The Wedding Night (19 page)

"Ah, Mairey, when you wiggle against me like that"—an involuntary shudder seemed to convulse him—"yes, like that, my dear, I'm only roused to want you all the more. Would you like to write that down in your field-notes?"

He stirred again, raising her hips with his, setting the swirling hem of her nightgown adrift in his wake. The hand he'd held across her was now gathering up the floating linen, pushing the fabric upward and upward along her thighs toward her hips.

"I'm not made of stone—not like your collection. And I think from your writhing that you're not, either."

Mairey watched in wonder as his dark hand disappeared into the surging folds of linen, in the clear pool where her legs were spread so indelicately, her knees propped wide against his and waiting.

Oh, yes, waiting shamelessly for his magic. She held her breath, disbelieving her anticipation, hopeless with desire for him to do whatever he planned.

His hand swept her curling hair through her drawers, eddies of cool water and then warm, summer sunlight. Sweet anticipation.

He groaned as he cradled his hand over the wild place between her legs. A riot of wanting, a need to explore further. To take her to heaven, to keep her always.

"Oh, Jack!" He had freed her mouth to delve there with his finger, to trace her lips and play at her tongue as he might at her cleft. He was so damnably near it!

"Stone doesn't quiver, sweet Mairey. Ivory isn't hot. And it doesn't ache."

"I
do
ache, Jack. For you. I ache like fire."

Jack thought he just might explode.

She was arched against him, the antiquarian clad in her proper Victorian nightdress and drawers, her lovely, lean thighs open wide to his hands. She was breathing with little sighs and gripping the sides of the tub in a white-knuckled fury.

"Jack, I, oh! I—Jack!"

He ached to the depth of his soul to part the slit in her linen drawers; a garment so perfectly suited to a lover's fingers. A husband's, surely. But he wasn't her husband—and that was his dilemma, as her springy curls teased at his palm, as her heat coursed up through his fingers.

Had he the right? Had he the will to stop what he shouldn't even have begun?

Married
. The word had meant nothing to him for so long, and now it plagued his every thought. He measured it against everything she did, everything she meant to him.

"You need to know,
madam, that
you can't just walk into a man's room while he's bathing." He'd awakened stirred to the boiling point, dreaming of Mairey. Dreaming of children,
Mairey's
and his together. She had become his life. He couldn't imagine his library stripped of her curios, of her laughter.

"You were sound asleep, Jack." She sighed against his ear, grabbed for it with her tongue and teeth.

"You can't bathe him without his waking up, wanting you in the tub with him." He caught her mouth with his, played at tongues and teasing.

"You were freezing."

"And you can't fondle penises, ancient or otherwise, in front of him without that man—"

"You. I was with you, Jack."

"Yes, without
me
—reacting just as
you
are now. You feel the ache?"

"In every part of me, Jack." She wriggled her hips, gave a little gasp, and then covered his hand with hers.

Bits of light scattered inside his skull. The split linen parted like a curtain, and he harrowed his fingers through her fleece. "Mairey!"

"Oh, Jack! It's wonderful! I only—" She took a gasping breath as he slid his fingers along her sultry folds and held her, kept her, wary of moving for the storm it would cause in them both.

"You only what, sweet?"

She had thrown her head back against his shoulder, tilting her pelvis into the cup of his hand as though she would consume him. Her nipples were dark points straining at the wet linen.

"Oh, Jack. I—I didn't want you to drown."

"You're too late, Mairey." He was so drugged with wanting
her,
he could peel off her gown and take her there in the tub.

But he couldn't—she was made for wedding, for vows, for a marriage bed. Unless he lost his mind completely in the next minute and buried himself inside her.

My God. She was bending, reaching for his scrotum.

"Mairey, please!" He caught her by the wrist and she turned in his arms, floated and then settled on him, her nearly bare skin cool against his fire-hot erection.

"What is it, Jack?" Her eyes were wide, and blinking.

"Have you learned nothing in the last few minutes?"

"
Mmmmm
… I've learned far more than I had intended." The minx closed her eyes and took a startlingly precocious pleasure in rolling his penis against the softness of her belly. "I don't know what's gotten into me—"

Me, my love. I want to be inside you, to the hilt.

"I'm not shy of you, Jack." She spread her fingers across his chest,
then
slid them up his throat to his jaw, her clear gray eyes filled with desire.

"No, you don't appear to be shy at all."

"Though I'm plagued with curiosity—"

"The scholar in you."

"Now I understand the lure of the phallus through the eons. Yours in particular."

"Mairey!" Jack groaned,
then
pulled her forward in a single wave of water, covering her mouth with his, claiming her with his tongue. Hungry, so hungry! He should really stop this. But she made tiny, laughing whimpers in her throat and crawled up the front of him, slipped her arms around his neck, and let him plunder and explore.

Until he realized that he was fighting with the third button of her nightgown, that he had breached the opening,
then
had a handful of lush breast, and his mouth was just bearing down on a
ripely
puckered nipple.

Mairey's
eyes were wide as she watched him, astonished, as though she wasn't certain this was happening to her.

And it shouldn't. Not now.

"Sweet Jesus!" Jack yanked the placket closed, and patted her breast when it was fully covered—out of sight, but not in the least out of mind.
He
was out of his mind! For going this far. For stopping. Hell!

He lifted her hips and stood her up in the well between his knees, staying hip-deep himself. Her gown was a transparent waterfall, her face flushed, her breasts high and round.

"What, Jack?" She looked incensed in her innocence, her hands fisted against her hips.

Despite the raging fever in his blood, he wasn't fit for a night like this. That would be a commitment to something far greater and longer lasting than silver.

"This is a marital pursuit, Mairey. And we're not, are we? Married, I mean."

"No." The word came out wrapped in a weighty
sigh,
and the next as horrified as if he'd suggested setting her library on fire. "No!"

Unclear why her eyes should be so filled with terror at the mere mention of a marriage between them, Jack decided to shelve the subject until a better time, and send her out of harm's way.

"I think you'd best leave me to my bath, Mairey."

"Oh, no, Jackson Rushford!" She flipped back her hair, the bottom half wet and clinging,
then
drizzled her opinions across his chest as she wrung out her hem. "I'm not letting you bathe alone. I found you asleep in two feet of water! You're staggering with exhaustion, and I refuse to leave you. Don't move."

He couldn't possibly.

She stepped out of the tub, taking half the bath with her, trailing a stream of water all the way through the open doorway into her room.

"What are you doing in there, woman?" Jack would have leaped out of the tub and gone for his clothes, but Mairey stuck her head around the panel, her shoulder heedlessly bare.

"Cover yourself with a towel while you finish if you want, Jack. I won't look, I promise. But I will be in the same room as you until you're out of the water." She disappeared, and he heard the plop of soggy fabric landing on the floor.

She was undressing. The door was half open, and the woman was undressing!

"I've got three little sisters, Jack. I know a lot about the drowsing effects of bathwater on exhausted children. Poppy gets sleepy the moment she sees the bath."

"I'm not a child, Mairey. I don't need your help." He needed to sort through his thoughts. He needed Mairey.

"And I don't need to find you floating facedown in your bathwater." She came through the door tugging a dressing robe around a nightgown. Her feet were bare, and her hair hung like a siren's around her shoulders.

She swabbed up her watery trail, hung the towel over a chair back, and then sprawled across his bed.

"Wash, Jack. Else I'll fall asleep here."

The woman clearly hadn't understood anything from the last few minutes, that neither of them
were
made of stone. But neither was she peering into his bathwater any longer.

So Jack scrubbed himself clean, from his scalp to the soles of his feet. The water went milky gray with soap and grime, the clean fragrance rising into his nostrils like memories of home, of scrubbing his skin to bright pink at his nightly baths in the kitchen after a long day in the mine. Privacy had been a foreign notion then, with the rest of his family at the hearth, just out of his circle of modesty. Emma telling stories, his mother plaiting
Banon's
black hair,
Clady
fast asleep on his father's lap.

God in heaven, he hadn't allowed such memories for years; hadn't dared, for the grief they exposed.

"Jack?"

"Yes?" He was standing in the water, his backside bare and dripping with rinse water. He spared a glance at the bed, prepared for the connection of her gaze, for the sharp pang of desire that was becoming as familiar as breathing. But she was tucked up against his pillow, staring at the ceiling,
her
hands behind her head.

Trust—she was free with it. To be sure, she kept her secrets from him, rationed her
Willowmoon
lore as if she were a bank manager suspicious of a loan. But when it came to the truth between them, Mairey Faelyn was as constant as the coming and going of the sun.

"Jack, I've been wondering about your sisters." He welcomed the change of subject and stepped out of the tub to dry off. "What is it you want to know about them?"

"You told me one time that you hadn't seen them for years."

"I haven't." He pulled on his trousers, having nothing else to wear, and certainly not trusting a towel.

"At first I thought you were estranged from them. That … well, I don't know … that you had offended them somehow in your magnificence, that you didn't think them your social equal, or that you'd married them off to your business associates for the profits they brought into the family estate." She
flopped
her arms on the mattress, obviously feeling tied to the bed. "May I look?"

"
Hmmmm
… I had no idea your opinion of me was so colorful." He was safely rolling up his shirtsleeve when she sat up and dangled her bare calves over the edge of the bed.

"My opinion of you remains colorful, sir, more so than ever. But the part about your sisters isn't true, is it? You're not estranged; you haven't seen them since the night your father was killed."

She was very good at finding things, uncomfortably so. He wasn't sure he wanted to continue.

"It was earlier that day. At breakfast."

She was quiet for a moment as he rolled up his other sleeve, because it gave him something to do.

"What are their names?"

Are
. Not
were
. Leave it to Mairey to understand the tiny morsels of hope that he tucked away for safekeeping. The bargains he'd made with God. He sat down beside her, gripping the edge of the mattress, staring down at the wooden floor, at the long cracks and the fine grain and the swirl of the knots.

"My mother's name is Claire."

"That's very pretty."

"Yes. I hadn't realized—she was my age when I last saw her. Emma was eleven at the time.
Banon
was seven. And
Clady
had just turned six." He struggled to get his voice past the lump in his throat. "She'd gotten into the honey that morning. I went up to the strike line with a gob of it in my hair."

"Oh, Jack." There it was in her eyes, in the way she turned to him and enfolded his hand in hers. He didn't have to tell her about the hearth shadows and the ghosts at the lodge. Or why he'd fought so hard to banish her sisters from
Drakestone
.

"What happened to them, Jack?" Her voice was a little frantic, echoing the panic whenever he wondered the same. "Where did they go? With your mother, surely?"

Take care of them, Jack, my son. He'd done a hell of a job.

"I lost them." He paced away to the open door between their rooms, where he could better gain a full head of steam. "I was forced into exile by my own mother. God, how I fought her. I was the man now, entrusted by my dying father to take care of them. But she put me on a ship bound for
Canada
, afraid that I'd be sent to prison."