A tryst by the sea, p.9
A Tryst by the Sea, page 9
The meal was simple—cold ham-and-cheese sandwiches, apple tarts, a bottle of Merlot. Gill appropriated the hamper from the porter when he met that good soul on the path under the elms.
“And her ladyship will want breakfast brought over, as usual,” Gill said. “Leave it outside the door, for she might not rise with the sun.”
The porter winked and trotted back to the inn. Gill had already settled up both his account and Penelope’s, because it was still his privilege to see to her financial needs. Three months hence…
He knocked on the cottage door, which opened almost immediately. Penelope was in an old morning gown, a shawl about her shoulders. She looked tired, dear, and determined as she stepped back to let him into the cottage.
“Do we fortify ourselves with sustenance first,” Gill asked, “or fortify ourselves with pleasure and eat later?”
If he’d shocked his wife, the only sign was a slight raising of her brows. “I suppose the wine should breathe.”
Gill set the hamper on the kitchen table. “Merlot typically breathes for less than an hour, Penelope. I have missed you for nine years, and I will not be rushed once we are in the bedroom.”
She blushed even as her chin came up. “Nor will I. We can eat later. A midnight snack.”
Oh ho. Gill followed her into the bedroom, though doing so felt precipitous. “I did not mean that I’d fall upon you like a plundering barbarian.”
“I was rather hoping you would, because now that the moment is here…” Penelope halted before the cheval mirror. “I did not exactly dress for the occasion, did I?”
Gill came up behind her and slipped his arms around her waist. “Now that you are about to have your wish come true—and one of my wishes, too, lest there be any doubt—you feel awkward. You are suffering cold feet and doubting yourself, but let’s not take that path tonight, Penelope. Let’s not be so polite and careful and proper. Let’s take the other path, the one where we speak honestly with each other, we show some trust and patience, and we listen without leaping to conclusions.”
They’d made a start down that other, wilder path in the past week. Too little, too late, but not in vain. Not entirely in vain. Even without this last night of passion, Gill would treasure the memory of this week for the rest of his life.
Penelope turned to embrace him. For a moment, they simply held each other, and for Gill, that was a time to relearn the pleasure of having his wife near. She was petite but sturdy, curved in all the right places, and she always smelled of flowers.
He paid attention to the exact texture of her hair, so thick and fine.
To the rhythm of her breathing, to the moment when she finally let herself lean into him.
“I am afraid, Gill.”
So am I. “What scares you the most?”
“The fear that I am making the worst mistake of my life.”
He realized two heartbeats after she’d spoken that she did not refer to a night beneath the covers. She referred to giving up on a ten-year marriage, very likely the only marriage she would have.
Gill set aside the rising joy of sexual anticipation and set aside his own myriad fears as well.
“I suspect had we been more willing to err, to share doubts and worries, we might not have come to this moment. But we were not brave the way we might have been. We were… proper, correct, tidy. We minded our elders and the etiquette books instead of minding each other. We were as we thought we should be, and now you want to live as your heart tells you to. That adjustment will take time.”
“And you?” she asked, stepping back. “What adjustments will you make?”
Gill had thought about this during the late-evening hours in his solitary room. “I will be more ruthless in the Lords. I won’t abandon my scruples, but I will take the gloves off, Pen. The world is changing, and change for the better in the midst of upheaval will take concerted effort.”
He sat on the vanity stool to pull off his boots. “The same with Bella, Mama, and Tommie. You have kept them from plaguing me too awfully, but they will descend upon me, expecting to get the same reception they had from me when I was one-and-twenty and new to the title. They are in for a polite, stern awakening.”
“Good,” Penelope said, turning down the bedcovers. “Long overdue, and if you truly wanted a challenge, you could have MacMillan take a look at the Lychmont account books.”
Gill stripped off his stockings and draped them over his boots. “A daunting thought, but of course the creditors will expect me to cover my brother’s debts.”
“Cover them once if you must, then put the trades on notice that Tommie has been cut off. I will do the same with the modistes and so forth, because Bella won’t allow a little thing like an annulment to interfere with her larceny.”
“You sound very determined.” While Penelope looked quite fetching, sitting on the bed steps, her slippers in her hand.
“I will no longer have the threat of your intervention to hold Bella or the trades or anybody in check. I must learn to be ruthless, too, and I suppose that is another fear I have about living on my own.”
“Let me undo your hooks,” Gill said, shrugging out of his jacket and draping it over the back of the wing chair. “And for your information, you are already quite formidable. Ask anybody who has ever tried to bring you a bit of tattle, anybody on your charitable committees. You are a force to be reckoned with, do you but know it.”
This time, he did kiss Penelope’s nape and had the satisfaction of knowing he’d earned her attention.
“I’ve always enjoyed that particular preliminary,” she said, making no move to march off to the wardrobe and hang up her dress.
Gill was out of practice, but he wasn’t stupid. He lavished kisses on his wife’s nape and on her shoulders while he eased the dress down to her waist. Penelope wore no stays, bless her foresight, and thus he could gently cup the lovely shape and weight of her breasts through her chemise.
He would have been content to go slowly, to let desire build gradually, but Penelope wasn’t having any of that. She rounded on him, lashed her arms around his waist, and fused her mouth to his. The shock of her passion rocked through Gill, stirring his own ardor from embers to flames in moments.
“Penelope… There’s no…”
“Nine years, Gill. Nine years I’ve waited to taste you again, and they have been long years.”
The gleam in her eye did not bode well for Gill’s buttons. He fumbled out of his waistcoat and shirt, but kept his breeches on lest he disgrace himself.
“We have all night,” he said as Penelope wiggled out of her dress and tossed it—tossed it—atop the vanity stool. “We need not—”
“I need,” Penelope said. “I need and I want and yearn, Vergilius. For you.”
A tempest blew through the bedroom in the next quarter hour. Penelope had Gill on his back atop the covers, his breeches unbuttoned, and his hands pinned to the pillow. She sank onto his erect cock with the confidence of a woman who knew absolutely who and what she wanted.
As a new wife, Penelope had been sweet, playful, ardent, funny… but nine years had taught her how to take what she needed, how to demand her lover’s cooperation.
Gill gloried in her newfound wisdom. Nine years had taught him a thing or two as well, about strategy and patience. When Penelope was riding him hard, satisfaction eluding her by the smallest, most frustrating increment, he wrapped his arms around her, rolled with her on the bed, and drove into her with all the passion in him.
The tempest became a one-woman gale, a silent, thrashing force of nature determined to seize her pleasure and hold it fast. By some miracle of marital devotion, Gill managed not to spend—perhaps the shock of Penelope’s loving had done that for him—but they remained joined as her hips slowed, and her arms eased from about his neck.
“Good God, Vergilius. Almighty, everlasting, merciful God.”
“Catch your breath,” he whispered, resting his cheek against hers. “We’re just getting started.”
He caught his breath, and the second loving was gentler but no less passionate. Gill managed to hold out once more, though the third time capsized his self-restraint as effectively as it sank Penelope’s.
He was vaguely aware of hunger as his wife drowsed against his side and also of a creeping sadness. In the coming weeks and years, he’d stay busy, he’d maintain decorum when anybody was watching, and he’d find ways to distract himself from this new version of his ongoing marital sorrow.
He’d learned all of those skills years ago.
But as he held Penelope in the shadowy bedroom where they’d first fallen in love, his grief was as vast as the ocean. They had both tried so hard for so long. He could not ask Penelope to keep trying now.
“It wasn’t like this before,” Penelope murmured.
“It wasn’t,” Gill replied, kissing her brow and needing desperately to avoid a discussion of the differences between honeymoon lovemaking and farewell lovemaking. “Are you hungry?”
“Famished.”
Penelope was allowing him to change the subject, to call an intermission to the pleasure and the pain. They ate companionably in the kitchen, Penelope wearing nothing but Gill’s old dressing gown. He decided that this would be his favorite memory of her, eating sandwiches by candlelight, looking well loved and tired.
“You will wake me before you go?” Penelope asked.
“I will love you before I go,” Gill replied, offering her a smile and a wink.
She smiled back, though neither one of them was quite able to make those smiles merry. Penelope had spoken the truth when she’d said the lovemaking had never been like this. Never been this intense, this honest, this emotional.
This sad and wonderful.
When they’d finished eating and tidied up, Gill wrapped himself around Penelope beneath the covers, determined to stay awake, a feat he managed for five entire minutes. His last thought before drifting off was that the lovemaking had never been like this before, and it would never be like this—like anything—ever again.
Sneaking away from Vergilius back in London had felt wrong, and as Penelope drowsed beside him, she understood why. Giving up on her marriage was the lesser of two pains—another nine years like the last nine would be unbearable—but she had failed to acknowledge precisely what she was giving up on.
She’d dodged that bit of honesty with herself, and this week with her husband had held her accountable.
Vergilius was, if anything, a more impressive man than he’d been ten years ago. He had grown into his title and now wielded it for the benefit of others. He was stalwart in the face of family members who took his generosity for granted. He was kind, humble, hardworking, and entirely deserving of a second chance with another woman.
He was also breathtakingly desirable.
If-onlys multiplied in Penelope’s head, and her dreams were troubled. She woke at one point in darkness to find herself alone in bed, and in her panic to locate her husband, she banged her elbow and barked her shin.
She finally caught sight of him, wandering alone in the moonlight down along the shore. The sight was so dear and sad Penelope nearly shouted at him to come back to the cottage and back to bed.
Back to her. He’d said he would not leave her without waking her, so she instead waited on the terrace, swaddled in blankets, until he turned his steps in the direction of the path.
She had learned too well how to wait for him, more’s the pity.
When Gill again wrapped himself around her beneath the covers, she feigned sleep, though she was in truth exhausted. She let the rise and fall of his breathing soothe her back into dreams, and when she awoke, faint light seeped through the curtains.
Gill was still abed with her, and she could tell he was awake even before she opened her eyes. The awful hour of parting had arrived, as it must.
“You said you’d love me before you leave,” she whispered.
Vergilius could have put her off with vague excuses meant to be kind. Instead, he loved her in silent splendor, rising above her and looking directly into her eyes as passion ignited. Penelope tried to hold his gaze, to return his regard, but as the yearning crested higher, so did heartache. When the end came, she closed her eyes and clung as she had longed to cling for so many years.
Gill held her gently, then withdrew and spent on her belly. He dealt with the mess and did Penelope the great kindness of curling up beside her and tucking her close.
“You will stay here for the next week?” he asked.
“I will.” She’d need to. “I’ll send word to Patchwork Cottage to expect me and give the staff some warning before I descend. You’re for London?”
“London and the solicitors. I will send the traveling coach for your journey to the cottage. I will also boot Mama and Bella from the town house. Mama can stay with friends if she must bide in Town, and as for Bella…”
“Be not merely firm, Vergilius, be ruthless. Bella cannot be allowed to destroy your peace as she has so often tried to destroy mine. Give her an inch, and she will have appointed herself your hostess by Friday.”
Vergilius shuddered. “Tommie married somebody very like our mother. Will you help me to dress?”
“Of course.” A wife often valeted her husband, and he served as her lady’s maid. Penelope tried to view passing Vergilius his sleeve buttons, tying his cravat, and straightening his watch chain as final mementos of a lovely week, but those small acts mostly just made her sad.
Sadder.
He was leaving because she’d asked him to leave. She needed him to leave.
When he was dressed, had downed two cups of tea, and tarried over the last of the apple tarts, there was nothing more to say or do that would not be a blatant delay of the inevitable. Penelope belted her old dressing gown more tightly about her middle and accompanied Vergilius to the door.
“Thank you for this week,” she said. “And for last night.”
He drew her into his arms, and she went willingly. “Last night was magnificent, Penelope, as you are magnificent. Let me know when you are settled at the cottage. There will be agreements to sign, affidavits, and so forth. All tedious, but we’ll get through it.”
They would. Now, when it was too late, she and Gill had developed sufficient trust and shared purpose to weather the impending storm. She walked with him to the door, the flagstones of the floor cold through the thin soles of her slippers. Vergilius donned his hat and coat, then dipped his head to kiss her cheek.
“Platitudes would be blasphemous,” he said, pausing just outside the front door, “but silence won’t do either. Promise me again you will let me know if you need anything. Don’t go through the lawyers. Just drop me a note and be blunt. I will worry about you, and I will…”
Penelope nodded, crossing the threshold to take his hand. “Miss you. I will miss you as well, Vergilius.” She hugged him, all of her fears welling up into one great big ball of sorrow lodged in her throat. What did he fear? What nightmares haunted him? Too late to ask that now.
“Will you write back?” she murmured, breathing him in, memorizing his wondrous male shape. “I always wondered why you never wrote back to me, Vergilius. I know you were busy, but… I should not ask.”
Penelope’s husband stared down at her in the predawn gloom. “Write back to you?”
“All those years ago, when you had to be at the Hall, and I was still too unwell from childbed to travel from Town. I wrote to you, and my letters went unanswered.”
He looked at her as if he had no clue what she was going on about.
“Never mind,” Penelope said. “I should not have asked, and you must be going.”
He studied her, then he kissed her again, this time on the mouth. “Be well, Penelope, and if you can, be happy. Perhaps I did not answer your letters for the same reason you did not answer mine.”
He was out the door and striding up the path in the next instant, though she did not understand his explanation. At that moment, Penelope understood little except that Vergilius was leaving, her great freedom was at hand, and all she felt was devastating loss.
Penelope watched her husband until he disappeared into the elm grove, and still she stood on the cold stones, staring at the morning mist. When she stepped back inside the cottage, she was shivering, but she could not bestir herself to put the kettle on, or to do much of anything.
A marriage long over had just ended in truth, and only in the past week had she realized the magnitude of the defeat that represented. Penelope returned to the bedroom, struck by the disarray she and Gill had created the previous night.
Her dress was in a heap, one slipper peeked from beneath the bed skirt, the indent of Gill’s head still shaped the pillow. Penelope moved forward, intent on smoothing her hand over that pillow, when something solid bumped against her thigh.
Something in the pocket of her dressing gown. She did not recall that weight being there when she’d put the dressing gown on, but then, her powers of perception were not at their most acute. Gill had found the strength to leave her, and she must be grateful to him for that consideration.
She withdrew a perfect, iridescently beautiful ormer shell from the dressing gown’s pocket. This specimen was smaller than the first one Vergilius had given her, though it gleamed even more brightly.
He must have slipped the shell into her pocket as they’d parted. A memento, a treasure. Penelope climbed beneath the quilts, the shell clutched in her hand, and curled up on her husband’s side of the bed.
She held firm against all the voices clamoring in her head—the commands to soldier on, to put the past aside, to consider her blessings. On and on the lectures and sermons would go, if she allowed them to.
Instead, Penelope gripped her green ormer, clung to her pillow, and cried like a childless mother.
Chapter Seven
Gill could not ride like the demons of hell were after him, because he valued his horse. He also needed time to think, to start this new phase of grieving, and to plan. He made the journey to London in reasonable stages, and all the while, he considered options.
