Hadrian (17 page)

They would talk, Hadrian silently promised Avie, when his raging case of frustrated lust subsided yet further, for Avie was apparently no more knowledgeable regarding male erotic functioning than either of them had been twelve years earlier.

What a scene that had been. Him, thinking on the strength of his strutting college boy’s experiences, he could pleasure a woman, and her, not even realizing what she’d asked of him. He’d ached badly that day and not only in the physical sense. He’d wanted to propose to her, but kept hearing her contempt for marriage at every turn.

Avis had wanted him for a lover but not for a husband. His overblown eighteen-year-old sense of honor and his delicate young man’s pride hadn’t been sophisticated enough to understand the time and trust she needed.

Still needed.

Thank God for the passage of the years.

The prayer was sincere, one of his first sincere prayers in weeks.

“I can’t sleep,” Avis said on a yawn. “Not any more. Neither am I in a hurry to scurry back to the dower house and oversee the work of the glaziers.”

“Harlan Danvers has been glazing windows since he was in short coats. He’ll manage. Would you like some wine?”

“I would, but I don’t want to move.”

“Alas, we did not learn when studying scripture how to make wine bottles levitate.” When she pushed off him and sat up, Hadrian got to his feet, discreetly adjusting his clothes while she fussed with her hair.

He kissed her shoulder, happy in the knowledge that he had more sense than he’d had at eighteen—he wanted to linger and cherish, not bolt off to commit the sin of Onan. “Leave that, Avie. I’ll see to your braid, but first, your libation.”

He retrieved the wine, poured her a glass, and then took up a position behind her on the blanket, his fingers tugging pins from her hair.

She plucked a clover flower from the grass. “I’m glad you’re not angry with me this time.”

Hadrian paused in his leisurely quest for hairpins. “I beg your pardon?”

“Twelve years ago. You were so wroth with me, I thought you would hurl thunderbolts because I’d importuned you, and you were such a decent young man.”

Hadrian hugged her from behind and dredged up the courage that was supposed to come with maturity. “Twelve years ago I was sexually frustrated, disappointed in myself, and hurt that you wanted me for a lover but nothing more. I was not angry with you, though I was an utter buffoon.”

Not the last instance of buffoonery on his part, but confessing to Avie eased his heart.

She shredded the clover, dusted her hands, then plucked another victim. “When you called the next day, you weren’t seeking me out to scold me and heap scorn on my head?”

Her question made his heart ache all over again. “I sought you out to propose, but with you, I didn’t even get as far as a rejection. I suppose you were my first, best failed proposal.”

Why hadn’t he seen that earlier?

She leaned back against his chest. “My poor Hadrian. I’m sorry.”

“I assumed you were wroth with me, thinking I’d used the same tactic as Collins had, or a version of it.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

Truly, this was a conversation they should have had years ago.

“He thought by despoiling you, you’d be forced to keep your engagement to him,” Hadrian said, drawing her hair over her shoulders. “I was determined to offer for you, but then realized you’d feel just as trapped, just as manipulated, and I wanted you to know, before I left for school, that I’d wait.”

Perhaps he was waiting still. Interesting notion.

“Then I didn’t receive you. What a tangled web.”

A tangled web that had led them back here, to a blanket shared amid the fresh air and sunshine of the Cumbrian countryside.

“Have you a pocket comb?” He drew his hands through the silky glory of her unbound hair again while his cock, which had been obediently subsiding, stirred back to life.

Exactly as if he were still eighteen.

She passed a small comb over her shoulder, and Hadrian focused on his task, despite having a few questions of his own.

“I wrote to you, my first term back at Oxford and then again in the spring.”

“I was off at Aunt Beulah’s in Scotland. Hers was not the most organized household, and the letters might not have received the attention they deserved. I could not write to you. Aunt would have forbidden such an impropriety.”

“I didn’t expect a reply,” Hadrian said, but he had hoped for one. He’d spent months hoping. “I wrote to you again before I married Rue.”

“How long ago?”

“Years.” He thought back, even as he drew the comb through her hair, something he’d never done for his wife. “Not quite six.”

“I should have received it, but the king’s mail is not as reliable as we’re supposed to believe. That feels good.”

“Better than good.” He swept her hair aside, to kiss her nape and turn the conversation from that long ago letter. His last epistle had been the most pathetic, baring his soul, begging, pleading, and promising with all the frustration and passion in him. What a mercy, in some sense, that the missive had gone astray.

“I wrote to you,” Avis said. “When Rue died.”

“I received that letter,” he replied, running his tongue over the top of her spine. She tasted of lavender soap with a touch of lemon. “Your kindness was a consolation, but this is a pleasure.” One that abetted his unruly manhood, so he forced himself to get back to work on her hair.

“What was your Rue like?”

A question to bring a fellow’s parts to heel.

“She was my escape route out of the frustrated ranks of young curates, and I was her escape from her father’s parsonage. She was the youngest of several sisters and at risk for being the one left behind to look after her aging parents.”

“The plain girl. I’ve envied a few plain girls. At least they have parents to love.”

Hadrian leaned in closer. “If you marry me, you can have babies to love, Avie. I’d thrive on giving you babies. Rejoice in it, exuberantly.”

“And you were being so good. I can accept the advisability of being courted by you to appearances, Hadrian, at least until we know what Collins is up to, but I doubt you’ll embark on the business strictly for show.”

“No, I will not. A vicar has ample opportunity to observe his flock making sheep’s eyes, Avie, particularly during his sermons. All and sundry will remark my callowness.”

“I don’t want to give you false hope.”

She was so good, so decent. “What happened on this blanket didn’t give you some real hope?”

“You gave me real pleasure.”

“That, my love, is a start.”

Never had a bridle sported such a shiny bit, never had the leather been so thoroughly cleaned and oiled. Fen was about to unbuckle the entire business and start back at the beginning when his favorite Choir Boy came sauntering into the stable yard.

His holiness had been getting some sun lately. Maybe a few kisses, too, judging from the state of his hair and neckcloth.

“Well, if it isn’t Bothwell the Younger, come to interrupt my work.”

“Fenwick.” Bothwell slid onto the bench beside him. “Haven’t you a pasture full of sheep to visit or some hay to scythe?”

“Give the hay another few days.” Bothwell bore more than a hint of Avie’s rose scent, too. “Soon we’ll scythe until we have blisters on our blisters. We’ll get through one more rainy patch, according to Sully’s lumbago, and then the sun will be out for a solid week.”

“Somewhere, maybe. Not here in Cumberland.”

“I listen to whatever guidance I can get when it comes to haying.” Fenwick set his bridle aside and resisted the urge to get off a bench that had grown uncomfortable an hour ago. “How did your discussion go with Lady Avis?”

Bothwell had warned Fen that the quarry pond was unavailable to staff, stewards, and meddling companions until further notice.

“I informed Lady Avis of Collins’s possible plans to turn up locally and offered her the protection of both my stout right arm and my name, should it come to that.”

“Fast work there, Bothwell. How did she respond?” Fen sustained a dart of jealously, followed by an equally sharp shaft of admiration. Bothwell grasped the magnitude of Avis’s problem and didn’t hesitate to take responsibility for its solution.

“Her ladyship tried to reject my suit out of hand, but has too much sense not to see the wisdom of it.” Bothwell shifted, crossing his legs at the ankle. “Why it is I can comfortably occupy a blanket on the hard, unforgiving ground of a Cumbrian hillside for better than an hour, but five minutes on a bench next to you and my backside protests?”

“Because you’ve a skinny arse.” And because Avie had occupied that blanket—those blankets—with him. “You’re rich as a nabob, already broken to the marital bridle, good-looking, pious to all appearances, and in line for a title. Poor Avie Portmaine will be reduced to becoming your viscountess.”

Bothwell let the pious-to-all-appearances jab pass, such were the reviving effects of time spent on blankets in the Cumbrian hills.

“Fenwick, you will not lecture her, you will not exhort her, and you will not offer her an alternative.”

Avie’s choir boy was turning up both possessive and protective.

“She hasn’t any alternatives,” Fen said, fingering the stout, dark leather of the curb reins, “unless she wants to summer down in London with Benjamin, and nobody in their right mind wants to do that.”

“You’ve spent summers in Town?”

He’d endured London, as young men from good families were supposed to. “I’ve spent time in London in spring, before the members of Parliament abandon weighty matters of state to shoot at hapless grouse with greater focus than they ever bring to affairs of state. I found the capital a pestilentially miserable experience.”

“One does recall the stench, even years later.”

“She’ll have you, Bothwell.” Fenwick looped the reins up through the headstall, the first step in tying up the bridle.

“Yes, I hope she does, but will she marry me thereafter?”

Bothwell rose and disappeared into the shadows of the stable, while Fen finished seeing to his bridle, then took out his knife, and once again polished the gleaming blade.

“I thought nothing could equal the ache resulting from shearing, but haying is an altogether hotter, itchier torment,” Hadrian said as he pulled on his second boot and straightened—carefully. The bank of the pond held lovely memories for him, but now it also qualified as the place where he’d nearly toppled into the water, so stiff was his back.

“Haying smells better than shearing,” Fenwick remarked philosophically as he slicked back his wet hair. “Haying doesn’t involve all that damned bleating and wailing for mama the livelong week. Then too, the quarry pond isn’t quite so frigid come haying.”

The pond was cold as the ninth circle of hell, which probably accounted for why Hadrian was still awake.

“I’m cleaner than I’ve been in two days. All I want now is my dinner.” Hadrian had left his shirt partly unbuttoned, his waistcoat as well, as had Fen. Their progress down the hillside was as slow as a pair of old veterans heading from the alehouse on a moonless night, but as they approached the stables, Lily Prentiss caught sight of them, her lips turning down at the corners as she veered off toward the dower house.

“We’ve been found wanting,” Fenwick noted, alluding to a verse from the book of Daniel he’d cited on other occasions. “That woman could teach raisins to wrinkle.”

“She’s pleasant enough. Perhaps you’d like to teach her something?”

“How to decamp for distant parts,” Fenwick muttered. “She’s a blight on the landscape, and you would do well to watch your back around her.”

Lily Prentiss was also loyal to Avis and her only female friend, as Fen well knew.

“Fenwick, the woman has been nothing but pleasant to me, and she’s a spinster, for pity’s sake. Do you expect all women to embrace your flirting and irreverence?”

“If they won’t embrace me, then my larking about is harmless fun, so yes, I do.”

Damnably logical. In addition to the ache in Hadrian’s back and the misery that was his hands, his head also throbbed from too much sun, or perhaps too much of Fen’s company. “Will we have another party after the haying?”

“There is no life after haying,” Fenwick said as they thumped onto his back porch. “Haying goes on for two weeks at least, if the damned rain doesn’t spoil the crop. Then you’re too tired to sport about between the keg and the dance floor.”

“A party then.” Inevitable, much like village assemblies had been back at Rosecroft. “I am too old for the demands of country living.”

More and more, Hadrian understood why Harold, living alone at Landover year after year, had sought an escape.

“We’ll toughen you up, Choir Boy. The biggest celebration comes after harvest, but we do a sort of midsummer bonfire after haying. The solstice generally arrives as we’re putting up our hay forks.”

Pleasant memories rose from Hadrian’s distant youth as Fen led the way to the kitchen. “Naughty old solstice. Do the young people still sneak off after dark to make free with the ancient traditions?”

“Make free with each other, you mean? Oh, of course.”

Fenwick’s house smelled good, of dried herbs and—truly, Hadrian had gone for a country squire—hay.

“You’re plotting the downfall of Lady Avis, aren’t you? Do you church fellows make a ritual of even your swiving?”

“For the last bleating time, I am not a churchman. I am a damned tired, hungry neighbor, who dreads the thought of lifting a rake tomorrow or ever again.” Though Hadrian also looked forward to it far more than he’d ever looked forward to delivering a sermon.

“At least Avie can’t scold you for wrecking your hands.”

“Perhaps not.” Hadrian looked at his paws, which he’d kept conscientiously gloved the livelong day, and which had developed a complement of calluses in any case. “My back is about ninety-four years old, though, and my arms are ready to fall off.”

“I’ve some horse liniment that will do wonders.”

“While leaving me noisome in the extreme?” Fen would pull such a maneuver, too, in retaliation for the rose and comfrey salve, and for the sheer hell of it.