The Courtship

to her plans than arguing.

She slid her hand down the muscular plane of his chest, over his flat belly, down to the gratifyingly firm— dauntingly sizable—bulge behind his falls. “Enough talk, Percy. Make love with me.”

He pushed into her hand for a moment, once, twice, then led her farther into the woods, to a clearing lit with the meager moonlight. In moments, his cloak was spread on the soft grass and Esther was flat on her back, while he loomed over her, blocking out the stars.

“You must be sure, Esther. There can be no undoing what happens now, no regretting it.”

So earnest, so unlike the shallow cavalier she’d seen across the room not two weeks ago.

He would not be earnest and careful like this with other women. As he untied the bows of her dressing gown, Esther knew the relief of certainty. He would be charming and lighthearted, tender even and generous, but he would not be so… serious. For that, she loved him—loved him a little more.

She trapped his hands in hers. “You first.”

He sat back on their makeshift blanket and had his waistcoat unbuttoned in seconds. “You want to see the goods, do you? Ought I to be flattered or nervous?”

His shirt followed, drawn right over his head.

“You ought to be neither. You ought to be naked.”

“We ought to be naked. I would never have taken you for pagan, my dear. It’s a fine quality in a woman, a latent streak of paganism.” He sat back to tug off his boots. Esther hiked herself to her elbows and wished she hadn’t wasted the full moon on proprieties and insecurities.

“I’m nervous, if you must know.”

He left off unbuttoning his falls to peer over at her. “You will enjoy this. You’ll enjoy me. That’s a vow, my lady. You may say good-bye to your maidenly vapors. They have overstayed their welcome.”

He sat back and worked his breeches over his hips, moving without a hint of self-doubt. Moving as if… he might be concerned she’d change her mind.

What a cheering thought. When he prowled over to her side, naked as the day he came into the world, Esther had cause to regret that she hadn’t scheduled this coupling for the broad light of day.

“You are a beautiful man.” She ran a finger down one muscled bicep. “Beautifully strong, beautifully smooth and warm to the touch, beautifully brave…”

He caught her hand and wrapped it around a part of him Esther hadn’t had the courage to examine yet. “Beautifully aching for you.”

And for all his swaggering and social nimbleness, Percival Windham was also a man capable of patience. He let her explore with her fingertips, with her palms, with eyes and nose. Let her consume him with her senses, until Esther was again flat on her back, this time with a naked Percy Windham crouched over her and her nightclothes frothed around her in the moonlight.

“We either turn back to our separate paths now, Esther, or we forge ahead together. The choice is exclusively yours.” He laced his fingers with hers where her hands lay amid her unbound hair on the cloak. The feel of that, of his hands linked to hers, was both a portent and a reassurance.

“Together,” she said. “Now, let us be together.”

She braced herself to feel him probing at her body, but he surprised her with lazy, sweet kisses, teasing kisses and big, manly sighs, until she was a mindless puddle of female wanting beneath him.

“Percival, please.”

“Soon.”

His idea of soon was maddening. “Now.”

He nudged about, in no hurry at all. Purely at her wit’s end, Esther lunged up with her hips and found herself… found herself a lover. The sensation was wonderful and strange, and yet when several moments of silence and immobility went by… “Percival, will you move?”

His hand came around to cradle the back her head. “You’re all right?”

Only a few words, but so tender.

“I am mad for wanting you,” she began. “You have no sense of dispatch, and I am relying on you entirely to know how to go on, as difficult as relying on anybody for anything is for such as I, but I take leave to doubt whether—”

He laughed—a low, happy chuckle signaling both affection and approval—and he moved, a lovely, sinuous undulation that soothed as it aroused as it fascinated.

“You can move too, love. Move with me.”

Esther’s body had a sense of dispatch, a sense of soaring, galloping pleasure in the man she’d chosen for her first intimate encounter. She moved as he’d suggested, and found he knew things, marvelous, subtle things about how to leave a woman breathless with wonder and panting with ecstasy.

Percival Windham knew that a woman’s ears were marvelously sensitive. He knew that patience on a man’s part was an aphrodisiac. He knew exactly when to increase the tempo and depth of his thrusts, when to cradle Esther’s head so she could cry out softly against his throat. He knew to hold her just as closely as her pleasure ebbed, and to hold her more closely still when an urge to weep tugged at her happiness.

For the rest of her life, Esther would treasure—and miss—Percival Windham and the things he knew.

And yet… Percival braced himself over her, giving her just enough of his weight that the night breezes cooled her skin without leaving a chill. She took a whiff of cedar and spices and stroked her hand through his unbound hair.

“What about you, Percival? Are you to have no pleasure for yourself?”

“If I endured any more pleasure, my love…”

She stopped his inchoate blather with her fingers over his mouth. “No flatteries, no prevarications, Percival. I have withheld nothing from you. Nothing. I only wish…”

He snuggled closer, a large, fit man, to whom Esther was sure the term “sexual athlete” might be accurately applied, and yet he’d been so careful with her.

He shifted, so his lips grazed her neck. “What do you wish?”

His hair was so marvelously soft, as soft as moonlight. “I wish I knew how to render you as witless and befuddled as I am, as…” in love. That would be trespassing against common sense, so she compromised. “As helpless.”

A beat of silence went by, while Esther feared her limited disclosures had overstepped whatever the rules of dalliance permitted, but then Percival began to move, slowly, powerfully.

Intimately. “My love, you already have.”

Hours later, when the crickets had gone quiet and the nightingale no longer stirred, Percival retied the bows on Esther’s nightclothes, wrapped her in his cloak, and put himself to rights while Esther watched through slumberous eyes. He carried her—effortlessly—through the gardens and up three flights of steps to deposit her onto the little cot in the little garret.

He sat at her hip then leaned down to kiss her on the forehead.

“I will see you in my dreams, my lady, and they will be sweet dreams indeed.”

She murmured something about cracking the window—she was already half dreaming herself—felt a cool, sweet breeze waft into the room, and heard the door latch click shut in the darkness.

When she rose in the morning and went to down to breakfast, eager to see by daylight the man with whom she’d shared such wondrous intimacies by moonlight, she learned that Percival Windham, along with his brother Anthony, had quit the premises entirely.

Four

“Do I take it you’re jaunting into Town with me to ride chaperone on any trysts I might stumble into?”

Anthony sounded put out as only a younger brother can when saddled with the unwanted company of an elder sibling. Percival tossed a coin to the coaching inn’s stable lad and swung up onto Reveille before