Page 57

O phelia smiled against Silas’s lips and pulled her arms tighter around his broad back.

He felt heavenly; warm and solid, the linen of his shirt and waistcoat rumpled from travel, his cheek against her hair rough with a day’s stubble.

It all spoke to the rush in which he had left the farm, a rush to find her , and Ophelia couldn’t help the flush of happiness that unwound in her chest. She slid her arms farther up Silas’s back to loop them around his neck and deepened their kiss.

He sighed into her mouth and tightened his grip on her, lifting her right off her feet.

She liked the feeling of weightlessness and wriggled against him, trying to get even closer.

Silas drew back, his eyes impossibly dark green.

“God’s sake, woman, I love you, but I’ll not ravish you in public,” he said.

“As it happens, I know this place quite well. There’s a nice quiet spot just back here,” she said, looking back at him with what she hoped was a saucy smile.

The kitchen garden had an air of elegant abandonment; the leafy structure of boxwood and yew topiary still visible among perennials gone to seed, the fruit trees left unpruned.

But the sturdy oak bench still sat by the back door, and it was here that Ophelia guided him.

Silas sat down, taking in the garden, and she knew he was seeing the bones still there under the overgrown shrubs and bolting perennials.

He turned to her and she squeezed his hand.

She looked down at their hands twined on his thigh, the woollen fabric pulled tight against the muscles of his leg.

He rubbed his thumb down the length of hers sending a flash of desire through her.

“How have you found it, being back here?”

The damp of the garden bench wound through the thin layers of her skirts and Ophelia missed the feeling of her legs in trousers, missed the movement available in her WLA uniform. She felt smaller and more vulnerable in these clothes.

“It is hard,” she admitted. “After we finished packing up the things that might be sold, I suggested Mrs. Greene take a week or so to visit family. I paid her as much as I could to cover her time away, but there’s not really much to pay her with, honestly.”

She twisted a finger in the volume of her skirts.

“It seems my father has gambled away a good deal of what was valuable. I’ve had letters from Mr. Bone in the last day or two laying out a way forward.

It seems I am to inherit the estate, well the house and the grounds, at least, and he thinks that selling some parcels of land will be enough to cover the cost to get the house going again. ”

“Ah, Jesus, Fee. I’m sorry about the way your father left things.”

“Me, too,” she said. “Makes me feel uncertain all over, perhaps I’m not equal to what I’ve chosen to do? Taking on the estate was not what I envisioned when I left.”

It was hard to admit that she wasn’t sure she could live independently as she hoped, to admit she was glad of his help, his company.

Silas squeezed her hand and spreading her fingers out over his thigh, threaded her fingers with his, making a fist. “You are living independently, have already been doing it. A death is no small thing to face on one’s own, nor is resolving a will, especially one that has what I imagine are tangled legal dealings, but you will handle it with grace, as you do all things.

And,” he said more slowly, “if you want, I will be here with you.”

“Yes,” she said, then more firmly, “I thought I needed to do this alone to prove that I am independent, but I was wrong. I do want your support and I’m finally realizing those things aren’t mutually exclusive.

I don’t feel much love for my father, but closing up the house, selling the few belongings my mother collected, that feels lonely. I’m so glad you’ve come.”

He nodded and squeezed her hand again. She pressed her thigh closer to his, wanting to feel the warm strength of him, the steadiness of his presence. She could count on him, he had told her so much with words and deeds.

“What you said before, about loving me ... do you think you might still feel that way in the future? What I mean to say is ...” He was watching her with those deep green eyes, golden at the edges, somehow soft and sharp all at the same time.

She forged on. “I mean, could you love me, stay with me knowing that I may never want to be married? That I might always want to work on a farm or at some other vocation?”

To her surprise, Silas came to his knees in front of her, hands resting splayed over the fabric pulled tight across his thighs.

For a breathless second, he knelt with head bowed, wheaten strands falling forward, then he looked up at her.

His green eyes were anguished and she felt herself falling into their stormy depths, felt her fingers itch to caress the pale skin taut over his high cheekbones.

Ophelia watched Silas’s mouth work for a moment, forming and then abandoning words. He blew out a long breath.

“My love, my Fee. I have been wrong about so many things, worrying about my place in the world after war and in suffrage, not able to see the truth you’ve found in it, afraid to imagine a different way of seeing the world, afraid of what I might lose.

” His hands flexed on his thighs and he sat back, shaking his head.

“I thought this place, this land was important, was the thing that made my parents work, made their marriage a thing of joy, but living at the farm with you and seeing you working with the WLA, Mrs. Darling, the horses even ... it’s not the land, but the people who make a place whole.

You could be in the Arctic or a desert and if I were with you, it would be home.

You are my home, I don’t want to be anywhere you are not .

.. ever.” He paused and she pressed her fingers to her lips to keep from breaking the spell he cast. “Whatever future you want to build, I want to help. It doesn’t matter to me if it means marriage or not, something others recognise or not .

.. I want you , Fee, and I’ll take you anyway you come. To hell with everything else.”

A robin swept down from the stone wall at the far end of the garden and Ophelia blinked, her vision marbled with tears.

She slithered off the bench and landed awkwardly in Silas’s lap, straddling his knees.

He cupped her face in his hands. They were warm and rough against her cheeks, along the line of her jaw, and she felt the damp of her tears gathering in his palms. Stroking his thumbs across her cheekbones, he regarded her seriously, waiting.

“To hell with everything else ...” she echoed, Silas’s words still spinning around her head.

Another stroke of his thumbs across her cheeks, the gentle pressure of his firm, blunt fingertips at the back of her head.

“I want ...” She paused and ran her hands up Silas’s chest, hooking her fingers under the lapels of his waistcoat, possibility and hope igniting within her.

“I want us ... I don’t know what to ask for yet, I only know I want to try to be equals, going forward together, side by side. Could you want that, too?”

“Yes,” he breathed, his forehead sinking to rest against hers. “Yes.” He angled her chin with his hands to press a kiss to her lips, soft and chaste. “Yes.”

Ophelia pressed her lips together, relishing the taste of Silas that lingered there.

Lifting her chin, she pressed a kiss of her own to his mouth.

Watching his eyelids flutter closed, she said, “I’ve been thinking over Bone’s letters the last few days, trying to see a way forward and I keep wondering what if we didn’t leave here, but we did something different, made something better with the estate, with the land? Something of our own.”

The words hung for a moment between them, then Silas kissed each of her eyelids whispering, “Yes.”

“Silas?” Ophelia said.

“Hmm?”

“Make love to me?”

He didn’t answer, just hauled her farther up onto his thighs, one large hand possessively spread over her backside, the other threading through her hair, loosening it from its chignon.

Having freed most of the dark hair from its pins, he lifted a handful and ran it across his lips and cheek.

“Like satin,” he growled. “God, I’ve missed you. ”

Ophelia laughed. “It feels like we’ve been apart a year.”

“True,” he said, his voice rough as gravel. “And every moment hellish.”

She squeezed her thighs together, giddy with surprise and desire, drunk on the possibility of she and Silas for real, and felt a slow heat kindle as the muscles of her legs contracted around Silas’s.

He growled again and dropping his handful of hair, dipped his head to cover her mouth with his.

His fingers flexed against the curve of her bottom, each fingertip a point of fire through her layers of skirts and petticoats.

Ophelia scooted closer to him, settling herself on what she could feel was an already firm erection.

The rasp of Silas’s woollen trousers against the skin of her inner thighs sent a flood of warmth to her centre, and she sighed at the press of his lips against hers.

His tongue flickered against the seam of her mouth, teasing at the corner, and Ophelia opened, sliding her own tongue against his, slick and warm.

Silas’s arm tightened across her back and he deepened the kiss, teeth and lips sliding over each other in a desperate bid to come closer.

Ophelia rocked against him, her hands skimming up his back to wrap around his neck, one sliding into the silk of his hair.

His hand had begun to fiddle at the buttons down the side of her neck.

“Fee,” Silas hissed, pulling back from the kiss to the press his face into her neck. “Ah, God, I love you.”