She had stopped moving.
“It feels cold only for the first few moments,” she said. “It probably would not feel cold at all through your boots.”
“That was all I needed to hear,” he said and stepped into the water while she shrieked with laughter.
He could feel the coldness even through his boots and stockings. And his canes were indeed sinking rather alarmingly into the wet sand. But though he was only a few feet from dry land, it felt as if he had stepped into a different element. The sun beat down hot upon them. The sea sparkled about them.
He felt a sudden longing for George or Hugo or one of the others to see him now. He laughed.
She stepped closer to him, gathering her skirts into one hand as she came, and she took one of his canes in the hand that held the fabric and stepped closer still.
“Put your arm about my shoulders,” she told him.
“My weight would be too much for you,” he protested.
“Do it, anyway,” she said. “I promise not to collapse.”
He felt embarrassed, even a little humiliated, but he had no choice short of snatching back his cane and perhaps offending her—or throwing himself off balance. He made it a practice almost never to lean upon anyone. He set an arm about her slim shoulders, and she fit herself against his side and wrapped her free arm about his waist.
Oh, Lord.
“We are not a cripple and a poor, long-suffering nurse,” she said, laughing up at him, her flushed, bright-eyed face alarmingly close, “but a man and a woman who have found a perfectly reasonable excuse for being close to each other.”
He thought he was probably flushing too.
“Do we need an excuse?”
“It would seem so,” she said, beginning to walk along the edge of the water with him. “We have been very careful to leave a decent sliver of air between us since that night we shared a room. You are lean, Ben, but you are certainly not frail, are you? Quite the contrary, in fact.”
He was not going to respond with any description of her body.
“Am I leaning too heavily on you?” he asked. He was trying to put most of his weight on his cane, but that made it sink deeper.
He could feel the generous curves of her body all down his side. One firm, heavy breast was pressed against his coat. She was tall, though not quite as tall as he. He was aware of the faint scent of gardenia over the saltiness of the sea air. Her body felt warm through the flimsy barrier of her dress and stays.
And so was his body, by Jove. Warm, that was. Warmer than warm.
“You are avoiding the issue,” she said.
“Which is?”
“The fact that we have needed an excuse to touch,” she said.
“I promised,” he reminded her, “that you would be safe from me.”
“Sometimes,” she said, turning her head to look out to sea, “safety seems a dull, unadventurous thing.”
And by God, she was right about that.
“After you have left here,” she asked him, “will you regret that you were the perfect gentleman the whole time we were together? Well, almost the whole time.”
“How could I regret behaving like a gentleman?” he asked her. “That is what I am.”
Would she regret it?
They had stopped walking. He was feeling ruffled, even a bit annoyed. Being a gentleman was important to him. And yet … He would have let go of her, put some distance between them, but she still held his cane.
“It is just that freedom is a precious gift,” she said. “One ought to be able to use it to do whatever one most wants to do, provided one is hurting no one else in the process. We are almost never allowed to act freely, though, are we? There is always someone or some rule or convention that says, no, it is not at all the thing. And so we toe the line of propriety and deny the freedom that has been offered us and lose our chance for some happiness.”
What she was suggesting, he thought, was that they become lovers before he left. And it all made perfect sense when they were out here on the beach together like this. Why should they not do something … free? Something they both wanted to do. Except that this was not the world—this beach. And they could not live out here forever.
He would regret it. For he would surely be an inadequate lover and would disappoint both her and himself. He would regret waking the sleeping devil of his sexuality—except that it had already awakened, had it not? He would regret the end of the affair. He would regret having to leave her, for he could not stay and she would not want him to. And she would regret it if they had an affair, even if she was not disappointed in his performance. For no one had ever been constant in her life. Even her mother had died young. She needed more than a temporary lover.
There would be pain.
There was always pain.
She was gazing into his eyes, and he was the one now gazing out to sea.
“You are tired from all the walking,” she said. “I have had my eye on that large rock over there since we started along the water’s edge. Let us go and sit on it for a while.”
He did not argue. He really did need to take the weight off his legs. A lower ledge of the rock she had indicated was flat enough to sit on, and it was just wide enough and at just the right height for the two of them. The dog dashed off to chase some gulls that had landed at the water’s edge farther along the sands.
“Have I spoiled your first visit to a beach?” he asked her.
“By being tired and needing to sit down?” she said. “No, of course not.”