Eight hours on two trains and then one long carriage ride finally brought Eleanor home to Edenfell.
The winter sun had long set by the time the carriage turned into the drive, but the lane glowed like morning. Four years ago, after a carriage had run off the drive, Søren had ordered lampposts to be installed. A dozen on each side of the lane were lit and it seemed as if she were being carried to a magic castle in a fairy story.
Edenfell was a great gray box of a house, an old Georgian manor, square and sturdy and safe. Her happiest days had taken place in this home before Søren had left her. And her loneliest nights after he was gone.
The carriage pulled up and she saw Søren on the grand main steps waiting with Kingsley at his side. He came down the stairs and did the footman’s job of putting down the step and opening the door for her, helping her out.
“Welcome home, My Lady,” Søren said, and pressed a cool kiss on her cheek. Kingsley escorted Annette into the house leaving her all alone with Søren.
On his arm she entered the house and found no one to greet her, but the house itself. The hall glittered with candlelight reflected off the freshly polished brass chandelier. The warmth enveloped her.
“Where is everyone?” she asked.
“I’ve ordered the official welcome of the lady of the house to wait until tomorrow,” Søren explained. “The staff wasn’t pleased with me, they’re so happy we’re married. I imagined you’d be in no mood for a raucous welcome.”
She wasn’t and found the silence a relief. “You left early today,” she said.
“I had preparations to make for your arrival,” he said as he steered her into the drawing room. “You see?”
Eleanor’s eyes widened. Søren had brought in a Christmas tree—a fine tall spruce with silver baubles and candles on it all aglow. And greenery decorated the hearth and hung from the ceiling.
“I wanted to give you back the Christmas I took from you when I left so abruptly,” he said.
He was trying so hard to please her. Did he still not understand?
“May I show you something?” she asked. “Outside?”
“Of course,” he said and though he looked puzzled, he followed her from the decorated drawing room, through the garden door out to the snow-filled veranda. Eleanor pulled the hood of her cloak up as Søren slid on his gloves. She led him down a pathway and to the old wood and stone gazebo.
“Here,” she said as she stood at the railing and looked up at the bright and shining new winter moon. “This is where I would go to be with you after you left. Every night that winter.”
“Be with me?”
“I couldn’t cry in front of Claire, or she would start crying, too. I told her once how you smelled like winter and she laughed at me. She said you smelled like shaving soap and nothing else. But you do. The snow collects in here and the night wind, too. I can’t explain but in here is where I would find you. And I would close my eyes and breathe you in again and again until I had filled myself to the brim with you.” She turned to him and found snow dusting his golden hair and his gray eyes glowing silver in the moonlight. “Did you know I wanted you that much that I would stand in the winter in the cold and the snow at night just to catch, for a moment or two, the scent of your skin?”
“No,” he said.
“I did. Yet I think…I think you forgot me the moment I was out of your sight.”
“You think that, do you?”
“Is it not true?”
“I will tell you what is true.” He moved to stand closer to her so she could feel the warmth of his body radiating even through his coat and her cloak. “In Paris at Mass, a girl with black hair like yours would attend every day. I would sit two pews behind her so I could stare at her hair and pretend she was you. I kept an orchid in my room because its scent reminded me of your soap and I wanted to smell you whenever I lay in bed. The hart tie pin you gave me? I wore it every day until the clasp broke and even after I kept it with me. Even now,” he said and pulled from inside his breast pocket the small silver stag pin. He slipped it back into his pocket.
“You gave Claire and me ‘pin money.’ I never had pin money before. I thought you were supposed to use it to buy pins. So I bought that for you. My hart. My heart.” She put her hand over her own heart.
“Your heart. I carry it against my own.”
Before she could speak, he took her face in his gloved hands and kissed her roughly and deeply. This was no tender kiss, not loving either, but possessive and aching and desperate. She had no choice but to open her mouth to the kiss and receive it. His mouth pressed hers open, his tongue touched hers and she moaned. Without thinking, she found herself twining her arms around his neck and pushing her breasts against his chest. He gently but insistently pressed her back against the gazebo railing. Her fingers found the nape of his neck and clung to it.
“You make me ache inside,” she whispered into his ear.
“You can’t say something like that to me,” he said, “and not prove it.”
Before she could demand what he meant, he kissed her again and pulled her hard against him. He opened his heavy coat and wrapped her inside it and it was like stepping into a warm room.
And once she was warm against him, he began to lift her skirts.
“Søren,” she gasped against his lips but he pressed his tongue into her mouth to silence her. He brought her skirt and petticoats all the way to her hips. In the shelter of his coat she barely felt the cold. What she did feel was his hand, still incased in his supple calfskin glove, sliding along her upper thigh and then between her legs. He wouldn’t, would he? Here? And with his gloves on?
He would. He did. He pushed his finger through her folds once and then twice, a third time while she moaned against his mouth. When he found her entrance, the tender hole, he stroked it and Eleanor gasped and thought she might faint.
“You do not hold the patent on frustrated desire, Little One. Even if you did invent it, I perfected it in the three years we’ve been apart. The three longest years of my life,” he said and slid his finger up and into her. Eleanor shuddered as he entered her, and she pushed her hips into the palm of his hand.
“Again,” he ordered and she pushed into his hand again. Pleasure rippled through her stomach and hips. Then again. She couldn’t stop herself even if she wanted to.
“I can feel your heat even through my glove,” he said into her ear. She was too lost to speak. She had to grip the railing behind her to stay standing as he worked her on his hand. When he started to push a second finger inside her, she had to raise her leg and place her foot on the stone bench to open herself to him. “God,” he breathed as he went deeper into her.
He gathered her wetness with his fingers and brought it to the knot at the apex of her thighs. He slicked it over her and kneaded it until it throbbed against his finger. Then without warning he entered her again. His gloved fingers felt thick inside her. She could feel the seams of the leather stitching grazing all her tender places. Inside her passage, he spread his fingers apart, opening her and her inner muscles contracted in protest and pleasure.
“I imagined this,” he said and his breath turned to steam. “Touching you inside until you came apart in my arms. I had to leave a piano recital once because they played Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata,’ and I couldn’t stop picturing your thighs straddling me at the piano bench.”
“You always played it for me,” she said.
“Which is why I can’t hear it without thinking of you.” He thrust into her with his fingers, again, and then again. He thrust with his hand as he had last night when he took her. Though she knew this time he would not stop until she had reached her peak. She breathed hard as he stroked her so intimately, not at all gently but firmly, vigorously, obscenely. “Release for me, Eleanor.”
Even if she wanted to disobey him, his searching stroking fingers would not let her. He moved in and out of her wetness, sliding across that throbbing knot again with his gloves as he entered her. Her hips pushed into his touch and soon the most intimate and delicious flutters began. There was no stopping it now and she came, crying out and shuddering. The pleasure went on and on as he stroked and caressed her.
“Tell me again,” he said as he held her cupped in the palm of his large strong hand, “that I forgot you.”
She reached between their bodies, took him by the wrist and pulled his fingers from her. She pushed her skirts down and smoothed them, stepped back and away, her hands pressed into her lower stomach where the muscles still fluttered.
“Tell me why you left me—three years ago and last night.”
“Eleanor, please—”
“I thought once it would be enough if you desired me even half as much as I desired you,” she said and all her pleasure turned to sadness. “But it isn’t enough. Legally I am your property and cannot deny you your rights as a husband, but I ask you to never touch me again until we can have a true marriage. And it can be no true marriage without the truth.”
She pulled her hood up and returned to the house. She was cold now and shivering, and not because it was winter.