Waking Up With a Rake (31 page)

“True.” He took one of her hands to soften his admission. “But before you take offense, let me add that I’m glad for it. I’m glad I married you. At our wedding, I’m pretty sure I promised to protect you. Childbed can be a dangerous place, and that’s why I thought I should protect you from it.”

The prickliness melted away and she reached a hand up to his face. “Oh, Rhys. That’s sweet. If you’d told me that when we first argued, there wouldn’t have been a fight about this.”

If he’d thought it would have worked then, he would have said it. He wisely clamped his lips shut now but made a note that he didn’t do his best thinking immediately after making love. He’d have to make sure Olivia didn’t draw him into any more important conversations when all the blood in his body was still pooled somewhere besides his brain.

“If women began fearing childbirth, where would we all be?” she said. “Besides, I saw you with little Alex. You’ll make a wonderful father.”

He was going to explain that he didn’t think they should start a family until he was reconciled to his, but the words died on his lips. If he never patched things up with the rest of the Warringtons, it would be all right.

Olivia was his family now.

He drew her close and kissed her. It started as a sweet kiss, a grateful kiss, but quickly deepened into something tinged with more urgency. When he cupped both her breasts, she pushed against his chest.

“I didn’t mean you ought to start siring a child now,” she said.

“Why not? There’s no time like the present.” He nibbled on her neck the way he knew she liked, and she stopped pushing against his chest.

“I know we dallied in the coach on the way here, but”—she gasped when he bit down on her earlobe—“surely these things ought to be done by night in a proper bed with the lamps turned down.”

“Not necessarily. How am I to see the sights with the lamps turned down?” He waggled his brows at her as he began unbuttoning her bodice.

“You’re not taking this seriously.”

“Of course I am. There’s nothing more serious than when you and I come together. But that doesn’t mean we have to act as if someone’s died. Loving is supposed to be fun.”

“Are you sure?”

“Trust me. It’s one of my areas of expertise.”

“Well, aren’t you full of yourself?”

“Yes, I am.” He picked her up and carried her to the waiting bed. He laid her down on the thick feather tick and looked down at her. “But I won’t be happy until you’re full of myself too.”

She laughed out loud then and lifted her arms to welcome him.

Chapter 29

Her laughter warmed him to his toes. When she ran a hand down his flat belly and cupped his genitals, the warmth pooled in another place. He leaned down, bracing himself on his palms, and nipped her earlobe as her palm slid over his groin. He was fully erect and straining against the wool. She waggled her brows at him and slanted him a sidelong gaze.

“I think I’m going to like not being serious with you,” she said.

“As long as you seriously love me as much as I love you,” he said with a laugh. Then his laughter died as he looked down at her. She hadn’t said it outright, but it was suddenly something he needed desperately to hear. “You do love me, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes, Rhys,” she said, her eyes shining. “I think I loved you from the first moment I saw you and you took my breath away.”

“I’ll do my best to do that with regularity, madam.” He stretched out beside her and they sank into the coverlet in a hailstorm of kisses.

***

Rhys was torn between wanting to draw this loving out and the desperate need to sink into her sweet flesh and find release.

She
loved
him. All his flaws. All his failures. She knew what he was and she didn’t look away. The wonder, the grace of it, made him weak and strong at once.

She bleated a piteous little sound as he nuzzled between her legs, drunk on her scent. Her knuckles were white where she fisted the linens.

“Only a little longer, Olivia.”

She groaned with wanting.

His balls tightened in response to her need. He wanted to give her the best, and to do that he knew, as she didn’t yet, that delay would mean more delight. He’d taken his time undressing her and working every sensitive place on her body into a frenzy. But now he couldn’t bear her sweet agony for another second.

Without even realizing he’d done it, he found himself positioned between her legs, his cock knocking at her gate, poised to slide into her.

His shaft throbbed at the nearness of her soft, wet core. Rhys could deny their need no longer.

He rushed in with one long stroke and she molded around him in a warm, tight embrace. Then his balls drew up into a tense mound, coiled for release. He held himself motionless, willing the urgency to subside so he could revel in the joy that was Olivia a little longer.

Only
a
little.

She wrapped her legs around him and hooked her ankles at the top of the cleft of his buttocks. His heart pounded in his cock, but he forced himself to be still.

Her mouth gaped. Her brows tented in distress. He couldn’t keep her suspended between need and completion any longer. He had to let her go.

He covered her lips with his and flicked his tongue in and out, loving her with his mouth and his cock in tandem. She rocked beneath him, urging him in deeper with little noises of desperation that threatened to shred his control.

He moved faster then. Rougher. She rose to welcome his bone-jarring thrusts.

A
little
longer, please.
He was lost in the heat, the friction, the animal joy of rutting, but something else was happening inside him too.

The door to that sheltered part of himself, the part he’d never opened to anyone, was being battered down with every thrust. Olivia was suddenly in there with him, wrapping her sweet self around his secrets, guarding them, loving him in spite of them. All the scattered bits of himself, those pieces of his heart he’d carelessly given away, were zinging back into him. One at a time, Olivia put them back together until his heart was whole.

She pulled her lips from his and turned her head to the side. “I can’t wait any—”

He felt it start. “Now, Olivia, now.”

Rhys arched his back, driving in as deep as he could as his life shot into her in steady pulses. Her inner walls contracted around him.

It’s like being born
, he thought disjointedly. But instead of going out, he was trying to come in. Into her joy. Into her bliss. Into her love.

Pleasure, sharp as a blade, sliced through him, rending him soul and marrow.

Olivia’s whole body convulsed around him, pulling him into her warmth, her light. He laid his cheek against hers as their connected bodies continued the mad dance of lust for a few more seconds.

When it finally stopped, his cheek felt damp.

He raised his head and looked down at her with concern. “You’re crying.”

She smiled up at him. “Only because I’m so happy.”

He kissed her again, a soft shared breath. And he knew the years of wandering were over. Even if he was never received in his father’s house ever again, it no longer mattered.

He was already home.

***

Olivia had her way. The next morning, she’d sent her father’s coach back to Barrowdell with all the letters and announcements she’d written. She and Rhys stayed on at Braebrooke Cairn. Each day, relations with Rhys’s sister and brother-in-law improved. By end of the second week, they had formed a jolly house party during the day, though Sarah and Blakesby were careful to give the newlyweds time to themselves.

Little Alex was less thoughtful and latched on to his uncle fiercely. Rhys went galloping through the ancient keep with the laughing toddler on his shoulders. Of the two of them, Olivia didn’t know which was having the most fun.

But Rhys and Olivia enjoyed plenty of privacy by night. And if by the end of their honeymoon she wasn’t with child, it wouldn’t be for lack of trying.

At the beginning of the third week, she was a little distressed to see her father’s coach lumbering back up the long drive. Several large trunks were strapped to the top of the conveyance. Surely even a busybody like Beatrice Symon knew a man wouldn’t welcome his mother-in-law on his honeymoon.

Olivia needn’t have worried. Only Babette and Rhys’s valet, Mr. Clyde, climbed out of the Symon coach, along with Jean-Pierre and two of his best seamstresses.

“Your mother, she thought you would need a trousseau so she set Monsieur du Barry to work,” Babette said as she shook the wrinkles out of the new gowns and hung them in Olivia’s capacious wardrobe. “Now all that’s wanted is the final fittings, and
bien
sur
, when you and your bridegroom move to London, you shall take the city by storm.”

Her mother must have ordered the trousseau the day after Olivia and Rhys ran off together. No doubt, she’d driven poor Jean-Pierre and his seamstresses ragged to complete so many pieces of a new wardrobe in so little time, but she always paid them extra for quick work. There was a new mauve traveling suit, a peacock blue riding habit that would put all the other matrons who rode on Rotten Row to shame, several dresses suitable for receiving guests at home, and a breathtaking cloth-of-gold gown that would outshine royalty.

As Olivia ran an appreciative finger over the exquisite satins and silks, she realized her mother had some very fine qualities after all.

Rhys made himself scarce while Jean-Pierre and his minions made short work of marking places where the darts in Olivia’s new wardrobe would need to be taken in. But he was pleased to be present for a showing of the new gowns, bonnets, pelisses, fans, and other fripperies. Then he dismissed the fawning Jean-Pierre so he could investigate Olivia’s new stays, chemises, and stockings in private.

After a week of excitement over her new things, Rhys led her to the front parlor, covering her eyes. More than a dozen gaily wrapped boxes were stacked on the tea table.

“You were so taken with the trousseau, I decided it would be all right to wait a bit to show you these. Mr. Clyde was entrusted with seeing these wedding gifts safely here and has been fair to bursting for you to open them.”

She settled on the settee and eyed the presents, feeling giddy as a child on Christmas morn, but she wouldn’t touch a single ribbon until Mr. Clyde fetched a traveling desk. “We must have something on which to record each gift and who sent it so I can send thank you notes,” she explained.

Lady Harrington sent a china chafing dish. Pinkerton and Amanda sent a collection of colorful scarves with fantastical beings possessed of a multiplicity of arms in unlikely poses on them. The Baron and Baroness Ramstead sent an ornate silver snuffbox. Neither she nor Rhys took snuff and weren’t likely to start.

“But it’s the thought that counts,” Olivia said as she carefully set down a description of the useless gift for her records.

Even some of the Barrowdell staff sent simple homespun presents—a woolen shawl from the housekeeper and a pressed orchid and progress report on her mare Molly from Mr. Thatcher. Olivia treasured them all.

But one of the last gifts she opened threatened to turn her into a hopeless watering pot.

“Oh, my!” she said when she unwrapped the heavy silver teapot. “It’s Great-grandmother Gentry’s tea service.”

Olivia had only seen it once. Her mother had brought it out of storage and explained its significance when the Duke of Clarence first indicated interest in her. The tea set had belonged to Beatrice Symon’s mother’s mother, handed down from mother to first wedded daughter. Olivia knew her mother’s family hadn’t been wealthy. This tea service was the dearest thing they owned, and even though the family might have faced lean times, nothing would induce them to part with it.

The tea service wasn’t as fancy as the ones the Symons used now. The surfaces were polished smooth with no intricate filigree, and a few of the handles were worn thin. But Great-grandmother Gentry’s tea service signified an unbroken line of women whose goal in life was to make a proper home for their husbands and bring gentility to the menfolk who undoubtedly needed the civilizing influence.

When she’d first learned of the tea service, Olivia hadn’t been impressed, but now she hugged the teapot to her breast. It was her mother’s way of saying she understood about the elopement and wished her well.

“And this one’s from me,” Rhys said, pulling a small box from his pocket.

“When did you have time to go shopping?” And where would he have done it? As far as Olivia knew, there wasn’t even a decent-sized hamlet nearby.

“I didn’t. You’re not the only one who can write a letter you know.” He settled beside her and pressed the box into her hands. “Mr. Clyde picked it out for me.”

She gave the valet who’d stood in the corner while she opened gifts a broad smile.

“No credit to me,” Clyde said. “Lord Rhys was most particular in his instructions.”

The anxious expression on his face told her Rhys was also most particular that she open this present quickly, so she tore away the ribbon and raised the lid of the satin-covered box.