Little Red, Riding Wood Ch. 03

He added that correction to his impropriety quite purposefully, more to accent his own intransigence than to correct it.

"I'm sure it's nice having a pretty little thing around to pamper you as you age, but it isn't right. You're being selfish, and it's not in her best interests."

He'd argued with Gautier that it had to be her choice, or that she needed to at least be amenable to the arrangement, and Gautier had laughed at him. It wasn't unheard of, particularly for more doting parents, to give a girl some say in her future, or to hope that she could marry for love instead of convenience or necessity.

"She has no future with you, Sinclaire. She needs a future, and there is none here, with you."

But he was right about a few things, as coarse as his presentation might have been. He did want her to cook and clean for him, some, and to pamper him, and to light up his days. He didn't mind the cooking and cleaning. He was good enough at it himself, it wasn't beneath him, and unlike the other men in the village, he was sure that he did more than his share.

He loved the way she pampered him, just as he pampered her. He loved the way her eyes lit up the room, and he loved adding depth to her days with his reading and his insights, in stark contrast to the vulgar simplicity of the men like Gautier.

But was he being selfish? Had he perhaps exaggerated all of the issues and obstacles, just to keep her close, even if only for a while longer? Was his plan to take her on a long, improbably journey to find a suitor really necessary, or just a grandiose plan that was really motivated by nothing more than a deep seeded need to delay the inevitable day when she left him?

He glared at the next nail he set, striking it with added ferocity. He didn't know if he felt he was striking Gautier, or himself, or his own weaknesses or his own conscience, for pointing them out.

He was lonely. He hid the fact, even from himself, for year after year, but he was lonely. She was beautiful, and her rapid, recent march into womanhood had rekindled both those memories and those desires. She reminded him that he was a man, just by her own nature and presence and intense sexuality. He'd denied that part of his own nature for far too long, except that his problem was the same as hers.

There was no one in the village for him, and he found it hard to believe, that even with years of searching, that he would ever find anyone so suited to him as his own, beloved Celia, anywhere else in the wide, dangerous world.

Gautier was right. He did love and need Celia. He did love and need her presence, her kindness, her affection, and everything he brought into his life. Without it, he was finished.

She was everything to him. To lose his darling daughter would be to lose his very last foothold in life, the only thing left that kept his days from stringing endlessly from one to the next in an empty parade of dispassionate boredom.

Sinclaire needed to be honest with himself, he decided. Gautier was right, in some ways. Sinclaire had to admit to himself what he truly wanted, as well as what she wanted truly wanted, and what had to be done to make Celia as happy as she could be. He had to do the right thing, even if it might seem wrong to others, or to her. Even if it wasn't what she thought or knew that she desired, or admitted to desiring.

But first he had to figure out what the right thing was. It seemed to hover there, exactly what he should do, hanging just back in the deepest recesses of his mind, in the shadows, where he couldn't yet make it out.

He had to do the right thing, and in a moment of clarity, he knew that he would recognize it when the time came. That was the sort of man that he was, and always had been. He'd recognize right from wrong when he saw it. He'd do what was best for them both.

He was certain of it.

* * *

Tomorrow was the day of rest, so there would be no school to teach. There'd be no need to awaken too early to get back into town too soon if she spent the night with Papa out at grandma's house. She locked the house up tightly, closing all of the shutters and latching them from the inside, and checking to be sure that no food had been left where the mice could get at it. She as she stood at the main door, before pulling it closed behind her, she looked around at their little home.

It was the most familiar place in the world to her. There were a few small, mismatched wooden chairs, and some kerosene lamps on small, wooden tables and hanging from the ceiling. There was the two person table that she and her father had eaten dinner at for twenty years. There were various, clever decorations on the walls that he and she had made over the years. And in the middle of it all was Father's special, comfortable chair for one that could and often did fit two in a pinch.

She sighed once, feeling odd leaving the place empty of both of their presences for several nights in a row. She hesitated a moment for closing and locking the little wooden door that led to the private world of Little Red and her father.

She took little more than she would on a normal journey, only her red cloak and hood, her basket with some bread for them both, some fresh baked sweet pastries for breakfast, and her walking stick, not for support but instead for protection this time.

She could wear one of Father's own shirts to bed, as she so often did.

Celia took greater care this time. She started off by walking into the Riding Wood, towards the river. When she knew that no one could see her, after a sharp bend in the road to the left around a great mound, she instead turned right, off the road and into the woods.

A less clever girl might easily have gotten lost, even one raised in the woods as they all had been, but Celia was not a less clever girl. She found her way easily south, around the town, where she could enter the Wolf Wood from an unusual direction. From there it would be more difficult and dangerous to try to pick up the path to her grandmother's house, but Celia was certain that she could do it.

The thought of spending another night alone in town frightened her. She wanted to spend it with Papa, with her father. In fact, spending a night alone with her father in her grandmother's cottage made her heart race. Who knew what might happen there, tonight, she thought to herself, with her and her father left completely alone, and no one around for miles and miles to hear whatever might transpire? And with the wolves prowling outside, safely locked out but by the mere threat of their presence keeping intruders away as well, she would feel more safe than anywhere else in the world, especially after her trying ordeal with Royden and Ruffe.

Towards the river, then through the woods to Grandmother's house she went, hoping to be kept safe from all manner of wolves, and to spend a night alone with her beloved father.

* * *

From within the woods beside the north road where it entered the village, Gautier watched her leave with a sinister, calculating glare. He followed her discreetly for a ways. He had no need to stay too close. He had no doubt where she was going, and why, despite the subterfuge of heading to the east. That was absurd. What business could she possibly have down the Riding Wood Road? He knew where she was really headed.

To Grandmother's house. The thought it with a mental sneer, and sense of disgust. He knew she was headed there, but no one had ever known how to find the place, even when she was alive. Quite honestly, no one had cared to. Gautier didn't know the way, but he had other means at his disposal.

With a nod to Royden and Ruffe, they set off on her trail. With the damning evidence against them in her journal of their intransigence — no, he hadn't let them actually see it, because he needed to keep certain parts of that encounter to himself — they had no choice but to do as he bid.

She might outwit many, with her clever smarts, Gautier thought, but she'd never be able to hid her fresh trail from skilled hunter-trackers like Royden and Ruffe. They would find her trail, and he would track her all the way to their lair of disgusting, unheard of sin where he would deal with Sinclaire himself. He would make his demands of the evil, pathetic old man, to then return home a smiling, happy man himself, with his newly betrothed very properly, affectionately and most of all subordinately hanging on his arm.

He'd even move in with her into their home, larger and cleaner and better kept than his own. The school master himself could stay in that cottage and rot away, or suffer the consequences of shame and punishment over which Gautier now held sway.

Gautier set off himself down the Riding Wood Road, confidently and openly and care free, to catch up to Royden and Ruffe and to go with them to Grandmother's house with the heart of a hungry wolf beating in his chest.

* * *

Sinclaire rummaged around, accomplishing nothing, lost in serious thought as Celia, finally here after her long and unusually meandering trek through the forest, had asked to be given a moment to change in the small room to the side. He hugged her, warned her of the loose floorboards, then let her go to freshen up.

The room where she now changed had been his own room, growing up as a boy, but was really too small for more than a small cot, without even a table for a lantern, which instead hung from the rafters. It was too small, really, for anyone but a small child, and even then it was a stiflingly tight place to sleep and live.

That was, in fact, a reason why he had left his mother when he did. The cottage was far too small for a grown man and his mother to share in discretion. Celia herself hadn't realized this, or guessed that the cottage would ultimately be his alone, as it was for his mother, once she'd been properly and safely married to a good, worthy man.

He grimaced at that thought. He had begun to doubt — actually to know — that no such man existed for her. She was too different, too special, and too perfect. Gautier and Royden and Ruffe and the rest had shown him that maybe his dream of finding the right man for her was, in fact, only a dream. The wealthy merchants cared not for knowledge and books and imagination, but only for money and profit. Men of all different sorts and bents didn't care for a woman of charm and intelligence and insight. They only wanted a cook, and a housekeeper, a nursemaid for their brats and a whore in their beds.

He shook his head. None of this related to his immediate problem, which was how he and Celia could share the next few nights, let alone future weeks and months before his mission was accomplished, in this too close, too intimate space, with so little privacy to separate a father from his young, sensual, beautiful daughter.

She was beautiful, he thought. If he had been another man she could and would have made him so happy, and he would have returned that gift to her a thousand fold. The pleasures that could only be shared by a loving man and woman would have cascaded into a sparkling fountain for a couple such as they would be, multiplying their joy in a never ending waterfall of delights.

Was it really so wrong, he asked himself? It was, he knew. It was nothing that could ever be seriously considered. But the fantasy was an evening's delight of a thoughtful dream.

They were so alike, and so perfect for each other. His age was really no factor. Many men his age took another wife for comfort, having lost their first or even more to the dangers of childbirth, or sickness. He himself was healthy enough. He was getting on in years, as the gray in his beard betrayed, but he was hardly old.

She was so very perfect, and so brilliant! His own departed wife, while more worldly and educated than most, had never possessed the sheer intellect that Celia wielded. She was so quick to grasp something new, and added such wonderful insights of her own. Conversations with her were a marvel and challenge. No other woman in his life had every challenged him as she did. She forced him to be better, to try to keep up.

She was a true soulmate, in so many ways, and so very, alluringly beautiful to him.

He could satisfy her, he was sure, and then tried to banish the thought with an angry surge of guilt at the sinful thought. But it was too pleasing a thought to relinquish.

He could please her, more than he ever had any other woman, he thought, even his wife. They would be magic together, he was sure, just as they were in spirit and mind. As easily as their conversations and light hearted laughter flowed from one moment to the next, almost as if they were of one mind, so their touches and caresses would easily flow, he was sure, until they became one body.

He shook his head to clear the thoughts, and the growing warmth he felt inside. The growing bulge in his trousers was an embarrassment he'd have difficulty hiding from the dear girl here in this cramped cottage. He do well to undo that particular evidence of his line of thought.

Yet he continued. He'd been down this road before, during many a cold, lonely night of late, even if he hid and even regretted the images in the bright light of day, faced with his responsibility to her as a man and her father.

She was so beautiful. The pale, smooth skin of her breasts that she so freely and ill-advisedly exposed to him was such a sore temptation. Her every hug pressed those fine breasts into his chest, making her womanly femininity that much more obvious to him.

He had no idea how beautiful her form truly was, as it was so often, so appropriately veiled by her flowing skirts and so often that inseparable red cloak which almost seemed to be a part of her.

Her red lips, on that small, sweet mouth, were beautiful. Her eyes, the eyes that looked at him with adoration and respect and love and joy and laughter, were too beautiful to describe, as was the gorgeous hair that flowed around that familiar, young face.

Her shoulders, her neck, her ankles, her arms, those flowing calves and cute knees and creamy lower thighs, every inch of her skin that he'd ever seen was beautiful and exciting and tempting to him in a way he could never admit to anyone, often not even to himself, and certainly never, ever to her.

But it was how he felt. It was an ache that he felt in his heart and, he had to admit with some degree of self loathing, his body, an ache that was growing more difficult to deny with every passing day. He wondered how he could survive sharing this cabin for even two days, let alone long enough to carry out his plan of sending her, with agonizing pain to him, away from him to live a happy, secure life where the temptations of her perfect flesh and spirit would no longer haunt his dreams, night or day.

* * *

Celia stepped hesitantly from the small room, trembling with fear, knowing that what she was doing was wrong. He'd scold her. He'd glance at her, then look quickly away, perhaps embarrassed, but probably worse with a growing look of shocked, disapproving anger in his face.

He'd look away, and order her to dress properly, or perhaps cancel the entire weekend plan and drag her home, in inconsolable, shameful tears.

He glanced down at her body. The hem of his shirt reached down on her to mid thigh, exposing far too much of her leg for any man to see. It was nothing that he hadn't seen before when she wore his shirts as, at first, as her bedclothes and then, in her ever more bold advances, around the house as her evening wear.

She had tied one, single tie below her waist, at her hip, to mask the secret, red garden that so many men had offered to visit, but none had been allowed.

Above that, to her undying but subdued shame, she had tied nothing. The shirt hung open, exposing her smooth belly, her navel, her collar bone, and the insides of naked, round, pale breasts. The shirt hid, but only just, the wide, round, pink circles of her hard, excited nipples.

Her breasts literally heaved, just as the more naughty books she'd found described. Her breathing was uncontrollably heavy and fast, quickened and deepened by this intoxicating brew of intense fear, anticipation and lust.

But it was done. She'd stepped into view. She'd made her choice, to show him as openly as she ever might how she felt, and what she desired. It was his choice now, to accept her and to love her as the woman she wished to be for him, or to send her in tears and eternal shame, back to change, back home, or off to a life with some miserable, gruesome lout of a man.

* * *

She was stunning. She stood before him as if she'd watched his dreams, and stepped right out of one of them to stand before him. If he'd been a more foolish man, he would have pinched himself, to be sure the opposite weren't true, and that he wasn't even now, lying on his bed, snoring away as he still awaited her impending visit.

He stared for far too long, feeling the raging battle of emotions clashing within him, even as he held himself outwardly, utterly frozen.

* * *

He strode towards her with the same confident, purposeful advance of a wolf, just like the large black wolf. His expression was strange. It frightened her.

There was ferocity there, certainly, but she couldn't tell if it was anger, or something else, something with deeper, even more feral roots. There was a coldness, the sort of coldness one shows when they are covering the smoldering feelings that burn even hotter underneath. And there was a hint of fear in his eyes, too. She rarely saw fear in her father's eyes. That was, perhaps, the most unsettling thing of all.

Celia felt her own trembling body increase its terror ten fold. Her heart thundered in her chest like tree after mighty tree being felled to the ground in a row. Her palms were coated with sweat. She felt dizzy and light headed. Her body seemed to sway, and she feared that she would faint to the ground.

As all of these thoughts race through her head, he approached. One long, endless moment, the man was striding across the room towards her, bearing with him the most terrible threat she could imagine, not just one of cruel if just punishment, but also the more cruel and unbearable threat of rejection.

And then he was there, before her. His chest, broad and strong, to her, was inches from her own. His eyes, piercing and stern, glared down into hers, unreadable before the sea of conflicting emotions she saw, or imagined she saw there.

His strong hands reached up towards her, clamping powerfully on her arms. The squeezed her tightly, as if she were a book that he were trying not only to slam shut, but to compact so that it might never be opened again. He squeezed her, and...

... He draw her towards him. His wide hands, grasping her irresistibly, pulled her forward and up, against his chest, and lifting her onto her toes, lifting her face to within an inch of his.

He stopped her there. She hovered, completely lost and frightened and out of control, imprisoned in her father's strong hands and arms, unable to move even if she'd had an ounce of strength or will. He held her there, staring deeply into her eyes. The ferocity hadn't left them. He looked as angry and intense and driven as before.

But the kindness was there. She hadn't seen it, but it had always been there and it still was, the warmth and kindness he always felt and showed for her. She saw it. She recognized it. She melted into it.

His lips pressed against hers.

* * *

The feel of her in his arms, like this, like a woman, felt more sinful than anything he'd ever allowed himself to imagine. This wasn't the sort of man he was, or wanted to be.

He forcefully held her frame against his, feeling the soft flesh of her arms squeezed in his hands, and the soft press of her breasts and thighs against his. He pressed his lips against hers, but even as he did so, he fought the urge to move them as he wished, to give her the sort of sensuous, lovers kiss that he'd intended.