“You don’t have to speak,” I said, enjoying being pressed against him. Soon enough I would be fumbling for a way into his pants, but why hurry this moment? His johnson would still be there; at least, I hoped so, that this time he would not turn skittish on me. “Your actions speak for themselves. Fluently.”
My admiring hands moved down the lean length of his back and flipped the tails of his coat aside in quest of his ass, firm yet squeezable, exceeding expectations. It really had been too long since I’d had sex. But this was like being so hungry you would eat anything and finding yourself at a banquet; I could not believe my luck. What has changed in him, though, I wondered as we stood there in the dark for a long time, holding each other and breathing fast. What has happened? I thought again of how he had sung for the ladies of Chawton Cottage; maybe something had been shaken loose inside of him.
He had backed me up against a stile, the wooden stepladder-like construction that gives access over a fence; climbing the first step brought me up to about his height. How different the world must look, from up here. What has changed in him, I wondered again, with an apprehension I tried to ignore as I nibbled on his neck and enjoyed the smell of him.
“I’m driven mad, Rachel. From the moment I saw you, I was done.”
I think that’s what he said; I was at work on his trouser buttons, which were resisting my attempts. There wasn’t much give in the buttonholes, and less than usual with the state of things in his pants.
“Dammit,” I muttered, and paused to wonder if this was a good idea. Not the thing itself, but our setting: a muddy lane, hedgerows, starlight. I stopped to listen: could anyone be around, another person who liked to take late-night strolls? Hearing nothing other than the usual sounds of the night, I turned again to the trouser problem. “Help me out here.”
Taking me by the wrists, he pulled my hands away. “You’re wonderfully direct,” he murmured, falling silent as he took my earlobe in his mouth, doing something with his tongue that shot a tremor through me. “It’s lovely, but can I just enjoy you for a moment? I didn’t mean for it to happen like this. You deserve something statelier.” He released one wrist to bring his hand up to my chest, encountering mainly corset. “They are sort of imprisoned in there, aren’t they?” He brought the other hand up in further study of this issue, and I shivered with delight.
“Set me free,” I said, untucking my fichu, throwing off my shawl, and arching my back, straining against the corset and getting partway out. I yanked at my neckline until my breasts fell out of my dress. Cool air shocked bare skin before Liam gasped and buried his head in my chest, seizing me by the waist to lift me one step further up.
“Rachel dear, I would love you forever for that alone,” he managed to say before taking me in his mouth as I writhed in pleasant agony and sought his trouser buttons again, now too far below me. I squirmed to reach a top button and flicked it open with one hand. Encouraged by this success, I took a step back down the stile.
CHAPTER 15
APRIL 4
Chawton
THE NEXT MORNING, I WOKE UP EARLIER THAN USUAL, BUT WHEN I looked across the hall, Liam’s door stood open; his bed was unmade and empty. Dressing fast, I went downstairs and out the back door into the kitchen garden and the foggy dawn with a strange urgency.
It seemed that everything depended on this moment. Our lovemaking in the lane had been better than I could have imagined; we had giggled back to the house, conspired to behave normally in front of Jencks—who had waited up for us as always—and parted in the upstairs hallway like old friends. But it all could still go south in any number of ways, and I felt that this was when I would know, when I saw him again.
I found Liam crouched in the area we’d been told was the asparagus bed, examining some green spikes that had emerged since the last time I’d looked at it. When he glanced up and saw me, he rose to his feet. He held out a hand, seemed to remember we could not count on being unobserved, brought the hand back down, and stood looking at me.
“Oh, Rachel, it’s you” was all he said, but with such quiet intensity, such a light in his beautiful eyes, that I remembered, belatedly perhaps, that I was dealing with an actor.
“Is the asparagus up, really?” I squatted down for a closer look, and as he did too, I added in a lower tone, “I’m glad you’re not sorry about what happened.”
“Are you stark raving? Sorry?”
“I wasn’t sure if you might not be.” He seemed to have nothing to say to this, and I went on: “Because there’s just one thing I wonder, and then I promise to stop talking about this.” He tilted his head in inquiry. “What’s changed between December at the Angel and now?”
“Nothing! That night, that’s what I’m sorry for. I was sorry even when it was happening.” He laughed quietly. “I thought, What an idiot I am. I thought, This is how the species dies out. I thought, I am disproving the theory of evolution.” He put his head down and laughed more, long and low, but I didn’t get the joke.
“So, why?”
“Let’s say, I didn’t see the possibility that you could like me a little.”
I thought back to that night, wondering if it was possible to make a more direct advance than I had. But all I said was “And now you do?”
“And now I do.” A sideways glance, smiling but shy, like a child with a secret.
“Well, good.” I paused. I’d hit a fork. I could ask, because I wondered, So what made you figure that out? And we would go down a rabbit hole of analysis and speculation about who thought what when, and where it was going, and what it meant. I asked instead: “How are we going to manage this? Without the servants figuring out?”
“We have to be careful is all.” A pause. “There’s not anything else you want to know?”
I felt the prickle of apprehension again. “Like what?”
“I’m breaking my engagement, the instant we are back. But maybe that’s too obvious to need saying?”
And then I understood what I had been worried about. Sabina.
With a sense of him hanging on my words, I hesitated. “You don’t have to make promises.” It came out kinder than I’d hoped. “Things might look different when we get back. Generally, I don’t go around stealing people’s fiancés.”
There was long silence before Liam said, “I’m not anyone’s property.”
“I only meant, let’s not worry about things in our own world right now. We have enough worries here.”
“If you like me a little, it’s a start. I am not worthy, but give me the chance to try to be.” His expression grave, he met my eyes. “But perhaps there is someone. You never said. Yet how could there not be, lovely as you are?”
Even so adroitly framed, this is a question I hate. I shot back: “If there is, I wouldn’t tell you. Because I’m not anyone’s property either.”
“Touché.” He smiled again, and I felt he saw through me; there was no someone. How would there be, considering the person I am, and the way I have lived my life?