The Courtship - Catherine Coulter [42]
“Lord Beecham, I will see you in the morning. If it isn’t raining, we can once again endeavor to reach Dereham.”
What was he to say? What he wanted to do was push back his chair, rise slowly, never taking his eyes off her, walk to where she stood, and put his hands around her white neck. He didn’t know how hard he would squeeze. Certainly hard enough to gain her attention, curse her. He flexed impotent fingers as he watched her leave the dining room. She was dressed in soft gray silk down that draped very nicely over that delicious white body of hers.
He had made love to her three times, given her his all, actually more than his all, simply because, for no reason he could fathom, she had hauled it out of him. She had completely possessed him, emptied him, and now she wanted to forget it?
Not if he had anything to say about it.
He and Lord Prith played whist. Lord Prith talked about how his sweet little Nell was the very picture of her soft, very gentle mother. If it had not been for Flock hovering close, Lord Beecham would have choked to death on his brandy.
He lost sixty pounds and had drunk too much delicious smuggled French brandy by the time Flock fetched his lordship for their evening walk.
11
“DAMN YOUR EYES, HELEN, you will talk to me about this. Women always love to talk after making love to the point of rendering a man insensible. Usually a woman starts chattering immediately, when the man is lying there, felled, still utterly witless. I will admit that our surroundings yesterday were perhaps not all that inspiring, and thus you wished to wait to talk everything to death and in great detail. Now it is time. We are in pleasant surroundings. Now you may speak to me.”
Nothing from Helen.
He persevered. “You may now feel free to thrash everything over, Helen. You may complain about certain minor digressions or perhaps omissions.”
But Helen, curse her beautiful eyes, began whistling.
He jerked on Luther’s reins, and his horse reared back, nearly unseating him. He turned to her and yelled, “Damn you, stop that. All right. I will accept that just perhaps not everything that happened between us was necessarily perfect during those hours yesterday that you are claiming to forget.”
“Goodness, Spenser, whatever are you talking about?”
He ignored that bit of goading. He was a reasonable man. Sometimes a woman needed to be eased into spilling her innards. She had to trust a man, know that he admired her, particularly if she wished to praise him. Of course she knew he believed she was utterly delicious. She also knew, damn her, that he’d given her wondrous pleasure. He could still feel her hot breath in his mouth when she moaned her climax. He had felt it to his toes. His breathing hitched for a moment. Perhaps she was just embarrassed to tell him how spectacular a lover he was. That had to be it. “If you wish to speak of how immensely well suited we are, you may do so now. I will listen. I will attend you.”
Helen continued to whistle. A robin redbreast answered from a maple tree to the side of the country road. Rage was building up inside him, nice, bubbling rage, but still he held his voice calm, the epitome of male reason.“Listen to me. We are alone, there is no more bloody rain today, the sun is shining down quite brightly on our heads, our horses are clipping along at a fine rate, and I am ready to listen to you.
“It is all right, Helen. I understand you now. You want me to wrap every pleasurable thing we did yesterday all up in a poetic and soulful package.”
She gave him a look of female amusement, a look that could shrivel a man’s manhood. “Since we did not do anything at all yesterday afternoon—at least nothing worth mentioning that I can remember—then you may take all your soulful packages and dump them in a ditch.”
“You will stop trying to enrage me. This so-called memory lapse of yours is laughable. When I take a woman, she never forgets it. Never. If I ever take a woman three times, her life changes utterly.”
Curse her all the way to China, she laughed. She looked over at him