The Traitor (17 page)

“Brodie, turn loose of my baroness.”

Michael’s expression was bemused. “She’s not your baroness yet, and she says your soil is too damp for your weeds.”

Milly straightened and dusted her hands together. “They are herbs, Mr. Brodie, and they keep the fleas from your bed and the infection from your wounds. Show some respect.”

Michael’s consternation was a lovely addition to a pretty day. “Listen to my baroness,” Sebastian said, taking Milly’s hand. “I certainly intend to.”

They left Michael among the shrubs, his bemusement blossoming into a smile.

“Michael smiling is an unnerving proposition,” Sebastian said as they moved between rows of plants. “Puts one in mind of Lady Freddy going quiet, or the professor lapsing into Russian.”

“Marriage to you is an unnerving proposition.”

His Milly had such courage. “Marriage to me, or marriage in general?”

“Both.”

He closed his fingers more snugly around hers. “You will tell me why.”

“You need a baroness whom none will find fault with, St. Clair. I am a nobody, though for the most part, I’ve been happy in that state.”

“Sebastian. You are to be my wife, and that gives me the privilege of hearing you say my name. For years, I was Robert Girard, some fool Frenchman with a reputation for nastiness and no family to speak of. Please call me Sebastian.”

“Robert Girard? Those are your middle names, aren’t they?”

“They are. Why would you recall something so inconsequential?”

Against his palm, her hand was dusty and warm.

“Your very name could not be inconsequential to me, any more than you’ve brushed aside my name as a silly exercise in penmanship. Where are we going?”

“Out of the sun.” They were engaged. According to the contradictory and labyrinthine rules of proper English behavior, they could now be alone together for brief periods. Unfortunately, privacy was in short supply on a small horticultural farm. Sebastian led Milly to the drying shed, a building larger than its name would suggest, but upwind from the stables, the fields, and anything else that might pollute the fragrances captured there.

“Come harvest time, this place will be full to bursting with bundled herbs hung up to dry. The scent then is intoxicating.”

“It’s lovely now.” Milly leaned close to an old wooden workbench, sniffing the surface. “That is remarkable.”

“It’s a cutting table, which you can no doubt tell from the scars, but it absorbs the oils of the plants year after year. Why are you afraid to marry me, Milly?”

She turned and hiked herself up onto the cutting table. She could do that because she was a nobody, a village girl gone into service, not a bloody, simpering debutante. “Not afraid, reluctant. Come here.”

Two of his favorite words, when she spoke them. Sebastian moved to stand at her knees. “Have I a smudge on my nose?”

“A bit of lavender in your hair,” she said, brushing his temple. “I do like you, you know.”

He captured her fingers and kissed them, dust and lavender making the taste of her pleasant and summery. “You’re not afraid of me, then?”

She didn’t withdraw her hand, and in the light slanting through the old windows, her complexion had a luminous quality.

“Why would I be afraid of you? You’re patient with the elderly, clean about your person, kind to abused donkeys, a generous employer, and an inspired teacher of penman—”

He kissed her. Kissed her because she didn’t understand the question, though she might possibly understand the answer. “We’ll be intimate, Milly. Horrendously, inescapably intimate. Does that bother you?”

He kissed her again, because he didn’t want to hear her dithering and dodging. With her aunts as her finishing governesses, it was quite possible that Milly—despite a taste for passionate kisses and a surfeit of courage—did not look forward to the wedding night.

She hauled him closer by his lapels, and damned if he didn’t feel her boot hooking around his flanks. “I like being intimate with you, St. Clair.”

“Sebastian.” He growled this against her mouth, then smiled as her second boot hit him on the backside. “There’s more to a wedding night than kisses, you know.”

She dropped his lapels, and her boots fell away, leaving Sebastian standing between her spread knees. “I am not uninformed, sir.”

“You might well be
mis
informed. Do you look forward to the wedding night?” That wasn’t what he’d meant to ask, but she was breathing heavily, her breasts shifting gently in a fashion that directed his blood some distance south of his feeble male brain. “Do you know what happens on a wedding night?”

“One is intimate with one’s spouse.” She gently dusted the fabric of his lapels, the gesture wifely, but not in a league with her kisses. “One attempts to conceive the baronial heir.”

He stepped closer and hauled her forward by virtue of his hands scooping under her derriere. “One pleasures one’s wife witless.”

His motive for providing a demonstration was complicated. He did not want her disappearing to the North, and he did not want her anxious about their conjugal intimacies. Those reasons for sealing his mouth over hers again were real and true.

Also paltry compared to the lust roaring through him.

He wedged himself against her sex, letting her feel the evidence of his arousal, and needing to know she would not shrink away.

“Sebastian—”

She squirmed
closer
. Her hands ran riot over his neck, his ears, through his hair, and down his arms. He hoped she was leaving a trail of dust for all to see, hoped his imprimatur on her would be equally clear as a result of his kisses.

He wrestled with her skirts, shoving them aside enough that he could get his hand on one bare, delectable knee. “We can’t—”

She twisted her fingers in his hair, a compelling, entirely delightful pain. “Talk later; kiss—”

He kissed her like a man dying for warmth and starving for lack of kisses. Kissed her even as he turned her and laid her down on the old wooden table, the window light bathing her in sunshine. He traced her lips with his tongue as she went quiet, flat on her back, one knee propped up, her skirts falling in disarray.

“Hush,” he said as he got his coat off, folded it, and tucked it under her head. “I’m not finished kissing you.”

Not nearly, though how kissing resulted in a man climbing onto a table, taking his lady in his arms, and spooning himself around her was not entirely clear. Their dealings shifted, became slower, less desperate, even as Sebastian’s fingers reveled in the smooth warmth of Milly’s knee…and…thigh.

“No freckles here,” he observed, drawing her skirts up higher. “Only perfection.” Though even her freckles struck him as perfect, he wasn’t about to tell her that.

“I cannot think when you touch me like this, Sebastian. I don’t want to think.”

Good. A woman incapable of thought was incapable of planning a journey to Yorkshire. Sebastian brushed his hand up the silky inside of her thigh, his fingers drifting through soft, springy curls.

“Lift your knee, love.”

He kissed her ear lest she argue, then took her lobe between his teeth and pulled gently. “You understand how one goes—how two go—about conceiving a baronial heir?”

“I do.” Even in two syllables, he could hear the caution in her tone. Her understanding was theoretical, at best, while her trust in him, at least in these moments, was real.

Sebastian teased his index finger up the crease of her sex. “You understand that we’ll copulate, my cock inside you, my seed spent in your body?”

“Mmm.” She moved against his hand, which was answer enough. Sebastian repeated the caress but pressed close enough to find dampness. His cock was rioting behind his falls, pushing snugly against her backside, and clamoring for him to discard boots, breeches, and common sense.

Which would not do. His immediate objective was not to anticipate their vows, but to ensure those vows were taken. He petted her curls, smoothed his fingers against her skin, then went exploring again.

“Close your eyes, Milly. Focus on where I’m touching you.”

When she’d complied, Sebastian closed his eyes too, the better to picture the terrain his hand was learning. Soft, pink folds, damp flesh, and a delicate bud…there.

He worked her gently, slicked his fingers over that bud repeatedly, until the dampness grew, and Milly’s breathing deepened. She was waiting, but the tenor of her stillness, the way she eased each breath carefully in and out, suggested she didn’t know what she waited for.

Fortunately for his nerves, she didn’t have to wait long. Milly’s body
knew
, even if the rest of her did not. Her hips started a slow rocking in rhythm with his caresses, she nuzzled at his shirtsleeve where her cheek rested against his biceps, and then she was pressing against his fingers, a soft, sighing moan keening past her lips.

“Sebastian… Oh,
Sebastian
.”

He withdrew his hand as she went boneless against him, his cheek pressed to her hair. No woman had called him by his real, true name in an intimate moment.

He’d been Robert, Girard, Colonel, St. Clair, and most often no name in particular, but never Sebastian. While Milly drowsed in the sunshine against him, Sebastian unfastened his falls and extricated his cock from his clothes. The scent of herbs, brisk, complex, and pleasant, was stronger, perhaps because the sun hit the old cutting table, perhaps because he’d brought pleasure to the woman he was going to marry.

He tucked his cock between her legs, not coupling, but enfolded by her heat. She scooted back against him, as if she understood what he was about, and brought his hand up to fill his palm with her breast.

“I am remiss,” he whispered, planting a kiss on her nape. “I did not pleasure your breasts.” She closed her fingers around his, and though her corset posed a damnable impediment, the table was hard beneath them, and dust motes danced thick on the sunshine, Sebastian found both pleasure and relief.

As a soft, sweet release rose up and shuddered through him, tension lurking in all manner of places in his mind and body ebbed, contentment beckoned, and gratitude welled up.

He would live long enough to give Milly a wedding night she’d never forget, and hopefully, never regret—provided, of course, she did not leave him first.

***

A scent wound among the fragrance of herbs of Provence, an earthy, not exactly sweet scent. Milly lay in the sunshine—this was what it meant to
bask
, she suspected—and conjectured that she smelled the scent of coupling.

“Knee up, my dear.” Sebastian stroked a warm hand over her bare bottom, finishing the caress with a brisk pat. Someday, Milly would pat his bottom with exactly the same blend of affection and possessiveness.

“Knee up?”

He showed her, and Milly had to be grateful she was facing away from the dratted man as he pressed a handkerchief against her privy parts, then positioned her hand over the handkerchief.

“I apologize for the mess, but anything might happen before an engaged couple can get to the altar.”

Milly pushed her skirts down, the handkerchief pressed between her legs. “Are you apologizing for more than the mess, Sebastian?”

She posed the question carefully, because in the wake of such—such!—unimaginable pleasure, came emotions neither tidy nor convenient. Milly fought her skirts into submission and rolled to her back, the better to wade into battle with her intended.

He was on his side, propped on his elbow, his hair disheveled, his marvelous green eyes guarded. “Do I need to apologize for more?”

“Yes, I rather think you do.” She tidied his hair as best she could, mostly for the pleasure of touching him.

The light in his eyes went from guarded to shuttered. “Apologize, why?”

“I am not particularly literate, but I’m of age, you know. A biology lecture wasn’t necessary, though you might have warned me about that other. Not well done of you to ambush your own fiancée that way.” Somebody might have warned her, anybody, though she would not have believed them.

He cradled Milly’s cheek against his palm. “That other? That pleasure, that closeness, that sharing of intimacies?”

She treasured his touch, which bore a whiff of herbs, musk, and…donkey?

“That bodily surprise. It discommodes one.”

He leaned closer. “Does it make one inclined to take marriage vows instead of hare off to Yorkshire?”

The inconvenient, untidy sentiments rose higher. Milly shifted, wrapping her arms around her fiancé and pulling his head down to the breasts he’d neglected.

“I wrote those letters in case you changed your mind, Sebastian. In case you came to your senses, which I fully expected you to do. You won’t, will you? Please say you won’t. I could not bear to remain near you, knowing you don’t care for—”

His tongue swiped up her cleavage, and then his voice rumbled against her heart. “Your letters gave me a start, madam. I can’t go racketing about, chasing every fiancée who takes a notion to tour the West Riding. A man has obligations to see to, herbs to raise, an aunt to supervise.”

And a donkey to spoil. Milly kissed his temple, having the curious conviction that he’d have come after her at a dead gallop if she’d been on the northbound stage out of King’s Cross.

“You might have tried discussing matters with me, sir. I can be reasoned with, even if you do neglect my breasts.”

His shoulders moved. Milly took a moment to grasp that she’d made him laugh, and then she was laughing too. There on the hard table, amid the dust, sunshine, and scents of old herbs and new love, they laughed together.

***

Dear
Acorn
was a man with problems, and like every man with problems Henri had had the tedious honor to know, an application of spirits provoked a recitation of those problems.

“Frieda says I should have the blasted chit declared incompetent, but that’s the perishing problem.”

Henri moved the bottle closer to Upton’s elbow. “Madame Frieda offers her opinion too freely?” Frieda, whose poor husband had not been permitted conjugal comfort since Wellington had shipped out for Spain.

“Damned right she does.” Upton glanced around the taproom, likely to ensure nobody had overheard his domestic treason. Henri had appropriated that uniquely English vantage point, the snug. This cozy corner of the common put Henri in mind of the confessional of his boyfriend, though now, Henri assumed the role of confessor.