Page 75 of Better Love Next Time
He kissed her, canting his mouth, holding fast to her yearning gaze. He flicked his tongue with hers and gave in to an open-mouthed, hungry exploration.
Gathering her in his arms, his pace was languid, his muscled flesh taut, restrained, urgent. She shuddered at his touch, gentle, persistent, almost cautious when he reached her most secret part. She cried out, nearly died from the flood as he gazed upon what he had wrought and slowly came over her.
Her senses in an uproar, she enfolded him in her arms, to press upon, taste, and breathe in every inch of his skin. A sigh grated at his teeth, his focus intense and still cautious. When it was beautiful and nothing to worry for. When she felt no fear, only a joyous fever, her hands teeming with thrilling electricity, exploring the muscled lines of his back, the hard curves of his shoulders. There was power in him and mysteries to unfold. And finally the secrets unveiled themselves. He hung his head as if overcome. She arched in the pleasure and pain and completeness of it.
“I feel it,” she said between gasps. “Oh, Julian, it is…”
He revealed himself, the lines of his face harsh, moving inside her, cradling her against him, whispering at her lips. “It is us, Kitty. It is us.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Present Day
Southampton, England
Kitty had twistedJulian about her little finger as she always could with seemingly no effort on her part. After buying up half of Southampton’s market, she had informed the Reverend Robert Carleton they were attending service. And they did. An hour early. While Kitty left him to speak to Robert, Julian paced the arcade outside feeling more like a husband than he ever had.
He stole inside as the worshippers arrived and dropped to the farthest pew from the altar and closest to the door. Miss Lucretia Carleton stopped to greet him in her effusive manner, and a grandmother leaned over the pew in front of him to offer her condolences. When he spied Kitty sitting at the organ in the chancel, Julian understood what his brother Oliver had felt every time he clutched his chest and shouted he wouldn’t live to forty. The girl he had known since ten with the rabid father who had damned all Protestants as heretics played beautifully, like she did the pianoforte. His inexpert opinion was confirmed by the celebrants murmuring in appreciation around him.
How long had it been since he had been to service? That he hadn’t been smote by the Almighty upon entering was a wonder, given his youthful transgressions and dissipation that had defined his life after he had deserted the yard. Julian had only marginally believed in God. He had never caught the pox, his liver wasn’t bilious nor his pockets turned out. He wondered what or who had protected him from his recklessness.
He stretched his legs until his knees hit the pew in front of him and a matron in cap and tails cast him a pitying look instead of glaring at his ill manners.
Worship ended. The crowd of sailors, middling and poor families with children trailing, shuffled out while Kitty played a somber dismissal. Not until the pews were deserted did she rise as a slim swath of unremitting black down the line of Gothic arches. She stowed away the music and faintly smiled at her surrounds. He sensed she had been fortified by worship. But since their agreement, she hadchanged. He more than welcomed it.
Julian escorted his wife outside, and milling about the portico were a hundred eyes waiting for them. He leaned to Kitty’s ear, “Perhaps a warning next time.”
She stepped away and engaged his old friend Robert and his sister, Lucretia, in conversation. Robert praised Kitty’s singing and inquired if she would like to join the choir. He invited them to dinner at one o’clock next Sunday.
Julian turned to a young woman loitering at his right.
She bobbed a curtsy. “I spoke to me husband. He says once you got steady work he’ll come see you, sir.”
Jack Johnson, from the night of the brawl, approached with his wife and children. “I’ll come work if you need me.”
Another said, “You get a contract, St. Clair, and I’ll be glad to work for you again.”
As was becoming the norm, six people offered condolences. The last, a carpenter who had agreed to work at his yard, ended their conversation with an awkward lean. “I know, sir, how it is. I lost a son, meself. And we got to look out for our womenfolk. Their hearts are a tender thing.”
Julian offered in kind and the case of the mysterious condolences was solved.
He said to Kitty as they walked back to the Dolphin, “I didn’t expect you would actually tell people you lost a son.”
“I didn’t expect I would,” she said softly. “But at least his death has mended your reputation.”
“André, was it?”
“Yes.”
The fragile quality of her answer sat strange inside of him. He sought out her small, gloved hand and squeezed it with a chuckle. “Wish I could thank the little bugger.”
She looked up at him without changing her stride, her gaze piercing from within her black bonnet. “Countless children have died, Julian. The men who would work for you, their wives, they know the crushing grief of loss, a grief that will never leave them. To make light of it is reprehensible.”
She pulled her hand free and walked on ahead of him.
The following Sunday, the dinner at the vicarage was enjoyable if strained. Vicar Robert Carleton, a brief partner in fun many years ago, didn’t quite know how to be around Julian. Maybe he saw Julian’s presence as temporary like the rest of Southampton and chose to conserve energies best directed to those who deserved them. Julian couldn’t blame his old friend. But it irked him as he and Kitty strolled the short walk backto their apartments, and an excess of useless what-ifs plagued his mind. Deserting his yard had been his decision alone. He couldn’t blame Kitty. But if she had not left him, his life would be different.
He unbuttoned his jabot and stock as soon as they entered the door, throwing it to a chair cushion. His green silk coat followed. The air was thin. The walls crept inward. It was the same every time he was alone with Kitty in their rooms. She was his for the taking. And his body refused to let it lie. Right now, in the afternoon summer light suffusing through the gallery window, he could lay her down on the gold sofa and seek his pleasure. Bury his worries inside her. Lose himself and the doubt.
