Mary Brendan - Mr. Trelawney's Proposal

‘Are you in trouble…with Lord Ramsden?’ His continuing silence started to unnerve her a little so she offered breathlessly, ‘I could speak to him for you…tell him how you assisted…’ Warmth suffused her cheeks. She hadn’t intended reminding him or herself of the sight she had presented when he had hauled her out of the pond. Her tongue tip came out to moisten her dry lips. The closer he came, the taller and broader he appeared. She felt infinitely small and fragile…and vulnerable. She attempted to peer past him and the piled hay to the exit. Why wouldn’t he talk to her? Why wouldn’t he say something…anything? Just hello would suffice.

Making to slide past his obstructing body, so near hers now, she announced nervously, ‘I’m sure I could persuade him. I’ll go and look for him.’

A muscular arm shot out to brace itself against the rough brick wall, blocking her intended flight to the door. ‘You’ve found him,’ he said softly. ‘How are you going to persuade me?’

Rebecca placed a tentative hand on his linen-clad arm, feeling rock-like sinewed muscle flex at her feeble attempt to move him. She looked up into his dark intense features, struck again by how unbelievably handsome he was.

‘That’s not funny,’ she mildly rebuked him, managing a small, sweet smile even though she didn’t understand his sense of humour. ‘Robin Ramsden can be very…understanding. I’ve found him so,’ she falteringly explained, as she carefully removed her hand from his lawn shirt-sleeve and unobtrusively retreated, giving herself room to detour to the exit.

Luke watched her back off, his black-pupilled eyes heavy-lidded as they discreetly surveyed her from head to foot. Dried off, wearing a plain cotton dress, she was as beautiful and desirable as she’d been with her clothes plastered to her slender curves and damp tendrils of honey hair clinging to her delicate face. Perhaps not quite so erotic…

His tormenting reminiscence tailed off. Her turquoise eyes were watchful, a blend of caution and courage again coalescing in their glossy depths. He recognised it from their last encounter. Then it had been enough to make him reluctantly leave. She was intending to go this time. He had frightened her again. He could tell from the way her eyes slid furtively past him that she was within a hair’s-breadth of making a dash for the door.

He didn’t want that. If she ran he would stop her and if he touched her that way…No woman yet had caused him to lose self-control, he wryly reminded himself. Nevertheless, he dropped his arm and walked away a yard or so but still casually blocking any escape route.

‘Are you often to be found in Lord Ramsden’s barn, Rebecca?’ he asked mildly, with a charming, boyish smile. His calculated ploy worked. Rebecca visibly relaxed.

‘Only when I’m looking for John,’ she said, returning his smile and feeling unaccountably pleased he had remembered her name.

‘John?’ he echoed with deceptive softness, as his smile thinned and he became furiously certain he had just interrupted a lovers’ tryst. She didn’t look in the least chagrined at having been thus discovered. Perhaps he should have let her try to escape after all, he thought cynically. If she’d been abandoned by some spineless rustic swain, he was sure he would prove a more than satisfactory substitute.

‘Lord Ramsden’s carpenter…well, he is an apprentice, really,’ Rebecca pleasantly interrupted his savage supposition. ‘But he’s quite capable of repairing my roof.’ She gazed about then as though she might spy the lad lurking somewhere. ‘He’s usually to be found in here, sleeping away hot afternoons…when he thinks he can get away with it.’

Silence between them lengthened and Rebecca became uneasily aware of dark eyes fixed unwaveringly on her. ‘For it is about to rain, you know,’ she said distractedly. ‘Gregory Turner…oh, he and his wife help me at the Summer House…well, Gregory is quite sure that rain is finally due. He’s rarely proved wrong. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if…’

She trailed off, aware that Luke had approached her again while she had been nervously chatting. He now rested against a hay bale within a foot of her, a disturbing sleepiness in his velvet-brown eyes. ‘…it rains tonight,’ she breathlessly finished, her aquamarine eyes wide and entrapped by his.

A slow hand moved unthreateningly to her face, cupping her fragile jaw. She remained entranced as a dark thumb traced the curve of her lower lip with featherlight softness. Either he wasn’t as tall as she had at first thought or…He was bending to kiss her, she realised wildly as his face neared hers. Their eyes were still inextricably merged and when the leisurely descent of his narrow mouth brought their faces within inches of touching, Rebecca breathed out, ‘What are you doing here?’ She watched him frown and slowly, frustratedly, close his eyes as she shattered the spell he’d been casting.

‘Were you discovered by Williams trespassing?’ she asked, reverting to her initial line of questioning, stepping away again.

‘No,’ was the extent of his terse response and she sensed his irritation. He threw his head back and gazed up at the fanlight windows set high in the barn wall. He sighed, knowing explanations were long overdue. But then, so was easing the tantalising ache in his loins she had provoked hours before, and was now innocently boosting. Tumbling her in a sultry barn in the middle of the afternoon…it was hardly the time or place.

Besides, he knew he wasn’t going to be that lucky. He almost laughed at his arrogance. Getting close enough for a kiss was proving one hell of a job. What was it he had mourned earlier today? The lack of necessary charm and seduction in his life? He had an unshakeable notion that he was about to dredge up every skill he had ever mastered in those areas. He gazed back at her, momentarily undecided, then said softly, ‘Come.’

Approaching the barn door, he stretched out a hand behind him, beckoning for her to follow. She did so, ducking under his arm to gain the dry heat of the afternoon as he held the door open for her.

‘Miss Rebecca!’ Rebecca twisted about and then hurried the few paces towards Edward Miles as he hobbled across parched grass towards the barn.

‘Miles,’ she greeted him, for no one who knew him well ever used his given name. Miles was always just Miles. She gave the elderly man an affectionate peck on the cheek, as always, aware of his pleasure at seeing her. His faint watery eyes peered past her to the tall, dark man who impassively watched the scene.

‘So you’ve met the new master, Miss Rebecca,’ Miles bitterly muttered.

Rebecca’s welcoming smile faded. She frowned her bemusement. ‘What do you mean?’

Miles glared purposefully past her. She turned then to watch as Luke Trelawney approached them, aware, oddly for the first time, of overwhelming authority and power in his manner and bearing. Her mind raced back to his puzzling statement in the barn when she had offered to seek out Lord Ramsden. ‘You’ve found him…’ he had said and she had believed him to be joking; had wondered at his odd sense of humour. Her eyes sought Miles quickly, pleading for immediate explanations before Luke reached them. But the butler’s attention was with his employer.

‘The servants are assembled in the hall as you wished, my lord,’ he informed with a certain disrespectful emphasis on the title which didn’t pass unnoticed either by Luke or Rebecca.

Mingling horror, disbelief and recrimination strained and whitened Rebecca’s face. She whispered, ‘Why didn’t you…?’

‘I did,’ Luke reminded her curtly. ‘You weren’t listening.’

‘In the woods…you could have told me hours ago in the woods. You let me make a fool of myself. Where is Robin Ramsden? You let me warn you needlessly earlier today…about prosecution…about the gamekeeper…’ The disjointed accusations and queries jumbled together in her distress.