“I do worry.” Beck traced the dimples at the base of her spine. “Just when I think much of Nick’s reputation is merely gossip and rumor, another of his cast-off lovers will assure me the facts are understated, not overstated. I don’t know what drives him, but it isn’t a happy impulse.”
“You said you were happy a moment ago. Maybe your brother wants that happiness.”
“Maybe,” Beck allowed, but he wasn’t convinced he’d ever understand what drove his brother. “Are you happy?”
“Disconcerted,” Sara rejoined all too readily, “but not unhappy.”
“Talk to me,” Beck said, appreciating her honesty, even if her answer wasn’t what he wanted to hear. “Tell me about being disconcerted.”
Sara rubbed her cheek against his chest. “Has it escaped your notice that we are naked, tangled upon each other, and having a discussion?”
“And which of those disconcerts you?”
“The three of them.” She raised up enough to frown at his chest, then settled back down, a bit to the left. “The three of them together. How do I face you in the morning?”
She fell silent, and then the quiet took on a busier quality as Beck felt her tongue slide experimentally over his nipple.
“Behave yourself, Sarabande.”
She did it again then settled back. “Does that make you feel the way you make me feel?”
Beck smoothed his thumb over her jaw. “Now how would I be able to speak for how you feel? I can tell you I like it, it’s arousing, and I can feel it right down to my vitals.”
“Good. I’d say the same, were you to ask me—which you shall not—but you’ve avoided my question.”
She sounded shy and brisk, and Beck found both appealing. “About facing each other in the morning?”
“The very one.” She batted her eyelashes over his nipple this time, suggesting an inventiveness that boded ill for Beckman’s remaining wits.
“You are a delight.” He closed his arms around her in sheer affection. “An absolute, utter, unequivocal delight.” A dangerous delight. A shaft of misgiving went through him, because leaving this delight behind when it came time to return to Kent would be difficult.
“But a housekeeper too,” Sara reminded him, “and delighting is not on my list of duties, though when you hold me like this, you make me want to rethink my list.”
“Delight belongs on your list, Sara,” Beck said in all seriousness. “I am not your lover yet, but I would dearly like to be.”
“You can be my lover, but only if I can discern a means of becoming invisible thereafter, Beckman. I cannot hold in my mind at the same time the way we are together now, the way I behaved with you earlier, and the need to ask you to please pass the cream at the breakfast table tomorrow.”
For a widow who’d just found her pleasure, she was peculiarly reluctant to experience it again. “So skip breakfast. Have me instead.”
Sara tongued him again for his insolence. “I can’t help but feel everybody will know. They’ll be able to see by looking that I’ve cast my morals to the wind and embarked on a life of dissolution.”
“Oh, indeed.” Beck drew his hand down her braid, which had gotten satisfactorily messy. “You spend one hour a week in my bed, and now you’re a flaming strumpet. How much time does Allie spend drawing and painting?”
“Hours and hours.”
“And in the past week,” Beck went on, “how much time has Polly spent in North’s exclusive company?”
“Several hours at least. They walk out. She takes him his lunch. I think he reads to her some evenings.”
Good work, North, Beck wanted to retort, but he had a point to make.
“And how many hours in a week do you spend in housework?”
She was silent a moment. “Seventy, at least.”
“But you think this one hour with me will define you to the exclusion of those seventy? I’d say you’re entitled to one hour a week, Sara, at least one, to be pleasured, held, and talked to like an adult. Surely you don’t begrudge yourself that little respite?”
Surely he didn’t begrudge it to himself?
When she didn’t answer but went back to playing with his nipple, he knew she was considering his argument. He could tell this, he assured himself, by the thoughtful manner in which she was driving him beyond reason with her mouth.
She fell asleep on his chest, much to his relief. He indulged in a long, long hour of holding her and letting his hands travel at will over the soft planes and hollows of her skin before wrapping her in his dressing gown and carrying her through a silent house to her bed. When he was convinced she wouldn’t wake, he returned to her room with her clothing and slippers, kissed her as she slumbered on, and sought his own bed.
Not until he was almost asleep did it occur to him that a married woman, of all women, ought to have a nodding acquaintance with a piss hard, particularly if she’d traveled with her husband in close quarters.
But to Sara, the whole idea had been terra incognito—as had the idea of sexual pleasure.
Interesting.
Ten
Nick Haddonfield rode along beside his half brother Ethan Grey as their horses trotted the perimeter of one of Nick’s farms in Kent. Long ago, as boys, Nick had not needed to speak with his brother, so thoroughly familiar had they been with each other’s hearts and minds. And now… the silence had taken on a taut, unhappy quality that made Nick want to gallop off in any other direction.
They could not discuss the earl’s failing health—what would be the point?
They would not discuss the weather, Ethan having no tolerance for idle talk.
They should not discuss Nick’s attempts to find a bride before the earl passed away, lest Nick end up babbling to his brother about impossible things best kept silent.
Ethan rubbed a gloved hand down his horse’s golden neck. “I ran into Beckman down near Portsmouth.”
Beck was a fine topic for discussion, a safe topic.
“I gather from his correspondence that Three Springs was much in need of attention?”
Ethan shot Nick a look that suggested the topic was perhaps not so safe. “Beck is plowing and planting like a yeoman, Nicholas. His muscles rival your own. I begin to think his sense exceeds yours or mine too.”
Nick steered Buttercup around a mud puddle, while Ethan’s gelding shied at the comparable hazard in the parallel rut. “Beckman is very sensible, except when he’s not.”
The next look from Ethan was easier to read: Nick was spouting nonsense. “Beckman will see Three Springs put to rights, provided you or the earl don’t banish him to some foreign shore once again.”
Nick silently scolded his grandmother for carrying tales to all corners of the family, even corners estranged from one another—banish, indeed. “Better that dear Becky take a repairing lease overseas from time to time than be the object of unkind talk.”
“Hmm.”
Nick was an older brother many times over. He knew older brothers took special delight in finding the most aggravating delivery possible of even a single syllable. In future, he noted to himself, he would not “hmm” quite so often at his younger siblings.
“What, Ethan?”
“God forbid a Haddonfield should engender talk, particularly talk more interesting than that caused by the Berserker of the Bedroom.”
As broadsides went, that quiet observation would do nicely. “You aren’t in possession of all the facts. The death of his wife rather knocked Beck off his pins. He’s done better lately, but one worries for him.”
“For him, or for the consequences to his family? From what little I know, Beckman has been widowed nigh eight years. For the last three of those years, I haven’t heard a single word regarding him when there’s a Haddonfield to be gossiped about.”
The retort Nick was prepared to deliver never made it past his lips.
Three years? Had it been three years since he’d dragged Beckman out of that cesspit in Paris?
No, closer to four…
“You’re silent, Nicholas. When you might be describing some fool’s errand in the far north for our younger brother or a repairing lease in, say, St. Petersburg, you’re silent. I beg you not to spoil such a boon. One thanks God for the occasional small favor.”
Ethan nudged his gelding into a canter, and Nick—rather than offer a reply—let his mare speed up to keep pace.
“What has you in such a good mood?” Polly drizzled brown sugar icing over the sweet buns she’d taken from the oven, interrupting Sara’s humming with her question.
“I slept well,” Sara replied, which was not a lie.
“I looked in on you before I came out to start the bread dough,” Polly said. “You were sleeping well in a very large blue dressing gown, and your clothes were draped across the bottom of your bed.”
Sara wished a blight on concerned sisters the world over, even if they did bake up delicious sweet buns. “Why would you look in on me?”
“I often do. It’s an old habit, from when you performed and were never there when I went to bed. I’d check on you first thing when I woke up, and last night, Sister dearest, you were not there when I went to bed.”
Sara felt her lovely mood wafting away. “Are you going to be difficult?”
“I am not.” Polly considered the buns, which were dripping with sweet icing. “I am going to be concerned for you. Just…”
Her thought was interrupted by a cold breeze from the back hall, followed by the sound of North’s voice sporting its customary irritable edge.
“The ladies will have to decide where to put them,” North was arguing. “I am not an arborist. Good morning, ladies. Are those sweet buns I spy on yon counter?”
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