The Belligerent Miss Boynton AND The Lurid Lady Lockport (Two Companion Full-Length Regency Novels) (50 page)

Shifting his position as little as he could, he looked down on his sleeping bride, her head still resting trustingly on his bared chest. Her features were softer in sleep, her full lips slightly parted, and a rosy flush brushed her cheeks. She was, in short, the picture of innocence.

Running an estate the size of The Hall almost single-handedly, taking with it the responsibility for every soul on the place while living in near squalor in the midst of wealth, and burdened all the time by the stigma of her illegitimacy—she'd been saddled with enough troubles to make a grown man turn tail and take to his heels. And yet, for all her bravado, all her independence, all she had been through at the hands of her father, asleep, she looked small and young and endearingly vulnerable.

But to run with the local smugglers? That was beyond the bounds of what was believable. Was it for the money that she did it, or for the excitement? Or was it a bit of each? No matter, Kevin decided firmly, she wouldn't be doing it again, not if he had to tie her to a bedpost every night to keep her safe.

For a long time Kevin lay still, gazing down at Gilly as she slept. That was nice for a while. Even comforting. But he wanted her to be awake. He wanted to watch her expression as she opened her eyes and realized where she was, who she was with. Mostly, he wanted to kiss her. He was amazed at how much he wanted to kiss her.

Picking up a strand of her hair, he dangled it above her face, employing it to tickle the tip of her nose. Gilly's nostrils twitched a time or two and she screwed up her face in an attempt to evade the annoying tickle, but in the end she was forced to open her eyes.

"Good morning, wife," Kevin greeted her amicably, trying not to laugh at her wide-eyed look. "I hope you've rested well. I must admit to waking you, however. My arm—the one just now crushed beneath you—is stiff and sore due to having been deprived of movement these last hours. Tut-tut, remember your poor shoulder," he added hastily as Gilly tried to move away and was rewarded for her efforts by a sharp pain in her arm. As she reluctantly lay back down, he soothed, "There now, isn't that much more comfortable?"

Gilly wanted to ignore him, refuse to speak to him. Indeed, her teeth were clamped so firmly together her jaw had already set up a dull ache. But curiosity got the better of her. "How did I come to be sharing your bed?" she asked through clenched teeth and then, with increasing urgency, "And how did I get into this nightgown?"

"Interesting questions both, my dear." Kevin leered down at her. "How much do you remember?"

"You're as amusing as a splinter, do you know that?" she shot back at him, once more struggling to rise.

Because he didn't want her to hurt herself with her struggles, Kevin relented and told her the truth, reluctantly leaving out all innuendo and embellishments that might serve to discommode her and repay him, if only in small measure, for his earlier anguish.

Slowly, careful not to injure her shoulder, which really was not hurting half as badly as she had thought it would, Gilly rose to a sitting position, wrapping the comforter about her like the rags of a tattered dignity. "I thank you for your kindness, my lord, but you needn't have bothered. I could have done it myself if I, er, if I—"

"If you hadn't fainted dead away and lain until morning only to rise, thanks to your sodden clothes, with a putrid cold or worse?" Kevin offered pleasantly.

Gilly lifted her chin and shot back, "As I now recall the thing, I wouldn't have fainted at all if you hadn't ripped my sweater away so violently. Besides, even if you did act out of some perverted sense of husbandly duty, I believe your ministrations could have stopped short of carrying me in here to your bed without fear of censure. It was a shabby trick, Rawlings, and well you know it."

Kevin pushed his pillows against the carved backboard and sat himself up before gifting his wife with a wicked (or so she believed) smile. "Do you really think so? I rather enjoyed it myself, as did you, if the way you cuddled around me like a limpet can be construed as a indication of your satisfaction with the arrangement. Now why don't we cry friends, hmm? Give me a kiss, puss, and I'll know you aren't going to hold it against me."

"No. I don't like kissing," Gilly told him flatly.

"Is that so? You are, I presume, speaking from the benefit of your vast experience," Kevin said with remarkable sangfroid.

As Gilly's romantic experience before Kevin's advent into her life consisted of one hurried kiss at the hands of a village lad when she was but fifteen, she could only blush and hang her head—and secretly hope that Kevin would pursue what he must see as his advantage.

He didn't disappoint her.

Kevin lifted her chin with one finger and told her kindly, "I thought so. One swallow does not a summer make, pet. Now, come here and give me my kiss."

With a belated show of spirit, and what she believed to be a long overdue return of good sense, Gilly declared mulishly, "I'd as lief kiss a frog!" and folded her arms across her chest with a snort of disgust.

"Oh, is that so?" An unholy gleam came into Kevin's eyes and he sat up beside her, quoting: "'A frog he would a-wooing go. Sing heigh-ho says Rowley,'" before capturing Gilly and dragging her down across his chest, just as she had secretly hoped he would.

His kiss was begun half in jest, half in honest curiosity. But it rapidly progressed into something quite different, until his became an embrace fraught with all the passion the revelations and the worries of the previous night had brought to bear on him.

At first Gilly struggled in his arms, fearful but not repelled by the strange sensations coursing through her body, but soon her struggles ceased and she returned his ardor. Returned it, reveled in it, refused to deny it. What could she deny? The truth? He had to know the truth by the way she held on to him, by her inability to let him go.

After the kiss ended they lay quietly for some minutes, side by side, each intent on their own thoughts, until at last, with his wife still locked within his embrace, Kevin said softly, "You won't be traveling with the free-traders again, will you, pet? Loathe as I am to admit it, I aged ten years when I saw your wound and realized what you'd been about. Did you run afoul of a revenue cutter?"

Gilly nodded, still too shy to look at her husband, especially after his only half-believed expression of concern, and told him, "The surf was running high on the shore, with a contrary tide and a fresh blowing wind. Try as we might to keep to our schedule, we didn't gain the land until much too late. By then we were all but perishing with the cold, wet to our middles." She grimaced at the memory. "But when we caught sight of the customs officer and his troops on shore, we had no choice but to a man all oars and fight the tide back out to sea again. I heard shots, but I didn't know I was hit until later, when my shoulder began to throb while we were sowing the crop."

Here Kevin interrupted Gilly's story to ask the meaning of her last words, and she was happy to supply an explanation. Anything was better, safer, than kissing him again. At least, if she were talking, she wouldn't have to think about how much she wanted to be kissing him again.

"We were carrying Geneva tubs and brandy, and luckily already had the tubs all strung together with ten feet of rope between them. You must anchor some of the tubs with stones tied to them on other ropes, you see, so that everything sinks to the bottom. Tubs float otherwise," she pointed out to her uninitiated husband. "The one tub we don't weight down, the last on the line, floats just under the surface so we can spot it to pick it up later—or harvest our crop, if you will."

Kevin had let Gilly rattle on, knowing she needed time to recover her composure after their rather explosive embrace, but he hadn't realized how extensive her knowledge of the fine points of smuggling was, nor, worse yet, that she was more than just one of the onshore helpers recruited to aid in the unloading of the cargo before carrying it to a place of concealment. That she actually went to sea with the smugglers was unbelievable.

"How did you get mixed up in all this, infant?" he found himself asking.

She shrugged fatalistically. "Everyone around here is involved one way or the other, either riding the tubs, or manning the shore groups. We need the blunt, especially since the harvest failed last year. At first the men didn't take too kindly to my coming along while they met the delivery boats out in the Straits, but since I can swim and nearly none of the others can, they decided I might come in handy." She smiled, pleased with herself. "And I do, you know. Come in handy, that is."

"Who all is involved, Gilly? The leaders, I mean. Is yours a large operation? How many boats do you have? Do you put out often, on a regular schedule?"

He tried to ask the questions in a tone that signaled he was simply being curious about something unfamiliar to him, and Gilly actually began to answer him. "Well, there's Harry, of course, and—" before suddenly clamping her jaws shut tight.

Kevin was idly stroking her hair away from her forehead. "Yes, Harry. I believe you've almost let that name slip a time or two. Go on."

"Why?" she parried, lifting her head to look him straight in the eye. "What great need of yours will be satisfied by such information?"

Seeing her narrowed eyes and wary expression, Kevin laughed, giving her chin a playful pinch, and said, "Don't look so suspicious, infant. I'm no customs officer, you know. I was merely making conversation. Although, now that I think of it, there is something else I can suggest to occupy our time between now and luncheon."

If Gilly meant to argue the point (and let it be said here that she did not) she was given precious little time to mount her objections before Kevin had rolled her neatly onto her back, his lips and hands immediately beginning a gentle assault on her body.

Gilly knew she probably should fight him. Because it was wrong—this lovemaking devoid of love. It was insanity as well, but a gentle insanity, and her resistance melted away with the knowledge that there was at least a little love—if that was he proper definition for the warm feeling that overtook her lately every time she clapped eyes on her husband.

She shivered a bit in her effort to keep a rein on her emotions as his hands began doing wonderful things to her body. Was this love?

What was love? Certainly it was a different sort of love, this attraction between a man and a woman. Different than anything she remembered.

Gilly had not known love of any sort since her mother had died. Oh, there had been the friendship and affection of the other servants at The Hall, but she was careful not to let anyone get too close to her, become too important to her.

She had loved her mother and her mother had been taken from her. She had loved her childhood playmates and they had been taken from her. Love, love of any sort, meant pain. Love meant eventual but sure loss. She did not seek out love any more than she would deliberately seek out ways to inflict injury to her person.

If she allowed her present feelings for Kevin to grow, she would only hurt the more when, once the puzzle was solved and the fortune his, he left her to return to London. But, she argued fiercely to herself, did that mean she should deprive herself totally of this happiness, however fleeting, she was feeling now? Was she that afraid? Was she that much the fool?

As Kevin nibbled delicately on her ear, his hands soothing her while at the same time filling her with an only recently aroused but still recognizable yearning, she gathered up her courage and asked him, a bit breathlessly, "This exercise in occupying time, as you call it," she asked, tilting her head to give him easier access to her throat. "I'll admit to a slight interest. How often do you suggest we indulge ourselves?"

Kevin chuckled into her ear, sending shivers down her spine. Propping himself on one elbow, he then smiled down into her face. "I'm a firm believer in keeping a tight rein on my personal indulgences," he told her, his fingers busy with the buttons of her nightgown. "I try at all times to curb any tendency to do anything to excess."

Gilly tried not to look crestfallen, failing miserably. "Oh," was all she could say before she could say nothing at all, because Kevin's hand had found its way inside her gown and was now cupping her left breast. Her earlier shivers threatened to turn into a full-body ague, marked by chills and fever and a weakness that fair bid to undo her.

"Therefore," Kevin continued, still smiling, his hands still gently roving, his fingers finding, then holding to her puckering nipple, "I believe once or twice a day for the next forty years should be sufficient without fearing a descent into gluttony."

"Oh!" she exclaimed, unable to hide her blushes or her relief. "How—how comforting it is," she gasped out, her eyes closing as another strange ripple of what must be desire hit her, "to know you are a man of moderation."

Kevin threw back his head and laughed in honest delight, then swooped down once more to capture her mouth with his own.

Not even in his wildest dreams, could he have dreamt that he could find such pleasure in the arms of any woman, most especially this woman, his unasked for, unwanted bride. Yet slowly, and (he now realized) inevitably, he had been at first piqued, then attracted, and at last, captivated by this skinny (he mentally substituted the word willowy), flame-headed, freckle-faced girl-woman, until, with the consummation of their marriage at last at hand, he was forced to admit to himself that he loved. He truly, truly loved. For the first time in his life.

The emotion he felt for Amanda Delaney was finally recognized for what it was—the gentle love of friendship and the closeness of troubles shared and trials survived.

He held many of the same feelings for Gilly. The desire to cherish, protect and comfort her. The enjoyment of her conversation, company, and personality. The admiration of her character, honesty, and courage. But there were other feelings that had never been a part of his love for Amanda. This hungry yearning for just the mere sight of her, for one; this intense pleasure at the simple touch of her hand, or this fierce protectiveness born from the knowledge that if Gilly should disappear from his life there would be no reason for him to continue to exist.