A Fiery Lady’s Accidental Affair – Extended Epilogue

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“Oh, Laurence, it’s wonderful!”

Alicia’s eyes roved over the new carriage, made of a handsome dark wood and veritably sparkling in the morning autumn sunlight. It was a most beautiful vehicle, though it looked oddly out of place beside the homely old buildings that had quickly become home to Alicia.

I wonder how long it will be before the animals make a right mess of the thing? she thought wryly.

“Well, it may not be quite the conveyance of a proper London gentleman,” said Laurence, sidling up next to her and putting his arm around her waist. “But it should get us to Grace’s wedding in at least a modicum of comfort.”

Alicia felt her knees quiver as Laurence’s strong hand pulled her closer to his side. She had had three long months to grow used to his touch, yet she still felt as excitable—and insatiable—as a bride on her wedding night. Many were the meals they had abandoned on the table to dash up to their room, and many the walk around the countryside they had stopped after only a few moments so they could indulge in a joyous bout of marital bliss.

It is a shame all of that will have to go by the wayside for a few days, she mused, sneaking an appreciative look back at her man’s firm backside. Three months into their marriage and there still felt like so many things Alicia desperately wanted to explore and try and talk about with her dear Laurence. Strangely, as much time as she had been able to spend with him since their nuptials, she felt almost in a hurry to try everything all at once, as though this wonderful thing might disappear like a good dream as soon as she closed her eyes.

Still, she reasoned, Grace was good enough to come to our wedding when I invited her. And even with all she’s done, even though I’m sure she simply wants to flaunt whatever outrageous affair she’s gotten Mister Cavendish to pay for, she is still my sister. My own wants can wait a few days, I suppose.

Her eye flitting to Dennis in his new driver’s uniform, just finishing hitching up Robinson and Rhea to the carriage, Alicia firmed her resolve and stepped reluctantly out of her husband’s loving grasp. She shot him a flirtatious look as she walked around to the far side of the carriage.

“Come now, modesty is unbecoming in a man of your stature,” Alicia quipped, peeking at Laurence from through the carriage wheels. “To say nothing of how poorly London society looks down on that particular virtue.”

“Especially as it was your dowry that allowed us to afford the carriage. Yes, very well,” said Laurence as he stalked around the carriage, giving Alicia that hungry smile that gave her gooseflesh. She giggled, racing just ahead of him. “In that case, it is as fine a carriage as any man or woman has ever seen.”

“It’s also ready to leave whenever you are, Mister Gillingham, sir,” said Dennis in his creaky voice. The bent older man hopped down from his seat at the front of the carriage, trudged between the happy newlyweds and threw open the door. “If you’d like to hop in, we can be on our way.”

Laurence gestured gallantly toward the door. “After you, Milady.” Alicia gave a longing look back to the farmhouse—It is strange just how much like home it already feels, she thought—then climbed into the interior of the carriage.

Before he followed her in, Alicia saw him hang his head back out the carriage door and call to the old cook who was standing by the door to see them off. “Now, Margaret, you are quite sure your nephew understands the instructions for taking care of things around here?”

“Yes, sir,” the woman called back to him. “I checked with him myself this morning.”

“Did you remind him he’s not to let Clio out into the yard? Her foot still isn’t quite right, and we don’t want her wandering off or getting hurt.”

“No, sir. Yes, not a problem.”

Laurence furrowed his brow in thought. “That’s tomorrow morning they’re expecting the last of the turnips, remember, and—”

“Laurence, dear—”

“Yes, all right, all right,” said Laurence as he swung himself into the carriage and closed the door behind them.

“After all, you’ve got a lot of good men and women working for you here, and they’re like as not to be glad to be rid of you for a few short days. Lord knows Jenny will be just fine in my absence, though of course, she doesn’t have nearly as much to accomplish as everyone else around here.”

Laurence interrupted any further elaboration with a dazzling kiss on the lips that left her blushing and speechless. “Right as ever, my pet.” He leaned his head out the open window and called out to the driver’s seat, “We’re all set in here, Dennis!”

With a hesitant cry from Dennis and a great heave from the team, the new carriage was off on the long road to London.

* * *

The scenery that passed them by was now almost blessedly familiar to Alicia’s appreciative eye. Though the colour palate that graced the hills and dales of Dunwood was tinged in reds and oranges now, Alicia fancied she could recognize each dip in the road, each tall pine and babbling brook they passed. Still, this time her attention was taken up less by the glories of nature and more by the solid form of Laurence, against whom she leaned on one of the carriage’s soft padded seats.

“If you don’t mind me saying it, I’m surprised Grace was content to wait for such a long engagement,” said Laurence idly. “I would have thought she would have been in more of a hurry to make her bond with Mister Chisholm a lasting one, before either of them thinks better of it.”

“It’s Mister Cavendish, as though you didn’t know that,” Alicia said as she gave him a good-natured elbow in the rib. “And I had had the same thought until she let slip in her most recent letter that she only procured an offer of marriage last month.”

Though Alicia could not see her husband’s face, she had learned his mannerisms well enough to perfectly picture the frown of concentration he was surely making during the pause that followed her explanation. “I thought she told you at our wedding that good old Catamount had already proposed?”

Alicia laughed, shifting her position slightly. “You mean she exaggerated her romantic prospects unreasonably? Can you imagine Grace behaving any differently?” As Laurence shared in her laughter, she could feel his abdomen shake pleasantly.

“Well, at least we will be able to manage a visit to your sister while we are in the city. It will be good to see Mary-Anne for a while. I may even get the chance to meet this elusive husband of hers, if she has not sent him off on some long-ranging errand the way she described.”

“It may only be a short while, I’m sorry to say,” said Laurence as a familiar put-upon note sounded in his voice. “The harvest is still only half-finished, my love, and I really cannot be—”

“Darling,” said Alicia softly, silencing her husband with a loving glance and a hand poised on his tight, muscular abdomen. “You know I have endless curiosity about everything to do with the farm. But I did ask that we leave farm business behind, at least for the duration of our sojourn to London.”

Laurence answered this by leaning forward and planting a tender kiss on Alicia’s forehead. “As you wish. I suppose it is the least I can do, since we have not had time for a proper honeymoon.”

“It’s funny, really,” Alicia mused. “As horridly as Grace treated me—treated us both, I have not forgotten—I find that I have nothing in my heart but happiness for her.”

“I feel the same way.”

“I cannot know for certain, but from her letters, it seems that she truly has found the man she has been looking for all these years. Mister Cavendish is well-regarded in London society, I understand, and he is extremely well-off besides.”

“He sounds lovely. Are you completely sure you do not wish to give up your dirty old farmer husband and steal Grace’s man, as she has always accused you of?”

Again Alicia thumped her arm against Laurence, who gave a gratifying grunt in response. “Why, my dear husband, is that a hint of green I see in your clear blue eyes?” she asked with a laugh.

“Perish the thought!” he chuckled.

“As if any of that held the slightest appeal for me.” Alicia nestled her head more closely against Laurence’s lap, revelling in the feeling of his powerful thighs beneath her. “It’s strange just how different we are, Grace and I. We always have been, and now that we are married women, it feels all the more so. She has always been so concerned with rank and standing and money, always money. I could never stand any of that money talk. Not as a child, and even less so now.”

Laurence ran his thick fingers through her brown curls, eliciting a low moan of satisfaction at the sensation. “How lucky it is that you have found yourself a husband who has no head at all for the stuff, then.”

As the countryside rumbled past the window, the sun climbing higher in the sky and her eyes growing heavy from the strain of travel, Alicia found her thoughts wandering back to another time when she was sitting in a carriage bound for London.

Was that only a few short months ago? she wondered. It feels as though it was another lifetime entirely…

“Do you know, Laurence,” said Alicia contentedly. “Looking out the window, travelling in a carriage like this, I find I can think of nothing but the first time we met. Do you remember?”

Laurence shifted his body at the question, rising from his seat and leaving Alicia sitting back on the cushioned bench on her own. “How could I forget?” he asked with a smile in his voice. “It’s not every day a beautiful, elegant young woman in distress appears just down the road from my house.”

“Was that really what you thought of me, that first day?” Alicia felt a hint of melancholy come into the edge of her awareness. “I have often wondered if I did not come across as a frightfully snobbish girl. What are you doing?”

He looked at her with a wordless grin, then pulled down the shade on the carriage window, shrouding them in pleasant, velvety darkness. Alicia frowned, confused by his action, but then she recognized something in the dimples in his masculine face. She blushed, leaning back further against the bench and giving him her best come-hither wink.

“Really?” asked Laurence in a tender tone, taking a seat next to her and sidling close. “What I thought was that I must have done something absurdly good in my life to be so rewarded. I am already fortunate enough to be surrounded by such beauty every day in Dunwood—”

“All of which you have been good enough to share with me,” interjected Alicia, putting her hands behind her head coquettishly.

Laurence leaned over slightly, his hand stroking the length of Alicia’s thigh. “Yet all the same, I felt at that moment that the world was giving me an entirely different sort of beauty, one I had never glimpsed before in my life.” He shook his head with a queer smile on his lips. “I did not even have an inkling that you might stay in my life longer than the moment I spent in your company on the road. But even that was enough to be grateful for.”

“Honestly,” Alicia murmured, her melancholy returning once again. “It makes me feel a bit sad to think of it.”

Even in the midday dark of the carriage’s shadowy interior, she could see Laurence wince at the thought, his chiselled lips shrinking in a gesture of terrible helplessness. “Why is that, darling wife? Do you still harbour some regrets?”

“No, no, nothing like that. It’s just that…my life was so nearly such a different thing. If Herbert had steered the carriage just an inch to one side, if you had not been out in your fields by the road when you had, then we might never have met. I would have carried on to London and continued with my miserable life. Probably would have married some noble nincompoop and had his nincompoop children, or else settled into a miserable spinsterhood with Grace.”

“And now instead Grace will be married, and you will have our nincompoop children instead.”

Then Alicia jumped in her seat, feeling a surreptitious pinch at her bottom from Laurence’s hand. She shot him a glare that quickly dissolved into giggles as the two of them began slapping and tickling one another on the bouncing carriage seat.

“It all feels so much better than before,” Alicia sighed, gazing into her husband’s blue eyes. “Knowing that we will only be in London for a short time before going back to our true life together. Still, it feels strange to be in the same place as I was those months ago, riding in a carriage like this.”

“Oh, yes. It’s quite frightening, really. After all, what should happen if our carriage struck a rock?” Laurence asked in a low, breathy voice, his eyes half-lidded with desire.

“Oh, that would be terrible,” Alicia murmured as she leaned back against the comfortable seat, interlacing her fingers behind her husband’s neck. “Why the carriage could be rendered completely unusable, and we should be stranded here in the middle of the countryside.”

“Mmm, whatever would a proper London lady do in such a circumstance?” As he said this, his lips came deliciously close to that sensitive place on her neck that he had uncovered over the past few weeks of conjugal merry-making. Alicia felt herself writhe at the memory of what those lips had done, of the cries and utterances he had awoken from her with the gentlest touch of his skin against hers.

“She would have to hope she is lucky enough to find a strong, handsome, generous farmer to come to her aid,” said Alicia with a desirous smile.

Her fingers sought purchase in the golden hair at the back of Laurence’s head, and she pulled him closer to her. Her lips parted, inviting him to kiss her even as his body was pressed atop hers. She could feel his desire pulse against her frame, and she cast only a brief look to the closed window shade before she felt his lips teasingly brush against her neck.

“That would be quite a terrible circumstance,” Laurence whispered in her ear. Alicia felt her insides churn with desire at the reverberations of his deep baritone against the sensitive skin of her ear. “A lady in distress would have to be very, very lucky for such a thing to happen.”

“Lucky indeed,” she mouthed. Her fingers tried in vain to pull him closer that she might feel his mouth on her skin, his hands on her most secret places.

“And what if she did not find such a man waiting for her, but instead a terrible scoundrel?” Laurence growled, still teasing her with the lightest, briefest touch at her upper thigh. “The kind of man who would take advantage of a lady in such a circumstance, who would—”

“Shh,” said Alicia, unable to take the tantalization any longer. He was only too happy to oblige, and together they found an altogether better use for their lips.

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