillowcases and gossiping about other women’s hairstyles and china settings and shoes.

It would be like...taking a wild deer and penning it up in city stables.

Unnatural. Even cruel.

It was far easier to imagine her fighting a bout of fisticuffs in Gentleman Jackson’s saloon, or arguing a bill in the House of Lords. She’d be quite impressive at those ventures, wouldn’t she? Fierce and agile and utterly inexorable both in landing punches and in her line of reasoning. But, alas, neither a boxing match nor a seat in Parliament were within his power to offer her.

He heaved a sigh.

Still...they had done what they had done, and the demands of honor on that score were perfectly clear. Of course, honor also demanded he marry one of the Lawtons.

If only honor permitted bigamy. He could marry both women, and the Lawton girl could serve as viscountess during the day, and Mary could share his bed at night.

Good Lord
—that was
not
an appropriate thought. Appealing, maybe, but not appropriate.

Well, it was Tuesday now, and tomorrow would make a full week since they’d got themselves tangled in those damnable blackberries. They had to resolve this, and they had to resolve it soon.

Which would, of course, be far easier to do if he could get Mary to have a conversation with him.

So now he was skulking about the village green, restless as a schoolboy on the lookout for mischief. Mary had to show her face here sooner or later. Tomorrow was May Day, and she was, not surprisingly, head of the committee tasked with preparing the village festivities.

Men had been working all morning, pounding in the tall post for the May Pole—a huge thing hewn from the trunk of a pine tree more than a hundred years ago and stored in the Merchant’s Hall most of each year.

Ropes were strung between the living trees all around the Green. The last few nights had been unseasonably warm, and everyone hoped the evening dancing might be held outdoors by lantern light rather than up in the stuffy assembly rooms above the Hall.

He turned on his heel for what felt like the nine-hundred-fiftieth time to walk yet again up the path between the school and the church, when at long last, he saw Mary coming, leading a little group of ladies with long, brightly-colored ribbons draped across their outstretched arms. He was a mere ten feet from the May Pole for which those ribbons were intended, so Mary couldn’t possibly evade him now.

He stepped forward, trying to project a polite smile that would communicate to onlookers something like, “I’ve come to speak with Miss Wilkins about a matter of impersonal village business,” rather than, “Please Mary, let me make amends for debauching you the other day.”

Mary caught sight of him and blanched. She stopped dead, causing another lady behind her to plow straight into her back.

But a third lady, Annabel Lawton, did not stop; she weaved her way neatly past the others and swooped right in upon him with a smile of her own—one that said, “Here is the gentleman I intend to snap up in holy matrimony, and I know I will succeed, for no man can resist my personal charms.”

His throat constricted.

Miss Lawton stopped mere inches away from him, batting her soot-black lashes. Her armful of ribbon was held out imploringly, a clear sign that he should relieve her poor, weak, ladylike arms of the awful burden of those thin strips of cloth.

It would be a grave insult to refuse her. “Allow me to assist you with those, please, Miss Lawton,” he said dutifully, and took the ribbons into his own arms.

As he did so, Miss Lawton contrived to brush both his hands with hers, and then blushed prettily and glanced away with a little gasp, as though the contrivance had been entirely his.

Lord
.

He had to give her credit for her skill.

With that distraction past, he looked around for Mary—who had already managed to climb a tall step-ladder and was balancing on her tiptoes, using a long stick with a hook on its end to thread the first of her ribbons through the round ring at the top of the May Pole.

The sight of her stretched out up there struck him with erotic force.

Damn
.

Whether any of the good townspeople openly acknowledged it or not, May Day was part of pagan tradition, from long before the coming of Christianity, a true rite of spring. The May Pole was a spear thrust up to pierce the frosts of winter, a symbol of fertility, of the surging energy of the newborn earth.

The lithe line of Mary’s body made him want to see her stretched out naked on the grass. With his naked body stretched out over top of hers. He willed her to look at him, to see the heat she sparked in his eyes.

But she was paying no attention at all to him. Her gaze was solidly focused on her task.

Was it really so hard to guide a ribbon through a six-inch ring, or was she
pointedly
ignoring him?