Chapter 28
Vagaries: Frolics, wild rambles.
A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
Francis Grose
Nick cleared the ha-ha and stomped his way toward the copse of woods. It occurred to him that he was exhibiting all the symptoms of a lovesick wretch. He’d told himself he needed fresh air and blessed quiet to think, but the deeper into the woods he wandered, the worse he felt.
Simply put, he was heartbroken. He’d never experienced heartbreak before, at least, not that he was willing to admit to himself. The feeling was . . . singular. And, yes, wretched.
It was as if he’d been stripped of a vital organ, and all that was left in its absence was a hollow pit that ached and longed and could never be soothed or filled. Poetry didn’t do the feeling justice, but he now understood the compulsion to try. Anything to relieve the anguish. For the poets, it was flowery words. For a man of action, it was a midnight ramble.
He should make his way back to the inn where his horse was stabled and ride like hell for London. His sanity likely depended on it. But, then again, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d made a sane decision. Not since he’d laid eyes on Mariana in Paris, and certainly not in coming here tonight.
His feet carried him forward alongside thoughts that refused to be tethered to the back of his mind. An unconscious smile began to play about his lips. Mariana had handled Bertrand Montfort like a master, striding into that room and neutralizing her uncle within minutes. And Montfort . . .
Well, Nick could admit a grudging respect for the man. He’d chosen family over pride. Not many men were big enough to make that choice. Montfort had even voiced an admiration for his niece, a feeling to which Nick could well relate. Mariana was a rare woman.
A discordant thought wedged its way in. He’d waited too long to trust her—with his secrets, with his life, with his heart—and now time had run out. Some wounds ran too deep. Some heartbreaks were destined to forever be aching voids of the soul.
What mawkish rot.
He exhaled a rough breath and glanced around at the night wilderness rendered into various shades of gray by indifferent moonlight. Above, a soft breeze fluttered leaves cast dark slate against an indigo sky. Below, the undergrowth of shrubbery to either side of the path transformed into an indistinct morass by the deep ash darkness. A quiet world, both aurally and visually, surrounded him.
His eye happened upon a tiny grave marker to his left, and he stopped.
Here lies Horace
A beagle after one’s own bacon
He wished he had a slice of ham with him to offer in remembrance. It didn’t seem fitting that anyone should pass Horace’s final resting place without a breakfast meat of one variety or another.
His feet resumed their ramble, his thoughts, too, resuming their newly established pattern of maudlin regret. Hopefully time would erase the maudlin part, but he suspected it had no fix for the regret.
His eye happened upon an object in the middle distance, momentarily diverting his morose state of mind. It was a slight, insignificant object. What lent it significance, however, was the simple fact that it glowed crisp and white against the dark and blurred world around it.
Curiosity piqued, he strode over and snatched it up. A line formed between his eyebrows as his mind registered the long, sinuous object in his hand: a diaphanous silk stocking the color of alabaster.
His head snapped up, his awareness of the surrounding wood suddenly razor sharp. Just ahead, at the bend in the path, he spotted another bright object. The stocking’s mate. Within seconds, he held the matched pair, his feet continuing forward in a determined line.
Here was the thing about these stockings: they belonged to a lady. A servant frolicking with her lover didn’t lose these stockings. If a servant had the good fortune to own a pair of stockings of this quality, she wouldn’t forget them on a country path, no matter how diverting the tryst. A lady left these stockings.
If he didn’t know better, he might think he was following a trail of crumbs. The crumbs in this case being a lady’s undergarments. And not just any lady’s undergarments, he knew deep in his bones.
Again, he scanned the area, but no more lady’s finery jumped out at him. The path before him led to Duck Pond. He would know his way down this trail blindfolded. A hope threatened to blossom in his chest, a hope he must tamp down. He should know better by now. But the heart, it seemed, never learned.
After a few bends of the path, his eye snagged on another object, and his foot tripped on a root. In a single, efficient motion he righted himself and caught the object between forefinger and thumb. This item was smaller, yet more substantive. His heart kicked up a notch when the moon moved from behind a cloud and illuminated the bit of silk in his hand: a lady’s garter—a lady’s fuchsia garter.
A muted, rhythmic splashing caught his ear from just around the next curve of the path. It was coming from Duck Pond. His heart became a steady hammer in his chest. No longer could he deny this budding suspicion. Yet he couldn’t quite allow himself to believe it either.
Slowly, almost reverently, he moved toward the noise. Almost as if he would spook her if he approached without proper intentions.
Proper intentions? What exactly would those be in this circumstance? He and Mariana didn’t have a great record of abiding by proper intentions.
As he ascended the rise to the pond, he encountered more clothes—another garter, a dress, a shift, one boot, then the other. They lay haphazard as if they’d fallen off her body as she walked. Then he reached the top and all speculation, all thought, really, fell away at the sight before him: her naked form floating atop a black void of water, caressed by the mellow light of the moon’s nocturnal rays. His breath suspended in his chest.
“I thought I might find you here,” she called out.
Her words jolted a laugh from him, allowing his breath to release.
Playing along, he returned, “What a coincidence that you happened upon me.”
Her serious gaze traveled across the water, dispelling the moment of levity. “I’m not sure I know you.”
The directness of her words nearly leveled him, confirming what he already knew about his wife. She was formidable and brave. It was a rare strength to make one’s self open and vulnerable. It was a strength he’d never possessed, but one he must summon if he was to slip inside this chance he was being offered. And he heard within her words a chance.
“Is that so very bad?” he asked, his body tense and hot with anticipation of her answer, as if his very life depended on it.
Perhaps it did.
~ ~ ~
“It might be very good,” fell from her lips without thought. She was tired of thinking and overthinking. She was ready to succumb to a feeling, and she had a feeling about Nick.
“The man I thought you were made a lousy husband.”
She began breaststroking toward the shore . . . toward him . . . luxuriating in the cool slide of water as it curved around her bare skin. Just before the water became too shallow to remain fully immersed, she halted her forward momentum and began to tread water. She had something to say to this man, and she preferred to say it from here with an insulating measure of distance between them.
“You couldn’t tell me about Percy,” she said. “I understand that now. You were protecting him from Uncle and . . . you were protecting me. You didn’t want to come between me and a beloved family member. And”—She willed her voice not to crack with sudden emotion—“you’ve been that man all along.”
She searched his face for a reaction, but he allowed her not the slightest glimpse into his thoughts. It was entirely possible that he’d only let her win at their card game in Paris. Unwelcome thought.
“Are you cold?”
Just as she began to shake her head, her body gave an involuntary shiver. “A blanket lies just to your right.”
It didn’t escape her notice that he’d evaded her words as if her praise had disconcerted him. If it was possible to fall more in love with her husband, she just did. This man was unaccustomed to recognition and thanks, his good works carried out alone and in the shadows, necessary and thankless.
Beneath her watchful gaze, he retrieved the blanket and spread it flat. Next, he shrugged off his overcoat and held it open before him. She glided forward. They both knew what was coming. She would step out of the water, naked.
Her feet found purchase on the bottom, and she began placing one foot in front of the other. Boldly, she rose out of the pond, like Botticelli’s Venus. A frisson of excitement pulsed through her at the way his unblinking gaze drank her in.
Tempted by the warm, dry overcoat held out for her, she sidestepped it. Instead, she set foot on the dense, woolen blanket and laid herself flat and supine, face aimed at the stars. Maybe if she squinted hard enough, she could discern within the universe’s depths a map to guide her through this night.
Nick hesitated no more than three heartbeats before joining her on the ground and silently stretching his long body alongside hers, their gazes now pointed in parallel at the night sky above. Awareness suffused the air.
Separated by a space no more substantial than an inch, a magnetic tension pulsed between them, daring them to succumb to the carnality achingly within reach. But, no, she would hold steady to the map she was improvising. She and he were on the border of a specific sort of territory . . . a territory too long unexplored. They must brave the edge.
“What I said in Paris was wrong.” She inhaled and crept closer to the edge. “You are neither inhuman nor ruthless. All this time you were the man I spent an entire decade trying to forget how much I liked. And now I feel as if it might be safe to do so again. Why did you hide yourself, your true self, away from me all these years?” Her gaze steadily trained on the mute stars, she ventured further, “It wasn’t due to your work with the Foreign Office.”
A tense moment passed. Then another. And another. She thought he might not answer, but then he spoke. “From the first moment I saw you, I knew I wasn’t worthy of you.”
“Oh, Nick—”
He shook his head once, and she quieted. She must let him tell his story his way.
“I fled to the Continent in the name of Crown and Country, but mostly I fled you.” He paused, and a nightingale trilled its lovely evening song. “This is the very spot where I first beheld you after that long year on the Continent.”
“An experience seared into my memory, I can assure you.”
“I wanted you to be nothing more than a too curious, too pretty girl—the sort of girl I’d met a thousand times over. I thought to shock you.” She hazarded a stealthy sideways glance and detected an involuntary smile tipping up the side of his mouth. “I thought you would run for your life. Instead, you picked up my clothes, and I knew I had to have you.” The smile fell from his lips. “It was instant.”
Mariana rolled onto her side and propped herself up onto an elbow. She would see his face as he spoke the truth she yearned to hear.
“I wanted to understand this girl and her effect on me, as if it was quantifiable. Yet I knew on some elemental level that you were already mine and always would be”—His eyes found hers. He was at once so very close and so very far away—“You and I simply were. What we shared was inevitable . . . biological.” He paused as if weighing how much to reveal. “Elemental, inevitable, biological. Those were the words I used to describe our bond. They were necessary words. Words intended to create distance. And never once did I allow myself to consider, much less admit, the one word that most accurately described my feeling.”
Within his eyes she saw the ghosts from their past swirling. They were the same ghosts, she suspected, that had haunted her for the last decade.
Suddenly, he, too, rolled onto his side and propped himself up, his body a perfect mirror of hers with one exception: he remained fully clothed.
She sensed the breath hitch in his chest at the sight of her, his gaze unable to resist a roving scan of her naked form. A heady feeling of sensual power coursed through her, one she must suppress. She and he were on the verge of a truth that must reach the surface if there was to be a future for them.
“It was easy to tell myself,” he continued at last, his voice a husky rasp, “that I had to keep my distance because of my connection to the Foreign Office. But the truth was I feared your effect on me. Our bond had come on so fast and so strong. It wasn’t the sort of marriage I wanted. I wanted a Society match. It was my greatest fear that I would have a marriage like—”
“Your parents,” she finished for him, feeling the confirmation of her words resonate deep within her gut.
“They began as a love match. And after the love curdled, they spent the majority of my childhood privately and publicly tearing one another apart. My understanding of love was that it inevitably collapsed, and that pure love eventually transformed into pure hate. From the very beginning, I knew our happy marriage was a mirage.”
“Nick—” she began, but stopped herself. How she ached to ease his torment.
“Yet with each passing day my feeling for you increased.”
“Only increasing your fear that we would repeat the mistakes of your father and mother,” she ventured.
“You were my worst nightmare come to life.”
Infused with a burst of nerves worthy of a green schoolgirl, she pushed herself up to a seated position, reached for the discarded overcoat, and draped it across her shoulders, reflexively inhaling the residue of his fading warmth.
He followed her up, his gaze never once releasing her. Again, they were mirrors of one another, yet he didn’t seem nervous at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. It was this quality that had first drawn her in—his ability to remain ever calm and collected.
“I understood on a fundamental level that if I ever loved someone, I would have to let her go. I never had enough faith in myself, but mostly I never had enough faith in you. You are formidable, funny, intelligent, beautiful, loving, kind, brave . . . You are everything, Mariana. Even when my travels took me to distant lands and across oceans—”
“We still need to discuss the Mississippi riverboat,” she inserted, unable to resist the pull toward humor, long dormant joy releasing within her and bubbling up. She wasn’t nervous at all. In fact, she was ecstatically, effervescently happy.
“—You were my everything. I should have trusted you.”
“No, Nick, you should have trusted us.”
“Can you forgive me?” he asked, his gray gaze at once vulnerable and penetrating.
“I forgive you. After all”—Her buoyant heart threatened to lift out of her chest—“you did give me a Woolly Mammoth.”
She tucked her hands into silk-lined pockets, and the slink of warm, supple metal wrapped around her fingers. Instantly, she knew what lay within her grasp. She pulled it from the pocket’s depths.
“You’ve had it all this time?”
She held up the locket, its pendulous weight gently swaying from side to side, catching the transient shimmer of a moonbeam.
“Yes,” he said without an ounce of apology.
“Why?”
“Because if I couldn’t have you, I could, at least, have a piece of you. It was selfish, but I couldn’t let it go. I couldn’t let you go. Do you remember the words inscribed on the back?”
“You are forever in my blood.”
“A coward’s words.”
“I thought them lovely.”
“You are forever in my blood, Mariana. You are forever in my heart.”
He slid the chain from her slack fingers and leaned forward to reach around her neck. Her eyes fluttered shut, her other senses taking him in: the warm tickle of his fingertips as they worked on the latch; the catch of his breath in her ear; the release of his breath on her neck.
She could remain here, in this place and in this moment, forever. The weight of the locket settled onto her sternum, and she felt whole.
Of course, that feeling could also have something to do with the man whose arms encircled her neck. She sensed, rather than felt, his muscles tense as he began to shift backward. She couldn’t allow that to happen; any amount of space between them was entirely unacceptable.
Her eyes flew open, and her hands shot up, grabbing his wrists, holding them suspended. Their noses nearly touching, eyes locked, breath mingling, she released her grasp and reached up to gently caress his face, hard angles unyielding beneath her touch.
Her fingertips began trailing across his face the way a blind person memorizing each individual detail of a lover might do. It wasn’t enough to know him by sight. She would know him by touch.
“I am here, Nick, a flesh and blood woman, not a mirage. I’m not going anywhere.”
When her fingers found his yielding lips, it was his turn to wrap his fingers around her wrists.
“You never played predictably or safely,” he said into the scant breadth of air separating their mouths. “I thought you were like me. But the truth is I overestimated myself. The truth is I was never as brave or as daring as you. I wasn’t willing to brave the wilds of the heart.”
He pressed first one palm, then her other, to his mouth, sending tiny shocks of pleasure through her.
“I love you.”
All vestiges of the stubborn past fell away, leaving only her and him and but one response. The joy within her wouldn’t be contained. “And I love you.”
He closed the distance between them and touched his lips to hers. It was a tentative, almost reverent, kiss. It was the sort of first kiss young girls dreamt of, because they couldn’t envision how much more a kiss could be.
Mariana didn’t want a dreamy, girlish kiss. She wanted a kiss of flesh and blood and longing and need and raw, unfiltered desire.
She leaned into him and allowed the overcoat to fall off her shoulders. As the full length of her naked torso made contact against him, her hard nipples pressed into the fine lawn of his shirt.
She was a flesh and blood woman. She might be his wife, but she was his lover, too. This new marriage would begin as she meant it to go on.
Just as she moved to match action with intention, he moaned, grabbed her hips, and set her away from him. Her eyes flew open on a squeak of protest.
When he shot to his feet, it was next a gasp of shock that issued forth from the rounded “O” of her lips. Before she could formulate a thought, he was kicking off boots, pulling his shirt over his head, and discarding his trousers in an inelegant frenzy of movement uncharacteristic of the calm and collected Nick she knew. It was fascinating.
She reclined onto her elbows and took in the view of him standing utterly and completely naked, his body taut and magnificent. She didn’t know whether to feel aghast or amused.
Quite unexpectedly, she felt aroused.
“You’re wilder and braver than I ever had the courage to be,” he began, his words nearly tumbling over each other in a rush. “I vow to always stand naked and unafraid before you.”
“Oh dear, that might make for some uncomfortable dinner parties,” she couldn’t help quipping.
“Always, Mariana,” he continued, his eyes burning bright with love. “You are forever in my blood. You are forever in my heart.”
His vulnerable sincerity reached out and grabbed her heart. She suspected it would never let go. She rose to her feet and tipped her head back to meet his gaze. “We shall be wild and brave together.”
This time when his lips claimed hers, the kiss was everything a kiss should be.
And more.
It was everything.