The Windflower (52 page)

Just outside the window a breeze tossed the crown leaves of a walnut tree, and their shadows drifted over his face. "You don't have to retreat into symbolism; I'm not Rand Morgan. You want me to understand that you find my apologies vacuous and self-serving."

"I find your apologies thinner than skimmed whey!" she said hotly. "That night in my bedroom you
attacked
me."

He wondered how many years would pass before he could call up that memory without being sick at heart from it. Very gently he said, "I can only hope that with time I'll be able to fill you so totally with my love that you will be able to shed the sting of my abuses."

"And?"

"And I'd see my hands cut off before I'd hurt you again. Ever." The corners of his eyes began to play with a smile. "Love, have a care. You're coming close to listening to an apology."

If a hundred men were to smile at her, not one could affect her as deeply as the barest glimmer of suppressed mirth-light in Devon's eyes. The muscles around her mouth begged her to respond. Thank heavens her wrists remembered the rope he had put around them yesterday.

"Listening to isn't the same as accepting." Once the words were out, they sounded childish, which was a disappointment. One always kept hoping one would be able to outgrow the occasional clumsy remark. Especially at moments like these. Gathering back her retreating dignity, she said, "You seem to be thinking far ahead of me, so I have a question. Just what is it you want?"

Leaves rippled beyond the muting window glass; as gentle was his gaze, holding her as he said, "I want to wake each morning with your breath on my shoulder. I want to sit talking to you before the fire on rainy days." Softly, "I want to sleep with your back curled into me, and your breasts under my palm."

His warmly animate glance strayed to her firm lower lip, to the faint vibration of the pulse on the incline of her throat, and then to the swell and fall of her breasts. The golden eyes were strained as they returned toilers. "Merry, if I can't be with you now, I don't know how I can stay intact for one more day. Whatever was there that helped me not to take you before has gone. It seemed to vanish on the
Joke
on the way to England. When I heard your laugh across the deck, when I turned to look at you, I wasn't sure each time that I could keep myself from going to you. . . . Love, I need you. Will you come to bed with me?"

His naked urgency shocked her as much as his readiness to show it to her. From Devon the last thing she would have expected was this blunt, almost shaken plea. Her blood flamed in answer—her breasts ached for the offered caress.

"I don't think so," she said, trying to maintain an expression of cool reserve. "I've just come from bed, and I can't think of a single reason why I'd like to go back." Reserve fled as he combed her with a curious smile and went to shut the door. She scampered like a hare behind a chair-backed settee near the window bench.

She had surprised him. That much was evident. He folded himself into the nearest chair and studied her impassively. Finally he said, "You could put down the flowerpot, Merry pet. I can see this won't be a simple adjustment for you, but you're not on the
Joke
anymore. One shout from you would bring the entire household and half the garden staff at a run."

"You're the Duke of St. Cyr. Your servants would gainsay you nothing!" she said and then immediately felt rather embarrassed. Even for her current state of burning sensitivity it sounded a little theatrical.

"You'll find out," he predicted. A dry smile hovered on his lips. "They'd gainsay me in a second if I tried to force myself on a woman. Whatever you might think of me, these are very respectable people. They've known me all my life—I was concerned they'd keep you awake for hours telling my baby stories."

She stared at him. Then, "As the matter of fact, they did tell me one or two."

"I hope it wasn't the one about the time I ingested my name in alphabet tiles?"

"No. The baby cap."

"The alphabet tiles will come." He sighed. "Anyway, there you are. Safety." He gave her a fresh smile that went straight to her heart. "I have an idea."

She watched him lever himself upright, trying to concentrate on anything but the sensual promise of his limber body as he crossed the room and began to dig in a lower drawer of the desk. From a tangle of pottery marbles and ivory spillikins he collected playing cards into a deck and came to her, shuffling them.

"My mother hasn't straightened a drawer in twenty-five years," he said. "Don't run. Watch." He set the deck on a small tripod table beside the settee. "Cut them."

He was calm suddenly, and there was a playful curve to his erotic mouth. Warily she looked at the cards, and then at his face. "Why?"

"I'll tell you in a minute. Go on."

She bent forward and divided the deck with an exasperated snap. "Now what?" she asked, gazing suspiciously at the back of the cards, which carried a picture of a dog balancing on a ball, jauntily tipping a striped top hat.

"Now," he said, fanning out the cards, '*we draw. One card each and the winner has his or her choice about our conjugal arrangements."

"That's the most preposterous thing I've ever—"

"Be practical, Windflower," he interrupted with what seemed to Merry like heartless good nature. "We have to find some way to settle things. Do you have a better idea?"

"You
might
agree to leave me alone."

His smile this time was new to her, breathtakingly soft and lush with whimsy. He lifted a hand to the warmth of her throat, his fingers moving in gentle inquiry over the delicate curves of her flesh. "Love, it's the only chance I'm likely to give you. You'd better draw."

Her heartbeat was tolling furiously. "How do I know you'd abide by the draw if I won?"

"Because I wouldn't have proposed it if I didn't intend to carry through." His palm came down on the back of her hand. His fingers spread hers, lacing through them, to cup into her palm and carry her hand to the cards. In a soft imperative: "Do it."

Pink mist rose in her cheeks as she shook off his hand. Her fingers wavered over the cards and then quickly flipped one over. Nine of clubs.

He looked at the card as though in thought before he reached out to draw his own.

"W-wait!" She herded the cards into a pile, picked them up, and studied them. They seemed to be a regular deck; but she shuffled them thoroughly and spread them out once again.

Devon's eyes had suddenly filled with laughter. He turned over a knave of hearts.

"It's a trick. I know it!" she said, grabbing up the cards and carrying them distractedly to the window, examining them under the dappled sunlight. One at a time she stared at them. She laid four in a row and stared at them. The same. The dog pictures appeared to be all exactly the same. The cards fell from her fingers, and she dropped her face into the open cup of her hands.

"Shall I undress," she choked out, "or would it suffice if I lean my back to the wall and draw up my skirts?"

He moved behind her. His hands came to rest on her shoulders, sloping carefully inward to the bare skin at the base of her neck. His thumbs sought her nape, caressing her with steady ease. She could feel the soft displacement of her hair as his lips touched at random among her curls.

"What I'd like," he said softly, "is to walk with you out-of-doors. Will you come?"

Out-of-doors was not the manicured and slightly aloof formality of Grecian summer houses, velvet lawns, and sternly perametered flower beds edged in topiary. Devon's home was a working farm and one of the loveliest spots on earth. The house itself, a cottage
orne
in pink brick peeping between strawberry trees and a weeping ash, was called Teasel Hill, for the teasel his mother grew to invite goldfinches. Yellow roses climbed busy outbuildings around a courtyard of rosy sandstone gravel where harness brasses jingled on returning teams. The scent of the forge, of buttermilk, applesauce, and clean straw mingled warmly, and through the open door of the barn Merry heard the hiss of the thresher's flail. Colored ribbons untied and caps atumble, a group of little girls were playing trey-trip by the dairy while across the yard beneath an ironwork hoop heavy with deep-violet clematis their elders were admiring the much cross-grained block of elm resting on a farm sled that had been chosen for this year's Yule hearth. Men stripped off their hats, and white aprons began to bob in curtsies as they saw Merry with Devon, their smiles ebullient and welcoming. Merry was discomposed by the gleam of moisture in the eyes of many of the older people as Devon introduced her to them.

Suddenly a group of five women, young wives and girls Merry's own age broke, laughing, from the rest, and crying, "Quickly, Your Grace! This way!" they seized Merry and pulled her at a run around the delicate gray-blue spire of a juniper and through a maze of buildings to a kitchen garden. A chinked stone well crouched in a burst of azure-blue and fluffy white asters, and drawing water forth swiftly from the well, they bade Merry to drink it at once. Nervous, because teasing pranks of this sort on the
Black Joke
sometimes had rough endings, Merry drank and was applauded gaily.

"Look! The gentlemen are coming, and too late now!" said one young woman, whose lilac-pink dotted skirts swelled prettily with the evidence of her advancing pregnancy. " 'Tis the marriage well, Your Grace, and it's said that whichever spouse drinks here the soonest after they wed will rule the marriage. When I wed my Robin, he ran here straight away from St. Andrew's Church."

"He was the first to drink then?" Merry asked.

"Nay," said the girl with a sparkling glance, "for I'd carried a bottle with me to the church!"

Devon received a good deal of keenly witty commiseration on his defeat from the men, as well as laughing self-reproaches that they had forgotten to remind him about the marriage well. In the end Devon had taken Merry's hand in his and said laughingly that all he wanted out of life was to be ruled by this small hand. Probably, Merry thought cynically, it was all for show, though the kiss he pressed into her palm tingled sparklike in her breasts.

An irresistible lad in skirts with blackberry stains on his lips was tugging on Devon's coattails, and Merry watched Devon lift the child into his arms, telling him with a smile that he'd grown two feet at least. As though it were an old joke between them, the boy answered that he'd
always
had two feet, and did His Grace know that he was to have his first real trousers on Michaelmas and that Hannah More had had kittens? In a whisper: Did His Grace think the new duchess would care to see them?

The toddler's sharp-eared grandmother was quick to say sternly that the duchess would not want to be crawling around in hay barns looking for kittens. The blackberry stains began to droop at the corners, and Merry protested impulsively that she would love to look for kittens, particularly when they belonged to such an illustrious mother.

Beaming smiles rewarded Merry's words. Both intimidated and warmed by the delighted affection in the faces around her, only beginning to understand the intense emotion the people on Devon's estate would feel for his wife, Merry tried to listen with an air of intelligence to a lively discussion on the genealogy of Devon's cats while one of the young women fetched a quilt of blue plate printed textile to protect Merry's gown for the expedition.

Hannah More lived in a distant meadow inside the thatched barn that housed feed for the cattle pastured there in the winter. Country folk were busy on the driveway near the farm; the sunburnt hedger worked among hedgerows daintily scattered with red hips of the wild rose; the milkmaid in her yoke balanced on the stepping stones of a stream whose banks were overhung with herbs and flowery shoots. A plowboy's whistle lilted through green boughs weighted down with ruddy-cheeked apples.

The sky was a rich oiled blue, and sunny breezes licked the harvest stubble and Merry's skirt as Devon led her through a field. Alone with him amidst the melody of thrush and blackbird, passing under plump hazelnuts on high branches, she was becoming increasingly aware of a restlessness in her body and of the closeness of his.

The barn was in a vale beside a small chestnut wood. Primroses and harebells grew near the door, and inside Devon found the kittens in the loft. Merry pulled off her pink-dyed kid shoes and silk stockings to climb the ladder and sit with him on the wide quilt.

Kittens, she discovered, loved Devon. A tiny calico ball bravely climbed his chest with unfurled claws. Shiny black paws batted at his hair, and peachy small tongues tasted his cheeks. Hannah herself slipped through the great hills of fragrant hay to sit at Devon's hip. Black except for an immaculate white spot on her nose, she groomed the fur on her chest until apparently she felt the visit had been long enough and then carried the kittens off one by one, her tail waving proudly in the air, the end bent like a banner.

Devon had stretched out on his side, his head resting on the lazy prop of a long-fingered hand. He didn't speak, and neither could she, but she felt the flesh on her cheeks and chest burn. The wind had tousled his hair like a lover's hand, and in his sculptured face his eyes had an intent, sleepy glow. Through the outline of fabric she could see the long elegant muscles of his body, pressing in places against the cloth. Light poured from a high, narrow window to form a veil of woven silver touching the symmetry of his cheekbones, his shoulders, his upper thighs. Twice her eyes strayed down the line of his body and then lowered in a shaken way.