“There is no easy way to say this, and nor do I suppose should therebe, so I shall just say it straight out.” The older woman huffed. “Miss Maybury claims to have witnessed you having a tryst with my nephew this morning at the stables.”
Oh, good grief, what had she seen?The heated kiss? Guy’s hand on her breasts? Down the front of her breeches while she writhed against it? Hers brazenly exploring the length and girth of his impressive erection while her tongue was in his mouth?
Lady Frinton folded her arms. “I take it from your scarlet face and saucer-shaped eyes that her claim is true.”
Lottie scrabbled around for any excuse that would keep her in her job. “It was a moment of madness, my lady, and it will not happen again.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake, gal! I couldn’t give a fig! What two consenting adults dodiscreetlyin their own free time is nobody’s business but theirs! Life is too short not to grab the moments of madness, as you so aptly call them, by the horns. So long as you are still running around at my beck and call when I expect you to, the pair of you can fornicate like rabbits for all I care.”
“Then you are not going to dismiss me?”
“Of course not.” Lady Frinton waved that away. “I merely wanted to warn you to be a bit more discreet, especially where the obnoxious Miss Maybury is concerned. She’s a sly one, that one, and I wouldn’t trust her as far as I can throw her. Despite the half an hour of her detestable company that I had to endure this afternoon and my assurances that she shouldn’t read anything into two people running across a stable yard together as anything beyond them being in a hurry”—she paused to watch Lottie visibly relax at that clarification before she pointed a bony finger—“she is definitely on to the pair of you, and she is more than unhappy about it, so… be careful.”
Lottie didn’t know quite how to react or what to say to that, and fortunately she didn’t have to.
“Why the blazes are you still gawping at me, gal? Go do something with your hair. You look as if you’ve been dragged through a hedge backward!”
No sooner had she stepped out of Lady Frinton’s door than she collidedwith Longbottom. “Seeing as it has been sitting on the hall table for two days, I thought I’d best hand deliver this to you.” He passed her a letter, looked her up and down. “Are you all right, Lottie?”
“Just a bit bemused, Longbottom.”
He assumed, because she had just left their employer’s bedchamber, that Lady Frinton was the cause. “I empathize. I feel like I’ve been permanently bemused for the last fifteen years. But ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do, eh?”
“Indeed.” Except she had no earthly idea what to do next—with either Guy or Miss Maybury.
Her head spinning, Lottie took her letter into her room and stared at her youngest brother’s scruffy handwriting on the front before she put it on her nightstand to read later when the spinning stopped. Then, overwhelmed with considering all the potential consequences of her increasingly complex situation, she picked it up and cracked the seal.
Dear Lottie,
I have no idea how you did it, Beanstalk, but sending Lord Wennington to the farm was a stroke of genius. Thanks to you, our father has a spring in his step, the cows are saved, Stephen’s read every book on legumes that he can find and now considers himself the world’s foremost expert on the subject, and we’re all preparing the Field of Doom, ready to plant it in the spring.
I know Papa has already written to him to thank him, but can you thank Lord Wennington personally for me for the two cartloads of pea seeds that arrived so promptly the day after his visit?
It was obvious to me that they were brand-new despite all his claims that they were leftovers moldering away in his barn, it was obvious to the rest of the boys too, but we roughed up all the sacks before our father saw them and he is, thankfully, none the wiser. You know how proud and stubborn he gets at any whiff of charity!
I dread to think how much Lord Wennington paid for all those seeds though at such short notice, but let him know from me that once they grow, we’ll repay him properly for his generosity.
Dan
P.S. I know there is no accounting for taste, but from the soppy look he got in his eyes each time your name was mentioned, I think it’s fairly safe to assume that Lord Wennington sent those seeds because he likes you. Goodness only knows why.
She dropped the letter in her lap and shook her head. Just when she had thought her feelings for Guy couldn’t get any more complicated, the wretch decided to rescue her family behind her back and not mention it at all. Not even as a way to get his hands down her breeches!
How noble and utterly romantic was that?
Guy’s mother had placed Lottie at the other end of the dining table again, but each time their eyes had met, the unmistakable heat in hers wreaked havoc on his body.
He liked that she wanted him. Almost as much as he liked that she didn’t play games. He knew, just from the way that her gaze devoured him, that she wanted to finish what they had started this morning. That she wanted to touch him and wanted him to touch her—and the sooner, the better.
But imagining her as ripe and ready under the table as she had been this morning was not without its pain. Thankfully, his mother had placed Lady Lynette right beside him again and that alone kept stopping his pistol from firing and disgracing him beneath the tablecloth.
“Are you looking forward to our impending concert, my lord?” Guy offered the horrid woman a polite, noncommittal smile as he toyed with his trifle, wishing this interminable dinner over with so he could spend the rest of the evening with Lottie. “Are there any particular tunes you would like us to play?” She touched his arm and that instantaneously did wonders to deflate his painful cock. “What is your favorite?”
“I’ll listen to whatever it pleases you to play.” It wasn’t as if he had a choice! He would be stuck there listening to it until the damnedmusicalecame to an end to please his mother.
“Well… I thought we’d start with some Beethoven to wake us all up after this large dinner and then…” His ears immediately tuned Lady Lynette out again. She was wearing a gown cut too small to hold her copious breasts and, likely on purpose, a mountain of trussed-up cleavage spilled out of it which sheaccidentallytouched often to attempt to draw his eyes there as she droned on. They weren’t bad breasts. In fact, they were good enough that they might have impressed him two weeks ago, before he’d caught his first glimpse of Lottie’s by the pond. But now that he had been fully converted to the small but oh-so-sensitive breasts camp, Lady Lynette’s bountiful charms did nothing for him. Frankly, if Lady Lynette scooped them out of her bodice, laid them in his dessert plate, and smothered them in cream right this minute, he wouldn’t care.
But when he got his hands on Lottie’s later, he was keen to test his theory that she would climax just from having her breasts pleasured alone. Then he was keen to test how quickly she would come when he pleasured her downthere. It seemed only polite after she had invited him to touch herthereearlier. He would start with his fingers and then use his tongue—
