CHAPTER 27
The spring breeze drifted over Eva, stirring her anticipation. She lay immobile and listened to the sounds also entering through the window she had set ajar.
Voices and boots moved around the house to the front. Horses grunted and stomped, and a carriage door opened. Erasmus exclaimed in pain, and Harold cursed him. Then the carriage rolled, its sounds diminishing with each moment.
She listened, waiting. Finally, bootsteps on the boards below paced slowly into the library. A pause, then more steps coming to the stairs. She imagined Gareth noticing her bonnet on the chair in the reception hall.
Up the stairs those boots came. The sound of each footfall aroused her more. She cast aside the sheet that covered her, so he would know at once that she wanted all the danger he could provide.
He did not enter the bedchamber. Instead he went into the dressing room. She heard him in there, moving around. He made her wait a long time. All the while her desire tightened until she was hot enough that the breeze tantalized her body with its cool, feathery caresses.
Finally he entered the chamber, his hair damp from washing, his eyes full of passion’s depths. He was naked, too, just like her. Naked and beautiful and aroused.
He came over and stood beside the bed. “You are impatient.”
“Yes.”
“I think I will make you wait, anyway.” He caressed two fingertips down the side of her face.
The slow stroke continued along her jaw, then her neck.
Her breath quickened as he touched lower yet, up the swell of her breast. When he grazed her tight nipple, her back arched in reaction to the exquisite sensation.
He dallied there until she writhed and moaned and gave up trying to contain the pleasure.
“No more demands that I not touch you, Eva, or that we retreat into friendship. No more being good and careful.”
She was beyond arguing. She would agree to anything. Yet not only her body accepted the command. Her heart nodded as well, secure and sure that love left her no alternative. No more denial of what now centered her world.
His fingertips meandered again, down her body. Despite how her whole consciousness licked at the pleasure, she likewise wanted him to know such sweet torture. She reached over and used her own light caress on his erection, running her fingers up the shaft.
She had imagined making love to him many times since their last encounter in London. She saw herself doing it properly with great sophistication. She had not pictured it like this, so passive, almost languid. She had been a goddess of Venus in those dreams.
She swung her legs around and sat on the side of the bed. She took him in her hands more purposefully. She circled the shaft with one hand and used the other to caress the tip. “Like this?”
“Yes.” His voice came ragged and low. “Damn, yes.”
She liked that note in his voice. Loved that he stood in front of her, feet widely placed as he sought not to sway. Loved how he let her learn on her own what made his teeth grit and affirmations come out like muttered curses.
He stepped closer yet and reached below her arms to tease her breasts.
The power and impatience claimed her again.
Control trembled out of her. She kissed his stomach while she caressed him.
Kissed him in gratitude for the pleasure and so much else.
And it seemed very natural to move the kisses to the tip of his erection.
His reaction told her how much he wanted that.
His quiet moans guided her explorations.
Tension coiled tighter in him until she suddenly found herself falling back on the bed.
He spread her thighs wide and lifted both her hips until they angled off the bed.
He thrust into her three times. Each time his head went back and his eyes closed as if he felt the same as she did, that this joining relieved an unbearable hunger.
Then he hitched her legs around his hips and took her, watching while she cried out, and begged for more.
* * *
“Ishould go home. Rebecca will be alone.”
“She is visiting the sisters. Harold will bring her back, and wait. There is no need to go yet.”
“You worked that out neatly.”
“I thought so.”
She sat up and scooted to the edge of the bed. “I am hungry at least. I will go find us some food.” She reached for her chemise and pulled it on.
“I’ll come. The day is fair. We will dine out in the sun.” He went to the dressing room and pulled on some clothes.
When he returned, she looked down on her half-naked self, then at him in nothing but trousers again. “There will be no one to see us out in the sun, but it still seems a wicked thing to do.”
“You like wicked, so that should please you.”
Down the stairs they went. He spied her bonnet and sketchbook in the reception hall and picked them up on the way. He set the bonnet on her head. “That will spare your complexion.”
She felt the bonnet, looked again at her dishabille, and laughed.
In the kitchen Eva set about making up a tray to take outside.
Gareth idly paged through her sketchbook, flipping back and forth.
He found a drawing she had done of him while he slept.
She must have done it that afternoon in London.
It was very good. Like her copies, it showed a keen eye and steady hand.
If given half a chance she would probably become a very good artist.
He flipped more, and the pages opened at a most peculiar drawing. “What is this?”
Eva looked over. “Oh, that. Nigel did that. There are a few others there. While first recovering, he proved too restless to handle. He did not even sleep well, but he could not walk far or rest enough to read. I suggested he try sketching. That was the sorry result. Still, it occupied him for several days at least.” She reached up for plates.
Gareth tucked the sketchbook under his arm, took the tray, and followed Eva out to the garden. They made their luncheon at a rustic table under a budding tree. He puzzled over Nigel’s odd drawings while he munched on ham and hard eggs.
“I think it is a view,” he said. “A primitive one. Old maps were done this way.”
She stretched to look. “Perhaps. He had no training. That is how a child would draw, mixing up perspectives like that. However, now that you mention it, I think that is the view out our back window. That would be the far garden wall there, and these must be the trees.”
He turned the page to see more of the same, only much more elaborate. This view had buildings. A memory, perhaps.
He paged on, to Eva’s recent work. She had been busy. While he studied her drawings, however, something about Nigel’s kept prodding at him. Suddenly he knew what it was. He went back to the second one.
He knew this place. He identified the house and walls and ponds and hills. The outbuildings lined up exactly as they should. Crude little horses even stood in their correct pasture up near the edge of the page.
“Eva, did your brother know someone connected to my father’s family?”
“I don’t think so.” She came and peered over his shoulder. “Why do you think he did?”
“Because this looks like Merrywood. Even the drawing of the house is a childlike rendering of it, with the hipped roof and rusticated basement level.”
“If you say so. I always assumed he was trying to replicate my views, with poor results.”
It was not the main house that had attracted Nigel’s best attention.
Rather the rendering of the outbuildings showed great care in details and placement.
He had included a few tenant cottages to the east as well, and had even drawn the roads leading to them.
He had mapped the estate fairly well. One of the cottages showed no wagons or chickens near it.
Vacant, then. Nigel had graced this cottage with a thick dark line beneath it.
To the left of it on the same road another little cottage appeared, only with half a roof and darkened walls, as if a fire had destroyed it.
He stared at that cottage.
One of the gentlemen involved in the theft had died recently. The one who held great sway over the others. The one who had probably faked a fire to convince his comrades the paintings were gone and unavailable for sale.
The one who had a burned tenant cottage in view of his main house, that he had neglected to rebuild or repair for over five years? Gareth remembered noting just such an eyesore as he approached Merrywood.
Percy, you thieving blackguard.
No wonder Crawley thought it so amusing that he and Ives were the ones to be tracking down those pictures.
How he would laugh when, after buying all he could by dangling the promise of more information, he finally took Ives to Ives’s own family home as the most likely place to find the rest of the collection.
Eva rose and strolled over to some shrubbery.
Early bulbs had sent up flowers in front of the greenery.
She bent over to pluck a few. Her chemise rose in back as she did, revealing the lower swells of her bottom.
Gareth closed the sketchbook, far more interested now in his lover’s charming eroticism.
He would write to Ives and tell him to search Merrywood and its cottages for any pictures the family should not have.
He would not have to tell Ives anything else.
With a few inquiries it would probably be learned that Nigel and Crawley at times rode out to drink in country taverns with Percy, Duke of Aylesbury, a man known to cause pain and grief to others for no other reason than his own perverse amusement.