And yet he knew it was more than that.
“I feel guilty. That I don’t remember them. They loved me, if Mr. Foxcroft is right. And seemingly they were kind, good people, who nevertheless met a tragic end. And yet I have not even a hint of a memory of them. When I was a child, I tried so hard for so long to remember anything about my mother. Or my father. But it’s a blank. There’s nothing. It feels…disloyal. As if I am a bad son.”
“I can see where you would feel that way,” Henrietta said softly. He liked that she didn’t try and convince him that his feelings were wrong.
“And then, there are people, like you and John or Leith and Montaigne, who have had parents die—parents they knew and loved. How dare I compare what I have experienced to that? I can’t even remember them.”
At these words, Henrietta turned around towards him, resisting her attempts to hold her this time.
“Trem, you forget that I have experienced both. All my life, I thought that my mother died giving birth to me. I would look at pictures of her in the gallery, ask the servants what her favorite walks had been in the garden, examine her old garments and jewelry and wonder if she meant them for me.” She huffed a little laugh at that. “Of course, now I know she would have regarded me as nothing more than a parasite—and that she was not my mother at all. But, still, back then, I thought she was. That type of grief and pain, it isn’t comparable to what I felt when my father died. One is not better or worse—they’re just different. But I can say that I am so glad I knew my father. The pain of losing him was well worth the sorrow. I think most people would agree. It is, in many ways, so much harder to have never known your parents.”
For a moment, in his throat, he felt an uncomfortable tightness. He coughed to relieve it. Her words were a balm but it was still hard for him to accept them.
“And here I was, always thinking I was lucky.”
“No, in fact,” Henrietta said, smiling. “You’re very, very unlucky.”
She kissed him, her lips soft on his.
He wanted her now.
He broke the kiss.
“I used to sit here and imagine that, one day, I’d marry a beautiful lady and she would come and live here with me.”
Henrietta laughed. “No, you didn’t. I bet you sat here and played battle with your horses and toy soldiers and gave no thought to ladies.”
“I did a fair bit of battling, it’s true,” he said, sliding his hands around to her arse, causing her to emit a little shriek of delight. “But I also used to look at this picture of Artemis and imagine marrying a lady just like that.”
She gave a huff of disbelief, which caused him to laugh. After her words, it felt easier to talk about his childhood in this way with her. She made it easy.
Henrietta snaked her hands down to his breeches, her eyes going a bit wider at the feeling of his hardness. In response, he pinned her against the wall of the grotto. She looked up at him. The blue beams of her eyes had an openness that made him want to fall into her and never surface.
“Did you really sit here and think that? About marrying a lady?”
He paused for a moment. He could make a wry joke and let her think that he had been merely jesting, that it was all a form of foreplay. But that wouldn’t be true.
“Yes,” he said, finally, kissing her. She twined her arms around his neck and he coaxed the hems of her skirt up from around her legs. He saw, thankfully, that she wasn’t wearing drawers. Trem reached out to fondle those pretty curls over her core and found, to his surprise, that she was already wet.
“Fuck, Henrietta.”
“Hurry,” she prompted.
He had the falls of his breeches undone in a second. Then, he lifted her up, pressing her between his body and the wall. He entered her and she cried out, pressing her hips towards him.
“Touch yourself,” he said, wanting her to find pleasure, and knowing that he wasn’t going to last long. She reached and touched between her legs. As he thrust, she moaned, her muscles tightening around them.
“I’m going to—oh, Trem.”
“Come for me, darling. Please.”
He was nearly at the brink himself, so ready to spend inside of her that he could feel it building in the base of his spine.
She came, raggedly, against him. Her spasms of pleasure sent him over the edge and he drove into her as he did, uttering her name and reveling in her warm, silken heat.
As his orgasm dissipated, Henrietta’s hand clenched his shoulder.
“Trem. The lake party.”
