Chapter Nine #2
“It certainly has been in my experience.”
“Did I do it wrong?”
“I do not think that is possible.”
Louisa grunted. She looked frustrated.
Naive and bold. That was his Louisa. She wanted things and was never shy about expressing herself, but she was still an unmarried lady of the ton who had not experienced much of life outside of her family’s narrow world.
“Apparently it is possible,” she said, “because kissing Rotherfeld was highly unpleasant. But that can’t be right, can it? I find him handsome. I wanted to kiss him.”
Fletcher just shook his head, unsure of what to say.
He really didn’t need to know about her kissing Rotherfeld, although he was enjoying the fact that Rotherfeld was a bad kisser.
On the other hand, if Louisa did not want Fletcher, he did not want to sentence her to a life of dull conversations and unpleasant kisses.
“Louisa, this conversation may be straying into territory that is not appropriate for—”
“Bugger off, Fletcher.”
He gasped at her use of language, but then he laughed. He adored this woman. He was tired of pretending otherwise. “See, this right here, this is my problem. I want you to tell me to bugger off at least once a day, but instead you’re planning to marry the dullest man in London.”
“Fletcher. That was unkind.”
“I’m sorry, but you were on your way to telling me you think the very same thing about Rotherfeld that I do.”
Louisa set aside her tea and began pacing in front of him.
Fletcher leaned back in his chair and watched her.
She truly was beautiful. He could imagine her figure underneath the layers of her gown, and he wanted to touch it.
He wanted to pull all the pins out of her hair until those bouncy curls lay around her shoulders.
He wanted to show her what kisses should feel like.
He wanted her naked and underneath him and…
Well. There was that whole sexual attraction between them that he’d thought was not there. Apparently it was an extremely strong presence in their relationship, and he’d just never noticed it. Somehow. But now that he had noticed it, it was all he could think about.
But it shouldn’t have taken her engagement to another man for Fletcher to fully wrap his head around how he felt about Louisa.
“All right,” he said, because she seemed cross. “I apologize. I’m sure there are other people who are not me who find Rotherfeld to be a very exciting man. I’m sure there are other men who are interested in discussing bird beaks and farming techniques with him.”
“And horses. I take it he loses money on races quite often.”
“I did see him at the Ascot last year. Lost a fortune on a profoundly stupid bet.”
“You see my concern?”
“Define your crisis for me precisely. Are you worried that your future husband is dull?”
“I worry I made a mistake agreeing marry him.”
Fletcher could see the agony in her expression. Louisa had always been the sort of person who made a decision and plowed ahead with it, and to see her questioning this one—arguably the most important decision she’d ever make—made Fletcher’s heart squeeze.
“I am sorry you are dealing with this,” Fletcher said, standing so that he might steer Louisa back to the settee, because her pacing was starting to make him anxious, too. “But why come to me?”
“Because you are my friend. You always steer me straight. Remember when we were young and I wanted to collect frogs, but you stopped me?”
Fletcher nodded, not knowing where she was going with this.
When he’d been about twelve and she’d been about seven, they spent a summer together at the Greystone manse in Cornwall.
Fletcher did remember an afternoon when they’d been sitting beside the pond and Louisa had piped up to say she wanted to gather all the frogs from around the pond in her dress to keep as pets.
Fletcher had talked her out of it—the act of collecting said frogs would involve getting into the mud and frogs did not make for good pets because they could hop away too easily, and Louisa’s mother would have been horrified and infuriated by all of it—although she had still persisted in capturing one frog and keeping him in the pocket of her dress for the rest of the day.
On returning to the house, her mother found it and screamed like she’d seen a ghost.
“Or the time I thought to be a professional musician, even though my piano skills are decidedly lacking. Or the time I tried to smuggle a little statue from Lady Eltingham’s gallery?”
“Yes, Louisa, I remember all of those things.” And he remembered every prank they’d planned together and carried out.
Most of these involved catching insects or small amphibians and putting them in places they did not belong.
He probably should have tried to talk her out of some of those, too, but often, they’d been having so much fun together, he didn’t have the heart.
“You were not with me when I agreed to marry Rotherfeld, but now I suspect you would have tried to talk me out of that, too, had you been there.”
“I am less certain of that,” said Fletcher. “The decision about who you marry should be yours.”
“And my mother’s, at least according to her.”
“But you like Rotherfeld. You wouldn’t have agreed to marry him otherwise.”
“I didn’t know him. I realize that now. I know he’s kind and intelligent and unerringly polite.
But in the last few weeks, I’ve tried to understand who he is as a man, and all I have so far is that he likes gambling and boring conversational topics, he hates art…
and kissing him is like kissing a fish.”
“A fish?” Maybe Fletcher’s friends were right. He needed to give Louisa an alternative. “Did he do it right?”
“He admitted to not having much experience with women.”
Fletcher found that a little surprising.
A handsome man like Rotherfeld? Was it true or was he lying?
Fletcher took no issue with it if it were true—it could have just been Rotherfeld was religious, or that he’d lived in gender-segregated spaces his whole life and hadn’t had many opportunities to interact with women. But if he were lying to Louisa…
“What should kissing be like?” she asked.
“I don’t know that I can describe it. But in my experience, it has always felt good.”
“Show me.”
“What?”
“Kiss me, Fletcher.”
Fletcher just stared at her. His heart was beating so hard and fast, he suddenly worried it might burst. He, of course, wanted to kiss her, he’d been thinking about it since she first said the word kiss, but she was engaged to another man. “What about Rotherfeld?”
“I am not allowing you to compromise me. I trust you anyway. This is an experiment.”
“An experiment.”
“I just need you to… I need to know, all right? Show me what a good kiss is.”
He had a million reasons not to kiss her.
She could use this knowledge to teach Rotherfeld how to be a better kisser.
She could decide kissing Fletcher was also unpleasant.
It was possible some women just didn’t like kissing.
And kissing another man’s fiancée was definitely not how gentlemen comported themselves.
But he really, really wanted to kiss her.
“Louisa, I shouldn’t.”
Louisa made the decision for him. She practically lunged at him, faster than he could react. He caught her at the waist, but by then, her lips were already on his.
So he kissed her.
And it was spectacular. Louisa’s lips were soft and pliant, and she smelled like roses and berries and tea, and though he could feel her stays under her gown, just getting a sense of the real shape of her was sending arousal through his whole body in waves.
She put her hands on his shoulders and stood on her toes to get closer to him, so he bent his head and parted his lips and licked into her mouth.
He felt her sigh and knew he had her. When her hands came around the back of his neck and held him there, he knew Rotherfeld was the dead fish; it definitely wasn’t Louisa.
He and Louisa would be fiery together. His beautiful, hot-headed, amazing woman.
Except she wasn’t his.
He broke the kiss and took a step back. He panted as he looked at her, unable to get his breathing back to normal.
“Louisa.”
Her fingers traveled to her lips, which she touched. “Is that what a kiss is supposed to be like?”
“We cannot… You are engaged…” Fletcher buried his head in his hands.
“Fletcher,” she said softly, but he could not bear to look at her.
* * *
Now Fletcher was going through some kind of crisis.
Kissing him had felt amazing. Nothing like kissing Rotherfeld. Kissing Fletcher had made Louisa feel warm and tingly, and she had enjoyed it immensely, and she wanted to do it again, but now Fletcher stood before her, hiding his face.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” she said.
“You’re engaged. And not to me.”
“What just happened… Rotherfeld will never know.”
“That’s not…” He dropped his hands and eyed her. “I do not behave this way. I do not kiss virginal young women who are engaged to other men.”
“Right. You keep your indiscretions to incorruptible women.” She said it flatly. She was stating a fact.
“You mock me, but I’m really trying to do right by you. And what we just did, that should not have happened.”
She nodded. Fletcher was right, she was putting him in a difficult position. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have done that, but at least I know now what kissing can be like.”
“Maybe it was a…maybe the timing was wrong. You should try again. With Rotherfeld.”
“Yes. Absolutely.” Although she doubted the timing could have been wrong on every kiss attempt, and frankly, she was surprised Rotherfeld didn’t recognize how bad their kisses were.