The Marriage Act (19 page)

She had the strangest, keenest feeling of disappointment—as if someone had been dangling a treasure in front of her only to pull it away at the last second. As if she’d been dreaming she could soar unfettered through the air, but had suddenly remembered she didn’t know how to fly and had come crashing back to earth.

It took a moment for the truth to dawn on her. My God. She actually
wanted
him. Not just his kiss or his touch, but
him
.

How was that possible? For five years, she’d thought him horridly cold and disdainful. He’d left her alone at Halewick when he’d gone away to Vienna, and hadn’t even contacted her upon his return to England. He’d seemed to enjoy insulting her. Worst of all, he’d never forgiven her for leaving him for Lawrence Howe, until his very existence had felt like a rebuke.

But there was no denying John’s physical appeal, even if she’d once been too young and immature to see it. When they’d first met, she’d scarcely given his dark good looks a second thought. He’d been rather like a painting she might walk past in a gallery—certainly pleasant to look at if one chose, but not exciting or important enough to capture her attention.

Now she wondered how she could have been so blind. Englishmen ran the spectrum from ginger to sun-tanned, but Welford’s dark good looks were especially striking. The lean, athletic lines of his body made her pulse quicken. And the way he’d been touching her only moments before...

“It’s not an imposition,” she said meekly. “I’ve already told you I’m sorry about what happened in the hunting box.”

His face changed with the shift in her tone, his dissatisfied expression giving way to a faint, hopeful gleam. “What does that mean, you’re ‘sorry’?”

“I suppose it means I want another chance, a chance to make amends.”

He eyed her speculatively for a moment from where he lay stretched out on the bed. “So you think I should—well, for want of a more accurate euphemism, let us say ‘make love’ to you.”

Her cheeks warmed. Was he really going to make her say it? “Yes.”

“Really do it, or just pretend to do it? Because in the event anyone is listening through the walls, all we need do is
sound
as if I’m making love to you.” When she remained momentarily at a loss for words, he elaborated. “Bounce up and down on the bed, pound the headboard with the sides of our fists, that sort of thing.”

She had the feeling he was toying with her.

“You could moan a little if you like,” he added.

Yes, he was definitely toying with her. Strangely, though, it wasn’t the kind of toying she was used to, in which he seized the moral high ground and then proceeded to torment her from his superior position. No, there was something genuinely mischievous about him this time, a humorous glint in his eyes she wasn’t used to seeing. She found it strangely exciting.

“We’ve only done it twice before,” she pointed out, “and one of those times was all of five years ago. I’m not sure I would know how much to moan, at least not convincingly. And...well, you did say you’d like to become a father.”

“Hmm.” He considered a moment, a smile playing about the corners of his mouth.

She tossed her hands in the air and made to turn away. “Oh, fine, Welford, have it your way. If you don’t wish to—”

“No, I didn’t say that,” he replied quickly, sitting up. “But you’ve taken me rather by surprise. Having steeled myself all day to pass another night in lonely celibacy, it may be that I could use some encouragement.”

She eyed him askance. “Encouragement?”

He settled back against the pillow, once more tucking his hands behind his head. “You know. Wooing. Coaxing. Something to put me in the mood.”

There was a suspicious bulge under the quilt. She flipped back the covers to reveal the lower part of his torso. Even through his smallclothes, his erection was impossible to miss. Rather impressive, actually. She hoped he hadn’t noticed the hitch in her breath when she saw it.

“Really?” she said in a skeptical tone. “You honestly need encouragement to put you in the mood.”

He glanced down, then back up to her. “Ah well, that happens—surprisingly often, to be frank. It’s not as if I’m in the habit of making love to the nearest available female every time I develop a cockstand.”

She almost told him not to be vulgar and to stop joking. She was so used to being on an adversarial footing with him, the words were on the tip of her tongue. But she realized just in time that she didn’t want him to stop. Teasing, wicked, playful John was a welcome change.

“For heaven’s sake,” she said, between laughter and frustration. “What is it you want me to do?”

“Think of something,” he said with a faint smirk. “You’re an inventive woman.”

Inventive, perhaps, but hardly as knowledgeable as he seemed to think. Despite letting Lieutenant Howe kiss her and even touch her breasts behind the Shire Hall, she’d known next to nothing about actual bedroom doings until the talk her brother’s wife had given her just before her wedding. Neither her first time with John—the wedding night she’d largely forgotten—nor the second—the misguided encounter in the hunting box—had been especially instructive, and he’d taken the lead both times.

She knelt beside him on the bed. “If I do try some encouragement, will you tell me if I’m wide of the mark?”

He raised one eyebrow. “You mean something like ‘You’re getting warmer’ or ‘You’re getting colder’?”

The notion sent a zing of excitement through her. “Yes, if you want to put it that way, that would be helpful.”

He smiled a slow, roguish smile and glanced down to where his erection tented his smallclothes. “Very well. Have at it.”

She laughed, though her pulse was skittering with nervous anticipation. She set a hand on his chest, above his heart.

“Warmer,” he said. “But only because you’re starting from out in the arctic wilderness.”

She leaned down and kissed him on the mouth—a slow, lingering kiss, her hair falling like a screen around them. Then she sat back on her heels and gave him a questioning look.

“Warmer.”

She leaned over him again, trailing kisses along the firm line of his jaw until she reached his ear. She breathed softly into it, sliding her hand lower as she did so—over the firm muscles of his chest, across his ribs to the flat plane of his abdomen. Her hand stopped just south of his navel.

“Warmer.”

Ah, that was better. He sounded more serious now, as if amusement was giving way to desire. “Have I ever told you how much I enjoy looking at your body?” she whispered, her voice husky. “Broad shoulders, big solid muscles...” She let her hand drop lower, slipping it inside the waistband of his smallclothes. Her fingers closed around him. “And that’s not all that’s big.”

“Getting hot,” he rasped. “Definitely getting hot.”

“I wish I’d let on how I really felt, when you were having your way with me in the hunting box.” She drew her hand up his hard shaft, her grip firm, and then slid her thumb slowly over the head. “I
did
like it.”

“Hot. But I think your description could be hotter.”

She might have taken offense at the suggestion if the way he panted the words hadn’t been so flattering. “Having you inside me, filling me, so deep I could almost taste you...Mmm, it was all I could do to keep still. I’ve been craving you there ever since, until I’m positively slippery with it. I want you so much I—”

The next thing she knew, he’d seized her by the waist and flipped her onto the mattress. Her cry of surprise might have gone a long way toward convincing anyone able to hear that she and John were doing a good deal more than pretending.

“That was fine coaxing.” He reached under her chemise and trailed his hand up her thigh.

Her breath caught as he slipped a finger into her wetness.

“You were telling the truth,” he said, looking both surprised and gratified to find her slick and ready.

“Did you really doubt it?”

He kissed his way down her neck to her collarbone. “This has to come off,” he ordered, tugging at her chemise. She sat up slightly and he stripped it off her in a single motion, throwing it to the floor.

Then she was on her back again, bared to him, and his head was at her breast, taking her nipple into his mouth. His tongue circled the little peak, gently flicking against it. She gasped and squirmed with pleasure, burying her fingers in his thick hair as he suckled her. He moved to the other breast, and before long she was lifting her hips off the bed, arching higher in an unconscious invitation for his touch.

He set a hand between her legs, spreading her open with his long fingers. “My God. You’re so wet.”

She broke off their kiss with a little gasp as his touch came to concentrate on the center of her pleasure. She remembered him touching her this way on their wedding night, but only dimly, and even then it had been a gentle, incremental advance, not this sudden onslaught. “Oh, John...” Biting her lip, she threw her head back against the pillow with a soft moan.

“Tell me you want me,” he whispered against her ear.

She hesitated.

“I want to be inside you, but you have to say it first. Tell me,” he demanded. “I need to hear you say you want me.”

She swallowed. “I do. Oh please, John, I want you.”

He pushed his smallclothes out of the way and entered her with a slight growl, an animal sound so at odds with the John she’d thought she knew it sent an added surge of lust through her. If teasing, playful John was a welcome change, then fierce, verging-on-rough John made her heart race.

* * *

The bed squeaked. With Caro panting beneath him, it took him an absurdly long time to realize that it was really the bed and not his pulse ringing in his ears.

This was the sort of giddy lust he’d lost all hope of ever experiencing again, at least with his wife, yet here he was, the ropes under the mattress creaking as he thrust into her, giving himself over to the almost unbearable satisfaction of his body driving strongly into hers.

“Oh, John,
yes
.”

Dear Lord in heaven, but she felt good, so soft and tight around him he was all but delirious. A wiser man might have slowed down, made the most of the occasion, but they were both worked up and panting, and he’d never claimed to be wise. Slowing down seemed impossible, like trying to stop a boulder as it crashed its way down the Matterhorn.

The better it got—the harder they went at it—the more noise the bed made.
Eee-ah
,
eee-ah
,
eee-ah.
What if the rest of the household could hear them?

Oh, blast the rest of the household. That was the kind of thing men with irritating rectitude cared about, not daring rascals with beautiful wives. He and Caro were married. She
wanted
them to hear.

She wrapped her long legs around his waist, urging him on. Her breasts bounced with his every thrust. The bed creaked wildly. Bowing his head, John tried to will back the climax threatening to overtake him, but there was no resisting the sheer physical thrill of it.

“Ah, God...” he ground out. And before he could catch himself, he added the starkest, most unequivocally sexual profanity he knew.
Loudly
.

Caro gasped, and for a single frozen second he thought he’d gone too far. But then she gave an ecstatic cry and arched beneath him, and he realized it wasn’t shock at his language that had made her catch her breath, but her own crisis.

Could there be anything more exciting than Caro in the throes of ecstasy? The swooning, heavy-lidded look of her, the way she tightened around him in waves, sent him over the edge. With a final deep thrust, he stilled inside her, exploding in a dizzying release.

When he came back to himself, he had rolled off her and onto his back. And Caro—baffling, infuriating, irresistible Caro—was doing her best to tug the covers out from under him.

He shifted his weight to make it easier for her. “That was...unexpected,” he said, closing his eyes. Clearly he’d been wrong in his assumptions when he’d proposed, and proceeding slowly and respectfully was the wrong tack to take with Caro.

She laughed. “I might have said the same.” She drew the blanket up over the two of them, tucking them in for the night. “I had no idea you had it in you.”

“Had what?” he asked, groggy.

She gave a low chuckle. “Never mind.”

How had everything changed so quickly? Earlier that same week he’d been tossing and turning on the floor, bitter and resentful, and now he had Caro nestling against him, sighing with contentment. It really was a miracle.

He had the vague sense it was too good to be true, and Fortune was only waiting to find some new way to pull the rug out from under him.

Chapter Eighteen

Nothing flatters a man as much as the happiness of his wife;
he is always proud of himself as the source of it.

—Samuel Johnson

John peered into the mirror, humming to himself as he shaved.

“You are in a good mood this morning, my lord,” Leitner observed.

“And why not? It’s a fine day.”

Leitner glanced at the window behind him. “I believe it is cloudy, and with a chill in the air.”

“And? Chilly weather is good for any number of things.”

“Such as, my lord?”

He turned to Leitner with one brow lifted. “Such as not having to explain the reason for one’s good mood.”

Leitner gave one of his crisp Viennese bows. “Just so. I beg your lordship’s pardon.”

He supposed he was being rather transparent, grinning like a Cheshire cat. He’d awakened that morning with Caro, gloriously nude from head to toe, spooned against him. When he’d gently eased his arm out from under her to slip out of bed, she’d given a soft sigh of disappointment in her sleep.

Her sigh reminded him of something the first girl he’d ever tumbled had told him. Betsy had been an experienced twenty to his sixteen, a young soldier’s widow when he was only a third-year on leave-out at Winchester. She’d said that though there were a good many young gentleman she’d happily go to bed with, there were very few she’d care to wake up beside.

He wanted Caro to enjoy waking up beside him.

“I expect everyone else is already up and about?” he asked Leitner.

“Not everyone—in addition to your lordship and Lady Welford, Mr. Ronald also has yet to make the appearance.”

He hoped that meant Ronnie had taken their talk to heart and was buckling down and studying his Logic. “The Fleetwoods are going to think we’re a shiftless lot,” he said lightly, tying his neckcloth.

“I do not know about that, but Miss Fleetwood has been asking for you.”

Chilly weather or no, he would do his utmost not to be confined to the house with an overly attentive eighteen-year-old. “Have you any notion what she wants?”

“I believe she enjoys cutting silhouettes, my lord, and she is wishful that you should sit for her.”

He could think of few things he would enjoy less than having to remain still while Miss Fleetwood hovered a few feet away, painstakingly cutting his profile out of paper. He’d find some way to make his excuses—performing some service for Caro, perhaps.

He tucked his watch into his pocket, and Leitner helped him on with his coat. “Very good,” he said with a glance in the mirror. “That will be all, Leitner.”

Leitner bowed again and withdrew. Instead of following him out into the corridor, John considered a moment, then headed back through the bedroom door.

He stood a few feet from the bed, regarding Caro as she slept. Her long hair spilled across the pillow, soft and shining. A faint blush tinged her cheeks. Though the covers were drawn up nearly to her shoulders, he could remember every inch of her body, naked beneath the sheets.

He didn’t mean to wake her—only to look at her a little while—but when he sat down carefully on the edge of the bed, she stirred and opened her eyes. Her gaze, at first sleepy and unfocused, fixed on him.

She smiled. “John. You’re already dressed.”

“Yes. You’ll be shocked when you hear what time it is.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t shock that easily.”

“So I’ve discovered,” he said with a grin. He hesitated. “Caro...I’ve been thinking, and I owe you an apology.”

Her brows rose slightly in surprise. “You do?”

“Yes.” He was about to say,
If everything you told me about our wedding night is true
, but realized it wasn’t much of an apology if he called her confidences into question. His next impulse, to begin,
You were wrong to go through with our wedding when you never loved me
,
but...
, was worse. Clearly he lacked a talent for making apologies.

Instead he began, “I shouldn’t have encouraged you to drink so much champagne on our wedding night. I thought it would help you to relax, but I didn’t realize you weren’t used to it, and afterward I had no idea it had affected you so much. I’ve been blaming you for everything that went wrong, when as your husband I had—I
have
—a duty to look after you and protect you. Getting you foxed was my fault, and most of what happened that night flowed from it.”

“That’s very...” Unable to finish, she swallowed and said in a small voice, “Thank you, John.” She sat up, clutching the bedclothes to her chest. “But I never blamed you for that, only for being so angry and cold to me afterward. The rest was my doing, and I still regret it.”

“If you hadn’t had so much champagne, perhaps the rest would never have happened.” He shook his head. “Believe me, you’re not the first person to wind up with regrets after drinking too much. If I could take back my twenty-first birthday...”

“What happened on your twenty-first birthday?”

“I made rather a fool of myself.” At her questioning look, he said, “It’s a long story...”

She gave him a teasing look. “It’s already shockingly late. What difference will a long story make?”

He nodded his head to one side in acknowledgement. Besides, he’d be a fool to cut their conversation short when every breath she took caused the bedsheets to dip lower, revealing a tantalizing glimpse of firm breasts. “It’s the custom when the heir reaches his majority to have a coming-of-age party, but I never had one—”

“Why not?”

He shrugged. “Various reasons. My stepmother didn’t like the idea overmuch, and if my father had been able to get his hands on sufficient money for a celebration, he’d likely have gambled it away first.”

“I’m not sure which part of that is more troubling. Did your stepmother really begrudge you a party?”

“Suffice it to say she was less than enthusiastic about the idea, and she had a good deal of influence with my father. Attaining my majority was a particular sore spot with her, since I came into a small inheritance from my mother when I turned twenty-one. From that day forward, it never ceased to torment my stepmother that I had more money than I required, while she required more money than she had.” He added hastily, “Not that she really
required
it. I hope you don’t imagine I left her or Ronnie helpless after my father died.”

“Considering the amount of pin money you gave me even when I was living in disgrace at Halewick, no, I don’t imagine it. Besides, Ronnie told me himself his mother was something of a profligate.”

“A share of the blame for that goes to my father. Not only did he lack the strength of character to curb her extravagance, he could never practice any economy himself. But then, gambling was like a sickness with him. After every disastrous loss he would swear never to play again, only to go back to the card table as soon as he’d slept off the remorse.”

“Was that what you meant when you said you’d seen the chaos that comes from living without rules or limits?”

“Yes. My father couldn’t mortgage Halewick since it was entailed on me—another circumstance my stepmother bitterly resented—but bit by bit, the two of them sold off everything they could. First the art, then most of the furniture, then the plate, and finally even the hack my father had given me on my tenth birthday.” He gave a regretful shake of his head. “Losing my horse wasn’t the worst reversal in a financial sense, but it was the one that hurt the most. I was seventeen at the time and came home from Winchester to find Aboukir’s stall deserted.”

Caro’s brows drew together in a puzzled frown. “But Ronnie told me he was given a pony when he was five, and Buck a few years later.”

“And so he was. Ronnie never had to give up his mount.”

“That doesn’t seem fair.”

He shrugged. “It was and it wasn’t. My stepmother was always quick to remind me that as my father’s heir, one day I would have advantages Ronnie wouldn’t.” He took care to keep his tone light, though his stepmother’s actual phrasing had always been that he would have advantages he didn’t deserve. Also that Ronnie was more clever, better behaved, sweeter-tempered...”He was her only son, but I was my father’s firstborn, which meant both the title and Halewick would belong to me one day, and through no merit or effort of my own. Ronnie, on the other hand, would have to work for his advantages. That’s why I’ve always been so determined to see him make something of himself.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “Still, to sell your horse while you were away, and not even inform you...What did your stepmother say when you discovered he was gone?”

“She told me she’d sooner have been rid of me than of my horse, but at least Aboukir was worth a hundred guineas.”

Caro winced. “I hate to think how you responded to that.”

“How could I respond, except to walk away? She had all the power. I wasn’t much more than a boy at the time. Besides, I loved my father, and my father loved her.”

“I’m sorry I brought it up.”

John waved a hand in a careless gesture. “No need to apologize. I’d forgotten all about it.”

“Except clearly you hadn’t.”

He considered a moment, then gave a humorless laugh. “No, I suppose I hadn’t.”

She leaned her chin on her palm and gazed at him with compassion in her eyes. “I’m sorry your stepmother treated you so coldly. When I look at you, from your appearance to the kind of work you do—well, if we all got our just deserts, she should have doted on you.”

Either his ears were playing tricks on him, or Caro had just given him a compliment—an exceedingly warm compliment—and her family wasn’t even there to hear it. It was almost enough to make a man blush. “Is that a much nicer way of saying that my rectitude makes you want to scream?”

Caro leaned forward. “Something made me want to scream last night,” she said in a naughty, playful tone, “and it certainly wasn’t your rectitude.”

Good lord. If he wasn’t blushing before, he was surely blushing now.

“So,” she said before he could decide what to say to such a remark, “you were going to tell me how you made a fool of yourself on your twenty-first birthday.”

“Ah, yes. So I was.” As much as he’d enjoyed the compliment and the flirtation, it was already growing late for breakfast. “I have a proposal for you. Leitner informs me it’s chilly outside, but if you don’t mind a little nip in the air, I wonder if you might like to take a walk with me once you’ve dressed and had your breakfast. I can tell you the story of my birthday then.”

“I’d love to take a walk, but would you mind if I check with my father first to see if he requires anything?”

“Not at all. I’ll see how Ronnie’s getting on with his Logic, and we can meet in the front hall.”

He took his leave, though as he walked away he had the distinct feeling he was wasting an opportunity, letting himself out into the corridor while Caro remained in bed, naked and lighthearted beneath the sheets.

* * *

When Caro found her father in the drawing room, he wasn’t in his usual chair by the fire but was sitting sideways on a stool opposite the window. Sophia had hung a sheet of paper on the wall behind him and was tracing his shadow on the paper with a pencil, preparing to cut out his silhouette.

Her father broke into a delighted smile when he caught sight of her. “Caro, my love. Don’t you look radiant this morning.”

“Good morning, Papa.” Grinning, Caro kissed his cheek. “Good morning, Sophia. What an excellent idea! Might I prevail upon you to make a copy of Papa’s silhouette for me?”

“If you like. I was hoping to do yours and Lord Welford’s as well, if you’ll agree to sit for it.”

“The advantage of a silhouette,” Caro’s father said, “is that it doesn’t show one’s gray hair or wrinkles.”

“As if you have wrinkles,” Caro objected. “In any case, John has no need to worry about such things.”

“No,” Sophia agreed with a sigh. “He doesn’t.”

“How are you feeling this morning, Papa?” Caro asked. Her father’s symptoms seemed to vary from day to day and even from hour to hour, swinging from terribly worrisome to barely perceptible. He appeared to be having one of his better days, and not just because he was clearly in a sunny mood—after all, he was rarely blue-deviled. His color looked healthy, and he sounded not at all breathless.

“Now don’t go fretting about me,
cara mia
. I couldn’t be better.”

“You’re certainly in good spirits.”

“And why shouldn’t I be? My beautiful daughter is here, and my clever son-in-law as well, and I can see how happy they are together.”

Sophia shot Caro a dubious look.

Caro
did
feel happy, though it wouldn’t do to reflect too long on the reason why, not in the presence of her cousin and her father. She might have told John the night before that she wouldn’t mind if her family heard them together in bed, but at the time she’d said it, she’d assumed any sounds she might make would be little more than acting. She’d expected John’s lovemaking to be as correct and self-controlled as he was. Certainly their encounter in the hunting box had been far from abandoned. But she’d been completely wrong.

And John’s unexpected enthusiasm in bed was only one more discovery that had her wondering if she’d been largely mistaken about him. Since the moment he’d announced his intention to go to Vienna without her, she’d considered him cold and aloof—a perfectionist who disapproved of everything about her, humorless and condescending. But how could he do such a convincing job of playing the warm, doting, occasionally naughty husband unless he had at least some version of that man buried inside him?

And something he’d said that morning had her looking with new eyes at his treatment of her after their wedding night, banishing her to Halewick, ignoring her for five years except to dole out the occasional disdainful remark. She’d thought it irrefutable proof that he was coldhearted. But his answer when she’d asked how he’d responded to his stepmother’s cruelty had surprised her—
What could I do
,
except walk away?

She’d never given John’s childhood much thought, not even since learning his stepmother had been hateful and insulting to him, but now she realized it must have left a lasting mark. As a powerless boy living with a stepmama who disliked him, what choice had he had except to keep his emotions under tight control? Perhaps detachment and an obstinate sense of his own worth had been his only defenses.