Elmwood
Wake up? Seven Charmers’ tits, how long had he been asleep? It was undoubtedly long past when he was meant to meet Lady Croft.
He sat up so abruptly that the movement bounced Lady Isobel away from him, and then he slid even farther away from her, stumbling to his feet. It was unwise to stand so quickly, and his hip let him know it.
“Erol!” cried Lady Isobel. She too got out of bed, and she ran around it to reach him again, throwing her arms about his middle. “I hope you will forgive my boldness, but I have so longed to speak with you alone so that we might open our hearts to each other and truly become reacquainted.”
But he didn’t have time to spell all of that out for her at present. It would require soothing, and letting down gently, and a good deal of unflattering honesty, all of which he was prepared to offer her, but not when Lady Croft was hopefully still waiting for him.
“I’m sorry, Lady Isobel,” he said, trying to sound regretful instead of impatient, “but I am quite exhausted and require more sleep. Perhaps we might conduct this opening of hearts upon the morrow?”
She squeezed him again.
“I will stay with you, then, my darling! We will sleep in each other’s arms and then, upon waking, share the sweetest of confidences.”
“Um…” However was he going to get her out of here?
“Or perhaps I could convince you to stay awake a little longer…” she began, and then her hand was sliding down to grope his…
“A vow!” he yelped, jumping back and away from her. “I took a vow.”
“A vow?” she said, confusion wrinkling her pretty brow. Now that he was a bit farther away from her, he could see that she was dressed only in her shift, and it was made of the thinnest linen ever to be spun. He’d walked through spiderwebs that were more substantial!
“Yes! A vow to be celibate,” he lied, looking at the ceiling.
“Celibate? But…”
“I have sworn off pleasures of the flesh,” he said firmly.
“But my darling, surely, since we are to be married…”
“Even then, I’m afraid I will have to abstain,” he blurted out. This was not the path he had intended to go down, paved with lies and absurdities, but he needed her to go!
She was staring at him mutely.
“I don’t understand,” she finally said. “I will admit to being largely innocent in these matters, but I do know that some pleasures of the flesh are customary for a satisfactory marriage!”
Largely innocent in these matters? Without meaning to, he conjured once more the vague, gin-soaked memory of her tits.
“Forgive me, Lady Isobel, but…did we not…I mean to say, I had rather assumed that the night of my father’s funeral, we had…” How was one supposed to put this? “Known each other intimately?”
She blushed full scarlet.
“We did not,” she whispered.
That couldn’t be right. What about the tits?
“Are you…quite certain? Perhaps if you had never experienced such a thing before, you were not fully aware of…” He trailed off, wondering if he was being insulting to her intelligence. He didn’t mean to be, but this was ridiculous!
“I offered you my maidenhead. But you did not wish to take it.”
Relief flooded him in a torrent resembling the rain bucketing down outside.
“Oh, thank fuck!” he said, and then regretted it when he saw the hurt expression on her face.
“I am sorry,” he said. “It’s only that I feared I had taken unfair advantage of you while I was inebriated. I could have sworn…well, I thought I had a memory of seeing you without your clothing on, and I was afraid that I had behaved in a way that was…ungentlemanly.”
“Oh! You did see my breasts, of course,” she said, sounding a bit more cheerful again.
Well, shit.
“You said they were perfection! But then you told me I should wait until I was married to be intimate. I said that I only wanted to be intimate with you, and you said I could do better, and I swore that if I could not have you, I would die a virgin, and then you said you supposed you’d better marry me before that happened, as it would be an awful waste. Do you truly not remember, darling?”
“I’m afraid not,” he said, rubbing his eyes.
This was all surely still an entry on the extensive list of his wrongdoings, but…
perhaps it was not as bad as he had first assumed it was?
He was an idiot who had drunkenly proposed to an innocent, mostly naked young woman for the wrong reasons, but at least he had not fucked her and forgotten it like a careless wretch.
He had said no to the temptation of her tits, and urged her to make a better choice than him.
That knowledge made a sliver of his self-loathing lift, giving him a renewed sense of control over the whole absurd situation.
What it required, he now saw, was a touch of panache.
He offered her his hand, and to his relief, she took it. He pulled her a little toward the door.
“You are the model of patience, Isobel,” he said, letting his voice deepen. “Thank you for clarifying the details of our engagement. I promise, we will speak as much as you like tomorrow, for you have given me much to consider, and I require time for private contemplation.”
“But I…”
He opened the door and swung her gently around with a little spin as if they were dancing. The move made her gasp, and then she was in the doorway.
“Good night, sweet lady,” he said, and then he kissed her hand, tucked it neatly back at her own side, and closed the door on her.
He waited for several minutes and was about to consider the coast to be clear and make haste to his rendezvous with Lady Croft when there was a knock at the door.
Had he truly lost his touch to the point where he couldn’t placate one amorous woman?
He pulled the door open, prepared to try again, but it was not Lady Isobel standing on his threshold.
It was Winthrop.