Listen to the Moon (5 page)

Where had John been? In the pantry, to judge by the angle of sight. Polishing something, no doubt, while his mother smiled at the Dymond boys and sliced into a warm jam tart. He must have been almost twenty, too old to envy children, so he had told himself he was annoyed by the noise, and by the disruption of his mother’s orderly kitchen at the only time of day when the servants could hope to work without interruption.

“Has it got
you
in trouble?” he asked.

She looked away. “I’ve lost a couple of places for talking too much,” she said softly.

Every good servant deplored a chattering maid, and yet he felt hot anger on her behalf.

“I suppose you think I deserved it.”

“No. I was merely thinking that when one works as closely with one’s employer as a servant does, it is as necessary for one’s personality to please, as one’s work.”

She gave him a sharp look. He was sure she was thinking he had solved that problem by not having a personality, but he hadn’t provoked her enough to make her say it.

Somehow, he wanted her to say it. He wanted to hear the arch note in her voice that would take the sting from the words. He wanted to hear it even if she left the sting in. “Perhaps one day you’ll find a mistress who is glad to have you fill the silence in her life.”

She stopped walking abruptly. “Here we are.”

The unleaved tree was beautiful, wide and rambling and perhaps thrice his height. High above them, a few twisted, gleaming branches were yet bowed with clusters of bright yellow-and-red apples.

Having taken the tree’s measure, John glanced down at Sukey, who was pulling off her stockings. Her boots stood empty—and, he was touched to notice, she had set her bonnet atop them to protect them from rain.

That flash of bare foot and ankle was a shock. It took several seconds for his thoughts to flow again. “Miss Grimes—”

“It’s going to start pouring any second. You stand below and catch the apples so they don’t bruise.” She clambered barefoot onto a low branch and very carefully pulled herself up to sit on a higher one. He wanted to tell her to come down, but she was right. He was far too heavy to climb in her stead.

Unreasonable commands were part of their profession.

Her bare feet dangled, shivering. He wanted to warm them in his hands. In the fraught, idle silence, that desire grew into a daydream of kissing her ankles, gently sliding up her skirts to expose white, slender calves downed with dark hair.

“Catch.” She tossed him an apple. The distance was small enough that he caught it with ease. Two more followed. The black clouds were nearly overhead, and the wind was picking up.

“How many blacksmiths does Lively St. Lemeston possess?”

Sukey strained for a particularly fat apple hanging just out of reach. “Two, but they bring their apprentices and boys with them. What they don’t take, I’ll make into stucklings.” Sliding along the branch, she levered herself up and yanked the apple free just as the skies burst open with a deluge of rain, a fierce gust of wind and a blinding flash of lightning.

She lost her balance and fell, screaming and clawing at nothing.

Chapter Four

John’s breath stopped, but somehow he lunged forward and she plummeted into him instead of the ground. His arms locked around her, and her hands went around his neck. His pulse thundered in his ears, the sudden rush of blood making him dizzy. His cheek was hot and raw where her buttons had scraped it. Her breath came and went in heaving, whimpering gasps. Was she shaking, or was he? Or was it only the freezing rain hammering down on them?

Thunder rumbled, recalling him to himself. “Can you stand?”

“Thanks to you.” She wiped water from her eyes with one hand. The other was still tight around his neck.

Reluctantly, he set her on her feet. “We ought to find shelter before the lightning reaches us.” Another bright flash. Already the thunder came sooner, more lightning on its heels.

She drew in a deep breath. “There’s a farm that way.”

He made out the shape, a few hundred yards off but distorted by the heavy rain. His hat had fallen when he caught her. He set it on his head and picked up the basket and folded umbrella. “Take your boots and run.”

His hands full, his broad-brimmed hat blew off again almost at once. He ignored it with a pang, but she turned back. “Leave it,” he called sharply. “Will you be struck down for a hat?”

Heedless, she chased it down for precious seconds, fingertips catching at the brim. She only gave up when a gust of wind sent it soaring into the air. Lightning came again, turning the world colorless.

He stumbled through the rain, praying that nothing tripped them up. The wall of the barn rose up before him, and he was plastered against it before he could think. The door was round the other side; with her help he got it open. They slipped inside, shutting the door behind them just as lightning and thunder crashed simultaneously.

The sudden absence of rain on his skin and in his eyes, the distancing of the sound of it, left him disoriented. Blinking, he made out the barn floor on which he stood, just large enough for a hay wagon. To his left was a hay bay crammed to the rafters, and on the other side, a row of cow stalls, with haymows above.

Sukey appeared before him, plucking the apples out of the basket he still held and examining them for damage. That done, she peered up at John. With her pointed chin and narrowed eyes, she looked like a drowned ferret. “You’d better get out of that coat,” she said, shrugging out of her own.

Her kerchief and shoulders were wet and her skirts waterlogged about the hem, but the rest of her appeared essentially dry. Nevertheless, she was damp and cold enough that her nipples showed clearly through her clothes.

She gave him a little shake, hands on his elbows, and undid the buttons of his greatcoat. “Here now. Say something.”

I can see your nipples
, he thought. The greatcoat’s fitted sleeves wouldn’t come off unless he removed his gloves. The soaked leather clung to his fingers.

Sukey was examining her own pelisse. Assessing the damage, he supposed, as she lingered on a dry patch in the lining, but then she lifted it up over his head and rubbed his hair dry. He was so startled that he let her.

When the coat went away and he could see again, she was smiling. “It’s a good thing there aren’t any mirrors here. I think you’d have hysterics.”

He sighed and worked his gloves free, spreading them over a bale of hay with his wet greatcoat. There was a hard object in one pocket. He pulled it free, puzzled, and recognized with dismay the slim second volume of
Count Julian
. He’d slipped it into the coat on Sunday, in case it rained and he needed to linger in church. The edges were soaked, already rippling. He pressed it flat between his hands for a moment before he could resign himself.

He tried to wipe his coat down with his handkerchief, but the square of linen was quickly soaked and the coat little improved. He knew already that the weave would never look as crisp as it had.

“I’m sorry,” Sukey said quietly.

He wasn’t. If she had fallen, without him—“One ought not to fret over trifles.” He could do nothing now for his possessions. What could he do for their health?

Sukey had sat on a bale of hay and tucked her bare feet into her petticoats. Probably that would suffice to warm them. Probably what he was about to do was entirely unnecessary.

But he crouched down and drew out one damp foot, cupping it in his bare hands. The other peeped out from beneath her hem as she shifted to look at him. They were so small. Fairy feet, meant to dance in the moonlight. He traced her anklebones with his thumbs and pressed his fingers into the arch of her foot.

Calluses lined her sole and ridged her big toe. She was no fairy, but a hardworking woman. That did not lessen his excitement.

He let go her ankle and chafed her toes briskly between his cold hands for long moments before heat began to build. Relief flared in his chest as she sighed and leaned back on her hands. Her toes relaxed between his fingers. When he was satisfied, he did the same to her other foot.

He didn’t meet her eyes. If he did, this would be seduction and not aid.

When he released her, she hopped up and fished her stockings out of her coat pocket. “Dry as a bone,” she said with satisfaction, thrusting her hand down into the toe of one and rolling it up in preparation for putting it on. She hesitated. “I suppose you’d better turn round.” He obeyed at once, trying not to think of legs exposed or garters being tied. Was there a sound more provocative than rustling?

“All right, I’m fit to be seen.”

Her nipples still showed through her bodice, and while her shivers had subsided and her lips had lost their blue tinge, she was white, her back kept straight only by her stays.

He sat beside her.
This is common sense, and not seduction.
“We are both thoroughly chilled. As one cannot safely light a fire in a hay barn, our best source of warmth is each other, unless we wish to cuddle with the cows. I give you my word I will be all that is respectful, if you will trust me so far as to…”

“Sit in your lap?” she supplied, amused. “But someone could come in.”

At once he was on fire, thinking of everything he could do to her while she sat in his lap. How he could bare her breasts and warm her nipples with his hands. How he could turn her so she straddled him and warm them with his mouth. How he could enter her.

He deliberately recalled how he had said to her,
I brought myself to completion this morning, thinking of taking you
. Embarrassment drowned his inconvenient arousal. “The choice is yours. But I should hate for us to catch our deaths through immoderate modesty.”

“Now that’s an improving tale for the ages.” Sukey took off her wet cap. “I’d ought to bring it to Mrs. Dymond’s attention.” (That lady made her money, what there was of it, writing literature with a high moral tone for children.) She hesitated, then pulled a pin from her hair, evidently intending to take it down to dry. It was a good notion, and John supported it wholeheartedly.

Damnation, this was laughable. Either he should fuck her, or he should stop thinking about fucking her, because he was in no position to satisfy himself any time in the near future. He leaned over and took up his book. He found his place without difficulty, but it was an effort to take the words’ meaning in along with their shape when he could hear hairpins clinking together in Sukey’s palm.

“I don’t like being cold.” She dried her own hair in her pelisse.

“Neither do I,” he agreed mildly. Who did?

“It’s one of the things I like least about being a maid. They get to stay in their warm beds until I’ve lit the fire.”

John himself had never minded that. Discomfort was unpleasant by definition, but he hated excessive heat far more than cold. He peeled the page away from the next one and turned it carefully. A scrap of paper came off in his hand. He sighed.

“I won’t be cold when I don’t have to be,” she said, and climbed into his lap.

He spread his legs to accommodate her, thinking she would turn her back to him, but she stayed curled up, resting her cheek on his shoulder and drawing her legs up to her chest, the back of her heels against his outer thigh.

She tugged at her skirts until they flowed straight from her gown’s high waist over her shins. Her knees pulled at the gown, tugging the bodice away from her breasts so he saw the drawstring of her stays and a dark, bottomless gap that showed him nothing but that might, in better light, have revealed the busk of her stays, the swell of her breasts, and her thighs.

Her back was icy where it touched his arm. Unbuttoning his coat, he wrapped it around her as far as it would go. Her unbound hair, imbued with her scent, spread damp tentacles over her shoulder and clung to his arm as he lifted it to continue reading. She smelled of ashes and damp wool, tallow soap and turpentine, clean rain and lemons and sweat and skin. Seductive beyond reason. If he bent his head, he could bury his nose in her hair.

He tried to keep his eyes on his book.

Sukey made believe that Mr. Toogood was a very lumpy pillow. It wasn’t easy, as he kept shifting about, his arms moving as he turned a page, his chest rising and falling under her cheek. It took long, clammy minutes, but at last a comforting heat built between them. It had been so many years since she was a girl sharing a bed with her mother, she’d forgotten how much better another person was than any warming pan or hot bricks or leaning against the chimney.

Even so, she wished they had a blanket.

Light flashed from outside, and though she knew the roar of thunder was coming, it made her jump a bit and burrow closer to him. He shifted again, uneasily. Blood rushed to her face as she became aware of something hard poking at her hip.

He must know she’d felt it. Would he speak? Would he kiss her? She held her breath.

He turned a page in his book.

Oh, it wasn’t fair! He wanted her, and she wanted him, and why
shouldn’t
they? Why shouldn’t he lay her down on this hard, scratchy bale of hay and stick that cockstand right into her?

But he’d already refused her once. That and the damp chilled her enough that she could remember Mrs. Humphrey’s kindness in giving her the rattle. Her mistress, who didn’t trust her with a twopenny bit, had had faith in her virtue. Her mother had striven to bring her up to be smart and careful. It would be letting them down if she gave away her maidenhead like any featherwit.

How smug Sukey had been when Mrs. Dymond’s sister had found herself with child last month. How sure she’d been that
she
would never be so foolish. Even after Friday in the kitchen, she’d thought,
Well, I’ll be on my guard now
. Forewarned was forearmed.

He had lovely forearms.

Didn’t pride go before a fall indeed? Sukey knew she should be ashamed of her weakness. But strength felt like a burden just now. She didn’t want to die a virgin. She didn’t want to go home and lie alone on her cold pallet in the kitchen and hear the moon whispering outside about what fun everyone else was having.

“What are you reading?” she asked, to have something else to think of.

“
Count Julian: A Tragedy.
It’s a play about medieval Spain and the Moors. Mr. Dymond gave it to me after he’d read it.”

She’d guessed as much from the expensive binding. “Do you like it?”

“I do.” He shifted, the muscles in his legs tensing and relaxing. “It reminds me of Lear: a man who loves his daughter, yet puts his pride above her and so destroys a nation. But the author hasn’t Shakespeare’s gift for a story. I would have found the plot murky if Mr. Dymond hadn’t explained the history of it beforehand.”

She sighed. “There’s been talk of building a theater here. A real theater that real companies would come and perform in. But I don’t suppose it can happen before the next election, and who knows when that will be.” Nearly everything in Lively St. Lemeston was built by elections, Orange-and-Purple Whigs and Pink-and-White Tories buying goodwill and vying to see who could subscribe more generously to the building fund.

He lowered his book, one arm coming to rest at her lower back as he put his hands on his knees. “Don’t give up hope.” His voice hummed through her where her side pressed into his chest.
I brought myself to completion, thinking of taking you
, he’d said. “I know the project is dear to Lady Tassell’s heart.”

It was dear to Sukey’s too. By rights she ought to spend the next ten minutes sweating him for every last bit of information he possessed. But she couldn’t frame one question. She couldn’t do this. “I’m much warmer. I think I’d better…”

A still, charged moment—and he leaned away, his arms spreading wide to allow her freedom of movement.

She got to her feet, retreating to a nearby bale of hay. The parts of her that had shared his heat were soft and vulnerable. They felt colder than the rest of her, longing to press themselves up against him once more. She darted a glance at him and met his piercing amber eyes as he buttoned his coat, hiding the fall of his breeches. She guessed he was debating whether or not to apologize.

She’d ought to apologize to
him
. He was only in this barn, soaked through and denied release, because he’d helped her.

Knowing that Mr. Toogood was hard with wanting her and could set it aside and go on being kind—knowing that he was ignoring his own desires the way she’d ignore an aching back or sore knees—every bit of her strained for a way to thank him, to show him he hadn’t offended her. And after a few frustrated moments she remembered that kissing a man wasn’t the only way to tell him you thought he was splendid.
I lack the impulse to confide in others
, he’d said.
Sometimes I regret it.

“Did you see many plays in London?” she asked.

He nodded. “I enjoy the theater. Lord Lenfield was kind enough not to object to my absenting myself of an evening, provided I was home before him.”

That meant more than once a week, then, or he might have gone on his half-holiday. “What was your favorite?”

He hesitated.

“Please. I’ve never been to a real theater.”