But she had never considered that Jack Pike might be married. Those had been terrible moments, standing on the dock, when she had thought he could be.
She shuddered.
She didn’t want to own him. She never could. He had had many women, and after her, he would have many more.
But a marriage. A promise made in a church. She would have been part of his breaking a vow. That might be the way in decadent London, but it was not her way, not the way in Kinmarloch.
And she hated that she did not know if, in the heat of passion, she would have thought twice about bedding him.
No. She straightened her back, sitting on the riverbank with Mags. She wouldn’t have bedded him if she had known he was married. She would have gone elsewhere for her training despite the havoc of lust he wrought on her body. She had a mind and a soul and she could control her desire. She was the Countess of Kinmarloch.
“Are ye all right, my lady?”
“Aye. ’Tis very pleasant here, isn’t it, Mags?”
“I like to see the boats.”
“I do, too.”
Jack and Duncan came back after a while. Something was changed about both of them. Jack was thoughtful. Duncan seemed clear of some worry Helen had not sensed earlier.
Helen took Jack’s hand to stand and twisted to look at the back of her dress. No grass stains, no dirt. She noticed Jack looking, too. She thought of his look at her bottom in her breeches when she had met him and first known how much a woman could want a man.
Not the thoughts that belonged at a picnic.
“Are ye to row us back upriver? Sure, willnae it be a strain?” she asked.
“No,” Jack said. “I’ll just row us back to the hospital. I arranged to leave the boat there. We’ll take a ferry back to London.”
“I’ll row us back to the hospital, Jack Pike,” Duncan said.
Helen expected some argument from Jack, but he grinned instead. “The honor guard will be allowed to do the honors. Especially since we’ll be going against the flow of the river. I’m already worried about how I’ll feel tomorrow.”
Jack said the ferry they boarded at the wharf by the hospital was a barge. Duncan watched the watermen plying their oars, as if to see how he might improve his own rowing. Jack spoke with the men, asking about the tide, had they been in the navy. Oh, what ship? And Jack made the watermen aware they should watch their coarse language.
“There are ladies present,” Jack said and caught Helen’s eye. Their joke together.
But she did not let her gaze linger on his face or his body. She looked at the water and the buildings on the shore and listened to his voice and his laugh.
It had been a good day, one she would always remember. Seeing London from the water, watching Jack Pike row a boat as he must have when he was young, picnicking on the land he owned.
But it had been a wasted day, too.
She could feel her tie to her duty growing more and more strained under the weight of her desire for Jack Pike. She was here for the Duke of Dunmore, and she didn’t want to wait any longer. She wanted it done with, like pulling out a loose tooth. When she was a child, she hadn’t liked the feeling of a tooth wobbling in her mouth, her tongue incessantly worrying it. And her patience had not improved with age.
Tomorrow, she would find a way to the duke’s house without Jack. This dress was surely good enough.
Jack had leftthe trio in their rooms, saying he would call tomorrow afternoon. And he had meant it when he departed from them. He needed to get home. He needed time, by himself, away from them all and everyone else. He needed to settle himself, find a solution to the predicament of Helen and Kinmarloch. But mostly Helen.
Why then did he find himself pounding on the door to the rooms again at midnight?
Helen answered the door as before, but in her worn nightdress this time, her eyes blinking with sleep, her hair loose around her shoulders. She drew him in by his arm and called himmo luranand kissed him tenderly. She took him to her bedchamber and undressed him, her hands sliding over his waistcoat, his trousers, his shirt.
“Are you still sore, Helen?”
“Nae. I dinnae think so.”
He made agonizingly slow love to her that night. All parts of their bodies touching, his hands on her hair and her face, with either his mouth on hers or his face right above hers, looking at her. She released several times while he was inside her without the use of his hand, and he watched her face as she did so. He thought he had never seen anything in his life as gratifying as his savage countess responding to his cock and rising to a boil and tipping over and simmering for long seconds, contracting around him, gripping his back with her hands. And then her hands would fall away and she was soft and hazed and sated until she wasn’t any more and her mouth on his and her hands and her eyes and her sounds told him she was, once again, reaching that same boil as before.
