Page 68 of A Lady's Heart Deceived
Piers let his hand drop, and he moved away from the door. “I shall wait here.”
While he lingered outside in the hallway, Maggie quickly found her boots and her cloak.
A short time later, she opened the door. “Where are we going?” she asked, stepping out of her room.
Piers, who was leaning against the wall, pushed off and stood upright. “Back to the barn where we were last night. I want to have our conversation again, but this time, I am going to get it right.”
A perplexed but resigned Maggie followed him downstairs, out the garden gate, and across the rain-soaked top field. The ground under her boots squelched with her every step and Maggie struggled to keep up with Piers’s fast marching pace.
At the barn, he pulled the bolt back and opened the heavy door. As with the previous evening, Piers closed it again as soon as they were inside. He hadn’t brought a lantern with him this time, and the pale morning light barely filtered through the slats in the walls. It left the barn in an eerie state of semi-darkness.
“Please have a seat,” said Piers.
Maggie dropped onto the dry hay. She was doing her best to beat down her humiliation of the prior evening. It wasn’t easy. Anger simmered in the back of her mind.
Piers, meanwhile, paced back and forth, his hands clasped behind his back. His shoulders were stiff, his spine, ramrod straight. While she sat and impatiently watched, he continued marching up and down.
Finally, an infuriated Maggie got to her feet and cried, “Piers. Stop!”
He came to an immediate halt. His shoulders slumped as he bent and rested his hands on his knees. Maggie made tentative steps toward him but halted before she got within reach. Piers was struggling—that much was obvious. It pained her to see him in such distress.
“Do you trust me?” she asked.
Standing this close to him, in the faint light she could make out the deep lines of worry on Piers’s face. It made her anxious. She feared what might come next. What was so terrible that he had to take her all the way from the main house to the isolated barn just to tell her?
“Yes, Maggie, I do trust you. It’s myself I am not sure of. I’m afraid of what will happen if you find me lacking.”
She took another tentative step forward but stopped when Piers flinched. He raised himself to his full height and faced her. “Answer me this: what do you know of what happens between a man and a woman in the marital bed?”
What?
She was innocent of such things in the physical sense, but she had a pretty good idea what they involved. Of what went where. If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have openly offered herself to him. This didn’t make sense.
“Is that what you are worried about? That I am afraid of sex? I would have thought what happened here only a matter of hours ago should have shown you that I am not. And yes, I am aware of the marital act. My mother sat and gave me the talk when I first started my courses. I might not have actually ever doneit, but I understand the physiology that it involves.”
She had also been privy, on more than one occasion, to her male cousins walking naked out of the lake at the Key in Scotland. She had caught sight of their manly appendages swinging to-and-fro before they made a mad dash into the lodge to dress.
But something told her that Piers wasn’t in the mood to hear another Radley family holiday story.
He raked his fingers through his hair, gripping tightly to the ends. Frustration oozed from him. “No. I,” he huffed.
Maggie waited, suddenly sensing it was something far worse than her lack of sexual experience.
Finally, he drew in a deep breath, and let it slowly out. “You understand what is possible between a man and a woman. Well, there are things which can also happen between men.”
Her brain took a minute to absorb that fact, to come up with an answer as to how that was possible. She hadn’t ever considered that such a thing could occur.
“I see. I think,” she said.
“It’s actually a crime in this country, punishable by death. Which is why no man wishes to ever have his name mentioned whenever the subject is raised.”
A horrible cold dread gripped her. Was this the real reason why the British Army was holding onto Piers? Had he done something illegal?
“I served under the Prince of Orange as an assistant aide-de-camp. What is not widely known in polite society is that the prince regularly conducts sexual liaisons with both male and female lovers. It was a closely guarded secret amongst those of us who served with him—that some of the prince’s other aides-de-camp were what could only be described as special close friends.”
Maggie felt close to tears. “And were you and he . . .” She couldn’t finish the sentence. The thought that Piers would never be hers was heartbreaking. Not after all she had gone through with Robert.
Was that why he hadn’t wanted to consummate their relationship? His love for her perhaps being different to how she felt for him?
