Chapter Eight
Only a fool would pursue a love affair with a lord of the realm.
Apparently, Martha was a fool.
It had been one thing to romanticize Lord Preston while acting as his temporary secretary. Imagining deeper meaning in his compliments and suggestive desire in his looks had been a way of lightening her days—making her feel young again, even.
But now he had kissed her.
Martha didn’t know how to keep her head on straight after such a kiss.
She would have kept kissing him forever. Even after Lord Preston pulled away, there had been such desire glimmering in his expression that Martha had nearly thrown herself back onto his mouth to resurrect their embrace.
But the carriage had stopped, and they had descended as if they were only a lord and his dependent, and Martha could not even keep holding his hand. Lord Preston excused himself to examine the roof of the stable.
Martha was too muddled with desire to do anything but retreat to her room, claiming to the maid Renee that she needed a lie-down.
Of course, she couldn’t sleep. Alone in her room, she shut the door—but did not lock it, in case Lord Preston miraculously decided he needed to enter.
She left the curtains open, too, though he would have to climb a tree to look in.
She didn’t care about reason or reality; her body was alive like a young bride’s, and she wanted to put it to use.
She washed her face, hands, and thighs in the basin by the window.
Unbuttoning her sturdy gown, she exchanged it for her linen dressing robe, tied at the waist over corset and petticoats.
She unpinned her hair so it fell in silver waves down her back.
She even dabbed on the London perfume she saved for special occasions—though she knew her bed partner would never come.
Lord Preston had kissed her, and that was enough fuel for her to imagine him coming to her after his errand in the stables.
She pictured him staring up at the roof with a cock stand, waiting desperately for his chance to get away, only the stable master was talking his ear off and dear Lord Preston couldn’t very well say Mrs. Bellamy is waiting for me to fuck her.
Martha had always delighted in the dirty words when unwrapped in the privacy of her boudoir.
In company, they were vulgar; in an embrace with Kenneth, they were aphrodisiacs.
She wanted to be fucked, she wanted her cunny to be toyed with, she wanted to fill the room with tits and pricks and bawdels.
Just thinking of the words kept Martha’s lust alive.
Laying back on her mattress, she spread her legs wide and murmured them to herself as she licked her fingers and flicked her own pussy back and forth.
“Fuck me like a whore, Lord Preston,” she whispered—and pretended he was walking through the door to find her ready for him.
“Put that big cock inside me, sir.” And imagined a girth and length like never before filling her. “Rut me as fast and hard as you can.”
The words in the air, even though she said them to herself, carried her to ecstasy. Martha muffled her cry with her pillow.
A wise woman would let that be the end of it. Nothing good came of a sixty-two-year-old widow chasing after a baron.
You are someone spectacular.
Martha found it difficult not to be a fool.
The next morning, after taking both supper and breakfast in her room, she reported to the study in her widow’s weeds with her hair braided too tightly as a reminder to herself to behave.
Lord Preston stood from his desk to greet her but did not meet her eyes, instead handing her a stack of correspondence.
“If you are willing, would you please decline these invitations for me?”
Of course, a small part of her had hoped he would sweep her into his arms once more, but she could not blame him for trying to put the kiss behind them.
He was no fool. Martha schooled her body not to react as she took the letters from him, and she successfully avoided grazing her thumb against his.
Her breath still shortened, her heart racing, just from being near him.
A woman couldn’t help being a fool; she could only endure it until her body released her from its daydreams at last. Martha endured by writing out the rejections Lord Preston requested; by trimming her pens and organizing her desk; by not complaining when he excused himself to review crop plans with the farmers.
If she found herself analyzing the looks he gave her, she pinched her thigh and refocused on the task at hand.
If she indulged herself by making a witty comment to catch his attention, she paid penance by noticing the excuses he found not to take luncheon with her.
The kiss would fade into a memory—no, a dream!—if she only bided her time.
It was the afternoon of her third day of enduring when Lord Preston groaned from behind his desk. Martha whirled around, expecting to find he had sliced his hand open with a penknife, to see that he had pushed away from his desk and stalked to the bay window, frustration lining his face.
“Is something the matter?” she asked.
He exhaled in a slow hiss through his teeth. “Reality frustrates me.”
It was far too philosophical an answer for his agitation.
If Martha wanted to overcome her infatuation, she knew she should turn away now and let him soothe himself.
But what if he meant the reality of her frustrated him?
And if he did, was it that she was present and he could not have her that frustrated him, or that she remained present when he had made it clear he did not want her?
She asked, “To which reality do you object at the moment?”
“Financial reality.” He glared back at his desk, as if it were the devil himself.
At the same time, he ran a hand through his thick hair—and Martha had to remind herself not to let lust levitate her away from the conversation.
“The Ladies’ Society for the Relief of African Slaves has lost their major funder, and they have asked me to make up the difference so they may continue operating.
But the only funds I have available are required here to expand the living quarters. ”
It wasn’t fair of her, but Martha couldn’t help smiling. He wasn’t frustrated with her at all. “We common folk like to imagine that you peers do not have any financial woes, but you’re just like the rest of us, balancing your budget between what you need and what you want.”
Lord Preston echoed her smile with a shy quirk of his lips. “Money is, unfortunately, a universal evil.”
It was the fact that he was looking at her again without any of the polite shields he had used these past few days that spurred Martha to hold out her hand for the letter in question.
“Then a little commonsense budgeting must surely be a universal skill. Let me see if there isn’t a solution available for you. ”
He handed her the letter. In fact, he did more than hand it to her: he walked over to place it in her hand and remained by her side while she read it.
His presence made her mind flutter, so she had to read the letter a few times before it made sense.
“They need five thousand pounds to keep operating through next year,” Lord Preston said, “and I haven’t five thousand pounds to spare.”
Martha got to the end of the letter, where she found the writer had predicted this problem.
“No, you haven’t, but you have a following of good people who are willing to take your direction.
” She pointed out the relevant paragraph to him.
“Mrs. Brockway suggests you ask some of your friends to help raise the necessary funds. Do you have a hundred pounds available to start a pool of donations?”
“And fifty friends?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Surely some of your friends are even wealthier than you.”
Now his smile was unadulterated. “You have turned my mountain back into a molehill.”
“As you did for me with Mr. Sebright. It is what friends do.” She said it to remind herself that they were nothing more than friends—not so that this interchange would lead to another kiss.
But when he stared into her eyes and said, “You are incomparable, Mrs. Bellamy,” she found she didn’t have the strength to endure it.
“You mustn’t compliment me like that if you don’t intend to do anything about it.”
The man looked at her with such astonishment that Martha almost wondered if she had made the whole carriage ride up. She lifted her chin as high as when her mother used to stack books upon her head.
“You kissed me. Did you think I would forget?”
Lord Preston took a step backward. His hand clapped across his heart. “I owe you an apology. Multiple apologies. First, for the…and then, for handling the aftermath poorly. I am sorry. I am ashamed of myself, which is my best excuse for why I have been so eager to act as if…”
Martha waited. As if what? As if he had never been so idiotic as to kiss her? As if he had never kissed a woman as old as she? Or as if he had never been swept up in a wave of feelings, as she had been?
He looked up instead of completing the sentence. Whatever he saw in her eyes made him straighten and he said more sincerely, “I have failed you. You are right; I should have explained myself. I’m sorry.”
Martha’s heart thudded a little painfully. What she had wanted was for him to have followed her up to her bedroom, not to have explained his reasons for not doing so.
But she would accept the explanation, if she couldn’t have him. “You may explain yourself now.”
He blinked at her, cheeks red.
“You need not worry about injuring my feelings,” Martha said, though it was a lie. “If you regret what transpired because I am unappealing, I will not run crying to the gossips that you have broken my heart. I only want to know the truth so I may reckon with it.”
“I do not find you unappealing. How could you think I find you unappealing?” Lord Preston fell to his knees before her chair and took her hand.
“You are—that is to say—I find you very appealing, Mrs. Bellamy. That is why I must not impose myself upon you. We are not…I…” He stared down at her fingers.
“This is the type of situation that fathers warn their daughters against. I do not want to do wrong by you.”
It was strange to hear herself referred to as a daughter, as if she were an errant youth swept up by unwise passion.
As if she were as reckless as Lucas.
“I did not find our kiss an imposition.”
Lord Preston’s breath landed in a rush on her hand. “But what does a kiss lead to?”
And Martha knew she was a fool for pressing on with this conversation. She was a respectable woman; her husband was only seven months in the grave; she knew better than to pursue an illicit love affair with a baron who could never marry her.
But, after all, that wisdom was for women who wanted husbands.
“I am no virgin, sir, nor am I in danger of falling pregnant. Are you so faithful a man that you are shy of fornication?” Kenneth, who had prided himself on being a practical rector, had counseled that a little fornication before marriage kept bad unions from tying people together for life, and most people Martha knew did not actually pay too close attention to the boundaries of matrimony.
Then she remembered the mistress waiting for him in London. “Are you being faithful to someone else?”
His brow knitted together, and his gaze at last lifted to meet hers again. “I am a man who lives by my principles. What funds I do have go into Northfield Hall. I do not keep a mistress. I never have.”
There was an anger lacing his reply that suggested men who did keep mistresses lacked moral fiber. Which gave Martha enough hope to smile. “Is that it? I do not hope to be kept by you any more than you are keeping me already by hosting me at Northfield Hall.”
“You owe me nothing for that.”
“This isn’t about what is owed. This is about what is wanted.” She cleared her throat because even now, she wasn’t sure she was brave enough to say it aloud. “I only want to be your lover.”
He gripped her fingers as if the world would fall apart if he let go. “It isn’t the right thing to do.”
“But why not?”
His dark eyes flickered all over her face. “Everyone knows it isn’t right. A man should only do such things with his wife.”
“Why?” She let herself look at those lips, which she had spent so many hours daydreaming about. “Explain it to me, Lord Preston. Give me as cogent an argument as you made to Parliament for penal reform.”
His tongue darted out to wet his lower lip. He adjusted his fingers, his thumb sweeping across the bare expanse of the back of her hand. Martha felt every twitch to her core, but she waited.
“It skews the dynamics of a community. It upends who owes whom what. It will make me consider you in decisions in which you should carry no weight.”
“In other words, it threatens that great natural order that you wholeheartedly believe in?”
Lord Preston scraped his gaze across her face. “Why are you torturing me so?”
The words lit Martha on fire.
He thought she was spectacular.
He considered her incomparable.
And he wanted her so badly that he was torturing himself to keep from having her.
“Because you have been a bad student,” she whispered, as wickedly as she might say a dirty word, “and you have not sufficiently considered alternate perspectives on this topic.”
He rasped back, “How am I to consider alternate perspectives?”
To which Martha replied: “Lock the door.”