A Spinster by the Sea Page 9

  Sunshine put a different complexion on the whole undertaking and left a lady wishing for candlelight—on her side of the bed.

  Tindale made the mattress rock as he joined her beneath the covers, and Anne was again reminded of how different he was from her first love. Christian had been slender, pale, and sweet, while Tindale was… also sweet, but there the similarity ended.

  “Cuddle up,” he said, threading an arm beneath Anne’s neck. “I understand you’ve been invited to the Friday-night ball and tomorrow night’s card party. You will save your supper waltz for me, please.”

  He was warm, all-over warm. Anne snuggled close, her head pillowed on the hollow of his shoulder. “I’d rather not attend any balls, but Helen would disown me for such cowardice. I will save my supper waltz for you.”

  She wanted to tell him that she’d save him more than that, that this need not be their only tryst, except that at the end of this week, Tindale would go back to Town, and Anne would… not. She’d finish out her fortnight at the Siren’s Retreat and then maybe go hillwalking in the Lakes and, this time, actually enjoy the scenery.

  Or in Bavaria, now that Europe was at peace.

  “My dancing is merely adequate,” Tindale said. “Ladies have shorter legs, while I… I hope my lovemaking recommends me to you if my waltzing cannot.”

  Had a window banged open on a fresh breeze, Anne could not have been more surprised. “Don’t be nervous, Tindale. We are above all else friends, and I desire you madly.”

  “Do you really? Perhaps you might consider bestowing a few kisses on the fellow you profess to desire?”

  Anne shifted to straddle him, her own boldness shocking her, but feeling right with Tindale. “Prepare to be kissed.”

  She was aware of his arousal, snug against her intimate parts, and aware of his smile, more buccaneering than its previous incarnations.

  “Do your damnedest, Miss Baxter, and I shall give no quarter.”

  She began gently, suspecting that Tindale, for all his robust health, had known little of tenderness or sweetness. She pressed her lips to his brow, his cheek, the corner of his mouth and felt him gradually relaxing beneath her.

  “More,” he whispered. “Please, Anne.”

  He trailed his fingers over her arms, then along her jaw, and back to the chignon at her nape. After a few slight tugs, Anne’s braid slipped down over her shoulder.

  “I want you undone,” he said, frothing her chemise up around her thighs. “Utterly cast away with pleasure.”

  He bowed up, and the kissing took on an intensity as Anne realized that through the material of her chemise, Tindale was stroking her breasts.

  “That is… That is sumptuous.”

  He knew what to do with his hands, knew how to provoke magic and fire and an urgency that obliterated reason.

  “I’m wearing white,” Anne said. The thought came from nowhere and made little sense. Her wedding dress had been white, as if she’d been a virgin sacrifice in some old pagan ritual. “I don’t want to wear white with you.”

  Tindale undid the bow of the décolletage and gathered up the fabric. “Then don’t.” He eased the chemise over Anne’s head, leaving her naked and straddling her lover. She crossed her arms over her chest, smitten by self-consciousness. No man, not even her first, long-ago lover, had seen her thus.

  If she and Tindale ever made love again, which was unlikely, they’d do so after dark.

  He pulled the covers up over her shoulders and wrapped his arms around her. “You have no need for shyness. You were a bold and fearless girl, to hear you tell it. Racketing about barefoot wherever you pleased, exploring wherever your curiosity led. Recall that fierce, well-loved younger Anne and introduce her to the woman who just kissed me witless.”

  His words reminded her of much that had been lost when she’d been orphaned and also inspired her to move on her lover, to be again curious and bold and confident.

  Tindale sank back against the pillows. “Fiend, beautiful, lovely… Take me inside you, Anne, or I will make a very unimpressive showing as your lover.”

  Anne took him in hand, though he needed little enough guidance. While she crouched above him, he began slowly, each thrust a slight advance over the previous one.

  “Don’t rush,” she said, curling onto his chest. “Don’t hurry. I need…”

  “What do you need, Anne?”

  To make this last, to understand, to hoard up the beauty and longing and pleasure… “I need you, Augustus.”

  Quiet enveloped them, bracketed by the distant roar of the surf and the soft rustle of bedclothes. Tindale granted Anne’s wish, keeping the tempo slow, even as her desire mounted to a frantic pitch.

  He’d wanted her undone, and Anne obliged him, shuddering in his arms as sensation coalesced into unspeakably intense satisfaction. She clung and shook, and when the pleasure rebounded and crested yet higher, she held to him more tightly still.

  “Undone,” she whispered, subsiding against him. “Utterly, absolutely.”

  His response was to visit upon her a series of revelations about the depths of bodily joy a lady might plumb with a skilled and generous lover. Augustus was as relentless as the tides, until Anne was tossed from one pleasure to the next, drifting sweetly one moment and thrashing through another fierce tumult minutes later.

  When she was replete beyond her wildest imaginings, Augustus withdrew and stroked himself to a swift completion. He lay on his back in decadent repose, eyes closed, chest heaving.

  “I should get up,” he said. “Fetch you a flannel, open the window.”

  Anne extricated herself from him and from the bedclothes. “You have earned your rest.” She tottered to the dressing closet, intent on finding a damp cloth, and caught sight of herself in the mirror over the washstand.

  Hair half undone, cheeks rosy, gaze sparkling. The gleam in her eyes delighted her as hard gallops and midnight moonrises once had. This interlude with Augustus had given her back a precious part of herself that she must never be parted from again.

  Her soul, perhaps. Her wits, her self.

  She wrung out a cloth and brought it to the bed. When Augustus made no move to take it from her, she tidied him up and hung the cloth over the bedpost. Silly man, to think she’d hesitate to handle him intimately now.

  Anne cracked a window and climbed back beneath the covers, snuggling up to Augustus as if they’d spent years of afternoons in such wanton intimacy.

  “Sleep,” he said, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. “I will be here when you waken.”

  Anne allowed herself the exquisite pleasure of sinking into slumber in her lover’s arms. She was owed that much, and so was Augustus.

  Chapter Seven

  Augustus awoke feeling as stuporous as if he’d overimbibed, though in place of all the nasty effects of intemperance, his languor was suffused with sweetness. Every part of him—body, mind, heart—was saturated with peaceful joy all tied up in a lacy bow of quiet sexual awareness.

  He was curled around Anne, and without knowing how, he could tell that she, too, was awake.

  “Love me again, Augustus. This time, I want to be on my back.”

  “Any way you please, Anne.” The angle of the sun slanting in the windows told him they’d slept only briefly, so he took his time. Intimacy with Anne Baxter was to be savored, and in her slow caresses and sinuous undulations, she cherished him as well.

  The joining became a homecoming, and the pleasure threatened Augustus’s control. This was not a wild ride or a delicious nightcap. This was profound, courageous intimacy with the woman he loved.

  He tried to draw out the climb to satisfaction, to explore the side paths—Anne was ticklish below her ribs, and she knew precisely how hard to dig her nails into Augustus’s backside—but she was not to be denied, and soon Augustus’s arms were full of a sighing, well-pleasured lady.

  He eased away and spent on her belly, longing for the day when that precaution wouldn’t be needed. He hung over her, replete and ready to contemplate another nap. He levered up, intent on tidying up.

  Unease crept through his lassitude as he beheld his beloved. “Anne Baxter, look at me.”

  She used the sheet to wipe at her cheeks, then offered him a smile. “Your turn to fetch the flannel, Your Grace. Noblesse oblige for the party on top.”

  He wrapped his arms around her. “Tears, Anne? At least tell me why.”

  She stroked his hair, and he could feel her choosing words. “I have been lonely too, Augustus. You assuage that loneliness and allow me to admit how difficult the past years have been.”

  That was an honest answer, also a prevarication. August held her for a while longer, hoping she’d say more. The distant tide surged and retreated, and Anne’s fingers drifted through his hair, but she gave him no more words.

  Noblesse oblige. Nobility obliges—or obligates. Augustus left the bed, returned with a flannel, and tended to his lover.

  “Shall we nap again?”

  Anne elbow-walked closer to the window side of the bed. “A cuddle, to restore my equilibrium. The idea of popping back into my clothes, raiding the larder, and nipping down to the beach… That is beyond me now.”

  “Good, because popping, raiding, and nipping are beyond me as well. Cuddling is well within my powers.” He banked the pillows so he could half recline, his arm around Anne as she snuggled up to his side.

  “Now will you tell me why you were moved to tears, Anne?”

  She fussed with the covers, hitched her leg across his thighs, and then toyed with the hair on his chest.

  “I felt sad. After being so close to a lover, some sadness afterward is to be expected.”

  The witness was avoiding the question. “You were not crying afterward, Anne. You cried while I was yet inside you.”

  The duke in Augustus told him to desist, to stop pestering the lady for what might not lend itself to words. The solicitor in him agreed, because a badgered witness could give untrustworthy testimony, but the lover in him had to know what troubled her.

  “Our scheme,” Anne said, “your scheme, in which I have been complicit, is not working, Augustus.”

  He had to exert mental effort to parse her meaning. “The scheme where you reject my advances? I see no reason to abandon that little diversion now. Toss me over at the ball, and all and sundry will say I got what I deserved. I will become the object of talk rather than you. After a suitable period of manly brooding, I will renew my addresses to you and—”

  She put her fingers to his lips. “No, Augustus. I want no part of farces, diversions, or subterfuges. That would make you look foolish, which I am unwilling to do. Your kind attentions to me have kept the gossips in check, and we must content ourselves with that much.”

  He grasped her fingers gently. “I am more than willing to look foolish before a lot of buffoons and imbeciles who mean nothing to me.”

  Anne’s removed her leg from his thighs. “Those buffoons and imbeciles will decide if any of the bills you introduce in Parliament have a prayer of becoming law. They will decide if your daughters take, or have no suitors. Their children will either befriend your sons or make their public-school years hell. The buffoons matter, Augustus, more than you know.”

  Despite Anne’s naked warmth pressed to Augustus’s side, a chill gripped him. “You are rejecting me.” He had no daughters, he’d as yet introduced no bills, and he had no sons. That left… only him. The lover, the duke, and the solicitor.

  “I am thanking you for all you’ve done for me just in the past week. I am profoundly grateful for the time spent with you, and I hope we can be friends, but, Augustus… those people will make your life a misery if you give them the slightest opening. They already gossip about you, and when Lord Corbett comes back to Town, as he inevitably will, he will expect you to console him for his foolishness, not make sheep’s eyes at me.”

  “Lord Corbett can”—bugger himself—“take a flying leap into the Thames.”

  “Lord Corbett can make your life very difficult, and my life difficult, too, lest you forget.”

  Every instinct Augustus possessed, honed over years of wrestling complex legalities, wanted to argue with Anne, but she’d cited an irrefutable truth. Lord Corbett Hobbs could speak ill of Augustus in the clubs, disparage him before his friends, cut him in the carriage parade.

  None of that mattered, nor did it compare to what his lordship might do to Anne if he took a notion to indulge in the wrong sort of tantrum.

  “They were already whispering about me,” Anne said, pushing herself upright to sit beside Augustus. “I’m used goods. I cannot buy a husband even with all my wealth. I must have a love child somewhere if Lord Corbett set me aside in that humiliating fashion. All of those whispers have been silenced by your marked courtesy to me.”

  Augustus brought her hand to his lips and kissed her knuckles. “Marked courtesy? I have never regarded glorious lovemaking as a marked courtesy, Anne.”

  She eased from his grip. “Hume Billingsley would not have been half so gallant to me had you not already set the bar at least that high. Lord Bertram would not be making overtures to Helen if this house party had turned me into an object of scorn. I’m an object of whispers and, perhaps, pity, and that is as good an outcome as I could have hoped for.”

  She sounded so cool, so logical, and yet, she had cried in his arms.

  “Please assure me you will not marry Billingsley, Anne. He does not deserve you and never has.”

  She smoothed her palm over the worn quilt. “I might have, before today. I’m fortified against such weakness now.”

  That remark perplexed Augustus. When he would have asked Anne to explain, she kissed his shoulder, then rose and shrugged into her dressing gown.

  “My hair is a fright. Perhaps you’d help me put it to rights, Your Grace?”

  Your Grace. Proper address should have no place between lovers when private, but Anne was making a point. Augustus brushed out her hair, and they assisted each other to dress, but some boundary, some properly defended border, had been reestablished.

  “You won’t accept Thurlow as a spouse?” Augustus asked as he and Anne made their way down to the beach.

  “Gracious days, of course not. I’ll lose more to him at tomorrow night’s card party, but that’s the limit of my charity where he’s concerned. Shall we build another sandcastle, Tindale?”

  How could she do this? How could she pretend that the past two hours hadn’t happened? But then, Augustus knew how. Of necessity, Anne had grown adept at pretending, at ignoring slights, at not overhearing what had been said loudly enough to wound her.

  “You won’t marry Thurlow, you won’t marry Billingsley, and you won’t marry me,” Augustus said. “Do I have that right?”

  Anne faced the sea, her hat brim riffling in the breeze. “My best option, Tindale, is to slip into genteel spinsterhood, donating generously to charities, and having the curate and his sweetheart to dine on Sundays.”

  “You aren’t telling me the whole of it.” Her reasoning was sound. The tabbies and schoolgirls had sheathed their claws. The men were keeping any ribald remarks about Anne to themselves. Augustus’s attentions had protected Anne’s prospects to that limited extent.

  Anne was far better acquainted with these people than Augustus was, and he knew she had a point: If she humiliated him publicly, her consequence might rise—and it might not—but his would surely fall.

  Where had that keen insight on her part been a week ago?

  And even if Anne’s determination to quietly go her own way was the best possible ending to this house-party tribulation, why did her pragmatic, selfless decision leave her in tears and Augustus wanting to demolish this entire pretty little cottage by the sea?

  “I’ve changed my mind,” Anne said. “You will have to attend the card party without me.”

  Helen, who had been notably quiet since returning last night from her shopping expedition, poured herself a second cup of tea.

  “Will you claim a megrim, Anne, or a case of cold feet? Matters are progressing nicely, if you ask me. Lord Hume has shown you nothing but cordial good manners, the Daleys have retreated behind their fans, and according to Bertie—Lord Bertram, rather—Lieutenant Thurlow has become your champion in the men’s retiring room. Lose a few more hands of cards to him, and he’ll be singing your praises at the punch bowl.”

  The morning was brilliant and the air mild, a harbinger of warmer weather and a reminder that Anne could not tarry by the sea much longer. Rose Cottage was in demand, as well it should be.

  As for Lieutenant Thurlow… “The lieutenant took a young lady strolling by the sea last night. Miss Charlotte Daley, if the lady’s taste in evening gowns was any indication.” Charlotte still wore the pale colors of the recent schoolgirl, while Roberta preferred patterned muslins. Both sisters wore the same elaborate flounces.

  “We must not hold that gallantry against the lieutenant,” Helen said. “Charlotte is to be pitied, after all. Until her older sister finds a husband, Charlotte is more or less doomed to idle flirtations.”

  The notion that Anne should pity a woman who’d spied on her… Though, in fact, Anne did feel some pity. A smidgeon of pity.

  “Go to the card party without me, Helen. I have shown the flag and weathered even Lord Hume’s gracious pity.”

  Helen sipped her tea, studying Anne over the rim of her cup. “This has to do with Tindale, doesn’t it?”

  Most of Anne’s waking and dreaming thoughts had to do with Tindale, and probably would for some time.

  “His Grace has been an ally, and he has my gratitude, but he’s done what he can. Anything more than gentlemanly regard could only redound to his discredit.”

  Helen put down her cup. “He’s a duke. In case you’ve forgotten, a duke can live openly with his wife and his mistress, the resulting miscellany populating his nursery, and nobody dares say a word about it.”