Joan Wolf (21 page)

The moon had an odd, greenish look to it that I had never noticed before. Perhaps we will have a storm tomorrow, I thought.

The dogs were surprised when I did not set out on our usual walk to the Ridge but detoured instead around the house to the
path that would take us to the lake. Once they realized where we were going, they raced happily ahead of me, darting off the path here and there to check the stands of trees that Capability Brown had scattered so gracefully all over the north lawn. I followed more slowly, searching for something to think about to take my mind off the coming meeting with Stephen.

I thought of this evening’s dinner and of how the presence of my mother and the duke had acted as a catalyst to bring together all the cousins, much in the way we had banded together when we were children.

I had made many acquaintances during the years that I was married to Gerald, but my stepcousins always remained my best friends. We shared that most unbreakable of all bonds, the bond of a common childhood.

An image of Jack flashed suddenly into my mind, Jack and the way he had looked tonight, sitting around the nursery table with Giles and Miss Stedham, laughing and playing cards. Giles’s little face had been bright with happiness.

I had known Jack forever, and I was convinced that he did not have it in him to exploit a child’s feelings for his own advantage. I was furious with Adam for planting such an ugly suspicion in my brain.

Portia and Merlin barked joyfully and began to run toward the pavilion. I looked, and the moonlight showed me the glow of a white shirt on the pavilion porch. I followed the dogs and mounted the wooden stairs. Stephen was leaning on the railing, watching me.

“How did you manage to get here ahead of me?” I asked.

“I slipped out the French doors right after you left us,” he replied.

“Oh.”

He straightened as I approached, and the two of us stood face-to-face on the wooden porch in the strange green moonlight and looked at each other.

“It is driving me mad, being near you like this and not being able to touch you,” he said.

The concentrated passion in his voice struck an answering spark deep within me, but I steeled myself against desire, I said in as cold a voice as I could command, “Whatever was between you and me was finished five years ago, Stephen. You killed it when you left me to go to Jamaica.”

The moonlight was bright enough to illuminate the tenseness of his fine-cut nostrils, the tautness of his mouth, the glitter of his eyes as he looked at me. “I don’t believe that,” he said. “I won’t believe it.”

“I don’t care what you believe.” I could hear the anger vibrating in my voice. “You left me,” I repeated. “You just got on that boat and sailed off to Jamaica without sparing one single thought for me!”

“That’s not true,” he defended himself. His long dark eyelashes were making shadows on his cheeks in the moonlight. “Of course I thought about you! I had every intention of writing to you after I reached Jamaica.”

I folded my arms across my chest, trying to ward off the treacherous feelings that his nearness was provoking in me. “Well, you didn’t write,” I said bitterly.

“Christ, Annabelle, you married my brother! What did you expect me to write? Congratulations? “

The light breeze blew a loose tendril of hair across my face, and I lifted my hand to brush it away. Stephen groaned audibly, and before I quite realized what he was about, I found myself in his arms and his mouth was coming down on mine.

I had suspected that Stephen might try something like this, and I had fully intended to repulse him. In fact, I had expected to derive a good deal of pleasure out of rejecting him the way he had rejected me five years before.

At least, that is what I had told myself when I had agreed to meet him here at the lake tonight.

Stephen’s mouth covered mine. I made a pitiful attempt to push him away, an attempt that he quite rightly ignored. He kept kissing me and kissing me, and when the force of his kisses bent my neck backward, he put one hand behind my head to support it and his other hand came up and covered my breast.

I had forgotten what it was like to feel like this. I forgot all about my anger with him, all about my plan for revenge. I kissed him back. I pulled his shirt out from his waistband, slipped my hands under the soft white linen, and ran them up and down his rib cage, feeling his skin under my fingers. He was burning hot to the touch. I inhaled the smell of him. I licked his skin.

“Annabelle.” His voice came out like a croak. “The chaise longue. Inside ...”

I was trying to undo my bodice so his hand could get inside, could touch my bare skin.

“Yes,” I said.

My knees were so weak that when I took a step, I staggered. Stephen scooped me up in his arms and carried me into the octagonal room that constituted the main part of the pavilion structure.

Fishing poles were stacked against the walls, and extra line, and two empty buckets, and four unlit lanterns. There was a low chest in one of the points of the octagon, and the extra rowboats from the lake were stored in three of the other points. Even though the windows were open, the room smelled of damp and mildew and fish. The cushions on the longue smelled of damp and mildew and fish, too, but Stephen and I were not in any state either to notice or to care.

We fell together onto the longue, pushing and shoving at our clothes, trying to get them out of our way, and all the while Stephen was kissing me. My heart was beating so hard that it made my breasts tremble. He pulled the combs out of my hair, and it came loose from its chignon and tumbled all around us. Then Stephen was pushing up my skirt.

I arched my back and lifted my hips. I wanted him every bit as badly as he wanted me. Then he drove, deep into the moist heat at the heart of me, again and again, lifting me with the power of his thrusts, and the pleasure of that pounding was absolutely excruciating.

I said out loud the name that, for five long barren years, I had only been able to whisper in my heart.

“Stephen,” I said. “Stephen, Stephen, Stephen ...” Then, triumphantly, as my whole body was shaken by shock after shock of explosive pleasure,
“Stephen!”

The only noise in the room was the ragged sound of our breathing. We lay as close together as it was possible for two people to get, flesh buried within flesh, my legs encircling his waist, our arms wrapped around each other. It seemed we could not get close enough.

He said in my ear, “When I had to leave you today on the lake, it was the worst moment of my life. It was even worse than when I heard you had married Gerald.”

My eyes were tightly shut, my face was pressed against his neck. I muttered something meant to sidetrack him from that particular line of thought.

Typically, Stephen would not be distracted. He said, “I would wake in the night sometimes, and pictures would come into my mind—pictures of you and Gerald together—and I would want to kill him.” I felt the shudder that went all through him. “No one should feel about a brother the way I felt about him then.”

I supposed it had to be said, so I shut my eyes even tighter and said into his neck, “Every time I lay with him, I pretended that it was you.”

He groaned and his embrace actually managed to tighten. “Oh God, Annabelle,” he said. “Oh God.”

I felt him growing big within me. I lifted my head so that my mouth was next to his ear. “ Kiss me,” I whispered.

We needed each other so badly. The night passed in a fury of passion, and after a while the dogs gave up waiting for us to leave and just lay down on the floor and went to sleep.

It was Merlin’s voice in my ear that finally woke me from an exhausted sleep shortly before dawn.

Whimper, whimper, I heard. Then a little whistle. Then a squeak, followed by a long whine. Then another whimper.

I opened my eyes and Merlin barked joyfully. He obviously could see me, although I could not see him. The moon was down and the sun hadn’t yet risen, and the spaniel’s black face blended into the darkness that blanketed the pavilion.

I fought my way back to complete consciousness. The chaise longue was narrow, but Stephen and I had managed to fit together so that we both could sleep. At one time we had had a great deal of practice sleeping together on this particular piece of furniture.

His right arm and leg were draped over me, and I couldn’t move.

I had no idea what time it was.

“Stephen,” I said urgently.
“Stephen!
Wake up. I have to get back to the house before I’m missed.”

He didn’t answer and didn’t move. No one slept as soundly as Stephen.

I was lying on my stomach and I began to squirm, trying to roll over so I could push him off me. Merlin barked again, and this time Portia joined him. The combination of the dogs’ voices and my squirming finally got through to Stephen. He grunted.

“Stephen,
get up!”

“Annabelle.” Once Stephen’s eyes opened, he was always completely awake. “We fell asleep,” he said.

“The moon is down. It must be late. I can’t see a thing, Stephen, and I have to get home!”

“Don’t panic,” he said. I felt his weight come off me, and I scrambled to a sitting position. At some point during the night we had removed all of our clothes, and I felt around for mine on the floor beside the longue.

Stephen said, “I’ll see if I can light one of the lanterns.”

A floorboard squeaked under him as he crossed the pavilion floor. To my eyes the darkness was impenetrable, but Stephen had always had excellent night vision. I heard him lifting the lid of the chest.

“ The tinderbox is here,” he said.

“Thank God.”

I heard him moving again over to where the lanterns were stored. A minute later we had light.

I blinked and looked at Stephen as he straightened up from lighting the lantern. His man’s body, illuminated by the yellow glow of burning oil, had the same flat stomach and narrow hips as the boy’s body I remembered, but the chest and shoulders were a good deal broader and more muscular. His torso was tanned a deep, Indian brown, but between waist and knees he was English white.

I was scandalized. “Did you walk around half-naked the whole time you were in Jamaica?”

He glanced down at himself and laughed. “I told you I did a great deal of swimming.” He left the lantern where it was and started back toward me. “The beaches in Jamaica are beautiful, Annabelle. The sand is so fine and white and the water is the color of turquoise.”

“It sounds like paradise,” I said.

He sat next to me on the chaise longue, and the mattress made a little crunching sound as it took his weight. His mouth set. “The physical setting may resemble paradise, but I can assure you that the living conditions are far from heavenly for the unfortunate black people who live there.”

I leaned over and kissed his sternly set mouth. Then I pulled my dress over my head without bothering to put on my petticoat or drawers. I stood up to smooth down the dress, then bent to pick up my discarded jacket. “Thank God I had the presence of mind to take the key to the back door,” I said, feeling in the jacket’s pocket to make certain it was still there.

Stephen had stood up to button his shirt, and now he looked down at me and grinned. He didn’t say anything.

The grin annoyed me. “I didn’t take it because I planned to spend the night with you,” I said haughtily.

“No?”

“No.”

“If you say so.”

He didn’t sound as if he believed me. I wasn’t sure I believed myself. Why had I taken the damn key? Hodges usually locked all the doors at midnight, before he went to bed, and I was always in from my evening walk by midnight. Tonight, however, for some reason I had lifted the key from its hook by the door and slipped it in the pocket of my riding jacket as I went out.

We finished dressing in silence, and then Stephen said, “Do you want me to take the lantern?”

If we took the lantern, we would be required to explain away its presence in the morning. I said, “Do you think you can see well enough to get us home without it? “

“Yes.”

“Leave it, then,” I said.

Birds were beginning to call to each other as we left the pavilion and walked together through the darkened park. Stephen put his arm around my shoulders, and I pressed the length of my body against him and matched my steps to his. I could hear the dogs’ panting as they trailed at our heels.

He said, as if we were continuing a conversation that had been interrupted earlier, “Do you have to wait a year before you can marry again? “

“Yes,” I said.

“That is six more months.”

“Yes.”

He released his breath with a long whistling sound. “Six months is a damn long time, Annabelle.”

I didn’t say anything.

As we were walking, the first streaks of gray had appeared in the sky. The world was beginning to take shape around me, and by now I could see well enough to find my own way. I stayed where I was.

“Giles is a brave little fellow,” Stephen said. “He didn’t want to leave you today, Annabelle. You should be proud of him.”

“I am.” I took a deep breath and then I said one other thing that needed to be said between us. “You should be the next earl, Stephen, not your son.”

“I don’t want to be an earl,” Stephen said.

I went on as if he had not spoken, “I have been wondering if perhaps we might do something legally to reestablish your right.”

He stopped walking. He tipped up my face with his finger so that I had to look at him. “What are you talking about? “

“Well...” I watched him closely to gauge his reaction, “Perhaps we could have Giles recognized as your son.”

His brows snapped together. His eyes blazed blue fire. He said incredulously, “Are you mad, Annabelle? To do that you would have to brand him a bastard. I would
never
do that to Giles.”

I could feel two tears spill out of my eyes and begin to roll down my cheeks.

“Stop it,” he said crossly, and began to walk me forward again. “I don’t want to be an earl,” he repeated. “I want to sit in the Commons and agitate for reform.”

I turned my head a little so that my lips touched his collarbone.