Holy Scoundrel (29 page)

Her joy begot laughter that grew to the point that she bordered on hysteria.

Gabriel calmed her. “But these are Bridget’s baby clothes,” he said.

“Yes! Yes, they are.” She cupped his face in her hands. “Gabriel, Bridget is our daughter. My mother sent her to Clara with Mac, and Clara brought her home to you when she knew she was ill.”

Gabriel read the embroidery and read it again. He looked more confused afterward. He ran a finger over the embroidery. “Kendrick,” he said.

“Bridget Ashton Kendrick,” Lace said. “Our baby didn’t die. Mother sent her to Clara so she wouldn’t bear the stigma of being a bastard
.
W
e
gave Bridget life, Gabriel. I knew I heard a baby cry that morning.”

“Aye, you did.”

“How do you know?”

“I sat beneath your window the whole time, and I heard the cry as well. When I did, I wept.” He ran a hand through his hair, though with his other hand, he held her quite a bit tighter. “Why didn’t you say Bridget was mine? You about killed me with your lie.”

“I never wanted to hurt you. That’s why I did it . . . with love, because I didn’t want you defrocked when you had just taken holy orders. You finally had your father’s living, your family name was set for you to mend, to exalt, that’s how good a vicar I knew you’d be. How could I destroy all that? They were your dreams, Gabriel.”

“I wanted desperately for your babe to be mine,” he said.
“
Yo
u
, Lacey, and our child, were more my dream than anything. Didn’t you know?”

Their kiss lasted longer this time because they’d thrown honesty and forgiveness into the mix. “I love you, Gabriel Kendrick.”

“I would have left here in a minute with you and never looked back. I love you . . . and our daughter
.
Bridge
t
is our daughter!”

He chuckled. “Lace,” he said more softly, combing both hands through her hair to cup her face. “You’ve married me and now you can sleep in my bed every night.”

“You know we’ll never sleep.”

“But we will be happy.”

Lacey combed her fingers through the waves in his hair. “Since I like your passion so much, we’re bound to have six more.”

“Hopefully,” he said, “in a new home and parish, where we can be a family, you, me, and Bridget. We’ll tell her after we move, shall we?”

Lacey touched his arm. “We’ll tell her when she’s an old married woman and then we’ll give her the sacque and bonnet, the one she went to Clara in. Right now, she’s just a child and it will come out. She’ll learn about the excitement of secrets, or some child will say she doesn’t belong to us, and she’ll defend herself. It’s the nature of children.”

“You’re right,” Gabriel said. “Look at me. I’m acting like a child who wants the secret to come out and I’m—”

“Older than me. If it comes out,” Lace said, “she’ll be labeled. No man will want her. No respectability for our Cricket, if we tell. And she tells.”

With a sigh, Gabriel laid his head against the headboard, taking her with him.

“I like your shoulder better than a pillow,” she said.

He smiled. “I want to shout it to the world that she’s ours,” he muttered.

“Marcus is a fine man of affairs. He can help us find our way through the legal system to adopt Bridget. They adopted Emily, you know.”

Gabriel raised his head, eyes brightening. “Did they? Legally? And no one questions that she is totally theirs?”

“No one.”

“As soon as we move then, we’ll make her ours forever.”

They rejoiced over their living daughter, Bridget, the child of their love.

CHAPTER TWENTYFOUR

Eventually, after a bit of sleep, Gabriel freed Lace from his open shirt. “Let’s make it last this time, with both of us participating.”

“Both of us. Yes.” She’d waited a long time to belong in Gabriel’s bed. Shame on her if she couldn’t beat him at his dratted “let’s make it last” game.

She slipped his breeches off him, nothing beneath, and took him captive, all naked, his wavy hair mussed, his amber pupils dilated with lust, his big-boy hard as the proverbial rock.

When he knelt over her and made to nuzzle her breasts, she slugged him hard, in the shoulder.

He reared back, puzzled, speechless.

“Mercy!” she said, raising herself on her elbows, arching so as to point her breasts his way and keep him focused. “We’ve yearned for each other, leapt on each other, feared being caught, and got interrupted more often than not, and now you want to make it last? Are you addled? I want sizzling, spicy, star-bound lovemaking, both of us reaching the firmament together, Kendrick. I want the old Gabe, and I want him now! You’re not trying to make it last, you’re tryin
g
no
t
to lose yourself to passion, and I won’t have it, I tell you.”

“But I keep remembering what Clara said, and we’ve talked about her a lot tonight.”

“She lied. She told me in the letter
that she made sure you didn’t live as husband and wife. She turned from you for us.”

He ran a hand through his hair, put on his dressing gown, and went to the window, all the old guilt rising up to eat at him. “Do you mean that
I
didn’
t
frighten her with my advances?”

“No. She loved her husband in a bold, physical way. I knew that from the day she married. Before she married. Girl cousins raised like sisters talk, you know. When she came to you, she was likely still mourning him.”

Gabriel wanted to scream in frustration, shout in triumph, and for the first time, he wanted to make love without guilt and with every racing beat of his heart. He wanted mutual love, a sharing of bodies until the ultimate release, both of them together. He turned to her, sitting as demurely as a naked goddess can sit in the middle of an empty bed
.
Hi
s
bed
.
Hi
s
wife.

“I want what you want, Lace, passion, with no emotions lacking,” he confessed. Ignoring the heart-skip the insane statement brought, he approached her as if he stalked her.

Lace squeaked and scuttled backward on the bed until her back hit the headboard.

He grinned. “You wicked, impatient seductress. Hard and fast, say you? You asked for it. Passion unleashed.” He climbed on the bed on all fours, growled for good measure, found her so royally sexy, the former Lady Lace, his bride, that he had to keep himself from swooping in and devouring her. “Just a small bite,” he said.

“Big bites now, hard and fast, slow and tantalizing nips later.”

“As you say.”

He kept going, inspired by her anticipation, and perhaps even a frisson of fear that she’d loosed an animal, so he knelt before her, his eagerness rampant. “Have at me, my love.”

“Glory, glory,” she said, her gaze focused on his sex.

“Why, thank you.” And while she blushed, he grew more rigid before her widening eyes.

“More, please,” she said.

“Insatiable seductress, too late for savoring. I’m giving you what you desire.”

“Oh,” she said, still focused on the nest of his arousal. “Just let me touch . . . everything.” She stroked him slowly, took him into her greedy hands, raised him to the precipice, and turned him into her dutiful slave. She handled him with gentle reverence, kneading and nuzzling with fingers and lips, growing him, breath by gasping breath, stroking her cheek against his arousal, nibbling with her lips, until he got so close to spilling, he pulled her away and atop him.

Still on his side, he slid into her, in one fast, incredible thrust, burying himself to the hilt, satisfying a longing so sharp, it hurt to achieve, yet it burst so wondrous, he could hardly bear the pleasure. He wanted the same wild and unexpected bliss for her and more. He wanted to make a wedding memory that would last.

She came almost at once, making him slick, easing his heaving way. When he caught his breath, when they both did, he rolled her to her back, still inside her, and rose over her. “That’s one,” he said. “Hard enough?”

“Harder.” She arched, pulsing tight around him, milking him into a sensual haze of eagerness.

“Greedy,” he said, rising to the occasion and going for two, pretty certain that trying to satisfy her by giving her as many orgasms that she could take
,
befor
e
his turn came, would about kill him.

She wrapped her incredible legs around him, legs that only he had the privilege to see, kiss, stroke, and lick, always hidden by her gowns, except i
n
hi
s
bed. Her gorgeous legs tugged him forward, worked him deeper, the muscles of her womanly sheath pulling and swallowing him, kneading and pulsing. He began to move faster; he had no choice.

She was milking him, wringing sanity from him with every pulsing beat, every rotation of her hips with each stroke of her palm and scratch of her nails. She came again, praise be, and he’d survived, reeling, exhilarated, and breathing shallow. Impossible, but he fell deeper beneath her spell with her every explosive orgasm and the way in which she took full and uninhibited pleasure. Have mercy!

When Gabe thought he couldn’t take a second more of her torture, when he pumped so intensely into her, afraid he’d hurt her, Lacey reached between them with both hands, cupped his bollocks, and held them firm against them both.

Gabe groaned and he growled, begged her to stop, begged for more, and he knew once again, with the wisdom of the ages, that no other woman would ever mean as much to him as Lace.

He shouted his triumph, cursed her, and kissed her
as if to devour her
and spilled his seed in a climax that made anything previous seem like nothing in comparison.

If he lived, he thought—heart beating in his head like a drum—he would survive to be a hundred because he was a lot tougher than he’d imagined.

“Lacey?” He pushed himself up in a panic and fought dizziness. “Oh God, I’ve killed you.” He’d pinned her to the bed, crushed her when he lowered his full weight on her, her face pale and still. She wasn’t even breathing.

He rolled off her, called her name. “Lacey? Lace, speak to me.”

“Shh.” She failed to open her eyes. “I’m floating.”

Gabe laughed and collapsed, pulled her against him, and buried his face in her neck. “Thank God.” He allowed himself to float as well, until the air in the room nipped a chill along his nether regions and his pounding heart settled to become softer than the wind outside his window.

He grabbed a blanket, pulled it over them, felt Lacey’s slowing heartbeat, the gentle way she breathed as she slept.

As he warmed, Gabe replayed every incredible fly-me-to-the-stars moment since their wedding . . . and before. Since the day they met. Lady Lace, age seven. The vicar’s ragged son, age eight. He’d adored her from the start.

She hated him as fast. The more she berated him, ordered him around, the more he loved her. A life of mixed messages was the best way to describe their courtship. But their marriage, he could sum that up in three words. Hard, fast-loving. Or . . . Happily ever after.

Unless Prout had her way.

What could she do to them now? Her threat had been empty. He’d bet his life on it.

No . . . he would not.

Lace woke to his talented hands raising her again toward that star-sprinkled place where he’d left her. “Yes.” She stretched like a cat so tremendously content it couldn’t bear to leave that spot of sun below the window. “Now,” she said, all but purring. “Now it can be slow, sensuous, lay-me-on-a-cloud lovemaking.”

Gabe laughed and kissed her. He kissed her with the slow-easy experience of a lover. “More, she wants, after she’s about slayed me with lust.”

“You suffer so at my hands,” she admitted, stroking his brow.

“Aye, I do.”

“You know what you did tonight? You finally accepted passion as a beautiful physical expression of love.”

“I’ll admit to forgetting the first passion we shared and its power.” He stroked her bottom with the same attention she gave to his brow.

“We’ll have to make love in the big copper tub,” she said. “The next time MacKenzie’s away.”

Gabe pretended to pass out from exhaustion, but when she manually lifted his eyelids, he laughed and pulled her atop him. “Good thing I didn’t know you were insatiable or that you knew all those tricks, or I’d have been walking around embarrassing myself for weeks.”

“But you did.”

Gabe growled. “Tell me no one noticed.”

“The Scoundrels noticed,” she said. “Perhaps a few others.”

“Prout,” he admitted with a sigh. “Let me set you up with a hot bath. I’ll set the copper tub in front of the fire, so you can soak. You must be sore.”

After he hauled up the tub, then the hot water, she fell asleep in the tub. He fell asleep in the bed. And sometime later, she must have climbed in with him.