Simply Magic

11

Susanna’s bags were almost completely packed. She had done the job herself after breakfast, though Frances had told her not to bother, that she would have a maid sent up later to do it for her. But she had come and watched anyway-and admitted while they chatted that she would still rather do many things for herself than rely upon servants to wait upon her hand and foot.

Susanna had been feeling almost cheerful. She was genuinely looking forward to returning home-and that was what the school was to her. It was home. And the ladies and girls waiting there for her were her family.

She had determinedly thrown off the depression that had weighed her down the night after the assembly. She had spent a wonderful two weeks of relaxation in lovely, luxurious surroundings and in company with one of her dearest friends and a whole host of other amiable acquaintances. And if that were not enough, she had had her first ride in a gentleman’s curricle, she had engaged in-and won-a boat race, she had attended her very first ball-the assembly did qualify for that name, she had decided-and she had danced all but two sets there, each with a different partner. She had even waltzed, and she had been kissed for the first time-that brief meeting of lips did qualify. She had decided that too. Friends of opposite gender could occasionally kiss even if the sentiment behind the gesture was affection rather than romance.

She had decided-very sensibly-that she would remember everything about these two weeks down to the last little detail, and that she would enjoy the memories rather than allow them to oppress her.

It had helped that Viscount Whitleaf had not singled her out for any particular attention during the past two days. They had been able to smile amicably at each other and even speak with each other, but as part of a group of acquaintances.

It had helped too that he had not come this morning with Mr. Raycroft and his sister and the Calverts. All four of the young ladies had hugged her when they were leaving, and Miss Raycroft and Miss Mary Calvert had actually shed a few tears. Mr. Raycroft had taken her hand in both of his and patted it kindly as he wished her a safe journey and a pleasant autumn term at school.

Ah, yes, it had helped that he had not come too, that he had avoided actually saying good-bye to her.

And yet it had been very hard at luncheon to maintain a cheerful flow of conversation with Frances and the earl.

It had been hard to swallow her food past the lump in her throat.

It had been hard to avoid admitting to herself that she was hurt-both by his absence this morning and by the care with which he had avoided being alone with her yesterday and the day before. She knew it had been deliberate.

It was as if that kiss, which had perhaps not been a real kiss at all, had destroyed their friendship.

But now he had come after all.

Alone.

And he had found her alone. Yet when the earl had suggested that he and Frances join them on their walk outside, Viscount Whitleaf had conspicuously not grasped at the chance of having company. He had said nothing. And Frances seemed to have believed that Susanna wanted to spend a few minutes of this last afternoon alone with him.

Did she?

She and Frances had intended spending the afternoon walking all about the lake. Just the two of them. The earl had said at luncheon that he would leave them to enjoy each other’s company since they were soon going to be separated for a while again.

Viscount Whitleaf’s arm, Susanna noticed, was not quite relaxed beneath her hand. There was a certain tension in the muscles there. He did not speak for a while as she directed them across the terrace and diagonally across the lawn toward the woods, where the wilderness walk began.

She could not help remembering the silence in which they had walked more than halfway from Hareford House to Barclay Court the day they met-not quite two weeks ago.

But there was a different quality to this silence.

It was almost impossible to believe that just two weeks ago she had not even met him-except once, briefly, when they were both children.

“There it is,” she said, breaking the silence at last as she pointed ahead to where a clearly defined path disappeared among the trees. “The wilderness walk. It winds its way through the woods and over the hill to a small bridge across the river, and then it follows the river past the waterfall to the lake and continues all around it to approach the house from the other side.”

“A long hike,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Are you up to it?” he asked her.

“I have always loved walking,” she told him.

“I have too,” he said. “I have been on walking tours of the Scottish Highlands and the Lake District. I intend to try North Wales one of these days.”

“Mount Snowdon is said to be quite breathtaking,” she said, “and the whole country rugged and beautiful.”

“Yes,” he said, “so I have heard.”

The path was well kept and allowed them to walk comfortably two abreast. There was an instant feeling of seclusion as tree branches offered shade overhead and tree trunks closed in around them like pillars in a cathedral. A number of birds were trilling out a summer song from their perches above.

“I would be interested to hear about your walking tours,” she said.

He did not answer for a while, and she was aware that his head was turned toward her. She kept looking ahead.

“We can do it this way if you wish,” he said softly at last. “We can find topics upon which one or both of us is able to converse eloquently and at some length. And when we have reached the end of the walk and arrived back at the house we can each congratulate ourselves on the fact that we allowed not a moment’s silence to descend between us after the first few awkward minutes. We can take a cheerful farewell of each other and that will be it. The end of the story.”

She did not know what she was supposed to say. He had asked no question.

“Yes,” she said.

“It is what you wish?” He bent his head closer to hers, and she risked turning her own to look into his eyes, darker than usual in the shade of the trees, only a few inches from her own.

It was her undoing.

“No,” she said, not knowing exactly what she meant but quite certain that she did not want to chatter politely with him about inconsequential matters when this was their last time alone together.

Ever.

“No,” she said again, more firmly, and she smiled fleetingly and turned her head to look ahead along the path once more. “But in what way are we to do it, then?”

“Let us simply enjoy the afternoon and each other’s company. Let us laugh a little,” he said. “But real enjoyment and real laughter. Let’s be friends. Shall we?”

It was foolish to feel tragic. This time next week, next year, she would look back and wonder why she had not taken full advantage of every moment instead of living with the emptiness of what the future would hold. How did she know the future would be empty? How did she know there would even be a future?

“What a good idea,” she said-and laughed.

“I think it quite brilliant.”

He laughed too, but though their laughter was about nothing at all-her comment and his retort could hardly be called witty-it felt very good. And suddenly she felt happy. She would not peer into the future.

“Have you noticed,” she asked him, “how we live much of our lives in the past and most of the rest of it in the future? Have you noticed how often the present moment slips by quite unnoticed?”

“Until it becomes the past?” he said. “ Then it gets our attention. Yes, you are perfectly right. How many present moments will there be before we arrive back at the house, do you suppose? How long is a present moment, anyway? One could argue, perhaps, that it is endless, eternal.”

“Or more fleeting than a fraction of a second,” she said.

“I believe,” he said, “we are dealing with the half-empty-glass attitude versus the half-full-glass attitude again. Are we by any chance talking philosophy? It is an alarming possibility. If we are not careful we will be trying to decide next how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.”

“None at all or an infinite number,” she said. “I have never been sure which. If there is a correct answer.”

“Well,” he said, chuckling, “shall we agree to live this particular endless moment strictly in the present tense? Or this myriad succession of present moments?”

“Yes, we will so agree,” she said, laughing with him again.

And as they strolled onward, Susanna lifted her face to the changing patterns of light and shade, warmth and coolness, and was aware of the sounds of birdsong and insect whirrings and the scurrying of unseen wildlife and the smells of earth and greenery and a masculine cologne. She felt every irregularity, every small stone on the path beneath her feet, the firm but relaxed muscles of his arm beneath her hand, warm through the sleeve of his coat.

She turned her head again to smile at him and found that he was smiling back-a lazy, genuine, happy smile.

“I see a seat up ahead,” he said. “It is my guess that it looks out on a pleasing prospect.”

“It does,” she said. “This path was very carefully constructed for the pleasure of the walker, as you observed yourself when we walked to the waterfall.”

They stood behind the seat for a while, looking through what appeared to be a natural opening between trees across wide lawns to the house and stables in the distance. An old oak tree in the middle of the lawn was perfectly framed in the view.

And she was here now looking at the view, Susanna thought, deliberately feeling the soft fabric of his coat sleeve without actually moving her hand.

“The path moves up into that hill,” she said, pointing ahead. “There are some lovely views from up there. The best, though, I think, is the one down onto the river and the little bridge.”

They stopped a number of times before they came there, gazing alternately out onto the cultivated beauty of the park and over the rural peace and plenty of the surrounding farmland.

“I wish you could see Sidley,” he said, squinting off into the distance when they were looking across a patchwork of fields, separated by low hedgerows. “You did say you had never been there, did you not? It always seems to me that there is nowhere to compare with it in beauty. I suppose I am partial. Undoubtedly I am partial, in fact. It smites me here.” He tapped his heart and then turned to her suddenly and smiled roguishly. “It smites this chest organ, this pump.”

“The heart, the center of our most tender sensibilities,” she conceded, “even if only because we feel they must be centered somewhere. It must indeed be wonderful to have a home of your very own. I can well imagine that you would come to see it more with the emotions than with the eye or the intellect.”

“I hope you will have a home of your own one day,” he said, tapping her hand as it rested on his arm.

They strolled onward, following the path down through the lower, wooded slopes of the hill until it climbed again into the open and they could see down to the river, narrower here than it was closer to the lake. And there was the little wooden footbridge that spanned it, so highly arched that the path across it formed actual steps up to the middle and down the other side. The water flowing beneath it was dark green from the reflections of trees growing thickly up the slopes from its banks.

“Ah, yes,” he said as they stopped walking, “you were quite right. This is the best view of all. Even better than the view from the waterfall. That is spectacular, but like most of the views here it encompasses both the wilderness and the outside world. This is nothing but wilderness.”

Susanna let go of his arm and turned all about. The hill rose behind them to meet the sky. On the other three sides there was nothing to see but trees. Below were more trees and undergrowth and ferns and the river and bridge.

“I had not really noticed that before,” she said. “But it is true. That must be why I love being just here so much. It offers total…”

“Escape?”

But she frowned and shook her head.

“Retreat,”she said. “It is a better word, I think.”

“Shall we sit down for a while?” he suggested. “There is no seat just here, but I don’t suppose the ground is damp. There has been no rain for several days, has there?”

He stooped down on his haunches and rubbed his hand hard across the grass. He held the hand up, palm out, to show her that it was dry.

She sat down, drawing her knees up before her and clasping her arms about them. He stretched out on his side beside her, lifting himself onto one elbow and propping his head on one hand while the other rubbed lightly over the grass.

The sun beamed down warm on their heads.

“Oh, listen,” she said after a few moments.

His hand fell still.

“The waterfall?”

“Yes.”

They both listened for a while before he lifted his hand from the grass and set it lightly over one of hers about her knees.

“Susanna,” he said, “I am going to miss you.”

“We are not supposed to be thinking about the future,” she said, but she had to draw a slow, steadying breath before she spoke.

“No,” he agreed. His hand slid from hers and he tossed his hat aside and lay back on the grass, one leg bent at the knee with his booted foot flat on the ground, the back of one hand over his eyes to shield them from the sun.

There was the rawness of threatened pain at the back of her throat. It was no easy thing to hold the future at bay. She concentrated her mind again upon the distant sound of the waterfall.

“Do you ever wish,” he asked after a couple of minutes, “that you were totally free?”

“I dream of it all the time,” she said.

“So do I.”

Two weeks ago-less-she would have assumed that such a man had all the freedom he could possibly want or need. Indeed, it had seemed to her that most men were essentially free.

“What ungrateful wretches we are,” he said with a low chuckle.

“But it is not freedom from school or from relative poverty or from anything else in my circumstances that I yearn for,” she said. “It is…Oh, I once heard it described as the yearning for God, though that is not quite it either. It is just-mmm…”

“The longing for something beyond yourself, beyond anything you have ever known or dreamed of?” he suggested.

“Yes,” she said with a sigh.

“Are we talking philosophy again?” he asked, and he removed his hand from his eyes, turned his head, and grinned up at her. “Twice in one afternoon? I think I must be sickening for something.”

She laughed and looked back at him.

And something happened.

Suddenly the moment was very present indeed, as if past and future had faded to nothingness or else collapsed into the present. And the moment was simply magic.

And unbearably tense.

Their eyes held, and neither spoke as their smiles faded-until he lifted his hand and set the knuckles lightly against her cheek.

“Susanna,” he said softly.

She could have said or done any number of things to cause time to tick back into motion. But she did none of them-did not even consider any of them, in fact. She was suspended in the wonder of the moment.

She turned her head so that her lips were against his knuckles. And she gazed down into his eyes, violet and smoky and as deep as the ocean.

He slid the hand down and pulled loose the ribbons of her bonnet. He brushed it backward and it fell to the grass behind her. She felt the air warm against her face and cool in her slightly damp hair. He cupped her face in both hands and drew it downward. She released her tight hold on her legs and turned so that she was kneeling beside him.

And then their lips met-again.

It was a kiss as brief-and as earth-shattering-as the last one. He lifted her face away from his and gazed up into her eyes, his thumbs circling her cheeks.

“Let me kiss you,” he said.

It was something of an absurd request, perhaps, in light of the fact that he had just done exactly that without asking permission. But despite her almost total lack of experience with kisses, she possessed enough woman’s intuition to know exactly what he meant.

“Yes,” she whispered.

She continued to kneel over him, one hand spread over his chest, the other bracing herself on the grass on the far side of him, while he kissed her again.

But this time the kiss did not end after a brief moment. It did not end at all for a long, long time. And this time it was not a mere touching or brushing of lips.

This time his lips were parted and warm and moist, and he nibbled at her lower lip with his teeth and touched both her lips with his tongue and with its tip traced the seam between them from one corner to the other and back again but pressing a little more firmly this time until it curled up behind her top lip to caress the soft, sensitive flesh inside. And then he feathered little kisses across her mouth and down to her chin before kissing her fully again, his mouth pressed harder, more urgently to hers. His tongue pushed past her lips, past her teeth deep into her mouth. And then finally the kiss softened, and he lifted her head away from his again.

His eyes were heavy-lidded as they gazed into hers.

“Lie down beside me,” he suggested. “You look uncomfortable.”

She was still crouched over him, her hands clutching one lapel of his coat and a clump of coarse grass.

She stretched out beside him, lying on her side, his arm beneath her head. She rested her hand over his heart and closed her eyes. She did not want him to speak. She did not want to think. She was too busy feeling.

Did people-men and women-really kiss like that? She had had no idea. She had imagined being kissed, and in her imagination she had been swept away by the sheer romance of the meeting of lips. In her naïveté she had not considered the possibility that a kiss, as a prelude to sexual activity, might have powerful effects on parts of her body other than just her lips. All parts of her body, in fact, even parts she had been only half aware of possessing. She ached and throbbed in all sorts of unfamiliar places.

Neither had it ever occurred to her that a kiss might involve the mouth as well as just the lips.

She could feel his heart beating heavily beneath her hand.

And then, before she had even begun to recover her wits, he turned onto his side to face her, and his free hand touched her cheek again and his fingers feathered through her hair, moving it away from her face.

She both saw and heard him swallow.

“The trouble with kisses,” he said softly, “is that inevitably they make one want more.”

“Yes.”

More?

Kisses as a prelude to…

He kissed her again, softly and lazily, and they lay with their arms about each other while she responded with moves of her own. She moved her lips over his, touched them with her tongue, stroked his tongue with her own when it came into her mouth again, sucked on it. When he made a low sound in his throat, she spread her hand over the back of his head, twining her fingers in his sun-warm hair.

That was when he brought the rest of her body against his and she felt all the unfamiliar thrill of being flush against the hard-muscled body of a man from the lips to the toes. One of his Hessian boots hooked about her legs to hug her closer.

“Susanna,” he whispered into her mouth.

“Yes.”

“Say my name,” he murmured.

“Peter.”

It was so much more personal, so much more intimate, than his title. She had never even thought of him as Peter before now. But it was his name, his most personal possession. It was how she would remember him.

The ache of-of wanting became almost unbearable.

His hand was at her breast, exploring it lightly, caressing it, his palm lifting it, his thumb rubbing over her nipple, which was taut and tender. He hooked the same thumb beneath the fabric of her dress at the shoulder and eased it down her arm until her breast was exposed. His hand covered it again, warm and dark-skinned against its paleness. And then he lowered his head and, before she could guess his intent, took her nipple into his mouth and suckled her.

Sensation stabbed like a knife up into her throat and behind her nose, down through her womb and along her inner thighs.

It was the moment at which she abandoned self-deception.

This was no ordinary, innocent friendship.

It never had been.

She could not bear the thought of tomorrow. But it was not just because she would be losing a friend. She would also be leaving behind the man with whom she had tumbled headlong and hopelessly in love.

Hopelessly being a key word.

Hopelessly. Without all hope. Without any future.

There was only now.

He lifted his head and brought his mouth close to hers again. But instead of kissing her, he gazed deep into her eyes, his own heavy with a desire that clearly matched her own. It was not hard to interpret that look even though she had not seen it on a man’s face before.

“Stop me now,” he murmured, “or heaven help us both.”

Stop?

No! Oh, no. If there was no future, if there was only now, she would not have it snatched away from her-forever. She would have the whole of it.

It was not rational thought, of course, with which she considered his words. She was past rational thought-but had no experience with anything else. Her mind did not even touch upon virtue or morality. Even less did it touch upon consequences or the very real dangers inherent in not stopping him.

There was only now.

Now he was here with her.

Tomorrow she would be gone, and the day after so would he.

“Susanna?” he whispered again.

“Don’t stop,” she said. “Please don’t stop.”

He did not stop. He turned her onto her back, kissing her, baring her other breast and fondling her with expert hands and lips while she lay beneath him, bewilderment and desire and sheer physical sensation tumbling together through every vein and bone and nerve ending in her body.

And then he lifted the hem of her dress, drawing it all the way up to her hips and disposing of undergarments until she could feel the grass against her bare flesh. He fumbled with the waist flap of his pantaloons and brought himself over between her legs, which he parted with his own before sliding his hands firmly beneath her to cushion her against the hardness of the ground.

She knew what happened. With her intellect, she knew the process-or some of it anyway. She knew about penetration and the spilling of the seed. It had always seemed to her that it must be both painful and embarrassing, though she had always wanted to experience it anyway.

There was pain. He came into her slowly but firmly, pressing past the barrier of her virginity until he was deeply embedded in her.

There was no embarrassment.

She had not known how large he would feel, how hard, how deep.

And she had known nothing of what happened between penetration and the spilling of the seed.

What happened was pain and pleasure and shock and satisfaction all rolled into one. Pain as he withdrew and thrust over and over again past the soreness of her newly opened womanhood. Pleasure because it was more wonderful, more exhilarating, than any other sensation she had ever experienced. Shock because she had not expected such a deep and vigorous and prolonged invasion of her body. Satisfaction because now, before it was too late, he was her lover. Because she would always be able to remember him as her lover.

Despite the pain and the shock, she wanted it never to end. She braced her feet on the ground, feeling the supple leather of his boots along the insides of her legs as she did so, wrapped her arms about him, closed her eyes, and allowed herself to feel every painful, powerful, wonderful stroke of his body into hers, to hear every labored breath they both drew, to smell his cologne and the very essence of his maleness, to understand that at last, for once in her life, she was celebrating her sexuality-with a man she loved.

She would not be sorry afterward.

Surely she would not.

She would not even think of afterward.

But it came anyway.

His rhythm quickened and his strokes deepened until he held still in her, every muscle tense, and then sighed and relaxed even as she felt the gush of a greater heat deep inside.

She swallowed against a moment’s disappointment that now it was over.

Forever.

It did not matter. It would not matter. She would always remember.

He drew free of her and rolled off her, careful to lower her skirt over her legs and lift her bodice over her breasts as he did so. He lay on his back beside her after setting his own clothing to rights, one arm flung over his eyes, the other hand palm-down over the back of hers as it lay on the grass between them.

It seemed to her that he slept for a few minutes.

How could anyone possibly sleep after that? But he had, of course, expended a great deal of energy.

Deep inside her she harbored his seed.

The beginnings of rational thought niggled at the edges of her mind.

“Susanna,” he said sleepily, while she lay with closed eyes, reliving every moment of what had just happened.

She turned her head to look at him. He was tousled, slightly flushed, impossibly handsome.

“Come away with me,” he said.

“What?” An irrational hope blossomed for a moment.

“Let’s go away,” he said. “Why say good-bye when neither of us wants it to happen? Let’s go to North Wales. Let’s see Mount Snowdon together and go walking over the hills and along the beaches. Let’s do it. Let’s run free.”

And the horrible thing was, she thought as she stared at him, that he meant it. And that for two pins she would have cast caution and good sense to the winds and agreed to go with him.

“And afterward?” she said.

“Afterward?” He laughed softly. “To the devil with afterward. We will think of that when the time comes. I won’t ever leave you destitute, though, I promise. Come with me. Let’s do it.”

Rational thought came crashing back from wherever it had been hiding and took up residence in her conscious mind again.

She would be his mistress.

They would have a wild, doubtless glorious fling together, and then he would pay her off. Because he was a basically decent and kind man, he would see to it that she did not starve after he discarded her.

She could be his mistress.

His whore.

“I like my life as it is,” she said. “I love the school and my work there and my pupils and my fellow teachers. I have to go back tomorrow.”

“You do not have to do anything,” he said.

“You are right.” She sat up and straightened her dress as best she could with slightly shaking hands. “I do not. I do not have to go away with you.”

He sat up too.

“I cannot bear to let you go,” he said as she reached for her bonnet and pulled it on over her disheveled curls. “Can you bear to let me go?”

“No,” she admitted, pausing as she tied the ribbons beneath her chin. “But there are no alternatives that I can bear even as well as saying good-bye to you.”

“Susanna-” he began.

But she had got to her feet and stood looking down at him. She had even dredged up a half-cheerful smile from somewhere.

“I will treasure the memory of this fortnight,” she said. “Even the memory of this. But this is the end. It must be. Anything else would be sordid.”

“Sordid.” He frowned up at her and then reached for his hat and got slowly to his feet to stand beside her. “Would it?”

“Yes,” she said. “I am a teacher, not a courtesan. I will remain a teacher.”

He looked at her for a long moment, his eyes unfathomable, and then he nodded.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I do beg your forgiveness for the insult.”

“It was not insulting,” she said softly, “to let me know that you would prolong your acquaintance with me if you could. Shall we go back instead of walking farther? We must have been gone for some time, and Frances will wonder what-”

“We have been up to?” he suggested.

Slowly and ruefully they smiled at each other.

When he offered his arm, she took it, and they resumed their walk, albeit in the opposite direction. She felt all the unreality of the past half hour or so.

Except that it was not unreal.

Between her thighs she could feel the trembling aftermath of what they had done together.

Inside, she felt an unmistakable soreness.

Deep inside she harbored his seed.

Too late she thought of consequences.