by Mary Balogh
“This family did not just feel sorry for me,” he continued. “They did not even just feel that they must take me into their collective embrace and care for me. They felt guilty. As though everything that had happened was somehow their fault. My father was my grandmother’s son and my aunts’ brother. They blamed themselves for the way he turned out, though it seems extremely unlikely there was anything they could have done to stop him from being the rotten apple he was. Alexander blamed himself for inheriting what ought to have been mine, even though he made it obvious from the start that he did not want any of it. Anna blamed herself for being our father’s only legitimate child—as though she could help that—and for inheriting everything that was not entailed. Even Hinsford.”
“You told me before that it does not belong to you,” Lydia said.
“She has tried a number of times to give it to me as well as what she insists is my quarter of the fortune,” he said. “But I have steadfastly refused. Now that I think about it, though, perhaps my pride has made me unkind. It is unkind to rebuff a sincerely offered gift. My family’s sensibilities have been soothed by the happy marriages of my mother and my sisters. But there is still me.”
“And you are about to turn thirty,” she said.
“Precisely.” He stopped for a moment to set Snowball down to walk beside them.
“And you are still living here in the country,” she said. “Unmarried and without children.”
“And therefore in their estimation not living happily ever after,” he said. “And they still cannot forgive themselves for offenses they did not commit. I cannot resent them, Lydia. They love me too dearly. And I love them.”
“But,” she said, and laughed.
“But,” he agreed, and sighed—and then laughed too.
“Do you find all the children bothersome?” she asked.
“No.” He looked at her in some surprise. “Why should I? I find them a delight most of the time, and when I do not, they are their parents’ responsibility, not mine. I get the best of both worlds.”
“Seeing those three little girls, cousins who look to be close to one another in age, reminded me of how much I longed for a sister when I was a girl,” she said. “Though I would happily have settled for a cousin or two.”
They had come to the back of the house by now and paused for a few moments to look at the long expanse of the kitchen garden. Spring flowers, presumably ones to be cut for the house, took up half of one side and were blooming in some profusion. Vegetables, many of them already pushing through the soil, stood in neat rows to fill the rest. Snowball, taking up the whole length of her lead, was sniffing along the roots of one row of crocuses.
Lydia felt herself begin to relax. Until Harry spoke again, that was.
“Lydia,” he asked, “why did you not have children of your own?”
She froze. He knew the reason. Did he not? She had wondered, but . . . Oh, surely he had realized the truth.
“Sometimes one does not,” she said.
“I beg your pardon,” he said almost simultaneously. “I . . . had no right to ask.”
They resumed walking and made their way beside the gardens toward the trees beyond them. Lydia was finding it a bit hard to breathe evenly.
“We decided not even to be friends,” he said, apparently moving on to another subject.
“We did,” she agreed. So why were they here?
“Which was utterly absurd of us,” he continued. “I missed you while you were gone. Though I did not even realize you were gone. When I got no answer to my knock twice on that one day, I assumed you wished to avoid me and I respected your wish. I stayed away from the village. I did not even attend the Easter services at church. But I missed you, Lydia.”
Perversely—utterly perversely—she was hurt by the fact that he had not even known she was gone.
“It is hardly surprising you did not know I was away,” she said. “Just a few weeks before that you scarcely knew I existed.”
Oh, petty words, Lydia.
“Because you deliberately hid,” he told her. “Even though you went out and about, you made yourself virtually invisible. It was a remarkable performance.”
“And obviously a necessary one,” she said tartly. “As was my going away for a couple of weeks after . . . well, after we had agreed not to see each other again. You came anyway. Twice. My deliberate hiding, as you called it, and my going away to stay with my father for a few weeks stopped anything like this from happening.”
“This being my calling on you again after you had been so unfairly singled out for gossip, I suppose,” he said, “and offering you marriage to shield you from it, and sitting beside you with my sister and her husband at church yesterday to show that we are friendly acquaintances even if nothing more, and persuading you to come walking in the park with me today. All and everything that has happened to you during the past few days is my fault, I suppose. Yet as I remember it, Lydia, it was you who suggested that we become lovers.”
“Oh,” she cried, stung. “I did not suggest any such thing. All I did was ask you if you were ever lonely.”
“You said a lot more than that, my girl,” he told her, “even if you could not force yourself to the end of any sentence you started.”
That was it. She was horribly mortified. And how dare he remind her? He was not a gentleman. She was sorry she had ever thought he was.
“I am not your girl or anyone else’s, Major Westcott,” she said. “I am not a girl. I am twenty-eight years old.”
“And I am not a major,” he said. “I am Mr. Westcott if you must be ridiculous enough to address me formally after what there has been between us.”
There. See? Not a gentleman.
“I am not your girl, Mr. Westcott,” she said. “And I would be obliged if you would turn around and take me back home. Better yet, I will take myself home. I do not expect I will get lost between here and my cottage.”
He clamped her hand to his side as she tried to jerk it free of his arm. And he had the gall to . . . laugh.
“Our first quarrel,” he said. “Wherever did that come from? I wonder. But do you think perhaps it means we are friends after all, Lydia?”
The man had windmills in his head. “Friends?” she said. “Friends? Harry, you are . . . You are . . . absurd.”
“Yes, aren’t I?” he said, grinning. “And I am Harry now, am I?”
“But I suppose I am still a girl,” she said, refusing to be appeased. “May I please have my hand back?”
“Lydia,” he said, keeping her hand, “you are very much a woman.” And he spoke the words in a velvet voice, the provoking man. She felt it stroking down along her body, inside and out, until it reached her knees and turned them weak. How dared he? She glared indignantly at him.
“Very much,” he said in the same voice. “Forgive me. You did not explicitly suggest that we be lovers.”
“But you know very well that I did so implicitly,” she said. “And it was not explicit only because I lost my courage. It does not matter. It happened anyway. But if you are a gentleman you will forget.”
“The funny thing about memory, though,” he said, “is that it cannot always or perhaps ever be commanded at will, can it? Perhaps you are right, though. Perhaps I am not a gentleman. If you wish to go home immediately, I will escort you. But please, will you consider strolling through the jungle walk with me instead? Let us change our minds and be friends after all, shall we? We do not also have to be lovers. Somehow that did not work out when we tried it, did it?”
She closed her eyes briefly and took a deep breath. Snowball was tugging on her lead, eager to move on, and Harry was standing here, invading her space and her consciousness, and she desperately wanted them to be friends again, as they had started to be before she recognized the hopeless danger of their seeing each other privately and tried to turn
him away. Only to make love with him instead—and then turn him away.
Her mind was one churning jumble of confusion and contradiction—just as her actions had been a few weeks ago.
She released the breath. “Only if you can promise there will be no snakes,” she said, opening her eyes.
“If I see one,” he said, “I will pick it up and hold it a safe distance from you before warning you.”
She laughed. Oh, how could she possibly not do so when his eyes smiled at her as they did now?
They walked onward, not talking. But it was a strangely companionable silence. The air was really quite warm. The sun was beaming down from a clear sky. There was a bit of a breeze. Perhaps it would blow away that stupid gossip. And it really was stupid. She did not understand now why she had not simply laughed at Mrs. Piper at the time and ignored all the rest of it during the past few days.
Perhaps, indeed, it was already blowing over. Mrs. Bartlett had appeared at her back door quite early this morning with two muffins fresh from her oven. They could have walked home together from church yesterday, she had told Lydia, but Mrs. Tavernor had already disappeared by the time she herself got outside. It was being said that Mrs. Tavernor’s mother had once been a dear friend of Lady Riverdale, who was now Lady Dorchester, of course, though Mrs. Bartlett still thought of her as Lady Riverdale because that was what she had been when she lived here for so many years. But . . . was it true?
The warm muffins had been an olive branch, Lydia had understood. Owed entirely to the bogus story Lady Dorchester was spreading rather than to any faith in Lydia’s good character. Even so . . . Well, an olive branch was an olive branch.
Snowball’s lead had somehow got wrapped about her own legs, and Harry stopped walking to disentangle it. When he stood up again and they walked on, her hand was no longer drawn through his arm, Lydia noticed. It was in his ungloved hand, and their fingers were laced with each other’s. She made no move to draw her hand free, and she said nothing. But this felt very . . . intimate. Almost affectionate.
They walked in silence again toward the trees and the path that led in among them.
Eighteen
Harry had occasionally thought about having a proper wilderness walk back here, something with a grotto and follies, lookout points where there was something to look out upon, flowering shrubs, perhaps even a viewing tower, since the woods back here were not on enough of an elevation to provide any awe-inspiring vistas over the surrounding countryside.
But then he would come here and find that he liked the unspoiled beauty and seclusion of it all just as it was. The branches of the trees met overhead in places and bathed the rough path in a soft, verdant glow while not completely obliterating the sky. Sounds were muted here, except for birdsong, which seemed magnified. There was always a distinctive smell of greenery and soil. And while for most of the year the predominant color was green, at present there were carpets of bluebells among the trees. He always felt a million miles from civilization when he came here. Far from battle and slaughter and mayhem. And nightmares. And the annoying feeling that so often assailed him these days that he ought to do something with his life. He did not have to do anything here. He could just be.
Perhaps that was the best and most enduring of lessons one could learn from life.
The gardeners did a decent job of keeping the path clear of the inevitable debris caused by changing seasons, of removing large stones that popped to the surface from time to time as though from nowhere to trip the unwary, of clipping back low-hanging branches and undergrowth that forever tried to encroach upon the path.
Lydia’s dog found a lot here to be sniffed at and yipped at. There were plants to be smelled and tree trunks to be marked and all sorts of rustlings and snapping of twigs as unseen wildlife went about its business. And since they were in no hurry, Harry stopped every time Snowball did. He was still holding Lydia’s hand. He had taken it in his almost without thinking after he had disentangled the dog’s lead a while ago. And she had not pulled it away. After a few moments he had laced his fingers with hers. It felt natural for her to be with him here, as though their friendship had somehow grown in the weeks since they had officially put an end to it.
They had not spoken for several minutes, another sign, surely, that they were friends at least. He felt no discomfort with the silence between them and could feel none in her. Only a heightened awareness.
Danger time, he warned himself. But perhaps it was already too late. No. It was already too late. But he did not have to act upon personal feelings, did he?
Snowball was yipping at a robin that had dared to land on a tree branch just overhead in order to sing a little song. It stopped and flew away, perhaps to find a more appreciative audience elsewhere. The dog gave the edge of the path a good sniff before moving on, her nose still to the ground. Not that her nose was ever far from the ground, of course, her legs being so short they were almost nonexistent. She looked for all the world like a snowball rolling along the path, attached bizarrely to a lead.
Harry turned his head to smile at Lydia and realized how close to each other the narrowness of the path had forced them. Their arms were straight at their sides, their fingers entwined. Their shoulders touched. Her face was partially shaded beneath the brim of her bonnet. But a shaft of sunlight slanted across her nose and mouth—that lovely wide, inviting mouth he had noticed as soon as he started to notice her at all. Her eyes were gazing directly into his own.
He kissed her.
And she kissed him back.
Both of them with closed mouths. As though they were nothing more than friends.
But did friends kiss each other on the mouth?
He glanced around before backing her against the trunk of a tree on her side of the path and looping the dog’s lead over a low branch. He set his hands against the trunk on either side of Lydia’s head and leaned his body against hers. She closed her eyes briefly, and he both saw and felt her inhale slowly. She made no attempt to push him away.
“Lydia,” he murmured.
And he closed his eyes and found her mouth with his own—open this time. He slid one arm about her shoulders and the other around her waist, and moved his tongue over her lips until she parted them and he could touch the soft, moist flesh within and reach his tongue into her mouth when she opened it.
He had never been in love before. He had thought he was a few times in the long-ago past. He had had women, especially during his military years. He had liked and respected them all, without exception. But it had never been love.
Not like this. At some time in the last month or so, when he was not paying attention, or perhaps on that one particular night when he had been, she had become all in all to him. The woman he wanted above all others. The reason for his restless depression during the past few weeks, when he had avoided passing her cottage and going to church or anywhere else she might be while all the time she had been gone.
“Lydia,” he murmured again against her lips.
Her arms were about him. Her body was pressed to his, all the way down to their knees. She was slim, pliant, warm, lovely, and he throbbed and yearned for her. He moved one hand down behind her hips to press her more firmly against his erection.
He wanted her. As he had wanted her every day since the last time. As he would surely want her every day for the rest of his life. Not just with this urgent sexual need but in every way he could imagine. God, he wanted her.
“Harry,” she murmured. A few moments later she said it again, but with more awareness. “Harry.” She had got her hands between them and was exerting enough pressure against his chest to make him aware that she wanted him to step back. Yet she was not pushing hard or looking either upset or angry. Her eyes huge and dreamy, she gazed into his, surely with a longing to match his own.
He slid his hands to her hips, took a half step back, and forced himself to smile at her.
“You see,” she said, “I thought we could be lovers and have some pleasure together. It was totally naïve of me. For when it happened there was far more than just simple pleasure. There was a whole explosion of physical sensations and powerful emotions. It was very foolish of me not to have understood that before it happened.”
But how could she not have realized it? She had been married. For a number of years. To a man with whom she had admitted to having fallen headlong in love. Surely she had learned that any sexual relationship would bring with it more than just simple pleasure. Unless . . . He had been fishing earlier when he had asked why she had not had children. And for a moment, before giving him a noncommittal answer, she had frozen.
“There was all the terrible carnality,” she added.
Terrible? Its literal meaning was arousing terror. Did she mean it literally? Had he brought her terror rather than pleasure that night? And carnality? She had not expected it? She had expected only a superficial sort of pleasure?
“I want to be free, Harry,” she told him as he dropped his arms to his sides and took another half step back from her. “It is what I decided after Isaiah died, and I have not wavered in that decision since then.” Her frown deepened. “It would be foolish to waver now just because of all this turmoil. I will not be forced into doing something I do not want to do.”
He held out his arms to the sides. “You are free, Lydia,” he said, though his heart—or something else inside him—was heavy as he spoke the words. “You do not have to let yourself be bullied by Mrs. Piper and her followers. And you certainly will not be bullied by me.”
Snowball was yipping and bouncing and straining on the lead, frantic to give chase to whatever wild creature was cracking twigs somewhere among the trees on the other side of the path. Lydia turned away from him and unwound the dog’s lead from the branch and continued along the path with her.
Harry fell into step on Lydia’s other side, his hands clasped at his back. Love could not be either grasping or possessive if it was to be worthy of the name, he told himself. Yet it took every ounce of his willpower not to pour pleas and persuasion into her ears. She had chosen freedom and independence after her husband’s death, and she had remained steadfast in that choice ever since, even though she had admitted to occasional loneliness and the dream of taking a lover—him. Even though she had actually done so. Once.