by Mary Balogh
“I had something better to do,” he said.
And so he had gone home and changed into his morning clothes. Did he intend staying all night, then? She hoped so. It was already past midnight. Time was running out on her. But she would not think of that.
He raised his arms so that she could lift his shirt over his head. She dropped it on top of his waistcoat, spread her hands over his chest, and set her face against him. He smelled faintly of some musky cologne.
“Sophie.” He took her by the arms and held her away from him while those wonderful bedroom eyes of his roamed all over her. “You are so very beautiful.”
“Oh.” She laughed, embarrassed. “It is very kind of you to say so, Nathaniel, but you need not do so. I know I am not lovely. But”—she lifted a hand to set against his lips to stop him from saying what he was about to say—“thank you for saying it anyway. Every woman should be told that at least once in her life. You have suddenly made me feel almost beautiful.”
And she would always, always remember that he had said it, that he had been that attracted to her.
But his eyes were looking quite intently into hers. “I have just realized something today,” he said. “At some time in your life—I do not know when, perhaps even at the very beginning of it—you convinced yourself that you were not pretty. And so you set out to hide your beauty from yourself and from everyone else. You have been quite clever at it—with the style and fit and color of the clothes you have always worn, with your manner of dealing with other people. If someone had asked me even a week or so ago about your appearance, I might have described you as pleasant looking but not particularly lovely. And then you said those words this afternoon—about my looking at myself in a glass and looking at you and at Lady Gullis. The implication was that I would find you by far the most inferior of the three. And I realized that you had trapped me—always, ever since I have known you—into seeing you as you see yourself.”
Once upon a time she had thought herself tolerably pretty. Sometimes, when she was feeling particularly vain, she had even thought herself beautiful. And then she had married Walter....
She bit her lip and wished his hands were not still holding her where he could gaze at her. She wanted to put her face against his chest again.
“Sophie,” he said, “you should always dress in light colors like these. You should always dress your hair not to confine its glory but to display it. And you should always smile as you smiled at me downstairs after you had opened the door to me tonight. You are surely one of the most beautiful ladies of my acquaintance—perhaps even the most beautiful, but then I am partial.”
She had always told herself that beauty did not matter. And indeed she believed it. She had told herself that it was more important to be an amiable person, to have friends who liked her. She had told herself that it was better to be good old Sophie than to be a ravishing beauty.
But oh, it felt wonderful beyond belief to be told that to Nathaniel she was perhaps the most beautiful lady he had ever known.
She smiled at him—as she had smiled downstairs. “Thank you,” she said. “Oh, I do thank you.”
“Did Walter never tell you that?” he asked her.
She sobered instantly. Walter had never been able to bear to touch her.
His hands released her then, and his arms came about her, drawing her to him like iron bands. “I am sorry,” he said, his mouth against the top of her head. “I am so sorry. Your marriage is none of my business. Please forgive me.”
But she was not going to have her glorious night spoiled. She lifted her face to him and smiled again. “I do not want to think about Walter,” she said. “I want to think about you, though I am not sure I wish to do a great deal of thinking.”
“Sophie.” He rubbed his nose against hers. “Ah, Sophie, I have missed you.”
She put her arms up about his neck as he kissed her and abandoned herself to her night of love. Although she would not say so in words, she was not even going to pretend that for her it was not going to be just that. A night of love.
“Sophie,” he said after a couple of minutes, “you are as hungry as I. Let’s remove the rest of our clothes and lie down, shall we? Let’s make love.”
“Yes,” she said, smiling at him as she undid the ribbon bow that held her dressing gown closed at the neck. She thought she might well burst with happiness. “Let’s make love.”
It was getting light outside. That happened early at this time of year, of course, but even so he must be going soon, Nathaniel thought regretfully. It would be very pleasant just to go back to sleep with her head pressed against his arm as it was now and one of her arms thrown across his chest. And to wake up with her later, perhaps make love to her yet again before they got up and had breakfast together and planned their day together.
He opened his eyes and stared upward. This was the part of a night spent with a woman when he usually felt cozy and regretful at having to leave the comfort of the bed—but he usually felt eager too to be gone, to draw fresh air into his lungs, to stride off homeward, to feel free again, his own person again. He did not usually think of breakfast with and the rest of the day with his bed partner.
But usually of course no longer applied to him. Nights like this past one were no longer usual with him.
And a night just like this last one was unique to his experience.
They had slept very little. They had made love over and over again—with fierce passion, with moaning tenderness, with quiet, shared pleasure. They had made love without clothes, without covers, without masks. They had given and taken and shared. They had exhausted each other and restored each other. They had been as one.
And he was not sure he was going to be able to let her go at the end of the Season. He caught himself in the thought but he did not push it instantly away. He held it and considered it. No, he was not at all sure.
He bent his head and kissed her mouth. She opened her eyes and smiled sleepily at him.
“Did I fall asleep?” she asked. “I wonder why I came to do that.”
“I must be going,” he said.
But she rolled closer and tightened her arm about his chest. “Not yet,” she said. “Oh, not yet. It must be very early.”
“I must have made you very sore,” he said. “I have been insatiable, I am afraid.”
“Not too sore,” she said. “I feel wonderful—there. There, where you have been. Sore and sensitive and aching for more. Come there again.”
She spoke—she had spoken all night—quite unlike the Sophie he knew. She had told him quite graphically what pleased her, what might please her more. She had asked in the same way what she might do to please him better and had done everything he had suggested, apparently quite un-shocked by the more shocking intimacies he had been unable to resist asking of her.
He had been quite right in what he had said to her last night. She had been in hiding for as long as he had known her. Their small and seemingly rather plain Sophie, their cheerful, placid good comrade Sophie, was in fact a beautiful, slender, passionate, vibrant woman.
It was a startling discovery.
“If you absolutely insist.” He turned onto her and slid deeply into her warm wetness while she wrapped herself about him and held tight. “I’ll come to you again tomorrow night—or do I mean tonight?—if I may, Sophie, but I cannot promise that all my body parts will function efficiently. You may have worn them out for a while.” He grinned down at her before lowering much of his weight onto her and going to work in her.
But she was not in the mood for a gentle loving with humor. She tightened inner muscles, increasing his own desire, and moaned to his every stroke. She climaxed very quickly and then lay still and relaxed while he completed his own act.
He wondered if she would be able to let him go at the end of the Season. Was he merely receiving the benefit of the long-pent-up sexual appetites of a passionate woman? Or was she making love to him?
One thing had become disturbing
ly clear to him. She had had anything but a good marriage with Walter Armitage. They had always seemed content with each other, but then perhaps that was the key word—content. Sophie was made for far more than mere contentment. And he had always admitted that there was no way of knowing what went on in a couple’s relationship in the privacy of their own home.
It had not been a good marriage.
“Mmm,” he said, realizing that he had allowed himself to relax the whole of his weight on her. “One squashed Sophie. You should have pushed me off.”
But when he went to lift himself away from her, she tightened her arms about him again.
“Not yet,” she said. “Not just yet. I like your weight.”
He sighed and relaxed for a few minutes longer. But she did not relax, he noticed. Her arms held him to her as if she would never let him go.
Perhaps she would not let him go at the end of the spring either. And perhaps he would not mind. Perhaps it would be mutual, as everything that had happened this night had been.
“There,” she said, letting her arms fall to her sides at last, “you must be eager to be gone. And it is time. Go then.”
He kissed her and smiled before drawing free of her and lifting himself off her and off the bed. “Not eager,” he said. “But it is time. I do not fancy bidding Samuel a good morning as I leave.”
She had tears in her eyes as she let him out of the front door ten minutes later. But she was also smiling that radiant smile he had never seen on her face until last night.
“Thank you,” she said. “Oh, thank you, Nathaniel. You were always my favorite, you know. Always.”
He pondered those words as he walked along the street after kissing her one more time. Her favorite? Among whom? Ken and Rex and Eden—and Walter? All men? He had been her favorite. In what way? Sexually?
Yet she had only ever been a dear friend to him. How could she so effectively have hidden for so long? How could he not have seen in her from the start the woman who could mean more to him than any other woman, than any other person, who would feel as close to him as the beating of his own heart?
Was this, he wondered uneasily, what being in love felt like? Was he in love with Sophie? And did he also love her?
Could he live without her? That was surely the test. Could he live without the air he breathed? Could he live without the beating of his heart?
Could he live without Sophie?
“Nat had better keep his eyes hidden beneath the brim of his hat,” Kenneth said. “They are bloodshot.”
“The question is, Ken,” Rex added, “whether the ladies would consider they looked more than usually as if they belonged in a boudoir.”
“The lady who caused them to be that way probably does,” Kenneth said, and the two of them chuckled as if they had been the authors of marvelous wit.
“One can merely hope,” Eden said, reining in his horse so that he would not lose a tittle or morsel of the conversation, “that Lady Gullis does not sport a similar beauty feature this morning. It would not suit her as well as it does our Nat.”
“One must similarly hope,” Rex said, “that no one but us made too much of the fact that the lady was absent from last night’s ball while Nat left indecently early.”
“But everyone would doubtless be as charmed as we are,” Kenneth said. “Not that Moira is charmed, it is true. She believes you can do altogether better for yourself, Nat. I was forced to remind her that you are not exactly setting up a wife. In her opinion, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.” He grinned.
“I wonder,” Nathaniel said at last, gazing about him at the trees and feeling nostalgic for the countryside, “if everyone in town suffers from the same mathematical malady. Does everyone add two and two together and come up with five?”
His three friends simultaneously roared with laughter.
“Protecting the lady’s reputation, are you, Nat?” Eden asked. “We are all agreed that you have impeccable taste, old chap.” He cleared his throat. “But I beg leave to remind all here present that it was I who selected the lady for you.”
“Doubtless,” Nathaniel said, “you will receive your reward in heaven, Ede.”
“I have an idea for how we may help Sophie,” Eden said, changing the subject abruptly as he often did. “At least, the idea was not mine exactly. It was your cousin‘s, Nat. She cornered me last evening and deprived me of my supper. But she had a deuced good idea.”
“I have the best idea,” Nathaniel said grimly. “I am going to pick a quarrel with the bastard and force him to challenge me. I can remember just how we all did it for Rex when there was Copley to deal with. I am going to kill him and it is going to be the one killing in my life that I will enjoy.”
Rex spoke up sharply. “Don’t talk yourself into thinking that, Nat,” he said. “I remember feeling the same way, and I still do not really regret shooting Copley instead of wasting my bullet on the air as I might have done if he had not shot before the signal. But I still see him in my sleep and probably always will. I still feel that I have him on my conscience even if my reason tells me that I did what was right. Pinter is guilty of blackmail, which is evil enough, I grant you. But not quite as evil as what Copley was guilty of. Besides, I did it for the sake of my wife. Sophie is only our friend.”
Nathaniel’s lips tightened. “Nevertheless,” he said, “I am going to kill him.” He turned to Eden. “What did Lavinia have to say? I wish I had not allowed her to become involved in this. She helped me find the pearls and the ring, you know. It is hard to say no to Lavinia, and it was Sophie herself who made me see that perhaps I ought not simply because she is a woman.”
“She thinks we should blackmail Pinter,” Eden said.
Kenneth and Rex both laughed.
“With the threat that Nat will hang him and draw and quarter him if he does not leave Sophie alone?” Kenneth said. “It might work too, by Jove. Did you ever see an officer direct his men from behind them as often as Pinter did? He is undoubtedly a cowardly bastard. And even some stouthearted men would quail at the thought of having Nat let loose on them when his temper is up.”
“But what the devil can she have done?” Rex asked of no one in particular. “One cannot imagine Sophie doing anything that might even remotely make her prey to a blackmailer.”
Nathaniel had been thinking about it. The answer had been staring them all in the face, but then the answer seemed almost as unlikely as their first assumption.
“Perhaps it is nothing she has done,” he said. “Perhaps it was Walter.”
“Walter?” Eden sounded incredulous. “There was no one more solid, more respectable, more thoroughly dull than Armitage. He would not have recognized temptation if it had met nose to nose with him.”
“Is it more unlikely than that it was something to do with Sophie?” Nathaniel asked.
“The whole thing is a mystery to me.” Eden shrugged and turned his horse to begin the ride back to the park entrance. They all followed his lead. “But blackmailing Pinter, having him sweating and shaking in his boots appeals to my sense of justice. Not just the threat of Nat, though. Miss Bergland had me blushing from the tips of my toenails up when she blurted out her conviction that Pinter got sexual thrills out of watching whippings.”
“The devil she did!” Nathaniel was appalled. “And she actually said it to you, Ede? Aloud?” He grimaced.
“But she was right,” Eden said. “We all knew it. I can remember Ken’s saying it more than once. The thing is, can we gather enough of such muck to make him dread having us make our opinions public?”
“Do we need any more?” Nathaniel asked. “I could make a very colorful story indeed out of just that. With a little embellishment and a whole parcel of innuendo we might create a nice balance to whatever it was Sophie—or Walter—did.”
“There might be more,” Kenneth said with obvious reluctance, turning all attention his way. “A new recruit complained to me once that Pinter had made advances to him. Sexual advances,
of course.”
Silence succeeded his words.
“I had a talk with Pinter,” Kenneth said, “and assured him that the boy had doubtless misunderstood and should probably be whipped for so criminally misunderstanding an officer—but it might be less humiliating to let it pass that one time and give the boy a chance to redeem himself. It seemed the only way to save the poor blighter from punishment on one of the usual trumped-up charges.”
“And you never reported him?” Rex asked.
“Pinter?” Kenneth said. “No. I knew a few boys at school with the same preference, as you all probably did, and in the army too. The law notwithstanding, I never felt the need to hate them or root them out or bother them provided they did not make themselves obnoxious to me or anyone under my command. They were created that way, I have always thought, and no one can help the way he was created. The fact that Pinter was a thoroughly unlikable character did not seem excuse enough to report him.”
“We have him, then,” Nathaniel said grimly. “Dead to rights. It is a capital offense, by Jove.”
“I rather think we do,” Eden agreed.
“And so we save Sophie whether she likes it or not,” Rex said. “She need not know it was us, need she? She can think for the rest of her life that the bastard developed a conscience. I wonder if she will ever talk to any of us again?”
“He threatened her to make her stay away from us, you may be sure,” Eden said. “Especially in light of what you have just told us, Ken. He knows that you know that about him, or at least have reason to suspect, and that the four of us are close friends—and deuced fond of Sophie. Once we have explained his options to him and he has kept his distance from her for a while, I think she will realize that she can speak with us again. Good old Sophie. We will have to wait a while not to make it too obvious that we have interfered, as she puts it. But we should be able to start inviting her about again before the Season is over.”
“We had better go about this in a way that will impress itself properly upon Pinter,” Kenneth said. “Shall we agree upon tomorrow morning? Today I will write a few things down and we can all sign. I’ll make several copies and we can all have one. We will have to make it obvious that he has a lot of us to get rid of if he is to be free to continue tormenting people like Sophie.”