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At this tiny touch—the rub of my fingers on the rough texture of his pique-knit polo shirt—heat sears through me, starting at my fingertips and radiatingeverywhere.The heat only gets worse when my tug on his shirt makes Mariano slant a glance over his shoulder. Our eyes meet—his darkening—and the smallest of grins curves his full lips.
“Come along, Mariano.” His head whips back to face front at the sound of Aunt Dottie’s stadium voice. “And Lolly, is that it? Yes? No more lollygagging!” God, I hate that word, but Aunt Dottie gives a full-throated cackle, and at least she’s pretending I’m a new acquaintance, even as she calls everyone’s attention to how Mariano and I have lagged. So much for dragging him to a room. Any room.
Everyone else is already down the steps and onto the matching moss-and flower-planted path. “Join us, you two! We’re taking a stroll down ‘the primrose path of dalliance.’” Aunt Dottie’s smile is wide and wicked, and I cover my mouth with my hand to stop my laughter. Everyone else has enough politeness—English or otherwise—not to acknowledge the reference, but the instant I realize the path is literally planted with primroses, my effort to contain my giggles fails. It comes out in a snort.
Mariano shoots me another glance, a question in his eyes.
“Primroses!” I wheeze, and he purses his lips—not in censure but in the way of someone trying not to laugh at someone else dissolving into laughter—and turns away quickly enough that I lose my grip on his shirt.
As soon as Mariano’s boots land on the path, Aunt Dottie flings a dramatic gesture toward what looks like nothing more than a collection of sticks jutting out of the dirt. She steps down the ornamental border, touching buds and twigs. “Ah, theMadame Bovary.”Oh, god, she’s going to go off on a literary jag. I shouldn’t have encouraged her with talk of Mr. Wiggins scratching at the attic door.“How did Flaubert put it? ‘The universe, for him, did not extend beyond the silken round of her skirts.’ I got that right, didn’t I, Lolly?”
I shake my head and shrug.Don’t give me away now, Dottie! We aren’t family, remember?
“The question for the literary student is always, did Flaubert punish Emma Bovary for her sexual appetites or her commercial avarice?” Aunt Dottie is in her element, but the guest/students—champagne flutes in one hand and sandwich plates in the other—are mostly oblivious, taking in the garden and chatting among themselves. “She died by her own hand, debts mounting, her lover gone, her spirit broken on the backs of greed and fashion. But to my mind, Flaubert allowed that a woman—even a married woman—might have carnal appetites, and for that we love him.”
I don’t know whether to applaud or throw up. Aunt Dottie’s driving atsomethingand I’m not sure if I want to know where this literary jibber-jabber is going.
“Ah, yes. Delightful! Here we have theMarilyn Monroeheirloom rose. It might not be much to look at now”—a truer statement was never uttered, as it’s winter still in England—“but in the spring it is simplyalluringthe way her petals open and blush brighter and brighter, until they fall at our feet.” She sweeps a hand as if to indicate a petal-strewn path before us, which she then commences to sashay along while I almost die on the spot.
Everyone follows behind her dutifully, and she flings an arm toward a wooden cold frame. “Let’s just take a little peek at what’s inside when we lift the lid, shall we?” She struggles to open the thing and Mariano springs forward.
“Allow me, Miss Hainbright.” He bends to pry the lid open. Condensation drips in slow rivulets down the glass, leaving meandering trails lower and lower, not unlike the fingernail tracks I’d like to drag down Mariano’s back.
“You’re an angel!” Dottie rests one hand on Mariano’s shoulder and waves the others over to see the tiny seedlings growing inside the cold frame before fanning her face. “Oh, my! It really does heat up in there, doesn’t it?”
He smiles at her, his perfect teeth flashing. In that second, his interactions with his would-be patroness shine in a new light—merely a polite younger man paying deference to an older woman, bestowing a glow of attention upon her. And then he comes back to me, his eyes on mine until he slips behind me. He doesn’t even touch me, but the tiny space between my back and his chest is charged, electric. I want to lean back into him, but I don’t dare, or my knees will give way and I’ll drop at his feet exactly like Marilyn Monroe’s ripening petals.
“I’m sure you’ve all heard of beef, or as the Americans call them, beefsteak, tomatoes? Well, these tomatoes are theBig Beef,and over here theBucking Bronco,and they are the most gloriouslyvoluptuousthings you’ve ever seen. Just the sight of these bright, ribbedglobesat the height of summer, dangling from the vine, waiting to be handled!” She smacks her lips and gives a little shimmy. Over tomatoes. Except she’s looking at Mariano as if she is trying to communicate with him telepathically. His fingers close around mine, giving the slightest of squeezes as if testing my ripeness. A fresh ripple of heat flows from where we are joined, my every nerve alert to the slightest of his touches, my sensitivity to him heightened—andfuck. If this is how I feel at a tiny hand-pulse…
Mariano trails a finger down the center of my French braid, teasing me with each delicious tug as his finger bumps at the woven sections and down to the center of my back where the hair tie holds what the English call a plait. He gently slips it off, the pull at my crown a harder one, until the instant its grip releases and my braid loosens, along with every joint in my body. A sigh escapes my lips and I lean into him, his free arm slipping around my waist, anchoring me. His breath whispers at my temple. “You are more lovely than any Englishflores.” He pulls me closer to him and oh, god, he is just as aroused as I am. I can feel everything—every bulge of muscle and…well,everything. I have got to get him out of this garden, somewhere we can be alone. There’s a smile in his voice when he adds, “and more beautiful than anytomate.”
I let out a sharp guffaw—no one has ever compared me to a tomato—and Dottie’s commanding voice snaps me to attention, ripping me away from the path my mind was headed down. “Come along, everyone!” She has a way about her—she fills a room, even when that room is a garden—and every eye goes immediately to her the moment she opens her mouth. “Keep up! Especially you, Mariano!” We’ve fallen behind. Again.
Mariano gently thrusts his hips and presses a particular bulging muscle against my backside. “Keeping up is not the problem for me.” But he relaxes his hold on me and there is a space between us that I detest.
“You really all must come this way.” Dottie waits, her eagle eye pinned on me until the pair of us moves forward, Mariano using me as a shield to hide what is going on in his pants. Then Dottie whirls, her flowy skirt billowing as she hurries along the stone wall that borders the garden, pointing out the seven different varieties of lavender—emphasis on theFrench— that populate this space, which is the moment I realize two things. One: all of this, the names and varietals, Dottie is making up on the fly because a) while the idea of a garden planted to honor human sexuality is a brilliant idea, none of these names for plants can possibly be real and b) Mummy’s gardener is the one who plants and maintains the grounds and c) in our entire acquaintance, Dottie has never taken any interest in theflores,unless they’re in her hothouse, and only then when they’re exotics.
Two: Dottie is leading the group directly past the arched gate that leads out of the garden and into the estate grounds proper. The instant I am alongside it, she gives me the most unsubtly owlish wink ever, and I understand: she is doing all thison purpose.She is not trying to make me laugh with her veiled references to promiscuous women and the bulgingtomatesof men and what they might do and have done to them, she is sending me a message.
I take her message and run with it. I slip from the main path onto the one leading off toward the gate, a finger to my lips as I pull Mariano after me.
The gate opens on well-oiled hinges, and I praise the estate’s gardener for his attentiveness. Mariano has to duck to go through, and I have only just closed the hasp when his hands on my shoulders spin me to face him.
We meet with all the intensity of a cold front meeting a warm tropical one, reverberating with thunder as two minds, two bodies, fit themselves together. His hands slide along my jaw, sending jolts of heat everywhere they touch. His lips are on mine, and I open at the slightest touch of his tongue, wanting more of him, wanting to be as close as we can. His hands are gone—for a moment there is the chill damp of the evening air—and then one finger drags through my already-loosened braid, freeing my hair from its weave. As waves fall around my face, he breaks off our kiss and looks at me—really looks, his gaze sending a tingling warmth through me.
“I want…” He struggles to find whatever word it is.
But I already know what I want. “Everything.”
If his eyes were dark before, they are black and focused now, hungry. “Todos?” His hands slide down to the small of my back, following the curve of my ass. His hands are sure and somehow gentle, even as the electricity between us builds. One hand slips lower, to the back of my thigh. “Your legs…”
He doesn’t have to say it twice. I fist my hands in his shirt as I slide my thigh up along his, like some half-remembered move from the tango, except the friction between his jeans and my breeches means I can’t effortlessly glide my leg along his the way I want. Even with the barrier of clothing between us, his muscles tighten beneath mine. He’s restraining himself, the way a horse that wants to explode into a gallop can be held back—at least for a little while.
“God.” It comes out sounding more like a moan. “I wish I weren’t wearing pants.”
He lets out something like a laugh combined with a frustrated growl and nuzzles away the hair at my neck before taking in a deep inhale. He presses a kiss to my throat right where it pulses. “Ah. Lolly… I do not have… This place is not…”
“There’s a gazebo. We could…”
