Chapter Twenty
Harry had thought that the pit of despair he had been wallowing in could not possibly get any deeper, but he was wrong. Not only had he crossed the respectable line between employer and employee, he’d exacerbated his ill-timed and unwelcome yearning for the siren.
Who knew that a simple kiss could enthrall him so? Ruin him so spectacularly that he knew no other would ever match it?
The darndest thing was that Miss Rowe’s initial kiss had been so clumsy, it shouldn’t have affected him so spectacularly. But that had been the start of his undoing. Then the clever minx had learned so fast she had made him unfurl like a sail.
She was such a passionate little thing. There had been nothing coy about her when she was aroused, and he had been left in no doubt that she had been last night. The soft, encouraging moans and greedy sighs as she sought her own pleasure had stoked the flames of his desire until they had positively burned. He’d lifted her hips to his and pressed his hard cock against her, for pity’s sake, and instead of being scandalized by that outrageous liberty, she had wound her shapely leg around his waist and ground her womanly hips against it.
Her nipples had been so puckered with need he had felt them all the way through his clothes, tempting him. When he had given in to that temptation and had filled his hands with her pert, perfect breasts, she had moaned and writhed and bucked her hips some more and, heaven help him, he had been seconds from having her. Worse, he could not shake the seductive knowledge that she would have let him.
How, exactly, was he supposed to cope with all that new and torturous knowledge today? Tomorrow? Next week?
Until blasted Flora decided to come home to save him from himself and the dangerous siren who consumed him?
His intense physical attraction to her aside, there was no denying now that something about her called to his heart as well as his body. The clues had been there before last night. In truth, they had been there from their very first meeting, when he hadn’t been able to take his eyes off her. Amongst all that spontaneous attraction had been something less definable beyond a sense of serendipity. He’d felt it like a jolt the second her lips touched his. That sense of rightness, like a bolt sliding into place, which he was pretty certain he had never experienced before—which was worrying.
Now he was left not only wanting to know what it would be like to possess all of her in the carnal sense—but to know all of her too. What she thought. Her hopes and dreams and… essence, he supposed. He also had the overwhelming urge to woo her. To charm her and court her. To make her his in every possible way, and that was… terrifying. Not only because this was the absolute wrong time to enter into such madness, but because he knew in his heart that if he ventured down that treacherous path again, that there would be no coming back. The previous siren in his life had not been in this flame-haired vixen’s league. Miss Rowe was Salome and Delilah and Helen of Troy all rolled into that compact, passionate, and indomitable womanly package. An intoxicating and addictive enchantress. One oozing spirit, determination, and uniqueness. She was very definitely the sort of woman a man couldn’t sail away from—when he very much had to. The sort he would foolishly sacrifice a career for.
All control for.
Himself for.
The exact sort, if he was stupid enough, that he would allow history to repeat itself for, so he had no choice but to end things between them before it was too late, and certainly before they arrived in blasted Plymouth.
He could hardly dismiss her. In her own irrepressible way, she had done everything so right, the children not only loved her—they behaved! However, there was no denying his life in Plymouth would certainly be less painful if she was safely two hundred and fifty miles away from him. And as tempting as it was to say to hell with it all and just have her the once and be done with it—as men had been prone to do for time immemorial when they had an itch to scratch—Harry already knew once with her wouldn’t be enough. She was the sort who lured a man willingly onto the treacherous rocks of forever.
“Good morning, all.” Harry took a deep breath and strode into the stable yard. He hoped his fa?ade of breezy calm was more convincing than it felt because his besotted heart thudded at the sight of her in the same plain gray traveling dress he had thoroughly ravished her in last night, giving his still-rampant body ideas.
She stiffened at his voice and was blushing profusely by the time she turned around. Although to her credit, even though you could probably fry an egg on one of her overheated cheeks, she was also doing her very best to appear unbothered by the inescapable and inexcusable fact that only a few hours ago, her oh-so-sensitive breasts had been filling his greedy palms. While his insistent erection had been twitching against her tummy.
“Is everyone well after all the… um… unnecessariness of last night?” It was probably best to lay his cards on the table straightaway, even if he was looking directly at the subdued Felix as he said it.
“I’m sorry, Uncle Harry.” His nephew stared at his feet. “I’m sorry for wandering off and I’m sorry for not listening. But most of all I am sorry for all the trouble I caused.”
“Miss Rowe has already issued her punishment for Felix’s disobedience,” said a gleeful Marianne as she pirouetted toward him. “He has to go to bed straight after supper every night for a week and is not allowed to step a foot outside without an adult for a month. Simpkins says that if Felix had been in the navy, he’d have been given at least twelve strokes of the cane while bent over a cannon. But as he hasn’t got either a cannon or a cane handy, he is going to make him polish everyone’s boots for a week instead.”
His eldest niece caught his hand and stared up at him, expectant. “We are all curious what your punishment will be? Grace and I think that you should burn his cricket bat as he wasn’t a particularly good brother last night when we were both under the weather. Instead, he put his needs first and that’s unbelievably selfish.” Out of the mouths of babes! As Harry had also put his needs first last night.
“Well… um…” How the blazes was he supposed to think of a fitting punishment for his nephew when he still had no earthly clue how to tell Miss Rowe that last night had been a huge mistake? Probably the greatest of his life, and after the epic one called Elizabeth, that was saying something. “I… um… haven’t decided yet. I should… um… probably consult with your governess first to see what she thinks is appropriate.” He looked to her properly for the first time and felt his own earlobes fill with blood, although thanks to the inordinate amount of the stuff still flooding his groin, he hoped they weren’t red enough to notice. “Shall we… um… discuss last night now?” He gestured to the other side of the stable yard where they would have some privacy. “Simpkins can load the children and Norbert into the coach, can’t you Simpkins?”
From his comfortable seat next to the driver, Simpkins scowled. “If I must.”
“You must.” He offered her an approximation of a smile which felt more like a grimace. “Shall we?”
“If I must.” She grimaced back, cringing with mortification, but she followed him across the yard, dragging her feet and making him hope that she had had as many reservations about their incendiary kiss as he had. In unspoken and tacit agreement, they walked beyond the stable yard until they were completely out of sight or earshot of anyone, her looking at her hands as if her life depended upon it and him looking every which way but at her.
“Well, this is awkward.” It was a feeble way to break the ice, but someone had to. “But… um… I suppose I should apologize for… um…” How many ums could one grown man manage in a minute? “Well… um…” Harry was dying. Dying on his feet with his stupid ears burning and couldn’t seem to string a sentence together.
“What I mean is… um…” He knew that he was wincing. There was a pain between his eyebrows because the furrow there was so deep. “I think we can both agree that last night was a dreadful mistake.”
Finally, her eyes snapped to his. They looked incensed and… yet still hurt. “A dreadful mistake, to be sure.”
Was that vehemence or sarcasm? If it was the former and she bitterly regretted last night, then that swift denial hurt him, although he was in no position to be wounded by her echoing his lie. If it was sarcasm and he had hurt her, maybe that suggested that she hadn’t thought it was a mistake at all until he opened his mouth and put his big, booted foot in it. In which case, maybe… “Well… um… perhaps that is too harsh a… um… maybe it wasn’t so much a mistake as… um…”
So much for his iron reserve to resist the allure of her if he was already wavering at the first hurdle and the masochistic devil inside him was angling for a compromise! When any compromise beyond complete resistance would likely ruin his life! “By dreadful mistake I mean that it shouldn’t have happened and, in all likelihood would never have happened in a million years if… um… circumstances hadn’t been so fraught, and you and I hadn’t been… um… thrust together all alone in the thick of it.”
She looked down at her hands again, nodding. “Of course, it wouldn’t.”
As he sensed only partial agreement in that proud affirmation, and as he could hardly admit to her that his poor heart had already been broken once and he feared that he would never recover if he gave it to her, he clung to that handy excuse with his fingernails, embellishing it for all he was worth.
“Let’s face it, we were both tired—exhausted, in fact—had spent most of the night worried sick and expecting the worst. Both of us were riddled with misplaced guilt too and clearly shaken by the ordeal. Inconsolable in places… and in dire need of some… comfort.” He flapped his hand at her, like the worst sort of coward passing over all blame, as if it had been entirely her fault that he had enjoyed the feel of her in his arms so much, or that his willpower had evaporated along with his wits.
“Was it any wonder emotions were running high, and we mistook our understandable mutual relief at Felix’s safe return for… um… m-more?” Marvelous. Now he was stuttering too. “And that… um… the… um… comfort we offered to one another got… um… out of hand.”
“All the stress affected our heads.” She was nodding like a woodpecker, fixated on the strings of her reticule she was twisting in her busy fingers, rather than allow him to see if the message in her eyes matched her words. Which was probably just as well, as, for all his assertions otherwise, only a blindfold would disguise all the yearning in his. If hers yearned too, then he just did not possess the strength now to resist the pull of her. “And we lost them.”
“It meant nothing.” He forced a smile past that lie to choke out another. “Nothing beyond two overemotional people letting off some steam in the heat of a very trying moment.”
“Of course it meant nothing!” She was smiling, too, as she finally lifted her head. It was every bit as brittle and unconvincing as his own and so, of course, made his stupid heart soar because it gave him hope. “I am so relieved that you said that.” She blew out a breath as if she were. “Otherwise, things between us going forward would have been very awkward indeed.”
Something told him that she was lying through her teeth, too, but he did not have the strength to call her on it because he absolutely did not have the strength to even begin to consider how he would cope if he indulged his heart’s burning desire. “Which is exactly why I wanted us to clear the air this morning. Put all that… um… silliness…” He flapped his stupid hand again, hating himself as well as that errant appendage. “Behind us.”
Hers began to flap in unison. “Forget it ever happened.”
“Exactly.” As he wanted to fiddle nervously with one of his watch chains, he clamped his hands behind his back and rocked on his heels like his curmudgeonly grandfather used to whenever something displeased him.
“That is much appreciated, Captain Kincaid.”
He waved that away while the masochistic devil inside him screamed that a woman who had ground her hips against his cock while she had moaned into his mouth had surely earned the right to call him Harry? That she should simply be Georgie too because he now knew the exact shape and weight of each of her breasts!
“Let us never speak of it again, Captain.”
“Speak of what, Miss Rowe?” He tried his best to look like a man whose memory had been erased entirely and not one who still remembered how she had melted as his thumbs had teased her nipples. Nipples he had pondered long and uncomfortably hard all night as he had wondered if they would be as pale as her skin or as pink as her lips. How they would feel in his mouth as his tongue tasted them and she moaned his Christian name over and over again until…
Bloody hell, Plymouth was now doomed to be the most horrendous punishment he had ever suffered!