Once in a Blue Moon (17 page)

He covered her lips with his, smothering his own ragged moan. His mouth was hot and wet and tasted of him. He made a low, wanting sound deep in his throat. He was hungry for her, fierce for her. The kiss he gave back to her was all raw and savage longing. It was like swallowing fire.

The force of his weight pushed her against the hedge, the stones digging into her back, but she didn't feel them. He gripped her hair so that he could hold her mouth in place while he thrust his tongue in and out. She clung to his arms, her fingers digging into the tense, rigid muscles, and the blood pounded in her ears, drowning out the slam and roar of the surf.

He tore his mouth from hers, and her head fell back. His lips trailed down the taut tendon of her neck, sucking and licking, and fire crackled over every inch of her skin like tiny balls of summer lightning. His hands were all over her breasts, his fingers pressing her taut nipples through the thin cloth of her dress. It almost hurt, but not quite, and all her muscles coiled up tight, tight, tight, and she thought she would come flying apart, burst all to pieces, and die.

He raised his head and looked at her out of dark, tortured eyes. "Jessa, for the love of God, I'm only a man. God help me, I don't think I can stop—"

Stones clattered on the cliff path, and he snapped away from her like the backlash of a whip.

Bathsheba Stout appeared over the top of the bluff. She pushed the tangled black mass of her hair out of her eyes and stared at them a moment, unsure, her mouth in a soft pout.

She shrugged, her breasts lifting and pushing against the faded material of her worn frock. "We'd best be getting the boat back, sur. If me da notices it missing, he'll be takin' the strop to me."

Lieutenant Trelawny leaned against the hedge, his chest heaving as if there suddenly weren't enough air in all the world. His face was flushed, and a pulse jumped in his temple. His sex, thick and rigid, strained against the confines of his tight breeches. As if he felt her eyes on him, on that part of him, his head swung around, and Jessalyn took the impact of his gaze like a soft blow to her belly.

His eyes were like raw wounds in his face, hot with fury and lust. And something else...

Jessalyn limped through the back gate, the kitten clutched tightly to her breast. Something was not quite right. The Sarn't Major stood in the middle of the courtyard, a musket in his hand, the big gull lying dead and bloody at his feet. The sight was odd, but odder still was what came toward them across the barren, broken moorland. A lone man riding a black hack, a stranger who lolled and bounced in the saddle, as if he weren't used to having a horse between his legs.

Jessalyn hugged the kitten to her chest, watching the figure on horseback come closer. A vague dread built within her, cutting off her breath. They never got visitors at End Cottage, and she had never seen this man before.

The Sarn't Major made an odd choking sound, drawing her attention away from the coming horseman. Tears streamed into the seams and cracks of the studmaster's face, and he kept shaking his head back and forth, in a slow, ponderous movement. "She be dead," he said. "The filly be dead."

"Dead?" Jessalyn repeated, thinking that he'd made a mistake, that he must be talking about the gull.

The words spilled out of him, more words than she'd ever heard out of his mouth all put together. He had shot the gull, and the sound of the blast had startled Letty's Hope. There must have been a weakness in the filly's heart because it had given out, just stopped. One moment she had been galloping around the paddock, kicking and lashing out with her hooves and tossing her head, and then she had plunged onto her knees and fallen over dead.

Jessalyn stared at him, her eyes wide and confused. A part of her understood what he was saying, but she couldn't make the words seem real. She heard the clatter of hooves on stone, and she twisted around. The stranger had reached the gate now and was turning in. She kept thinking that all she must do was wait for him and then everything would be all right. As if the stranger could save her from what the Sarn't Major was saying.

The man dismounted and came up to her, removing his hat to reveal a head of thick hair the color of ripening corn. He had a long face and gray hollows beneath his eyes, and his forehead was pleated with deep lines. "Miss Letty?" he said, his voice rising upward in uncertainty.

Jessalyn nodded. A part of her was aware that the Sarn't Major had left and was now walking toward the stable, and

Letty's Hope was acting strangely, lying in the paddock next to the rubbing post, not moving. The kitten squirmed, meowing and scratching her hand. But she didn't put him down. She didn't dare put him down because the black-backed gull might come back. Except the gull was dead. She stared at the mangled heap of blood and feathers, reassuring herself of this fact.

The strange man with the haggard face and thick thatch of white-blond hair looked her over, taking in her dirty, ripped dress and the bloody gouge on her hand. "Miss Letty?" he asked again, as if still not quite sure that he had the right person. "My name is Geoffrey Stanhope. I am your mother's, er... friend."

Jessalyn shook her head once in a sudden jerking movement. "But I don't..." Something—a sort of bewildered hope, mixed with fear—squeezed at her chest. "My mother?"

"Yes." A door opened behind Jessalyn, and the stranger's gaze fluttered away from her. His eyes reminded her of a deer's, soft and brown and liquid. "After he—after your father died, your mother, uh... chose to abide with me," he said.

"Aye, the pair of ye have been
abidin'
together in sin for years." Lady Letty came toward them, her cane rapping on the stones that paved the courtyard. The old woman's speech had taken on a rough country burr, straight from the slag heaps of Wheal Ruthe. "Is the slut worth it? Do ee get much pleasure from a woman who'd make a cuckold of her lawful husband on his very deathbed an' then desert her only babe?"

The man licked his lips, which were full and soft, almost womanly. His deer-eyed gaze fastened on to Jessalyn's face. "We couldn't help falling in love, your mother and I. I would have made her my wife after he—after your father died. But I was married myself to—to someone else." A soft sigh blew out his lips. "Am still married to someone else." He turned to Lady Letty and held up his hand as if pleading with her to understand. "Emma and I... Our love could never be sanctioned by God and society, but we couldn't bear to be apart. We thought the child would be better off here with you. Away from the scandal of our, uh... liaison."

Lady Letty snorted. "An' so she was. Better off. What are ye doing here now? What does yer slut want?" Her out-thrust chin suddenly trembled, and her arm wrapped hard around Jessalyn's waist as if she could physically bind her granddaughter to her. "She'll not be getting the gel back. I'll see her dead first."

"She
is
dead. Emma's dead." His voice cracked on the last word. His gaze went to Jessalyn. "I thought you should know." His head swiveled back to Lady Letty. "The girl is her daughter after all. She has a right to know."

Jessalyn couldn't move or speak. The Sarn't Major had entered the paddock and was walking toward Letty's Hope, dragging a blanket behind him. For a moment she wondered what was wrong with the filly, why she was lying so still like that in the middle of the paddock. And then she remembered: The filly was dead.

The stranger was talking again, and she struggled to pay attention. "There's a house in London," he said. "By right, it belongs to you, for your father purchased it shortly before he... It's heavily mortgaged, of course, but there it is. We had expenses. It's expensive, living in Town. There was also some money, but I'm afraid most of it's long spent. And horses, Thoroughbreds. We had to have a dispersal sale a while back, just before she got... sick, and so most of the good stock is gone. Still, she's left you a racing stable of a sort."

"Why?" Jessalyn said.

The man blinked, and his lips sucked inward as he drew in a deep breath. "Well, you are her daughter. Her only child."

"She never came to see me. Not once. She didn't even write to me. Why?"

His gaze shifted away from hers. Color mottled his cheeks like two identical raspberry stains, and his big hands crushed the brim of his beaver hat. "The scandal. We thought... she thought..." His breath eased out of him in a sigh. "No matter what, you are still her daughter."

But it hadn't been the scandal, Jessalyn thought. Not one visit, not one letter in ten years. She had been in the way. In the way of her mother and her mother's life with this man.

"Not anymore," Jessalyn said to the stranger. Her mother's lover. The kitten was purring now. Jessalyn rubbed his furry body against her cheek. He was warm, and she could feel the fluttering beat of his heart. "I haven't been her daughter for a long time now."

The wind was quick and salty. It fluttered the ribbons on her hat and flattened her skirt, revealing her leggy slimness.

The tide had gone out recently. The man in scarlet regimentals limped toward her across the wet sand, leaving footprints like scars behind him. He stopped beside her, not speaking. She didn't acknowledge his presence but stared out at a sea that was striated with ripples of colors, from green to blue to the cool, clear gray of her eyes.

"Miss Letty? Becka told me about your mother, and about the filly. I—"

"Don't tell me you're sorry. Whatever you do, don't tell me you're sorry." Wisps of hair blew across the sunburned skin of her cheeks, and the smell of her came to him, of sun-drenched beach and hot, earthy longing. He felt overwhelmed with an aching need to gather her into his arms and hold her.

But holding her was not all he ached to do to her, and that was the trouble.

The sun moved from behind a cloud, tinting her skin so that the blush of freckles across her cheekbones glinted like gold dust. His gaze traced the sharp flare of a brow, the straight slope of her nose, the deep indentation above her wide and puffy lips. He had never thought her pretty, but he saw now that in a few years she would be strikingly beautiful. It didn't matter anyway, for the things about her that so intrigued him were already there: the sunbeam smile, that unrefined, raucous laugh, her gamine warmth. She drank of life. She gulped it down as if it were a big glass of bubbling champagne and then held out her hands for more, laughing... all the while laughing.

She was not laughing now.

The sea brushed the beach in a gentle caress. She turned to look at him, searching his face. "Why are you here, Lieutenant Trelawny?"

She spoke as if her throat hurt, and her heart was in her eyes, those deep eyes that were the wells of her soul. Life hadn't taught her yet how to keep her feelings hidden. Life hadn't been cruel, until now.

"I've come to tell you good-bye," he said, deliberately making his voice cold. "I'm off to Plymouth, where I'll board a ship to rejoin my regiment."

She stared at him a moment longer, then looked away. "There are some officers, surely, who take their wives to the West Indies."

"Only a fool or a man with little regard for his wife. It is too unhealthy a clime for women."

"But there are some, surely, who have wives who wait at home for them."

"Those that can afford wives."

"I do not need much."

Something swelled within his chest so that he could barely breathe, let alone speak. What she was asking, what she wanted, was impossible. It couldn't have been more impossible than if he were a shepherd and she a bal- maiden turned into a hare. At least then they could have had their nights of the blue moon.

He reached across the short distance that separated them and brushed her face with his fingertips, then wished he hadn't. For just that briefest of touches fired a raging hunger in him that left him trembling.

But that was all it was. Hunger. He could appease that hunger now; he could bear her down onto the sand and take her and then walk away without looking back, because he knew all about hunger. And he knew himself. And she... she thought she loved him, but what she thought wasn't real and never lasted,
couldn't
last. Because love didn't exist in the first place. It was an appetite, nothing more, an appetite satisfied in bed and gone by morning. He'd known this truth since he was twelve years old.

"You need more than I can give you," he said, shocked at the way the words tore at his throat. "You deserve more."

"But you don't understand." She turned to face him, pain and yearning stark in her eyes. "I don't want to
save
myself for some dull, steady man. A man who will marry me but love his mistress, who will go to church on Sundays and ride to hounds on Fridays, and be drunk on port every other night of the week. The sort of man who will give his servants a whole extra shilling come Christmas and expect to be
thanked
for it."

"Who is this paragon? Perhaps
I
ought to marry him myself."

"Oh, God..." A ragged gasp of laughter tore out her throat, turning into a sob. But the enormous gray eyes that looked at him shone with a fierce light. They were filled with an emotion he didn't understand, something that struck terror deep within his soul. "I want to spend my life with you," she said.
"You.
With your hard and sulky mouth, and your rough and gentle hands, and that wonderful, irreverent way you have of looking at the world. I want the man who built an iron horse and then dared to take me for a ride on it...."