Chapter 24 #2
“I only used half of that blanket to dry myself, so you may use the other half.” She pointed at the blanket draped on the other rocker. “And there are two completely dry blankets left, so you can cover both halves of yourself, just as I did.”
“Very practical, Lady Drake. Eminently practical.” He picked up the blankets and said stiffly, “I apologize there is no other room for me to go to.”
“Oh, no, you couldn’t be at fault for that.
And you can’t go to the woodshed, can you?
You’ll just get wet again. And it must be exceedingly far away since it took so long to find.
But I’ll close my eyes while you get dry, and I’ll tell you what I was thinking about while you were looking for the woodshed.
” Harry closed her eyes. “I was thinking about these rocking chairs and the problem of developing a perpetual motion device. A force—like my feet against the hearth—starts this chair rocking, and what are the forces that slow it?”
As Harry burbled on about friction, Thomas went to the far corner of the room and took off his tailcoat and waistcoat and bent over and pulled off his boots.
He stripped off his shirt and his soaked breeches with their knees stained by mud.
Mud from his long stint of kneeling under the eaves after seeing his elf queen.
It was cold away from the fire, but, finally, he was naked.
He picked up the shared blanket to dry himself quickly, but all movement was arrested when he held the blanket to his face to start drying his head and inhaled deeply.
The blanket smelled of her. It was the smell of ink and old books and grass and coffee.
And there was a tang of feminine—would you call it musk?
No, he should call it what it was—her sweat.
Sweat she had earned by climbing over stiles with him this morning and racing through the meadow on the edge of the forest. Harry would call it sweat.
It was the most intoxicating odor he had ever smelled.
Harry kept her word and her eyes screwed shut until she heard a creak from the floor near her.
She peeped at him sideways. He had come back to the fire, blanket round his waist, but he had not yet covered his upper half.
She saw his broad shoulders, his chest with a smattering of dark hair which led to a trail of hair down the center of the muscles of his abdomen.
A trail that eventually disappeared under his blanket skirt.
And then—whoosh—he swept the other blanket around his shoulders and sat in the rocker.
There was silence. The fire crackled.
“I’m afraid I didn’t follow what you were saying,” Thomas said.
“Oh, never mind. I’m sure it is frightfully dull to you.”
“Not at all.”
“No. I know. Mama Katie told me I had a genius for tedium. But she did tell me the most interesting topic of conversation when one is conversing with a man.” Harry leaned forwards and felt a bit mischievous.
“And what is that? Could it be cards? Horses? Surely, not the weather?”
“The man himself!” Harry crowed and leaned back.
Thomas laughed. “I assure you I would find myself a very dull topic, indeed.”
“Well, I wouldn’t.”
Again, there was silence.
“I do believe that is the very first compliment you have ever paid me, Harry.”
“No.”
“No?”
“It’s not the first.” Harry looked down at her hands and started rocking a trifle faster, a trifle harder. “On my birthday, I told you you were reasonable. And the night when the Swintons came, I told you that you were not a good actor and I liked that. And do you remember our wedding night?”
“I wasn’t drunk, so, yes, I do remember it.”
“I complimented you on your ability to generate heat.”
“Oh, yes.”
“When I got into the bed, you had made it very warm. I’m always cold. I said you were better than a bedwarmer.”
“I see. Yes. That is definitely a compliment. Are you cold now?”
Harry wasn’t, but she said, “Yes.”
Thomas opened the blanket covering his chest. “You are very welcome.”
Harry stopped rocking and turned her face towards him. She had trouble looking at his naked chest. Maybe better to look at his forehead. Or the ceiling.
“You don’t mind?”
“No.”
“I’ve gotten so much bigger since coming here. I’m sure I will be much too heavy.”
“You can’t weigh more than eight stone. You’re still a sliver of a thing.”
Harry got up and crossed the two steps to his chair and, grasping her blankets as tightly as she could, she sat on his lap. Thomas folded his blanket and his arms around her.
She suddenly knew her impulsive lie, saying yes to being cold when she wasn’t, was her greatest stroke of genius yet.
Here she was, on his lap, perched on his muscled thighs.
And although she was tall, he was much taller still, and with a little slouching, her cheek could rest comfortably on his hard chest. And his arms held her firmly in place.
“Is that better?” Thomas asked.
“Much.”
She was now very warm. The heat came off his body and surrounded her. Suddenly, she was able to place his scent. The scent that had baffled her for as long as she had known him.
Cinnamon.
He smelled like cinnamon.
She could feel his heartbeat quicken under her cheek. She noticed a pulse in his neck. She traced his collar bone with one finger. She touched the mat of hair on his chest. Soft over hard.
“Men have hair here, I see.”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know.”
“You didn’t know some men have hair on their chests?”
She sat up out of her slouch, letting her blanket slip off one of her breasts on purpose. “In the museums, the statues, the paintings, none of the Greek gods or the Bible men have hair on their chests. How was I to know?”
He nodded gravely. “Yes, I see. Certainly, there was no way to know.”
She settled back down against his chest. This is extraordinary. My skin against his skin. Maybe it is causing a reaction in his lap. She wriggled slightly and thought she could feel something swelling.
He didn’t know if he should tell her one of her breasts had escaped when she sat up and he had glimpsed a small, rosy nipple capping a blushing areola.
Her left breast, the one that had slipped out of the blanket, was now plastered against his chest with no blanket between them. She must know she had been exposed. But she made no move to adjust her blanket around herself.
He gripped her more tightly by a fraction and thought again about cricket.
She now let go of her own blanket completely so she could wrap both her arms around him. This action bared both of her breasts against his chest.
“Your upper trunk has a very large girth. What does your tailor say is the circumference of your chest?”
She had never embraced him before. Her face, her generous mouth, those lips were mere inches from his.
He could kiss her easily in this moment.
He turned his head away and stared at the beams above them.
He concentrated on the keys on their chain around her neck and how cold they were against his skin, rather than how warm and soft her breasts were. “I can’t remember.”
“How odd. But you have said before you have no head for figures. Get your tailor to write your measurements down, and I will learn them off.”
“Harry—” His voice was strained. He put one arm under her legs and stood, holding her, and deposited her, willy-nilly, back in her rocker. The blanket that had been around her shoulders was now on the floor, and he whipped it up and over her, covering her breasts.
She looked up at him. “Thomas?”
There was no guile there. Not in her voice, not in her eyes. She was not even hurt by what he had done. She was merely curious as to why he had unceremoniously shoved her off his lap. My God, despite the breasts, she is still a child. Maybe her stepmother is right, and she always will be.
“I’m too hot now,” he said and walked away from the fire, flapping his blanket over his shoulders as if to cool himself. His blanket kilt stayed on, barely.
“Do you like cricket?” he asked too loudly. Away from the fire, he could peer out the window and see the sky was lighter, the rain less insistent.
She didn’t answer. He turned to look at her and saw her in the same position he had left her, staring at the fire.
“Cricket?” she said absently. “I don’t understand the rules.”
“It’s a great game, Harry, a great distraction. You see the point of cricket is—"
She abruptly straightened her back, holding her blankets.
“I’m not interested in distractions. This rain has delayed my work. Do you think there might be some paper and ink here so I might write?”
“A gamekeeper wouldn’t have much use for paper, Harry.”
“Not even to count the pheasants? Very well. Until the rain stops, I’ll ask you not to talk so I can work in my head. I have a very troubling problem to solve.”
Harry put her keys in her mouth and sucked thoughtfully.
Thomas returned to his chair and maintained his silence, only moving to put more wood on the fire.
That evening, after Thomas had settled comfortably in what he had come to think of as his chair in Harry’s bedchamber, Harry stood in front of him.
“Thomas,” she said. He was thumbing through Pope’s Iliad, looking for the passage where he had left off, and he did not look up. “I wonder if I might sit in your lap again.”
Now he looked up. She had her eyes on his waistcoat buttons. Serious face. What the devil did she mean by proposing that?
But why should he worry about Harry’s motives? He knew he wanted her on his lap. Their clothing should make it safe.
He was immediately filled with self-loathing for the lies he told himself so he might feel her against him.
But he could control himself. He knew he could. He would keep his part of the bargain. “No fucking, no kissing,” she had said. He could do that.
“You may,” he said.
She glided onto his lap, found a place for her head on his chest, and became very still.
He had greater difficulty than usual in finding the right page, but eventually he did, and he began to read aloud.