The Soldier's Dark Secret

Sunlight danced on the water and in her eyes. Droplets of lake water clung to the rough smattering of hair on Jack’s chest. Her camisole was plastered to her body like a second skin, making it completely transparent. Her nipples were hard and puckered with the cold, and clearly visible. Jack’s eyes were riveted on them. She did not feel embarrassed. In fact she felt emboldened. Desire twisted inside her. Jack’s eyes met hers. She stepped towards him. His arms went around her waist. His chest was surprisingly warm. It was not like before. No flare of anger to propel them towards each other. This time it was slow, a different kind of heat. She tilted her head. Sunlight dazzled her eyes until Jack’s head blocked it, and his lips met hers.

Different. He tasted of lake. Cool. Tentative. Like a first kiss. A gentle tasting, the sweetest of touches. Slow. A kiss with no purpose but to kiss. And to kiss. And then to kiss again. She wrapped her arms around his neck. He pulled her closer. Kissing. Only kissing. Her arousal was languid, melting, none of the fierce flames of before. She could kiss him for ever. This was the kind of kiss that would never end. Lips and tongues in a slow dance. Hands smoothing, stroking. Skin clinging, damp, heating.

Jack traced the line of her throat with butterfly kisses. He kissed the damp valley between her breasts. His mouth sought hers again, and their lips clung, still slowly, but deeper now. She kissed the pucker of his musket wound. She flattened her palms over the swell of his chest. His hands covered her breasts, making her nipples ache. The sweetest of aches, the gentlest but most insistent tugging of desire, making her sigh, and then making her moan.

She’d thought it was too much before. But this was too different. The dazed look in his eyes, his lack of resistance when she disentangled herself, told her he felt it too.

‘Thank you,’ she said gently, ‘for the swim.’ She began to wade ashore. She had hauled her gown over her wet undergarments and was wrapping the rest of her clothing into a bundle when Jack re-joined her. They walked slowly back to the Manor together in silence, words for once superfluous.

Chapter Seven

‘A very proper, very English young lady.’ Celeste repeated, looking blankly at Jack. They were in the studio, where she had been laying out her preliminary drawings to allow Lady Eleanor and Sir Charles to make their final selections, before she began the task of painting the actual canvases. ‘You think that my mother was of genteel stock?’

Jack nodded. He had taken a seat across from her at the table. In the two days which had passed since their early-morning swim, they had both been careful not to mention it or the kiss which had followed. Though as far as Celeste was concerned, it hung in the air, almost palpably, every time she looked at him.

She shuffled a bundle of rejected sketches, quite unnecessarily. ‘What makes you come to this conclusion?’

Jack tapped his pencil on the notebook in front of him. ‘A number of little things. Hasn’t it ever struck you as odd, for example, that the wife of a school teacher would employ a cook?’

‘I’ve never given it much thought. It’s just how things were.’

‘Then there’s this school you attended in Paris. It sounds as if it was a good one.’

Celeste frowned. ‘The girls were from good families. Titled, mostly, or very wealthy. Or both. That was one of the problems I had to deal with, being neither.’

‘You mean you were bullied?’ Jack’s hand tightened on his pencil. ‘I don’t know why, but I assumed that sort of thing was confined to boys.’

‘If you mean fighting, then it most likely is. Girls are more subtle,’ Celeste said grimly. ‘It doesn’t matter, I learned to hold my own. Besides, I cannot believe it was really so grand a school,’ she rushed on, having no desire to recall how effective the bullying had been. ‘We were not permitted a fire except in the dead of winter and then never in the dormitory. And the bed sheets were almost threadbare. It was hardly luxurious.’

‘Which confirms my point,’ Jack said with a tight smile. ‘My so-called exclusive prep school had dormitories that would have delighted a Spartan. Such privations don’t come cheap. Then there is her knowledge of dinner-party etiquette. And the comment about—what was it—a woman’s reputation. Your mother could draw and paint, but she couldn’t cook. Could she sew?’

‘She taught me to embroider.’

‘Precisely.’

Jack looked pleased. Celeste was unconvinced. ‘I never thought much about my mother’s origins. Why should I, when Maman was so determined that she had none? She would have preferred me to believe she had been baked like dough in an oven.’ Blind baked, Celeste added to herself, a brittle pastry with a hard crust.

She pushed back her chair and went over to her favourite spot at the window. Was she being unfair? Maman had been cold, distant, aloof. Certainly stern, and yet at other times she had looked...