Page 55 of Exile's Return
‘What about you, Daniel? Apart from Jennet, have you ever loved?’
He curled a tendril of soft, brown hair around his finger. Love was not something he had had much time for since his first calf love, the head groom’s daughter. Jennet had loved him to the point of embarrassment but he had not reciprocated the emotion, only the intention. A marriage to Jennet had suited him. In his hopeless situation, it had spelled not only freedom but a future. He had kissed her but there had never been anything more physical than that. He had certainly never told her that he loved her. Whatever else he may be, he was not a liar. When she died his grief had not been at her loss, but at what her loss had meant to him personally. The thought shamed him now. Jennet had deserved better.
But this conversation was not about him. He wanted to know about the woman in his arms, the woman who stirred something within himself that he did not recognise. He took a deep shuddering breath, knowing that in taking Agnes to bed he had stepped out onto treacherous, unfamiliar ground.
But even as he had that thought, she jerked out of his embrace and lay beside him, staring up at the ceiling of the bed, her handsfolded across the covers. The few inches between them now yawned like a gaping chasm.
‘Daniel, you need to understand. Love is a luxury a woman in my position cannot afford. I have to look to a man for my protection and the simple comfort of a roof over my head. All I have to give you in return is my gratitude and my friendship — don’t ask for my love,’ she said.
In a swift movement, Daniel swung himself over her, pinioning her between his knees and holding her forearms down against the mattress. In the greying light of dawn, her eyes widened but she did not struggle.
‘Gratitude is not enough, Agnes. If nothing else, let me show you that a woman has a right to be pleasured.’
The last few years had not been without female companionship, and the willing girls of Fort Royal had taught him something about how to please a woman. He pulled back the covers exposing her to the grey light of the early dawn. She shivered in the cold air but did not protest as he let his fingers stray over the soft, silky smoothness of her inner thigh.
She braced beneath his touch, her breath exhaling in a gasp. ‘I…I’ve never been touched like that before.’
He silenced her with his lips and let his fingers coax and gentle the woman in his arms until her breath came in short gasps and she cried out, arching her back before falling back spent and shuddering. He slid his hand across the flat plane of her stomach, the skin beneath his touch contracting.
She lay supine in his arms, her chest rising and falling as if she had run a hard race.
He allowed her only a fleeting moment or two of spent passion before gathering her in his arms and rolling onto his back, bringing her with him. She took him inside her without resistance, moving in rhythm with him until he too came to climax and they both cried out from the sheer joy of the momentand she collapsed, spent, on his chest, her soft curls spread across his body.
He lay awake, his fingers playing in her hair. While her surrender to him had seemed to be complete and unconditional, there had been something she had held back, and a lump rose in his throat. He recalled the girl in Fort Royal who had recoiled in horror, calling him “un lépreux” — a leper.
Like that girl, Agnes had not touched his back.
Chapter 24
Slipping from Daniel’s bed before the servants came to light the fires, Agnes skipped barefooted along the cold floorboards to her own bed-chamber. Shivering, her breath frosting in the cold morning air, she pulled on her clothes and sat down heavily on the edge of her bed, staring, without seeing, at the world outside her window.
She touched her lips, warm and swollen from Daniel’s kisses, and smiled. Wrapping her arms around herself she hugged herself tightly, reliving the memories of the previous night. Every nerve in her body seemed to crackle as if her skin still responded to the touch of Daniel’s fingers.
At the thought of his hard, strong body, her own heart melted and a warm glow spread up from her toes. It was all she could do not to run back to his room and into the warmth of his arms and do it all over again.
Was it possible that this was love, she wondered? Was it love to want to be with someone every moment of the day?
He had given her more in one short night than her years with James Ashby. James had only ever taken his pleasure but Daniel had cared for her, her pleasure as important to him as his own.
She just hoped that in the passion of the moment he had not noticed that as they had made love, she could not bring herself to touch his back, the wheals and grooves that marked his torture at the hands of Outhwaite, foreign to her touch, inviting a degree of intimacy she could not give.
She hunched her shoulders and huffed out a long, shuddering sigh. Surely that reticence on her part could only mean one thing — that whatever had driven her to his bed last night had not been love. If you loved someone then it shouldn’t matter. A cold, grey reality as chill as the dawn light encircled her.
‘What have you done?’ she said aloud.
What if there was a child? A child born of lust? A child born to a penniless and homeless mother?
James had always been so careful. After Henry there could be no more children, no suspicion to cast the faintest doubt on Henry’s parentage. Now, in one night of passion, Agnes had thrown all that caution to the wind.
She rose to her feet, pacing the room. ‘You fool!’ she castigated herself.
At the window she stopped, looking down into the courtyard where a milkmaid, her pails swinging from the wooden brace across her shoulders, hurried toward the house.
There could be no repeat of last night, however much she…or he…may desire it. They would meet as friends, nothing more.
But her resolve weakened when they met at the door to the parlour. A smile lightened his face and his arm circled her waist, drawing her into his embrace. At the touch of his lips on hers, the last of her resolution slipped away. Only the sound of footsteps on the stairs behind them caused them to jump apart.
Kate Thornton rounded the corner, her gaze going from one guilty face to the other.
