Page 44 of To Catch a Lord
‘Last night? But that was in public.’
‘And now the door is locked. I locked it. Marcus, do you mean to do all the things you told me you wanted to do, when we were together in the moonlight?’
‘I mean to do all of them and more. I’ve lain in my bed at night and tortured myself with all I said to you, when I thought there was almost no chance that any of it would ever happen, however desperately I wanted it. I hope you want it too.’
She smiled up at him in loving mischief, her answer in her expression. ‘I too,’ she said. ‘God knows, I too. And more, as you say. Do you know how it affected me, when you described your nakedness – your bruises?’
‘No, I don’t, my love! How could I? It sounds most promising – I wish you’d tell me.’
‘I’ll show you, that’ll be better.’ Her eager fingers were at his cravat, tugging at the knot. ‘I don’t think you can have considered, sir, the sad case we women find ourselves in. Our dress, especially evening dress, is so flimsy and revealing…’
‘I had noticed,’ he said with feeling, as she unwound the snowy muslin from about his throat, then tossed it aside.
‘You have seen my arms bare almost to the shoulder, my lord, and a good portion of my chest…’
‘Not enough, I swear. Never enough.’
‘Yet all I have seen of your skin,’ she continued, dealing ruthlessly with the buttons of his shirt, ‘till now, is your hands and face. They’re excellent in their way, naturally. But it’s not enough. It’s not fair.’
The strong column of his throat was exposed now, and the deep vee where his shirt opened, and she made a little sound of appreciation and reached up to stroke his warm skin, tracing her way down and down. She could feel the blood thrumming in his veins, and his breath coming fast where her hand caressed the muscles of his chest. She pressed her lips to his flesh, closing her eyes for a moment as she drank in the beloved scent of him.
‘Is that better?’ he asked a little raggedly.
‘Well, it’s definitely somewhat better,’ she whispered, her breath tickling him and making them both quiver. Her hands were still running over the hard planes of his chest under his shirt, tangling in the hair she found there. There was a deep scar that puckered his right shoulder, and her fingers traced it gently, wanting to know and love every inch of him. ‘But you told me you boxed shirtless. You can’t expect to say that sort of thing and not have it lodge in a woman’s mind. You said you had bruises in surprising places, and my immediate thought was that I wanted to kiss them all better.’
He groaned deep in his throat, and reached to pull the shirt over his head with astonishing swiftness; she helped him, and it was gone in a second, thrown aside to land they knew not where. ‘I think there are still a few traces of them on my back,’ he said very low. ‘I’m sure they would benefit from being kissed better by you. How could they not?’
It was true. Not really bruises, but the shadows of bruises, yellow and brown, still lingered upon his broad shoulders and across his back. The biggest of them was still distinct in shape, as he had said, and vanished tantalisingly beneath the waistband of his breeches. She ran her fingers lightly over them all, from top to bottom, and then brushed the highest one with her lips as she stood close behind him. She kissed each bruise, and when she came across a lesser scar here and there, each one a relic of his dangerous life and an unmistakeable sign of how excessively lucky she had been that he had lived to find her, she kissed that too.
The room was very quiet, save for his soft gasps, and hers. Her hands explored him as her lips did, and her fingers traced along the line in front where soft buckskin met flesh, and where the fall of his breeches was closed with buttons. She caressed the round buttons too, slowly, one by one, tracing each circle, and his big hands captured hers, and held them there. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘yes, put my hand on you, Marcus. I did not quite dare, though I wanted to.’
He did not seem able to speak, but he guided her right hand so that it lay over his length, his highly aroused member pressing through the buckskin leather into her palm. She stroked him through the covering, and his hand still lay over hers; she was crushed tight against his back now, her lips at his neck, her breasts and belly moving against his naked flesh though the thin fabrics that abraded her heated skin, her other hand on his hard thigh, holding him close. His hand moved on her hand, and they panted together; she was nipping at his neck now with her teeth, tugging on the tendrils of hair that curled there, his urgency spurring her on, her breasts swollen and heavy and liquid fire pooling between her thighs. In a moment he let out a great groan of release, and pressed himself into her hand. ‘My love, my dearest love,’ he gasped out.
They were still for a moment, breathless, then he turned and seized her ruthlessly in his strong arms, lifting her up and carrying her to the sofa. He set her down among the cushions, throwing up her skirts and kneeling beside her. She was entirely exposed to him, as she had never been to anyone before in all her life, but she did not feel shy. They had passed far beyond that, into a place where there was only love, and trust, and always desire. ‘Now it is my turn to put my hand on you,’ he murmured. ‘Will you guide me, too?’
She took his hand without hesitation and pressed it straight to her core, whimpering at the first contact of his fingers with her hot, aroused flesh, writhing under his touch. She was wet for him, and the slightly roughened pads of his fingers slid across and around her engorged pearl of Venus in a confident manner that suggested that he hardly needed her direction. But she was enjoying the intimacy of their hands being joined still, and so she did not pull hers away, but moved with him, her whole body – and his – focused on the sensations of pure pleasure that built and crested and broke, carrying her away.
When she came back to herself, she found that Marcus was still on his knees at her side. ‘I think we have thoroughly compromised each other, my darling,’ he said tenderly. ‘I hate to think what your Aunt Keswick would say. Let’s not tell her. Will you really marry me next week, by special licence? How does Tuesday sound?’
44
They had somehow found themselves sitting together on the sofa, and Marcus said, as she snuggled close to him, ‘Is it too soon? I don’t want to pressurise you, and perhaps now everything is resolved, you may wish to have a little time really to be engaged, rather than the pretence we made of it before. Maybe you would even prefer to be married at Wyverne, as you once said. I don’t want you to feel that I am rushing you if you would rather wait.’
She shook her head. How complicated it all was. ‘I want to be alone with you, that’s the plain truth of it. We always seem to be surrounded by so many people, and while we remain betrothed, that will not change. I love Sophie and my brothers, I am sure I will quickly grow to love your mother and sister, and I am even fond of Aunt Keswick, who has always been very good to me despite her gruff exterior. But they are always here, or about to burst in at any moment – it is a wonder we have had these few precious moments alone.’
‘We could go down to Thornfalcon for our honeymoon,’ he told her, caressing her cheek and making her sigh and press her face to his hand. ‘It’s a good deal more than a day’s carriage ride from London, and some of the roads are bad, so we’d have to break our journey somewhere on the way. But once we got there, we could be private together.’
‘Does it hold many memories for you, Marcus?’ She knew that Thornfalcon in Somerset was where Marcus had grown up, which meant that it was also where he had fallen in love with Lavinia, his neighbour, and lost her. And they now knew that his brother had died there at her hands. It must be full of all sorts of recollections, both good and bad. Was it really wise to go there straight after their wedding?
She was relieved that he did not fail to understand her. ‘You are worried that at home, I will see Lavinia in every room and on every walk and ride – you fear she will haunt us? And if she does not, my poor brother’s fate will?’
It was something that had never occurred to her before this conversation, but when he put it to her in that stark manner, she could not deny it. ‘I know we will be obliged to go there eventually, even if we do not do so straight away. It is your principal seat, is it not? And so I can understand that you want to live there, or even that you might decide youmustlive there even if you don’t want to. I have no idea what you feel about the place – whether that might be love, hatred, or indifference, or something altogether more complex. We haven’t discussed it at all, have we?’
‘You are right, we should,’ he said, leaning back. ‘We should talk about our expectations and our hopes and fears, should we not? Where and how we shall live. It has never crossed my mind before – how unjust it is that a woman marries a man and is merely expected to live where he says they shall live, with no discussion. Nobody would question my right to tell you grandly, “We shall live at Thornfalcon”, which is a place you’ve never even seen and know little about.’
‘It’s a conundrum. It’s foolish to imagine that I might think of saying to you that I don’t wish to live there, supposing I should visit and dislike it, and that you might simply agree. Because in practical terms, if you own an estate, it would be negligent of you not to spend a substantial portion of your time there. Even if you don’t care for it at all, or you wife doesn’t, you are committed to the place and its people. I know this from my brother, who hated being at Wyverne when my father was alive, and yet had a duty not to abandon it completely.’
‘My feelings are mixed,’ he told her, and she could see that he was trying to puzzle it out for himself. ‘Perhaps less mixed than your brother’s, for there is no question of anything as extreme as hatred. It was a wonderful place to grow up, and it’s beautiful, I think – not in a dramatic but a quiet way. It’s not a great mansion with Palladian columns and a lake.’ He grinned at her – plainly, he had heard what Wyverne was like. ‘It’s a big, old, rambling house built around a courtyard, with parts of it very ancient indeed, and lots of unexpected steps here and there, and secret corners such as children love. Yet it was never meant to be mine. I could not tell you when I realised that Ambrose would inherit it, not me – I seem always to have known it, and I swear I never resented it. It wouldn’t be true to say that I never allowed myself to become deeply attached, because it was my home, and I was happy there. But I always expected to leave it and make my way in the world, in a way that my brother did not. I found it odd, when I came home after I was wounded, to walk about the place and think it mine for the first time. I still haven’t grown accustomed to that. And I can’t claim to any deep knowledge of how to run an estate – my father never thought to teach me, since there was no need. I dare say Helena knows more of such things than I do; my mother certainly does, and she has been a great help to me. So you see, it’s all new to me still, my love. And you’re right, I cannot neglect it. I don’t want to, and it’s not just a matter of obligation and duty; I want to do right by it. I would never have come to London at all this spring if Helena had not been making her come-out.’
