Chapter 4:
Friday
Robert went over his carefully planned schedule again. Today was Friday. If they picked all the berries and made the sugar-of-roses figures for the landscape today, and tomorrow they candied the rose petals…
Betsy came in with her usual cheery greeting. Robert wanted her at once, blood rushing to his cock.
Was it her usual cheery greeting? Or was there something self-conscious in her smile? They had been so comfortable together before.
He smiled back as best he could and bent his head over his list. “We’ve got to find folk to help us Tuesday. You and me can’t possibly churn that many ices ourselves.”
“How many sabotieres can we get our hands on?” she asked. Robert only owned two of the small ice makers.
“Five.” Even with five, it would be hard to churn enough ice in time, but he could think of nowhere to beg one that he hadn’t already begged.
Betsy frowned. He wanted to trace the lovely crease in her forehead with his fingers. “I’ll ask Jemima if she can get the afternoon free,” she said. “And I think my mother and sister can come. If not, I’ll find people.”
Robert had come to Lively St. Lemeston for professional reasons: because it was the nearest market town, because it was big enough to support the sort of shop he wanted, because his patroness Lady Tassell had a political interest here and agreed to help him if she could count on his vote when he became a freeman of the borough. But he’d thought it would become home.
Yet after eenamost a year and a half, he had no one here he could ask for help. With the Honey Moon occupying his whole attention, he’d made few friends. No friends. Just Betsy.
He supposed the Dymonds were friends after a fashion. But he couldn’t bring a woman he’d hoped to marry into the kitchen, now he and Betsy were—entangled. Besides, he already owed the couple far more money than he ever expected to repay.
They didn’t expect it either, which was worse. He’d meant their wedding cake to be a gift, and then he’d taken the coins they pressed into his hands, because his credit was running out again with the milkwoman. Every time he saw them he felt ashamed.
He could ask his old friends from Runford to come; it was only a drive of an hour or two. But then they’d see how near he was to failing, after he’d told them all his hopes for the shop.
“Thank you,” Robert said gruffly, pulling pails and flat crates from under his worktable. “Did you bring gloves?”
She twisted so he could see them tucked into her apron strings. Despite the heat she wore a long-sleeved dress, old and stained, to ward off raspberry thorns.
He patted his purse nervously. “I’ve rented a cart, and then we can drive to Wheatcroft and buy our pineapples from his lordship’s greenhouse.”
Lord Wheatcroft was young and kindhearted and might have let him buy on tick, but the Wheatcrofts were the Tassells’ political archrivals, and Robert thought it best not to owe the baron a debt.
This would be the last of his ready money.
* * *
“I can’t reach!” Betsy complained, laughing. “Ow!”
She was just around a bend in the path, hidden from sight by the same trees and tall raspberry bushes that concealed the River Arun, rushing along a few yards away. Shielding his face, Robert followed her voice around the bend and through a narrow gap in the bushes. He emerged in a small clearing.
The bushes lining the path were picked over, but fat red berries ringed the clearing. Betsy stood on tiptoe, trying to reach a cluster. He plucked them for her, dropping them one by one into her pail.
Taking off his glove, Robert fed her the last one, and then couldn’t draw away his hand. Tracing her lower lip, he slid his finger into her mouth.
She closed her lips around it, sucking, and then pulled away with a squeaking little pop. Her tongue was soft.
He wanted to put his cock in her mouth.
Could he ask for that? Had she done it before, with somebody else? This was all a revelation to him, but maybe to her it was nothing out of the common way.
She said bedding you was better than eating ices.
Ices were near a religion to him, but even Robert knew it would be daft to take that as any kind of declaration. He fed her another berry.
“Mmm.” Her smile was an invitation. “This is a nice spot for our luncheon, don’t you think?”
“I—” He flushed. “Yes.”
Betsy’s eyes sparkled with mischief, as if she knew he’d not been thinking of luncheon. “I’ll fetch it from the cart.”
She returned with their basket and an ancient bedsheet, which she spread on the ground. “Would you think me very wicked if I took off my bonnet?”
“Ever so wicked.”
She laughed, setting the bonnet down with her gloves. Dappled sunlight snuggled up to her like a lover, making bright spots in her yellow hair and a sunny circle the size of a farthing on one striped shoulder. He felt suddenly as if touching her wouldn’t sate his hunger, any more than eating sweets when you craved salty. He wanted something else from her.
“When we were small I’d take Nan raspberry picking to get her out of Mum’s hair. We’d sell the berries to Mrs. Philpotts for jam.” Betsy chewed at the corner of her mouth, her smile a little sad. “I always saved a handful for Mum. Sometimes they made her smile.”
Robert’s hunger was for this, he realized. For her to talk to him. “Was she very sad after your father left?”
She blinked, surprised. “I think he left because she was so sad,” she said after a moment. “He was a bricklayer, and gone dunnamuch for work, but he was home more before my sister was born. After that…I don’t know. I was small. I only know Mum was always crying, and he hated it, and then he was home less. And after a few years of that, he went away for a job and never came back.”
She huffed a laugh. “D’you know, I used to think maybe he’d come back if I made her happy again?”
What a cruel, impossible task for a child. “What would you do if he came back now?” Robert asked. He would be tempted to smash the man’s face with a rolling pin.
She thought it over, plucking at the edge of the sheet. Her mouth twisted wryly. “He won’t.”
“Can I ask you a silly question?” His heart pounded.
“Aye, anything,” she said, but she looked wary.
“Do you ever—do you ever lie awake at night worrying?”
She laughed. “Doesn’t everyone?”
He didn’t know. Did they? His face was hotter than the sun or the conversation warranted. “What do you worry over? What are you most afraid of?”
She frowned, dismayed.
She didn’t want to tell him. She was glad enough to give him her body, but maybe that was all. There was a lump in Robert’s stomach like he’d eaten raw dough.
It was absurd, anyway, to say she gave him her body. No more had she taken his. He’d not mind that, belonging to her. But they were still entirely separate, and could go anywhere they liked, away from each other.
Don’t go, he thought. I’ll do anything you like, if you like to ask me for it.
“Not being good enough,” she said, very quiet. “Doing my best and falling short.” She laughed. “That and being murdered.”
It came so near the endless circle of his own fears that it shocked him. Why should she fear? It was plain she was good enough for anything she put her hand to.
It must be a leftover from her childhood and her sad mother, one of those feelings like cheese gone ampery after too long on the shelf. You knew you’d ought to feed it to the pigs but somehow it lurked in the corner for weeks.
All at once he remembered the tight way she’d said, You were ready enough to take a wife last autumn.
Did she…did she think herself not good enough for him? Did she want him to marry her?
Hasty as ever, he’d have liked to propose on the spot. But his debts grew every day. Debtors’ prison was…was it likely? It felt likely. He didn’t want to be another man like her father, abandoning his wife to support a household on her own.
Likely she meant something quite different, anyway.
Betsy lay back and stared blindly at the sky, her face in a patch of sunlight. “Your worst fear is losing the shop, isn’t it?”
Panic stirred in his throat.
You’re not going to lose the shop, he told himself firmly. You fret too much, that’s all. This assembly will be a roaring success, and Mrs. Lovejoy’s twenty-five pounds will pay your debts and give you something to go on.
Looking at Betsy stretched out on the sheet, he vowed to himself he’d propose when he had those twenty-five pounds in his pocket, and hang the consequences. He couldn’t stand not knowing how she felt any longer than that.
Soothed by this promise of relief, he lay down beside her. The sky was bright, bright blue behind the leaves. “I reckon so. You know I’m my parents’ only living child.”
She rolled towards him, shading her eyes. “Living? Did you have brothers and sisters?”
“They wanted a whacking big brood, but she don’t conceive easy, my mother. And then there were two miscarriages and a son and daughter lost to cholera and the influenza, before I was born. They doted on me. I want…I suppose I want to make up for it. To suffice.”
“Your mother didn’t want you to sell the bakery.”
That was an understatement. The bakery had been in his family for generations. It was steady, rock solid. But Robert had never cared about bread. He’d cared about pastry, about fragile, flaking, spun-sugar towers.
“Mum baked us a cake every day for dinner,” he said. “To make us happy. To make me happy, because I loved sweets. And it did. I want to make people happy.”
“I know.”
He’d told her this before, but he didn’t think he’d ever made her understand how much he wanted it. “Mrs. Lovejoy told me sometimes she can’t hear herself think, but when she comes into the Honey Moon, she can breathe again. I want the shop to be that, in folks’ lives. A slice of joy, a morsel of calm when they’ve need of it. A place that won’t ever turn them away.”
Robert could see it so clearly in his mind. He’d staked everything on it, and if he failed, then he’d sold lifetimes of sober hard work for naught. He’d been entrusted with his parents’ hopes, and willfully dashed them.
“So long as they have extra pennies in their pocket.” Betsy sighed. “I’m sorry, that was mean. I don’t know what’s got into me.”
The words pierced him. She was right, sugar and cream weren’t cheap. It would have been wiser, and more virtuous, to keep to the honest labor of flour and water and yeast.
“I thought…” He was almost afraid to say it. “I thought you liked the shop.”
“Of course I do,” she said at once, warmly. “I’m sorry I’m being so dull.”
He felt across the sheet until his hand found hers. “I don’t mind.” He brought her hand up—would she think him strange?—and kissed the back of it. “You’re cheerful to everyone. I’m glad you know you can be dull with me.”
She took in a sharp breath, as if he’d hurt her.
When he glanced over in surprise, she was blinking furiously. “Thank you,” she said thickly.
Don’t cry, he wanted to say, and Please don’t be unhappy. But he’d just said she could.
He rolled towards her, covering her body with his. I’m unhappy too. He kissed her as if his mouth could communicate the thought without words.
Her fingers curved around his skull. It filled him with such violent yearning he couldn’t breathe. He wanted to swallow the small hungry sound she made, wanted to dissolve into her the way sugar dissolved into water and was neither sugar nor water, but something new.
She wanted to be good enough, and he’d never even told her how wonderful she was out loud.
He kissed the curve of her cheek and along her jaw, downy as a peach. “You’re beautiful,” he said before he could think better of it, and kissed her neck so she’d not see him waiting for her reaction.
She sucked in a breath. For the compliment, or the kiss? He shaped her body with his palm. “You’re like—”
Oh Lord, he couldn’t say she was like a sweet-smelling lump of dough, round and soft and full of promise. He couldn’t say she was like honey on his tongue. He had thoughts that weren’t about the kitchen, didn’t he?
“Like—”
She went perfectly still. He could feel her listening even when he curled his hand where her buttock rolled into her thigh, his fingertips inches from her cunt. Her breath stuttered hopefully.
“Like summer,” he said, pleased with the thought, and she sighed in satisfaction. “When the trees are laden with fruit and everything is warm and growing.”
“There really is something wanton about summer, isn’t there?” Her voice was lazy and content.
He took hold of her hips and rolled them until he lay on his back, Betsy sprawled atop him. She sat up, a leg to either side of him, looking a trifle dizzy and perplexed. Mmm, he liked that. He could see all of her. “Beautiful.”
She blushed and smiled. Her hair was tumbling down, on the side. “Should we, outdoors?”
“We’d hear someone coming.” He twisted that loose hair around his finger. “So soft.”
It was a miracle, the way she looked. There was more architectural mastery in the tilt of her nose than any half a dozen cathedrals one cared to name.
Would she be charmed if he said that? Or would it sound pompous, as if he were trying to be poetic when he was only a confectioner? He’d never even seen a cathedral, only engravings of them in a textbook.
He tugged at her skirts, and she rose up on her knees to gather them out of the way while he unbuttoned his breeches.
“You…” she said hesitantly.
Oh God, what? He held his breath.
“You’re quite handsome yourself.” Her smile was half sly and half self-conscious.
Somehow it didn’t matter that he’d already known she must think so. He puffed up like a soufflé.
She took his cock in her hand. “And your proportions are very good.”
Ohh, she drove him wild. He’d asked her that dunnamany times about a sugar sculpture: Are the proportions tolerable?
Her mouth curved as she frigged him. “You like that, don’t you?”
He grunted and thrust into her fist, unable to think of a clever answer. She filled his vision, stray bits of raspberry bush and sky around the edges of her.
“I love your eyes,” he told her.
“You do?” she said, sounding surprised and flattered, and shut them. “What color are they?”
Did she really think he didn’t know? “Green with honey in the center.”
She opened them, blinking. “I always thought of them as hazel.”
“Same thing.”
“I like your nose,” she offered shyly, even as her hand tugged familiarly at his cock.
His fingers dug into her thighs. His nose? But it was enormous and lumpy.
“It’s so friendly from the front, and so severe from the side.”
“Please,” he got out. “Please.”
“Do you want something?” she teased.
He remembered that he did. “Would you…”
“Mmm?”
“…put your mouth on it?”
Her hand stopped. Betsy looked down, scrunching up just the left side of her face. “I…” She licked her lips uncertainly and his cock jumped in her hand.
She laughed. “Why not, I suppose.” She rustled away down his legs, and he almost changed his mind with wanting her back.
She leaned forward, her mouth inches from his cock poking through her fist. “It looks like we’ll be getting better acquainted,” she told it.
He flexed his hips so it bobbed a greeting. Speaking for it in a little high voice seemed like too much, but the idea made him swallow a laugh.
Her lips brushed him, feather light, and then she closed them around the head of his cock.
Oh. Oh. He hadn’t thought it would feel that good. He hadn’t thought it would be quite so overwhelming to see her bent over him, eyes closed and mouth around the most sensitive part of him. Taking him in. Tasting him. Her hair tickling the soft skin at the crease of his thigh.
She hesitated, and then her tongue licked at him.
His hips jerked upwards, and she choked.
“Sorry,” he said hoarsely, holding very still. After a moment she bobbed her head. Oh Lord.
That was blasphemy, wasn’t it? But this felt like prayer, it did—this immense silent asking and hoping in his chest. Please, God, let me be this happy.
“You’re so beautiful.” He repeated it until he didn’t know what he was saying, only that he meant it more than he’d ever meant anything in his life. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, with each wet slide of her mouth over his skin, his hands fisted in the sheet.
She went slow and so careful and that was good, like taking small bites of cake to make it last longer, he didn’t want this ever to end.
“I’m going to—”
But she didn’t stop. Instead she tightened her mouth around him and sucked. Her teeth scraped him clumsily, and somehow that was what made him spend.
She sputtered a little, and distantly he thought, I should stop shaking, but he couldn’t.
When it was over, he lay like a beached fish, gasping. He’d been terribly selfish. He’d spilled his seed in her mouth.
She swallowed, making a face, and reached for the flask of lemonade.
“Kiss me first,” he blurted out. “If you don’t mind.”
She grimaced, but she did it. When he slipped his tongue between her lips she mostly tasted like Betsy and her lunch, but a faint flavor lingered, salty and earthy like mushrooms.
He’d spilled his seed in her mouth, and she’d swallowed it. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Do you think you might return the favor?”
“I can think of nothing I’d like better,” he told her honestly.
* * *
When they got back to the bakery, Mrs. Lovejoy was knocking on the kitchen door.
“Oh, there you are!” she said with brittle gaiety. There were dark circles under her eyes. “Do you think we might have some fresh figs? They’re Sir William’s favorite.”
Still warm and relaxed from their day in the sun, Robert laughed. He didn’t mean it in an ill-natured way, but he saw Mrs. Lovejoy stiffen.
“I beg your pardon, ma’am.” He couldn’t quite stop smiling yet. He even felt in charity with Mrs. Lovejoy, since her money would let him propose to Betsy. “Figs are out of season another month at least.”
“Green figs, then.”
“I haven’t any on hand and they take weeks to make.”
By the time she left, Robert had agreed to a little tree for the temple lawn hung with candied figs from the jar in the cold room, and his smile had long gone.