She was pleased when he leant over to snuff the bedside candle, and pleased too as his fingers unbuttoned her bodice, exposing the lawn and the lace of her chemise. Unpeeled, she thought, as the cold air gave her goose-bumps, enhanced by the thought of what might come next and her whole insides tightening with delight.
He had not removed his tattered shirt, but the lacings on his trousers were gone, as were the boots he had worn. She felt almost fully dressed in contrast. The difference made her writhe.
‘Hurry.’ The word was out even as she thought it and she saw the quick flash of white teeth as he drew the yellow silk of her dress down over her body. Only lawn and lace kept her from him now, and she knew he knew it too as his breathing quickened.
His hand lifted her petticoat and bundled it into a wad, before dealing with her drawers. Easily disposed of, the flimsy silk removed without exertion.
Only her now, and his hands against her thighs.
When she went to move he kept her still.
‘Please?’ Soft. Honest. No force within it.
She lay back again and waited as his fingers found what it was they sought and when her head arched her body followed, sweat beading the channel between her breasts as she reached for the stars and the sky and the place in her life where all was good and true and right.
‘Now.’ Just now. Just this time. Again. The squeezing knots of lushness washed across her, the languid ache of perfection echoing in her very bones.
Taris had never met a woman before who was so responsive, so quick to delight, so unheedful of her nakedness and pleasure.
Already she turned to him seeking, and his erection grew against the satin skin of her stomach, the bedclothes kicked away on to the floor and only firelight between them. He could see the flicker of the flames against greyness and feel the heat of passion marking the contact of her hand against his bottom. Her tongue lathed his neck, joining whispered pleadings for more.
No hesitation in it. No demand for protection or heed for safety. Just him and his seed filling her, the ease of their coupling natural and right, the rhythm of his thrusts finding a home he had never had, taken and given, deeper before spiralling up and up, his breath fast and her hips rocking and the feel of her teeth as he climaxed, her muscles milking his hardness until he collapsed against the mattress, struggling to find a breath.
Laughing. His laughter against the silence of night and the carefulness of years and the unexpected paradise of her body.
‘Beatrice?’ He whispered her name when he could and she whispered his back, two people caught in the question of flesh and the elation of freedom and the bone-deep rightness of what had just happened between them.
‘Bea-all-and-end-all.’
And then they slept.
She could not believe that he was gone when she woke up. Could not believe that he had crept through her house without awakening her as he let himself out. How had he got home? How had he been able to negotiate a distance that he had no knowledge of? But the first rays of dawn were just touching the eastern sky and the space beside her was empty.
‘Lord help me,’ she whispered, the thought of her wanton abandon sending shivers of uncertainty through her this morning. Throughout all the years with Frankwell she had lain like a wooden doll on a marriage bed that had been the antithesis of what had happened last night.
‘Lord, please help me,’ she repeated again. Would he think her a whore? Was that why he had left? Would he think her a woman who was promiscuous and easy, a lady who would cross the boundaries without a single thought for consequences?
Consequences? Did two nights of loving mean she was now Taris Wellingham’s mistress? His woman to use when fancy struck him? A lady kept for pleasure in his bedroom?
‘No.’ She shook her head, though a darker thought lingered. Could she refuse him should he come back? She was becoming exactly the woman she had sworn she never would be again. A woman with no say over the dominion of her own body. Last time in hate and this time in lust.
Which was better?
Frankwell at least had placed a ring on her finger and the law condoned a husband’s needs in whatever form that they should take.
But now, here, in the morning light with a bed that was rumpled and musky, Beatrice felt both sullied and stupid.
A woman who would preach the doctrine of independence and then ignore every single tenet of it? She pulled the sheet around her nakedness and sat, the sight of her clothes strewn around her bed making her sigh.
Abandonment had its repercussions.
Her head fell against her hands and she wept both for the woman she had lost and for the man that she had found. And then she slept again.
Taris counted the steps between Bea’s bedroom and the stairs and then counted the number of stairs to the front door.
Perfectly easy, he thought, as his hand had found the handle and he let himself out.
Jack was waiting on the front step just as they had arranged.
‘It’s a dangerous game you play, my friend.’
‘How so?’
‘Mrs Bassingstoke is a woman of some reputation. One word of this gets out and she will be ruined.’
He was quiet.
‘There are houses in Covent Garden with girls whose names would not be so destroyed…’
‘Enough, Jack. Where’s the carriage?’
‘Around the corner. I didn’t wish to risk anybody seeing it.’
‘Thank you.’
‘If Asher learns of any of this he will have your head on the block.’
‘My brother’s newly formed morality is no concern of mine.’
‘You hold the Wellingham name, Taris. It is simply that he tries to protect it and for a man who has rutted his way until the early hours of the morning you’re surprisingly taciturn.’
‘Leave it, aye?’
They walked the rest of the way in silence.
Arriving home, Taris went straight to his room and lay down on his bed. He did not change his clothes because he wanted to keep Bea’s smell with him. Violets and laughter and freedom. The smell of abandonment and the joy of sex!
One hand fell over his eyes, shutting out any light at all and giving him rest.
Neither shapes nor colour. Just the blackness to think in.
He had left because he knew if he had been there in the morning things would have been difficult and in the break of day his presence would raise questions that a night-time assignation would not.
Still, he thought, perhaps he should have left something. As an explanation. Not a note, because it had been long since he had written anything in any shape and form but…something. He had not thought of it then in his haste and his worry. It was only now, when he had time to ponder and remember, that the idea had struck him. But what exactly could he have left because, lying here, he had no idea as to what his feelings were?
Beatrice was a woman who did not want a dalliance or a meaningless tryst, just as she had said time and time again that she desired nothing permanent either. Not a frivolous woman or a woman prone to a quick affair and yet not one who demanded anything else more enduring.
A puzzle. And he knew that the puzzle was linked somehow to the husband who had died only a few months back.
Corrected.
My husband said that if I ate more that I should appeal to him better
Clues that something had not been right. He remembered Asher’s words at the ball when he had said that Beatrice and her husband had not mixed much and that few people in the area had a good knowledge of them.
The town they had lived in had been Ipswich. Perhaps it was time to find out something about the late and very mysterious Mr Bassingstoke.
Three hours later with the intrusion of Ashe and Emerald and Lucinda and his mother into the breakfast room, Taris decided that his home in Kent, which was a little removed from all the other Wellinghams, definitely had its advantages. He was also glad that they would be repairing to Falder come the morrow for he felt like a goldfish might in a glass bowl, the curiosity of his family firmly fixed upon him and the questions that they asked leading to one person.
Beatrice-Maude Bassingstoke.
‘Lucinda said that she was unable to have children, Taris. A sad state of affairs in a woman nearing thirty.’ His mother’s tone was more than critical, though Emerald seemed to be leaping to the defence of Bea.
‘I think that would be an enormous sadness, Mama, and if a medical problem is the culprit then it is hardly Mrs Bassingstoke’s fault.’
The wheelchair that Alice rarely got out of these days creaked as she turned it. ‘I did not intimate that it was, Emerald. I only think that with such knowledge a liaison would be foolish to consider, especially if one needed heirs to consolidate properties.’
Taris stood and walked across to the window. Here the shadows were not so thick and the sun today allowed him to see the rough shape of his hand as he laid it out against the glass.
‘I am not certain where you are receiving your information, Mother, but I have no intention at the moment of providing heirs for any of my properties. Ruby, Ashton and Ianthe are quite sufficient as my legally designated recipients.’
Asher joined the fray. ‘ You are thirty-one, Taris, and the Earl of Griffin has asked me to approach you regarding the future of his daughter.’
‘A lovely girl,’ his mother exclaimed, ‘and so very convenient with her lands bordering your own.’
‘She has few opinions on anything,’ Emerald interjected. ‘I doubt you would be much entertained by her company, Taris.’