Edith Layton (15 page)

“’E’s at it again,” one footman told the other. “Best
get all back to the kitchen and ’ave Cook make up a tray, as usual when ’is lordship entertains a lass.”

“Thought this one were different,” the other said, listening to the fading sounds of merriment.

“Different? She’s female, ain’t she?”

“Thought he said this time were different,” the first footman insisted.

“Aye,” the other mocked, “when a tiger changes ’is stripes, ’e’ll be different, that one. ’E’s somethin’, ain’t ’e?” he added proudly.

Her gown was just a breath of gauze, as easily lifted off as it had been to put on. But she hadn’t known an elegant man could remove his clothing, boots, neckcloth, breeches, waistcoat, and smallclothes so quickly. It seemed only a moment after they’d reached their room that they got to the bed, and a second after, she felt the blessed thrill of the warmth and shock of his naked body next to hers.

This time she was as eager as he.

He groaned. “Bridget, wait, let me, let me. Ah, Bridget, what are you doing to me?”

Her arms around him, her hands moving over him, she was so relieved to find
her
Ewen again. Her laughing, intimate, aroused Ewen. She was flushed with desire, heated by the long moments in her bath and the longer moments remembering him.

He did his best to fan the flames, and then, when he could no longer fight her curiosity or his rampant desire, he brought them together, and sighed with the absolute pleasure of it. He tempered himself, fought himself so he could move slowly, battled his unruly desire so he could linger, even though the very thought
of tarrying brought an ache to tinge his delight. Then at the last, when he heard her breath catch, he gave in.

But only so far. Because at the end, at the last thrust he could control, he pulled away from her before his pleasure could erupt.

She’d been spiraling upward to some new height she’d never known. But when he suddenly left her the spiral stopped and she came crashing down to reality. She watched in confusion as he flung himself away. He pressed his forehead to their pillow, his broad back convulsing. But he kept one arm around her and gasped in her ear as he came to completion beside her, without her.

“Ewen?” she asked in a little voice when he lay still at last. “Ewen? What happened?”

“What happened,” he said breathlessly, raising up on his elbow so he could look down at her, “is that I spared you a child.”

“Oh,” she said, frowning. Her eyes grew wide and frightened. “You don’t want me to have your baby? But why? I’m your wife, Ewen.”

He took a deep breath. He toyed with a lock of her hair. His fingers caressed her cheek. “Bridget, you’re new to this game of ours. Surely you don’t want to be encumbered by a babe, at least not just yet?”

Her eyes were enormous, gray as the twilight. “I’m not that young, Ewen. Is it—is it that you don’t want me to bear…Ewen, an outer scar doesn’t mean the baby will be marked. That’s an old wives’ tale. I know, I asked a doctor.”

“Damn and blast!” he said, sitting up and pulling her up with him, his hands hard on her shoulders. “I know that! I wasn’t thinking that. I was trying to spare you. Most women don’t want—”

“I’m not most women, Ewen,” she said quietly.

“I know you’re not,” he said, and laughed. “Good God, how I do know that. Very well. I take it you want me, and all of me, whatever the consequences?”

“Would you want less of me?” she asked as answer.

“I want as much of you as I can get,” he growled, pulling her down beside him again, his anger turning to passion, her fears becoming tinder.

They lay tangled together, quiet at last. The moon was high and threw stark white shadows across their naked bodies, highlighting a curve of breast here, an outflung leg there. She lay on his chest, her hand playing over it. He lay back on the pillow, one arm behind his head, one hand still stroking her back.

“So that’s what you always feel when you make love?” she asked languidly.

“Not always. Never like this, no.”

“Thank you,” she said, “but I mean what I felt. That moment of absolute…well, you know.” She blushed in the dark, thinking about how he’d wrung such sighs and whimpers of pleasure from her, until she’d heard herself and even then couldn’t stop herself. And certainly not after he’d heard and urged her to utter more. “Is it always like that for a man?”

“It never felt like this for me,” he said again, “and so I couldn’t say. I suspect that was only the beginning for you. You’ll see.”

“The
beginning
?” she said in wonder.

“Well, gratifying as it was to see you learn so fast, I believe you could still remember your name and where you were. I’ll have to do better than that,” he chuckled.

“Oh, my,” she said, and lay still, listening to the
steady beat of his heart. There was little else to hear in the still country night. It reminded her of something. “Do you know why my mother named me Bridget?” she asked softly.

“No,” he said, yawning drowsily.

“Well, I had no sisters or brothers, and I was lonely. So, sometimes when I didn’t want to go to sleep on summer nights like this, she’d tell me to lie very still in my bed in the dark. She said that if I did, and listened very close, I’d hear all the creatures talking to me, saying my name. Listen—they’re still doing it. There’s a frog. Hear what he’s saying? B
ridg-et
. B
ridg-et
. And the crickets, too. Hear them? I’m glad you told them I was here, Ewen.”

They each smiled then.

“When I was companion to one cousin or another,” she went on, “all those lonely years, sometimes at night I’d listen and I’d feel better, knowing all the animals were calling me.”

He smiled. “All the animals, eh? Including me? B
ridget
,” he growled as he bent his head, tipping hers up to receive his kiss. “You won’t be lonely anymore, my dear.”

She settled herself to sleep again, her hand on his heart.

“You didn’t ask me,” he said, his voice low and rumbling.

“Mmm? What?”

“Why my mother named me as she did.”

“Ummm,” she said, trying to think of something clever. But she was sleepy and too content to summon more than an echo. “Why Ewen?”

“Exactly. ‘
You win
.’ Music to my ears. She said I’d always hear people saying that to me. whatever I challenged them to do.” She thought a minute and then gig
gled. He added more seriously, “But it’s true. Bridget, if you think to test me, remember, I always do win.”

“Well, fine,” she mumbled, and fell asleep, still smiling.

But he didn’t. He’d had wide experience and thought he’d little conscience, and he’d never finished lovemaking and lain awake brooding before. She was unique; he’d hadn’t been wrong about that. She was a joy and a delight; he hadn’t been wrong about that, either. He felt better than he had since he could remember. And yet he had a certain history, and an uncertain, unplanned future. Now he’d linked her future to his.

He
would
make her happy, he promised himself. Easy enough for now. It seemed that all he had to do was make himself happy in order to do that. But later? He wasn’t accustomed to thinking of that. He stretched, yawned, and drew her close, just to hear her sleepy murmur. And just to take her murmurous kiss. And just to move her closer still and let her help him forget himself and all his troubling questions tonight.

Bridget smiled as she came awake. Early light filtered through the windows. It was a fine morning. Finer, because for the first time in her life she’d woken to find a man in bed beside her. Not just a man—her husband. Not just her husband—her Ewen.

She spent a few minutes watching him sleep. His hair was growing and beginning to curl around his ears, which were flat to his head and very shapely, she thought with pride. His eyelashes were really quite long, she noted. A faint dark beard outlined that hard jaw. Now that he was utterly still, she could see that half his attractiveness came from the spirit that animated his face, because while it wasn’t unappealing, it wasn’t classically hand
some in any sense. Just enough to make her lose her senses, she thought, sighing with happiness.

She passed a few more glad moments merely watching him and then began to wonder if she ought to wake him—nothing too presumptuous, just a feather touch, really, just to see if he wanted to—M
adwoman
! she chided herself. Y
ou have a day of hard traveling ahead, and a night of lovemaking behind you
. U
p with you. and off you go
.

She started to slip out from under the covers. A long arm snaked around her waist and held her back.

“Done watching over me?” Ewen asked, a smile in his voice. “Or did you take a good long look and decide to leave such a bad-looking fellow?”

She fell back into bed, laughing. She knelt over him, holding herself up on her hands and looking down at him, her hair falling to form a curtain around his face. “Wretched man! Do you never sleep?”

“I don’t dare. I might snore, and you might leave me,” he said comfortably.

“I might leave my senses, you mean. But I have to get up now. We have such a long trip before us. Another thing I never thought to ask,” she said in chagrin. “Is it two days or three to get to your father’s house?”

But now he was staring into her eyes. “Gray in the dark, silver at dawn—you have the most astonishing eyes,” he murmured.

“Well, I’m glad of it, but I don’t see them much,” she said, dismissing his compliment to get at the facts. “How far must we travel today, Ewen?”

“How far? To the convenience and back, to the dining table and back—that is, if you really feel you have to get out of this bed at all,” he said, brushing a kiss along her brow.

“Don’t joke. I’d like to know.”

“I’ve never been more serious,” he said, and she did see serious intent in his eyes. But it had nothing to do with leaving the bed and traveling on.

“Ewen! Really, we have to get going.”

“Precisely my thoughts,” he said with a smile, and tugged at the bedcovers she held to her breast.

“I meant to your father’s,” she protested. “You said we have to leave early.”

“So I said,” he murmured as he put his lips to her shoulder, “but I was wrong.”

“What?” Bridget put her hands on his chest to hold him off, her eyes troubled. “Ewen, we wed in haste, we rode like mad things to get here, and now you say we don’t have to hurry anymore? I don’t understand.”

He took her two hands in one of his and held them to his heart, his eyes narrowing when he saw how the bedcovers had fallen away from her breasts, showing them coral-tipped and tilted.
She wears them like ornaments on that slender frame
, he thought.

“I wake early,” he explained, forcing himself to gaze back up into her eyes. “A most un-rakish trait, I agree; please don’t let it get out or my reputation is ruined. I went downstairs at dawn, while you were sleeping, to see if there was a new message from my father. I told you I get reports daily. Since we’re closer to him here than we were in London, I thought a message might come earlier. It did. He’s better, Bridget. I don’t know whether it was the news of my marriage or God’s own will that did it, but he’s better.”

She gazed at him, looking adorably confused. He smiled and his voice was soft as he went on. “You see, he’s not a sickly man, in the normal way of things. But he contracted an ague this past winter. It grew to a fever,
and then worse. Much worse. He had a crisis. But it’s passed! His fever finally left with the dawn yesterday. That’s why I dared stop here. Now his doctor says it’s all he can do to keep him in bed.

“He wrote to me today. He finally had strength to write to me himself,” he said with a wide grin, “to say he’d prefer not to meet you in bed. It’s a wonder the fellow is my father, isn’t it? I suppose he meant he didn’t want you to meet him while he was in bed.” He smiled at his joke; he was all smiles this morning.

“And,” he went on, touching a finger to the tip of her nose, “he says he wants us to have a proper honeymoon. He told me to take a few weeks to celebrate my marriage to you, and leave him that time to recuperate. Vanity. We’re a pair of vain males.
Recuperate
, my foot. He wants you to be impressed with him when you do meet. So there it is. There’s no finer place for a month of honeyed moons than this. And so we travel nowhere today, Bridget…unless I can talk you into a taking a little journey with me now.”

“A journey? Where?”

“I was thinking of someplace where we’d both be happy,” he said as he lowered his lips to hers. “To the stars, I think, for a start.”

But he lied, because he soon took her to the heart of the sun. She followed where he led. She let him gather her in his arms, she let him lead her back down the paths they’d explored in the night and then take new turns in the growing daylight. If it wasn’t for a strange moment of niggling doubt about what he’d said, it would have been entirely exquisite for her. But that didn’t matter. Because that made it only blindingly exquisite for her.

B
ridget came to understand why the period after a wedding was called a treacle-moon or honeymoon. Each day was slow and incredibly sweet, drifting into a delicious night, as days and nights seemed to run together into a pool of delight.

But she had a practical soul—she’d had to have one to survive so long without love. So even in the midst of love, she tried sometimes to remind herself that nothing can live in honey, that a taste of it was always sufficient, that too much would cloy and jade the palate.

That didn’t happen.

She came to know Ewen better than she believed a woman could come to know a man. She memorized his body, became fascinated by it, was repeatedly surprised by its power and by how gently he could use it. After
only a week she knew what made him sigh or shiver, what simple touch could suddenly fire his passions.

She was astonished by her own passions. She hadn’t known she’d had them. There was a whole dimension to life she’d never imagined, and now she couldn’t recall how she’d lived without the pleasures he could make her feel. Sometimes just a certain look from him could set her yearning. Even more remarkable to her, sometimes just a look
at
him would do it.

A few days more and she knew his favorite foods and scents and songs. She asked questions and was answered—sometimes with a jest, sometimes with a kiss, sometimes with an embrace that made her forget her questions.

Some facts she did discover. His father’s name was Simon Cuthbert Sinclair, his mother’s had been Mary Elizabeth. He’d had a brother and two sisters, but none had survived infancy. He enjoyed swimming, he liked to ride and fence, he didn’t care if he never hunted again, but he loved to fish. He confessed he liked to watch a good pair of pugilists sparring, he read the newspapers every day, and tried to read a book each week. Of course, as he told her with a sudden kiss as he bore her back on his bed, that was before she’d come into his life and banished books and papers from his world forevermore.

Some things he told her readily.

“Yes, I suppose I might’ve been in danger sometimes, those years I was on the Continent, acting for England,” he said one day in answer to her question as they sat in the gardens together. “But what of it? I had friends who were in constant danger. They were fighting Napoleon on bloody battlefields. I was trying to do it in salons and
at balls. They faced sabers and shells. I was gossiping in bedchambers and gaming hells while they were being blown apart in real hells. There was never any question of me stopping because of
danger
.”

“But they might have found you out. You might have died,” she protested.

He shrugged. “We were at war. I couldn’t join the army because I was my father’s only son and heir. But neither could I have lived with myself if I’d sat the war out. Some things are more important to a man than life.”

“Honor,” she said, nodding.

“And love,” he said, then turned and took her in his arms, stopping her questions for another hour.

Some things were hard for her to ask, but she summoned the courage—when she couldn’t watch his face or he hers.

“Ewen?” she said one night as they lay deep in their bed.

“Mmm?” he murmured, half asleep after their lovemaking.

“That time when you left me before you could…when you pulled away from me when we…loved?” She spoke in a rush, her voice higher than she liked, because it was still embarrassing to talk about some things, even though she could do most of them now. But she needed to know. “Why did you do it? I know you said it was to spare me a baby. But you said you married me so you could have a baby for your father’s sake.” The time ticked by and he didn’t answer. But she knew he wasn’t sleeping.

“Oh,
that
time,” he said. “I suppose that was the time I came closest to lying to you. But I was only lying to myself. Dear Bridget, darling Bridget, it pains me to tell you, but I think the truth was half that I felt you were so
new to such pleasures it wouldn’t be fair to you. But honestly, the other half was habit.”

She was very still. He stroked her back with one warm hand as he spoke, his voice low and cajoling. “You know I wasn’t a monk before we met, my dear. I never wanted children that side of the blanket, and I was accustomed…. So I wasn’t thinking, I suppose. You have a way of turning my wits to water, you know. Let’s see if you can still do that.”

She learned he could turn the blood in her veins to fire.

Some things he spoke of briefly, and only if she persisted. She often asked about his past, and he freely told her about his childhood, his days at school, his travels to exotic places abroad. But only when she gathered her courage and asked directly did he speak of what she most wanted to know.

“My wife?” he finally told her one mild morning as they strolled by the brook. He paused and then chose his words carefully, being economical with them. “Yes, she was beautiful. And young. As was I. We weren’t together very long.”

They were under trees, in leafy shade. She could feel the play of light and shadow across her face and was glad of it, because she felt the dappled light somehow disguised her scar. She almost forgot it sometimes. But never when she was outside, and never in the daylight.

“It must have been tragic for you,” she said hesitantly, because she’d never dared ask details of his first marriage before, and his demeanor was so guarded.

“So suddenly tentative, my brave Bridget? Do you think that I pine for her? Or compare you to her? Unthink it, then. I don’t. I never have. I couldn’t.”

“But you never told me about her. Nothing. I mean, was she fair? Or dark? Smaller than I am, or—”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, picking up a stone and tossing it into the water. “It never mattered. Our fathers wanted the marriage, they arranged it, we agreed. We were both good children,” he added with a twisted smile.

“But when she was…gone, that’s when you started gathering information abroad, wasn’t it? Were you trying to forget her?”

“It was what everyone was supposed to think.” He stared at the rushing water. “Because a heartsick youth trying to drown his sorrows in mindless pleasures can gain entry to many places.”

“But was it true?”

“One thing was: There didn’t seem any point to coming back to England right away. The time slid by, months became years. The war lingered, and so did I, my original reasons forgotten. Don’t waste your pity. I took a bad situation and made something good from it. Bridget, this is dreary stuff! Speaking of waste—what a waste of a fine day,” he said suddenly. “Tell you what: I’ll teach you to fish. The water reminds me of it. I’m sure there are some rods back at the house. Or are you afraid of worms?”

“I am not fond of them,” she said cautiously, “but if you promise not to dangle them in my face, like Cousin Sylvia’s sons did, I think I can deal with them.”

“My word on it!” he said fervently, grinning like a boy himself. “Let’s get to it before the weather changes.” He took her hand and they ran back to the house, laughing.

They were laughing even more an hour later. “Yes,” she giggled into his ear as they lay replete on their bed in the sun-drenched bedchamber, “a wonderful rod you showed me, my lord.”

“And look what I caught with it,” he said, picking up a handful of her hair and letting it drift down to cover them both. “Much better than a fish—she’s got warm blood, a sleek body that twists and turns in my arms. Lord, Bridget, no sooner do I catch you than I am caught again. Is there any end to this desire?”

It seemed there wasn’t. But they became more accustomed to it, as one becomes accustomed to any luxury.

But Bridget began to be uneasy. Her edginess lay beneath the surface, half noticed, slowly growing as the days slipped by. One morning she became aware of why she felt it. She was writing to her mama again. While she was thinking of the next thing to say, she idly noted the date on the top of the page she was writing. Two weeks had passed. T
wo weeks
, she thought in shock. And still they tarried at his hideaway, making love and laughing as if there were no future.

But the summer was ripening; she saw it in the cumbrous roses, the onslaught of butterflies, the growing ripeness in the air as she strolled the peach orchards. The future was coming, and she still didn’t know how to take her place in Ewen’s life and had no way of learning it. She hadn’t met his father or any of his relatives. Except for the red-haired man in London and the few people who’d been at the wedding, she didn’t know any of his friends. She hadn’t met anyone since then but the servants at this house. Ewen had taken her from London and preserved her in this glowing golden amber jewel of a honeymoon. She worried about the future, even though she felt ungrateful for doing so.

“What a face!” Ewen said as he came into the room from his bath, rubbing his hair with a towel. “Why such gloom?”

She looked up, embarrassed. “I was only thinking.”

“Yes,” he said as he sat beside her and put an arm around her, “obviously. Because whatever you think is on your face. What tragedy is this?”

“It’s only—Ewen, we’ve been married two weeks!”

“A tragedy,” he agreed, “and with any luck, before we know it, it will be three weeks. If you’re depressed now I’d hate to think of how you’ll be then.”

“But Ewen, no one knows me! That is to say, your family and friends heard we were wed, but I’m just a rumor to them. I might as well be on the moon.”

“Oh, I see. You wanted to honeymoon in company?”

“That not what I meant! You know how lovely it’s been. I never want this to end. I only mean—we’ll meet your father soon, and then eventually everyone, I imagine. But we’ve been here two weeks, and you must know the people here, and yet I…”

“You feel I’m hiding you?” he asked, suddenly as serious as she was. He looked at her grave gray eyes and nodded. “Well, then, that’s easily remedied. We’ll go to town this very afternoon. Put on your best bonnet and mind your manners, and I’ll introduce you to the world of Little Newton.”

It was foolish to be so excited about a trip to the tiny town nearby, but Bridget
was
excited. She didn’t turn her nose up at such a treat. When she’d been a companion her only recreation had been trips to nearby villages And this was Ewen’s home, after all. So she put on one of her new gowns, a pretty pink one with a red-stripec overskirt. She wore a new bonnet, too, not as a jest, but because it was the most fashionable thing, with a turned-up brim.

Country lanes would have played havoc with the spindly wheels of a high-perch phaeton like the one Ewen drove in London. Here in the country he drove a light carriage instead.

The entire village of Little Newton was a two-street affair. There was a village green, but the only traffic Bridget saw there was a line of ducks going back into the pond. There was a church on the highest slope; below that was a smith’s, a grocer, and a few other shops whose signs were too weathered to read. There was even a modest inn, with a little outdoor garden.

“It’s not a historic place,” Ewen said as he reined in his horses. “The site’s old, but not the church. The original burned down several times, and they kept rebuilding. You’d think they might have started wondering if the deity really wanted a church just there. But Little Newton doesn’t question itself much.

“We could walk the streets and chance the bustling crowd,” he went on with a smile, “but let’s take refreshment at the inn and let the town discover us instead, shall we?”

The Stars and Garter was dim and beery-smelling on the inside. A few old men sitting at a table near the tap looked up at them. They touched their caps when they saw Ewen and then went back to talking together in low voices. Ewen led Bridget to a table by a window. The landlord hurried to serve them.

“M’lord,” he said, bowing to Ewen. “Ma’am,” he said to Bridget, looking hard at her, and then quickly away. “Meat and cheese is our usual fare. Will it do for you? Well, then, Sukie’ll be bringing it soon as can be. Ale for you, my lord?”

Ewen nodded.

“And would the lady want lemonade? I make it fresh.”

“That would be fine,” Bridget said. But when he left she frowned.

“You don’t care for lemonade?” Ewen asked, leaning back in his chair, studying her face.

“It’s not that. I just thought since this was your hometown, you’d be greeted more warmly here.”

He laughed. “Hardly. I only come here now and again for a day, at most a week or two together, and not that often in a year’s time. When I do, I usually stay at Brook House by myself or with whatever friends I’ve brought. Most of them aren’t such demons for spending all their days in town, as you are,” he teased. “So the villagers don’t know me well. And if they think they do, they think of me as a wicked libertine. That is, when they think of me at all.”

“Oh,” Bridget said, disappointed, because there was little sense meeting people who thought badly of her husband.

The serving girl certainly didn’t, though. She came to their table smiling widely, and only at Ewen. She brought their luncheon, and seemed to be carrying her own considerable bosom on the tray with it. She was fair-haired and dimpled, a pretty little thing, even if there was far too much bosom, Bridget thought—nervously, because who knew if a man ever thought there was too much bosom?

Bridget glanced at Ewen. He was admiring his cold beef and not the other sumptuous flesh being presented for his inspection. The girl set down all their dishes and finally flounced away, looking resentful.

“You could have given her a smile,” Bridget said. “I wouldn’t have minded that. I know you noticed her.”

“Oh. Give her a smile? Instead of seething with frustrated lust, I suppose?” he asked too lightly. “My dear, I noticed, but I wasn’t interested. And a smile is considered an invitation to that sort of woman. Bridget,” he said seriously, laying his knife and fork down, “you either trust me or you do not. Which is it?”

“I’m sorry,” she said miserably. “I do trust you. But I also suppose I’m afraid to. Does that make any sense?”

“Too much,” he muttered.