The Escape by Mary Balogh
8
Ben had been aware almost as soon as he entered the room that Mrs. McKay had been crying. There had been no trace of tears left, it was true, but a slight redness and puffiness about her eyes had betrayed her. He had set out to distract her with conversation and had ended up coming very near to flirting with her.
That had not been his intention when he had decided to come. Well, of course it had not. He had expected a very dull, very formal visit with two ladies, not one. He really ought to have left immediately after he knew she was unchaperoned.
But she had been crying. And it had been apparent that she did not want to be alone. So he had stayed—very unwisely. Being alone with her here felt very different from the way being alone with her two days ago in Bea’s flower garden had felt.
Dash it all.
He had not wanted a woman in six years—not women in general, and not any woman in particular. He had even been a little uneasy about it. Had his injuries included the death of his sexual appetites? But he had been only a little uneasy since he knew he could never offer himself in marriage to any woman—not his broken self, anyway, and he was never going to be fully healed. He really could not bear the thought of offering himself outside of marriage either, since no amount of money would completely compensate for the physical revulsion any woman must surely feel if she was forced to be intimate with him.
He watched her in silence as she stood at the window. Her very dark, almost black hair was dressed in a simple knot at her neck. A few tendrils had pulled loose at the sides. They were uncrimped and hung long and straight to her shoulders. Her face was beautiful anyway. It needed no adornment. Her hideous black crepe dress could not hide the lush curves of her figure or the elegant perfection of her posture.
She had Gypsy blood, and she was sensitive about it. She had half expected he would want to leave once he knew.
She was, he thought, a woman desperately in need of a friend. And friendship was something he was quite happy to offer—for a short while, at least, until he went away.
The maid returned with a tray and set it down on a table before withdrawing. Mrs. McKay turned her head to acknowledge its arrival though she did not immediately move from the window.
“It is a dreary world out there,” she said. “It makes one thankful after all to be indoors with a fire burning in the hearth.”
“It is not dreary.” He drew his canes toward him and pulled himself to his feet as she watched. The dog scrambled up and looked at him, tail waving expectantly. Ben crossed the room to Mrs. McKay’s side. “Above the clouds, you know, there is nothing but blue sky and sunshine.”
“A fine consolation, indeed,” she said, turning her face back to the window and looking up, “when it is impossible to get up there to see.”
“A hot air balloon?” he suggested.
“Ugh!” She shuddered. “There would be rain on the way up to the clouds, and then the mist and dampness of the clouds themselves.”
“And the glory of the sunshine when we burst through to the other side,” he said.
“We? Would we go together, then?”
“Oh, I think so,” he said. “I was a military officer, of course, but I do not believe I could bellow I told you so quite loudly enough for you to hear me from down here.”
“It would be horribly cold despite the sunshine,” she said. “Have you never seen snow on mountaintops when it is warm on the plain?”
“You are determined to be pessimistic,” he told her. “We would take fur robes with us and huddle together inside them.”
“Together?”
She turned her head again. Her face was very close to his.
“One of the best sources of heat,” he explained, “is body heat. I daresay it would be very chilly indeed up there.”
“But we would be warm and snug together inside our furs.”
“Yes. We would enjoy double our individual body heat.”
He could almost feel her breath on his face. And her body heat. And here he was flirting again, but far more blatantly this time. Though he had not meant to. He had meant to cheer her up, to coax a smile or a laugh out of her.
“Where would we go?” she asked.
“Far, far away.” His eyes dipped to her lips when she moistened them with her tongue.
“Ah.” Her voice was a breathless whisper. “The very best place to go.”
“Yes.”
“Together.”
“Yes.”
Her eyes roamed over his face. They were large and dark and long-lashed and fathomless.
“It is longer than six years since I was kissed properly,” she said.
“Properly.” He swallowed. “And for me too—the same length of time. Perhaps we were both kissing for the last time on the same day at the same hour, more than six years ago, but we were kissing other people, not each other.”
“Your colonel’s niece?”
“Your husband?”
They both smiled.
“It is far too long a time,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Perhaps,” she said, “we ought to do something about it.”
He tried to think of all the reasons they should not—or at least all the reasons he should not.
“I am sorry.” Her cheeks flushed and she turned her head rather jerkily to gaze through the window again.
He tipped his head slightly to one side and kissed her. And one thing was immediately certain. His sexual appetite had not been killed or even suffered damage. Her lips were soft and warm and moist. They were parted and slightly trembling. She turned fully toward him, and her hands came to rest on his shoulders.
He opened her mouth with his own and slid his tongue inside. She sucked it inward and pressed it to the roof of her mouth with her own tongue. He felt a pleasure so exquisite that he almost forgot about his cursed canes.
And then her face was a few inches away and her hands were on either side of his face, her fingers pushing into his hair. Her eyes were luminous and steady on his, her lips full and rosy and still moist and still inviting.
“I am sorry,” he said. “I am handicapped. I cannot hold you.”
“Perhaps that is a good thing at this precise moment.” She smiled suddenly and looked young and very pretty. “Or perhaps it is just that we are both starved and any kiss would feel good.”
“A lowering thought.”
She dropped her hands to her sides, still smiling. But reality was intruding.
“I really ought not to have stayed when I discovered that Lady Matilda had gone,” he said. “You will be horrified when you relive this afternoon after I have left.”
“You presume to know my thoughts, do you?” she asked him. “My future thoughts? This was a horrid day before you came, Sir Benedict. I do not at all regret that Matilda has gone, but I do resent the fact that she left me feeling as if I were somehow in the wrong. And then it rained and I knew we could not ride. And the rain was dreary and I felt restless and lonely and utterly self-pitying. Self-pitying people are not pleasant company, even to themselves. And then, when I was at my lowest ebb, you came. And you somehow coaxed me into talking to you as though you were a trusted confidant. And then you flirted with me. For a few moments you bore me off with you to the sunshine above the clouds in a hot air balloon, wrapped together in warm furs and bound for a place far, far away. And then you kissed me. I am no longer at a low ebb. You can have no idea what I will feel after you have left. But I do assure you it will not be horror.”
Good Lord! He thought she might find later today that she had deceived herself. He felt distinctly uncomfortable himself. This was not the way a gentleman behaved. “Your sherry will not be getting cold,” she said, moving past him, “but my tea certainly will. Shall I put some biscuits on a plate for you?”
“Just one,” he said as he followed her more slowly across the room. “Thank you.”
She fetched him his biscuit and sherry while her dog settled at his feet again.
“How old were you when you married?” he asked.
She smiled at him as she sat down and picked up her cup and saucer. “You are good at arithmetic, are you, Sir Benedict? Let me save you the bother of doing mental calculations. I was seventeen. Matthew and I were together for a year before his regiment was sent to the Peninsula. I spent the next year at Leyland Abbey. After Matthew was brought home, we came here, where we lived for five years before his passing a little over four months ago. That makes me twenty-four.”
“You saw through my ruse, did you?” He laughed. “So you have been unkissed and celibate since the age of eighteen.”
“I can do arithmetic too,” she said as the flush deepened in her cheeks. “You have been unkissed and celibate since the age of twenty-three.”
He sipped his sherry. “This is not a very proper conversation for a respectable drawing room, is it?”
“This has never been called a drawing room,” she told him. “But you are quite right. Matilda would have an apoplexy if she could hear us. So would Lady Gramley, I suspect.”
“Lord, yes.” He put his plate down on the table beside him, the biscuit untouched. He set his sherry glass beside it, only two sips gone from it, and got to his feet again. “I believe I left common sense, not to mention my manners, outside in the rain when I stepped into Bramble Hall a while ago, Mrs. McKay. My being here alone with you is improper and would surely cause talk, even scandal if anyone were to learn of it. It must not happen again. I would not make you the object of unsavory gossip among your neighbors.”
There was a twinge of something to her smile. Scorn? Sadness?
“You are perfectly right,” she said. “But I will not regret this afternoon for all that, and I hope you will not. You have lifted my spirits when they were terribly low, and you have made me feel like a woman for the first time in years. I will remember our conversation and our kiss, brief and relatively innocent though it was. I will relive it far more often than I ought, I am sure. But you are right nevertheless. It must not be repeated. Will you give my regards to your sister?”
“I will,” he promised as she pulled the bell rope and then directed the maid to have Sir Benedict Harper’s carriage brought up to the door. “I am sorry about the ride. Perhaps we can try again on a better day. With Beatrice, of course.”
He reached out a hand to her and she took it.
“Do come to call upon Bea whenever you feel lonely,” he said. “She will be delighted. You could perhaps accompany her from time to time when she visits the sick. No one could argue that that is not an unexceptionable activity for a widow in mourning.”
“Thank you,” she said. “You are kind.” And yet there was an edge to her voice now that he could not quite interpret.
He turned and made his way to the door. He felt clumsy, even grotesque, knowing that her eyes were upon him.
He sat in the carriage a few minutes later and raised a hand to her as she stood in the open doorway of the house, the dog beside her, wagging its tail.
So much for offering her his friendship for a while. He had ruined that possibility by being damned selfish and flirting with her and even kissing her. Continuing to visit her alone was out of the question now that he knew she would be alone. It was a shame. She needed companionship. So did he. But a single man and a single woman could not be companions without courting scandal. And justifiably so, it seemed.
Perhaps he could find her other companions, ones who were neither single nor male.
Two days later Lady Gramley paid Samantha an afternoon call, bringing with her Mrs. Andrews, the vicar’s wife, and cheerful conversation and practical suggestions for how Mrs. McKay might involve herself in village life without in any way compromising her status as a newly bereaved widow. Before they left, Samantha’s name had been added to the list of official visitors to the sick, and she had become a member of two committees, one for organizing the church summer bazaar, and one for decorating the altar. She had been urged to pay social calls at Robland Park and the vicarage whenever she wished and was assured that she would soon find herself invited elsewhere too.
“I spoke with my husband about your situation, Mrs. McKay,” Mrs. Andrews told her, “and he assured me that neither church nor society would ever frown upon a widow involving herself in good works and the quiet exchange of companionship with her peers, even during the early months of her bereavement. And you may believe me when I tell you that the vicar is a stickler for correct behavior.”
Samantha suspected that Sir Benedict Harper was behind this visit, and she was grateful. Being busy in a way that was useful to others would surely still her restlessness and help her fulfill her desire to live again, not merely to exist from day to day. And perhaps making new friends here was not going to be so very hard after all.
But Sir Benedict did not come again. Neither was he at Robland Park when Samantha went there for tea, perhaps because she went by invitation and he knew about it in advance. When she saw him at church, he inclined his head politely but neither spoke nor looked fully at her.
She had relived their conversation and his kiss—especially his kiss—for the rest of the day after he left. She had lain awake half the night dreaming of it—ironic, that. And she had watched through the windows for him all the following morning and from the garden during the afternoon, when the rain had finally stopped long enough for her to take Tramp outside for some exercise.
But long before it was borne in upon her that he would not come again, she had succumbed to guilt. She had encouraged him to stay when he would have left after discovering that Matilda was no longer with her. She had encouraged him to flirt with her, though it had not been deliberate. And she had quite explicitly invited his kiss.
She had behaved quite shockingly badly. It was no wonder he did not wish to see her again. And she surely would not wish to see him again if she were not so lonely and so restless.
It would be for the best if she never saw him again, she decided. And then she learned that soon he would indeed be gone. Lady Gramley was planning to leave soon to join her husband in London. And her brother, she reported to a group of ladies at the vicarage one afternoon two weeks after his visit to Bramble Hall on that rainy afternoon, was going to do some traveling about the British Isles, starting in Scotland.
Samantha told herself quite firmly that the news did not depress her in the slightest. It was nothing to her. She had put memories of that afternoon firmly behind her. Soon he would be gone, and she could devote herself to her new life here at Bramble Hall without the distraction of expecting to see him wherever she went. She intended to be active and busy while she lived out the remainder of her year of mourning.
Perhaps she would even be happy.
