Authors: Grace Burrowes
“There you are!” Lord Tony Windham covered the length of the conservatory in double time. “Miss Himmelfarb, I have need of your company this instant. Sir, you will excuse the lady. She has promised to walk the gardens with me immediately.”
He nodded at Michael, who offered Esther the merest glance to ascertain her consent before stepping back. “Miss Himmelfarb, good day. Lord Anthony.”
“Right, good day, good afternoon, good morning.” Lord Anthony linked his arm through Esther’s and lowered his voice. “Time is of the essence, my lady. You must attend to the flowers in the rose salon immediately.”
This was not the affable, smiling Lord Tony whom Esther had come to know in recent days. This was a fellow with urgent business on his mind.
“I must?”
“Indeed. It is of utmost importance that you do.” He hustled her along, not stopping until they were outside the door of the parlor in question.
The closed door.
“Lord Anthony, what’s afoot here?”
He opened the door and gave Esther a gently muscular shove. “My thanks for your company.”
The tableau that greeted Esther spoke for itself. In a dress far too low cut for daylight hours, Charlotte Pankhurst reclined on a chaise, while Lord Percival stood over her, looking exasperated.
“Miss Himmelfarb.” He bowed to her very low, his expression one of banked relief. “A
pleasure
to see you. Miss Pankhurst is feeling unwell, and I was just about to—”
The door from the blue salon next door opened abruptly, revealing Lady Morrisette and several of the other older women in attendance.
“I knew I heard voices!” Lady Morrisette’s shrill observation rang out over the room while her cronies crowded in behind her.
“It’s well you’re here, my lady,” Esther said before Charlotte could open her fool mouth. “I came in to check on the flowers and found Miss Pankhurst feeling poorly. Lord Percival stopped by and offered his aid when he perceived the lady was in distress. Perhaps the physician should be summoned?”
The distressed lady—for she clearly was distressed
now
—bolted to a sitting position. “That will not be necessary.”
Lady Morrisette rose to the challenge after the merest blink of frustrated disbelief. “Perhaps it was the kippers at breakfast, my dear. They don’t always agree with one. How fortunate his lordship and Miss Himmelfarb were here to render you aid.”
Charlotte’s expression turned from mulish to murderous as Lord Tony came sauntering in. “Greetings, all. Percy, the horses are being saddled as we speak, and you’re not yet in riding attire. Miss Himmelfarb, I believe you were to join us?”
This was farce, but from the look in Charlotte’s eyes, deadly farce.
Esther turned a dazzling smile on Lord Tony. “Just let me change into my habit, your lordship. Miss Pankhurst, I wish you a swift recovery.”
She curtsied to all and sundry, spared a dozen wilted bouquets half a thought, and sidled past Lord Tony into the hallway.
“Oh, Miss Himmelfarb!” Lady Morrisette’s voice jerked Esther to a stop as effectively as if Esther were a spaniel upon whose leash the woman had tramped.
“My lady?”
Esther’s hostess approached, glancing to the left and right as she did. “Charlotte is my goddaughter, and one can’t blame her for trying. I’ll understand if you have to depart early.”
What
was
the
woman
saying?
“Are you asking me to leave?”
“Oh, good Lord, no.” Lady Morrisette’s smile was feral. “What ensues now should be very interesting indeed. I’m simply saying if you do decide your mother has an ague, for example, or your younger sister should come down with lung fever, then I will be happy to make your excuses to the company. I know my goddaughter, and she does not deal well with disappointment.”
A warning, then. “I appreciate your understanding. If you’ll excuse me, I must change into my riding habit.”
Lady Morrisette gave Esther a little salute. “Go down fighting, I always say. Enjoy your
ride
.”
The innuendo was cheerful, vulgar, and snide. Contemplating that Parthian shot, Esther felt as if she’d been the one to consume a quantity of bad kippers—and in the next two weeks, the feeling could only get worse.
***
Percival Windham did not believe in shirking his responsibilities. He boosted Esther Himmelfarb into the saddle, arranged her skirts over her boots, and remained standing by her stirrup.
“I am in your never-ending, eternal, perpetual debt, Miss Himmelfarb. I cannot thank you enough for your timely appearance in that salon. I’d received a note, you see, ostensibly from Lady Morrisette.”
Several yards away, Tony was fussing with his horse’s girth, no doubt sensible that the moment called for groveling.
“You should thank your brother, my lord, though I cannot think why he didn’t simply intervene himself.”
The lady’s words bore a slight chill, something more than politesse but less than indignation. This did not bode well for a fellow who’d reached the inescapable conclusion that he’d met his one true love.
“Had Tony come upon us alone in that room, he would have been honor bound to relate what he saw to our mother, Her Grace, and she would have been delighted to accept Miss Pankhurst as a prospective daughter-in-law. You see before you a man in receipt of nothing less than a divine pardon, Miss Himmelfarb, and you the angel of its deliverance.”
“That’s laying it on a bit thick, your lordship.”
Had
her
lips
quirked? Was humor alight in her lovely green eyes?
“It is the God’s honest truth, madam. You will consider what boon I might grant you in repayment.”
He left her with that offer to consider—a stroke of genius if he did say so himself—and swung up onto his bay gelding. Two grooms mounted up on cobs, while Tony climbed onto a leggy gray.
“Would you like to see Morelands, Miss Himmelfarb? It’s not five miles east cross-country.”
“Lead on, your lordship. Any hour out of doors on such a lovely day is time well spent.”
Esther Himmelfarb rode with the casual grace of one who’d been put in the saddle early and often, and while her habit was several years out of fashion, her sidesaddle was in excellent repair and superbly fitted to her seat.
Five miles passed quickly, with Tony falling behind a dozen yards to confer with the grooms.
“Let’s take the next turning. There’s somebody I’d like you to meet.”
At his suggestion, Miss Himmelfarb nudged her mare to the left, down a bridle path that ran between two high hedges.
They hadn’t gone twenty yards before she drew her horse up. “You wanted me to meet somebody in a graveyard?”
“I did, in fact.” He swung down, handed the horse off to a groom, and assisted the lady to dismount. She put her hands on his shoulders and slid to the ground, the closest they’d stood in days, close enough that his good intentions could be assailed by the scent of lavender and the feel of a slender female waist under his very hands.
“Come.” Percy grasped her gloved fingers in his. “Mrs. Wood bides here. This is the Windham family plot. All the best people are to be found in its confines.”
She gave him a look suggesting he’d gone barmy, but kept pace as he circled the small plot. Tony, may the Almighty bless and keep him, had signaled that he’d assist the grooms to water the horses at a small burn a furlong away on the other side of the hedges.
“When I was a small boy and periodically suffused with indignation, I’d come here to seek consolation. Peter always knew where to find me.”
He led her to a bench under an enormous oak.
“Peter would be the Marquess of Pembroke?”
“Tony still calls him Petey, if you can credit that.” He drew her down to the bench and kept her hand in his. He was not going to part with that pretty feminine appendage until Doomsday or something of equal magnitude required it.
“Who is the cherub? Eustace Penhaligon Drysdale Fortinbras Windham? That’s a lot of names for somebody who lived only… five years.”
“My older brother, though I never knew him. He fell from his pony, and that was that. Peter says Eustace was a daredevil but always laughing. My mother adored him, or so my father says.”
“It would break my heart to lose a child, and how your mother must have prayed for you and Lord Anthony, joining the cavalry and crossing the seas.”
In the quiet, pretty graveyard, their hands joined, he wanted to tell her that being with her, was comfortable in a way he hadn’t experienced in all his varied undertakings with the fair sex. Esther Himmelfarb’s company gave him a sense of coming home to a place he’d never been but always hoped existed.
“You would pray for your children, Esther. May I call you Esther?”
She did not withdraw her hand, but she pulled away somehow in silence. “When we are private, you may.”
“Are you going to remind me that we’re of different stations,
Esther
? Your grandfather was an earl. I’m a commoner, and I associate with whom I please.”
“I will pay for that scene in the rose parlor, your lordship. You will not. Commoner you might be, but I am to all appearances undowered. I did not take, I am plain, and I have not ingratiated myself to the people who matter.”
She was utterly convinced of her words, also utterly wrong.
“You are lovely. I’m glad you did not take, or some other fellow would have long since snatched you up, and I respect mightily that you have not ingratiated yourself with people who think they matter.”
She straightened, and Percival realized his tone was nearly argumentative.
“You mentioned a boon, your lordship.”
The female mind was not to be underestimated. “Don’t ask me to ignore you, my dear. You’ve proven that you’re a loyal friend, and don’t tell me you can’t use a friend too.”
Friendship was progress, wasn’t it? The exact dimensions of friendship with a female would be new territory for him, but the term seemed appropriate for the circumstances, and to Percival Windham, all females were deserving of beneficent regard, at least initially.
His new, reluctant friend was clutching his hand rather snugly, too. “I want you to teach me how to kiss.”
While Percival calculated whether he could peel off her glove and press his lips to her knuckles, Esther withdrew her hand and rose, pacing down a raked gravel walk to little Eustace’s headstone. To pursue, or to sit on the hard bench and drink in how lovely, how right, she looked among the Windhams of days past?
And how blessedly convenient her request was to Percival’s own plans for the lady.
He stuffed his gloves in his pocket and let himself stand behind her, close enough to drink in her lavender scent and to appreciate that, in riding attire, a woman was a more approachable creature indeed.
“You want me to teach you to kiss?”
She turned, the headstone at her back, which meant a marble angel’s outstretched wings protected them from view. “I want you to teach me much more than that, Percival Windham, but there’s a limit to my presumption—and to my folly. You are reputed to be proficient at kissing, and I would avail myself of your expertise.”
Kissing was wonderful folly, though when undertaken with this woman, it was also going to be in absolute earnest.
“Esther, if folly and presumption and those other obfuscations were not a consideration, what boon would you ask of me?”
She stared at a point several inches above his heart for a long, lavender-scented moment.
“I am a poor relation in training.”
Which made no sense, because upon inquiry, it turned out that Herr Jacob Himmelfarb was rumored to be quite well fixed. “And you’re a veritable hag, and children run from you when the moon is full.” He caught a strand of golden hair fluttering around her chin and tucked it back over her ear. “Ask me, Esther. I can deny you nothing.”
She stared at his chest so hard, she was perhaps trying to see his heart beat as it thundered between his ribs.
“Teach me to kiss, and I shall be content.”
No, she would not.
If he had anything to say to it, she’d be burning with frustration and unspent lust.
Or perhaps, if God were generous and the lady willing, spent lust.
“We have an agreement.” He brushed his lips over her cheek, not touching her anywhere else. “I shall teach you to kiss in exchange for your having spared me a lifetime of marital misery. I do not regard this as an adequate boon to compensate you for your kindness and quick thinking, but it’s where we shall start.”
Blond brows drew down as she tugged off a riding glove and touched two fingers to the spot on her cheek where his lips had wanted badly to linger. “That’s it? You kiss my cheek and announce we have a bargain?”
“Your first lesson: anticipation or surprise should be part of any kiss that seeks to leave an impression. And rest assured, my dear, when it comes to kissing you, I shall be impressive indeed.”
He bussed her other cheek and drew away.
This did not appear to mollify the lady, nor was it intended to. “You have only two weeks, my lord. I hope the entire course of your pedagogy is not limited to lectures.”
Oh, how starchy she sounded. How determined.
“There will be practical instruction as well, Esther my dear.”
And
lots
of
it.
Percival fell silent for a moment, and then Esther felt warm male fingers closing around her hand. He brought her knuckles to his lips and pressed a kiss there, then did not let go of her hand.
“How would you describe that kiss, Miss Himmelfarb?”
He wanted to
talk
about kissing? With
Miss
Himmelfarb
? “I’d describe it as brief and uninteresting. Proper.”
She put as much disgust into her description as she dared, and the dratted man chuckled. When Esther would have wrenched her hand free, he tightened his grip on her fingers. “Tell me about the kisses you’d like to receive, Esther. I must have some sense of my goal, for I am very intent on reaching it.”
He had an odd way of showing his intentions.
“I want kisses I’ll never forget,” Esther began, speaking slowly because this topic—the exact nature of the kisses she sought—was not one she’d considered.
Not one she’d been bold enough to consider, and certainly not one she’d ever been encouraged to consider.
“I want kisses that I can feel through my whole body, through my heart and soul. I want kisses that render me speechless and helpless with longing for more kisses just like them. From you, I want kisses so…
profound
that every time I catch the scent of cedar and spices, my knees go a little weak and I smile in a way that makes all the gentlemen around me, even the old men, take notice and smile a little too.”
He was rubbing his thumb slowly across her knuckles, as if waiting for her to go on.
“More than that,” Esther said, “I suppose I want kisses that defy description.”
“Passionate kisses?” Oh, how casual he sounded.
“Not only passion. I’ve been mauled and slobbered over. A man’s passion strikes me as an undignified, selfish thing.”
“Then you want kisses to inspire your own passion?”
She had the sense he was toying with her, trying to verbally back her into some corner where her dignity and her wits could not join her. Before common sense or some equally inconvenient virtue could stop her, Esther pushed him back so he sat on the headstone, and situated herself with a knee on either side of his hips—a somewhat athletic undertaking, given her riding skirts.
“Enough talk, Percival Windham.” She fisted a hand in the hair at his nape. “I’m tired of talk, and you promised, and I will not be put off by your lectures and interrogations. All day long I step and fetch and smile and pretend, and just this once, I want somebody to attend me. The other girls know to make the men toady to them, but all I get is—”
He kissed her, a fleeting press of warm, soft lips to her mouth. “Do hush, love. You’ll bring Tony with the grooms, and at the very least, for such kisses as you describe, we deserve privacy.”
Esther felt his arm encircle her waist, snugging her to his larger frame, and then a series of little tugs to her scalp.
“You are destroying my coiffure, Percival. Do you know how long I must work to arrange a coronet just so?”
“About five minutes, I’d guess. The rosebuds are a nice touch, but I want to see how long your braid is.”
Esther dropped her forehead to his shoulder and let him have his way with her hair. Maybe he thought that little nothing of a buss qualified as a kiss; maybe he kissed ladies only with their hair in complete disarray. “This cannot have anything to do with kissing lessons.”
“Tell me about your day, Esther. What did you have for breakfast?”
Her braid came slithering down her shoulders to rest along her spine, a kind of hair sigh to go with the soul weariness weighting her limbs and the frustration weighting her heart. More questions, though this question she could answer. “I like chocolate first thing in the morning, and warm scones with butter and strawberry jam.”
Something brushed her ear—his nose? “My mother prefers strawberry jam. Do you like raisins on your scones?”
“I do not. They taste foul when they burn. You are plundering my hair.”
“Just loosening a few pins.”
She cuddled closer, purely enjoying the feel of his hands in her hair. “I haven’t a lady’s maid, though Matilda Pott’s maid is looking after my clothes.”
“Hah. You’re helping her look after Lady Pott’s gowns. You smell even better up close, Esther Himmelfarb. You taste good, too.”
His tongue, soft, damp, and unhurried, had slipped along the place where her neck and shoulder joined. The sensation was both warm and shivery. “Do that again.”
“As my lady wishes.” He lingered over it this time, caressing her flesh with his tongue. It wasn’t kissing exactly; it was more than kissing and made her want to taste him in return.
“Your hair is like moon glow in my hands. I want to see it spread over a pillow by candlelight.” He spoke very softly, the words tickling her ear, until he closed his mouth around her earlobe. “I want to see you naked, but for this glorious, silky hair, Esther, and a smile of welcome for me.”
This was love talk, silly nonsense men concocted to make ladies want to shed their clothes—and it was working. Esther squirmed and realized that Percival Windham’s talk was having an effect on certain parts of his anatomy as well.
How… lovely. How intriguing. “What else?”
He laughed quietly. “Now who has the inconvenient questions? I want to make love to you, of course, endlessly, all night, until you are limp with pleasure and neither of us can move.”
Esther lifted her face from his shoulder, needing to see his eyes. “All I sought were kisses, Percival. You need not flatter and dissemble.”
His expression in the shadow of the angel’s wings was hard to read, but he wasn’t smiling. “Give me your hand, love.”
She obliged, and he brought their joined hands down between their bodies.
“Feel that. A man can’t fake desire. A kiss between a man and a woman should always have a little desire in it.”
If this thick column of flesh was his idea of a
little
desire… Esther withdrew her hand and felt her cheeks flush. “You haven’t even kissed me yet.”
“Nor shall I.”
For a devastated instant, she thought he was reneging, except his hand fisted on her braid, gently but implacably, and Esther understood in the next second what he was about.
He
was
hers
to
kiss.
Here in this small, secluded graveyard, peace filling the air and cherubs and angels looking on with eternal smiles, Lord Percival Windham was hers.
“Esther?”
Not so casual now, and how she loved hearing her name on his lips. “I’m thinking.”
Marveling at the possibilities. She made him wait for a few heady moments while she reveled in the feel of
his
hair in
her
hands, while she traced the shape of
his
ear with
her
nose, and she settled herself on the ridge of his erection. The luxury of time he gave her was a sumptuous gift, one she indulged in shamelessly.
“How does it feel when I do this?” She shifted her weight on him minutely, bringing on all manner of pleasurable sensations.
“It does not hurt. Will you kiss me, Esther?”
There was a “but” in his it-does-not-hurt, one Esther could not fathom. She hitched closer and wished she were in her nightclothes, or in nothing at all.
“Esther,
please
…”
Ah, the glory of hearing that hoarse, pleading whisper, of feeling it against her bare skin. Gently, slowly, Esther settled her mouth on his, treasuring everything about the moment.
The sound of their clothing rustled when she shifted, and his arm tightened around her.
The feel of his clean-shaven cheek against her palm as she cradled his jaw.
The scrape of his riding boots as he spread his legs and closed his fingers in her hair.
The sweet lemony taste of his tongue seaming her lips.
He
keeps
lemon
drops
in
his
snuffbox.
For long, long moments, that was Esther’s last coherent thought. She became nothing more than the female half of a passionate, unforgettable, indescribable,
profound
kiss, and how long she existed in that blissful state she could not have said, though for the duration of their kiss, Percival Windham was both storm and refuge, both the inspiration for her desire and the frustration of it.
When Esther at last subsided against his shoulder, she was panting and wishing her clothing to Hades—she was also wishing
his
clothing to Hades—and enjoying the feel of his hand stroking slowly, slowly over her hair.
“Can you describe that kiss, Esther Himmelfarb? I surely cannot.” There was wonder in his voice, awe even.
“My first kiss?” A modest description, also a confession of sorts. She wanted him never to stop touching her hair in that soothing caress and yet, as long as he touched her in that way, she would have no means of reassembling her scattered wits.
“Our third kiss, my love.”
“Fourth, if we’re to be precise.”
“Third—the little nothing before was just the appetizer. Let me hold you.”
He was counting their kisses. Esther hoarded up that realization and did indeed let him hold her, and hold her, and hold her. At some point, he shifted and rose with her cradled against his chest, and still she did not stir. He carried her—her, Esther Himmelfarb, whom the dainty, petite Charlotte had described as Amazonian—down the walkway to the wooden bench, then took a seat directly beside her.
Esther retrieved her riding glove from a skirt pocket and slipped it on, the better to control the impulse to touch Percival Windham’s hair, to cradle his palm once more against her cheek.
When Anthony came up the walk, whistling an up-tempo version of “God Save the King,” Esther was still sitting beside Percival Windham, not touching him but wondering how—how on earth—she would describe the kisses that just passed between them.
***
Esther had regrets. She regretted not packing more of her best gowns; she regretted her family’s assumption that she could be any kind of aid to Michael in his marital machinations and any kind of check on his wagering impulses. She regretted bitterly that there hadn’t been time to devise some other plan for rescuing Lord Percival from Charlotte Pankhurst’s infernal schemes.
More than any of that, Esther regretted that she’d asked Percival Windham only for mere kissing lessons.
“He didn’t even blink,” she informed an enormous white cat curled at the foot of her bed. “Desperate spinsters must importune him for kissing lessons the livelong day.”
The cat squeezed its eyes closed, eyes that sported the same startling, lovely, rosemary-in-bloom blue boasted by Percival Windham’s eyes.
Esther paced the confines of her small chamber. “I have been accosted, you see. I have been groped and slobbered over, I have been propositioned, and I have even been proposed to.”
She shuddered at the memory of Baron Bagshot’s proposal. She’d had to help him up from his genuflection, and given the baron’s fondness for his victuals and the unreliability of his septuagenarian knees, the undertaking had been ungainly.
And he’d been so unabashedly
hopeful
.
“I was supposed to consider myself fortunate, for he assured me I’d quickly be a widow and well fixed. What sort of bride wishes her husband into the grave?”
The cat rearranged itself to a sitting position.
“Percival isn’t the least bit conceited.” Esther regarded the cat, a creature born with a full complement of conceit. “He’s easy to talk to, and he smells good, and when he lifts one from a horse, one feels… dainty.”
Dainty was a novelty and precious. No other man had conjured this feeling in Esther’s breast, as if she might shelter in his arms, lean upon him, and enjoy conversing with his chin instead of enduring his conversation with the tops of her breasts.
“He has a determined chin, nothing retiring about it. I am in a sad case when I am besotted with a man’s chin… The way he uses his hands is equally enchanting, firm and… firm.”
Esther sat on the bed and picked up the cat, who had commenced to groom itself and looked none too pleased to be interrupted.
“My mama still berates us in wonderfully precise German when we transgress. She’s very practical, and I know exactly what is meant when a man and woman become lovers, cat.”
Because Esther was scratching the nape of the beast’s neck, a comforting vibration began to rumble forth from her confidante.
Esther whispered, her lips close to the cat’s elegant fur. “I should have asked him to become my lover. This is a house party, we’re sophisticated people, and even a poor relation in training is entitled to a few lovely memories.”
The cat began to knead Esther’s shoulder through her nightclothes.
“Naughty kitty.” She cuddled the cat closer, mentally assuring herself, for the thousandth time, that asking Lord Percival for his kisses had not been foolish and she would not regret it.
She would, however, regret not asking him for more.
***
The Marquess of Pembroke was a blond, shambling giant with genial features and a heartwarming devotion to his wife and daughters. As his father studied him, Pembroke sat by a mullioned window and pretended to read some thick tome, though no doubt a pamphlet on grafting roses or distilling perfumes lay between the pages of Pembroke’s book.
Pembroke pushed his glasses up his nose then rubbed the heel of his right hand absently against his sternum. The gesture belonged on an old man, but in recent years had become alarmingly characteristic of the Moreland heir.
His Grace launched himself into the room, lest he be found spying on his oldest surviving son. “Is your indigestion acting up?”
Pembroke blinked, set the book aside, and rose slowly. “Not particularly. Good day, Your Grace.”
“And the same to you. I trust your lady fares well?”
Bella had been present for last night’s meal, it being Her Grace’s decree that the family dine together in the evening, though formality had always characterized His Grace’s dealings with his sons.