Chapter 7
Seven
Sleep was nigh.
“I wanted you the moment I saw you,” her king whispered in the concubine’s ear. His body cupped hers.
“And I saw you the moment I wanted you,” she whispered back to him.
— The Concubine and Her King. Unpublished MS.
Susannah left the inn’s kitchen. The music played on, filled her ears, lightened her heart.
Ned was safely in bed, so she might stay and dance.
Even just watching the dancing would be a treat.
Her dress was plain, her hair was almost certainly disordered, but she’d be thought an odd body even if she had taken the trouble to don her best dress and brush her hair.
She took Beramo’s halter and led him to the back of the stables. They would be full of the inn’s horses and the horses of those who had ridden into Much Wemby for the fête, but she might ask the night ostler to keep an eye on Beramo and the cart.
“Is anyone there?” she called.
Seth walked out of the darkness, and her previously light heart sank into her stomach. She’d hoped it might be Dando’s friend Cornelius. Almost anyone would be better than Seth. Once upon a time, he’d been one of the men who would jeer at Susannah, follow her, try to get her alone.
I make him hate himself, so he hates me.
“Susannah Beasley.” He turned her name into a sneer.
She didn’t want to ask Seth for even the smallest thing, but the music called to her.
“May I leave my horse and the cart here? Just for half an hour.”
Seth said nothing, only looked at her the way many men looked at her. It was equal parts contempt and revulsion and appetite.
She could threaten him with Dando, but she didn’t like to do that to her brother. Despite her, the people of Much Wemby liked Dando, and she would not burden her brother with more than she already had.
Finally, Seth spat on the ground near her boots and jerked his head in a nod.
The green was lined with torches, and people milled about, drinking and laughing and talking over the music. But most were either dancing or watching the dancing. Susannah was delighted when she was almost immediately swept up into a Scotch reel by Will Skinner, one of the miller’s sons.
Will was a flirtatious boy, a scoundrel in the making, and he must not care what the village would say about him tomorrow. He might even think her a safer choice than the girls his age, most of whom were besotted with Will and hoped to spring a parson’s mousetrap on him.
Even in her boots and her ordinary dress, it was wonderful to dance, to weave in and out, to meet in the middle and kick and tap and jig up and down to the fiddles.
And Will appeared to love dancing as much as Susannah did.
He was smiling and sweating and leaping with such vigor.
She had to laugh at him and his capers. She was having all the fun she had wanted for Dando.
Weave and turn and hop and join hands and turn—
Her eyes caught on a pair of eyes. They were shadowed by an impressive forehead, but she knew their color. Pale blue.
Her startlingly handsome gentleman was standing with the spectators, watching her. He was definitely watching her. She kept moving, but she whipped her head around to keep seeing how he watched her.
“Turn the other way, Miss B,” Will said.
“Yes,” she said, but she kept turning the wrong way despite that.
Will must have taken note of where she was looking.
“So he came, after all. And he’s your fellow?” He grinned and winked. “A stranger coming in and immediately taking up with the prettiest girl in the village. I won’t have it.”
“Stop it, Will.”
She was not embarrassed by the lad’s good-natured teasing. Will could not embarrass her when she had withstood so much shame over the years, but she didn’t want to have this moment ruined by a joke. She wanted to remember a man—a man who knew nothing about her—looking on her with desire.
Because desire was what she had seen in the gentleman’s eyes. And that was no joke.
“Sorry,” Will said.
“It’s fine,” she said, but it wasn’t because in the seconds she had taken to curb Will’s tongue, the gentleman had vanished.
Thankfully, the dance ended just then, and she ran to where she had last seen him. She pushed her way through the crowd, searching, but he was nowhere to be found. He had come, and he had gone, and she was just Susannah Beasley again.
She made another circle of the green, looking for a golden head, burnished in torchlight. No luck. The fiddlers struck up another tune, but she was no longer in the mood to stay at the fête.
She had tasted something sweet, and she wanted to keep that flavor in her mouth, undiluted forever. To savor being a woman wanted without scruple by a man who seemed to want for nothing.
She got through the crowd spilling out of The Swan and walked towards Dando’s forge. She would circle around it to the back of the inn’s stables, get Beramo, and go home.
She turned the corner, and he was there. Inevitable, incendiary.
She found herself against the outer wall of the forge, and he hadn’t put her there, she hadn’t gone there, the wall had come to her, to hold her up, to keep her round legs from shaking, to save her from sinking to the ground.
He moved, came closer. Those pale, icy eyes were no longer icy but full of heat. He stepped closer, and she quivered.
A hand came to rest against her jaw.
“I . . .” he said.
She should push him away, but she wanted to bask in his touch for just one more second. And one more. And—
“. . . find myself quite taken with you.”
She could deny herself this, deny herself him.
“But you, a granddaughter, you said,” she choked out. She wanted nothing to do with anything that could not be out in the open.
“I see.” He took his hand away, stepped back. “I am too old.”
She wanted to weep. No, he didn’t see at all.
“You’re too married!”
His face was perfectly still. “I am a widower.”
A widower. She should have known. She didn’t know him, but she should have known this gentleman would never dishonor a vow.
He came back to her. He put his hand where it had been, holding her cheek.
“Miss Beasley.”
“Yes,” she breathed. Yes to her name, yes to him, yes to anything that happened next.
His eyes went to her mouth. He was thinking of kissing her. He was going to kiss her. What would his kiss be like? Lightning in the heat of summer or the silence of snowfall. The glide of a rose petal or the ravaging of a thorn. It didn’t matter, it didn’t matter, she wanted it.
His palm cupped her face more securely. His fingers dug into her neck, the angle of her jaw.
“Yes,” she said again. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
He lowered his head. His splendid nose bumped her inconsequential one. She felt his warm breath on her lips, smelled the sweetness of strong wine. She closed her eyes, and their mouths met, fit together, and—
If there were any magic left to be found in this world, it was in his kiss.
A shower of sugar sparks on her skin. Flashes of rich purple and riotous red. And wonder, wonder, wonder. She had been awoken from a hundred-year sleep, turned into a princess with satin dancing slippers, cured of the poison from a thousand barbs.
She opened her lips to him—and her heart and her soul. Foolish, foolish, foolish gray-haired girl.
And then the slide of his tongue took complete possession of her, heated her blood until she was all molten, throbbing need.
The wall was no longer enough. She arched into him, strained upwards, and her hands went to his admirable shoulders, and she clung for her life as their tongues joined, twined, and broke apart only to come together again.
His hand slid from her jaw, to her nape, and into her hair. Another hand found her waist and then the small of her back, pushing her up and into the hard ridge of his arousal even as his lips pushed her down with a kiss that was both a tender warning and a brutal beckoning.
It was a boundless kiss.
It was an unending kiss.
She could think that, but she was wrong. The warm solidness of him was suddenly torn away from her, and a whimper escaped her lips as she opened her eyes.
Panic became the reason her heart was racing. Dando had the gentleman’s lapels in his paws, his scowling face inches from the gentleman’s.
“Dando, no, no, no!”
“Touching my sister.”
“No! I wanted him to. Stop. Let him go.”
Still Dando held the gentleman. The gentleman did not look frightened, but he had grabbed Dando’s wrists, and that was pure foolhardiness as there was no way he could break her brother’s grip. Dando had forearms and wrists and hands of iron.
“It was nothing,” she said.
It wasn’t nothing. In fact, it had been too much, but saying that would not rescue the gentleman.
She took a deep breath and summoned the voice. It was the voice she had used on all of her brothers at one time or another. The voice known to mothers everywhere, save, perhaps, her own mother, who had been barely able to muster the breath needed for a scold.
“You let go of him right now, Andrew Beasley.”
The voice worked. Dando let go. The gentleman fell backwards but not to the ground. He stumbled and recovered himself, put his fists at the ready.
She went to her brother’s side, laid a hand on his arm. “It’s all right.”
“No.” He shook with rage.
“Yes, it is. I wanted him to.”
Dando finally looked at her. She could feel the violence still coursing through him, but there was also concern, fear, and disbelief in his face.
He didn’t believe her. She’d never understand why men found it so easy to accept the desire that lived within themselves yet so difficult to accept the same in women.
But she should allow Dando this. For so many years, he had stood between her and the men who wanted to use her. Dando and growing old had been the only things that had made some of those unwanted attentions fall away.
But this had not been unwanted attention. Even now, she wanted it, wanted her gentleman.
“Yes,” she said airily. “I fancied a buss in the moonlight.”
Dando glowered at her. “Don’t know him.”
“And who around here would try to kiss me in the open when they know you’re my brother?” Besides Ned. “Only someone not from these parts would dare.”
Dando shifted his gaze to the gentleman, and Susannah did, too.
“Are you hurt?” she asked him.
“Didn’t hurt him,” Dando said. “Just shook him.”
The gentleman dropped his fists, pulled the cuffs of his shirt down below those of his tailcoat. “I am uninjured.”
“Go,” Dando said through his teeth. “Go back to Sutton Hall. Stay there.”
So her gentleman was a guest of Sir John’s. Well, she’d guessed he was a gentleman, hadn’t she? Likely part of that exclusive set who made sure men like Father never had their chance. Landed gentlemen with their inherited estates and their degrees from Oxford and their nom de guerres.
In her mind, she set the gentleman aside. Her body throbbed. Her heart ached. But those two were traitors. Her mind knew best.
“Go,” she said to the gentleman.
The world narrowed, closed in, became just the two of them as it had when he had given her a kiss that ended worlds.
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” he said. “You’ll never see me again.”
Never.
“No,” she said. “You’ll never see me again.”