He let his eyes slide over her body; at last, he just looked and looked and looked.
Someday he would paint her. Maybe even like this: a secret picture, just for them. Light burnishing her coffee-dark hair with glows of red; her creamy skin warmed by the morning sun. Through the translucent linen of her shift, the form of her body and the shadow between her legs faintly visible. Peeking over the edge of her stays, a semicircle of damask rose—the edge of one nipple, wanting to be touched.
“Henry,” she admonished, crossing her arms over her chest as the moment drew out long and slow. But she smiled. And when he touched her forearm, pressed it down, she chuckled and lowered her arms to her sides, giving him an unobstructed view of her again.
Except for those dratted stays. Without removing them, he couldn’t take off her chemise either.
When restricted in some way, find another route.
He couldn’t quite shed the habits of the military. Right now, they gave him a marvelous idea.
He would find another way in. “Spread your legs,” he murmured in her ear.
A flush delicate as a new blossom spread over Frances’s cheeks and bosom. She breathed quickly, sharply as she slid one foot along the carpet until there was nearly a yard’s span between her feet. Her stocking-clad toes dug into the weave of the rug.
“Perfect.” Henry crouched on the floor at her feet. Balancing carefully on the balls of his feet, he lifted the cotton chemise and exposed her sex to his view.
Soft brown curls rich as earth, folds like a budded rose, flushing darker red, drawing his eye. His mouth. He needed two hands, damn it. He released her chemise, allowing the fabric to fall atop his head, and used his freed fingers to part her, opening her for his tongue.
He barely got a taste before she writhed, hips bucking. “Good God, Henry.” Nails dug into his scalp, raking the sensitive skin.
“Do you enjoy this?”
“I enjoy it so much that I’m going to ignore how ridiculous we both must look. Will you do a bit more? Or a lot more?”
Laughing, he pointed his tongue, found her hottest part, and licked at it with the gentle pressure he would use on the smallest paintbrush, for the most delicate coloring. The most precious, detailed part of a painting.
This time, there was no subsiding. This time, her fingers wove into his hair, pressing him against her hot flesh; this time she grew wetter for him, and her breath came in gasps. She trembled on her feet, and then she began to tremble all over, and as he tongued her, harder and faster and hungry and thirsty, she came apart in his mouth with shudders and cries.
She sank to her knees at once, wrung out. Henry rocked onto the balls of his feet then sat on the floor and folded his legs before him. They must look even more ridiculous now, facing each other on the morning room floor with their clothes half off.
To his eyes, though, Frances looked beautifuclass="underline" hair tangled, cheeks flushed, lips inviting.
He just wondered one thing. “Why did it please you that time?”
“What we just did?”
He nodded. “Last time we tried that, you didn’t like it.”
Frances let her head loll back. “How could I not like that? It’s… well, you can guess. You saw how much I liked it.”
She folded her arms and rubbed her hands over them again, shivering with a final spasm of pleasure. “Last time, I felt I was doing wrong by you, keeping secrets, and I couldn’t forget that.” She spread her hands. “So I couldn’t forget myself.”
Henry brushed tangled hair back from her forehead, traced the straight line of her nose, bumped over her lips, the indentation below them, then her chin. Whisked down her neck. Stopped.
“No more blame. That’s all in the past.” He leaned forward, kissed her furrowed brow.
“But the past… it doesn’t go away,” Frances insisted. Henry could feel her tension under his lips.
He sat back. “You’re right. It doesn’t.”
He shrugged his right shoulder, allowing the dead weight of his arm to swing and dangle. “The past is here with us. It shapes the present. It matters.” Of course his arm mattered; it would always matter. He would always regret the loss.
Yet without it, there was so much he would never have gained. His life had been routed onto a whole new path—one with obstacles and stumbles, but one he would not have to walk alone. He took a deep breath. “But it mustn’t prevent us from finding joy.”
Frances looked at her hands in her lap. She smoothed them over the translucent fabric of her chemise, then took both of his hands in her own and pulled them to her heart.
“Can you feel this?” she asked, her eyes deep as a forest.
Henry wanted to. He really wanted to. He longed to. But in his right arm, as always, there was nothing but a blank where feeling used to be.
But in his heart…
“Yes,” he said, and he knew she understood.
She smiled, a bit sadly. “How did you get so wise?”
A short laugh popped out. “Wise. Well, I haven’t been called that in a while.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, holding his hands and pulling them toward her. “You are. Very. Wise.”
When she opened her eyes, they were almost nose-to-nose. They breathed the same air, smiled the same smile.
She released his hands. “Very wise. So wise, I think you deserve a reward.”
The air of the room was still and warm on his skin. Frances pressed at his shoulders until he was laid out, flat, and his back ground into the coarse wool of the carpet. Sun cut through the window and filled his eyes, and he closed them against the dazzling brightness.
The world was nothing but touch, nothing but the sun, and her fingers gliding over his skin. And then it was her mouth, hot as a fire and wet as a lake. Impossible, yet it was happening. He was buried, and he was flying. He could not stand it; he could not bear for it to end.
His back arched in a silent cry.
His eyes snapped open. “Come with me.”
She leaned forward, the tip of her tongue peeking between her lips. “Now?”
“Yes.” He could not manage more than one syllable. He could only pull her atop him.
They would go through life together. They could come together too.
He laughed, and that made it even better.
Twenty-Eight
Their marriage was set to take place in two weeks’ time at Tallant House. As a wedding present to the couple, Jem helped Henry obtain a special license. He also sent a reluctant Sowerberry to Winter Cottage for several days, to install a few servants and make sure the small house was ready to receive the newlywed couple.
Four days before the wedding, Henry sat in Jem’s study looking over an account book for Winter Cottage. The usual assortment of post littered the broad desk, and Jem whistled as he sliced open invitations and notes and bills with swift flicks of a penknife.
As the knife slit paper after paper, the whistling grew louder, until there was no chance of concentrating on the accounts. As of three years before, Winter Cottage had seemed to be in solid shape, but for all that Henry could tell amidst Jem’s auditory barrage, it might have been conquered by mermaids since then.
The whistling stopped for an instant, then drew out long and slow in a piercing fall. Then silence.
“Jem?”
Getting no reply, Henry snapped the ledger shut. Standing, he faced his brother over the back of his chair. “Has something happened?”
Jem’s mouth was hanging open as he stared at a paper in his hand. Henry’s voice seemed to jar him back to awareness. His face grew faintly pink. “This must be some kind of maggoty humbug. Here, take a look, Hal.”
He released the inscribed paper from an unsteady hand before Henry could take hold of it. It flipped open as it drifted slowly to the floor, and from its folds a paper rectangle fell next to the desk.