Harry did not sleep that night. Instead, he looked at the stars from his balcony and felt the noose of his future closing around his neck.
That day, his mother’s guests would arrive. The fathers, brothers, and mothers of Society would flock to his door, bringing with them their marriageable girls for him to look over, so that he might choose one at his leisure and marry her.
He knew that he must do so. He knew that he must align himself with some family or other and take a wife, so that he might have a woman to run his home, to be his duchess, to produce his heir. He knew this as he knew that the sun must rise, but instead of a beginning of things to come, such a prospect seemed like an end.
He did not change into his riding clothes once dawn had broken, but went to the stables as the sun rose up over the sea, wearing the same clothes he had gone to dinner in the night before. If the grooms thought his rumpled evening dress overly formal, they did not comment, but saddled Sampson when he asked them to.
He had just risen into the saddle from the mounting block, afraid he was too bleary-eyed to mount without one, when Mary Elizabeth strolled in, looking as fresh as a late-summer morning.
“Hello, Harry!” she said, waving to him, startling Sampson. The horse did not rear under him or try to buck him off, but docilely stepped over to his lady and accepted the sugar from the palm of her hand.
“And how is this great beastie this morning? No more biting the grooms, I trust?” she asked the horse, for all the world as if he might answer her.
Charlie stepped up, sketching a bit of a jaunty bow, cap in hand. From the glow in his eyes, the boy clearly worshipped her. Harry shifted in the saddle.
“He’s not bit a one of us since you spoke with him, miss.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” Mary Elizabeth rubbed the stallion’s nose and gave him another bite of sugar. “I see you’ve gotten here before me and taken Sampson for yourself,” Mary Elizabeth said, smiling up at Harry.
He smiled back at her despite the fact that she was the reason he had not slept. He corrected himself. His future and its long, unturning road was what kept him awake, not this girl. But the thought of her beside him in that bed, and beneath him and—once he had tutored her in the ways of love—over him had been fantasies that he had indulged in the wee hours of the morning in an effort to forget all the rest. And now she stood in front of him in breeches, the sweet curve of her derriere begging for a man’s hand to caress it. Namely his.
“Shall we ride out together?” Mary Elizabeth asked, oblivious to the way his thoughts were tending. She swung up onto Merry, who had been saddled for her without her even having to ask. His grooms responded to her better than they did to him. So much for being lord of all he surveyed.
“If we bring a groom,” Harry responded, his eyes now traveling along the line of her thigh.
She smiled at him as if he were a bit addlepated. “Do you feel the need of protection from me, Harry? I promised you that I won’t kiss you again, and I won’t.” He felt his heart seize at her words, and then sink, until she said, “Not until you ask me to.”
The grooms close enough to hear her choked on what sounded like suppressed laughter. Harry waited for his anger to rise up, but it did not come. Instead, he found himself looking into the maple eyes of his Scottish friend, watching for the hint of green along the irises. When she turned her head toward him, he caught sight of that green, and it made him smile.
“Very well, then,” Harry said. “If you are resolved to behave with propriety, then so am I.”
Mary Elizabeth shot him a look at that bit of nonsense and nudged Merry with her knee, that they might start out of the stables and head into the sunlight. The cattle break had been covered over for the day, and she set out at a walk. Sampson followed along behind her, as docile as a lamb, with no hint of a request for motion from Harry at all.
Harry found himself watching the rise and fall of her bottom on the saddle, as well as the gentle swaying of her breasts, which seemed not to be caught up by stays at all. “Do you even own a riding habit?” he asked, hearing the petulance in his own voice.
“Yes,” she replied blithely.
Harry waited, but when she did not elaborate, he asked, “Why don’t you wear it?”
“Because the skirt is a nuisance, and riding sidesaddle makes it more difficult to take jumps. I’ll wear a habit when the fancy guests start arriving.”
Harry felt his misery rising up from the ground to swamp him. He scowled.
“You don’t want to see the visitors who are coming to my fancy dance,” Mary Elizabeth said.
Harry wondered where on God’s green earth Mary and her family had gotten the notion that his mother’s ball was for them, but he did not ask. Instead, he said, “Women are coming to look me over, and I dread it.”
He had not told another living soul that he hated the thought of his duty, that his certain future with a wife he did not love hung like a millstone around his neck. He had waited until he was thirty to find a woman who might brighten his days and liven his nights as well as serve as a decent duchess, and he had come to the conclusion that such a woman did not exist.
Mary Elizabeth was frowning, not at what he was thinking, but at what he had told her. “Even a duke’s poor relation is a hot marriage item then?”
Harry grimaced. He needed to tell her the truth, and soon, but he was not ready to give up his friend. Save for Clive—who had beaten him soundly when they were ten even though Harry was a duke’s heir—no one ever treated him as a person after they knew.
“I’m afraid so.”
Mary Elizabeth sighed, as if the burden of too many suitors was something she was familiar with. “Well, if you have need of a hiding place, let me know. I’ve found a few spots in that house where no one will find you.”
Harry smiled at the thought of pressing into some linen closet with her. The temptation would kill him. “You would hide me away, then, and keep me for yourself?”
Mary Elizabeth laughed at that, but she did not scoff, as he had thought she might. Her brown eyes were warm on his, and he felt the moment suspended between them, as if time had stopped. He almost wished that it would, that he might ride through his park forever, with this woman at his side.
He shook his head a little to clear it of such nonsense, but Mary Elizabeth did not look away. “If I could have a man, Harry, you’d be it.”
She said it simply, without affectation or flourish, and kept riding on, a steady presence at his side. The birds sang in the hedgerow as they passed, making a flurry of feathers at the intrusion of a man and a girl so close to their nest. But Harry barely heard them.
All he could see was Mary Elizabeth, the sunlight shining on the gold of her hair, which was even now coming down from its pins to curl along her shoulders and down her back. She looked like a hoyden and a scamp, and he knew that if he lived to be a hundred, he would never again see a woman as beautiful as she was.
“Race me to the beach, then?” she asked, no doubt in an effort to dispel the moment that had fallen over both of them.
“To where you kissed me yesterday?” he asked.
She laughed. “The very spot. Though there will be no such shenanigans today. I am a woman of my word.”
She touched her boot to Merry’s flank, and the horse was off like a shot, so quick that Harry was ten lengths behind before he took his next breath.
Sampson waited only a moment for his rider to give the order to run. When the order did not come, the beast took it upon himself to chase Mary Elizabeth down. Harry clung to his back and bent low over his neck, that the horse might go faster. He could not blame him. It seemed right that every male alive would be chasing after that girl and wanting all the beautiful things about her—things that he simply could not keep.
He found Mary Elizabeth waiting for him, her face turned toward the sea. Merry cropped the sea grass close by, and Mary Elizabeth absently ran her hand over the horse’s withers. She looked deep in thought, and all Harry could think of as he looked at her was how much he wanted her and what a fool he was to moon after a gently reared virgin from the North.
She met his eyes as he climbed off of Sampson’s back, and for a moment, he wondered if she knew what he was thinking. But when she spoke, it was not of the heat in his eyes that no doubt even a virgin could see, but something else altogether.
“The way to make it through this evening,” she said to him, “is to have a goal beyond it.”
Harry stared down at her, watching the swell of her breasts rise and fall with her breath beneath the linen shirt she wore. He saw the faint outline of a chemise beneath that, and when he wanted to look further, he forced his gaze back to her face.
“What goal would you suggest?”
“Well,” Mary said, “I’ve never been on the sea. You might take me sailing.”
“We’d have to marry after.”
She laughed out loud, and Merry shifted under her hand. Sampson shook out his mane and took three steps closer to her, almost crowding Harry out.
“You’re a fretful man, Harry. And I’m sorry for it.”
“You didn’t make me so,” he said.
“No,” she answered, turning her eyes back to the sea. “I did not.”
He stood there looking at her, the softness of her hair flowing down her back in a mass of curls that seemed to move like a living thing. He reached out with one gloved hand and stopped just short of touching those curls.
“You would go sailing with me?” he asked at last, lowering his hand before she might see it.
“Aye.” She smiled at him, giving him a wry, slanted look. “That I would.”
“If I make it through the ball tonight, we’ll go sailing tomorrow. Weather permitting.”
Mary Elizabeth stepped toward him then and laid one hand over his heart. The muscles of his chest leaped under her bare palm. The backs of her hands were soft, but her palms were callused from riding and from playing at war.
She looked for one moment as if she might rise on her toes and kiss him. But then she seemed to remember her promise, for she patted his chest as if he were Sampson and turned away from him to mount her horse.
“I’ll see you tonight, then” was all she said.
Harry did not answer, but stood staring up at her, watching the muscles of her thighs move against the brown wool of her breeches. She did not wait for him to find his manners, or for him to find his tongue, but touched her heel to Merry’s flank once, gently, and let the horse have his head as she rode away.