Page 54 of Better Love Next Time
“You brought it up.”
“Right. So use your pretty legs to fetch your cloak and ride with me back to Farendon.”
“No.”
“Forgive him.”
Kitty tossed her scissors to the basket. “It is not a lack of forgiveness which keeps me away. Your cousin showed a pitiless disregard for my feelings. He hurt me. I need time.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know.”
“What if something happens? What if he leaves and you never see him again? How will you feel, then?”
I will feel anger and emptiness, the desire to sell my soul for just one minute with him.Just like with my mother.
“I will write him back,” she finally said.
She marched to the desk, tore a corner from her sketchbook, and wrote in chalk. Folding it twice, she offered it to Georgiana, who squinted at the tiny paper.
After tucking the note in her coat, Georgiana reached behind and fished at the back of her breeches. She struck out a book. “From Julian’s personal library.”
Taking the slim volume in hand, Kitty opened to the title page.Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Flipping through the pages, she froze at an engraving. A woman reposed at the edge of a bed, legs spread wide open—wide open—as in Kitty had never seen the sight even on her own body. A man stood at the scandalous spot between her stockings, and another woman stood at the reclining woman’s right hip grasping the man’s… Kitty peered more closely. A staff rooting from his breeches.
“Mounting,” Georgiana said. “The way of humans.”
“What is he going to do?”
“Put it in her. Fanny. Said woman of pleasure.”
She looked back at the drawing.Itwas the size of a maypole. “It is huge. How is it to—to fit?”
“Lots of thrusting and stretching.”
Kitty flamed from her breasts to her hairline. “What?”
“Pleasurable labor, Fanny assures us. It makes women sick with delight, furiously agitated.” Georgiana chucked Kitty’s chin. “Read on, Lady Justice. I’ll not tell a soul.”
Lengthening his stride, Julian aimed for Nate bundled in two coats and waiting with a watch. A fortnight after his splint had been removed and the surgeon had announced Julian’s leg fit to resume duty, he had started running the circuit. Twenty-four stades, per the Greeks, or about three miles.
Where Julian was presently, before the finish, he leapt onto the rope fixed to the massive copper beech. He scaled hand over hand to reach the top without his legs, scrambled halfway down, and jumped back to the muck. On his first attempt at the circuit, he had almost died, and then, nearly wept at his pitiful time of thirty-five minutes. Today, despite the mud clinging to his flat leather slippers, he was going to make twenty-three minutes.
There were other challenges, many based on the Greek Olympian events, from sprints to pulling himself up on a limb or the bar he’d fastened in a closet doorway, dumbbells, jump rope, riding, swimming, and press-ups.
Training his body had become an obsession. Nothing cleared his mind of Kitty better than running. It was more peaceful than sleep or a bottle and provided a clarity not found in liquor. He hadn’t touched liquor, except for wine with dinner, since the night he had accosted Kitty.
She hurt and hurt long.
He didn’t blame her. But it didn’t make it easier.
At the finish, Georgiana sat astride her racing stallion with a smile. Usually he cooled down with a light run around the house perimeter before checking his time. Then, as prescribed by the Greeks, there was a therapeutic kneading of his muscles and a bath. Following that there were two hours of gymnastics, a long run, and his visit to theFairy. Every day, the same.
He double backed to the finish without cooling down.
“Twenty-four minutes!” Nate waved the second watch. “Thirty-six seconds!”
Julian pushed his hands from his knees, his breath blowing heavy and white. “The hell you say.”
