“You were very young,” he said. Good Lord, she was only twenty-four now. “You were being courted by a handsome military officer.”
“Where was I?” she asked. He did not know where he was. He had lost count. Sixty-nine? Seventy? “He fancied himself in love with me, of course, or I daresay he would not have done what he did. But it also occurred to him that it would be a splendid joke on his father if he married me. I was the daughter of a gentleman of no particular distinction. That would have been bad enough in his father’s eyes. He knew too, though, that I was the daughter of an actress and the granddaughter of some unknown Welshman and a Gypsy. And so he married me. He kept a decent silence about that part of his motive until I discovered the existence of his mistress, and then he told me about it—out of spite, I suppose, though he laughed as he told the tale and invited me to share the joke with him. It was funny, for it achieved everything he had hoped for. The Earl of Heathmoor was irate. When I refused to allow Matthew to touch me after I made my discovery and then he refused to take me to the Peninsula with his regiment and sent me to Leyland Abbey instead, again out of spite, I was made to feel that I was lower on the scale of significance than the lowliest servant. But because I was a daughter-in-law of the house, I must be subjected to a strict regimen of reeducation. I was not quite nineteen when I went there.”
He lowered the brush to the bed.
“I am not pleading for your pity,” she said. “Heaven forbid. My life is as it is. There are worse lives. I have never been hungry or literally homeless. No one has ever used physical violence on me worse than the occasional rap over the knuckles or smack on the bottom when I was a child. And now I have been offered the gift of freedom and a hovel of a cottage and a small competence with which to enjoy it. Do you understand what a wonderful thing that is for a woman, Ben? I can be a new person.”
She turned to face him on the bed and tucked her feet right out of sight.
“Then why the mournful look?” he asked.
“Do I look mournful?”
“I suppose,” he said, “it is because you have been forced to bring the old person with you.”
She grimaced. “Why is that? It is such a nuisance.”
“But how could you ever feel joy,” he asked her, “if you had not also known dreariness and suffering?”
“Is there ever joy?” Her dark eyes searched his face as though the answer was written there.
He opened his mouth to assure her that of course there was. But was there? When had he last felt it? When he arrived at Penderris Hall a few months ago for his annual stay there with his friends? That had been a happy moment, but had it been joy? He wished he had not used the word with her. It was a disturbing word.
And was that what his problem was? That wherever he went, he had to take himself with him? Was it in denial of that fact that he had decided to travel? The eternal quest to escape from himself, from the body that slowed him down, made him grotesque and ungainly, and stopped him from living the life he wanted to live?
“We have to believe there is joy,” he said. “In the meantime, we have to believe that our lives are worth living.”
She lifted one hand and set it against his cheek, her fingers pushing into his hair. Her hand was smooth and cool.
“It is ungrateful of me,” she said, “to have been given freedom and a new life and yet to feel a little depressed. You will find a meaning for your life.”
“I am going to be a world-famous travel writer.” He smiled.
“You will find what you are searching for, Ben,” she said. “You are a kind man.”
“And the good and kind are rewarded with fulfillment and happiness?”
He was surprised to see tears brighten her eyes, though they did not spill over onto her cheeks.
“They should be,” she said. “Life should work that way, though we know it does not always do so.”
He released his hold on the brush, caught her by the waist, drew her against him, and kissed her. She wrapped her arms about him and kissed him back.
Their lips clung. Their breath mingled. She was warm, soft, fragrant, very feminine. He was aware, even with his eyes closed, of her nightgown and bare feet, of her hair loose down her back, of the bed beneath them. There was an increase of heat, a tightening in his groin again.
She slid her feet free of her nightgown and he somehow got his legs right up on the bed, and his hands were on her br**sts, heavy and firm beneath the cotton of her nightgown, and her hands were under his coat, inside his waistcoat, warm against the back of his shirt.
She had lain down across the bed, and he had followed her, his hand beneath the hem of her nightgown, smoothing its way up the heat of her inner thigh. His tongue simulated in her mouth what he would like to be doing with her body. His weight was pressing against her br**sts.
He had made her a promise downstairs just an hour or two ago.
But not tonight. You are quite safe from me, I promise, despite the situation in which we find ourselves. I will not take advantage of you.
He tried to ignore the voice in his head—his own voice. It could not be done, however.
He lifted his head and gazed down into her passion-heavy eyes.
“We cannot do this,” he said.
She said nothing.
“We would regret it,” he told her. “It would have been provoked entirely by this room. We would regret it.”
Idiot, he thought. Fool.
“Would we?” She sighed, but he could see that she was returning to her senses.