Chapter 18
Eighteen
At a young age I concluded that shamelessness was a sin. Now I think that “shame” is a terrible thing, a weapon society wields to force everyone to adhere to their laws. So far, I have come up with two laws of my own: Be Kind. Don’t Lie.
Godric swallowed hard; I saw his throat bob. He met my eyes with an expression that promised he understood me.
I don’t understand myself. I’m a mess, an improper, emotional mess.
“Godric!” Lance shouted. “Get your arse over here!”
“Stay close,” Godric ordered.
I stared at him. My mouth couldn’t shape a reply. Not when I was caught in a daydream in which a man—this man—was making love to me in a snowbank.
“Evie,” he whispered, his voice hoarse. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“I’m not!” I squeaked, with all the credibility of a cat staring into a bowl of cream. “Go, go!”
He dropped my hands and walked over to stand shoulder to shoulder with Lance, slinging one of the ropes over his arm. He twisted around once again. “Walk in the track of the log, just behind us.”
I nodded. Colette waded through the snow to stand next to me. “Don’t worry. I will defend her,” she called.
Godric and Lance took the lead, bending at the waists and straining forward as they shouted encouragement to the grooms. The enormous trunk jerked once, and again, before it began carving a track through the snow.
Shrieking, Ophelia ran ahead of the log, acting more like a ten-year-old than a young lady of fourteen. Why shouldn’t she? She hadn’t had much of a girlhood.
As commanded, Colette and I walked in the thick scar left by the log.
Her eyes were bright as she watched Lance strain against the rope.
“There’s something about it, isn’t there?
” she asked me, impish and naughty. “It wouldn’t suit me to marry a farmer.
I like Lance’s embroidered coats and his elegance while dancing the quadrille.
I couldn’t marry a man of lesser stature, no matter how attractive he might be while laboring. But. But!”
But indeed.
Halfway back to the abbey, the men paused to remove their heavy coats and toss them on top of the log, wiping sweat from their foreheads. Snow filtered off tree branches high overhead and glistened in Godric’s hair, shining for a moment before melting.
He turned around and shouted (again), “Stay close!”
“We are!” Colette bawled back at him. “Bloody bossy man,” she muttered. “Does he think that we want to be picked off by a wolf? See what I have?”
She waved a thin spike. “If a wolf runs at us, I shall poke him in the eye. You could use one of your hairpins.”
“What if you haven’t time before the animal gobbles you?”
“Fleur told me that wolves howl as they run, which will give us warning,” she told me blithely.
Godric picked up the rope to begin pulling again, now without a coat. His thighs strained. My breath caught.
His thighs were massive.
His arse was massive. How did he hide that under sedate black coats? No wonder he went to Weston for tailoring; Weston is famous for tailoring military men, those whose haunches are socially acceptable due to their profession but must be disguised.
When Godric’s arse flexed, his tight breeches outlined every muscle.
It occurred to me that I must be experiencing a fit of madness induced by the shock of being confronted by Sophonisba. Hecuba became grieved and wept; Alice became affronted and fainted; Genevieve became . . .
Angry and adulterous?
The church wouldn’t accept Burnsby’s mistress as an excuse. I may not have attended Mass regularly until my marriage, but I have managed to pick up some tenets here and there.
A few Thou shalt nots.
Adultery is the slippery path to hell, for one.
There’s another key shalt not about murder. Last night I dreamed that Burnsby was trampling a flower garden, and somewhere among the blooms his first wife was hiding. Hoping to save Lily, I was about to accost him with my poker when the blossoms changed to stone ramparts.
Even in my dream, I didn’t push Godric off. But I considered it. Sadly for my immortal soul, I considered it again in the morning, while wide awake.
The moment we entered the outer courtyard, grooms swung the huge gates shut and shot a steel bolt across them.
“If it hadn’t been for the rear view of such well-shaped men in wet breeches, I’d count this a waste of time,” Colette said, putting away her spike. “Wolves were as scarce as ghosts.”
I turned to her, eyes wide. “What did you say?”
“Thighs, breeches—what is English for le cul?”
“Arse,” I said.
“That,” she said, grinning.
“You’re so confident,” I said, hearing the ache in my own voice.
“My mother taught me confidence. Given the color of her skin, Paris society was unfriendly when she first arrived, married to my father and much in love. But she persevered.”
Back in the abbey, Godric escorted me to my room.
“I need a bath,” he said, lingering at my doorway. His hair wasn’t in its gentlemanly tumble. It was tangled and sweaty, which should be disgusting.
It wasn’t, not after that display of rawboned strength.
And the way he smelled? Like a sweaty god collided with a fir tree.
Apothecaries should bottle Godric Everley’s sweat and sell it to weedy aristocrats hoping that the right perfume will catch an heiress.
“My clothes are clammy and wet, thanks to the snow angel,” I said, trying to sound casual. “Undoubtedly, Tess has prepared a bath for me.” Our eyes met, and I caught my breath again.
“Now that the door is open between our rooms, I hear you splashing around in the bath,” he commented.
I didn’t only see his expression; I saw straight into his imagination. He was kneeling by my tin tub, carefully running a sponge over my skin.
Naked skin.
I almost choked on a wave of hot desire. I swallowed hard, and before I could stop myself, said the only thing that came to mind: “What do you think about when you hear me splashing?”
How did I think his eyes were hard? They’re soft. And grave. And . . . full of desire. Desireful. Right now he was just staring at me as if—
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Why not?”
“You would be shocked. Aghast, perhaps.” He pronounced aghast with a purposefully elongated ghast that made me giggle.
“I know what men think about in these circumstances,” I said, not entirely truthfully. I couldn’t meet his eyes; instead I studied the puddle of melted snow around our shoes.
His finger curled around my chin, gently bringing my face up to his.
“What things do they think about, Evie?” His eyebrow, the one with the slash through it, raised ever so slightly.
My hands still felt clammy, but the rest of me was hotter than his rear end in those breeches.
I wanted to disappear before saying it aloud, but I held his gaze and whispered, “You know what things, Godric.”
His mouth parted, as if he was shocked (dare I say aghast?) by my honesty.
“You said I was brave,” I reminded him. “I think of it as blunt.”
But when his expression changed, I proved myself a coward. “Never mind. Later,” I added, breathless. “See you, dinner, library.” With that incoherent snippet of speech, I backed into my room and closed the door on his amused expression.
“Here you are!” Tess called. She took a pan of steaming hot water off the fireplace and added it to the bath she had waiting, rose petals floating on the surface.
“You have a good soak. I’ll run out to the kitchens and fetch hot chocolate to warm you from the inside.
It’ll be a wonder if you don’t catch your death of cold, wallowing through snowbanks to find an old log.
” For all her French training, Tess is an East Londoner, where no one plays in the snow.
There was nothing new about that bath, and yet everything was new.
I didn’t listen to Tess’s chatter. I went through the motions as she undressed me, paying no attention, because all I could think of were Godric’s parted lips, and how easy it would have been to rise up on tiptoe and lick them.
Wait, lick his lips? Maybe I was going round the bend. People didn’t lick each other’s lips. Or did they? I’d only seen kisses and stolen glances over cups of tea. But surely I was not the only one who—
I heard a splash from the adjoining room. Godric was in the bath, naked, just as I was. When had I paid enough attention to him to be certain what his body would look like without clothing?
If I was right about what he was imagining—and I was—to tend my bath, Godric would kneel by the tub, naked. Above the rim I would see a brawny chest, because he was brawny. His neck was thick, too. And his chin was square, almost square. An assertive chin.
I have an assertive chin, too. I touched it, to make sure that it was square-ish, but the touch of my own fingers sent a zing through my body. He would touch me with fingers much wider and more powerful than mine.
The last few nights, sitting by the fire after dinner, he had cracked nuts and handed me the meat, watching to make sure I ate the whole handful, a shadow of pleasure crossing his face every time my lips opened.
I often caught him looking for me, at me.
Taking care of me, making sure I was fed and warm, and not in danger of being caught by wolves.
He had become as nimble at buttoning up my mantle as Tess was.
He regarded me with affection.
I’m not stupid. I know that a motherless childhood leaves a person vulnerable. Yet another reason why I ended up with a septuagenarian? Burnsby had pretended to like me. That’s seductive for someone such as myself, who had played mother to another child and was never mothered herself.
I couldn’t help thinking that Godric would never allow his daughter to marry a man who’d had three wives and was rumored to have killed them.
He wouldn’t even allow me, a relative stranger, to trip over an uneven cobblestone. Or starve for lack of fourteen almonds.
Leaving his imaginary daughter to the side, if Godric knew how I felt at this moment, he would do his best to help. He would ease this intolerable ache where no ache had ever existed before. An empty, longing, utterly improper ache.
His fingers would brush over my shoulders and run down my arms in a sweet, delicate stroke. I caught sight of my breasts, my nipples standing out like chilled raspberries, dropped my head to my knees, and closed my eyes.
On the other side of the open door, Godric’s valet offered him a bowl of water to rinse his hair.
Water must be flowing down his chest, thighs, those male bits that hang off male bodies and don’t appear ridiculous nor small—not after seeing Godric in clinging breeches.
Heat spread through my whole body like a fever.
I. Was. Married. Married, married, married.
To a very rich old prune.
(But really, truly, why have a prune when you could have a young, juicy plum, or, more precisely, a pair— I cut that thought off. Had I lost all claim to being a lady? It seemed so.)
When Tess bustled back into the room, I was still sitting there, head propped on my knees, praying for sanity. There seemed to be precious little of it around. I couldn’t sum up the decency to be ashamed of my adulterous inclinations.
Me.
Contemplating adultery. Me.
Not Lady Burnsby.
Me: Evie. Making decisions for myself. Making mistakes sometimes, but making choices. I prided myself on my independence, but I had never imagined I would face this choice.
“The kitchen is fussing over Ainsworth’s cloak,” Tess announced, handing me a mug of hot chocolate.
I thought about Godric’s lips. I imagined dripping hot chocolate down his chest and licking—
“Ermine is terribly hard to clean. The cloak he gave her was meant for a taller person, and by evening the hem is black from dragging. Still, Ainsworth wants it delivered to her in the morning, spotless.”
“Huh,” I managed.
Tess’s lip curled. “I saw her making her way around the cloister like a big sheep walking on its hind legs. She’ll be lucky if a wolf doesn’t creep in and gobble her for breakfast.”
“Tess!”
My maid was unrepentant.
I went back to thinking about Godric’s lips. I’m unrepentant. Longing for Godric was dragging at my bones. A lady is governed by shame.
And yet, here I was, shameless.