Chapter Four
“I am inebriated,” Adam said, turning his chaise down the Petworth drive. “Drunk on the abundance of art and craftsmanship under one roof.”
“Petworth has an enormous roof,” Genie replied. “Would you like me to drive?”
He surprised her by passing over the reins. “A squire’s daughter is likely more proficient at the ribbons than I am.”
The horse in the traces was an inelegant piebald cob from one of the posting inns. A few adjustments with the reins revealed a surprisingly soft mouth and clockwork gaits. A duchess would never be seen driving such a lowly beast, which was silly.
“This is the best horse we’ve had all day,” she said. “Not much to look at, but her trot is smooth and tireless. She has excellent conformation for the job she’s doing, and that means she’ll stay sound long after the flashier animals are in the knacker’s yard.”
“Shall I buy her for you?”
He wasn’t joking. Adam Morecambe almost never joked, as far as Genie could tell. Never flirted either, drat the luck.
“Thank you, no. I’d rather buy her for myself.” Her friends would consider the purchase eccentric, despite the mare’s spanking pace in harness.
“Tindale doesn’t manage your funds, does he?”
“My father negotiated the settlements, and I’m well provided for. If you think the current duke would meddle with my money, you don’t know him.”
“I don’t,” Adam said, bracing a boot on the fender. “Given the damage done to my father’s reputation, I’m not likely to. You are a very skilled driver.”
Something Genie herself had forgotten. “Thank you. What did you like best about Petworth?”
He was silent for a long time, while the harness jingled in rhythm with the mare’s trot. “I can’t choose a single item, but do you know the legend of the peapod where Gibbons’s work is concerned?”
Genie had seen more fruit, flowers, fish, and game carved from wood that day than she would have seen offered fresh at most country markets, but she hadn’t noticed any peapods.
“Enlighten me.”
“He’d carve a closed peapod early on in a project and not carve it open until he was paid. Anybody observing the carving knew if the artist had been compensated for his labors. I like that Gibbons held his patrons accountable. I also like that so much of his work remains. I do not like that I must accord aristocratic families the compliment of having been the ones to commission and preserve it.”
“They doubtless preserved his art because nobody else has matched it. The formal gardens of a bygone age were simple to rip out, when rebuilding them would take only time and money. Art can’t be so easily reproduced.”
“Good architecture is art,” Adam said, sitting forward. “It takes into account everything from the local soil and flora, to drainage patterns, available materials, the owner’s aesthetics, and, of course, budget.”
He was off, expounding on the challenges of building a gentlemen’s club in London. Done right, his current project would function as a restaurant, coffee house, subscription library, gentlemen’s lodging house, and gaming hell. The club had to be both spacious and efficient, unpretentious and elegant, dignified and distinctive.
“You see it as chess game,” she said, when they’d traded the piebald mare for a rawboned chestnut. “Sacrifice a pair of pawns for a rook, stay out of check, while pressing ever forward.”
The sun was low across the fields, and fatigue put a soft edge on the day. Genie spent many evenings talking among acquaintances in polite society at card parties, musicales, or balls, but she didn’t converse. Those ladies and gentlemen did not argue that if London was to progress, then decent housing had to be erected for those who had only their labor to sell. They never stopped halfway down a corridor to stare at a ceiling while rhapsodizing about Michelangelo and Brunelleschi.
They chattered and gossiped and drove Genie nigh to bedlam.
Adam took the reins from her in a maneuver they’d perfected over the miles. His hands around hers, left and right, then she eased her grip on the ribbons, while the horse trotted placidly along.
“After the lunch Mrs. Bryce set for us,” he said, “I thought I’d never be hungry again, but even that feast has become but a memory. Shall we investigate your hamper?”
The hamper was still mostly full, the Petworth housekeeper having insisted on feeding a visiting duchess and her escort. The meal had been lovely, but so too had been having an intelligent male companion with whom to share it.
“I did promise you a picnic, didn’t I?”
“We’re making good time. We can afford a short respite.”
A longer respite would suit Genie. She wouldn’t mind returning home as gathering shadows afforded privacy. The chaise’s hood remained down, meaning anybody might note that she’d driven out with Mr. Morecambe.
“Let’s make the last change,” he said, “and then find a quiet spot for a quick meal.”
“Would you like to see the Pavilion?” Genie did not want the day to end, though it must. The next best thing would be another day with Adam. If the weather held fair, King George would likely be out and about during the day, and thus Lord Dunstable would have no reason to haunt the Pavilion.
“Everybody wants to see the Pavilion,” Adam replied. “That’s the whole point of the place, from what I understand—to be seen, to make an impression. The roof is rumored to leak, and other rumors claim George is soon to pull down Carlton House altogether.”
Their conversation became desultory as they traded the chestnut for Caliban at the last coaching inn. The sun was touching the horizon, and Genie was famished when Adam gestured with his chin to a grassy stream bank shaded by leafy oaks.
“How about over there? Caliban can have a drink, and if we spread the blanket on the far side of the oaks, we’ll have privacy.”
Genie saw to the hamper while Adam released the check rein and tethered the horse. She chose a spot along the stream out of sight of the road and spread two blankets over a bed of soft clover. The water babbled quietly, an evening zephyr carried the scent of scythed fields, and Caliban added to the bucolic peace by steadily munching the grass.
Why can’t life be like this? Why couldn’t life be peaceful and pretty, calm and relaxed? Why did life have to be stealing pleasures like a truant schoolgirl, hoping Dunstable or some other gossip wasn’t watching?
“What has put the sadness in your eyes?” Adam asked, standing before her.
He did this—noticed what was around him. Observed and remembered. “I’ve been going about this duchessing business all wrong.”
“You are my favorite duchess. How could you be doing anything wrong?”
“I’m not in a cottage in Derbyshire, watching the lambs frolic while the sun sets. As a girl, that’s how I saw my dotage, and it was a happy picture.”
He took her hand to assist her to the blankets, then came down beside her. “Sounds lonely.”
The notion that even he saw Genie as already in her dotage provoked her nearly to tears.
“That cottage in Derbyshire is not as lonely as being a duchess. The first year of my marriage, I was so homesick, I wrote to a different brother each day of the week, then started the rotation all over again the next week.”
“Did they write back?”
“They’re brothers. Of course not.”
Adam put an arm around Genie’s waist, she let her head rest on his shoulder, and some of the sadness slid away.
While the determination to change, to take charge of her life remained.
* * *
All day, for every moment of this damned, wonderful, unexpected, unforgettable, grueling day, Adam had been torn between the marvels of a spectacular country house and the marvels of his companion. The Duchess of Tindale was so quiet about her accomplishments, they almost eluded his notice.
She knew her art, knew how to drive a fractious coaching hack so the horse was happy to do her job. She knew how to eat a sandwich without getting a single crumb anywhere, and she knew how to keep silent while Adam was moved beyond words by the woodcarving of a man long dead.
Genie didn’t mock his passion for architecture, didn’t grow bored when he waxed effusive about capitals and astragals, finials and stringcourses.
She also touched him. Casually wound her hand around his elbow, patted his arm, stroked his lapel as if to smooth a wrinkle. Her caresses soothed a restlessness Adam had long been ignoring, and they enflamed a desire as surprising as it was inconvenient.
She was a duchess. He could never move in her circles. His Grace of Seymouth had made that plain. Adam had approached the duke about unpaid bills at the time of Papa’s death and had been escorted from the ducal town house under permanent threat of unending litigation.
“I don’t want to climb back into that chaise.” Genie put the cork in the bottle of lemonade and set it back in the hamper.
“Because the bench isn’t sufficiently padded?”
“Because this has been a lovely day, Adam Morecambe, in lovely company. I don’t want this outing to end.” She leaned over on all fours and kissed him, and the moment became gilded with possibilities.
Rather than sit back on her haunches, she stayed where she was, her palm cradling Adam’s cheek.
An invitation? She probably thought herself very bold. Adam thought her overture wonderfully understated. He kissed her back, smoothed her hair from her brow, and then she was on him, pushing him to the blanket, turning a polite kiss into a plundering of his mouth and wits.
“Your Grace, you needn’t—”
She got him by the hair. “No more your-gracing.”
“Genie, we have—”
He’d meant to say, We have time to discuss this, but the rest of his thought flew from his head as Genie loomed over him.
“I am inebriated too, Adam Morecambe. Drunk with the pleasure of a simple day spent in company I chose for myself. Do you know how long it’s been since I was permitted to drive my own gig?”
Rather than let him answer, she kissed him again: Too long. It has been much, much too long.
She broke off the kiss and remained crouched over him. “Do you know how long it has been since I was permitted—permitted!—to climb in and out of a carriage without some man handling me as if I were a doddering granny?”
She wrestled her skirts—Adam helped—until she was straddling him. “Do you know how long it has been since I could stay home for three days in a row, no callers, no compulsory entertainments, no matchmaking mamas currying my favor, no fortune hunters complimenting my fair gaze?”
Her gaze was furious and determined, much as it had been when she’d scolded Adam into modifying his construction schedule.
“Genie, there is nobody here to tell you what to do. There’s only me. Tell me what you want.”
The ire went out of her like a balloon losing loft. “Hold me, Adam.”
He rather was. He tucked her against his chest, wallowing in soft linen and softer curves. “What would make it better?”
“I can’t think about that at the moment, though I shall think about it, now that I’ve engaged in strong hysterics.”
Her hair remained in a neat bun despite miles and miles of driving. He set about freeing her braid.
“You merely expressed your frustration and shared a few delightful kisses with me.”
She was sharing her weight as well, settling agreeably close to a part of Adam that was feeling interest and frustration.
“I can’t even dress myself,” she muttered against his throat, “without two maids interfering with my attempts to put a button through a buttonhole. I’d like to undress myself now.”
Holy cavorting cherubs. Adam and his duchess were on a blanket on the outskirts of Lesser Cowclap, Sussex, and she wanted to undress.
But why shouldn’t she? Why shouldn’t Genie… Adam didn’t even know her family name, though duchesses all but lost a family name… Why shouldn’t she take a little joy for herself?
“Nobody is stopping you, Genie. If you want to dance naked under the rising moon, you’re free to do that.”
Her fingers went to the top button of her bodice. “You’ll think me daft.”
“I think you desirable.” Also dear, and in the grip of some thorny issue Adam couldn’t parse at the moment when every particle of him was longing to see the duchess unbuttoned.
He’d apparently said the right words, because Genie smiled at him with all the lovely mischief any man had ever longed to behold in a lover. She was still smiling eleven buttons later, and he was smiling too.
* * *
Genie hadn’t admitted to herself that morning that she’d set out to tryst with Adam Morecambe, but she had chosen front-lacing jumps instead of stays and a carriage dress that unbuttoned down the front. She wasn’t wearing drawers—not all ladies did in warm weather—and in an astonishingly short time, she was sitting on a blanket under a darkening sky in her shift, boots, and stockings.
“These…” Adam said, scowling at her boots. “I can’t nibble your toes if you’re intent on keeping these on.”
Nibble my toes. She shivered, not from cold. “Far be it from me to frustrate your appetite in any regard.”
He started on her boot laces. “When you talk like that, all prim and tidy, I want to muss you.”
“I want to be mussed.” The desire—the need—to be wild and wicked had erupted of a sudden, driven by frustration and discontent Genie had been ignoring for most of her widowhood, if not most of her adulthood.
“I want to be naked,” Adam said, setting her boots on the edge of the blanket. “I haven’t the patience.”
He undid his cravat, sleeve buttons, and watch, then peeled both shirt and waistcoat straight over his head. They joined the heap of linen Genie had started on one corner of the blanket.
His hands went to his falls, and Genie put her palm on his chest. “Might you pause for a moment? I’d like to admire the Creator’s craftsmanship.” He was no pale, pampered duke. He was closer to the heroic marble on such abundant display in the Petworth staterooms.
“I like manual labor,” he said. “I like wrestling with stone and brick, I like digging foundations so I know they’re level. I like…. I like that a lot.”
She’d traced the muscles of his chest, then down the midline of his torso. Dark hair dusted the terrain, and he was everywhere warm. He watched her in the gathering gloom, watched her gently cup him through his clothes.
“Genie…”
“So serious.” And so ready to indulge her on this adventure. Desire blended with something more complicated, not quite anxiety, but a sense of leaving the familiar forever behind.
“For a moment,” he said, “I must be serious. Consequences can follow from what we’re contemplating.”
She shook her head. “In five years of marriage, I never bore a child, and Charles was diligent in exercising his marital rights.”
They were kneeling on the blanket, face-to-face. Adam gathered her in his arms and lay back so she was tucked against his side.
“I’m sorry. Sorry you were denied the motherhood you sought, sorry your husband offered you mere diligence.”
Adam had put his finger on some of Genie’s frustration. Charles was the only man with whom she’d been intimate, but she’d heard enough frank talk among the ladies, caught enough muttered asides, to know that his efforts as a lover had been minimal.
“He’d come to my room after the candles were out, climb under the covers, lift my nightclothes, and fumble between my legs. He’d poke and heave and make odd noises, then flop upon me like a marionette whose strings had been cut. Sometimes he’d kiss my cheek.”
This was not disloyalty to a deceased spouse, but rather, grief for a marriage mired in silence and duty.
“He was probably trying to be considerate.”
“Do you think so?” Genie pondered that hypothesis, though pondering anything except the bulge in Adam’s trousers was hard—difficult, rather. “I never felt so empty as when he was inside me.”
Adam swore softly, while Genie undid the buttons of his falls. Then she was on her back, a blanket of warm lover over her.
He was in the mood to dawdle, while Genie was frantic, and that was a wonderful combination. Adam’s deliberate caresses left her free to be wild. When he cupped her breast, she could arch and writhe into his hand. When he settled his weight on her, she could move against him with blatant yearning.
As desire escalated to craving, pity wended through all the other feelings Genie wrestled—pity for the late duke who’d owned assets beyond imagining, but had been impoverished for cash, and for courage and imagination regarding his marriage.
As Genie had also been impoverished.
Chasing that pity was a determination that she never again make the same mistake. She’d learn from this interlude with Adam, learn to take hold of courage and imagination with the hands of a skilled whip, and send her life in the directions she chose, on her terms.
She wedged a hand between her body and her lover’s, got him in a firm grip, and showed him exactly where she wanted him.
Adam went still, dropping his forehead to her shoulder. “If you deny me some patience now, the pleasure will be too soon over.”
His voice had acquired a growl, and his embrace enveloped her with the immutable strength of a masculine edifice.
“If you deny me the full measure of passion now—”
He moved, and words failed. Genie got one hand wrapped around his biceps, the other on his backside. She locked her ankles around his waist and endured such a thorough, relentless joining that the pleasure bordered on unbearable. She caught a glimpse of the night sky over Adam’s shoulder, the stars emerging from their velvet darkness into a diamond-sharp illumination.
Then he gathered her impossibly close, and all the beauty and tenderness of the night sky filled her from within.