He closed his eyes to the sight of her pillow-soft lips and took another deep, satisfying breath. Turning away, he leaned his head into the hedge. He felt slightly dizzy, as if he were on an edge, teetering at the brink of some precipice. At the mythical perpetual, roaring waterfall at the edge of the world, dropping off into infinity. The infinity, the endless possibility of her.
“Just soap. From your bath. It’s heavenly. You’re heavenly. I’d like nothing more than to lay my cheek across the back of your neck and find that spot just behind your ear where the scent is strongest. But then I would be compelled to taste the warmth of your skin along the side of your neck, to press kisses down to your exquisite collarbone and the little hollow, right there. That sweet hollow, just waiting for me.”
He opened his eyes to the sight of her in the moonlight, staring at him with dark eyes, enthralled by his words. Her mouth was open a tantalizing fraction that made him long to slip his tongue into her warmth. Her bitten lips were the dark color of Bordeaux and just as intoxicating.
“But then, once I had had that first taste of your flesh, I would need to know the feel of your lips beneath mine. To see if they could possibly feel as infinitely soft as they look. And I would need to fit my lips over yours and exert just enough pressure to feel the warmth of your flesh beneath mine.”
Her breath left her body on a soft gasp and she was so still, pressing back into the hedge, he feared she had forgotten how to breathe. But her breasts were rising and falling with a rapidity that spoke of arousal. And she was not alone. His own breath was locking up tight in his chest, making him ache from the duality of what he was doing—arousing and denying all at the same time. It was having a decidedly erotic but chaotic effect upon his unruly body.
“I . . .” she whispered, and then tried again. “You seem to know my own thoughts before I do. I’ve never . . . My hands are tingling with the need to touch you. I want to touch your lips, to trace them with my fingers.” She looked down at her hands as if they were foreign to her, and then rubbed them together. “It does no good. Still they tingle. And still I want to touch your lips.”
She reached out and would have stroked along his bottom lip with one trembling finger. He felt himself leaning towards her, as desperate for the contact as she, when he stepped back. No. He was the one who was supposed to be seducing her. How could she, this untried, naive virgin have him aching and yearning for her simple touch?
“No.” He filled his lungs with the moist night air. “We cannot. I dare not. Because if you touched me, Miss Burke, it would only be the beginning. It would give me license to take your mouth with mine.” He closed his eyes, lost in the vision of his imagining. “Once I had kissed you, had tasted your lips and delved into the warmth of your unfathomably soft mouth, I would not be satisfied. I would not be happy until I peeled those silk clothes from your body and feasted my eyes upon your gloriously naked flesh. I would not be satisfied until I touched you. And once I had my hands upon the silk of your skin, I would not rest until I could bury my body in yours and feel the exquisite bliss of being inside you.”
His breath was sawing in and out of his lungs as if he had run a great distance. He shook his head to clear the image of her sprawled out beneath him, her skin pink against the white of sheets, her dark hair spread in riotous abandon across his pillows.
But the reality of her appearance was no less arousing. Even in the dim moonlight, he could see her skin was aglow with suppressed passion, her hands were knotted into the sticky, prickly yew branches, and her breaths were labored.
“So, you see why you cannot touch me. Why we cannot touch each other. I beg you, Miss Burke. Do not tempt me with so addicting a drug. Do not tempt me to forget everything decent and right.” He said it with more force than he ought, but he was in an agony of arousal. Thankfully, his last words had finally broken the spell he had cast around them.
She eased back away from him a pace or two.
“Forgive me, Miss Burke. You need not fear. You are quite safe with me. I am remembering, at long last, that I am a gentleman. For Emily’s sake.”
She nodded, a firm little dipping of her head. Her breath was still too fragmented to speak.
“You should go. Please.” He needed her to go before he forgot all his fine words and noble-sounding, gentlemanly sentiments, and fucked her against a yew hedge. Because he was only kidding himself if he thought his actions of the past half hour were all about revenge or justice for Emily. He was deluding himself if he thought he was doing it for any reason other than that he wanted Celia Burke. He wanted her with a hunger that made a mockery of his self-control. A hunger that made a mockery of his gentlemanly behavior. And he knew if he didn’t do something, he wasn’t going to stop until he had her.
C
HAPTER
8
C
elia woke with a feeling of lightness she had not experienced in weeks. All would be fine. She was going to be fine. At the end of her road was still a lovely little cottage covered with fragrant climbing
Rosa bracteata.
When Viscount Darling’s temporary fascination with her was through, she would still have her good name, her good sense, and her botanical work.
She had no doubt it was a temporary fascination. However she might try to remind him of his better self, he had shown her without question he was still a rake. And rakes always, always moved on to other pastures. Pastures full of widows and barmaids.
She felt so expansive she took Bains in tow before breakfast and set off across her father’s estate to an old, unused stone granary where she had created her workshop.
“You’re chipper as the larks this morning, miss.”
“Yes, I am, Bains. I defy anyone to put me out of countenance this morning.”
“You’ll be out of countenance once we get to that cave of yours and you find one of your precious specimens has died since the last time we’ve been there.”
“Not at all. I know where to get more!”
The workroom was more than a place to Celia, it was an idea. And an ideal. One she had nurtured from its inception in her brain until it was a physical place. A place where she could finally pursue her passion for botany without either interruption or interference. It was her sanctuary.
When they arrived at the tall stone barn, Celia and Bains climbed up the stairs to the loft and one by one threw open the heavy wooden shutters, flooding the room with bright summer sunlight. Beams of light slanted across the wide floor planks and filled the vaulted space with a golden glow.
All her money—all the money she might otherwise have had on hand to pay Viscount Darling, instead of becoming his willing partner in his game of seduction—had gone into this loft. In the dark days after she had come home from school, Celia had sought refuge in the great empty stone barn situated at the edge of the home farm, looking down over the mill creek.
Long ago, before her father had bought the manor as a wedding present for her mama, the barn had been a great granary, storing the harvest from the surrounding farms. But since her father’s management of the estate had been mostly pastoral, rather than agricultural, and they no longer grew and cut much grain, the barn had fallen into disuse.
No one had seemed to mind when she had cobbled together the spare furnishings from the estate’s castoffs. Once she set her mind upon creating a semblance of the laboratory they’d had at Miss Hadley’s school, Celia had not rested until it was complete and she could take up her study as before. As she had told Viscount Darling, she was nothing if not resolute of purpose.
Only here was she entirely her own person. Only here, had she been able to order her time as she pleased. She had been able to make her own decisions about what plants to study, and how to go about the work of recording her finds. She had found her life’s true purpose and dared to make her dreams a reality.
After opening the shutters, she checked on the previous session’s drawings. She had completed a study of the carnivorous common bladderwort,
Utricularia vulgaris
. The microscopic inspection of the plant had revealed its submerged bladders had trapped water fleas and even a very small tadpole, all of which she had recorded in minute detail. The series of drawings were complete and dry. She took them down from the drying racks she’d improvised from baker’s metal shelves and brought the last one she’d completed over to the light. The colors looked especially good. It had been difficult to achieve the bright intense yellow of the orchidlike blossoms and the vibrant soft green of the stem and root system. All in all, the
Utricularia vulgaris
series was a masterpiece.
It was a painstaking process she’d come up with, but in the absence of etching, which she knew nothing about, she had taken to drawing the plants first with pencil and then mixing watercolors to bring the drawings to vivid life. After the watercolor had dried, she traced over the pencil lines carefully with black India ink, to make the important outline of the plant fresh and crisp and easily discernible. Each drawing took days, but she did them in batches so every day she had several at different stages of development and completion on which to work.
As the current drawings were all dry, she collected them into a leather folio. There were by her last count three hundred and twenty-two full color drawings upon which her proposed masterwork, “A Survey of the Freshwater Plants of Devon,” would be based.
While Bains sat at the table to work on her own drawings of designs for gowns, Celia changed her shoes into the sturdy leather boots she kept by the door. Her own halfboots would leak like an old rowboat, but the tall, oiled leather boots kept her nice and dry. She also took down from their pegs her long oiled canvas work apron and redingote.
It was the perfect day to collect the specimen of
Fontinalis antipyretica
she had seen growing in the stream below the millpond. She had just enough of the right color paint to capture the deep, verdant green of the slow-growing willow moss.
“I’m heading down to the creek, Bains.” Celia picked up the empty wooden pails she kept for collecting and ducked out the door.
“Mind you wear your gloves,” cautioned Bains. “Those rope handles will rough up your hands proper, if you’re not careful. Then what’d Lady Caroline say, I ask you?”
“I have my gloves, Bains.” Celia’s poor mama never suspected why Celia went through so many pairs of riding gloves. “I’ll be back within the hour. I know just where to get what I want. You work on your drawings until I come back. Mind you don’t use up all that green. That pigment’s expensive, Bains.”
“Don’t need you to tell me, miss. Now you be careful down that bank.”
As Celia had been walking along the banks in question for more than fifteen summers, she paid Bains no mind, heading across the cart track and down the wooded hillside. It was the perfect day for a ramble in the woods, bright and clear. A glorious summer morning. Birdsong filled the wood, and soon the musical fall of water could be heard tumbling downstream over rocks and into pools. She had already mined most of this stretch of bank for aquatic plant life, but she followed the meandering line of the creek like an old friend, winding her way around horsetails,
Equisetum arvense
, and clumps of ferns, like
Pteridium aquilinum
—the poisonous effects of which, on grazing cattle and sheep, she had repeatedly warned her father and his steward—until all sound was drowned out by the roar of the millrace and the crank of the mechanical mill wheel.
Nobody paid Celia the slightest mind. She was a common enough sight along the local streams and riverbanks, but if anyone knew she was Lord Thomas Burke’s daughter, they made no mention. She was certainly careful never to be recognized by anyone she knew, but Dartmouth society rarely made trips up to the mill and would never take note of mere peasants if they did. Celia went about her quiet business with buckets and nets, fishing bits of greenery out of the water without any ado.
She had reached a small pool, downstream from the larger millpond, when she saw him.
Viscount Darling was a quarter mile upstream, riding a powerful black hunter across the mill bridge and heading toward the lane that wound its way through the wood. He was attired in a black double-breasted redingote over a red waistcoat. His black felt round-brimmed hat nearly hid his wheat-colored mane. High upon the black horse he looked more handsome and remote than ever. An unattainable ideal.
She ducked her face down, careful to hide her features beneath the wide brim of her straw hat. From beneath the brim she could simply admire him from the distance. Much easier to look at him when he wasn’t looking back at her with those azure blue eyes of his. They were the color of the sea and the sky, and spoke to her of all the wide-open, faraway places he had been. Places she would never see.
He turned and looked down the stream, directly at her.
It took every ounce of self-discipline she could muster not to bolt, but to stand still and hope his eyes would pass her by. She couldn’t explain why, but after the intimacy, vulnerability, and excitement of their time together in the shrubbery, she could not let him catch her there, filthy dirty, hems six inches deep in water and mud. Not just because she looked like an urchin, but because she was engaged in the very thing his sister, and his letters to his sister, had inspired.
It had been hard enough to have him treat her with disdain in her uncle’s book room, and to be so rude as to make a wager regarding her, but it would crush her, absolutely devastate her, if he were to show disregard, or worse, indifference to her work, to her one true attempt to find purpose.
She held still, like a deer in a wood, trying to take advantage of the camouflaging nature of her dull, earth-colored work clothing. It seemed for a moment as if he would go past, and keep riding in the grassy lane through the trees. Celia let out the breath she had been holding and relaxed her fear of being recognized.
But then he called out to her. “Miss Burke?”
Before she could admonish herself or even think about the folly she courted, her feet were moving across the millstream and she clambered into the densely wooded hillside as quickly as she could scramble.
The morning had begun with the promise of a beautiful day ahead. But what did one do for amusement in a provincial town like Dartmouth? It wasn’t London, which after the past year Del was much more used to. He’d have to cultivate an entirely new set of habits now that he was in the country. One couldn’t pursue seduction each and every waking moment.
That certainly had been what he had been pursuing, wasn’t it? If he forced himself to be truthful, his time at the ball had been much more about pleasure than he had ever anticipated. The thought left him decidedly unsettled, and not a little amused. That he had thought Celia a worthy adversary had been enough to prick his interest. That she had instead become a worthy partner in seduction pricked more than that. Several other, much less intellectual parts of his body were unsuitably aroused.
After another long night, in which he had been plagued by erotic dreams of pale-skinned, dark-haired, naked women instead of the usual nightmares, Del had decided a bruising ride was just the thing. He had set off across the open, moorlike landscape at a hard pace, eventually taking the lane along the top of the ridge back towards Dartmouth. Nearer the town, he passed by the pillared gates with the bronze plaque announcing the lane to Fair Prospect, Lord Thomas Burke’s estate.
Lord Thomas’s property was clearly marked by the excellent state of the stone-walled hedgerows. Del rode on, compelled by a reason he could neither name nor understand, around the boundaries of the property, not daring to cross into the Burke estate. He had already trespassed upon the man’s daughter. Somehow, he could not stomach trespassing upon his land.
He rode north, and then east, skirting the edges, cutting through unused pastures down towards the mill creek that fed into the Dart. At the mill, Del turned south and crossed the creek at the bridge.
As he crossed the stone bridge he saw a girl, a villager or a farmer’s daughter he supposed, carrying a pail along the rock-strewn bank. At first glance, he could have sworn the girl jumping across the rocks looked just like Celia Burke.
Something like panic forked through him, like loose fingers of lightning, leaving a hot, metallic press of blood in his throat. He could not fathom his reaction. Damn his eyes, it was just a girl, not an enemy warship bearing down on him.
On a second look, though she was dressed in quite plain, earth-colored country clothes, Del was sure it was Miss Burke. It was Celia’s profile, surely. No farmer’s daughter had such pale, unlined skin. He urged his mount off the bridge and towards the bank to get a better look.
She was standing perfectly still on a rock next to the water, a little more than a quarter mile downstream. What on earth would The Ravishing Miss Burke be doing in the woods near the millstream? And dressed like a farmer’s daughter? Anyone who had been at the ball and remarked upon her beauty would have laughed at the charge.
“Miss Burke? Hallo!” He tipped up his hat.
He was sure she looked up at him for a moment before she took off like a shot and scrambled back through the verdant undergrowth into the woods on the opposite side of the millstream.
“Miss Burke,” he called again. Still, she did not stop. She tore up the hillside away from him, like a fey, half-wild creature.
What in bloody blazes was that all about? Del looked back to the spot where she had stood. Her pails were still there, abandoned on the rocks. His well-weathered heart had misfired when Celia had jumped over the slippery, irregularly shaped stones. All he could think of was Emily, her head bashed in by rocks just like those, falling insensible into the water. But Emily had not been walking along the bank. Emily had thrown herself off the bridge.
Del glanced at the single, arched span of the stone bridge. There was nothing he could put his finger on, no definitive connection. But his well-honed instinct—the instinct that had kept him alive for over eight years at sea—would not let the moment, or the feeling still sizzling through his body, go. It felt important, even though he could not fathom why.