took the first step into the darkness.
She inched her way slowly along the narrow corridor, then paused again. Suppose he wasn’t in his room at all? Suppose he was there but snubbed her? He’d resisted temptation. It was she who’d weakened.
As she stood there, torn with indecision, a noise from the far end made her heart beat with frantic, disbelieving hope. A quiet click, then the sound of the door easing open, then silence.
She sensed rather than heard someone moving closer and stopping a few inches away. The heat of his body reached her, his warm breath, and finally the faint sensation of his fingertips on her face, her lips. An uncontrollable tremor went through her and her heart beat madly as his touch trailed down her neck to the swell of her breasts. Then it vanished altogether and she gasped in protest. The sudden deprivation was unbearable.
She waited for him to caress her again, and in the silent darkness she could experience his struggle. He neither moved nor spoke, but his torment reached her in waves. Now it was her turn to reach out until her fingers brushed his face.
It was as though a spark had set off a charge of electricity. Hands came from nowhere to seize her shoulders and pull her against him with all the urgency he’d been trying to deny. Beneath a light robe he was as naked as she, and now she could feel the power of his desire, demanding, unstoppable.
He paused, waiting for her signal. A mortal, fallen into the hands of fairies, might have waited like that, wondering what mysterious step he was asked to take. Meryl found his hand, grasped it, began to retreat to her own room, drawing him after her, until she could close her door behind them.
There was no moon and the mullioned windows gave very little light, but that was good. Tonight darkness would be her friend, blotting out everything except those selves that they would give to each other. The selves of the daytime, wary, fumbling, hiding suspicion beneath bright words, had withdrawn a little way, so that these two might reach out to each other in a shared secret.
Instinct told her that he wanted to speak, but she brushed her fingers across his lips. Words must came later, or perhaps not at all. When her fingertips had left his lips her mouth followed, touching him softly at first, then more determinedly as her message became unmistakable and he answered with one of his own.
This wasn’t like the kiss he’d given her for the cameras, when his surprise had been clear to her, or like the one earlier today, in the church, when she’d sensed the eagerness and warmth that were overtaking him, despite his resolution not to yield. He’d yielded now and was giving her the kiss he’d always wanted to give, and the one she’d always wanted to receive.
She felt him toss away her robe and his own. No barriers between them at last, nothing to stop her exploring his masculinity and revelling in every discovery.
They lay together on the bed, body to body. Without sight she had to rely on her other senses, and this man reached her through them all. The power and force of him was against her hands, her breasts, her thighs. The tangy scent of him was in her nostrils and her mouth wherever she kissed him. With every step her desire flowered, demanded more. Jarvis had always feared that she’d come to conquer, and he was right. But it wasn’t his lands or title she claimed. Only the man himself would do. She would never be satisfied with less.
He too was exploring, lingering on the curves and valleys that had tempted him, free now to indulge his curiosity. The soft roundness of her breasts against his palms made a sigh break from him. She heard it and arched against him, wanting more of him. He wouldn’t give her the words of love, she knew that, but there were signs that she could read.
And the signs were there in the ardour and tenderness with which he claimed her, parting her legs gently and moving slowly, giving her time to think, even to reject him. But she was way past that now. She reached for him, pulled him over her, claiming him in the moment that he claimed her. Giving and taking together. Possession, yielding, surrender, triumph.
And then astonishment. Lying beside him, matching her breathing to his, wondering how anything could be so wonderful as this feeling. And sensing, with awe and wonder, that he felt the same.
When she awoke in the half-light and found herself alone she was sad but not dismayed. She’d more than half expected this and besides, dismay was for faint hearts. No woman could be faint-hearted after such a night of loving. All the passion he couldn’t put into words had been there in his arms, his lips, his caresses that had been tender and purposeful, his loins that had claimed her like a man possessed.
And that was true. He had been possessed by another self, a self who could love and give openly and without fear. And one day, with her help, that other self would claim him completely, and she would awake to find him still in her bed, sleeping trustingly beside her, his arms about her, his face buried in her flesh as though he’d finally found his refuge.
She promised herself that, as she lay there in the quiet dawn.
As the last wedding guest departed Benedict carefully packed up his things, ready to leave. But he was detained a little longer by Meryl, who had something to show him.
She took him to Little Grands and introduced him to Sadie. Benedict was as thrilled with the knits as she’d known he would be, and with her help he went the rounds of the farms where he found women knitting to a standard that had him chortling with delight. There were discussions, chaired by Meryl. Contracts were arranged. Benedict put his head together with Sadie, and when she’d shown him some more of her designs and he’d filtered her ideas through his own needs, they discovered they had evolved a style.
It took three days to set up. Jarvis observed mildly that she seemed to be very busy and Meryl debated the wisdom of telling him details about the knitting. But she couldn’t forget how dismissive he’d been when she first mentioned the idea. It would be better to wait until she could show some real results. So she said merely that she’d spent the time showing Benedict the district, and Jarvis forbore to ask questions.
On the day of Benedict’s departure Ferdy called to ferry them across the water. Jarvis went down to the boat with them, cheerfully carrying bales of wedding dress material. The original luxurious dress that Meryl had rejected was carried by Benedict, who was a mass of nerves as it was transferred to the boat.
‘It seems a shame to waste it after all the work you put in,’ Jarvis observed.
‘Waste it?’ Benedict was scandalised. ‘It’s my masterpiece. It’ll crown my first show in the new premises.’
‘Well, get to work or there won’t be any new show,’ Meryl commanded.
‘There’s a lot of formalities-’
‘I know, I know. I’ve told you I’ll make a flying visit as soon as you’ve found somewhere, and we’ll sign the lease, hire the staff and I’ll stick my nose in until I drive you crazy.’
‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ Benedict said mournfully. ‘Darling, it will be a
‘I’ll send you flying into the water in a moment,’ Meryl observed.
‘Does this take much longer, or shall we just wait for the tide to go out?’ Ferdy asked of nobody in particular.
‘Coming,’ Meryl sang out. Benedict and Ferdy helped her into the boat. She waved at Jarvis, calling, ‘I’ll back tonight,’ as the boat moved off.
He waved back, uncertain whether to be dismayed that she was going to New York, pleased that Benedict didn’t want her to stay long, or furious because he’d called her darling.
Jarvis had once called Meryl a hothouse flower, and in the world she’d left the seasons were largely artificial. A treadmill took her from Manhattan to Los Angeles in search of parties, and to Paris or Milan in search of fashion, for she didn’t live in Benedict’s creative pocket. But the nearest she came to following nature was when she headed to the Caribbean in winter.
Now she was living in a place where only nature’s calendar counted. April was the month for sowing cereals, the time when a farmer survived or didn’t by the condition of his soil and often by his ability to beg or borrow the money for fertiliser. To Jarvis’s tenants, hanging on grimly after a succession of misfortunes, his marriage had come just in time to enrich the soil for that year’s sowing.
‘If we’d married a few weeks later it might have been too late for them,’ she put to him one day. They’d been riding the countryside on horses hired from Sarah’s stable, and had stopped off to let the beasts drink from a stream.
‘Not might have been, would have been,’ he replied quietly.
‘But you didn’t take enough from me, did you? That man we were with this morning-the one who was showing me the machine for planting potatoes-’
That made Jarvis grin. Farmer Bannion was a machine enthusiast, and there’d been no escape until he’d shown
