Chapter Three #2
She’d no sooner located her handkerchief than the old woman’s voice floated out again. “Oh, thank’ee, yer lordship. Much obliged.” And the door opened to admit Garrick.
He met her disbelieving stare with a smile and a careless shrug. “Did you forget this is my pew too?”
Of course. The Lockrams and Millfords had for decades shared a pew at St. George’s, as they shared everything else. “I’ve never seen you use it,” Madelina pointed out.
“Mad.” He slid to the wooden bench beside her. Too close. The skirts of his embroidered coat brushed her hip. “What happened?”
“I was caught with a rake with not even a kissing bough to excuse me, and now everyone thinks I must marry him.”
His eyes flared before he evened his expression into the smooth, confident charm he’d perfected when he was seventeen and first learned how to destroy a woman’s heart.
Madelina had seen it happen. Cassandra Beane, daughter of the rector at St. Mary on the Green, had thrown her lures hard and often at Garrick the summer he came down from his public school.
Mad, as hopelessly smitten but with no lures of her own, had to her everlasting shame snuck around following them and more than once saw them embracing behind the blacksmith’s shop, beneath the pear tree at the bridge, even once behind the rood screen in the nave.
At the end of summer Garrick went up to university with a spring in his step and a whistle on his lips, and Cassandra Beane hastily married the strapping blond man who ran the Old Swan and found herself co-proprietor of a public house.
Whenever Garrick returned to visit, Cassandra cast him looks of such obvious longing and torment that even Madelina cringed.
Garrick’s blithe avoidance of her every effort to engage his attention confirmed his reputation as a rake, while the tousle of dark hair on Cassandra Deane’s first child made every matron in town shake her head when the boy passed.
Twelve-year-old Madelina had decided that summer she would never lose her heart to a rake. Never.
And then thirteen-year-old Madelina had thrown that resolution straight out the door the moment Garrick Lockram, home from university, came down to the River Ouzel with his fishing gear and a bucket, growing into his shoulders and a devil-may-care way with the world.
She knew his cocky, careless ease hid the hurt from his father’s relentless disapproval and threw her heart after him all the harder, wanting to be his rescue, his shield.
His one soft place to land in a world full of hard edges.
“I thought you wished to marry the rake. You propositioned him yourself, years ago.” Garrick pushed away a lock of her hair that had freed itself from a pin and hung beneath the lace of her cap. His fingertips laid a trail of fire across her skin.
Oh, he must persist in bringing up that embarrassment. “I repent now the foolishness of my youth.” Madelina folded her hands in her lap as if in prayer. “I will only marry where my affections are reciprocated.”
“My partridge.” He tugged off her glove and slid his fingers over her knuckles, his flesh bare against hers. “Didn’t I capture your heart long ago?”
She whipped her head around. “Why, you arrogant cad—”
His mouth swooped down over hers, cutting off protest.
The world broke apart. The sky crashed down.
She had no way to explain why or how he made the gentle globe of her world careen off its axis, but the sensation slammed her off course, sending her into wild loops.
The heat of his demand. The tender press of his mouth, then the tease of his tongue, and the sweetest, softest bite of his teeth on her lip.
Her stomach burst into flames like spirits lit with a match.
She broke away, gasping for air. “Garrick, stop! We’ll be seen.”
“No one can see us. The walls of the pews are too high.” He kissed down her neck, and she let her head fall to the side.
A moan escaped her as he pressed her over his arm, his lips on her throat while one hot hand palmed her breast through the delicate cotton of her bodice. Her breath came in pants.
“Someone might come into the galleries.” She moaned as he licked the small hollow between her collarbones. Pleasure made her shiver like a tree in the wind.
“They are all busy in the vestibule, and no one will hear us over the noise. Mad. You smell delicious, and you taste like berries and cream.”
Without her knowing quite how, he scooped her breast from its stays and tugged back the lace of her bodice.
His hot breath kissed her skin and her nipple puckered to a thick point.
With a low chuckle that made her ache deep inside, he dipped his head and pulled the begging little peak into his mouth.
Madelina couldn’t order him to stop because she could no longer speak.
She had forgotten how to form words. She lay in the pew in the church and stared at the ceiling of St. George in a holy daze because Garrick was kissing her, kissing her breasts, and she couldn’t bear the delicious sensations funneling to every point in her body.
They arrowed everywhere, but they all seemed to circle back to place between her legs that was growing hot as an open fire.
He slid his hand beneath her skirt, his palm heavy and rough on her calf. “My God,” he muttered. “You’re like silk.”
“God is watching,” she said shakily. She could not bring herself to let this end yet. Garrick was kissing her. Touching her—her. At long last.
“He approves.” He moved to her other breast and the stab and swirl of his tongue made her float up into his arms, pressing against his body, leaving the pew and the whole earth behind.
His hand inched higher, and she could do nothing but whimper because he was moving toward that place, there, and she was certain his hand would stop the ache.
He knew how he made her burn, and he knew how to bring relief.
“You’re so beautiful. My Mad.” He wrapped a hand around her breast and squeezed her into his mouth, pulling, sucking.
She writhed and bit back a begging cry. His hand moved upward, fingers sliding along the groove at the top of her thigh, then the groove between her legs, and then his whole palm was pressed against her, hot and hard against the place where she ached for him, and Madelina’s entire body jolted with shock.
“We must stop,” she said weakly. Her voice was thin, hardly her own.
“Let me pleasure you, darling,” he murmured against her lips. His breath came as ragged as hers. He pressed his hand against her. “It will be good. I promise.”
It was too much, and she was too exposed. “Stop. Stop.”
“Mad.” He reared back, his face surprised. “You don’t want—? Ah.” His eyes flared. “You never have. You don’t know.”
She struggled to stuff her breasts back in her stays, to bring her rioting body under control. To put some measure of distance between them. “This is indecent.”
“It’s beautiful,” he said roughly. “It will be beautiful, with you. Let me share this with you, Mad.”
“What you’ve shared with so many others? So many, many others.” She tugged down her skirt and met his eyes with a defiant stare.
“Oh, I see.” His face turned to that careful blank. He wouldn’t even share his emotions with her, much less anything else. “If it’s a fumbling green boy you want, I’m afraid I can’t give you that.”
The heat scalding her now was of shame. She didn’t want a green boy. She wanted him, always and ever, him. And the unfairness of it made her unable to breathe. He would be her everything, and she would be one in a very long list of conquests.
“You told everyone here you meant to marry me,” she accused him.
He nodded. “I intend to.”
“I didn’t agree.”
He lifted his hand and traced a finger along the lines of her face as if testing the solidity of her features. As if mapping territory he’d never seen. He hadn’t yet donned his gloves, and his skin burned against hers.
“Don’t you believe I can make you happy?”
No. She nearly moaned it aloud. He would break her heart, again and again, and she would be left holding the pieces, loving him and watching him leave for the rest of her life.
At eighteen, she’d been foolish enough to think she could bear that just for the joy of being near him sometimes. She knew herself better now.
He read her answer in her face, and his brows drew into that heavy scowl. He went from sultry to dangerous in a heartbeat.
“I can make you want me,” he growled.
“You cannot make someone love you,” she said, because she’d been learning that lesson since she was six years old.
“I can.” Oh, the arrogance of him, the absolute brazen confidence. He bent and breathed on the tops of her breasts. Her nipples puckered immediately, visible through the cotton bodice, and his low, satisfied chuckle was an animal growl. “I will make you fall in love with me by Twelfth Night.”
Lust wasn’t love, but nevertheless, she rose to his bait like a trout. “And my forfeit if you win?”
He smiled, a feral smile, all his teeth showing, like the wolf from the fairy tale ready to devour the girl in the red cape. “Why, you marry me. And you are mine, body and soul, buxom at bed and board.” He dragged his tongue over her décolletage. “Especially bed.”
She nearly moaned. Worse, she nearly bared her breast to beg him to take it again in his mouth. The pleasure had receded, leaving a desperate, wanton craving that was going to drive her mad.
“I won’t,” she said stubbornly, because Moisenays were nothing if not stubborn.
“On Twelfth Night,” he said again, and drew on his gloves as if they’d concluded their business and he was ready to depart. “You’ll be begging for me to take you and vowing that you love me, desperately, completely. That you want nothing more than to be mine.”
This time he drew finger and thumb along her jaw, pressing her chin. He stared into her face as if printing her features on his memory. “All mine,” he said softly.
She pulled away from his touch and stiffened her shoulders.
“Prepare to be disappointed.”
“Neither of us are going to be disappointed, Mad. I promise you that.”
He put on his hat and nodded to her. Then he slipped out the pew door.
On his way down the aisle he passed a coin to the pew opener that made the old woman’s eyes wide as shillings.
She nodded vigorously in response to his murmured request. Every woman fell prey to Garrick Lockram, Lord Warin. Age and station were no barrier.
Madelina drew on her own gloves, shaking. She had to compose herself before she exited the pew. She’d been transformed by passion—by Garrick—and she had no notion what to do with herself.
She did know one thing. She had already lost his wager.
That meant she would have to cheat.