The Courtship (16 page)

A
T LEAST TEN MINUTES passed this time before he was once again moving deeply in her, more easily now, but soon enough it quickened, and he was a madman once again, his mind splintered, all his focus on her and how he couldn't get enough of her or get deep enough inside her. He wanted to possess her, to brand her, to imprint her, it was that simple, that final. He caught her cries in his mouth, felt her nails digging into his back, and climaxed as wildly as he had the first time.

“I will die now,” he announced to the silent, small room, his hot breath in her left ear. Her hair was tangled around her face, over her shoulders, her mouth red and swollen, her nightgown bunched up about her breasts. He was still inside her, but not so much now—after all, a man had to retreat sooner or later.

It was definitely later.

“Yes,” she said, “I will, too.” The sound of her frantic heartbeat was not so loud now in her ears. As for his heartbeat, it pounded deep, steady thuds against her breast. She said, her voice both surprised and bewildered, “I never imagined there could be anything like this. I have read many different books, looked at many different drawings. Never was there anything written or drawn that contemplated what you have just done to me so many times in so few minutes.”

“You mean what you and I have just done together,” he said. “I promise you that I could not have done this without you.” He sounded as baffled as she did, but she also heard something else.

She said, “I don't understand.”

“Understand what? That you are a passionate woman? That I am an immensely excellent lover?” The austere male arrogance was suddenly back, and she saw the blatant satisfaction stamped hard on his face, heard it in his voice.

“No,” she said slowly, rubbing her hands up and down his back, feeling his muscles, his bones, the warmth of his flesh, the wondrous smoothness of him through his fine lawn shirt. “I don't understand why you are scared.”

He jerked out of her and was on his feet in the next instant, pulling up his breeches, buttoning them. He stared down at her, sprawled naked, her white legs apart, long and sleek, so utterly beautiful, so soft in the gentle candlelight. “Damn you, I am not scared. You are a woman. Stop drawing absurd conclusions based upon your own weak female notions. I am not scared.”

She slowly sat up and slowly pulled her nightgown over her legs. She was very wet with him. It was strange, this wetness. It had been a very long time since she had felt such a thing.

Since yesterday.

She stroked her fingers through her hair to pull out the tangles. She looked up then to see that he was staring at her fingers pulling through her hair.

She saw his own fingers clenching at his sides. “I am not scared. That is ridiculous. It is nonsense.”

She looked over at the broken chair, a lovely Louis XV, all white and gold, that had belonged to her grandmother. One leg had broken off cleanly. The other leg had splintered badly. With care, perhaps, the chair could be repaired, but that one leg would be difficult.

She looked over at the pile of pages beside her on the floor. They had both been so focused, so urgent, that they hadn't even moved much, just gone mad together in one spot. The pages hadn't been touched.

“I don't like this, Helen.”

She sighed and stood up. Her legs nearly gave out on her. She grabbed the edge of the desk, waited a moment, then slowly straightened again. She said, her eyes focused just beyond his left shoulder on the narrow bookshelf in the corner that held her novels, “I am going back to my bedchamber now. I think you are doing a magnificent job on translating the scroll. It is about the lamp. I knew it just had to be. But how?”

He shrugged and tucked his shirt into his breeches. “I agree. I would have thought that since it is about the lamp, then the lamp would have been in the iron cask with it. Why was a letter or a message or whatever it is sealed up all by itself? What is the point? Where is that bloody lamp?”

“It is possible,” she said slowly, lightly touching her fingertip to the leather scroll, “that someone found this cask much later, perhaps even after the lamp was here in England with King Edward. Perhaps this someone knew where King Edward had buried the lamp in a general sort of way, and buried the cask nearby. Then if both were found, the scroll would explain about the lamp and all would be known. There was nothing else in that small cave. I looked very carefully. But perhaps close by, not too far away from the cave—”

“Helen.”

She raised her head and stared at him. He looked tough in the dim, spindly candlelight, tough and hard and dangerous. She had the sudden urge to fling herself on him and take him down to the floor. It was a floor she would never look at again in quite the same way. She smiled then. He had made love to her with his boots on.

“Don't smile at me. Listen, I am not scared. But I will tell you this. It must stop. This has never happened to me before, this complete loss of what I am and what I'm doing. Not once did I think to withdraw from you, not one single time, either yesterday or now. If this continues you will become pregnant.” Just saying the word made his eyes nearly cross, and, strangely enough, not with abject terror. No, in that instant, he saw her belly rounded with his child, and she was laughing and telling him something that made him kiss her and laugh as well. And his hand lay over her belly, over his child. Then it was gone.

He didn't know what was wrong with him. It was the bloody lamp. Whatever it was or wasn't, it was making him quite mad.

She looked away, toward the windows behind her desk, where the pale yellow draperies were tightly drawn. Her shoulders were slumped, her head bent. She said, “That need not worry you ever.”

He didn't know what she was talking about. He saw her again, her eyes sparkling, their babe in her belly, and his hands, they were all over her now.

“What don't you wish to worry me?”

“Your staying inside me is not a problem.”

“Spilling my seed inside of you isn't a problem?” No, he thought, it was not a problem at all. He said, “Are you mad, woman? Of course it could be a problem. I have no bastards because I have always been very careful. With you, it's been different, somehow.”

“I am barren.”

No, he thought, that wasn't right. There she was, so clear in his mind, her belly pressing against him when she kissed him. The babe was due soon. “How the devil would you know that?”

“I was married, once, a very long time ago, when I had just turned eighteen. My father believed I was too young, but I was desperately in love and thus he gave me my way. My husband, a man of nearly your advanced years, wanted an heir very badly.” She shrugged. “He was killed when the war started again, just after the Treaty of Amiens collapsed.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Yes. We were only married for two years before he died. I came back to my father's house and took my own name again.”

“I didn't know.”

“Why should you? It isn't common knowledge.”

“I remember I asked you if you had been married. You didn't really answer me, now that I think about it.”

“I would not have told you now, except you are very scared that you have made me pregnant. Well, you haven't. I am barren.”

She turned without another word and walked out of the study.

Lord Beecham slowly bent down to gather up the papers on the floor. He barely glanced at the translation he had managed so far. He laid the pages atop Helen's desk, snuffed out the candle, and left the room.

It was nearly three o'clock in the morning. When he fell asleep, he saw Helen again, so very clearly, and she was naked and he was kissing her mouth, her breasts, as his hands stroked her big belly, then he was kissing her belly, feeling his babe kick against his cheek when he pressed his face against her.

He jerked awake and sat up in bed. He was not a superstitious man. He did not believe in visions or in portents. Then he thought, If Helen birthed a girl, she would be an Amazon, a beautiful sharp-tongued Amazon. And a boy? He would be a big man, confident, a leader of men.

He smiled fatuously into the darkness.

I am losing what few wits remain to me, he thought as he pillowed his head against his arms. Helen was his partner. The rest of it was lunacy. All right, so she was both his partner and his lover, and even she must accept that now. They would do their best to find this lamp, whatever the thing was.

But there was this madness with her. When he had been a randy boy there had been the fire in his gut, as lust was spoken of in young males. But he wasn't a boy now. He was a full-grown man, a man of control and experience.

Only he had no control with Helen. It wasn't what he was used to. Usually, sating himself with a woman sent him into sweet dreams almost immediately, but not this time, not with Helen. He had been beyond sated, nearly unconscious, yet, at the same time, he had a very strong feeling that if Helen were to stroll into his bedchamber right this minute, he would want her as much as he had the first, the second, the third time he'd taken her on the floor of her study two hours before.

When he fell asleep again, he didn't dream of Helen. He dreamed of a man who held a gun in a very white hand. He could not tell where that gun was pointing, but he knew he was afraid. Then the man turned and Spenser saw that a black mask covered his face. He laughed, aimed the gun at Spenser, and pulled the trigger.

Spenser came awake abruptly and bolted straight up in bed, his heart nearly bursting out of his chest. There was Nettle, standing not two feet from him and he was screaming at the top of his lungs.

“Nettle, shut up. Good God, man, what's the matter?”

“My lord, you must help me, quickly, quickly! That madman will be here in just a moment and I know he is carrying an ax over his shoulder and he wants to chop my poor head from my neck. Please, you must help me, my lord.”

And Nettle bolted under Lord Beecham's bed.

Not two minutes later, Flock appeared in the now open doorway to Lord Beecham's bedchamber. He wasn't carrying an ax over his shoulder. However, he did have a gun in his right hand, and there was a very determined expression on his face.

“Where is the little rat, my lord?”

Lord Beecham said mildly, “Flock, do you know what time it is?”

“It is a good time for that little bastard you employ as your valet to meet his maker, whom I believe to be the devil.”

“Flock, get out of my bedchamber.”

“Goodness, Flock, you will stop this now or I will send you to my inn and discipline you with all my lads there.”

“Miss Helen,” Flock said with great dignity, which was difficult since Helen towered over him, “his lordship's valet, a man of no moral fiber whatsoever, was kissing Teeny on the back steps. She was even carrying a bucket of hot water for you, Miss Helen. She even set down that bucket to return the bounder's kisses. I must kill him, Miss Helen.”

“I don't see him in here, Flock,” Helen said. “You have disturbed his lordship, who, I must tell you, was working very, very late last night.”

“It wasn't all work,” his lordship said.

“In any case, you awoke him because of all this melodrama. Go away, Flock. Do you want me to discipline you, in a way you won't like at all?”

Flock's gun hand shook a bit. Finally, he whispered, “No, Miss Helen. Your stable lad at the inn told me what you did to him after he had started a fight with the butcher's cousin and bloodied his nose.”

“Good. Worse will happen to you if you do not give me that bloody pistol immediately and go see about Lord Prith's breakfast. You know how hungry he is by seven o'clock in the morning. If you don't hurry, he just might be awaiting you to wring your neck.”

“Yes, Miss Helen, but I am not happy about this. I already warned that little codpiece, you know that. If he believes that he can seduce my Teeny without retribution, I am sunk.”

“I will speak to Teeny, Flock. I will find out what is going on here, and I will tell you when I have all the information I need. You will not be sunk. Go away now.”

Once Helen had closed the door behind Flock and set the pistol down upon a dressing table, she eyed Lord Beecham, who was sitting up in his bed, the covers coming only to his waist, his hair tousled, and she called out, “Nettle, you will show yourself immediately, or it will be the worse for you.”

Nettle crawled out from under Lord Beecham's bed.

“An excellent hiding place,” she said. “Even Flock at his most ferocious would not have dared to peer beneath Lord Beecham's bed. Come here and sit down.”

Lord Beecham had never before been awakened to such wonderful comedy. He settled himself back against his pillows, crossed his arms over his chest, and prepared to be entertained.

“That's right, clean yourself off. I see that I will have to speak to Mrs. Stockley. Dirt and dust under the bed. She will likely chew on the maid's ear about that. All right, now, Nettle, you look well enough. Sit.” She pointed to a chair not far from Lord Beecham's bed.

Nettle sat, but he wasn't looking at Helen, he was staring beyond her, at the bedchamber door.

“Why were you kissing Teeny on the back stairs when she was carrying a bucket of hot water?”

Nettle crossed his small white hands over his chest. He looked soulful, or bilious, depending on the eye beholding him. “I am in love, Miss Helen,” he announced then, having set his stage to his satisfaction.

Helen said, “What is your last name, Nettle?”

“Why, it is Nettle, Miss Helen.”

“Your first name, then?”