Ever His Bride (28 page)

F
elicity awoke to
the sweetest pressure against her mouth and a splendid tightness
low in her belly. She thought her husband was touching her most
private place, but when she groaned and opened her eyes, he was
standing near the bed table, working furiously to button the front
of his shirt.

“Good morning, wife,” he said briskly,
looking very businesslike, sounding even more so.

Must have been shamelessly dreaming of his
kiss. Yet her lips felt damp and tasted of him. She certainly felt
kissed. She sat up and gathered the blankets around her feet.

“Are you dressing for the day, Mr.
Claybourne?”

“Yes.”

“But it’s not yet seven.”

“I meet with the investigators at nine.” He
fought with his stock and the clip at the back of his neck.

“Allow me.” She stood in the bed, took the
neckcloth, and motioned him to turn around. He seemed transfixed
for a moment on the front of her gown, then on her mouth, but he
finally caught his lip with his teeth and turned away.

“Your meeting is fully two hours from now,
Mr. Claybourne. What will you do till then?”

Hunter nearly jumped as she brushed his hair
away from his collar. The graze of her finger against his nape made
him tilt his head toward her hand. Yet her simple touch was the
very thing he ought to deny: that subtlety of the morning, the
sheltered intimacy of dressing. Domesticity.

“I plan to dine downstairs, Mrs. Claybourne;
attend to the work I brought with me; visit the site of the
accident. . .”

“Did you sleep well?” She lifted herself
closer to her work, and Hunter held his breath as the tips of her
breasts scripted her movements across his back. He shuddered in the
wake of the warm tracings, fancifully certain that she had written
her name there or some other testament that would someday prove his
downfall.

“I did sleep well,” he said when he’d caught
his breath again. He reassembled his scattered efforts at threading
his rebellious cufflink through his shirt and tried again. “Yes,
yes. I slept very well.”

“Good. I did too—after you came to bed.”

The memory of her intoxicating massage struck
him down again, gave challenge to his dexterity. He excused his
desire to bed her; what man wouldn’t be stirred to insanity by her
beauty, by the luscious curves that broke against her skirts and
the boldness in her stare?

When she had fastened the stock at the back
of his collar, she leaned over his shoulder to whisper at the back
of his ear. “Excuse me for asking, Mr. Claybourne, but were you
kissing me just now?”

He stopped the futile work on his cuff and
felt his face and ears go crimson. Caught! But damnation, she was
his wife, and she’d slept in the bed beside him all night.

“When?” he asked, turning calmly in place to
find her still standing on the bed.

Her nightgown was the plainest imaginable,
nothing more than a scaled-down version of the one that Ernest had
loaned her. Yet that independent plainness suited her, made her all
the more intriguing.

She’s your wife.

“When I woke, Mr. Claybourne, I thought I was
being kissed, and since you were the only man in the room, I
assumed—”

“Yes, yes, I kissed you. Yes.” And if he
didn’t keep close tabs on his desire, he’d do it again. He’d damn
well do more than that.

She stuck her fists into her hips, drawing
the linen across her breasts, thrusting the unguarded peaks against
the fabric. If she were really his wife, he would lift aside the
linen and take her into his mouth.

“That’s four kisses, Mr. Claybourne.
Officially.”

“What?” He flushed again at the direction of
his thoughts, then frowned down at his cuff. “You’re counting?” He
tried once more to push the link through, but gave up with a
curse.

“Let me.” She slipped off the bed and led him
to the window where the light was better. “You seem to be all
thumbs this morning.” As she lifted his wrist, her hair whisked
across his fingers and his palm, feathery and welcome. “You also
kissed me immediately after the train came to rest after the
accident. Do you remember?”

Was it possible to forget? He fit his finger
through a coil of silken hair and brought it to his lips, tamped
her scent into his memory.

“I kissed you then, Mrs. Claybourne, because
I was very glad you weren’t hurt.”

“And then you kissed me again just before you
lowered me into the railcar—”

“That time was for luck.”

“My luck or yours, Mr. Claybourne?”

“Ours, to be sure.” He warned himself to walk
away from the edge, but he couldn’t keep his fingers from playing
along the soft ridge of her ear, and she leaned into his
caress.

“And what was this last kiss for, Mr.
Claybourne?”

Calling himself every kind of a fool, he
laced his fingers through her hair, cradled the back of her
head.

“I wanted to wish you a good morning, Mrs.
Claybourne,” he said, indulging himself in her nearness, in the
perfume of her sunrise. “I understand it’s a practice among some
married couples.”

“I’ve heard that, too.”

But Felicity hadn’t felt completely married
until that moment, when her husband settled his heavenly mouth on
hers. A morning kiss, a kiss hello, a sweet beginning that would
only mean a more bitter-tasting farewell if she kept indulging her
fancies. But that was sometime distant from now; for the moment,
she surrendered to this bewildering, cold-hearted man, who made her
feel so wonderfully alive.

His eyes glittered darkly as he brought his
fingers beside her mouth and ran his scarred thumb across the
parting, drawing moisture from her lips. When she stopped his hand
to tease the tip of his fingers with her tongue, he took in a
half-voiced breath.

“You shouldn’t do that, my dear.”

Felicity was in the midst of asking why, when
he slanted his mouth across hers again, fiercely and randomly.

He hadn’t yet touched her, except to caress
her face, but now he tipped her chin and slid his searing mouth
along the line of her jaw, and down her neck, sliding her nightgown
part way off her shoulder as he followed the swell of her breast.
His odyssey caused a storm to rumble through every part of her, and
made her press her hips against him in a shameless, unthinkable
way.

“Oh, my dear Mr. Claybourne! Next time make
sure I’m awake before you kiss me.”

Hunter groaned and shuddered. He’d meant only
to taste her again, one sip of her. But her skin was the air he
breathed and her pulse was a mate to his, and her fingers were
locked insistently in his hair.

He pulled her into his arms, fitting her
against the length of him, memorizing the slope of her waist as it
met her hip. There would never be another kiss like this between
them. There couldn’t be. He would let her leave Blenwick on her
damnable travels to Northumberland, or to the Arctic, if it pleased
her. Hell, he’d finance a safari to darkest Africa if she cared to
go. Anything, anywhere that put a great distance between them, to
quell this terrifying feeling of contentment.

She’s your wife.

The voice came from some irresponsible part
of him, one he thought he’d evicted long years ago. She was nothing
more than shifting sand that dazzled him even as it fell through
his fingers.
Let her go.

“Do you always sleep in your clothes, Mr.
Claybourne?”

“No.”

“Then do you sleep in a nightshirt?”

“Why?”

“I think I should know such things when I’m
supervising the laundry, on such occasions that I’m at home.”

“Ah. Well . . .” he said, drawing his fingers
lightly from her brow, down the bridge of her nose, to settle in
the vale between her lips. “You won’t find my nightshirts in the
laundry, or anywhere, madam.”

“Then you . . .”

He lifted his eyebrow, waiting for the
question she would not finish.

“Oh, my.” Felicity felt her cheeks grow warm,
not out of embarrassment over his sleeping in the altogether, but
because some facts had just been added to her imagination. Now she
could quite easily imagine her husband standing naked without his
shirttails. There was still a blurring about his midsection, but
she’d seen and felt enough of his bare chest to know that an arrow
of sleek dark hair purposely directed her attention downward toward
some point of intense interest.

And she was pretty sure what she’d find
there. The British Museum abounded in statues of well-formed Greek
gods and warriors. Paintings of men wearing nothing but. . . paint.
She just couldn’t quite imagine such a sight made flesh. And the
very thought of her husband having that sort of . . . apparatus
down there, well. . . No wonder she could hardly breathe for the
pounding of her heart.

“Mr. Claybourne?” She touched her palm to his
chest, a feverish place that drew a sound from between her
husband’s teeth.

“Yes, Mrs. Claybourne?” He lifted her hand to
kiss it, but stopped to stare down at his gaping shirtfront.

“You’ve unbuttoned me, woman!”

She hadn’t remembered fingering any shirt
buttons, only the softly curling hair against her fingertips and
the warmth of his chest.

“Sorry, Mr. Claybourne. I had been thinking
about. . .”
Strawberries.
From the day before. But she
couldn’t very well confess a thing like that. Her behavior might be
wanton, might encourage him, but the man was her husband, after
all. And she was beginning to suffer this idea with some gladness
and a bit of anticipation. He wasn’t at all the sort of husband
she’d have chosen for herself. He was still a hopeless mystery to
her, needed uncrating, but he was becoming a joy.

Her husband fumbled with the buttons at the
front of his shirt, but she brushed aside his floundering fingers
and went to work on them herself, then broke away from him and
handed him his waistcoat.

She’d always wondered what it would be like
to take lodgings with a husband in one of the country inns she’d so
often written about.

There was much to recommend.

“I didn’t mean to pry into your clothes, Mr.
Claybourne.’’ She stopped and adjusted the image in her head. “I
mean, I just thought that I ought to know more about you and your
habits, your life.”

“You know enough.”

“I know that you’re a man of vast wealth;
your parents are no longer living; and that you and I are married
to each other at the moment. But that’s really all I know. You
didn’t even tell me your age when I asked. Do tell me about
yourself, Mr. Claybourne.”

He went still for a moment, then righted his
neckcloth with a yank. “I’m nearly thirty.”

“Not eighty. I thought not. And your
birthday?”

Hunter steeled himself against the dread,
fought to hold it at bay. His wife perched herself impudently on
the edge of the bed as if this were a game of questions and his
role was to answer her. “I was born in 1820. The ninth of
October.”

“Did you grow up in London?”

He swallowed hard, stared out the window and
frowned through the shimmering images of his childhood, wondering
which London she meant.

“Yes,” he said finally, hearing the word drop
flatly between them. Perhaps she wouldn’t notice. She must not
have; her smile never flickered.

“Which part of London, Mr. Claybourne?”

His fists were clenched at his side, distant
from him, a foreign and convicting memory of a time he’d sought to
forget. He had to unlock his jaw to answer.

“I lived in a number of places.”

“How exciting! And did your family also have
a house in the country?”

“No.” He spat the answer and she flinched.
He’d frightened her. Good. Best. Fear would restore the boundaries,
would remind her of the basis for this sham of a marriage. No more
questions.

“Did you attend Eton or Harrow?”

“Good God, woman!”

Felicity scrambled away from him, the cold,
malevolent stranger who had threatened her at the Cobsons. His warm
and supple mouth had become a rigid line. His gaze had hardened;
the light that seemed to have brightened with every passing day had
shuttered itself.

“I attended neither school, Mrs. Claybourne,
and let that be the end of it.” He reached the door but didn’t
turn. “I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

“It doesn’t matter, Mr. Claybourne. I may be
gone by then. To Northumberland.”

“Go wherever the hell you want.” He threw a
fistful of coins onto the dressing table and slammed the door
behind him.

“Bastard!” Not a word she used often, but the
man had all the charm and manners of a rock slide. Answering a few
questions about his past wouldn’t hurt him. No more prying than the
questions she often asked of perfect strangers sitting beside her
on the train.

But he wasn’t a stranger, he was her husband.
And a puzzle. And she wanted to know his heart.

Refusing to take the blame for his groundless
anger, Felicity bathed and took her time dressing, then sauntered
into the common room for her breakfast, expecting to see him, but
he wasn’t there.

Trying to get her bearings, she read over the
notes she’d taken in the last few days, and found little to
recommend to her readers. The description of the workhouse at
Leicester, a forsaken child and a ghastly train wreck wouldn’t
serve a book whose aim was to encourage travel. At least she could
recommend the Brightwater Arms for its reasonable food and lodging,
with the following caveat: never share a room with a madman. Even
if she had married him.

Nearly four days on the road and nothing to
show for it but a broken heart. Mr. Dolan would be mightily
disappointed. One bright spot in her trip to Blenwick – Giles! The
apprentice school was nearby. She’d visit him this morning, bring
him back here to the Brightwater for a hearty lunch, and then leave
Blenwick today by post road to rejoin her original trip. Without
her husband, and without the pile of coins he’d left her. She would
have to sort out this marriage of hers when she returned to
London.