Читать книгу The Regency Season Collection: Part Two - Кэрол Мортимер, Кэрол Мортимер - Страница 29

Chapter Twenty

‘I love you, Luke. So very much,’ Chloe said in a shaky voice, stirring at last as the fog of bliss brought on by becoming Luke’s wife in every sense of the word dissipated enough to allow her sufficient spare breath to speak.

‘Good, it took you long enough to realise my sterling worth and agreeable temper was exactly what you needed to make your life complete,’ he joked, with an echo of her own wonder in his eyes.

‘Pompous idiot,’ she said with a wifely look he seemed to find fascinating.

‘Wife,’ he murmured huskily, fascinated by a curl of red-gold hair trailing across her bare shoulder. He tested that word again on is tongue. ‘My wife,’ he murmured and she opened heavy-lidded eyes a little wider to take him in, naked as Adam and insufferably complacent about life as he currently appeared, and she sighed with contentment.

‘What is it?’ she asked sleepily.

‘You are my wife,’ he informed her as he kissed the disordered tumble of her wildfire hair over that satin-smooth shoulder, then eyed her as if tempted to work his way downwards and catch her in the sensual web he’d woven round so effectively last night once more. ‘Lady Chloe Winterley is my wife,’ he added, gloating over the fact of her as she stretched her sleek and very bare body luxuriously against his own naked form. ‘My lawfully wedded wife,’ he added for good measure.

‘I think we have already established that fact,’ she murmured, still half-asleep, but very willing to wake up to a new and very alert husband in her bed.

‘Not to my complete satisfaction we haven’t,’ he argued, even as the gallant impulse to leave his new-made wife to recover from his amorous attentions seemed to fly out of the window and she put all the provocation she’d stored up over a decade into kissing her one true love back. ‘I love you,’ he distracted himself by saying as soon as he could. ‘I love you, my Lady Chloe.’

‘You haven’t leapt out of bed and downed a pipe of port or a cellar full of brandy while I was asleep, have you, Luke? You sound drunk, even if you don’t taste it,’ she observed with a self-satisfied smile he took very personally indeed.

‘I’m only drunk on you, love. Merry as a grig on my first taste of housekeeper and very personal companion,’ he informed her with a smile that truly freed the wolf in him for the first time in ten years and, oh, but that wolf was hungry.

‘I like the sound of being employed so intimately by my Lord Farenze—do you think he’ll make a hard-working female like me a good master?’ she whispered and let her hand wander towards a very rampant piece of evidence he would be a very attentive one, if this newest Lady Farenze ever acknowledged any man her master and they both knew that was very unlikely.

‘I know Mrs Wheaton drove him nigh mad with need of her every time he laid eyes on the impertinent female. Shall we see if he can return the compliment?’ he whispered in her ear as he taught her the erotic potential of that delicately made organ with his busy tongue. She surprised a groan of delight out of him when she retaliated by exploring his manhood with a delicately curious fingertip.

‘Mrs Wheaton wanted you back, Luke; she wanted back you so badly that she used to pace her room at night for the pent-up frustration of wanting you in her bed and not being able to have you there. She cried herself to sleep with missing you more times than she wants to remember right now, poor lonely, lovesick female as she was. I longed for you with every fibre of my being, when I was so young I couldn’t imagine how anyone could want a man so much and not have him and for a whole decade after that. On nights when you slept under Lady Virginia’s roof for one night, or even a slightly less miserly two of them, I shook with need in my lonely bed and wept for all we could never have.’

‘And I had to leave after a few nights because I couldn’t sleep for longing for my great-aunt’s housekeeper in my bed. I wanted you so much I ached with it every time I was within thirty miles of the Lodge and you, Chloe. I had to stay away. There was no other way for me not to have you. You had a child to bring up alone and you were my great-aunt’s housekeeper and another man’s widow. How could I stay when you would have ended up my mistress and I knew that was less than you ought to be?’

‘If I’d known you wanted me back like that, I don’t suppose I’d have been able to stay away,’ she confessed with a blush beyond the rosy flush of need already spread across her cheeks and down to places where she hadn’t known she could blush until last night. ‘Even for Verity’s sake, I couldn’t have stayed away if I’d known you wanted me as much in return, Luke,’ she said and abandoned teasing for a moment to stare into his eyes with her heart in her own. ‘I love you, you great gruff, noble idiot,’ she said with wet eyes and a shaky smile. ‘I love you so much I won’t be able to pretend I married you because you were obliged to right Lady Chloe in the eyes of the world. I can’t counterfeit polite indifference and yawn my way through the odd evening when we happen to have no engagements if we spend a Season in London. If you don’t want me to give away the fact I feel as if half of me is missing whenever you’re not near; that I long for you so deeply that the world is less shining and wonderful when we’re apart, then you’ll just have to leave me behind. In Somerset or Northumberland I can be Lord Farenze’s besotted wife, who thinks about you every moment of her day, but you and Eve will have to leave me there while you go to London if you want to be fashionably indifferent to me in public, Luke.’

She reared up and dragged the bedclothes with her, since it was still only March and not even love could keep them warm when the fire had gone out hours ago and the chill of an early spring morning pervaded this splendid old bedchamber. Chloe propped herself above him as he lay prone against the bank of down pillows covered in fine and snowy linen and forgot what she had been going to say next in her fascination with watching him, her husband of a day.

‘So dark,’ she whispered as she swept a fingertip along the stern arch of his brow. ‘So determined...’ she lingered over the hard firmness of his jaw. ‘So tempting,’ she gasped as his lips parted to nibble that fingertip and his grey eyes heated to silver and steel and a hard flush of need swept over his cheekbones.

‘So yours,’ he rasped with such love in that dear gaze of his that she moaned in sheer awe. ‘So ready to let the wide world know I love my wife, will always love her and have loved her for far too long in silence to ever be quiet about it again. Now I have my ring on your finger and you in my bed for the rest of our natural lives, I shall never be able to pretend I’m not fathoms deep in love with you. We won’t be walking in Virginia and Virgil’s footsteps, my darling. We’ve got our own road to travel, but I want the world to know we’re every bit as besotted with each other as they were and intend to be so for as long as we live. Polite society will just have to accustom itself to that fact or keep away, wherever we are.’

‘It sounds wondrous,’ she told him with a dreamy smile.

‘It will be,’ he promised as solemnly as he had the day before, when they stood in front of the altar and made their vows before God.

‘Well, that’s all right then,’ Lady Farenze informed her enthralled lord, then blinked and eyed him a little doubtfully. ‘Are you sure the servants won’t come in until we ring the bell?’ she asked, as all sorts of possibilities suddenly suggested themselves when he gently shifted her over his prone body and she wriggled delightedly at all the wildly sensual ideas he was putting into her head with such promise in his wolfish gaze.

‘Come now, love, this is one of Mantaigne’s friend’s households we’re staying in whilst he’s up in London, getting ready to be fashionably bored for the Season. Please be serious, wife,’ he scoffed.

‘Rakes, the lot of you,’ she condemned.

‘Not rakes, my love, wolves. A rake is a care-for-nobody seducer of any woman who presents him with an intriguing enough challenge. We lone wolves mate for life, which makes us all the more dangerous to unwary ladies like you.’

‘Ah, but I’m not unwary any more,’ she said with all sorts of untried promises in her violet eyes. ‘Can we really?’ she added as he splayed her legs over his narrow hipbones and she felt the full force of his arousal against her over-heated feminine core once again.

‘I don’t know, can we?’ he whispered with a plea in his dear eyes to say how very much he wanted to, and a promise behind it that they would not if she felt too new at being a wife to ride to paradise in his arms like this.

‘Yes...’ she breathed as she solved his dilemma in the best way she could think of. ‘Ooh, yes,’ she gasped raggedly as she rose eagerly, then sank down on to the rigid and impressive length of his manhood and felt the fire and sweetness of mutual possession roar through her once again. ‘I knew I needed to wake up with you, my lord, but until today I didn’t know exactly why,’ she told him as she held his fire and thunder-shot grey eyes with hers, saw the same flash of burning colour on his lean cheeks as she felt on her own.

‘Ah, but you see, I did,’ he managed to say and thrust up into her wet silken depths at the same moment as she bore down.

Chloe felt her breath hitch even more, her heart thunder in her breast and her core tighten on him as they strove together towards ecstasy and this time she knew what was coming and yearned for it, even as she knew a lick of sadness that, with that lovely, trackless completion, their congress would end, for now. But it ended so gloriously; so passionately, as she bowed back and moaned in extremity and he bucked and shouted his ultimate fulfilment as he shot his seed so high up inside her that spasms of their loving still rocked them when she sank down on to his heaving torso, feeling even more boneless and full up with wonder than last time.

As she lay splayed across him where their last flex of bliss beached her, she spared a brief thought for the sad, bereft Chloe of ten years ago who longed so desperately for love she had even fantasised over her mistress’s stony hearted great-nephew.

‘As well for me that I didn’t know,’ she observed as she used the light of the strengthening spring sun to peer down into her lover’s tender, love-shot gaze. ‘I might have humiliated myself and crept into your bed, whether you wanted me there or not, if I’d known this lay in wait for me there.’

‘As well for both of us you didn’t, then, because I had to learn to love before it could be like that. It never was so with anyone else,’ he promised with such earnest need for her to believe him in his eyes that she nodded to admit he was probably right.

‘I hate the fact that there ever was anyone else, Luke. I can’t help but begrudge this to every other woman who ever faced you in bed of a morning and rode herself to heaven on your lordship’s most potent weapon,’ she said with a wicked glance at his even now half-alert member that seemed to have a life of its own. He looked half-disgusted and half-resigned about it as he managed a sheepish smile for his new and very demanding wife.

‘It’s been more of a curse than a blessing to me until now,’ he confessed and how could she not love the sheer mannish appeal of him as he lay there all gruff and undefended?

‘Has it really?’ she said with a dubious gaze that somehow had to linger in fascination on the difference of him, the intriguing drama and details of his sex.

‘Yes, when I met and married Pamela need and fury drove me nearly as hard as it did her, we were noxious together, Chloe. Even you would not like the man we made of me between us back then. When she left I was more relieved than angry; she took the tortured need to satisfy her, to somehow please her when the only thing that truly delighted her was to have me force her in some way, and that went against all I wanted to be as her husband. I had a mistress after she went; I admit that to you frankly and can’t bring myself to be sorry for it. She showed me that a woman doesn’t have to be begged or coerced to let me into her bed, proved I was physically desirable in ways Pamela never tired of telling me I wasn’t.’

‘I swear I could tear the vicious little cat to shreds for hurting you so deeply, or at least I could if she was still alive.’

‘I doubt it; you don’t have enough malice in you to go about avenging yourself on my past lovers.’

‘If any of them ever tried to hurt you, your Eve or my Verity, you might find yourself mistaken in that very flattering opinion of my character, Lord Farenze.’

‘Maybe so, but luckily I’m not fool enough to look at another woman while I have a wife ready and willing to satisfy me quite royally in bed, and perhaps even out of it?’ he suggested with a hint of ever more wicked possibilities in his deliberately melodramatic leer.

‘Perhaps,’ she echoed, her wild Thessaly imagination feeding her reasons to look forward to exploring them very urgently some time soon.

‘What an idiot I was not to snap you up ten years ago,’ he murmured as he kissed her tenderly and settled her head against his shoulder, so he could try not to dwell on those tempting scenarios while she was still a very new bride.

‘What idiots we both were,’ she said dreamily as she lay back against his powerful torso and simply enjoyed the warmth and reality of him after so many long, long nights fooling herself she could live without him.

‘Hmm, and now we have a whole decade of loving to catch up on spread before us like a Lord Mayor’s Banquet,’ he murmured and it was a fit promise for the first part of Lady Virginia Winterley’s expected year of wonders.

‘Well, we won’t have time for lying in bed when we get to Caraway Court, it sounds as if there’s far too much to do for that,’ Chloe said, wondering if they should have aped his last bride trip and risked the Lakes in springtime, instead of her childhood home that he’d bought for her, despite its ramshackle state.

No, she didn’t want any part of her marriage to echo Luke’s first one and shivered at the very thought. He mistook it for her being cold and cuddled the bedclothes even more securely round them, then held her close until she dismissed the idea as nonsense. She and Luke loved each other wildly and completely and his first wife had only ever loved herself. It was a truth Virginia had pointed out when Chloe was still pretending not to care one way or the other about the current Lord Farenze. Now something restless and uncertain in her settled as she realised she might be his second viscountess, but she was also his first love.

‘Think of the fun you’ll have getting the place back to how it was in your however many times grandparents’ time; it’s a housekeeper’s dream come true,’ he teased her.

‘Or her wildest nightmare,’ she replied as she contemplated the mammoth task of restoring her childhood home to anything like its former glory, after so many years of shocking neglect. ‘I hope you didn’t pay much for it. After what my brothers did to Daphne they don’t deserve a penny piece from either of us.’

‘Little enough, and it was worth it for their promise to take themselves off to the Continent with the proceeds and never come back. Crowdale House and the London properties will have to be sold to pay off their creditors, but this seemed a good way of getting them out of our lives with as little embarrassment to you and Revereux as could be managed.’

‘The Scottish estates will go as well, then,’ Chloe said with a suspicion that was poetic justice.

‘Revereux said he might bid for those.’

‘I hope not, my sister would rather see him happy than living in the past. She must have loved him very deeply to keep him a secret even from me. Verity is Daphne’s best memorial and Adam Revereux should be content with her.’

‘Aye, we husbands must all learn to be realists,’ he teased and Chloe decided she liked his diversionary tactics and snuggled back into his arms to dream of the future as the spring sun shone in and a symphony of birdsong sounded in the ancient gardens below their window.

‘Do you really not mind if I’m like Virginia and can’t give you a child, Luke?’ she asked, as the sounds of a new season and all the life and hope that came with it reminded her this was a time for new births as well as new beginnings.

‘I already have one and so do you. Any more will be a bonus. James can spawn a procession of young Winterleys in his image and I’m not sure if I pity the world or James most for that repellent notion.’

‘Wouldn’t that make you dislike him all the more?’

‘No, and I don’t dislike him. In a way I pity him for having to carry the weight of his mother’s frustrated hopes and dreams all these years.’

‘You’re a good man, Luke.’

‘No, I’m a lucky man, Chloe, and the fact I’ve finally realised it is Virginia’s finest legacy to me. Or should I count my wife as one of those as well?’

‘Willed to you as her last bequest? I’m not sure I like the sound of that.’

‘Not the fact of you, but the idea of you, perhaps? I think I learnt to hope the day I met your eyes across a cold expanse of January air and you couldn’t bring yourself to look away and pretend I wasn’t there for once. I was so sad and empty coming back to Farenze Lodge with Virginia dead and it seemed such a waste to know you so little and want you so badly. Oh, I haven’t the right words to say it, but that day I knew we would be different. That there was a chance for us, a future that might be opening up in front of us and it looked more wonderful than I dared to dream I deserved.’

‘I like your words, Luke. They’re so much better than your grim northern silences,’ she teased him a little, because it was tempting to give in to the tears stinging her eyes at the thought of him so lonely and grieving that day and this wasn’t a time for sorrow. ‘I love you, immoderately and passionately, and since ten years of enduring Lord Farenze’s gruff rebuffs couldn’t stop me doing it, I’m clearly going to suffer the affliction for life. I love you, Luke; today and tomorrow and every day after it that we spend on this good earth together.’

‘I’m so glad you love me back and echo every word in my stony and tongue-tied Winterley heart, even if I’m currently hungry as a hunter and in severe need of my breakfast.’

‘Oh, dear, that really is sadly unpoetic of you, my lord.’

‘I know, my lady, but I’m a mundane man and, as such, could be a sad burden to you for many years to come.’

‘I’ll still take you, my love; I’m a workaday woman and quite hungry myself.’

‘It’s been a busy sort of a day and night, getting ourselves wedded and bedded at long last. I’ll go and fetch us some breakfast,’ he said and jumped out of bed as if about to tear off downstairs stark naked, then get back to her before the bed was cold.

‘Luke, put some clothes on, you’ll terrify the maids,’ she exclaimed, trying to pretend the sight of his magnificent body, gilded by brilliant spring sunshine as the sun crept up the sky, hadn’t put all thought of food out of her head.

‘Very well, my lady, but don’t you go anywhere while I’m gone, will you?’ he said with a grin that made her knees knock too much to even think about getting out of bed quite yet.

‘As if I would, but I do love you,’ she told him with a besotted smile and how could she ever have thought his grey eyes were cold as he stared back at her, as if those words put every other thought out of his head but her.

‘I love you too, Chloe, so very much,’ he murmured and because he was a practical man he rang the bell instead of astonishing the servants, before leaping back into bed and rejoining his wife. ‘Far too much to go anywhere for even that long today,’ he murmured and kissed her so passionately and recklessly that they shocked them anyway.

* * * * *