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Thank heaven she hadn’t started stroking her husband’s arms. She hadn’t been aware the groom was there, so rapt had she been by the sight of a man, her man, cheerfully engaging in what her father would have scathingly described as woman’s work.
‘The tale of me up to my elbows in soapsuds will spread like wildfire through the taverns,’ Lord Havelock grumbled, holding out the plate he’d scrubbed for her inspection.
‘Perfect,’ she said with a sigh. Then blushed. ‘The plate, I mean,’ she added hastily. ‘At least it will be once you rinse it. Or perhaps I should rinse it.’ She went to take it from him.
‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ he said, dunking the plate into the clean water in the next sink over and clasping her about the waist. ‘I am quite capable of doing this, you know.’
‘Yes, but if you don’t want people to talk—’
‘I don’t care what people might say about me,’ he declared, before dipping his head to kiss her. ‘They can go hang for all I care.’
She totally lost the thread of what they’d been discussing as he kissed her over and over again, walking her backwards across the room until she fetched up against a wall. The slide of his wet hands up her legs as he impatiently thrust her skirts out of the way, and the thrill of complying as he murmured heated, explicit instructions into her ear.
The joy of having this man want her so much that he couldn’t even wait to find a horizontal surface to lay her down on thrilled her.
And the gratitude that came from discovering that for all his impatience to have her, he possessed the self-control to wait until he’d satisfied her, before taking his own pleasure.
* * *
It got better every time, with Mary. He’d thought nothing could surpass their wedding night, yet sharing that mattress in front of the fire, the next night, had somehow been even better.
And as for last night...even when they’d eventually finished ‘doing the dishes’, the fire between them hadn’t gone out. They’d raced up the stairs to the room she’d prepared and torn each other’s clothes off with such haste they hadn’t bothered using the warming pan she’d insisted on filling with embers from the kitchen fire.
He raised himself on one elbow to look at her. Just look at her. How had he ever thought her plain? Not that she had one of those faces that attracted notice at first glance. No, what she had was an attraction that shone from the intelligence in her eyes, or the warmth of her smile.
He couldn’t help just sifting her soft, silken hair through his fingers, then fanning it out across his pillow. He liked the fact she didn’t wear it in bunches of fussy ringlets. In fact, he wouldn’t be surprised if she found it hard to make it take a curl. It was so straight—like her.
He wasn’t a fanciful sort of man, not normally, but when it came to her hair, he’d surprised himself by comparing it to all sorts of things that another man, the kind of man who was bookish, might work up into a poem. It put him in mind of hot summer nights when, as a boy, he’d stolen away from this house to go swimming in the lake. Naked, he would float on his back in water that had felt like silk against his skin and gaze up at the stars. Stars whose reflection shimmered in the water that bore him up. There seemed hardly any distance between water and sky. He’d got the notion that if he stretched his hands up, he could have touched them, made them shiver the way their reflections all around him shivered. As though he was floating in sky, and stars, and water, all at the same time.
And when he plunged his fingers into her hair while he was plunging himself inside her, he got the feeling that what he was doing was not just slaking a physical urge, but something more...something almost mystical.
Her eyes fluttered open, fixed on him and...warmed. Welcomed his presence.
There was no pretence about it. There hadn’t been a moment of hesitation, followed by the calculated smile he was used to getting from the women he’d taken to bed in the past. She was genuinely pleased to see him when she woke up.
A strange feeling stirred inside. A feeling of acceptance he hadn’t felt since... Well, he wasn’t sure he’d ever had anyone show such fondness for him, not once they’d got to know him as well as she’d done, over the past few days. He couldn’t remember his mother all that well. He’d been too young when she’d died to work out whether those vague feelings of acceptance had truly come from her, or whether he’d just dreamed them up in his childish need for...for something he certainly never got from his father. His father had definitely never been fond of him. He’d seen him pet his hounds and horses, but never, not once, had he been anything but brusque with his own offspring.
Things changed a bit when Julia was born. As soon as she could walk she toddled around after him. Wanting him to notice her. Believing he could do no wrong in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Even when she got old enough to develop some discernment, her face would still light up when she first saw him after sufficient time apart.
Which was one of the reasons why he’d been determined to move heaven and earth to keep her safe.
Although, what had it cost him, really? Marriage hadn’t turned out to be anything like the irksome chore he’d imagined. By some miracle, he’d found the only woman on earth who could have made becoming a husband a positive pleasure.
And it wasn’t just because she matched practically every item on the list his friends had helped him make. It was because, in spite of all the ways he’d gone wrong, she appeared to genuinely like him.
So he kissed her. Well, what else was a man to do when a woman looked at him like that?
‘You were looking very serious, just now,’ she said when he broke off to take a very necessary breath. ‘What were you thinking?’
He was damned if he was going to upset her by telling her she met every criterion on his list of what constituted an acceptable wife. Or admitting that he’d dreaded the prospect of marriage so much he’d actually sought the moral support and guidance of his friends in compiling it.
And he certainly wasn’t ever going to share, with anyone, that he’d had that moment of...metaphysical madness...diving into star-studded lakes of black silk to find the road to...some spiritual realm where souls could entwine, or some such rot, indeed!
He’d tell her the first thing he’d thought on waking, instead. Haul his mind back to the arena in which he felt far more at home.
‘I was thinking,’ he admitted with a rakish smile, ‘that every time we change the venue for our...conjugal activities, it gets more enjoyable. Do you know,’ he said, shifting over her, ‘I have this...craving to...’ he nudged her legs apart with his own ‘...enjoy you in every single room in this house.’ He nuzzled her neck. ‘Just to see if I’m right.’
For a moment it looked as though she was going to yield. But then her sinuous, responsive movements turned into unmistakable attempts to wriggle out from under him.
‘We can’t...not now,’ she said apologetically. ‘There’s so much to do this morning. If you want to eat Christmas dinner at a decent hour...’
‘Hang dinner,’ he said, catching her round the waist just as she was about to leave the bed and pulling her back. ‘And hang decency. We’ll eat whenever what you make is ready.’
‘But Gilbey will expect—’
‘And hang Gilbey, too. He’ll eat when we do.’
‘But—’
He stopped her mouth with a kiss. And smiled against her lips when, with a sigh, she wrapped her arms round his neck and kissed him back.
* * *
It was the happiest Christmas she’d ever known. And it wasn’t just because, at last, she had a secure home, plenty of food to eat and no need to worry about how to pay for it.
It was because of Lord Havelock.
He made Christmas Day pass in a whirl of merriment and lovemaking. Which he topped off by declaring it had been the best Christmas of his own life, too.
‘Don’t look as though you don’t believe me,’ he said, a touch belligerently, when she gaped at him in surprise. ‘You may as well know, right now, that I never lie. Have never seen the point,’ he finished loftily.
‘I didn’t mean to imply you would,’ she said, going to the oven and kneeling down to rake embers into the warming pan. ‘It is just, well, it was all so... I mean, you must have had far more grand food and all sorts of entertainments, other years.’
‘Oh. Yes, I see what you mean. And in a way, you’re right. I’ve definitely been to a great many Christmas house parties where no expense was spared. But you see,’ he said, gently taking the warming pan from her as she turned and got to her feet, ‘when I was a grubby schoolboy, I always felt I was there on sufferance, wherever I was. And then, when I got older, the same girls who’d been turning their noses up at me all their lives suddenly realised I was a catch and began trying to trap me. Don’t care for being hunted down like a...coursed hare,’ he finished bitterly.
‘I see.’ She picked up the lantern, glanced at the kitchen table and smothered a giggle. He’d surprised her, right after dinner, by sweeping the dishes aside, bending her over the table and lifting her skirts. What followed had been wild and wonderful, if a little shocking. ‘It has been the best Christmas Day I’ve ever had, too.’ It had been just as well the table was so sturdy. They’d have shattered a less robust piece of furniture.
And probably carried right on, in its splintered ruins, until they’d finished what he’d started.
‘I meant what I said, you know,’ he said with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes as he followed the direction of her gaze.
‘What about?’ She’d lost the thread of the discussion while she’d been reliving the way his hands had taken command of her body, while his lips pressed hot kisses into the nape of her neck.
‘About wanting to make love to you in every room in this house.’ As if to prove his point, when they reached the door of the room they’d slept in the night before, he kept on walking.
‘There must be a dozen bedrooms along this corridor alone.’
‘They...they won’t be very comfortable, though,’ she pointed out, hanging back.
He turned and looked at her keenly.
‘It isn’t fair to expect you to put up with another night on a hearthrug, is it? Very well,’ he said with an exaggerated sigh. ‘Let’s be practical.’ He turned back and entered what she’d come to think of as their bedroom.
‘For now,’ he said firmly, shutting the door behind them. ‘But I give you fair warning that once the Brownlows get here, I shall have them make up every bed, in every room, so that we can try out whichever takes ours fancy, whenever,’ he said, thrusting the warming pan under the quilt, ‘it takes our fancy.’
Whenever? Oh, yes. She liked the sound of that. Funny, but she’d never thought of herself as a spontaneous sort of person. But then she’d never had the chance to find out who she really was, or what she really liked. She’d been too busy just surviving.
But from the moment she’d married Lord Havelock—or at least, the moment he first started to get undressed, she’d decided she liked being able to make love whenever the fancy took them.
‘But for tonight,’ he said, taking her in his arms, ‘I shall make up for the fact we have to stay in here, by showing you...something new.’
‘Something new?’
What more could there be? He’d started by teaching her that people could make love in broad daylight. And gone on to demonstrate that they didn’t even need to lie down.
Her stomach flipped over in anticipation as he took her hand and led her to the bed. The look in his eyes made her legs tremble.
‘What,’ she whispered, ‘do you intend to do to me?’
‘Drive you wild,’ he whispered back.
Chapter Eleven
On the morning of the twenty-eighth, while they were still eating breakfast in the kitchen, the back door flew open and a middle-aged couple burst in, bringing with them the inevitable gust of rain-laden wind.
‘My lord, I’m that sorry,’ the woman began to apologise. ‘Had we any idea you was coming, we’d not have gone away. To think of you having to make do, at Christmas of all times.’
‘My Lady Havelock,’ drawled Lord Havelock icily, ‘allow me to present, finally, Mr and Mrs Brownlow. The caretakers of Mayfield.’
She managed, but only just, to follow her husband’s lead and not get to her feet and welcome the couple into the home as though they were guests. But she felt most uncomfortable when the one bowed while the other curtsied to her.
‘You look as though you’ve done very well, considering,’ said Mrs Brownlow, her eyes darting about the kitchen before coming to rest on Mary, who suddenly became very aware of the shabbiness of her gown and the fact that she’d not bothered taking off her apron when she’d sat down to breakfast. It felt as though Mrs Brownlow was sizing her up for the position of cook, rather than lady of the house. And that, given the choice, Mrs Brownlow wouldn’t have granted her either position.
‘But now we’re back, you won’t need to bother yourselves with all this sort of thing any longer,’ she added with a sniff, before going to the stove, opening the doors, rattling the poker about inside, then shutting them with more noise than was anywhere near necessary.
‘I notice you’ve decided to make use of the green-silk room,’ said the woman, taking the tea caddy from the shelf where Mary had left it and restoring it to the higher one where she’d first found it, but which was so awkward to reach. ‘Saw the smoke from the chimneys as we was coming up the drive,’ she added, which explained how she’d worked out where they’d slept, without anyone telling her.
But then Mrs Brownlow stilled, catching the full force of Lord Havelock’s scowl.
‘We was that relieved,’ she said, veering from her display of competence to ingratiating sweetness, ‘you hadn’t tried to take over the rooms what used to be his late lordship’s and his wife’s. None of the rooms in that wing have been touched since I don’t know when. Need a real good spring clean before they will be fit for use.’
Mary could have told her, had she paused to draw breath, that she could tell exactly how competent she was, from the state of the larder, the kitchen and the wing that had been let out to raise revenue. And that she didn’t have anything to worry about. Lord Havelock might have a ferocious scowl, but he wasn’t the kind of man who’d turn someone off for not somehow sensing he was about to marry and descend on his ancestral home.
‘And we’ll need to get the chimneys swept before anyone attempts to light a fire in any of the rooms. Probably got several years’ worth of birds’ nests in them by now.’
At her side, Lord Havelock froze, his cup halfway to his mouth. From the way his face paled, and the muscles in his jaw twitched, she guessed he’d just had a vision of setting the chimney on fire and burning his house down around his ears on the very first night he took up residence.
‘Now, you don’t need to sit in the kitchen any longer, not now we’re back,’ said Mrs Brownlow, laying her hand on the teapot, then whisking it off the table with a rueful shake of her head. ‘Mr Brownlow will light the fire in the drawing room.’ She shot a speaking look at her husband, who scurried off in the direction of the coal store. ‘It will be warm as toast in next to no time. And I’ll bring you a fresh pot of tea in there.’
Lord Havelock set his cup down and got slowly to his feet.
‘See that you do,’ he drawled. His attempt at nonchalance was good enough to deceive the Brownlows, but not Mary. She could tell he was still reeling from that casual reference to highly inflammable nests, which often did get lodged in chimneys.
‘Lady Havelock,’ he snapped. ‘Remove your apron and leave it behind. I sincerely hope never to have to see you in it again.’
Well, he had to give vent to his feelings somehow, she supposed. Lowering her head, in token meekness, she untied her apron strings. But she had to press her lips together to stop a smile forming. She kept her mouth firmly shut all the while Lord Havelock led her to the drawing room.
But once they were standing in the middle of the cold, inhospitable room, it struck her that they were behaving more like two naughty children caught out by their governess, than the lord and lady of the house.
And the giggles that had been building finally began to bubble over.
‘What are you laughing at?’
Lord Havelock turned to her, his brows drawn down repressively.
‘N-nothing,’ she managed in between giggles. ‘E-everything,’ she admitted, dropping on to the nearest sofa and pressing her hand over her mouth in a vain attempt to stop.
‘There’s nothing funny about nearly burning the house down.’
‘Y-you didn’t, though. There must not have been,’ she said in a vain struggle to both reassure him and bring herself under control, ‘any n-nests up the ch-chimney, after all.’
‘Don’t say that word!’ He planted his fists on his hips and glared down at her.
‘Which one? Ch-chimneys? Or n-nests?’
She was laughing so hard by now that she had to wipe away the tears that had begun to run down her face.
‘Neither,’ he snarled, though his eyes had lost that dead, hollow look. ‘Both.’ As though coming back to life, he began to stalk towards her. ‘Do you hear me, woman? You are never, ever, to mention birds’ nests, or chimneys, to me again.’
His words were firm, but his lips were starting to twitch, too.
‘Or...’ she said, gratitude that he was a man who didn’t take himself too seriously surging up within her on a tidal wave of joy. ‘Or what?’
He was almost upon her now and his eyes were smouldering with such heat it made her want to lean back into the sofa cushions and open her arms to him.
‘Or,’ he growled, ‘face the consequences.’
With a little shriek, she leapt up off the sofa just before he lunged for her. For the next few minutes, he chased her round and round the sofa, uttering dire threats of what he would do if he caught her, which he could have done any time he chose since she was laughing too hard to properly control her movements.
And then the door opened and Mr Brownlow appeared with a full coal scuttle. And came to a dead halt at the sight of his master and mistress playing chase.
‘Dashed cold in here,’ panted her husband as Mary froze in place. ‘Just keeping warm, with a little exercise.’
The look on Mr Brownlow’s face, the knowledge that had he come in a few seconds later he would have caught them rolling about on the sofa rather than running round and round it, was too much for Mary. With a shocked little cry she darted past the scandalised caretaker and out into the corridor, where she made for the stairs.
She heard her husband’s footsteps pursuing her, but this time she wasn’t playing. She really did just want to run away and hide. Without thinking, she made for the only room in the house where she would feel safe. The bedroom in which they’d slept the night before. The embers still glowed in the grate, making the room less chilly than any other, except the kitchen.
Lord Havelock reached it only a few seconds behind her. Before she could even turn round, he’d grabbed her by the waist.
‘Got you,’ he cried, propelling her across the room and flinging her down on to the bed.
‘Now, my girl, we’ll see how long you can keep on laughing at me,’ he growled. Not that she felt like laughing any more. All the humour had gone out of the situation.
‘What is it? What’s the matter?’
She hadn’t realised she’d communicated her chagrin to him. But she’d definitely tensed up and he’d noticed.
‘I...I’m sorry,’ she said, tears starting to her eyes as he reared up and looked down at her in confusion. ‘It was just...’ She gulped. ‘I can’t believe I forgot Mr Brownlow was on his way to make up the fire in there. A few more moments, and he would have found us... He would have found us...’ She couldn’t go on. Her face flamed though, at the knowledge she’d been about to let her husband catch her and tumble her to the sofa he’d been chasing her round. And let him commence the perfectly thrilling punishments he’d been threatening.
He started to chuckle.
‘It isn’t funny.’
‘But it is, though. Far funnier than almost burning the house down around my ears. And you, madam...’ he gave her a squeeze ‘...couldn’t stop laughing about that.’
He kissed her brow in a comforting sort of way. And then her mouth, as his fingers sought the ties of her bodice.
‘Surely you cannot still be thinking about...about...’ Oh, but he most definitely was. And the minute he slipped his hand inside her gown, she was thinking about it again, too. Not just thinking about it either, but wanting it.
‘Since we’ve been married,’ he groaned, pushing aside an inconvenient swathe of material so that he could get at bare skin, ‘it seems to be damn near all I can think about.’
‘B-but we can’t.’
‘I don’t see why not. Mr Brownlow already knows what we’ve come up here for.’
‘Oh, surely not!’
‘Of course he does. He almost caught us at it in the drawing room, don’t forget.’
‘As if I ever could,’ she cried in mortification.
‘Mary,’ he said more gently, stroking the hair from her forehead. ‘You don’t really want me to stop, do you? Not...now?’
He ran his hand up the outside of her leg, pushing her skirt out of the way. A thrill shot through her, making her heart beat faster, her insides melt and her hips squirm.
‘It would be a positive crime to disappoint Mr Brownlow.’
‘Oh, don’t speak to me of him,’ she whimpered, torn between giving way to the delicious sensations he was rousing and the notion that she oughtn’t, she really oughtn’t, behave like this any more, not now they had indoor servants.
‘Not another word,’ he agreed affably. ‘In fact, I’m sure I can put my mouth to much better use.’
He did. He set about making love to her with such skill that before long her world shrank to the size of one bed, and the only two people left were the two people on it. What had started out downstairs as playful rose swiftly again to a crescendo of desperate need. The urge to scream when her release came was so overwhelming she didn’t know how to deal with it. In the end, she pressed her mouth into his shoulder to muffle the cry.
Afterwards, they lay together panting and just looking into each other’s eyes in a kind of mirrored awe. She was shocked at herself for responding to him with such ardour, in spite of her awareness that the servants must know what they were doing.
And he must be wondering what kind of a woman he’d married. One minute she’d been saying she felt self-conscious. That she really couldn’t...do that. The next she’d been tearing at his clothes in a kind of frenzy, wrapping her arms and legs round him, and coming to such a cataclysmic release she’d...she’d bitten him. She could see the teeth marks on his shoulder!
‘Oh, what have I done?’ She raised trembling fingers to his shoulder. Then pressed penitent lips to the reddening crescent.
* * *
She’d made him feel like a god, that’s what she’d done. He’d never been with a woman who responded to him the way she did.
‘It’s nothing.’ He shrugged with feigned nonchalance, whilst desperately trying to stifle the unfamiliar, and slightly disturbing, emotions welling up inside him.
‘It isn’t nothing. I’ve left a bruise....’
‘A mark of passion. Such things happen between lovers all the time.’
He winced at the look on her face. He’d been trying to make light of a moment he was damn sure was going to live in his memory for a lifetime. Instead he’d made her think of her wondrous passion as something...tawdry.
Sitting up, he turned his back on her and thrust his fingers through his hair in annoyance. He should have just admitted he liked it. He could have done so in a teasing kind of way, so that she wouldn’t guess how deeply she’d moved him, couldn’t he? And then she would have smiled and...