Mary Balogh - A Summer to Remember

He opened his mouth to speak and discovered that he had no idea what he would say.

She made no move to help him.

They stared at each other.

And because his mind really was quite terrifyingly blank, he leaned forward and kissed her instead of talking. Her lips softened and pressed back lightly against his.

“Lauren,” he said.

“Kit.” After a few moments she rescued him. “Why are you here? Why have you come?”

The dampness in the air had turned to drizzle.

“To instruct you to hurry back to the house,” he said, “if you wish to listen to Kilbourne. To suggest the cottage as a closer destination if you prefer the advice of the countess.” He grinned again.

“Kit.” She frowned. “I did not want to see you again. I really did not.”

He swallowed and set a hand against the rock beyond her shoulder. He lowered his head and noticed idly that the sand was destroying the shine on his riding boots—and he had come without his valet.

“You are still here,” he said. “Still at Newbury.” He had braced himself for the possibility that she would already be gone.

“Only until tomorrow,” she said. “Tomorrow I will be going to Bath to choose a house. I am going to live there.”

“Is that what you really want?” he asked.

“You know it is,” she said. “Kit, why have you come? Where is Lady Freyja?”

“Freyja?” He looked up at her with a frown. “At Lindsey Hall, I suppose. Why?” But he understood before she could answer. “There is nothing between Freyja and me, Lauren. There was once very briefly, but it was a long time ago. Now there is nothing. Nothing whatsoever and never will be.”

“Yet you suit,” she said.

“Do we?” He considered the matter. “Yes, I suppose there is a similarity. That does not mean we would suit. We would not. Did this misconception have anything to do with your breaking off our betrothal?”

“Of course not.” She sighed and leaned back against the rock. “It was all arranged even before I met Lady Freyja, remember? Kit, why are you here?”

“There is something I need to tell you,” he said. “Something I should have told you before you left Alvesley. Something you ought to know whatever you decide to do with the knowledge. Once I have told you, you have only to say the word, Lauren, and I will walk back along this beach and up to the cliff top and into the village and I will never trouble you again, never try to see you again. It is a promise.”

“Kit—”

He set one finger across her lips and looked into her eyes.

“I want to marry you,” he said. “I want it more than I have ever wanted anything else in my life. For many reasons. But only one of them really matters to me. It is the one I did not tell you of because it seemed somehow dishonorable after you had carried out your side of the bargain so sweetly and so well. I love you. That is it, you see, the part I omitted. Just that. I love you. I do not believe it can really hurt you to know. It lays no obligation on you. I just needed to say it. I’ll leave now if you wish.”

She said nothing, just pressed her head back harder against the rock and gazed at him with her lovely violet eyes. The drizzle was turning to light rain. It was running in droplets down her face. But it was not raindrops that were welling in her eyes.

“Tell me to go,” he whispered.

She started to say something and then swallowed. She tried again. “I do not need you, you know,” she said.

“I know.” His heart was down in his boots somewhere.

“I do not need anyone,” she said. “I can do this alone, this living business. All my life I have shaped myself into being what others expect me to be so that I will belong somewhere, be accepted somewhere, be loved by someone. When I knew I could not belong to Neville, I felt as if I had been cut adrift in the universe. I anchored myself by retreating into an even more rigid gentility. I don’t need to do any of that any longer. And I do have you to thank. But I don’t need you any longer, Kit. I am strong enough on my own.”

“Yes.” He bowed his head and closed his eyes again. “Yes, I know.”

“I am free, you see,” she said, “to love or to withhold love. Love and dependence need no longer be the same thing to me. I am free to love. That is why I love you, and it is the way I love you. If you have come here, Kit, because you think you owe me something, because you believe I might crumble without your protection, then go away again with my blessing and find happiness with someone else.”

“I love you,” he said again.

She gazed at him for a long time, her eyes still swimming in tears, and then she smiled, very slowly, and very, very radiantly.

He wrapped his arms about her waist, lifted her off her feet, and twirled her about in circles, while she braced her hands on his shoulders, flung her head back to expose her face to the rain, and laughed.

Kit whooped, and because the echo from the cliffs was so impressive, he threw back his head too and howled like a wolf.

How is your grandmama?” “Busy setting out the family christening robes.” “Oh.”

“I am to marry you before Christmas, get you with child by Christmas, and be pacing the floors of Alvesley by this time next year, tearing out my hair in clumps and wearing out my boot leather while you deliver our first boy. Strict orders. Why do you think I really came? Just to tell you that I love you?”

“Foolish of me.”

By the time sanity had returned down on the beach, it was raining in earnest and they had linked hands and made a dash for the cottage. Lauren had thrown off her cloak and shoes—her bonnet and gloves, she remembered too late, were still wedged in somewhere at the foot of the great rock. She was rubbing her hair with a towel and watching Kit, minus his drab riding coat, stooping down on his haunches before the fireplace, building a fire with the wood and kindling beside it.

If this were a dream, she thought, she hoped she would not wake up for a long, long while—like the rest of her life.

“Have you read your mother’s letters?”

“Yes, all of them. She is not at all respectable, Kit. And that is a massive understatement. She sounds so delightful that my heart aches. But you may want to think twice about allying yourself with her daughter.”

“Ah,” he said, reaching for the tinderbox and setting a light to the fire, “that explains a few things. It was her daughter, I believe, who swam naked in the lake at Alvesley, almost casting me into a fit of the vapors and drowning me. It was her daughter who came after me on one occasion to spend the night alone with me in the gamekeeper’s hut. Perhaps she is too shockingly fast for me.”

“Ki-it—”

He got to his feet, brushed his hands together, and turned a laughing face to her. She rubbed harder with the towel.

“And just look at you now,” he said.

She looked downward and saw in some embarrassment that her damp dress had molded itself to her body. She laughed.

“We cannot have you catching a chill,” he said, glancing through the open doorway into the small bedchamber within, “and coughing and sneezing your way through our wedding. It would just not be romantic.” He strode off into the bedchamber and came back with a blanket. “Come here by the fire.”

She came and stood meekly before him while he stripped off her clothes, looking at her frankly and appreciatively as he did so and before he wrapped the blanket about her. He talked to her all the while.

“Portfrey was clutching an infant,” he said. “They cannot afford a nurse?”

She chuckled. “The baby is absolutely adorable,” she said, “and is shamelessly spoiled by us all. I have never seen Elizabeth happier or his grace so relaxed. And Lily can never have enough of her new half-brother.”

“Are you now in charity with the countess, then?” he asked.

“I have always recognized that under other circumstances I would have liked her enormously,” she said. “She is sunny-natured and unaffected and loving. She has always been unfailingly kind and sympathetic to me. Now I can love her.”

“And Kilbourne?”

He drew her against him, opening back the edges of the blanket as he did so. She could feel his superfine coat, his riding breeches, his leather boots against her naked flesh and felt a rush of awareness more intense than if he had been unclothed.

“I love him too, Kit,” she said. “I always have and always will. If we had married on that day, I believe we would have had a good marriage. I believe I would have been content and would have thought myself happy. I would never have realized that my love for him was that of a devoted sister. I would never have wondered why I could feel no—no passion for him. I would simply have thought that was my nature.”

“But it is not?” She had tipped her face up, and he was bent over it, his eyes roaming it.

“No.” She shook her head.

“Lord help me,” he said. “You don’t feel a passion for me, do you, Lauren? And expect me to act on it?”

She laughed. And she did something quite outrageous—she rubbed herself against him and gazed at him through half-closed eyes. Desire stabbed down along her inner thighs.

“Devil take that rain,” he said. “It has trapped me in a deserted cottage with a woman who has conceived a passion for me. And no one is going to come riding to my rescue either. I distinctly remember someone up at the house telling someone else that you had asked not to be disturbed down here. And then someone telling me that I would have all the privacy I needed to say what I had to say to you. Now what do I do?”

She loved the way he could hold his features solemn, even alarmed, while his eyes danced with laughter.

“Absolutely nothing at all,” she told him. She lowered her voice as her hands found the top buttonhole of his coat. “Yet.”

He shivered elaborately and his eyes danced.

“I begin to think,” he said, “that I could grow to like women who are free to love.”

“And I begin to think,” she said, still in her low, velvet voice, “that you are about to be driven to the brink of madness by one of them, my lord.”

“Oh, goody,” he murmured agreeably.

She opened back his coat and pushed it off his shoulders and down his arms while he stood relaxed and unmoving. Waistcoats, she discovered then, had far too many buttons, all of them small, each with an accompanying buttonhole that seemed smaller yet. She did not hurry. She occupied herself while her hands worked by feathering kisses over his throat and neck above his cravat. She ran her tongue along the seam of the long scar beneath his jaw and surprised an epithet from him that was definitely not suitable for the ears of a lady. She kissed his mouth, which he held relaxed. She prodded her tongue beyond his lips, exploring the soft, moist inner flesh with its tip. She stretched her tongue deep into his mouth.

“I have won praise and commendation from high places,” he said conversationally when his mouth was free, her eyes being needed to discover the secrets of the front flap of his breeches, “for military feats that required only half the courage and discipline I am displaying this afternoon. I hope you realize that you are in the presence of extraordinary heroism.”

Sometime during the last ten minutes or so, she had lost her blanket, Lauren realized. It did not matter. The fire had burned up and taken the damp chill from the air. In fact the cottage felt almost uncomfortably warm.

“A word of advice,” he said, “from a man who has been undressing me for almost thirty years. Tackle the boots first. Would you like me to be a participant yet? Shall I haul them off for you?”

“No.” She kneeled down on the floor.

“An erotically submissive posture,” he commented with a sigh, raising one foot. “Entirely deceptive, of course. Yes, you have to tug hard. You are not about to break my ankle, I assure you. I feel inclined to urge you to hurry so that we can reach the good part. But alas, you are turning all my preconceptions on their head, Lauren. This tortoiselike seduction feels excruciatingly good.”

“And this is only the beginning,” she promised, looking up at him from beneath her lashes before pulling off the second boot and standing up again.

“Witch!” he said. “I strolled into Lady Mannering’s ballroom that night all unsuspecting, poor innocent that I was. You looked like a perfectly harmless lady. Respectable, prim.”