Unclaimed (13 page)

He turned and looked at her.

“Imagine,” he said, “I met her, and I was tied to someone who would just
do.
I want a wife I can love, Mrs. Farleigh. One who I
want
to be faithful to because there is simply nobody else for me, not because it is the right thing to do. I don’t want to resent my fidelity. Or my wife. And so…I wait.”

“What are you trying to
do
to me?” she asked, stepping back from the intensity of his gaze.

Her foot slipped on a rock—enough to unbalance her, just a little. He reached for her. She
knew
it didn’t mean anything, knew that he meant only to steady her arm—and yet still she flinched from his outstretched hand. It threw her entirely off balance. She went sprawling, her palms smacking painfully into rock.

“Did you hurt yourself?”

She examined her gloves—easier than looking up. Tiny bits of gravel had ripped through the fabric, abrading the flesh beneath. Her ankle stung, but only a little. “Just my pride.”

He started to extend a hand toward her to help her up and then grimaced and pulled it back. Instead he crouched down beside her, so that his head was level with hers.

“Look here,” he said quietly, “I’m not trying to do anything to you. I wish you’d understand that.”

“But—”

“But nothing. I don’t want to take you. I don’t want to possess you. Right now, I just want to see whether you’ve injured yourself.”

Jessica swallowed hard and stared at the ground. Then, tentatively, she held out her hands, wrist up. He made no move to take them. Foolish of her to be thankful for that. But his finger traced the frayed edge of her glove, brushed at little bits of gravel that had embedded itself in her skin.

“I’m not even bleeding,” she said.

“No.”

She looked up. Their eyes met. She didn’t know what to think of him, didn’t know what to think of herself.

“I’m hunting for sport, not meat,” he said. “Because I
like
you. Because in London, my every last step is dogged by gossipers and hangers-on. If I talk to a woman once, it’s in the papers the next day. If I talk to her twice, people start making bets. I hardly dare talk to anyone a third time.” He let out a sigh and sat back on a rock. “I intend to wait until I find the right woman. But I miss female companionship—and no, that’s not a euphemism for anything except…this. I
like
women. I like you.”

“There are a great many other women besides me.”

“I had noticed. That is the worst of London. I don’t dare let myself admire anyone. Not even a little. It’s an impossible dilemma. How can I know if a lady is the right one, without paying her some attention? But the instant I show even the slightest interest, the public assumes that marriage is a foregone conclusion. If I were later to decide she wasn’t right, I would embarrass her. Publicly. All it would take was three dances, spread over two weeks, and speculation would run wild. I can’t decide to marry on the basis of three dances.”

His fingers hovered over her wrist. She could feel her pulse beating against them.

“There’s a reporter in town now.”

“I’ll get rid of him.” He looked off into the distance.

She nodded mutely.

“You understand, then, what I’m telling you? I just want more than three dances. And you’re perfect.” His hand skimmed down her palm, down the joints of her fingers, to her fingertips. “I can’t possibly lead you astray, because you hate me already.” He was smiling as he said that.

Jessica swallowed. Just the touch of his fingertips—nothing more.

She might have responded with artifice. She was
supposed
to, if she meant to seduce him. But she could hardly seduce him, when even a touch made her flinch. Besides, she’d spent months in a dark haze. This feeling, this tentative flutter in her belly—this was
hers.
This was sunlight on her face. It was the warmth she’d dreamed of. It was a curl of honest attraction, the first she’d experienced in years. And so slowly, deliberately, she crooked her fingertips under his, so that the curve of his hand caught against hers.

She let her weary fear flow through her, found that cold, hard center of protest. She’d been letting Weston own her, though she’d tossed him out long before. She’d been flinching from every good thing, from even this simple touch. But she could at least possess this again—this electric feel of honest attraction.

His breath caught as their hands clasped.

“I don’t hate you,” she whispered.

“Oh.” His voice dropped. His thumb encircled her wrist. “Oh, dear.” And then he pulled her to him, gently.

She had a second to look up into his eyes, to breathe in the taste of him. “Sir Mark?” she asked, her voice suddenly quavering.

His lips touched hers.

It wasn’t a fierce kiss. It wasn’t an extravagant kiss. It was just his breath, feathering against the skin of her face, his lips, soft and gentle against hers. But there was not the slightest sense of hesitance to it, either.

She’d been kissed more times than she could count. She thought she’d known how to translate the language of lips. After all, kissing was a communication that spoke of only a few possibilities. A kiss was an offer or an acceptance; it was an invitation to commerce, or, on rare occasion, the conclusion of a bargain. Kisses were money. They were a mark of possession.

Or, at least, they were supposed to be.

But this wasn’t a claim, his kiss. His fingers curled around hers; his lips brushed hers. He wasn’t taking ownership of her. She didn’t know what to make of it. She didn’t know what to make of
him.
Most important, she didn’t know what to make of
herself,
of that impossible tangle of fear and want and attraction that she harbored inside.

He lifted his head. His eyes met hers.

He didn’t apologize. He didn’t make promises.

Another man might have made a joke, to pretend that it hadn’t meant a thing. Sir Mark blew out his breath and uncurled his hand from hers. “I
did
tell you I liked you.”

His words lingered in the air between them, charging it subtly with every breath she inhaled.

So that was what this was, this kiss. Not commerce. Not ownership. Affection, untinged by anything else. She’d never been kissed out of affection before. Her hand rose, as if of its own accord, to touch her lips. To ascertain that her skin belonged to her, that it didn’t bear the imprint of him. That feeling lingered inside her, unfamiliar and yet so welcome all at once.

She
liked
him.

Not a good idea. Not a good idea at all. She wasn’t sure what to do with that feeling—whether she should stomp it out or encourage it to grow. She’d spent all that time wondering what he wanted of her and none thinking about what she wanted of herself.

She turned to look back at Glastonbury Tor. The wind and sun were making short work of the mist. The tor itself shone distinctly; only the valley floor was a smudged green. It was going to rain. That’s what they said.

She hadn’t needed a folktale to know that. It always rained.

“And what do you do, Sir Mark, if you meet your Guinevere, and she is already claimed by another?”

He said nothing for so long that she turned back to see if he’d heard. His eyes met hers. She remembered them as blue, but they were changeable in the light. Right now, they seemed stony-gray.

“I’m not worried about that,” he said quietly. “I’m not worried about that at all.”

WHEN THE CLOCK struck eleven later that evening, Jessica was alone in her bed, clad in nothing but a linen shift.

It had been a long time since she’d felt desire. The feeling didn’t bother her; she’d come to accept it as a practicality, a tool for survival as much as any other trick in her arsenal. But there was nothing like performing for pay to render the pleasurable prosaic.

Over the past seven years, her desires, her wants, had been submerged in the service of the men who’d paid for her. It had been years since she’d owned her own sexual response.

It wasn’t an intelligent thing, what she did now.

It was one thing to tempt him. It was another, entirely, to tempt herself, to fool her heart and her desires into focusing not on his seduction, but on
him.
Still, she couldn’t help but revisit that kiss. That moment of startled intensity, when he’d looked into her eyes and said, “Oh, dear.” She relived the touch of his mouth against hers and didn’t stop there. Not with a simple kiss.

She wanted another and another. She wanted his hands on her, not just chastely touching her fingertips.

She wanted to banish the cold fear she’d felt and replace it with the true warmth of his want.

Her imagination sketched in the naked form of his body, stealing the imagery from the remembered curve of his biceps under her hand. He would be lean, but muscular, the lines of his body firm and strong. Jessica felt a slow shiver run through her at the thought, and her eyes fluttered shut. She’d worn his coat; she knew there wasn’t the slightest padding to it. The breadth of his shoulders owed nothing to clever tailoring.

At the thought of his coat, the memory of the scent of his clothing wrapped around her once more, a hot blanket enveloping her in the midst of the cool evening. Mark’s scent was clean male, with a hint of salt and starch. No extraneous perfumes; no pomade, no cologne attempting to mask more intrusive fragrances. His skin would smell like that all over—subtle, strong and attractive—an aroma she couldn’t pin down, somewhere between clean sunshine and the clear, cold water of a mountain spring.

In her imagination, she didn’t touch him. She didn’t need to. In her imagination, there was no reason to put his pleasure above hers, to set aside her own desires to make sure that he was fulfilled.
He
thought of
her.
He touched her. He took care of her.

It was just her imagination, but, oh, she wanted him. And it had been so long since she wanted anything, let alone a man.

She let herself want him in the safety of her own bed. She could want him without thought or analysis, without calculating the effect of every touch. She could want him purely for herself.

She gasped, and the night air was cool against her lips. Fantasy-Mark had no hands, and so her own had to do. She touched herself, taking back territory that she had ceded to others over the last long years: her breasts, her thighs.

She imagined his hand at her nipple instead of her own. His mouth. His fingers, spreading her legs, his palm brushing her thighs before he found the nub between them.

It didn’t belong to anyone, that spiraling twinge of pleasure she felt. Not to anyone except herself. It was
her
want, her
desire.
Nobody else mattered. No one else needed to be satisfied. She had no need to falsify a response, to try and inflame another person.

It shook her, that final moment. Ecstasy raced through her. It was stronger and more powerful than just physical release, and she almost wept from the joy of it.

Hers.
Hers.

She belonged to herself again, body and soul, pleasure and heartbreak. She was every inch
hers
again, her body reclaimed from those long years of bitter ownership.

She was hers.

She drew a tremulous breath, shaking, her eyes opening to see only darkness before her.

She thought of Mark. “Oh.” She exhaled slowly. “Dear.”

CHAPTER NINE

THE FIGURE THAT STOOD
on Mark’s doorstep the next evening was not nearly so attractive as the one that had greeted him days ago in the rain.

It was coming up on suppertime, but in the height of summer, the sun was still warm. The man before him wore a jacket of serviceable wool, creased by wear and dirtied around the cuffs. His skin had the look of a man constantly in the sun—spotted with liver and wrinkled. He held a shapeless slouch hat of dark fabric in his hands, turning it nervously as he avoided Mark’s eyes.

“How can I help you?” Mark asked.

His visitor smelled of sweat—not the sour sweat one might scent on a London vagrant, but the stronger, cleaner smell that belonged to a man who labored all day, every day.

Large hands wrung the hat. “I…I wanted to… You see, sir, my wife and I—we’re not the sort to take charity. I’d offer you my thanks, but…”

Something about the man’s tone, the way he avoided Mark’s eyes, suggested that he wasn’t talking about the pale gratitude that the wealthy townspeople offered because Mark had written a book. Had he seen this man before? He searched the man’s wrinkles for some memory of the person he might have been, but even if age hadn’t stolen any similarity, all his childhood memories had blurred into indistinctness.

“You’ve nothing to thank me for,” Mark said. “I assure you, it’s all been forgotten.”

The man shook his head. “I? Forget what your lady mother did for me? I’d be ashamed. I can remember it like yesterday. With my Judy alone with the children…” He shook his head. “Please, Sir Mark. If you won’t let me repay you, I’ll feel the shame of it the rest of my life.”

Shame.
It was Mark’s foremost emotion when he thought of his mother—that headlong rush into madness, the laughing looks the villagers had exchanged at every one of her tirades.