In Praise of Younger Men Read Online Free PDF Page A

convince her to change her mind and become his wife.
    By the time he caught up with her, Harriet was nowhere to be seen, just the mare she’d ridden standing alone and riderless on a remote height overlooking the firth. Tristan left his own mount to graze upon a tuft of grassland, and took the narrow pathway of natural stone steps leading down toward the rocky stretch of shoreline below.
    The Solway Firth was the border Mother Nature had created between England and Scotland, and from where he stood, on a clear day, Tristan could see all the way across to Cumbria. Many a sailing vessel had come to grief on her shifting sands and unpredictable surging tides. At this particular point on the bay, vast crags spilled out into the water, winds collided and surged, making it far too treacherous a landing point for even the smallest vessel—thereby leaving it the most secluded spot in all of Galloway.
    Tristan followed the path of Harriet’s bootprints to a small opening no higher than three, maybe four feet nearly hidden beneath an overgrowth of gorse. He carefully pushed aside the thorny brush, ducking his head to enter, and arrived at a natural cave no doubt carved out of the tumbledown wall of rock thousands of years before.
    Only the smallest finger of sunlight shone inside, enough for Tristan to make his way back into the darkness. He stopped when he reached a rock wall and could go no farther. But Harriet wasn’t there. He was about to call out to her when he heard a sound, a splash that seemed somehow to come from behind the cave wall.
    Tristan felt around in the darkness until he found a small opening in the rock wall that led to a second chamber. It was high enough for him to stand and lit by two small openings in the rock overhead, allowing the morning sunlight to pour inside. At the foot of the chamber, carved out of the granite by nature’s hand, was a small crystal spring fed by fresh waters from some underground source. Over the centuries, it had formed a pool that twisted and turned, weaving its way for some distance inward along the cave floor. Even now, in the waning of winter, the air inside the cavern was comfortable, not cold. The waters of the pool would be warm as well, he suspected, softened by the natural minerals of the earth like a Roman bath.
    Tristan watched in silence as Harriet threaded her way easily across the surface of the water, her arms cutting in gentle strokes, her hair, the darkest red, floating softly behind her. She moved with the grace and ease of a swan, beautifully poetic, and he was utterly mesmerized by her. When she turned suddenly and began floating on her back, Tristan found himself holding his breath as the peaks of her breasts rose just above the surface. In the light beaming down, they were palest white, tipped in rose beneath the sheer wet fabric of the shift she wore.
    Tristan was taken by an image then, an image of himself standing naked with Harriet in that glistening underground pool, water dripping off of them both as they wound arms and legs together. He would make love to her here hidden away from the rest of the world outside. Together, they would forget that anything else existed but them.
    He watched as Harriet kicked her feet, gliding to the pool’s edge. She pulled herself up with her arms to sit with her feet dangling, threading a toe across the rippling water as she wrung out the dripping weight of her hair. The sunlight shone down through a cleft in the rock above her, lighting her glistening skin. The steady rise and fall of her breasts beneath the damp shift nearly did him in.
    Tristan hadn’t realized that he had stepped from behind the cover of the wall until he heard his own voice echoing to his ears. “Harriet ...”
    “Tristan!” Harriet scrambled to her feet, taking up a tartan blanket she’d brought along to cover herself. “How . . . how did you find me here?”
    “I saw your horse alone up on the height while I was riding nearby. I worried you