Before Roberta could blink there was a flash of crimson livery and a splash. Cool water dashed the boat, hit the muslin roof, sprinkled her dress. She yelped, but Damon was already standing, leaning over the side.
“I can’t pull you in or we’ll go over,” he was shouting to the footman, who was treading water and pushing sodden hair from his forehead. “Best make your way to shore and go back to the house.”
The footman gurgled something that sounded like an assent, and managed to maneuver the pole into Damon’s hands. He leaped onto the small platform and pushed the boat forward again.
“I didn’t know you knew how to do that,” Roberta said, changing places so that she was facing Damon, sitting with her back to the current. He was poling the boat forward with long smooth strokes.
“Push footmen in the river, or punt?”
She was laughing so hard she couldn’t breathe. The two other boats, now far ahead of them, turned around a corner of the river and vanished altogether. “Did we arrange a spot to meet them?” she enquired.
“No, we didn’t.”
She watched his smooth, powerful movements as he poled the boat.
“Damon, who is Teddy’s mother?” she asked suddenly. “I know why you took him in…but who was the grandmother who brought him to you? Is he the child of your mistress?”
“I don’t have a mistress,” he said, shaking back a lock of hair that had fallen over his head. “I haven’t had one for the past five years.”
“And Teddy is just five, so—”
“No, Teddy is six. I pensioned my mistress after Teddy came to my house, and no, she wasn’t his mother.”
She looked at him.
“I can’t tell you who his mother is,” he said finally. “I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone.”
“Oh,” Roberta said, disappointed. “I am very good at keeping secrets.”
He pulled the pole from the water and an arch of water drops flew like shining diamonds back to the water. “I’ll tell my wife, of course,” he said conversationally.
“Oh,” Roberta said again. But the word sounded different in her mouth this time.
There was a bump and she squealed. “You’ve gone aground,” she cried, adding hastily, “not that I mean it as a criticism.” They had scooted right under the vast sheltering branches of a willow tree hanging over the edge of the bank and trailing its boughs in the water. Dappled light slid through the boughs, covering the boat with the shadows of the willow’s slender spear-leaves.
Damon drove the pole deeply into the bottom of the river, and then he slung a rope over it.
Roberta didn’t say a word. In fact, the whole lazy river seemed to hold its breath. She couldn’t hear a sound other than the dull and smothered voice of the water, and somewhere, a lark singing.
“Our boat,” Damon said, with a glance so suggestive that she felt herself grow even pinker, “has run aground.”
“I see that.”
“What a shame. I may have to undress in order to save us from sinking.”
“Really?”
He pulled off his coat.
Roberta could feel giggles rising inside her, faster than the bubbles rising from the bottom of the river. “What do you think you’re doing?” she enquired.
“Undressing.”
His eyes sang to her in some language that she had just learned, but seemed to know instinctively.
“Hadn’t you better follow suit?” he said, raising an eyebrow.
“I?” Roberta said. “I? Undress in a public river, in a flat-bottomed boat?”
“Be grateful it’s not another kind of boat,” Damon said, sitting down on the little platform and pulling off his boots.
“You can’t really mean it,” Roberta said, feeling very sure that he did mean it. “Anyone might happen by.”
“Nonsense! Almost no one travels this river, since it goes nowhere. We’re tied up to yet another cow pasture. This one has actual cows, and one must assume, fresher cowpats. It is, therefore, unlikely to host picnickers as well.”
“Impeccable logic,” she murmured. He pulled off his shirt. He was all sleek muscle, dappled by leaves, dusted golden by the sun, strong…
She reached out without even realizing and then froze again. “I can’t do this,” she cried. “What if someone saw us!”
“No one will,” he said and his voice was as potent as brandy. He was beside her now, throwing cushions onto the floor of the boat. But he took his time unlacing her gown, and after a time she fell into the sweetness of the shaded little room they had found under the willow.
“I suppose,” she whispered, “if we sit on the floor no one could see below our waists.”
“If we lie down, they can’t see anything at all. Don’t you think it’s done all the time?” He waited for her answer, eyebrow raised.
“No!” she said, with half a gasp because her dress was gone and he didn’t seem to be bothering to remove her stays, his hands were running up her legs seeking that sweet spot, and she was arching toward him.
He lay down in the boat and pulled her toward him. She gave up the battle—what battle?—and fell on him with a little cry as her softness came onto his hardness, his muscles, his demands. He was unlacing her stays while he kissed her, deep and hard, and she couldn’t help squirming against him, gasping against his lips.
One of his hands was between her legs, playing a rhythm that matched the sound of the water. She didn’t even feel out of doors. It was as if her small cries and the deep sounds he made when she touched him were swallowed into the vast stillness of the watery afternoon, leaving their small boat as enclosed and private as a walled room. Just the lark broke its invisible walls as he kept singing, spiraling higher and higher into the sky.
“Touch me,” he commanded, his mouth finding her waiting, taut nipple.
She cried out and her hands flew blindly about his body, touching him here and there, the smooth curve of a shoulder, the rippled muscles on his back. She couldn’t concentrate though, not when he was doing that, so she simply let her body twist against his, begging.
“Now touch me,” he said later, his voice thick.
He said it twice, and the meaning of it crept through her smoky brain, made her open her eyes and look down at him. “You want me to—”
“Touch me. I love it when you touch me, Roberta. No one has ever felt as you do.” His eyes were so dark that they weren’t even green any longer; they looked black in the dappled light.
Roberta reared back, back onto her knees and looked down at him. He lay before her, like a great feast. The wood of the boat was dark brown, rubbed smooth by years. Damon lay there like a figure carved from marble, warm and golden: long powerful thighs, a flat stomach, a chest that swelled into muscles. She started there, with a fingertip, just touching.
She knelt over him, careful, her hands slipping from one set of muscles to another. He shivered when she stroked his chest, groaned aloud when she touched him with her tongue. She sat back, looking down—
“No, you don’t,” he said hoarsely. “I can’t survive that, not in a boat.”
She giggled, all the laughter inside her spilling out. She was kneeling in a boat, wearing a chemise that was made of fine lawn.