Rather than setting directly across the field toward the little uneven mounds in the near distance, Tess wandered off to the left. Beyond this hayfield was another one. And beyond that what looked to be a little straggling stone fence, and then a sycamore standing just on the mound of a little hill so that the sunlight turned its leaves golden.
“Look at that,” she said softly. “Like the apples of Atlas.”
“You’re a font of classical knowledge,” Lucius said with some surprise. “Did Atlas have a golden tree with a partridge in it?”
“No,” she said, with a gurgle of laughter that delighted him. “Perseus found a garden with a golden tree that shaded golden apples. And—”
“I remember!” Lucius said. “He whipped out the head of Medusa and turned Atlas to stone, didn’t he?”
“Exactly.”
“So you and your sisters must have read as far as the O’s then?”
“No. For a short time the local vicar paid some interest in our education, and it was he who introduced Ovid’s Metamorphoses.”
“That seems a very odd choice for a vicar.”
“He was an odd vicar. Unfortunately, he began to have strong feelings for Annabel, and my father had to write the bishop and have him sent to another parish.”
They had reached the golden tree now, which turned to a rather stately, but obviously unmetallic, sycamore up close. Nestled under the tree were two tip-tilted little graves. Tess immediately knelt down in the grass and rubbed the leaves and grimes off the headstone of the one.
“Emily Caudwell,” she read softly. And: “Oh, Lucius, she was only sixteen years old. Poor thing. And here’s William.”
“The husband, one presumes,” Lucius said, bending down to peer at the old stone.
“He didn’t die for twenty-four years—or possibly twenty-five, I can’t read it clearly.”
She was pulling the weeds in front of Emily’s tomb-stone and staining her gloves. Not that it mattered much, since Lucius had already decided to toss out every stitch of clothing belonging to his wife so that he could buy her new, from head to foot. Still, he bent down and pulled a weed or two from William’s grave. The poor old sod.
“Don’t pull that one,” she said, putting a hand on his arm as he was about to jerk up a great clump of wildflowers.
“Why not?”
“It’s heartsease. He must have planted it when she died. See—it’s all over her grave, and has spread to his.”
“Heartsease?” he repeated, looking down at the sprig of fragile-looking blossoms in his hand. They looked rather weedy, although the violet petals with lemon yellow hearts were charming.
“They can’t have been married long, since she was only sixteen. Heartsease was a lovely thought on his part. It’s also called Love-in-Idleness,” she said.
“I prefer Love-in-Idleness,” Lucius said, a smile playing around his lips. “Does it have any other names?” Strands of red-gold silk were beginning to fall from her poke bonnet, so, without thinking too much about it, he untied the ribbons under her chin and pulled it off.
More hair tumbled from the pins that held the heavy mass of it at her neck. He picked a tiny spray of yellow flowers and tucked it into her hair.
She was definitely blushing now. How many men were lucky enough to marry a bride who blushed?
“Another name?” he prompted.
“Kiss Her in the Buttery,” not looking at him.
He picked three more sprays and tucked them into her glowing hair. “Kiss Her in the Buttery. What about Kiss Her Under the Sycamore? I swear I’ve heard that name somewhere.”
There was a smile trembling on her lips. “I suppose it could be a name.”
He came to his knees before her; her lips were as silken as his feverish imagination had remembered them. He slipped his hands into the sleek hair, the perfect shape of her head making his fingers tremble, the little sigh of breath against his lips making him ache.
At first he kissed her as if she were a blushing bride and he an affectionate husband: gently, sweetly, and with an eye to innocence. But gradually the roaring in his blood began to beat back the gentleman in him, and he started to taste her rather than kiss her. And tasting her—tasting Tess, his wife, his own wife—that was like an intoxication in which every touch made him hungrier.
His fingers curled possessively into her sweet-smelling hair, and he bent his head, taking her mouth, that unbearably desirable mouth, with a growl that had nothing to do with gentlemanlike behavior.
If Tess had but known, her husband had just turned into one of those uncultivated men who rip their wife’s clothes off their body, who fling themselves on the poor female in a carriage, in a garden…under a sycamore tree…
But she was drowning, her mind whirling. His mouth was hot on hers—hot! How could it be hot? She felt as if all her most important senses were lost, whirling around her so that all she could do was clutch his shoulders and hang on, fighting the strange sensations that kept sweeping over her body, making her knees tremble and an unwonted heat grow between her legs, and her forehead feel feverish—in fact, her whole body feel feverish.
It was alarming at the same time it was enthralling. It was frightening, as if some animal part of her wanted nothing more than to clutch Lucius by his neckcloth and pull him closer and closer. And yet they could hardly be closer; her body was pressed up against his in such a fashion that her breasts were positively squished by his chest, and she could feel—could feel—
Tess began to feel more than a little dizzy. Her hair was all down her back, and his hands were moving over her. When he was kissing her, she couldn’t think, but then his lips moved to her throat, and suddenly her mind burst with questions.
“Lucius,” she said, her voice quavering into the quiet heat of the afternoon. Nothing answered her but the song of a drowsy grasshopper. But she couldn’t be mistaken. Everything that she and Annabel knew about men and women suggested that Lucius was planning to do more than kiss her under the sycamore tree.
“Lucius,” she said again. And: “Lucius!” He was caressing her neck, whispering something against her skin, and his great hand was sweeping up her back, caressing her so tenderly that she began to tremble, and a bewildering sweep of heat broke over her body, following the track of his wandering hand, which was—which was—
“Mr. Felton!” she gasped.
He jerked away from her immediately. “Don’t ever call me that!” he said, his voice a growl.
“Why not?” she said shakily, trying to concentrate on anything other than the hunger in his eyes and her violent wish to curl her fingers into his hair and pull him back to her.
“My name is Lucius,” he said, standing up and helping her to her feet. “Shall we walk to the ruin now?”
It was just the surprise of his kisses that had her heart bumping in her chest like a drum, the shock that was making her feel desolate.
“Well, here we are,” she said calmly, as they approached the tumbled-down walls. “What part of the ruin in particular so interested you that you wished to revisit it?”
Lucius could hardly say that there was nothing interesting about a pile of moss-covered rubble. Nor could he say that he’d instigated the picnic for one reason only: to provide a decoy so that his wife would think that he wasn’t a ravening beast, wishing only to pull her into his bed.