In two fast steps, he leapt from the folly and swung her into his arms. Cradling her, he carried her inside, slamming the door closed with a swift kick backward. He dropped her to the mattress.
Then she was lost.
As the clouds blocked the moon, so Felix’s strong body blocked out the world. As the summer wind warmed her skin, so did his heat enflame her. As doubts flickered always at the edges of her mind, so did his lips flicker on her lips. Light little sips. Sweeter than doubt, banishing it. Before she parted her lips on a moan and his tongue stole into the cavern of her mouth. Stroke for stroke, she met him, played with him, mindless and lovely. This what she’d been needing, what had fueled her pacing.
She clutched at his shoulders. Again, he wore no shirt, nothing but his buckskins.
His hand fit like a brand, high on the outside of her thigh, close to her bottom. Squeezing, nails digging. How had he crept beneath her shift so quickly? Without notice. Oh God, she was losing her mind. What had she come here for?
This.
His hand climbed higher, stroking her hip.
This.
He scratched his fingertips up her ribs and cupped her breast.
This.
No. No, no.
Something else. What else? She ripped her mouth away from his, panting. She pushed against his rock-hard chest. His heart raced as quickly as her breaths. “Wait. Please wait.”
He groaned, dropping to the mattress beside her and scrubbing his palms over his face. “You, Caroline Canterbury, are a torment.”
She rather liked that. Made her want to kiss him more. She sat on her hands instead. “I came here to tell you my plan. For Hawthorne. Why I need it.”
His arms dropped and with a groan, he sat up, leaning against the wall at the top of the makeshift bed. “There’s more? I thought you already told me all that.”
She nodded.
“Can it wait?”
She shook her head.
Another groan that sounded much liketorment, then he pointed toward the other end of the mattress. “You stay there. If you’re any closer, I cannot guarantee I’ll continue to prioritize talk over other activities.”
No one had ever looked at her as he did. What power it gave her. How sultry it made her feel. Yes, remaining at the other end of the bed a definite necessity. She’d rip his breeches off otherwise.
She settled there, crossing her legs in front of her and smoothing her skirts over them. “We need a candle.” She wanted to see his face, needed to see his reactions.
He procured one, lit it, and set it on the floor next to the mattress before returning to his spot. The space between them flickered to life in a golden glow. Felix’s face flickered, too, tornbetween open curiosity and raw lust. As it wavered, so too did his gaze, dropping to her bosom then snapping back up to her eyes.
She almost laughed. Only nerves kept her from doing so.
“Well?” he demanded.
Impatient man. No reason to stall any longer. She took a deep breath and released the truth. “I plan to establish Hawthorne House as a refuge for women in need.”
The lust and curiosity drained from his face, replaced by…nothing.
She forged ahead. “Chloe and I devised the plan some years ago. In all our father’s work we saw women abused and forgotten. Young girls abandoned because they’d sold their bodies to keep themselves alive. Like Ruth. Married women with no legal self outside of a marriage that was destroying them. Papa helped, but he was mostly concerned with the labor of men, injustice and the working classes. Abolition, of course. Chloe and I began to realize that even though these causes should improve the lives of women as well, they did not… look at women as a central concern. We were leaving their specific plights unattended. Women are at the mercy of the men in their lives, and if they do not know kind men, like my father, forward-thinking men like you and your grandfather, they have few means to escape misery.”
She dropped her gaze to her lap. Her fingers rested there. Rested. Because she did not fear telling him this. She was proud of her plan, proud of the work she’d done, the ends she desired, the good she might put into the world. And she did not fear he would find her or her plan lacking.
Lifting her chin, she said, “Hawthorne will become a house of hope, a haven for those who need it, a temporary resting place for those to find new lives and purpose. I hope that… whatever ghosts you know here will be banished. Or rather, put to rest. Perhaps your family’s souls would like to know the house willbe doing good. Or rather, that I will be doing good with it, since houses, themselves cannot do good. Hell.” She was rambling, seemed unable to stop. “I had planned to do it all alone. That’s why I sought a man—a husband—with a house he didn’t want. So he wouldn’t interfere. Chloe and Garrett are supposed to help, of course, but not a husband of my own. He was supposed to very conveniently never want to see me. But you came after me right away and now, I’ve begun to wonder, to hope… that perhaps you might stay. With me. Beherewith me.”
She inhaled deeply, waiting for his answer in the flickering candlelight and soft silence. Darkness claimed the edges of the small world they inhabited, and her words lay like a stormy ocean between them.
