“Why do you care if I injured myself?” she demanded, seizing upon her defensiveness rather than lingering upon the mad yearnings coursing through her. “I should think you would be crowing over the fact that you were right, and had I listened to you, I would have neither blistered feet nor a sunburnt face.”
Kissing him had done something to her, clearly.
Addled her wits.
He startled her then by taking a lone, long forefinger, and brushing it gently down the bridge of her nose. “Why would I be pleased you are in pain? What manner of beast do you think me? And I thought you said your skin had not burned.”
She liked the warmth of his touch, the tenderness of the gesture. Too much.
And she hated herself for it.
“Perhaps my skin did burn, just a bit,” she acknowledged, also despising the throatiness of her voice.
“You have freckles,” he said, “just as you did the time we had the picnic luncheon overlooking the lake here. Do you recall that day?”
Yes, she did. The memories seared her from the inside out, sending a pounding thrum of desire directly to her core. In spite of the pain of the blisters on her feet, need pulsed to life, creating an ache so fierce within her that she had to press her thighs together in attempt to stave it off.
She did not succeed, however, for the action only heightened the sensation.
His gaze dipped to her lips. “You remember it, do you not? I fed you strawberries. We were watching the ducks.”
“Youwere watching the ducks,” she corrected before she could think better of her admission. “I was watching the swans.”
“You read poetry to me.” He smiled, a true smile, one that crinkled the corners of his magnificent eyes. “‘She sleeps a charmed sleep: Awake her not.’”
He remembered. “Goblin Market. The poem wasDream Land.”
The volume had been by Christina Rossetti. That summer day had seemed charmed. He had given her strawberries, one bite at a time, and they had kissed, their tongues tangling, berry juice sticky and sweet on their mouths. She had read him poems with his head in her lap, stroking his hair.
She had taken off her hat and abandoned her parasol. And later, their kisses and poetry had not been enough. He had rolled her onto her back and made love to her there on the hill overlooking the manmade Needham Hall lake.
“Youdoremember,” he said.
How could she not? So many details returned.
She told herself it meant nothing. That the faraway day had meant nothing, too.
If only she believed herself.
“I remember other days as well,” she added, chasing the memory, the thoughts. “The clearest day of all is the one when you betrayed me. But that was not the only time you were unfaithful to me, was it Needham?”
His jaw tensed beneath his beard, his lips firming into a thin, harsh line. “What happened that day was a mistake. It never happened before, and nor did it happen after.”
Again with his protestations he had remained faithful to her for three years.
“I do not believe a word that comes out of your mouth,” she told him.
And oh, what a beautiful, wicked mouth it was. If only she could stop imagining what it had felt like upon hers. What his kiss had been like.
“Do you still feed them?” he asked her suddenly.
Instantly, she knew what he was speaking of.
The ducks. The swans.
Of course she still fed them.
“The birds? No.” The prevarication left her because she wanted to spite him. She did not want him to think he still had the power to know her, even though he did. “I leave them to be tended to by others. I am far too busy for them now.”
