As for Helen, she realized much sooner exactly what she had done, and she cursed the air blue. Teeny paced in front of her tub, back and forth, wringing her hands, completely misunderstanding why her mistress appeared so angry she could spit.
Teeny said, “There is no reason for you to be mad about all the blood on your head, Miss Helen. I will be upset for both of us. It’s real blood, Miss Helen. Let me call in the physician.”
“I’m not mad, Teeny, you are. Now listen to me. I would have to be dead before I would let Ozzie anywhere near my person.”
“But you have said that he never tries to kill people.”
“Yes, that is true, but he fancies himself in love with me. No, he cannot come near me. Come now and help me wash my hair. We’ll get the blood out, don’t worry.”
Yes, Helen knew what she had done. What she had done three times. And it had been glorious. She cursed herself as she walked down the stairs to dinner.
Luther and Eleanor were home in the stables, having returned even later than she and Lord Beecham had, which was why, her father told her, no one had been in the least concerned.
“What were those damned horses doing if they didn’t come back here after they threw us?” Lord Beecham asked the table at large as he felt the rich turtle soup slide all hot and tangy down his throat. Was that a hint of lemon he tasted?
Helen cleared her throat and said to the potatoes on her fork, “They were probably taking shelter, just as you and I were, Lord Beecham. Don’t worry, Father. I can see you puffing up to worry in the worst way. I drank the warmed champagne and it cleared my head to such a degree that the past three hours could never have happened.”
She looked Lord Beecham straight in the eye. “Indeed, those three hours are fast becoming a blur in my mind. Yes, now all I remember is Lord Beecham and me riding away from here to Dereham. Then everything is a complete blur. There must have been rain, since we came back wet, but for all the in-between?
“It is gone from my mind and my memory. Now, everything is as it was. Nothing is any different. Nothing at all.”
Lord Beecham should have heard that with relieved ears. But he didn’t. He didn’t know why, but it enraged him. She wanted to forget he had given her immense pleasure three times? He cursed into his soup.
Helen rose when she finished her dinner. She looked directly at her father. “I am going to bed now. I hope you and Lord Beecham will excuse me. Whatever happened this afternoon has made me very tired.
“Lord Beecham, I will see you in the morning. If it isn’t raining, we can once again endeavor to reach Dereham.”
What was he to say? What he wanted to do was push back his chair, rise slowly, never taking his eyes off her, walk to where she stood, and put his hands around her white neck. He didn’t know how hard he would squeeze. Certainly hard enough to gain her attention, curse her. He flexed impotent fingers as he watched her leave the dining room. She was dressed in soft gray silk down that draped very nicely over that delicious white body of hers.
He had made love to her three times, given her his all, actually more than his all, simply because, for no reason he could fathom, she had hauled it out of him. She had completely possessed him, emptied him, and now she wanted to forget it?
Not if he had anything to say about it.
He and Lord Prith played whist. Lord Prith talked about how his sweet little Nell was the very picture of her soft, very gentle mother. If it had not been for Flock hovering close, Lord Beecham would have choked to death on his brandy.
He lost sixty pounds and had drunk too much delicious smuggled French brandy by the time Flock fetched his lordship for their evening walk.
11
“DAMN YOUR EYES, HELEN, you will talk to me about this. Women always love to talk after making love to the point of rendering a man insensible. Usually a woman starts chattering immediately, when the man is lying there, felled, still utterly witless. I will admit that our surroundings yesterday were perhaps not all that inspiring, and thus you wished to wait to talk everything to death and in great detail. Now it is time. We are in pleasant surroundings. Now you may speak to me.”
Nothing from Helen.
He persevered. “You may now feel free to thrash everything over, Helen. You may complain about certain minor digressions or perhaps omissions.”
But Helen, curse her beautiful eyes, began whistling.
He jerked on Luther’s reins, and his horse reared back, nearly unseating him. He turned to her and yelled, “Damn you, stop that. All right. I will accept that just perhaps not everything that happened between us was necessarily perfect during those hours yesterday that you are claiming to forget.”
“Goodness, Spenser, whatever are you talking about?”
He ignored that bit of goading. He was a reasonable man. Sometimes a woman needed to be eased into spilling her innards. She had to trust a man, know that he admired her, particularly if she wished to praise him. Of course she knew he believed she was utterly delicious. She also knew, damn her, that he’d given her wondrous pleasure. He could still feel her hot breath in his mouth when she moaned her climax. He had felt it to his toes. His breathing hitched for a moment. Perhaps she was just embarrassed to tell him how spectacular a lover he was. That had to be it. “If you wish to speak of how immensely well suited we are, you may do so now. I will listen. I will attend you.”
Helen continued to whistle. A robin redbreast answered from a maple tree to the side of the country road. Rage was building up inside him, nice, bubbling rage, but still he held his voice calm, the epitome of male reason.“Listen to me. We are alone, there is no more bloody rain today, the sun is shining down quite brightly on our heads, our horses are clipping along at a fine rate, and I am ready to listen to you.
“It is all right, Helen. I understand you now. You want me to wrap every pleasurable thing we did yesterday all up in a poetic and soulful package.”
She gave him a look of female amusement, a look that could shrivel a man’s manhood. “Since we did not do anything at all yesterday afternoon—at least nothing worth mentioning that I can remember—then you may take all your soulful packages and dump them in a ditch.”