Once and Always (48 page)

It had never occurred to Victoria that he would want her to touch him as he touched her, and the knowledge was thrilling. She put her hands against his tanned chest, slowly spreading her fingers, amazed when her simple touch made his breath catch. Experimentally, she slid her hands lower, and the taut muscles of his abdomen jumped reflexively. She put her lips to his tiny nipple and kissed it as he kissed hers, flicking her tongue back and forth against it, and when she pulled it tightly into her mouth a groan ripped from his chest.

Heady with her newly discovered power over his body, she rolled him onto his back and brushed her parted lips over his, sweetly offering him her tongue. A funny little laugh that was part groan, part chuckle sounded in his throat and he drew her tongue into his mouth, one hand cradling the back of her head as he crushed his lips against hers while his free arm wrapped around her hips and lifted her fully atop his aroused length.

Without thought, Victoria moved her hips against his engorged manhood, circling herself on him, until she was faint with the pleasure she was giving him and taking for herself. She moved downward, lost in her desperate eagerness to please him, trailing kisses along his chest, nuzzling his abdomen, until his hands suddenly tangled in her hair and pulled her face back to his. Beneath her she could feel the pulsing of his rigid shaft, the fiery touch of his heated skin, the violent hammering of his heart against her breasts. But instead of taking her, as she expected, he gazed at her with desire raging in his eyes and humbly said the words he had tried to force her to say last night. “I want you,” he whispered. As if he didn’t think he had humbled himself enough, he added, “Please, darling.”

Feeling as if her heart would break with the love bursting in it, Victoria answered him with a melting kiss. It was answer enough. Jason gathered her tightly into his arms, rolled her onto her back, and drove swiftly and surely into her. His arms wrapped around her shoulders and hips, pulling her more tightly to him, forging them into one as he drove into her again and again.

Victoria arched herself upward in a fevered need to share and stimulate his burgeoning passion, pressing her hips hard against his pulsing thighs, crushing her lips against his, while the waves of sensation shooting through her built into a frenzy and began exploding through her entire body in piercing streaks of pure, vibrant ecstasy.

A shudder shook Jason’s powerful frame as he felt the spasms of her fulfillment gripping him, and he plunged into her one last time. His body jerked convulsively, shuddering again and again as Victoria’s body drew from his a lifetime of bitterness and despair. She drained him of everything and replaced it all with joy. It burst in his heart and poured through his veins until he ached with the sheer bliss of it.

After all his farming financial triumphs and aimless sexual exploits, he had finally found what he had unconsciously been searching for: He had found the place he belonged. He owned six English estates, two Indian palaces, and a fleet of ships each with a private cabin for his exclusive use, yet he had never felt he had a home. He was home now. This one beautiful girl, lying contentedly in his arms, was his home.

Still holding her, he moved onto his side, then he combed his fingers through her rumpled, satiny hair and brushed a tender kiss against her temple.

Victoria’s lashes fluttered up and he felt as if he would drown in the deep blue pools of her eyes. “How do you feel?” she teased, smiling as she asked him the same question he had once asked her.

With tender solemnity, he replied, “I feel like a husband.” Bending his head, he took her sweet lips in a long, lingering kiss, then gazed down into her glowing blue eyes. “To think I actually believed there were no such things as angels,” he sighed, relaxing back against the pillows and reveling in the simple joy of having her in his arms, her head resting on his shoulder. “How incredibly stupid I must be—”

“You’re brilliant,” his wife declared loyally.

“No, I’m not,” he chuckled wryly. “If I had even the slightest intelligence, I would have climbed into bed with you the first time I wanted to and then insisted you marry me.”

“When was the first time you wanted to do that?” she teased.

“The day you arrived at Wakefield,” he admitted, smiling at the memory. “I think I fell in love with you when I saw you standing on my doorstep with a piglet in your arms and your hair blowing in the wind like flaming gold.”

Victoria sobered and shook her head. “Please—let’s never lie to each other, Jason. You didn’t love me then, and you didn’t love me when you married me. It doesn’t matter, though, truly it doesn’t. All that matters is that you love me now.”

Jason tipped her chin up and forced her to meet his gaze. “No, sweet—I meant what I said. I married you because I loved you.”

“Jason!” she said, flattered but nevertheless determined to set a pattern of honesty and frankness for the future. “You married me because it was the wish of a dying man.”

“The wish of
A dying
—” To Victoria’s astonishment, Jason threw back his head and burst out laughing; then he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her up onto his naked chest. “Oh, darling,” he said, chuckling, rubbing his knuckles tenderly across her cheek, “that ‘dying man’ who summoned us to his bedside and clung to your hand was clutching a fistful of playing cards in his other.”

Victoria reared up on her elbows. “He was
what!”
she demanded, torn between laughter and fury. “Are you certain?”

“Positive,” Jason averred, still chuckling. “I saw them when the blanket moved. He was holding four queens.”

“But why would he do such a thing to us?”

Jason’s broad shoulders lifted in a shrug. “He evidently decided we were taking too long to get around to the business of marriage.”

“When I think of how I prayed he would get well, I could murder him!”

“What a thing to say,” Jason teased, laughing. “Don’t you like the end result of .his scheming?”

“Well, yes, I do, but why didn’t you tell me—or at least tell him you knew what he was up to?”

Jason nipped her ear. “What? And spoil his fun? Never!”

Victoria gave him an indignant look. “You should have told me. You had no right to keep it from me.”

“True.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me?”

“Would you have married me if you didn’t think it was an absolute necessity?”

“No.”.

“That’s why I didn’t tell you the truth.”

Victoria collapsed on his chest, laughing helplessly at his unprincipled determination to get what he wanted and his complete lack of contrition for it. “Have you no principles at all?” she demanded with laughing severity.

He grinned. “Apparently not.”

Victoria was seated in the salon late that afternoon, waiting for Jason to return from an errand, when the elderly butler who presided over the London house appeared in the doorway. “Her grace, the Duchess of Claremont wishes to see you, my lady. I told—”

“He told me you were not in to visitors,” her grace said gruffly, marching into the room to the horror of the butler. “The silly fool doesn’t seem to understand that I am ‘family,’ not ‘visitors.’ ”

“Grandmama!” Victoria burst out, leaping to her feet in nervous surprise at the unexpected appearance of the gruff old lady.

The duchess’s turbaned head swiveled to the shocked servant. “There!” she snapped, waving her cane at the butler. “Did you hear that?
Grandmama!”
she emphasized with satisfaction. Mumbling abject apologies, the butler bowed himself out of the room, leaving Victoria apprehensively confronting her relative, who sat down upon a chair and folded her blue-veined hands upon the jeweled head of her cane, scrutinizing Victoria’s features minutely. “You look happy enough,” she concluded, as if surprised.

“Is that why you came here from the country?” Victoria asked, sitting down across from her. “To see if I am happy?”

“I came to see Wakefield,” her grace said ominously.

“He isn’t here,” Victoria said, taken aback by the old lady’s sudden scowl.

Her great-grandmother’s scowl darkened. “So I understand. All London understands he isn’t here with you! I mean to run him to ground and call him to task if I have to chase him clear across Europe!”

“I find it amazing,” Jason drawled in amusement as he walked into the salon, “that nearly everyone who knows me is half-afraid of me—except my tiny wife, my young sister-in-law, and you, madam, who are three times my age and one-third my weight. I can only surmise that courage—or recklessness—is passed through the bloodline, along with physical traits. However,” he finished, grinning, “go ahead. I give you leave to take me to task right here in my own salon.”

The duchess came to her feet and glowered at him. “So! You have finally remembered where you live and that you have a wife!” she snapped imperiously. “I told you I would hold you responsible for Victoria’s happiness, and you are not making her happy. Not happy at all!”

Jason’s speculative gaze shot to Victoria, but she shook her head in helpless bewilderment and shrugged. Satisfied that Victoria was not responsible for the duchess’s opinion, he put his arm around Victoria’s shoulders and said mildly, “In what way am I failing in my duties as a husband?”

The duchess’s mouth fell open. “In what way?” she repeated in disbelief. “There you stand, with your arm about her, but I have it on the best authority that you have been to her bed only six times at Wakefield!”

“Grandmama!” Victoria burst out in horror.

“Hush, Victoria,” she said, directing her dagger gaze at Jason as she continued. “Two of your servants are related to two of mine, and they tell me all Wakefield Park was in an uproar when you refused to bed your bride for a week after the ceremony.”

Victoria let out a mortified moan and Jason’s arm tightened supportively around her shoulders.

“Well,” she snapped, “what have you to say to that, young man?”

Jason quirked a thoughtful eyebrow at her. “I would say I apparently need to have a word with my servants.”

“Don’t you dare make light of this! You, of all men, ought to know how to keep a wife in your bed and at your side. God knows half the married females in London have been panting after you these four years past. If you were some mincing fop with his shirtpoints holding up his chin, then I could understand why you don’t seem to know how to go about getting me an heir—”

“I intend to make your heir my first priority,” Jason drawled with amused gravity.

“I will not countenance any more shilly-shallying about,” she warned, somewhat mollified.

“You’ve been very patient,” he agreed drolly.

Ignoring his mockery, she nodded. “Now that we understand each other, you may invite me to dinner. I cannot stay long, however.”

With a wicked grin, Jason offered her his arm. “No doubt you intend to pay us an extended visit at a later date—say, nine months hence?”

“To the day,” she affirmed boldly, but when she glanced at Victoria, there was laughter in her eyes. As they headed into the dining room, she leaned toward her great-granddaughter and whispered, “Handsome devil, isn’t he, my dear?”

“Very,” Victoria agreed, patting her hand.

“And despite the gossip I heard, you’re happy, are you not?”

“Beyond words,” Victoria said.

“I would like it if you came to visit me someday soon. Claremont House is only fifteen miles from Wakefield, along the river road.”

“I’ll come very soon,” Victoria promised.

“You may bring your husband.”

“Thank you.”

In the days that followed, the Marquess and Marchioness of Wakefield appeared at many of the
ton’s
most glittering functions. People no longer whispered about his alleged cruelty to his first wife, for it was plain to everyone that Jason, Lord Fielding, was the most devoted and generous of husbands.

One had only to look at the couple to see that Lady Victoria was aglow with happiness and that her tall, handsome husband adored her. In fact, it gave rise to considerable amusement when the
ton
beheld the formerly aloof, austere Jason Fielding grinning affectionately at his new bride as he waltzed with her or laughing aloud in the midst of a play at some whispered remark of hers.

Very soon, it become the consensus of opinion that the marquess had been the most maligned, misjudged, and misunderstood man alive. The lords and ladies who had treated him with wary caution in the past now began actively to seek out his friendship.

Five days after Victoria had tried to put to rest gossip about her absent husband by speaking of him in the most admiring of terms, Lord Armstrong paid a call upon Jason to request his advice in winning over the cooperation and loyalty of his own servants and tenants. Lord Fielding had looked shocked, then grinned and suggested that Lord Armstrong speak to
Lady
Fielding about that.

At White’s that same evening, Lord Brimworthy good-naturedly blamed Jason for Lady Brimworthy’s latest purchase of an extravagantly expensive set of sapphires. Lord Fielding shot him an amused look, wagered five hundred pounds on the next hand of cards, and a moment later smoothly divested Lord Brimworthy of that sum.

The following afternoon in Hyde Park, where Jason was teaching Victoria to drive the splendid new high-perch phaeton he’d purchased for her, a carriage drew to an abrupt stop and three ancient ladies peered at him. “Amazing!” said Countess Draymore to her cronies as she scrutinized Jason’s features through her monocle. “She
is
married to Wakefield!” She turned to her friends. “When Lady Victoria said her husband was ‘the soul of amiability and kindness,’ I thought she must be talking of someone else!”

“He’s not only amiable, he’s brave,” cackled the eldest of the old ladies, watching the couple careening precariously down the lane. “She has nearly turned that phaeton over twice!”

To Victoria, life had become a rainbow of delights. At night, Jason made love to her and taught her to make love to him. He bathed her senses in pleasure and drew from her a stormy passion she had never known she was capable of, then shared it with her. She had taught him to trust and now he gave himself to her completely—body, heart, and soul. He withheld nothing and gave her everything—his love, his attention, and every conceivable gift he could think of from the whimsical to the extravagant.