‘To start with I will build another house up here.’
‘A good choice, then. When you begin it I’ll give you a hand. I have some cattle you might like to look at, too. A new breeding programme has given me great rewards and...’
Adelaide turned her face into the sun as they were speaking of farming and profit and new breeds of livestock. There could be windows here facing the valley and wide doors to be able to access the lawn and gardens. To plan and build a home was exciting and hopeful, and something she had not thought she would have wanted to do.
She was taken from her reveries by Alexander Watkins saying goodbye and asking them both to come calling on his wife and himself soon.
‘Thank you, that would be lovely.’ Adelaide was quick to give him a smile as he left.
‘I could help him with his eczema.’
‘The red and itchy skin on his cheeks?’
‘I will make him up a salve and see how he goes with it. I had another patient once at Northbridge with the same complaint, only worse, and I should like to see if it clears up as quickly and completely as hers did.’
Gabriel Hughes stood before her, the light burnishing his face. All the many stories told of him by the ton surged into memory: his finesse, his conquests, his name whispered soft in the halls by those who watched him. A lover of great repute who’d left a trail of broken hearts behind him as he passed.
He was married now, though. To her. The ring on the third finger of his left hand caught the sun. She had seen it in the window of Phillips, the jewellers on Bond Street, and had gone in and bought it, a diamond set in the cut of its gold. Bound to each other through life and death, for better or for worse. For richer or for poorer.
He must have seen her worry for he reached out and took her hand, his skin warm from the sun.
A start. A direction.
She wished he might kiss her, hard and slow and well. But he did not. Rather he tucked her arm into his and led her back to the annex behind the Manor.
Chapter Fifteen
An hour after supper he knocked at the door of the chamber Adelaide was using and waited until she came to open it. She had let her hair down, he saw, and the chestnut of it curled to her waist.
‘I thought we might talk.’ He smiled, the edges of his eyes creasing in humour.
‘Here?’ Uncertainty lay in her query.
‘It’s private.’ His glance went to a book left open on the small table near the chair. When she hurried over to close it he caught sight of small neat rows of writing.
A diary and full of the worry he could see so plainly on her face? Once he had written his thoughts and dreams down, too. God, that seemed like for ever ago.
‘It is poetry. I am certain that they are dreadful and I have never shown another soul, but...I write them anyway, sometimes two or three a day and then not for months.’
‘But today the muse struck?’
‘With a vengeance. I imagine I shall burn them all before the week’s end, but for now they help.’
‘Help make sense of what is between us?’
Her smile dulled. ‘Or of what is not, my lord?’
She was braver than any woman he had ever met and much more direct. Under the valour he saw other things, too, fright and concern the most noticeable amongst them. He should tell her all that he was and was not but even the thought made him blanch.
‘I had imagined...’ She stopped and then began again. ‘I had imagined it different...the intimacy of a marriage.’
‘What was it you had envisaged?’
The corners of her mouth turned in a smile.
* * *
‘This,’ she answered, bringing her arms around his neck. ‘And this,’ she added, touching her lips to his before pressing down, the magic of him exploding into every part of her.
She had no idea quite what happened next given her lack of any experience, but she had read numerous romance books from the library and could guess at some of the ramifications of what she was doing.
But he surprised her as he dragged her forward, slanting her mouth to his own and tasting. No restraint in it, either, though there was anger, too, amidst the need as his fingers threaded through her hair. Their breath combined in the closeness and his heart beat like a drum, pounding between them with such a force that she pulled back.
‘Adelaide.’ Her name before his mouth returned, his tongue forcing itself in and then she was falling and falling outside of herself and deep into the ache of promise and hope. No boundaries, no notion of where he stopped and she began, a mutual sharing at the well of wonder. Nothing mattered save them here, pressed against each other and asking for whatever they would give, or take. Just lust, the roiling truth of it in the way he deepened the kiss, brokering no refusal and accepting no passive response.
She let him in without holding anything back; he was strong and beautiful, enigmatic and dangerous. All those flavours and more, the sadness in him and the anger were a part of what he showed her, too, as he let her understand just what one could know from a kiss.
And when she thought she might begin to comprehend, he held her still, the shaky sound of her own breath filling the room as he broke the contact.
‘I am sorry.’ He whispered this as she closed her eyes, the red warm world of sensation lessening, blurred by disbelief.
I am sorry? Sorry because he could not utter the words she might have liked to hear, the forever words, the loving words? Sorry because she could feel the tremble of unease that ran through him as easily as if it were her own?
* * *
Adelaide’s nails dug into his arms and he knew she wanted more. His heart pounded as noticeably as it always did when he touched her, but his member had not risen. Nay, it lay warm in the crease of his groin, a quiet thing of no mind for all he’d felt as he kissed her.
The anger in him seethed, and the shame, the manners he usually held on to squeezing through the fury. He needed to be away from such failure, to ride against the wind and the rain and the open air until the roiling unfairness of what had happened to him settled and he could cope again.
But he didn’t dare to leave her here, alone with her quick mind to pull all the pieces together and make a sense of them. He wanted neither pity nor help. He didn’t wish for mesmerising or sympathy, either, hapless words against a condition that was unchangeable.
His mind wanted her, God, it did without a doubt, but his body and flesh had not made the connection. Would they ever?
Tonight she had initiated the play with the flush of sex on her cheeks and the look of wonder in her eyes, as beguiling as hell and as sensual. Six months ago he would have been on her, emptying his seed until well into the night, a shared pleasure, a mutual satisfaction. But he was dead now from the waist down, withered and perished and numb.
Gabriel Hughes. Impotent.
How people would laugh should that come to be known.
By anyone at all.
He set her back from him, making sure that she could stand and was glad that she looked away. He could not answer questions or feign humour. He could barely even manage to speak.
‘I shall see you tomorrow, sweetheart.’ The endearment rolled off his tongue unmindful and he bowed slightly before leaving the room.
* * *
Sweetheart? Was she truly that? Adelaide breathed out. Hard.
If so, why did he not stay to take his ease, and lie beside her? Could he not see that she wanted him to? Should she simply say it to him? Stay with me. Hold me. Show me what it is to love a woman well.
Her only experience at a sexual intimacy had been Kenneth Davis’s brutal attack on her all those years ago and in the darkness and terror she had no real idea as to what had happened to his body. Gabriel was soft and slow and burning, his hands against her skin as if they wanted to be there, as if she were precious and beautiful and needed.
She still felt the shock of his mouth and the silver flame of light that rose to envelop her, his breath and her breath one, and an age-old knowledge of each other that needed no formal tuition.
She felt quickened somehow, waiting for more, a need that had no beginning or end, but just was.
Her aunts could have told her what this all meant had they still been alive, with all their reading and far-ranging knowledge, but there was no one else to ask. No sisters or cousins. No friends whom she might have confided in, either.
Alone.
She had always been that. Even at Northbridge in the care of her uncle, her fear of venturing out further after Kenneth Davis’s attack growing through the years, rather than diminishing. The village girls treated her with respect and her patients with more, but she had never had true friendship until now with Gabriel Hughes. She had told him her deepest secret and enjoyed every single conversation and she had married him for ever.
Before she knew what she was doing she had a thick shawl around her shoulders and, taking a candle, opened the door and followed him.
* * *
Gabriel was tired of it all.
He wanted to enjoy his wife in the deepest sense of doing so, with his whole body and his mind. Tonight had left him tense and wound up as tight as any spring. He ached to know how far Adelaide might let him go and if his body naked against her own would respond in the way he had long since forgotten.
‘God, please help me.’ He whispered this into the smallness of his chamber and crossed to the window.
It was warm and he took off his cravat and unbuttoned his shirt.
He saw her reflection in the glass as she stood behind him, the pale of her face and the candle flickering. He brought the folds of linen together so that at least his chest was not bare. Then he turned.