The Proposal (15 page)

“For
fun
?” That was a strange word to use to a grown woman. “I do all the usual things. I visit family members and play with their children. I attend dinners and teas and garden parties and social evenings. I dance. I walk and ride. I—”

“You
ride
?” he asked. “After the accident you had?”

“Oh,” she said, “I did not for a long while after. But I had always enjoyed riding, and not doing so cut me off from much interaction with my peers and much personal pleasure. Besides, I hate not doing something simply because I do not have the courage. Eventually I forced myself back into the saddle, and more recently I have even forced myself to encourage my mount to a pace faster than a crawl. One of these days I shall actually allow it to
gallop
. Fear must be challenged, I have found. It is a powerful beast if it is allowed the mastery.”

He was gazing with half-closed eyes at the incoming water. The sun was glinting off its surface.

“What do
you
do for fun?” she asked.

He thought about it for a while.

“I feed lambs and calves when their mothers cannot,” he said. “I work in the fields of my farm and particularly in the vegetable garden behind the house. I watch and somehow participate in all the miracles of life, both animal and vegetable. Have you ever smoothed bare soil over seeds and doubted you would ever see them again? And then a few days later you see thin, frail shoots pushing above the soil and wonder if they will ever have the strength and endurance to survive. And before you know it, you have a sturdy carrot or a potato the size of my fist or a cabbage that needs two hands to hold.”

She laughed again.

“And that is
fun
?” she asked.

He turned his head and their eyes met. His looked very dark beneath the brim of his hat.

“Yes,” he said. “Nurturing life instead of taking it is fun. It makes a man feel good here.” He patted a lightly closed fist against the left breast of his coat.

He was titled. He was very wealthy. Yet he worked on his own farms and toiled in his own vegetable garden. Because he enjoyed doing so. Also because it offered him some absolution for having spent his years as an officer killing men and allowing his own men to be killed.

He was not the hard, cold ex-military officer she had taken him for when they first met. He was … a man.

It was a thought that made her shiver slightly, though not from cold.

“How are you going to go about finding a wife?” she asked him.

He pursed his lips and looked away again.

“The man who manages my father’s business empire,” he said, “or
mine,
I ought to say, has a daughter. I met her when I went to London for my father’s funeral. She is very lovely, very well schooled in all the skills a woman would need to be the wife of a wealthy, successful businessman, very willing—as are her mother and father—and very young.”

“She sounds ideal,” Gwen said.

“And frightened to death of me,” he added.

“How old
is
she?” she asked.

“Nineteen.”

“Did you do anything to make her less frightened?” she asked. “Did you, for example,
smile
at her? Or at least not
frown
? Or
scowl
?”

He turned his eyes on her again.

“
She
was courting
me,
” he said. “Her
parents
were courting me. Why should I do the smiling?”

Gwen laughed softly.

“Poor girl,” she said. “Will you marry her?”

“Probably not,” he said. “Undoubtedly not, in fact. She would not be lusty enough for me. And my own lust would cool in a hurry if she were to cringe away from me in bed.”

Oh! He was deliberately trying to shock her. Gwen could see it in the hardness of his eyes. He thought she was mocking him.

“Then she will have had a happy escape,” she said, “even if she does not realize it. You need someone older, someone not easily intimidated, someone who will not cringe from your lovemaking.”

She looked deliberately back into his eyes as she spoke, even though it took a great deal of effort. She had
no
experience in this type of talk.

“I have relatives in London,” he told her. “Prosperous ones. Success in business seems to run in the family, though no one was quite as good at it as my father. They will be happy enough, I daresay, to introduce me to eligible women of my own sort.”

“Your own sort being middle-class women who may possibly derive fun out of getting soil beneath their fingernails,” she said.

“In my experience, Lady Muir,” he said, his eyes narrowing again, “middle-class women can be every bit as fastidious as ladies. Often more so, because for reasons I find hard to understand many of them aspire to
be
ladies. I have no plan to put my wife to work after I marry her—not work in the fields or barn, anyway. Not unless she chooses to involve herself. I once commanded men. I have no wish now to command women.”

Ah. This was not turning into the relaxing, perhaps slightly romantic afternoon she had anticipated.

“I have offended you,” she said. “I am sorry. There will be any number of eligible women only too eager to be introduced to you, Lord Trentham. You are titled and wealthy, and you have a hero’s reputation. You will be considered a great prize. And some women may not even be daunted if you scowl at them.”

“
You
are clearly not daunted,” he said.

“No,” she said, “but you are not courting me, are you?”

The words seemed to hang in the air between them. Gwen was very aware of the sound of the incoming tide, of the crying of gulls far overhead, of the intense gaze of his eyes. Of the heat of the sun.

“No,” he said, and he got abruptly to his feet and leaned back against the rock, his arms crossing over his chest. “No, I am not courting you, Lady Muir.”

He only wanted to bed her.

And she wanted to bed him. Everything in her eyes and the tense lines of her body told him that though she would surely deny it, even to herself, if he were to confront her with the fact.

Which he was not about to do.

He had
some
sense of self-preservation.

Bringing her here had been a ghastly mistake. He had known it from the first moment, even before he had carried her from the morning room to get ready for the outing.

For someone who had some sense of self-preservation, he appeared to have even more of a tendency toward self-destruction.

A puzzling contradiction.

She did not break the silence. He
could
not. He could not think of a mortal thing to say. And then he thought of one thing he could at least
do
. And that thought gave him something to say.

“I am going for a swim,” he said.

“What?”
She turned her head sharply and looked up at him. She looked startled, and then her face lit up with laughter. “You would freeze. It is
March
.”

Nevertheless.

He pushed away from the rock and tossed his hat down onto the blanket.

“Besides,” she said, “you did not bring a change of clothes.”

“I will not be wearing clothes into the sea,” he told her.

That
arrested the smile on her face—and brought flaming color to her cheeks. But she laughed again as he lifted his right foot to haul off his Hessian boot.

“Oh,” she said, “you would not dare. No, ignore that, if you please. You certainly would not be able to resist a dare, would you? No self-respecting man of my acquaintance ever would. Remove your boots and stockings, then, and paddle at the edge of the water. I shall sit here and gaze enviously at you.”

But after removing his boots and stockings, he shrugged out of his coat—not an easy thing to do without the help of his valet. His waistcoat came next, and she licked her lips and looked slightly alarmed.

He unknotted his neckcloth and flung it down onto the pile of garments that was beginning to accumulate. He dragged his shirt free of the waistband of his pantaloons and pulled it off over his head.

The air was perhaps not quite as warm as it had felt when he was fully clothed, but he was heated from within. Anyway, it was too late to change his mind now.

“Oh, Lord Trentham.” She was laughing again. “Do spare my blushes.”

He hesitated for a moment. But he would look an utter idiot if he merely wet his feet after all this. And soggy pantaloons would be horribly uncomfortable during the return journey to the house in the gig.

He really had no choice.

He peeled off his pantaloons and was left standing only in his drawers. He would
not
withdraw those, he decided somewhat reluctantly, even though he had only ever swum naked before.

He strode down the beach without looking at her.

The water on his feet and then about his ankles and knees and thighs felt as if it had just flowed from beneath the ice cap at the North Pole. It took his breath away even before he was fully immersed. But there was one consolation. It would be the perfect antidote to an unwilling and quite inappropriate ardor.

He dived under a wave, thought he was dead of shock, discovered he was not, and swam outward until he was beyond the foam of the breakers. Then he swam with powerful overarm strokes parallel to the beach until he could feel his arms and legs again and his breath steadied and the water felt merely cold. He turned and swam back the way he had come.

He tried to remember how long it was since he had had a woman. Since he could not come up with a satisfactory answer, it was obviously far too long.

Chapter 9

Gwen completely forgot about her ankle for a while. She sat with her knees drawn up, her arms wrapped about them, her feet flat on the blanket.

Her heart felt like a separate being inside her bosom, thumping to get out. She could not seem to calm it down or steady her breathing. And despite the short sleeves of her dress, it still felt more like July than March.

She had never seen a man naked, or even naked with the exception of his drawers. It was an odd fact, perhaps, when she had been married for a number of years. But Vernon had been very particular about respectability. During the day he had not liked her to see him even in as little as his shirtsleeves. At night he had come to her in a nightshirt and dressing gown.

Oh, she had seen Neville and her cousins in their drawers when they swam during childhood summers, she supposed, just as they had seen her in her shift. But they had all been just children at the time.

She was undeniably shocked that Lord Trentham would unclothe himself right in front of her. It was … well, it was
barbaric
. No gentleman would have removed so much as his coat without asking her permission first—and most would not even have asked simply because it would not be seemly.

But her shock owed less to prudish outrage, she had to admit as she watched him swim, than it did to reaction at the sight of his almost naked body. It was perfection itself. It was nothing short of magnificent, in fact. She had nothing with which to compare it, it was true, no one with whom to compare him. But she did not think any man
could
compare. His shoulders were wide, his chest broad. His hips were slim, his legs long and powerful. When he stood still, he looked like a finely sculpted god—not that she had ever seen such a sculpture. When he moved, he fairly rippled with muscle and looked like a warrior god sprung to vibrant life.

Could she be blamed for finding him knee-weakeningly, heart-poundingly attractive? For finding it difficult to breathe normally? For forgetting something as mundane as a sore ankle?

Could she be blamed for wanting a repetition of his kisses? For wanting, in fact, far more than just kisses? For feeling something as raw and unladylike as … lust?

It was a good thing, perhaps, that he had gone for a swim, that he was using up energy she knew he had wanted to use on
her,
that his absence gave her time to get both her body and her emotions under control. In fact, there was no
perhaps
about it. It was undoubtedly a good thing.

But how could she bring herself under control when he swam with such ease and grace and power, when even at this distance she could see the powerful muscles of his arms and shoulders and legs, the water and the sunlight causing his flesh to gleam as if it were oiled? She could look away, of course. But how could she do that when within a few days she would be gone from Penderris and would never see him again?

She gripped her legs more tightly and felt the raw ache of unshed tears in her throat and up behind her nose. And she also felt the
dull
ache of an abused ankle. She gave it her full attention and stretched her leg out again. She repositioned the cushions carefully beneath her knee and foot. She did not look toward the sea or, more specifically, to the almost naked man swimming in it.

It would serve him right if his extremities froze and fell off.

He was deliberately flaunting himself before her. A peacock used the gorgeous colors and extravagant size of its plumage to attract the female.
He
used his almost naked body.

Had he stripped and dashed for the water to cool off? Or had he done it to send her temperature soaring in the opposite direction?

Gwen leaned her head back against the rock behind her, felt the obstruction of her bonnet, and pulled impatiently at the ribbons so that she could toss it aside. She set her head back again and closed her eyes. The sunlight was bright. The insides of her eyelids were orange.

It did not matter why he was swimming.
He
did not matter. Not really. Or at least her
feelings
for him did not matter. They were here to relax, to take advantage of an unusually lovely day in beautiful surroundings.

But you are not courting me, are you?
she had said to him. It had not really been a question, but he had answered it anyway.
No, I am not courting you, Lady Muir.
And somehow it was the question and the answer that had sparked everything that had followed. And she had started it. It was her fault, then.