Page 59 of The Ladies Least Likely
“You’re not still soft on him, I hope?” Pen growled.
She knew he wasn’t speaking of Vaughn. “I’ve no wish to see him again. Ever.”
“Good.” Pen moved closer and she shivered as the warmth of his nearness teased her skin. He smelled like freshly turned earth and a hint of honey. “I’ve been trying to blot him entirely from your mind,” he whispered beside her ear.
His breath wafted across her neck, stirring the delicate hairs, and the flare of awareness plunged through her body, lighting an instant sliver of heat between her legs. St. Meleri’s marrow, how could he enflame her with a mere whisper? Was she that desperate for the touch of a man?
Not just any man. This one.
She turned toward him like a flower unfurling in the sun. The unholy gleam in his hazelnut eyes said he knew he’d aroused her, exactly as intended. The man played her body as confidently as she strummed her harp, and she thrilled to his handling. He knew how to satiate them both, and each night he feasted on her sighs and tremors as if her satisfaction heightened his.
No need to tell him the pleasure they found together far surpassed anything of her experience. Or that he was quickly erasing the possibility that she could ever want anyone else.
“Perhaps a bit more blotting is called for,” she murmured.
She smiled as his eyes narrowed and he gripped her waist with a warm, heavy hand, thumb brushing her ribs. “As much as it takes,” he said, his voice a low rasp.
Evans thumped into the room, and Gwen broke free of the spell. Her head had been moving toward Pen’s, mouth tipped up to invite a kiss, in front of nearly every person she knew in the world. St. Teilo’s teeth, what had come over her? Did she want everyone to know she was tupping the man who held all their fates in his hands?
Pen’s hand fell from her waist and cool air rushed in when he stepped away. She barely heard what she said in farewell as the men took their leave, Gareth with them.
Dovey watched her, one hand on her hip, wooden spoon raised in the air. Her eyes bore lines of strain and worry.
“What are you about, dearie?” she whispered as the others shuffled off to their tasks.
Gwen turned to the stove, cheeks burning. “It’s not to barter with him, much as it might appear,” she said. “And it’s nothing to do with his earlier offer, either. What it is, is?—”
A torrential passion that had upended her world. Like the merfolk of legend he’d called to her and she’d followed, the foolish maiden risking her future and her life for the sheer bliss of being desired by him.
“I fancy him, is all,” she said lamely.
“Fancy,” Dovey said. She popped a licorice stick in her mouth and chewed.
“Well, I can’t say I blame you a bit.” Mathry took the basket of licorice root into the stillroom. “He is a lush one, though I take a fright when he gets all lordly.”
But he didn’t belong to her, and he wouldn’t stay in her world. Gwen knew this as she collected her bottles.Shewas the mermaid, stealing him from his life. And keeping him because she loved who she became in his arms, a woman confident, capable, desirable. With Pen she wasn’t spoiled by betrayal or broken by loss. With him, she was whole.
The dream wouldn’t last. No dreams did, not even for those more deserving than she.
Gwen heardthe delicate footsteps first, then saw the woman’s shadow fall over the hard-packed dirt. That was all the warning she had. Her heart dropped into her belly, though she couldn’t see the figure framed in the doorway of the brewhouse, outlined in shadow by the afternoon sun, the blooming dogwood on one side and the crimson rhododendron on the other.
“Gwenllian! Is it really you? I thought I’d never see you again.”
The woman’s soft voice held the cultured accent of the upper-class English. The stick Gwen was using to stir the vat of malt slipped through suddenly nerveless fingers.
“Anne.” Her voice scraped through a throat gone dry. “You ought to have come to the front door.”
“I knocked. No one answered.”
Anne Sutton of Vine Court, and she had found Gwen in the outbuildings, cap discarded and shawl tied up, sweating like a scullery maid.
No. Working in good faith to tend the home she had built with her own two hands. Why did she fear Anne Sutton was here to take everything away from her? Again?
Gwen wiped her hands on her shawl. She had abandoned her friend along with everything else when she left Vine Court all those years ago. Anne might have believed what her parents told her, that Gwen was a grasping orphan who had tried to seduce, then trick Daron into marriage, and had been turned out on her conniving ear.
“Come into the kitchen,” Gwen finally managed to say. “There’sbara brithfor tea.”
Anne Sutton was accustomed to fine tea in formal parlors served from dainty porcelain dishes, and Gwen smelled like beer malt and sweat. Even so, Anne untied the ribbons of her bonnet and seated herself at the huge oaken worktable in the kitchen as if she’d come to tea at St. Sefin’s every day of her life.
