Mary Balogh (12 page)

The duchess kept her busy most days about real and imagined preparations for the wedding. And there were guests to entertain. She grew accustomed to being the hostess at Clifton, to spending hours in company with her husband, behaving for Sophia’s sake as if theirs was a real marriage. And it was a worthwhile effort. Sophia glowed and was utterly happy.

And yet, there was the need to spend time alone. For fourteen years she had been a very private person, bringing up a daughter, having a circle of good friends, participating in the social life of her neighborhood, and yet being essentially alone. She had grown accustomed to the life.

She needed time to think. Time to regain her equilibrium, her sanity. Sometimes she found herself almost forgetting that things were not as they seemed. Sometimes she found herself seating herself next to her husband or speaking to him or even seeking him out when there was no real need to do so. She had strolled beside him throughout one afternoon walk, for example, and had realized, only after they had returned home, that she need not have done so since Sophia and Francis had gone with a few other young people to the village.

And there were the mornings, two of them, when he had mentioned at the breakfast table that he must ride out about estate business for a few hours and she had asked him privately afterward if she might accompany him. She had always done so when they had been together. She did not want to be merely the lady of the house, she had always said. She wanted to be part of his world. She wanted to understand the workings of his land. She wanted to be able to talk meaningfully with her husband about the things that really mattered.

It was training that had stood her in good stead during
the intervening years. Although Marcus remained in close communication with his steward, he never came home and had learned to trust her with the day-to-day decisions concerning Rushton.

And so she rode with him about Clifton and enjoyed those mornings more than she had enjoyed anything else for a long time. She watched and listened and asked him questions and made comments. They scarcely stopped talking during all the hours they were gone. During those hours, she had not once felt any awkwardness with him, or any strain from their long separation and the knowledge that it would resume once Sophia was safely married. It had seemed quite like old times. They had felt like friends. Friends and comrades.

Dangerously like.

She needed some time to herself. And she found it not in her rooms, where she could in all probability have gone undisturbed, but in the hidden garden. It became almost a regular part of her day to steal away there for an hour in the afternoons. Only one rainy day had kept her away.

She would sit in the rock garden, merely thinking or dreaming, her eyes feasting on the beauty and color of the flowers, her nose drawing in the heady scent of the roses. Or sometimes she would take her book and read. Sometimes she stretched out on the grass beneath the shade of one of the trees and watched the clouds float across a blue sky and let the peace of nature seep into her very bones. Once, she fell asleep.

It was like a place apart, a dream world, a little heaven on earth. Not Clifton, not Rushton, not the past, not the present. Not of this world at all.

She never bolted the door behind her, but she always hoped that no one else would discover the hidden garden. It would not be the same once someone else had been there to exclaim on its beauty. Except one person,
of course. She went there each day to escape from him—not so much from his physical person as from the influence he was beginning to have over her emotions. And yet, of course, she took him there with her, for it was there he had first kissed her. It had been their garden—Marc’s and Livy’s. Two different persons.

She fought against the knowledge that in reality they were still the same people.

She was sitting there on the afternoon of the ball, rather than resting in her room before getting ready, as the other ladies were doing. The sun was hot again and the sky cloudless, as it had been so often recently. She was beneath the shade of a weeping willow tree, beside a bed of hyacinths. She was wishing that the remaining three weeks until the wedding would pass by quickly. And she was wishing that time would stand still.

She did not know what she wished, she thought, smiling ruefully at the contradiction in her mind and reaching out to touch a purple bloom.

And then the arched door opened and she looked up to see him come inside. She was not surprised. She had been expecting him.

Had she? Certainly she had not consciously done so. If she had, then surely she would have sought out privacy elsewhere. Had she wanted him to come? Onto magical ground like this, no part of the real world. Did she want him there?

He leaned against the door as he shut it behind him and she knew, although she could neither see nor hear it happening, that he had bolted it. She had expected it. Wanted it?

“You are not resting?” he asked her, strolling toward her along the path and around the sundial.

“Yes,” she said. “Here.”

He smiled and stopped below her. She was sitting on a
rock on a level with his shoulders. “You come here every day, don’t you?” he asked.

“Yes.”

It was a dream world indeed. He stood there looking up at her, his eyes roaming over her face, her hair, her body. And she looked at him, at the man he had become while she had not been there to observe the gradual changes. Neither seemed to feel the embarrassment of silence or the need to say anything.

Surely he was more handsome now than he had been. Or perhaps it was just that she was looking at him through older eyes that demanded more than a slender, good-looking boy. There were lines in his face—not wrinkles exactly—but lines of maturity and character. Lines that revealed that he had some experience of life. And his silvering hair was unexpectedly attractive. It was as thick as it had ever been.

His shoulders were broader, and his chest, too. And yet his stomach was flat and his waist and hips still slim. He was not showing his age in increased flabbiness as Clarence was doing. Clearly he looked after himself, as he had always done. The muscles of his calves showed that he walked and rode a great deal. She wondered if he still liked to spar at Jackson’s boxing saloon when he was in town.

When he reached out his arms to her, she did not hesitate to set her hands on his shoulders and lean forward so that his hands could grasp her by the waist and lift her to the ground in front of him. He held her above him for a few moments and she looked down into his upturned face.

It was inevitable. It was what she had known for days was going to happen. Had she? The conscious thought had not crossed her mind. But she had known it. She had been coming to the hidden garden and she had known that he would eventually come there, too. It was
their garden, after all, and it was still as lovely and remote as it had been when they shared their first kiss. It was the one thing in their world that had not changed.

He lowered her slowly, sliding her along his body until her feet touched the ground. And then he lowered his head and kissed her.

She could only feel shock at the sameness and the difference. He was Marc as he had always been, bending her body to his, his height arching her head back. And so familiar that the years instantly rolled back. There were no years. Only Marc and her and the rightness of their being together. He was the only man who had ever kissed her or touched her in any way intimately.

And yet so different. He had used to kiss her with parted lips. They had always enjoyed the warmth and intimacy of kisses. She had liked to curl against him on a sofa or on his lap, indulging only in kisses, without any particular thought to going to bed. It had been a warm and wonderful form of communication.

But he had never kissed her openmouthed as he was kissing her now, his mouth wide over hers, his tongue pushing up behind her lip and creating strange vibrations against the soft flesh there.

And then his face was above hers and they were looking at each other again, exploring each other’s eyes this time. And he was lowering his head and pecking light kisses on her temples and cheeks. She ran the back of her fingers softly over his jaw, her elbows up over his shoulders. His jaw was smooth. He must have shaved very recently.

They had always been able to look into each other’s eyes without embarrassment and had laughed together once after two friends had told them that they hated to sit opposite each other at table when alone because doing so forced them to look into each other’s eyes as they talked. She had laughed about it with Marc, and
the two of them had tried it, sitting opposite each other at a small card table, their elbows touching on its top, their chins cupped in their hands, trying to stare each other down. They had laughed and occasionally leaned forward to exchange brief kisses, but succeeded in staying where they were for half an hour before they had been called away to some unremembered task.

They looked at each other now until he wrapped one arm about her shoulders and the other about her waist, drew her close against him, and kissed her again.

And this time the unfamiliarity was total. He slid his tongue all the way into her mouth until she felt filled with its firmness and heat, and withdrew it as slowly before pushing inward again. And she realized, as her knees almost buckled under her, what act he was simulating and then had no more time for thought. Only for reaction.

She had never felt desire before, a strange truth in light of the fact that their five years together had been ones of almost daily intimacy, and that she had always—with the possible exception of their wedding night—enjoyed their couplings. She had enjoyed them because they always gave him such pleasure and because there was joy in being so intimately possessed by the man she loved more than anyone else in the whole world. If asked, she would have said that she felt both desire for and fulfillment with her husband.

But she knew now, beyond the realm of rational thought, that she had never felt desire before. Never this raw throbbing from her mouth to her throat to her breasts to her womb and lower. A throbbing and an insistent longing to be possessed. Never this uncontrolled need to have his body fill her and give her peace.

She arched herself into him as one hand twined tightly in his hair and the other went up under his coat and waistcoat to the warm silk of his shirt at the back. And
she held her mouth wide to the rhythm of the simulated loving of his tongue.

He was looking down at her again, his dark eyes gazing knowingly and heavy-lidded into her own. And he was turning her until their feet discovered soft grass, and lowering her down onto it, raising her muslin dress to her waist as he did so. His hands stripped her of her lower garments, removed his coat to set beneath her head, and undid the buttons of his breeches.

Was this going to happen? Was she going to allow it? It was one thing to share kisses with him in the hidden garden, however intimate, and quite another to couple with him there. Should she not put an end to the madness? She looked about her at the trees and the grass and the banked flowers spilling over the rocks. She could see the sundial behind her and the clear blue sky above. And she knew clearly what was happening and what was about to happen. She would never be able to accuse him of ravishment, she thought quite deliberately.

And yet she was like two persons. The one was detached and rational. The other ached for him and wanted him and needed him and knew that it had all been inevitable from the moment when she had read his letter asking her to come. For how could she see him again and not love him? How could she see him again and keep dormant within herself the knowledge that she had always loved him, had continued to love him even when she had hated him the most?

There was no stopping what was about to happen. And she would not stop it now, even if she could. She would think later of the shame of it, of the complications she was adding to her life, of the hell she would be facing after she had returned home, alone again.

He was beside her on the grass, pulling free the sash beneath her breasts with one hand as the other slid up her naked body beneath her clothes and covered one of
her breasts. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth in a silent cry.

What he did to her breasts, to first one and then the other, was achingly familiar to her. She bit down on her lower lip and smiled with the wonder of it after all these years. Marc. She wanted to open her eyes and speak his name, but that was one thing she could not do.

And his hand moved down between her legs as he kissed her again, and began to do unfamiliar things, things that brought her desire to a boil and had her arching up against his hand, crying out into his mouth, begging for a release she had never suspected a need of before.

And then his weight was on her and his hands beneath her and his knees pushing between her own and widening them and he came up into her with one sharp thrust and something shattered inside her and inside her world so that she clung to him with her arms and legs, her body shaking out of control as he moved quickly and deeply in her to his own climax.

She was hardly aware that he moved off her almost immediately because of the hardness of the ground, taking her with him so that she lay on her side against him, her head on his arm while he lifted his coat and spread it over her. She slept almost immediately.

H
E HAD GUESSED
that she came to the hidden garden daily, though he had not spied upon her. And he had tried to stay away from there himself, sensing her need to have somewhere to go where she could be alone. It must be difficult for her, coming into his world at a moment’s notice and forced to remain in it for a whole month. He realized that. And difficult, too, to be forced by her love for Sophia into spending more time with him than inclination would lead her to do otherwise.

He had tried to leave her alone and had failed on this particular afternoon. The ladies were all in their rooms resting in preparation for the evening’s ball. The gentlemen were all variously employed and did not need his company. There was no work that particularly demanded his attention. And the weather was glorious—perfectly sunny and hot. It was an afternoon made for love.