A Reckless Beauty (26 page)

For the space of the hour he and the innkeeper had decided on, Valentine remained in the taproom, reading a few of the barely out-of-date London newspapers the inn could boast of, learning that the Prince Regent had elevated the heroic Uxbridge to the new title of Marquess of Anglesey, while Wellington, already laden with titles, had been awarded the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, with other honors doubtless to follow.

He’d also read down a depressingly long list of casualties, to discover he’d lost even more good friends to Bonaparte’s ambitions, as well as a listing of the wounded, some of them now returning from Brussels, to be welcomed as the heroes they were.

The war seemed so far away now, a memory that was blessedly fading, although always to be a part of him. But there was a future now, for Fanny and himself, one he would protect with his last breath.

That thought took him to Edmund Beales, and that man’s ambition.

He’d been surprised to hear the name Nathaniel Beatty and realize that this was the man who had wreaked such havoc on the Beckets and their crew, the families whose survivors now made up the inhabitants of Becket Village.

As he sipped at a second tankard of warm ale, he cast back in his memory, putting together bits and pieces of the conversation that had gone round that dinner table so many months ago.

Talleyrand had been his usual prepossessing self, pleasant, ingratiating, yet always aware, alert, measuring those around him as if considering their relative worth and importance—and how they could be of use to him.

Beatty—Beales—on the other hand, had rather taken control of the conversation for the length of at least three courses, giving his thoughts on Bonaparte, Wellington, the role of the Alliance. And, oddly, as Valentine recalled, he’d spoken long and passionately about the writings of Machiavelli, comparing the Congress of Vienna to that man’s approach to governing, that man’s observations about power and its divisions, its pitfalls and its benefits.

In short, the man had been a bloody bore, in love with the sound of his own voice, and Valentine had made his excuses early and quit the room before anyone suggested they all retire for cigars and brandy. He had, in fact, decided that this was a man who’d never had to pick up a weapon and put himself personally in the path of danger.

He’d been wrong about that. The man certainly had picked up a weapon.

And employed it to do his utmost to destroy his supposed best friend and all that man held dear.

Valentine put down the tankard, no longer thirsty, and glanced at the clock on the mantel over the large, now cold, fireplace. Tossing a few coins on the tabletop, he got to his feet, stretched and headed for the hallway and the stairs leading up to where his bride waited, most probably impatiently, and not in the best of humors.

He reached the landing just as the innkeeper’s wife and two young girls who most depressingly resembled her both in face and figure stepped into the hallway, closing the door behind them. He waited until they were gone, heading for the rear stairway, he supposed, and then approached the room, knocking on the door.

Fanny’s voice came to him through the heavy wooden door. “As I said before, her ladyship is fine, thank you. She doesn’t need anything else.”

“It’s only your husband, Lady Brede,” he called back to her, and then smiled, as he was sure he heard a slight splash from the other side of the door. He could picture her, stepping none too daintily into the tub.

“Brede?
Now?
Where were you? No, never mind. Go away. I’m having a bath.”

“Yes,” he said, extracting the key the innkeeper had given him and slipping it into the lock, “that was the plan.”

Fanny heard the key turn in the lock and reached frantically for the towel that had been draped over a nearby chair. Which was how Valentine first saw her as he entered the low-ceilinged room to catch her half in, half out of the tub, her fair skin glistening with a thin layer of bubbles.

Fanny fell back into the bath with more haste than care, sending water sloshing over the sides of the tub, to soak into the wide-planked floor. “Brede! Go away!”

He slid his untied neck cloth out from around his neck, tossing it in the general direction of the high, wide bed. “You don’t mean that, sweetings.”

She goggled at him, simply goggled, as he began unbuttoning his shirt. “I most certainly
do
mean it. And stop grinning like that.”

“Grinning in what way, sweetings?” he asked her, slipping his arms free of the shirt and tossing that the way of the neck cloth. “I’m an earl, if you’ll recall. I am beaten down by the mighty weight of my considerable consequence, and I most assuredly don’t
grin.
”

“You do and you are,” Fanny said, at last locating the small—too small—sea sponge in the bottom of the tub and holding it up against her breasts. “You also giggle like the village idiot. You said so yourself.” She narrowed her eyelids as he walked to a corner of the room and used the bootjack bolted to the floor to rid himself of his boots. “Stop that!”

But he wasn’t listening. He was sitting in a chair he’d pulled out from a small desk in front of the window, and he was rolling down his hose, removing them, one by one. In another moment he’d be as naked as the day he was born, just as she was at the moment.

She was helpless, trapped in the tub.

So she closed her eyes.

“Yes, that’s probably a good idea, sweetings,” Valentine said as he stood up, walked around the tub so that he stood behind it. “It’s rather early days for too much familiarity.”

“If that’s true, why don’t you just leave?” Fanny said, then squealed involuntarily as Valentine reached past her to take the sea sponge from her nerveless fingers and begin running it over her bare back. “Oh, Valentine…”

“Shh, sweetings, and let me tell you something very important. The greatest pleasure I can think of in this world is in giving you pleasure. Never think otherwise, my dearest Fanny, all right?”

My dearest Fanny.

Fanny bit her bottom lip between her teeth as she nodded, acknowledged that she’d heard him, and that she understood.

“Valentine,” she said, doing her best to ignore the way he seemed to be drawing lazy circles on her back with the soapy sea sponge, “Morgan said that you love me.”

Valentine’s hand stopped, and a slow smile came to his face. “Oh, she did, did she? One might have thought she’d leave that sort of happy confession to the persons involved, rather than spilling the beans that way.”

Fanny half turned in the tub, to see that he was still wearing his pantaloons—not that it mattered. “Then you do? You love me?”

“Did I say that?” he asked her, frowning comically.

“Now you’re making fun of me!” And then, because she was Fanny, and she’d probably never learn to be entirely civilized, no matter how many books Elly gave her or how many times she did her best to behave, she grabbed on to the waistband of those pantaloons and pulled him into the tub.

He rather twisted in the air and landed on his rump, his legs sticking straight in the air, water and soapy bubbles splashing everywhere.

She daringly reached below the surface of the water, to attempt to open the buttons on his pantaloons. After all, she was naked, and what was good for the goose…

“Do you know, Brede, that Morgan told me something else? She thinks you’re homely.”

Brede was attempting to right himself, pull his legs fully into the tub so that he could face his wife. So far, as romance went, his idea wasn’t going all that well. “Really? An astute woman, although I would have said that she is very pretty, if anyone should ask.”

“But she’s wrong, Brede. I find you eminently adorable.”

“Oh, good, I’m now the
adorable
Earl of Brede. I’ll be laughed out of my clubs,” he said, struggling out of his wet pantaloons and tossing them across the room. “You mean, like a kitten, Fanny, or a puppy? Charmed, I’m sure.”

“Don’t go all starchy on me, Brede. You’re not at all like a kitten.”

“A puppy, then?” he asked, at last able to put his back against the tub, slip his arm around Fanny, pull her close against his side.

“All right,” Fanny said, running the sea sponge over his broad chest. “Perhaps a hound? With those adorably droopy eyes of yours.”

“This gets worse and worse,” Brede told her, taking the sponge from her, dipping it into the warm water, and then watching closely as he made lazy, soapy circles on the rise of her breasts. “I’d say I feel my dignity taking a strong hit, except that I’ve already been unceremoniously pulled into m’lady’s tub, and it’s too late now to worry about my dignity. I had a much different scenario planned when I came in here, you know.”

“Really?” Fanny was all but bubbling herself, even as her insides began to melt under the heat of her growing pleasure. Morgan had been right. Definitely not about her adorable Brede, but about leaving the
lady
at the bedroom door. “And exactly what had you planned?”

“Hmm…well, let me see,” he said, moving the sponge lower. “I believe I planned to begin by kneeling outside the tub—
outside the tub,
I said—kissing you as you sat here, warm and rosy. Gently kneading all the tension from your neck and shoulders as you purred beneath my touch.”

“Oh…” Fanny said, quite aware that the sponge was now floating on the surface of the water, but Brede’s hand had not surfaced with it. Indeed, it was quite busy elsewhere. “And…and then…”

“And then? Why, I suppose I would have washed your hair for you. But, of course, you would first have to get your hair wet for me.”

“Yes, I suppose I—” When she surfaced again it was sputtering, and with arms flailing, trying to hit him for having shoved her beneath the water, only to have him catch her wrists, holding her arms wide as he put his smiling mouth to hers. “Beast,” she mumbled against his lips even as he let her go and she wrapped her arms tightly around his bare shoulders.

“Sorry, sweetings, but turnabout is fair play, or so they say.” Then he caught her at the knees and back, lifting her high in his arms, the two of them dripping water and bubbles as he stepped out of the tub, nearly slipping on the wet floor.

“We’re causing a flood, Brede,” Fanny pointed out unnecessarily.

“Some things, sweetings, are more workable in theory than in practice,” he told her as he stood her on her feet and reached for one of the large white towels. “My tub at Brede Manor is more suited for what I’d planned.”

Fanny hung on to him, her eyes closed tight. Perhaps she hadn’t as yet left
all
of the lady at the bedroom door? But she did open her eyes for just a second, to peek. Then quickly shut them again.
My goodness!

“Would, um, would that statement, Brede, be more in the way of a threat than a promise?” she asked him as he wrapped her in the toweling and picked her up once more, this time heading for the bed.

The man seemed to have adjusted his plan accordingly, and it was very much in agreement with her own.

“You can open your eyes now, sweetings,” Brede said once he had laid her on the bed and joined her beneath the covers.

“Not if you’re laughing at me, no. I’m all wet and must look terrible.”

“The proverbial drowned rat, I’m sure,” he told her as he pulled the towel from beneath her. “And chilled, as well, perhaps?”

“Yes, I am. There’s no end to the flaws in your plan, Brede.”

He trailed kisses down the side of her throat and onto the curve of her breast. “I feel like a raw, bumbling youth, I agree. My dignity has quite deserted me, and I blame you entirely, wife.”

Fanny moved beneath him as he slid one long leg over her lower body. “I like you this way. Not perfect. People shouldn’t be perfect.”

“Perfect? Far from it, Fanny. What’s perfect is lying here with you beside me. Life, with you beside me.”

“Oh, Brede, you make me want to cry.”

He grinned. “Because you’ve just realized you’ll be spending your life at my side?”

“No, because you’re so smart. How did you know that at your side is exactly where I would want to be?”

“As I had been about to tell you earlier, before the aforementioned Morgan burst in on us, I knew so—I
hoped
so—my dearest wife, because I love you. Completely and utterly. I will love you until the day I die, and probably even after that.”

“Because it’s
necessary?
” Fanny asked him, her heart singing.

“Very necessary, sweetings.”

Fanny sighed as he slid his warm hand over her midriff, spread his long fingers, slowly moving his thumb back and forth between her breasts. He was so big, all of him, so very much the man. She felt small and fragile beneath him. And very much the female. Protected. Even cherished. And yet his equal.

“I find it necessary, too, Valentine. To love you, that is. Because I do, I really, really do love you. I know now what it means to say that, what it means to be in love with a man, and I am completely and absolutely in love with you.” She sighed against his chest. “You poor thing.”

Brede gave a shout of laughter, light, carefree, even
young,
and pulled Fanny on top of him, to kiss her and to hold her and to make love to her, with her, both of their hearts at last free to give each other all that they had to give….