Chapter 24
Twenty-Four
Harry and Thomas were tramping along a path deep in the forest when it started to rain.
At first, it was just mizzling through the barely budding trees, but the rain quickly became torrential.
She had on the lighter of her two red cloaks, but he had not bothered with a greatcoat, saying he expected exercise to keep him warm.
“Follow me,” Thomas said. They ran through the woods until they reached the abandoned gamekeeper’s cottage. Harry was surprised to find she could keep up with Thomas and not lose her breath.
The gamekeeper’s cottage smelled a bit musty but was clean and snug. Thomas quickly opened the chimney’s flue and built a fire with the few pieces of dry wood and kindling left by the hearth. He found a tinderbox on the mantel.
Harry pushed back her hood and sat on a wooden chair near the door. Her cloak and her dress were soaked through and dripping on the floor. She shivered.
Harry watched as Thomas worked by the hearth, one knee down and one up, concentrating on transferring flame from tinder to match to kindling.
As he leaned forwards, his tailcoat vent split open and gave her a view of his nether regions, hugged closely by his wet buff breeches.
She knew how muscled his thighs were—it was perhaps the very first thing she had known about him—but she had never noticed his backside.
She saw muscles in those cheeks now, muscles that flexed as he adjusted his position and leaned farther forwards, She thought what it would be like to touch those muscles, to cup those cheeks, to face him and to use her hands on that backside to pull him close.
She thought it might be very like stroking the haunch of Octavius, his stallion. But infinitely more pleasurable. Her fingers itched to touch him.
She began to tremble more violently and firmly wedged her hands beneath her own legs, trapping them against the chair.
“There, that’s going well.” Thomas stood from a merrily crackling fire, and as he did so, the vent in his tailcoat closed, and his rear was lost to Harry’s view. He put the tinder box back on the mantel and turned to face her.
Harry was sitting in an odd posture, her hands under her legs.
She was obviously very cold. Her cloak was pushed back off her shoulders.
The wet muslin of her light-pink dress clung to her form, and Thomas was pleased to see she had acquired even more flesh in the last few months.
In her legs and her hips. Because, of course, he was well aware of her breasts, which were now well beyond the fledgling stage.
But the wet dress did reveal her breasts to him in much more detail than her garments usually did.
And now he was greedy. Her neckline scooped low but not low enough.
He wanted to see the top of her bosom. The ever-present keys dangled into what could be a beautiful valley, but it was hidden from view.
He could see each breast was now almost a handful, and in his mind’s eye, he could see his own hands curling around them.
Her nipples pushed against the muslin, each about the size of an early spring pea.
He knew this phenomenon was a product of the cold and the wet, but still he couldn’t help wishing those nipples had hardened under his caress, his tongue.
Thomas had been cold himself a moment before, but now the room felt close and hot. Blood was flowing, his member engorging. He turned around hastily and knelt again to feed more wood into the fire.
“I think there is a woodshed around the other side of the cottage,” Thomas said a little too loudly. “I’ll go get some more wood. You should come closer to the fire.”
“Do you know . . .” Her voice trembled and then grew stronger. “Do you know if there are some dry clothes here? I am so very wet. I’m not sure the fire will do much good unless I can be dry, too.” She had come up beside him and was holding her hands out to the fire.
Thomas stood and went to the bed in the corner of the room.
The bed itself had just a straw ticking on it, but the cupboard next to it yielded a stack of wool blankets.
He crossed back to her, holding the blankets in front of him, shielding her view of his cock straining the front fall of his breeches.
“Thank you.” She took the blankets he proffered and hugged them to her chest, teeth chattering.
“I’ll give you time now.” He crossed the room and went out the door.
The bulge in the front of Thomas’ breeches when he handed her the blankets had not escaped her notice.
Again, that fascinating manifestation of masculinity.
But it had nothing to do with her. Thomas had just not gone to London lately, had not visited those women who satisfied him.
It was, as he had said before, a meaningless reaction.
She removed her cloak, unlaced her boots, and kicked them off.
She peeled down her stockings and started working her way out of her dripping dress while standing in front of the fire.
As she raised the dress over her head, the cloth pulled at her breasts.
She hadn’t worn a corset for her walk; she had never really needed one given the paucity of her figure.
But maybe now she should always wear one, not just when her stepmother or Smythe insisted.
Off with her shift. She touched her own nipples—they were hard nubbins—and as she pinched them, she felt a curious ache spread from her breasts to her groin. How wonderful and strange her body was.
A burst of nearby lightning and the ensuing thunder broke her reverie.
She discarded her petticoat quickly, knowing Thomas would be back soon and would expect her to be covered up.
She took one of the blankets and rubbed herself roughly all over, trying to use only one half of it to dry herself.
Her skin warmed under the friction of the wool blanket and the glow of the fire, and her shivering stopped.
She wrapped one of the dry blankets around her waist in a kind of skirt and draped another dry blanket over her shoulders.
She pulled two rockers up to the fire and hung the partially wet blanket over one of the rockers and sat in the other.
She put her feet up on the hearth, and pulled the blankets around her, allowing her toes to poke out towards the fire.
She needn’t have rushed. It was nearly a quarter of an hour before Thomas came back into the cottage with an armful of wood.
Thomas passed a small glazed window as he walked around the cottage.
He stopped and stood under the dripping eave and watched Harry disrobe.
He tried to assuage his sense that he was a filthy lecher by telling himself she was his wife and, in her own words, she didn’t attach much importance to bodies. She wouldn’t mind him looking.
She stood in front of the fire so most of what he saw was in silhouette.
As she lifted her arms and raised the shift off her body, he gasped.
She stood at exactly the correct angle so he could see her right breast. The breast was just as he had imagined it would be, moments ago, inside the cottage.
A graceful, gentle slope from her collarbone down to the tip and a luscious, taut scoop of flesh underneath, pillowing her areola and her nipple.
And then Harry put her hands on her own breasts and—was it possible?
—pinched her nipples. As she arched her back, his tumescence surged, and he thought he might spend in his breeches with no touch whatsoever.
A flash of lightning followed by almost immediate thunder made him duck his head. He didn’t think God took much interest in the affairs of Lord Drake, so he wasn’t anxious he would be struck down for his lust by a lightning bolt, but he was worried Harry would look towards the window.
Once a few seconds had passed, he raised his head enough to peek through the window again.
Her petticoat was off now, and she was completely naked in front of the fire.
For a moment, he had a vision she was some slender elf queen dancing around a midsummer bonfire.
That whimsy dissolved as she took up a blanket and started rubbing at her hair.
It was Harry, his Harry, and she was astonishingly beautiful.
There was a glimpse of small but well-shaped buttocks leading to long, slender legs.
She turned slightly and just before she wrapped herself into a kilt of blanket, Thomas thought he saw, in the firelight, dimples just above the buttocks. He sank to his knees and groaned.
She wasn’t his Harry. Not really. She was by law, but Thomas knew Harry didn’t give a fig for the law of man. Harry cared only for natural law and cosmic forces. Harry would always belong more to Newton and Euler and Descartes than she would to Thomas Drake.
Next to Harry, Thomas felt like a beast, a wild creature spurred on by animal appetites. This had seemed tolerable before, but with Harry now becoming more and more the center of those appetites, he felt wretched and ashamed.
He eventually got up off his knees, stumbled to the woodshed, and considered spending there if only to prevent further lusting after Harry.
But, no. He was not a schoolboy, unable to control himself.
He spent ten minutes thinking earnestly about cricket as his manhood waned, and then he gathered a large armful of dry wood and ran for the cottage.
“I, uh, had some trouble, uh, finding the woodshed.”
“Oh?” Harry looked up at him.
Her cheeks were now rosy, and her loose hair was starting to dry in tendrils around her face.
Her eyes were as enormous as ever, vast pools of hazel edged with ebony lashes.
She was snugly cocooned in blankets he knew were touching her bare skin, those delicate shoulder blades, that flat piece of flesh between her umbilicus and her maidenhair.
Now he wished he had spent when he had had the chance.