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She let out a little yelp in surprise. Benjamin blinked and smiled sleepily. He knew she had been watching him, even though, in truth,shehadn’t even known she had been looking his way.
“Forgive me,” she stammered. “Did it wake you?”
“I was not yet sleeping. One eye open.” He paused. “The sound of your quill was a little too relaxing. What was it you were writing?”
He asked the question with a smile, and Charlotte realized there was something odd in the way Benjamin held himself, expressed himself. He would grin, but it was tempered. He would laugh as if on a leash. There was something constantly stony about the bodily declarations of his feelings like he was no more a man than he was a sculpture. She cast her eyes away. “I was working on a new poem.”
He smiled again, full of that grace she had noted. “Why don’t you read it for me?”
“I…” She closed the notebook for fear of him spying. “No, I cannot. It is not finished yet.”
“But what if someone asks what Huxley currently working on?” His voice was full of mirth, playful. “Come now, Charlotte. You have me on tenterhooks.”
She quite liked that. She pried back open the book and read the clumsy verses. A chill rushed through her once she was done as if he were the most important audience there was or ever would be. Still, he sat in silent contemplation long after she was done, and she feared the worst.
“You think they are awful. Pure diatribe.”
“Why do you always assume the worst?” He came to a crouch suddenly and moved over so he could sit by her side. He pulled her notebook from her to read over the poem for himself. There was something devilishly intimate about the moment, as though he were not sifting through her poems but had spread her legs wide open. She felt the trail his fingers ran across the page down her back. Her imagination wentwildas she watched him—watching his lips move as he drank in her verses, as though he were at a service, and the greenhouse was their church, and the poem was God’s word. What did that make her? His God? Everything about the moment was blasphemy.
“You must have been in love.”
Her neck and face were on fire. She hoped he could not tell. “What did you say?” she asked, and her throat was parched.
“Your poems,” he explained. He looked at her, and she wanted to cry for his beauty. “They all speak of love. So,” he dropped his gaze to her mouth, and something—a new feeling, a scary feeling, adeliciousfeeling—swelled beneath her belly, “who was the man who made a poet of you?”
She wantedhimto make a poet of her. She wanted him to coerce verses from her with that mouth. It was wrong, wasn’t it? For her to long for him as the women in her verses longed for their lovers? He was a crook, a liar, a rogue—but, by God, was he a poem! “There has never been anyone,” she confessed, for it was true. She could hear her heartbeat in her ears. “Not really.”
His eyes did not leave her lips, and she sucked on her lower reactively. He shifted as she did, edging ever closer. “I can’t believe it.”
“Believe it.”
“The feelings you write are old as time.”
“A credit to my imagination.”
“To your dreams, perhaps?”
She could not breathe. “Perhaps.”
“And what dreams are those? A lady’s dreams? A writer’s?”
He placed a hand on her thigh, and her body tingled from the shock of it. She breathed in, filling her lungs, fearing she might die otherwise. And then she leaned forward, possessed by those dreams, wanting to kiss him.
He seemed to want to kiss her.
And then, while their lips were but a hairbreadth’s away from touching… came the crashing of the greenhouse door.
“My lady!”
Charlotte pulled herself away at once, drawing back so quickly she knocked her head against the wooden island behind them. Benjamin was to his feet before she could rub her embarrassment away.
“God above, Jo—” She really had to stop doing that. “What is it?”
Benjamin pulled her to her feet, not daring to look at her, as Josephine said, “Oh, I… the hour is up, my lady, and then some. I worried—” She tried to hide the blush on her cheeks.
Stepping toward the greenhouse doors, Benjamin laughed darkly. “She worried I was having my way with you.” He leaned down to press Josie further. “Is that not right, miss?”
It only exacerbated the maid’s blushing. “Yes, well, I—”
