The Wallflower Wager - Tessa Dare Page 0,28
to relieve yourself.”
“Really?” She wrinkled her nose. “Can’t you at least say I’m gathering flowers or something?” She picked at her wet, muddy frock. “And slipped into the stream in the process, I suppose, with a good roll in the mud on the way down.”
He shrugged. “If you prefer.”
“It’s just so embarrassing. As if I don’t generate heaps of humiliations on my own. Now I have to go borrowing them.”
“You, er . . .” He hesitated. “Not that I mind, but you may want to fix your frock.”
She glanced downward. Seeing her exposed breast, she quickly tucked it back in her stays. “See what I mean? Heaps of humiliations. Heaps.”
Gabe wondered if the past quarter hour went into her heaps of humiliations, or whether she regarded it as something else.
He wondered, but he wasn’t going to ask.
On his part, he wouldn’t be filing this memory under the heading of “Humiliations.” Oh, no. It was going straight into the stash of “Fantasies” that every man kept under his mattress, figuratively if not literally.
He was never going to forget the taste of her, pure and sweet. The way her skin moved like satin under his hands, warming to his touch.
And the way she’d responded to him? That was already etched on his brain.
I think it’s the urges, she’d said.
The worrisome part of it was, their urges had gone unsatisfied.
They would remain so, he told himself. This afternoon had been a mistake. An enjoyable mistake, but a mistake nonetheless. Time to revive his judgment. Gabe could survive deprivation of all sorts, including this one.
He would not put his hands on Lady Penelope Campion again.
Absolutely not.
Definitely not.
Probably not.
Damn.
Chapter Ten
To make her story plausible, Penny decided she might as well pick some wildflowers while she waited for the men to repair the carriage wheel.
So that was how she passed the next quarter hour: Picking wildflowers, standing in sunny places in a futile attempt to dry her frock, keeping an eye out for Hubert, and thinking about Gabriel’s tongue on her nipple.
Licking. Swirling. Sucking.
Sigh.
Other ladies—and no doubt a good many gentlemen—would view their tangled, passionate interlude as a mistake. Penny? Never. She had not an inkling of regret.
She felt awake. Alive.
And rather proud of herself, really.
She’d never dreamed she would feel such raw, carnal sensations. Her friends had marriages where love and desire were intertwined—two strands in a tightly braided cord. But Penny had always believed it couldn’t be that way for her. The chance had been stolen from her long ago, when she was too young to even understand what she’d lost.
But today . . .
She thought of the way he’d paused when she touched his hand. When she hadn’t known whether she wished to drag his touch higher, or push it away. But he hadn’t made any judgments or pressed to satisfy his own desire—he’d merely waited for her to decide. It was a revelation.
After packing up the picnic things—the ants wanted her sandwiches, even if Gabriel didn’t—she cast a final look at the riverbank, scanning the reeds for any sign of a sleek brown otter.
Nothing.
If Hubert had wanted to return to her, she supposed he would have done so. Perhaps Gabriel was right. He was pursuing the life he was born to have. A life that didn’t include Penny.
Farewell, Hubert. I wish you many happy years.
As she turned back toward the carriage, her bare feet squelched in her boots. She’d retrieved her stockings, but there seemed no point in putting them on when her wet skirts would immediately soak them through.
Penny was no wheelwright, but as she returned to the coach, even she could see that the carriage wheel had not yet been repaired. Her first hint was that it was lying on the side of the road.
“It’s the bit that connects it to the axle that’s broken.” Gabriel swiped at his brow with his forearm. “This could take hours to mend.”
“That’s unfortunate.”
“The two of us will walk ahead to the village,” he said. “We’ll wait on the carriage at the inn.”
“Why can’t we wait here?”
“I can’t take you home looking like that.” He swept a glance down her muddied, grass-stained frock. “We both need to wash.”
“I can bathe at home.”
“And you could do with a lie-down.”
“If you’re so concerned about my fatigue, why do you want me to walk two miles to the inn?”
“Because. I’m. Famished.”
Penny blinked at him.
“There. Are you happy? I couldn’t choke down enough of your miserable sandwiches. I need to eat something. Something that once had a face.”
She