Ever His Bride (33 page)

“I’m not a monster, you know.” He pulled off
his neckcloth and unbuttoned his collar. It sprang back from his
throat like the wings of an angelic beetle. She fought back a
highly inappropriate giggle.

“Nor am I, whatever you believe..”

“I’m quite sure of that, Felicity.” His voice
had a habit of rolling down her spine and lodging very low in her
belly. She had missed that, too.

She carried the shirts to the laundry hamper
in his dressing room, feeling a great deal of heat at the back of
her neck. He was leaning against the doorway, unbuttoning the back
of his collar, when she turned to leave the small room.

His eyes had gone very soft, and her muscles
felt like plum jelly as she crossed beneath his gaze.

“The world can be a horrible place. But I
don’t mean to hurt anyone, Hunter.” She pulled out his folded
trousers and his extra coat, and draped them across the back of the
chair. “Least of all innocent children.”

“I’m sure of that, too.”

He was being quite understanding, and she
wondered how far his goodwill would travel. “That’s not what you
said at Blenwick. You were not very complimentary.”

He grew quiet for a moment and seemed to
consider his answer carefully. “I was . . . angry. Angry at you and
at the likes of Rundull.”

She felt the sting again, unjustly condemned.
“Lumping us together? You are unfair—”

“And you are not at all like Rundull. That
isn’t my point, at all.” He lifted his hands as if the right words
were out there to be grabbed. “It’s just that, in my circle. . .”
He glanced at her, and then away, idly lifting the cover of a book.
“In my life . . . I see the competitive aspects of charity, and it
has always galled me. Lady Jerganson making the rounds in the boxes
at the Opera House, begging donations for distressed hatmakers; and
when Lady Tuckworth gets wind of her rival’s new charity, she
starts one of her own for distressed,
lame
hatmakers. And
neither woman has a clue what these hardworking hatmakers really
need.”

It seemed odd to her that he’d given this
much thought to charity, when he was so very uncharitable.

“But, Hunter, wouldn’t you think that the
hatmaker would rather grumble about his lot on a half-filled
stomach than on a completely empty one?”

He looked up at Felicity, and she was
heartened to see a calmness about his eyes. “I don’t know, madam.
Perhaps Lady Jerganson ought to ask the hatmakers directly. But she
never will.”

“Is that where I went wrong, Hunter?”

“You haven’t gone wrong, exactly. It’s just
that I’ve met so many of these dewlapped, moist-eyed, philanthropic
matrons and their—”

“Dewlapped!” Felicity grabbed a pillow off
the bed and hurled it at Hunter. The lout ducked and it missed him.
She launched a second pillow and caught him smack in the face as he
turned back to her. “Moist-eyed? Is that how you see me?”

“Felicity—”

“I am no matron, Mr. Claybourne! Dewlapped or
otherwise.”

He grunted as he grabbed the next pillow out
of the air, and then she recognized true mayhem in her husband’s
eyes. He started toward her, and she let out a scream. She swung
around the bed post, and he followed in his steady stride, a
self-possessed smile on his lips.

“And I’m no easy target to be buffeted by
pillows, my dear.” He came effortlessly around the corner of the
bed and reached for her. She hit him in the head with another
pillow, then dived across the mattress on her hands and knees.

“Not so fast, woman.” He caught her by the
ankle and she screeched, flipped her onto her back, baring her legs
to his gaze. He hauled her ever closer to him across the
mattress.

“Mind my nightclothes, sir!” But then her
thighs were bare, and then her hips, and then so was the patch of
her womanhood—and he was looking!

At everything!

“Mr. Claybourne!”

“The name is
Hunter,”
he said, as he
knelt down on the floor and pulled her over the edge of the bed to
a kneeling position between his legs. He was smiling, and his eyes
were a dense and smoky gray. “If I’m to see
that
much of
you, my dear wife, you’ll have to call me Hunter.”

“I’ll call you a libertine!” But she felt
wonderful, even as she tried to tug down her hem to cover her
nakedness. But his eyes were lit with brimstone. He caught her
hands and pinned them back against the bedside. “Let me straighten
my nightgown, sir!”

She was naked from the underside of her
breasts downward, and forced against the silk of his waistcoat. Her
knees were spread between his thighs and pressed into the carpet.
She must be blushed crimson all the way to the soles of her
feet.

“Fear not, wife,” he said in a voice that had
gone marvelously husky, “I can’t see much from here.”

“But you
did
see, sir!”

His sigh was light and roguish. “I cannot
deny it.”

A delicious, lime-scented heat poured off
him, seeping into her skin from his clothing. “A gentleman would
allow me to right my clothing.”

“I am not a gentleman, as you well know.” He
caught her completely naked hips with his overwarm, overlarge
hands, and fit her even deeper between his thighs. “But I am your
husband.”

“Yes, but you’re not a regular kind of a
husband.” Her embarrassment was too quickly deserting her efforts
to regain a measure of control, even while her belly was pressed
scandalously, deliciously, against his trousers.

“I may not be a regular husband. But I’m not
made of flint.” He teased her ear with his lips, leaving traces of
his breath to tickle at her neck. “But you are made of sunlight, my
dear. And I want you.”

“Want me?” She found herself plagued by a
huge curiosity. Strangely open-minded toward the way he played his
mouth along her jawline, she bent her head and lent him access. He
was her husband, after all, regular or not. This was entirely legal
and moral. And wonderful.

“God, yes, I want to drink your
sunlight.”

Hunter fought to keep his voice even and his
hands still of wanderlust. Dear God, if he had been able to explore
at leisure the poetry that had sailed past his eyes, he might have
drowned in bliss! Pink, pristine flesh, lean thighs, a triangle of
golden curls, and a softly cleaving shadow that had begged his hand
as well as his mouth. He couldn’t let go of her just yet. Not
yet.

“My dear, you have me thinking things I
oughtn’t be,” he whispered, as he coursed his tongue along the
ridges of her ear.

“What sort of things, Hunter?”

His answer was interrupted by the sound of
footsteps clattering down the hallway. A sharp rap sounded on the
door.

“Mr. Claybourne, sir! We heard a scream!”

Hunter didn’t move, and took heart that his
wife hadn’t either.

“Sir, are you there?”

“Yes, Branson,” Hunter said, feeling
remarkably at peace, as if he were sitting in his chair perusing
the
Times,
not squatting on his chamber floor with his
wide-eyed, half-naked wife caught with her knees spread apart
between his thighs. “I’m here.”

“Sir, I went to Mrs. Claybourne’s room,
thinking she needed our assistance, and . . . she’s not there.”

He felt every beat of her heart as it
thundered against his chest. “She’s here with me, Branson.”

There was a pause on the other side of the
door, then a voice of deep concern. “Are you all right, Mrs.
Claybourne?”

Felicity looked up into her husband’s
smoldering eyes and decided she was quite all right. She had missed
him while he was away. And the very idea was significant, made her
want to kiss him, made her want to squirm beneath his hands. He had
the manners of a mule, and ideas that needed changing, but she knew
above everything that he had no intention of hurting her tonight or
any other night, and that thought sent her heart and her hopes
soaring.

“Yes, Branson,” Felicity said plainly and
loudly. “I’m . . . in very good hands, thank you.”

Her husband’s eyebrows rose quite
charmingly.

A throat cleared politely in the corridor.
“Very well. A good night, then, to you both. And welcome home,
sir.” Branson’s footsteps receded.

She hadn’t taken her eyes off Hunter. He
canted his head and asked, “In very good hands, madam?” He grinned
and splayed his fingers across her bare bottom, laying down prints
of heat like a brand. “I’m glad you think so.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Oh, yes you did. Every word.” He closed his
eyes as he shaped his extraordinary hands over her backside as if
he were inspecting a summer melon for its ripeness. “You are very
cool here, wife.”

Feeling altogether wanton, Felicity kissed
the underside of his bristly jaw. “There’s a knavish breeze
whisking around on the floor, sir. Just above the carpet.”

His rumbling growl blew across her lashes,
and she was suddenly looking up into his eyes, and riding the rise
and fall of his chest. “Lucky fellow, that breeze. Wish I were
there.”

His wild words sent a surging rush of
outrageous pleasure to clog her veins. He was smiling as he leaned
closer, as he glided his tongue along the arc of her lips, and then
between them with an agonizing leisure.

She sighed and leaned against him. From the
moment he had dragged her off the edge of the bed and fit her
against him, she had noticed a length of hardness just below his
waist, a formation which seemed even harder at the moment, and very
much larger than earlier. Her hand was eager to discover the
source, but there was no room between them, so she moved her hips
instead.

That drew a gasp from him, and he reared up.
“Take care, Felicity!”

He looked dazed, his mouth damp and his smile
crooked and flickering. But she liked the roll of his hardness
against her belly, her woman’s wool against the wool of his
trousers.

She recalled the Greek statues in the British
Museum. Hunter’s apparatus seemed to be doing something completely
on its own. And his face had gone enchantingly red.

“Welcome home, Hunter,” she said, wondering
when his eyes had stopped being so darkly opaque, when they’d
become bright and clear.

“Yes, home,” he whispered, in the bare moment
before he covered her mouth with his, before he began to tug and
nibble and make delicious sounds in his throat. Before his magic
roared through her chest and lit the ends of her fingers and caused
her to want to ride his hips with her own.

She welcomed his tongue as if it were the
most natural thing in the world to be kissing with her mouth open.
He was a devastatingly thorough explorer, discovering her sighs and
her soft moaning. She brushed her tongue hesitantly against his. He
must have approved; he groaned and ground his hips against hers and
met her tongue in a frenzied dance.

He came up clamoring for air, still kissing
her temple. “Madam, you taste more sweet than I remembered.”

She loved the way his words caught against
her hair, moist and textured by the insistent softness of his
mouth. “I don’t recall being quite so completely kissed before
this.”

He smiled like a rogue and studied her, his
chest steaming like a locomotive. “Never? Not by anyone?” He drew a
finger from her chin to the base of her throat. “What about all
those other men you liked to kiss?”

She remembered too late that she had
professed to having kissed numerous other men, but found no shame
in being forthright with this truth. “Fictional, every one of
them.”

Her confession drew an arrogantly possessive
smile from him. “I’m pleased to hear it.”

She’d expected a chiding remark; instead, he
touched her mouth reverently with his fingers and followed with a
tender, worshipful kiss that quickly deepened until she had twined
her arms around his neck and buried herself in his embrace.

“Hunter . . .” Her skin was flushed with some
kind of magical energy that made her want to open herself to him.
His mouth had become unyieldingly hot and hard, and traveled to the
limits of her nightshirt. She had climbed so deeply into his arms
that he was forced back onto his heels, and now she sat brazenly
astride his lap, her bare legs spread indelicately, her tender,
swollen flesh at the junction of her thighs snuggled against the
wool of his trousers and all that simmering hardness just below—oh,
to have him touch her there.

“You were saying, wife?”

She’d had a thought in there somewhere,
something important and far-reaching. Yes, she remembered it. “Can
a child come from kissing in this way?”

Hunter heard himself groan. “Not directly.”
He let himself be drawn into another of her consuming kisses, until
he was toying dangerously with the buttons that fastened the front
of her gown, and with the irrational idea of undoing them.

“Indirectly, then?”

“There comes a point of no return.”

“And are we near it?”

He’d been near it ever since he’d met her. “I
don’t know, Felicity.”

“Would you know where that point was? I mean
. . . if we got too close to it?”

“I’m sure I would know exactly.” Then the
straining at his groin would be freed of its prison and she would
be lush and wet. She was near enough just now, and wriggling, only
a few buttons between the root of him and her sleekness.

“And could we stop there?”

“I doubt I’d have the strength.” He held back
another groan as she slid her tongue along his upper lip and then
followed the line of his jaw to his ear and to his neck; her
fingers played at his collar band. He held fast to her hips,
stilling his own fingers from a quest that he dare not accept.

He slid his hands upward across her silky
flesh—the distance from her ever-wriggling hips to the lush curve
of her waist was nothing, and everything.

And her breath came against his ear in a
long, hissing draft. “Your hands are very warm, Hunter.” She
stretched out against his chest. Her eyes were half-closed and her
mouth was turned up in a contented smile. “And big.”