Cottage by the Sea (26 page)

   "I have no plans whatsoever," he disclosed.

   "Then let's have at it," she agreed.

It was nearly three in the afternoon by the time Blythe and Luke had worked their way through the last cartons that had been stored for decades under the eaves in the stable loft, where the warm air still smelled of loamy hay. An old pier glass stood upright on gilded legs—a legacy from the Victorian Age. Nearby, an eighteenth-century brass daybed had been pushed against one wall. Its two ancient feather mattresses had miraculously survived under a dustsheet. Beside it stood the large, unwieldy leather traveling trunk whose contents they had been ignoring for weeks.

   Luke used a crowbar to force open the rusted lock.

   "Oh, wow…" Blythe breathed, awed by the sight of fine

lawn shirts, silk cravats, and an ivory shoehorn neatly stowed in the trunk's upper compartments, just as they had probably been packed away by some well-trained valet untold years before. "Look how perfectly preserved everything is!" she exclaimed. What lay before her in remarkably good order was a costumer's treasure trove. "Who do you suppose these belonged to?"

   Luke carefully lifted out the top tray and set it to one side. The next level contained men's sleepwear and shaving gear. Scrutinizing their design, Blythe could date the items as coming from the last quarter of the eighteenth century. A small leather-bound journal next to a pair of silver shoe buckles peeked from under a pile of silk hose.

   "This must have been Ennis Trevelyan's," Luke declared, carefully turning the pages of the two-hundred-year-old volume. "It's written during the period he was traveling abroad to study painting in Italy and France. See?" he added, pointing to the date 1789 scrawled in brown ink at the top of one entry. He flipped through a few more pages. "This is from March 1790, in Paris," he read. "'Last year the street rabble reduced the old prison to mere mortar and stone. People riot in the streets here for want of bread.'"

   "The fall of the Bastille…" Blythe said softly, remembering Garrett Teague's diary filed away behind the ledgers in Luke's library. Garrett's journal had been written during the same general time, when the two cousins had been traveling together on the Continent. "Storming the Bastille happened nearly a year earlier, didn't it? July… 1789… am I right?"

   "Correct. Because of the unrest in Paris," Luke murmured, tilting the diary so that the light filtering through the small window in the loft illuminated the yellowed pages. "Ennis writes that he and his cousin decided to continue on to Italy… Venice, in fact, where Ennis painted his self-portrait." Luke glanced sideways at her and added, "When I cleaned all the dust off the shredded portrait, I realized that he was standing in front of the Doge's Palace on the Grand Canal." He rifled through a few more pages.

   "Does it say there that they traveled farther south?" Blythe asked casually, remembering in Garrett's account that he'd had word in Naples that Blythe Barton Trevelyan was pregnant and that the news greatly upset him.

   "Rome… Siena… Sorrento…" Luke mumbled, thumbing through the pages. "Capri… Naples. Oh, dear," he chuckled.

   "What?"

   "It's just a single page. Ennis writes here: 'Father refuses to advance further funds and insists we return home.'"

   "Is that all?" Blythe asked.

   Luke turned the page and then said more seriously, "No. There's another short entry… Ennis received word a bit later that his father had died."

   "Collis Trevelyan?"

   "How did you know his name?" he asked, amazed.

   "I… I saw it on your genealogy chart," Blythe replied, avoiding his quizzical glance. Her gaze fell on a stack of letters nestled beneath a neatly folded linen neck cloth and tied with a ribbon the color of faded roses. The clear, bold handwriting identified the cache as posted from Cornwall.

   "Oh, my God…" Blythe murmured as she began to peruse the sheaf of brittle stationery she had taken from the top of the pile. "It's from Blythe… my namesake… to Ennis… written in July of 1790."

   "What does it say?" Luke asked, making room for her by the window so she would have better reading light. "Here, let me take the dust cover off the daybed and let's sit down."

   With the stack of old letters resting in her lap, Blythe silently scanned the parchment she held between her fingers and tried to keep them from trembling at the thought that her namesake had once held these same pages in her hand.

"Read it aloud," Luke protested.

   She looked at him, embarrassed to give voice to the other Blythe's two-hundred-year-old lust for Ennis Trevelyan. Then she shrugged.

   "I can take it if you can," she said. "Stand by, O Laird of Barton Hall. But I'm warning you… this is pret-ty spicy stuff."

   As she began to read to him from the beginning of the letter, her words took on the cadence of another age. When she reached the second page of Blythe Barton's highly erotic expression of thwarted passion, her voice sank to barely above a whisper.

   Blythe raised her eyes from the yellowed pages, unable to continue, and locked glances with Luke, who was staring at her with an intensity that totally unnerved her. After a few moments of electrifying silence, Luke pulled another letter from the pile and scanned it.

   "Oh, Christ…"

   "What?"

   "She's pregnant," Luke reported, "and longing for it to be Ennis's child."

   Poor Garrett Teague, Blythe thought suddenly. How heartbroken he would have been if he had ever stumbled upon these letters! He had loved Blythe Barton steadfastly, according to what she knew of the story, but had he and she ever—?

   She glanced over at Luke and felt an odd sensation: here she was, sitting beside the descendant of these people who had been caught in such tangled relationships so many years ago.

   And what of sad, benighted Kit, whose own brother had betrayed him? His relationship with his wife in the bedroom had probably been hell.

   And the wretched bride herself, Blythe thought morosely, a woman longing for what she could not have… a mere pawn of her elders' machinations. She must have been terribly lonely as the mistress of Barton Hall, living each and every day with a man she had been forced to marry who physically repelled her.

   Each of them saw their dilemma from their own vantage point, she reflected soberly. Thinking back to the debacle in her own life—and the unholy triangle with Chris and Ellie—perhaps there was some lesson to be gained in this observation.

   Her thoughts harked back to the accusations of neglect Christopher had hurled at her when she had gone to visit her ailing grandmother during the last year of their marriage. She recalled her bewilderment when Ellie categorically refused to accompany her on those trips, or to bear any of the burden of dealing with Lucinda Barton's lingering illness.

   "If you want to play Florence Nightingale to the old bat, go ahead," Ellie had announced resentfully. "She always liked you best. Be my guest."

   Undoubtedly Chris and Ellie felt like the injured parties, or at least they found a way to justify their reprehensible behavior in the same way the eighteenth-century members of the Barton and Trevelyan families rationalized their actions.

   Meanwhile, Luke had begun to read a third letter aloud.

   "Good God!" he exclaimed, reading from the missive that spoke even more candidly of Blythe's highly unsatisfactory marriage to Kit and described in explicit and immodest detail the young woman's carnal craving for Ennis to return to Cornwall.

   "She paints a pretty vivid verbal picture of her physical longings, I'd say," Blythe commented. She was secretly embarrassed to discover how stimulating she found the first Blythe Barton's words, and awed by the sheer intensity of the letters.

   "The Victorians may have been a repressed lot, but apparently not everybody in the Georgian Era was a prude, if Blythe's letters are any indication," Luke agreed as his eyes remained glued to the last paragraph of the letter he held in his hand.

   "We're talking hot tamales for the ol' eighteenth century, wouldn't you say?" she drawled, drawing a deep breath as she allowed the letter she'd read to drop limply into her lap.

   Luke retrieved it and reread the second page. "'Would that those contours were with you now…'" he recited aloud, and then shot her another unsettling look. "'Sinew and bone… flesh to flesh… so that you might recall the touch of my thigh… the taste of my lips…'" He shifted his gaze to meet hers and held it steadily.

   His continuing silence charged the air as if lightning were about to crackle overhead. Blythe's nervous laugh finally broke into the heavy atmosphere.

   "W-well—as my sainted Grandma Barton used to say: 'a lot of what a man knows, a woman knows better.'"

   Luke slowly shook his head, his eyes shifting briefly to stare at her hair and then back to her face as if he were trying to fathom some mystery concealed behind her expression. "I don't agree," he said quietly. "This letter reminds me of me, Blythe… when I was in the cave with you. How it was for me that day. What it's been like… whenever I've thought about you since."

   "Oh, Luke," she began, "I really don't think we should—"

   "The taste of you…" he murmured, as if he were putting together the pieces of a puzzle, "so hot… so sweet and laced with chocolate." He smiled faintly, ignoring her feeble protest that they should avoid the subject of what had transpired between them during their picnic at the beach. "When I touched your marvelous hair… and took the measure of those beautiful long legs…" He raised one hand and threaded his fingers through her curls, resting the callused heel of his palm lightly at the base of her throat. Here was a member of the British gentry who had the hands of a Wyoming wrangler, no less, she thought distractedly. It was crazy.

   Lucas Teague had stopped talking now, but his eyes glided brazenly down the length of her jeans.

   "Luke…" Blythe protested weakly, "you're supposed to be a repressed Englishman, remember?"

   "Shall I let you in on a secret?" he asked with a dangerous glint in his eye. "I confess that for quite some time now I've been plagued by impure thoughts. In fact," he confided in a conspiratorial whisper, "I feel quite the libertine when it comes to you."

   "You could've fooled me!" Blythe retorted, and then bit her bottom lip with vexation for having so imprudently displayed her cards.

   "Ah… then the waiting worked." He smiled roguishly.

   "You dog!" she shot back. Then she met his gaze head-on, her eyes troubled. "The timing's all wrong, Luke," she began, but he stilled her words by brushing his thumb across her lips.

   "Shhh…" he hushed her gently. "No, it's not. Both our hearts are sore, I grant you that, but—"

   "More to the point," she interrupted, "we both know we should keep this venture together strictly professional. What's happening here is… it's… well… we've both been deprived of a normal…" She halted in frustration. "It's just the letters," she blurted. She felt herself increasingly stymied—unable to think clearly or express herself adequately. "They're very—"

   "Provocative?" Luke suggested.

   "Hot," she replied, nodding emphatically.

   "Extremely stimulating," he agreed.

   "Hmmm…" was all she could answer.

   "After our picnic," Luke said, taking her left hand in his and examining the diamond ring she wore on one finger, "I could tell that you thought it was probably best to keep our relationship on the level of business." He turned her palm upright and lightly began chafing his thumb along the inside of her wrist. "It did seem the wisest, safest thing to do. But like our mutual ancestor, I'm afraid, Blythe, that I couldn't forget the touch… or the taste of you."

   "Our ancestor?" she protested in a strangled voice. "We don't know for sure…" She felt edgy and aroused, almost as if the Blythe of ages past had magically become encased in her skin, as if the woman's pent-up passion that had spilled upon these pages were dangerously close to overflowing right here, right now, in the loft above the deserted pony stalls. And it was definitely not Ennis Trevelyan who was putting Blythe's emotions in such turmoil.

   "Oh, Luke…?"

   It was a question and a plea, for she had found that she was unable to take her eyes off the sight of his thumb drawing gentle circles on her wrist. She felt as if she had begun to travel at Mach 2 speed down an elevator shaft. However, she knew with certainty that this time, she wasn't headed toward another century.