A Rogue of One's Own
It took a moment for her meaning to filter through, as such a thing was hardly a topic of conversation among men and women. It was strangely touching that she would address such a private matter rather than leave him wondering in regards to her whereabouts.
He cleared his throat. “I presume you won’t see me for a week, then.”
She nodded and turned away to cast a final assessing glance into the small mirror. In a minute, she would walk out. And he would not see her. For a week.
“Forgive my asking,” he said, “but are you indisposed during the daytime, too?”
She looked back at him, still pink-faced. “Why?”
“I should like to take you on an outing.”
Her brows lowered in confusion. “An outing—just an outing?”
“There’s no just about it,” he said. “My outings are spectacular.”
She was biting her cheeks not to laugh.
“Let me take you punting, the day after tomorrow,” he said.
A flare of excitement lit her gray eyes to silver, but then she shook her head. “People would see us.”
“Not if I take us upstream. There is nothing west of Lady Margaret Hall but rabbits and cows.”
She liked the idea, and wasn’t sure she wanted to like it; the struggle was written plain on her face.
“There would be a picnic,” he said casually. “Strawberry tarts are in season.”
She worried her bottom lip with her teeth, visibly torn, and he knew he had her. He didn’t even try and hide his smirk. She was, in many ways, as much of a glutton as he.
Chapter 28
Strawberry tarts. Her mother used to be adamant that her sweet tooth would lead to her demise, but drifting along on the Cherwell beneath a clear blue summer sky was an unexpectedly enchanting path to doom. The sun was warm on her face. The air was still and filled with the scent of wild apple blossoms and the lazy ripple of waves as Tristan propelled them up the river.
She was watching him through slitted eyes. He was a dark silhouette against the glistening sun, his strong arms ceaselessly working the punting pole with languid, even strokes, and he was hers for the day. Taking her on an outing, as if he were her beau. She felt giddy and a little dazed. It was doom, all right.
Having forgone a straw hat, he shielded his eyes with his hand. “You may come up now.”
She had climbed aboard upstream of Lady Margaret Hall’s punt house to avoid being seen, and had thought it prudent to lie flat until they were out of sight of the footpath. The back of her light blue dress had been protected by a tartan blanket Tristan had brought.
She rose to a sitting position and placed the bonnet back on her head. “Oh, this is lovely.”
Lush greens framed the riverbanks, and weeping willows dipped the tips of their branches into the glittering water. Her shoulders rose and fell on a deep breath. She hadn’t been surrounded by such calm . . . in a while. She tugged the glove off her right hand and let her fingers trail in the cool softness of the Cherwell, and she felt Tristan smiling at her.
He eventually steered the punt onto a crescent-shaped patch of white sand where they could spread the tartan blanket.
“Let’s see what my good man Avi deems essential for an outdoor luncheon,” Tristan said as he went down on his knees to open the basket latches.
She slid her arms around his neck from behind and peered over his shoulder. “Intoxicating beverages, methinks.”
Overwhelmingly, the basket space was taken up by a swaddled crystal pitcher, bottles of Pimm’s, champagne, and lemonade, and a disappointingly small jar with strawberries. A longish object wrapped in brown paper turned out to be a peeled and sliced cucumber, to be added to the cocktail along with the strawberries.
Tristan scratched the back of his head. “I shall have to be clearer in my instructions next time.”
“Don’t be cross with the poor man,” Lucie said pointedly. “He probably just packed what he normally packs for your outings with the scores of other women.”
“My jealous one,” he said, and shrugged out of his jacket to prepare the Pimm’s in the pitcher.
His concoction turned out to be rather potent, and a few glasses and many champagne-logged strawberries later, Lucie’s head was spinning. Tristan had stretched himself out long on the blanket and was using her lap as a pillow.
Looking up at her, his features were soft with languor. “I’ll have you know that there aren’t scores of other women,” he said.
She laid her bare palm against his sun-warmed cheek. “The papers and scores of women say otherwise.”
He leaned into her touch like a lazy cat. “Both lie,” he said, his eyes drifting shut. “Just think, I haven’t been in the country much since my deployment. My poor cock, it would be exhausting, bedding everyone who claims that I did.”
She shook her head. “Why on earth would women lie about it?”
“I suppose once word gets out that you are good at bedsport, enough people like to imagine that they took part in it. A lot of fellows are terrible at seduction in and outside the bedchamber, you see. A lot of marital beds are cold.”
Instinct told her there was truth to his words, and her stomach gave a nervous lurch. She did not need reminding that the storm of sensations she experienced in his arms was a rare thing, if not impossible to replicate. And a thought struck her that turned her insides cold: how did one go on living well and fully present, knowing that the brightest ecstasies lay already in the past?
She sat very still as the sparkling colors leached from the riverbank. Surely, her greatest ecstasy would be casting her first vote in a parliamentary election, the fruit of her life’s labor. And that moment most definitely lay ahead. Kept steadily moving out of reach like a rainbow, in fact. . . .
She absently stroked Tristan’s cheek. “So the affair with Lady Worthington is not true?”
He chuckled. “I have never spoken to the woman.”
“The incident with Mrs. Bradshaw in the linen closet?”
“Entirely made up by a mad editor at Punch.”
“The jumping into the rosebush from Lady Rutherford’s window?”
He opened an eye. “That one is true.” He turned his head and kissed her stroking fingers. “You are well informed about my movements.”
“It’s Hattie,” Lucie murmured, distracted by the softness of his lips against her thumb. “She reads and shares everything in the gossip columns. Why would you cultivate such a reputation if only half of it is true?”
She felt the slickness of his tongue between her middle and ring finger and snatched back her hand.
“Very well,” he said. “When I was young and juvenile, I noticed that it annoyed Rochester as well as made women I did desire take an interest in me. Such efficiency. So naturally, I fanned the flames. It soon developed a life of its own—the audience decides when to let a persona sink back into oblivion.”
“True,” she said wryly.
“You would know,” he said, his eyes meeting hers. “Tedbury Termagant.”
She smiled as an understanding passed between them, from one notorious figure to another.
He rose to a sitting position, only to wrap her in his arms and pull her back down onto the blanket with him, her back to his chest, his face buried in her hair.
It was astounding, how matter-of-course their bodies melded together these days. As though they had been made for it, despite their difference in height. Lying down, their fit was perfect.
The wool of the blanket was warm and rough against her cheek. A bee hummed and investigated, and she didn’t lift as much as a finger to shoo it. A pleasant drowsiness enfolded her. She hadn’t had a headache in weeks, she realized.
“You often sleep holding me like this,” she murmured.
“I do.” His voice was close to her ear. “It eases the night terrors.”
“Terrors,” she repeated. “Because of the war?” She remembered their conversation on her doorstep in the rain, after the trouble in the park. “Does it haunt your nights?”
“Occasionally.”
She resisted the urge to press him for more and was surprised when he released her and rolled onto his back to say: “It was so ugly, you see.”
She propped herself up on her elbow.
“Ugly,” he said to the sky. “And senseless. The senselessness is the worst of it.”
“Senseless—how?”
He still was not looking at her. “You want my opinion on the war?”
“I do.” As it was, she wanted his opinions on many things.
“It is a crime, against them, and us,” he said, and glanced at her. “Are you shocked?”
“Go on,” she said slowly.
“I remember when I first knew it. I was pitching our tents on this barren plain, and all that surrounded me was foreign—the jaggedness of the mountains in the distance, the animals, the taste in the air. It could as well have been the moon, and was about just as far removed from Britain, as a month of travel lies between our shores. All of Afghanistan could have vanished from the earth, with no Englishman any wiser back in London, and vice versa. Instead, we take the trouble to voyage there, since they never came to us and never shall, and the natives starve and are butchered, and I had to bury good English men in foreign soil. All because of an expansionist Tory manifesto Disraeli drew up in a fit of personal ambition. Yes, there may well be economic interests via a long, convoluted chain of cause and effect, but the feeling of senselessness remains and it is the worst of it—one may well live and die for a worthy cause, but a senseless one?”