Lady Merry's Dashing Champion (20 page)

"Come," he said, taking her hand in his, "let us walk through the fields to the woods. At my prayers this morn, I ordered a perfect day for you. A hot sun and a cool westerly sea breeze."

"You have great powers of communication beyond the common man," she said, smiling again.

"Ah, you well remember." His low tone held a throb of meaning.

Meriel blushed and clasped his hand tighter, pulling on it. They had reached the great fields of wildflowers she had seen from the carriage. She must hope the little doctor's onion elixir was up to this country air, though she must pass this way quickly before she began sneezing, which would surely be very unlike Felice. Even the onion drops could not protect against so many blooms. "And do your powers extend to foot races, my lord, or is the man not as fast as the boy?"

"Faster!" he said, laughing.

She ran away toward the oak woods, her eyes red from a sneeze, or several, denied.

He chased her, marveling at this playful spirit. Perhaps it had been part of her all the time. How could he have missed such jollity? Could he have been too demanding, too eager to mold her? Had he missed the real woman these last years? Though she dodged in and out of the tall grasses, he caught her easily and, laughing aloud, they walked on with their arms around each other's waists.

He loved the sense of her hips moving under his arm. He took great warmth from her body, warmth he still needed. He would never be without it again.

Meriel felt strength from his closeness. She would need strength to let him go when that time came, and a prickling on her neck told her that her time here was short. Chiffinch's plans would not be stopped by her kidnapping in Spring Gardens.

They crossed the carriage track and reached the woods and walked under its green-scented canopy, stepping onto a carpet of bluebells. She turned her face to his. "Why are you sad?" he asked.

"I've never been so happy," she said, sniffling.

He turned her to him and touched her cheek. "Here is a tear."

"My eyes are unused to—"

He put the moist finger to his tongue. "Tastes like a tear." He wrapped her in his arms, cupping his hand around the back of her head and pushing it gently into his shoulder. "Whence comes such tears? Sadness, and on this day of all days at our new beginning?"

Oh, how those words stabbed her because she knew that a sure ending was part of this beginning. "These are not tears of sadness, Giles, but of joy and love."

The past still kept him from instant belief in miracles. "Are there loving tears?"

"There are for a woman." Meriel could not tell him that she had adored him as her marble hero in a library far and away in Canterbury, an ideal of manhood that she had never hoped to actually hold in her arms. So she spoke all the honesty she could. "Giles, I love you because you are brave.

And because you can forgive. And because you are a man who makes gardens."

"Is that the truth?"

"The only truth that matters."

He gently closed her eyes and kissed them, both in turn, holding her as near as she held him.

"I can scarce believe that you are here with me like this." He shook his head as if to clear away any remaining doubt. He did not want to deny what he was feeling any longer. Suspicion was dropping away from him, taking anger and ill memory, everything but what he saw and knew at this moment.

Meriel bit her lip hard to keep from crying out all that he did not know. She would pay with a lifetime of emptiness for these few enchanted moments, but she was determined to leave Giles with a happy memory of his wife. She convinced herself that the masquerade must continue for as long as possible. Everything in life was a choice. At that instant, she could imagine no other.

They walked on through the slanting light, crunching under their feet the acorns missed by the manor's pigs, coming at last to a small shaded glade surrounded by a canopy of giant oaks, some with limbs as thick as trees. Meriel thought these must be the grandmother oaks of this forest, the oldest from which all the others had been born.

Giles dismissed the servant waiting beside the laden basket. "Merry, have you an appetite?" he asked, his dark eyes crinkling at the corners.

A comic twist of his mouth described the appetite of which he spoke. Laughing, she ran away so that he would give chase again. She wanted to be caught, to be carried by the weight of his body to the ground, to be loved here on the ancient earth of the Warboroughs. Mistress of all for a brief moment.

Giles chased her to the biggest oak of all and began to climb it, pulling himself up, then taunting her with a grin. "I challenge you, Merry."

"A countess doesn't climb trees," she said, fearing to become so much herself that she would be unmasked.

"I saw you climb from the ketch as no countess would." He balanced along the branch and back, showing his prowess. "I used to climb in this tree all the day, hiding from my tutors and the whipping that most often followed. It is one of my fondest memories."

"The whipping?"

"Definitely not. My Latin tutor could lay on with a will. It was a day alone in the forest that I could not resist, a day without conjugations and sums. I had always rather be on the land than in the schoolroom."

At that moment, Meriel loved him so completely it near took her breath. Giles was a peer of the realm, a Garter knight, but at heart he was a farmer, a sailor, a man at home everywhere but at Whitehall. There was no guile in him. He was showing her who he was. And she loved all that she saw.

Looking up at him standing tall on the huge limb, shaded by leaves, he seemed an ancient green man come to life. Before Meriel could stop her mouth, she blurted, "As a child, I swam in the river for just such escape to make my own private place."

Puzzled, he peered down at her. "You never said you swam the Stour. I thought you would have hated it."

The Stour? Her river had been Felice's? The thought tumbled about in her head while she tried to find the sense in it. What she found was a warning to watch her tongue.

Any unguarded word could create questions she could not answer and expose her deception. She couldn't risk it.

He stooped to give her a hand. "I grow lonely. Come up to me."

Without a thought, she reached high and grasped his strong fingers and he pulled her easily up to a perch beside him. The tree enclosed them, and higher up she heard the four-note love call of a hopeful woods dove.

"Look, Merry!"

She followed his pointing finger to a huge forked branch higher up, where young hands had built a platform.

"I haven't climbed up there for years."

"Take me up, Giles. I want to see where you went as a boy."

"I never thought you would want to see it."

Faintly in the distance, she heard horses on the estate road and knew that her time with Giles was short now, for if not this carriage, then surely the next would bring Chiffinch's orders. Meriel clung to Giles until he climbed to the next limb. "Quickly now, help me," she said, looking up and seeing Giles's happy face above her. She would make that smile last as long as she could.

Pulling her skirt between her legs and tucking it into her waist ties, she exposed her legs, but she was beyond modesty with this man. Quite beyond. She held tight to his hand as they climbed higher, the rough bark catching at her ribbons and untying them.

"Don't look down," he said.

"I have never been fearful." She was proud of that truth. She'd been born with nothing, not even a name. There wasn't much to lose after commencing life as an orphan. At least there hadn't been until Giles.

He grasped a rope hanging from the platform, but it came
away rotted by time. "Wait here," he said. He inched up the trunk, tested each branch for strength, then reached back for her. They clambered finally onto the rough planks lodged in a fork between two large branches. Giles brushed away old acorns and dried leaves.

Meriel could well see the proud boy building his woodland hideaway with railings like those on the prow of his ketch, a little ship sailing among a sea of leaves. Large square-head nails still held it sturdy.

"Are you dizzied?" he asked.

"Probably. Don't let go of me."

"Never and a day," Giles said, pulling her closer as he leaned his back against the huge trunk.

He lowered his voice so that the sound stayed between them. "I want you here, Merry. I want to give you our son here where I dreamed as boy and youth of the woman I would love."

"But you are neither now, my lord, but quite obviously full grown." She tried harder to shut out the sound of approaching horses and the rattle of a carriage now clearly heading toward Harringdon Hall.
Please God, just a little more time.
The begging words echoed through her.

He kissed her. It was a starved kiss and she felt all the years of his hunger at once. When she pulled back from him, she saw he was smiling.

"How could you kiss me like that and smile at once?"

"Merry, how could I not?" His hand found hers and put it on his manhood.

She held her breath. "I need no further proof that you are indeed full grown."

"You shall have it, nonetheless."

As Giles pushed into Merry, the force of his desire so soon after their long night of love ripped through him like a sudden storm at sea and came to rest in his full and swollen cock. The memory of loving Merry only hours before was not enough for him. He needed to touch her, to taste her; he needed to hold her in his hands, to pull her so close that they became one person, one flame, one primitive emotion.

He saw her throw back her head, her mouth open and her hands grip the railing lest she fall overboard. "Merry, my love—"

He felt Merry's tightened hold on his manhood, felt her pushing her legs against his back, wordlessly urging him on. He needed nothing further.

Meriel's thighs ached with tension. She wanted more of him and got it, rocking backward until he thrust into her deepest woman's well and completely filled the emptiness that she knew she would need only him to fill forever.

They cried out in ecstasy together, and the sound of almost unbearable aching throbbed through the old oak forest, sending birds flying from their perches and leaves quivering on their fragile stems. For a full minute the forest was still, then gradually birds returned and began to chatter and a breeze rustled the leaves, making it a forest again.

In the late afternoon, the earl's majordomo greeted his laughing master and mistress as they strolled arm in arm to the entrance of Harringdon Hall, Giles carrying a now empty food basket. "My lord, a Dr. Wyndham awaits below in the hall. He says he is sent by His Majesty, and indeed a carriage bearing the royal arms brought him." The servant handed his master a letter with the red royal seal and bowed again to Meriel. "Your ladyship, your maid Agnes accompanied the doctor from Whitehall. I sent her to your rooms."

Giles nodded and Meriel felt his arm muscles tense under her hand. He looked a question at her, and she shrugged. Although she had suspicions, she truly did not know why the doctor had been sent. No one could fathom Chiffinch's tactics, but he used everyone for his purposes. A royal physician would not be exempt if he wished to keep his position. What she did know was that her time with Giles was now very short, and she moved closer and clung to his arm.

The little doctor was seated by a wood fire in the ancient stone hall that seemed to hold the chill of winter even in June.

Giles had loosed Meriel's arm, and she could sense the suspicion that had returned almost as if it had been biding its time.

"My Lord of Warborough," the doctor said, rising and sweeping his hat before him, bowing so low that he almost lost his wig.

"We meet again, Doctor, I hope in better times," Giles said, though his voice held no such hope.

"Alas, your lordship, I'm afraid better times elude all true Englishmen. After plague and devastating fire, the people cry out for order. Yet we must now contend with the Dutch navy."

Giles drew himself up even taller than his normal height. "Has the king ordered me into naval service at last?"

"That is not why I am come, sir."

Giles's voice was rigidly polite, but along with the pulsing vein in his neck, his tone took on a noticeably harder edge. "Then I must ask why you are come, since I have no need of a palace doctor."

Wyndham cleared his throat and took a deep breath. "His Majesty is greatly concerned for her ladyship's health and wishes a royal physician"—-he bowed again to indicate himself—"to attend her. I am charged, sir, with—"

Giles stepped closer to the doctor, lowering his voice so that servants, always curious, would have no further gossip to carry to their quarters. "Her ladyship, Dr. Wyndham, is in excellent health, as you can plainly see. And mark you, for the king's ears only, we are in hopes of a babe by the coming spring."

Indeed, Meriel knew that the doctor could witness her health and possibly much more. Her gown was near undone from its ribbons catching on the climbing tree; grass and wine stains ... and perhaps the mark of lovemaking ... had soiled the skirt during their wild
pique-nique,
where she had acted the wanton shepherdess to Giles's highway rogue. That a babe had been conceived had not been far from her thoughts, either, though she could not visualize a future beyond the next few days, indeed the next hours. She could not imagine what she would do if she lived on and had Giles's babe. All her future was emptiness, either from quick death by the Dutch or a slower death without Giles.

The doctor cleared his throat several times and blinked rapidly. "Ah, yes, my lord, I do see great health in her ladyship, and I pray that God grants you the child you long for."

His face reddened and took on further confusion so that Meriel could not help but have sympathy for him, though he stumbled on. "Er, yet, sir, I am charged by the king's appointment as royal physician to examine her ladyship's healing of both her ankle and the scar opened, as you may know, by a careless maid, since... er, His Majesty knows me skilled in treatments of both bones and burns."