“No need for your thanks. You have two delightful tiny humans, and I’m honored to have the privilege to teach them what little I’m able to. They are quick learners, intelligent lasses.”
“I think so, too, but it gratifies a mother’s love to hear others praise her children. You’ve taught them much this morning, and more importantly, given them a laugh or two. I believe they will be requesting your presence every other day or so from now on, and …” She stood on the brink of another opportunity. The lesson was over, the girls gone inside. She stood alone with him a few moments only. The Wicked Widows would counsel her to make the most of it. “Mr. Webster?” She pulled calm about her like a quilt—warm and stoutly woven.
“Yes?” He shuffled further away from her and clasped his hands behind his back, the scrape of his boots on the ground a nail in the coffin of her confidence.
She’d venture on, nonetheless. She opened her eyes and settled her gaze firmly on his face. “About that kiss the other night—”
“No. No. No need to discuss that.” His cheeks burned red. “I will always live in shame over it.”
Oh, God. This again. His shame over having kissed her. Mortifying. But she would not be quelled this time.
“No need for shame, Mr. Webster.” She took a confident step forward then stopped it with hesitation, her foot hovering in another forward step before she rocked it backward. She would not rock back her words, too. “I wanted the kiss. I was there. At the back door. For the kiss.”
He blinked rapidly, his long golden lashes had been burnished to rust by the rain, and they fluttered in a blur as he tried to blink the truth of her words into his thick skull. “Pardon?”
“I believe you heard me very well,” she said softly. “Is there truly a need for me to repeat myself?”
He shook his head. “No. But … Why?”
Here was the difficult part. More difficult even then the admission that she had wanted the kiss. Still did, in fact, want his kiss.
She would not hesitate to do the difficult thing. “Because I have determined to take a lover. And I had some little hope that you might agree to be he.”
“Me? A lover?”
She laughed, the sound a brown and brittle leaf falling to the earth. “Aren’t you often? I was under the impression you had some level of experience in the role.”
“Yes. Hell yes. I—” His jaw tightened, and he slapped his thigh then turned sharp as a spear point and paced away from her. He leaned his palms into the edge of a stable door and folded over as if wrapping around a fist that had found its way into his gut with force and violence.
Odd behavior, but she must soldier on.
“Ye-es.” She peeked to one side and then the other, trying to see his face, failing. “Not only that. Also because I’m rather comfortable with you. I should like the man that I take into my bed to be someone I am friends with.”
He laughed, slowly unfolding to his full height and turned to face her. “Damn me, Lady Woodfeld. You speak so softly, yet each of your words is like a knife to my gut.”
Entirely inscrutable, his face. Like a knitting pattern. Even the easy ones proved foreign languages to her eyes, and there seemed nothing easy about Mr. Webster.
“I do not mean to harm you,” she said. “Quite the opposite.”
“And then she twists the knife. Ha!” A mirthless bark. He hung his head, shook it, shedding raindrops from the tips of his hair. “Darling, you’ve lodged me someplace between heaven and hell, and I don’t know how to make my way up or down. I’m stuck.”
Discomfort shook into her bones, smashing what confidence she held to bits. Hell? Her words like knives?
“If … If my kisses are so”—a hard swallow, a sharp sigh—“displeasing to you, and if my conversation is so painful, then I will retract my offer and leave you be. Thank you, again, for the riding lessons. Good day.”
She turned softly, barely disturbing the air around her, and left the mews for the alley. What was she to do now? She did not want a lover other than him, but she did want a lover. The rain descended harder now. No longer a mist settling light on every surface but driving tears that pierced quick and sharp to the bone.
She closed her eyes and tipped her face to the steel gray, weeping sky.
“Freddy.” His voice was like velvet. He stood in the rain just beyond the mews door. “I cannot tell if the wetness on your cheeks are tears or raindrops.”
She managed to smile, wobbly though it was. “Me neither.”
“Hell,” he muttered. Long, rapid strides consumed the space between them, and then his body was pressed against hers, his large hands wrapped firmly around her lower back, clutching her even closer into his heated torso. He whipped her out of the rain and into the mews and pressed her against the wall.
Always pressing her against walls.
She liked it. Liked the warmth of it and the security of it. The world, she knew, could fall away, disintegrate beneath her feet, leave her alone and longing, but when this man of muscle and grins pressed her against a wall, she could imagine it wouldn’t. Because he wouldn’t let it.