Wilde Child EPB

by James, Eloisa

  Thaddeus’s lips thinned. “My father claims that he married his mistress before he married my mother, which would make me illegitimate.”

  Joan sucked in a breath. “No!” She instinctively moved toward him and put a hand on his arm. “Does he have any proof?”

  “He says that he could present the proof if necessary,” Thaddeus said, “but to this point he has declined to do so.”

  “Absurd!” Joan cried indignantly. “Make him show you those marriage lines, because I’d guess they’re forged.”

  Thaddeus’s mouth eased into a smile. “My solicitors agree. Unfortunately, the claim, and the process of disproving it, would be dreadful for my mother.”

  Joan thought of the dear, pink-clothed duchess. There was nothing strong about her. She was Aunt Knowe’s closest friend, but they couldn’t be more different.

  Aunt Knowe faced the world like Joan’s own namesake, Joan of Arc. The Duchess of Eversley was quiet and shy. She still giggled like a girl. Joan hadn’t known her long but she knew instinctively that the duchess would be devastated if her estranged husband told the world their marriage had never existed.

  “That’s horrible,” she breathed.

  “My mother wouldn’t leave the house again,” Thaddeus said flatly. “Not even once the courts proved his claim to be a lie, which it certainly is. The humiliation would be too acute.”

  “He must be mad,” Joan stated.

  “Indeed, he might have an illness of the brain. He is obsessed. Ruining his bloodline, squandering the duchy: none of it matters more to him than legitimizing my half brother.”

  Joan knew about that type of illness. When she was a girl, one of her brother Alaric’s admirers had become dangerous in her passionate pursuit of him.

  She cleared her throat. “Aunt Knowe still visits a family acquaintance who lives in retirement, due to her inability to recognize reality.”

  Thaddeus raised an eyebrow.

  “The lady in question firmly believes that she’s married to Alaric, and they have a child on the way. Meanwhile, my brother hasn’t seen her in four or five years. Aunt Knowe says that she lives in a fantasy world, more pleasant for her than the ordinary one in which we are forced to reside. Is that what your father is doing?”

  Thaddeus shook his head. “Not precisely. My father is both cunning and unscrupulous. He knows I’ll do almost anything to stop my mother from being hurt by his allegations that their marriage was not legitimate.”

  His mouth twisted. “My mother is a gentle person, yet he told her on their wedding night that he would never love her, and moreover, that he had a disdain for her figure, her face, and the color pink, which she had worn to the altar.”

  “She’s worn it ever since,” Joan murmured.

  “Revenge can take quiet forms.”

  “How have you managed to stop him from releasing this so-called evidence so far?”

  “I allowed him to believe that I am considering stepping aside in favor of my half brother. That I am thinking about it.”

  She opened her mouth to say, again, that “stepping aside” wasn’t allowed, but Thaddeus raised his hand. “I know. But he thinks that I will finally recognize that his opinion is the most important. And he feels that as a duke, English law doesn’t apply to him.”

  “So he doesn’t believe in the laws of primogeniture. The eldest son doesn’t get everything.”

  “He says it is a foolish rule and every duke—every man—should be able to choose his successor.”

  “How does that make you feel?”

  She wanted to take back the words the moment they left her mouth. Of course, he felt unloved. Rejected.

  “Like a fool,” Thaddeus said unemotionally.

  “He’s the fool,” Joan cried. “He’s the one going against British tradition back to, back to, well, not the Roman times, but a long time ago. Inheritance is all about marriage. And blood, the right blood. As you said earlier, with future dukes marrying noblewomen.”

  “Which you know all too well, given most gentlemen’s rejection of you as a possible spouse,” Thaddeus said grimly.

  “That’s an exaggeration,” Joan said, giving him a mischievous smile. “I don’t know how many British men are in the gentry and below, but I haven’t met with any particular reluctance from the larger group.”

  He rolled closer and ran a finger down her nose. “You laugh at the very things that would destroy a woman such as my mother.”

  “I’m not laughing,” Joan protested. “I’m just making my point. If you add together the men whom I’ve kissed in order to prove that point—”

  “Let’s not,” Thaddeus murmured. He bent his head and feasted on her mouth, letting himself kiss her slowly and thoroughly. She gasped, then murmured something and put her arms around his neck.

  Long minutes later, they were still kissing, occasionally breaking apart for air. He was so thirsty for her: for the sweetness of her lips, the sauciness of her tongue tangling with his, the way her slender body trembled against his.

  Though he hadn’t allowed himself to touch her, other than to cup the back of her head with his hand, protecting her from the ground.

  More kisses . . . He became aware that he was shaking too.

  “Are you making a point of your own?” she whispered against his lips, opening eyes drenched in desire. Real desire, not the kind she displayed at balls.

  He felt a throb of triumph go through him, and then registered her question.

  “No.” He took her mouth again. Joan’s lips were pliant and sweet, but she’d asked a question that ripped the erotic haze from his mind.

  So he pulled back, ignoring the needy pulse in his body. “What point could I possibly be making?” he asked in a husky voice, tracing her rosy bottom lip with one finger.

  Joan looked up at him. “That I shouldn’t have brought you to the island. Or that I’m attractive, even though I’m illegitimate. Or that . . .” Her voice trailed off. “I’m not sure, to be honest.”

  “I would never hurt you,” Thaddeus said. The words sounded like a vow; he watched her eyelashes flutter as she looked away. “You’re not merely attractive; you’re the most beautiful woman in the world.”

  She flinched, a small movement, but he saw it. Then she pulled away and scrambled to her feet. “Enough of this foolishness,” she said, her voice gay. “We really ought to fold the cloth and practice fencing now.”

  Thaddeus got to his feet, knowing that his cock was straining his silk breeches.

  Her eyes flew to his crotch and away. Oddly, Thaddeus found himself grinning. His cheer felt like part and parcel of the afternoon: He’d shared his father’s claim of a wedding to his mistress with someone other than his solicitor; he’d had his first picnic; he’d kissed a gentlewoman . . .

  With no plans to offer marriage, and she knew it.

  He rolled up his sleeves. The light linen of his shirt was not overly warm but he’d seen Joan looking at his arms. On the other side of the glade, Joan rolled up hers as well. His arms were burly, roped with sinew and muscle. Hers were slender but not frail.

  Mind you, she was gripping her rapier as if it were a cricket bat.

  He strode across to her and adjusted her grip, then backed up again. “En garde,” he said, bending his knees slightly. “No, no, look at my hands.” He held his sword lightly before him. “You must always know where your opponent’s sword is.”

  “First, you stop that,” she said, her voice rising.

  He frowned.

  Rosy color poured into her cheeks. “That!” She waved her fingers toward his waist.

  Thaddeus looked down. His cockstand was as evident as it could be, given the silk breeches he wore. He was well-endowed, and every inch was proudly displaying itself. A smile spread across his face, and he found himself laughing.

  “Laugh number four,” Joan said crossly.

  “I’m choking back any number of boyish jests about swords,” he told her, and then took pity. “It’s not in
my command. Nor that of any man.”

  She scowled at him.

  He straightened. “I want you, my body wants you, and my mind can’t control that.”

  The sentence interrupted the bees, the quiet, the birdsong.

  “You can’t have me,” she replied, eyes meeting his. “Not just because you’re a future duke, but because you will need to fight a battle in the court of public opinion, if your father has his way. Lady Bumtrinket is right. You have to marry someone of irreproachable, noble birth.”

  “I know. But my body doesn’t.” He paused. “I suspect that my body will always want you, Joan. Forever.”

  “Nonsense,” she said. “Remember your father? He should have cleaved to your mother, as it says in the Bible. Put his mistress to the side.”

  He felt his brows drawing together. “Are you suggesting that I will long for you my whole life? Find myself berating my legitimate son, wishing to disinherit him in favor of a child of yours?”

  “For God’s sake,” Joan said blankly. “You’re suggesting that I might become your mistress?”

  “You brought up the simile, not I,” he said.

  Her turn to laugh, startling the birds. “The role of courtesan doesn’t interest me, Thaddeus. Even for you.”

  Then she bent her knees and gripped her sword. “En garde!”

  He shook his head and walked behind her, putting his arms around her from the rear. His body fired to even keener attention, but he forced himself to breathe evenly. “Hold your rapier like this. Now dodge and twist, like this.”

  His arm curled over hers, the foil pointed at an imaginary Laertes, he showed her how to thrust while turning, and finally to plunge forward with a straight lunge under the armpit of her imaginary foe. “Pull back your blade with a shuddering motion, as if withdrawing it from flesh,” he advised.

  “You learned to do this in school?” she asked.

  “Play dueling in the bedchambers. We would drive each other back and forth, leaping on and off the bed.”

  Two hours later, as Thaddeus was rowing them back through the weedy lake, Joan was tired but happy. She was hopeful that she could fool the eye enough to please an audience. Thaddeus had taught her some flashy moves with her sword, while cautioning her that they would get her killed in a real duel.

  She was going over the moves in her head, when she heard a loud curse and jerked up her head.

  Gulliver was waiting for them on the bank.

  Joan’s clothing was untouched, in the same heap where she left it. But Thaddeus’s clothing had been scattered. A white stocking hung from both sides of Gully’s mouth, as if he had suddenly grown a long, snowy mustache.

  Thaddeus bounded to the bank and tied off the boat, shouting, “Bloody hell, Gulliver!”

  The goat looked at him inquiringly and cocked his head.

  “He’s never done that before,” Joan said, giggling madly as she made her way off the boat. “I am truly sorry.”

  Thaddeus turned around, crossing his arms over his chest. “You know why he did this, don’t you?”

  “No idea,” Joan said. “Oh, dear, I’m so sorry about your shoe. Perhaps it can be repaired.” She picked it up. “No, I’m afraid not.” She started giggling again.

  “That bloody goat is in love with you,” Thaddeus said bluntly. “He was marking his territory, letting me know that I’m not welcome. Not unlike the belligerent peacock. I suppose I’m lucky the bird didn’t follow us down here and piss on my wig.”

  He bent over and picked up his coat from on top of the picnic basket and pulled it on. “You’re his owner; you owe me a forfeit.”

  “Fitzy wouldn’t have done that,” Joan protested. But she broke out into giggles again as Thaddeus tugged on one side of the stocking hanging from Gulliver’s mouth. She ended up laughing so hard that she bent over.

  “Forfeit,” a voice repeated just in front of her.

  She straightened and found herself in Thaddeus’s arms. He was warm and hard, his mouth capturing hers, a sensual hint of pressure telling her to open her mouth to his.

  Joan wound her arms around his neck and let his tongue tangle with hers. She felt like a teakettle on the boil, bubbles fizzing through her veins. As soon as they started kissing, it was if they had never left off.

  Her attention was entirely on Thaddeus, so much that she stopped smelling Gulliver’s odiferous presence, or feeling late afternoon sunshine slanting onto her neck. The world shrank to Thaddeus’s lavish, passionate kisses.

  She didn’t hear a breathy snort that resembled a protest issued by an ancient relative of a minotaur, removed two or three hundred times.

  But she certainly felt it when Gulliver’s solid—if elegant—horns butted Thaddeus directly in the rear end. He lurched forward; she fell backward onto the grass. He went down after her, catching himself on his hands before he flattened her.

  A thought that sent a stab of lust through her.

  “Are you all right?”

  She looked up at him, blinking. “Yes.”

  Thaddeus turned to his side and pointed at Gulliver, who looked as close to laughing as a goat could look. “You,” he said, in a calm but authoritative tone.

  Gulliver cocked his head.

  “Drop my stocking.”

  To Joan’s shock, Gully’s mouth fell open, and a mangled, wet stocking plopped onto the grass.

  “Now go back to your orchard,” Thaddeus said, keeping his eyes on Gulliver.

  “I can’t believe it,” Joan exclaimed, propping herself on her elbows to watch Gulliver trot away. “You bested him!”

  Thaddeus turned back. He was lying half over her, the weight of his body a heady pleasure.

  “Gully isn’t defeated,” he said, a wry smile playing on his mouth. “Did you catch the moment when he dipped his head? He took my other shoe with him.”

  “It’s not as if you could wear only one,” Joan whispered, curling one of her hands around the back of his neck. Not to pull him toward her, because that would be frightfully unladylike. Her fingers played along the strong cords of his neck.

  “I’ll have to return to the castle with no stockings and no shoes,” Thaddeus said, looking unperturbed by this prospect.

  “It doesn’t bother you?” she asked, realizing when she spoke that her voice had dropped to a husky tone that she’d never heard before. “Such a state of disorder isn’t very ducal.”

  “I find it does not.”

  He was looking down at her, eyes intent.

  Damn it. She was going to have to kiss him this time. She moved her head just enough to nip his lower lip.

  In response, he dropped to an elbow. One of his hands slid underneath her and cupped her bottom. “These breeches will be my downfall,” Thaddeus said.

  A conversational comment, except that if her voice had been husky, his was a rasp.

  She wiggled against his hand, grinning at him. “I rather like your . . . breeches as well. Or what’s inside them.”

  He went still all over. “Do you?”

  “I’ve seen such things on babies and in books,” she said, laughter swelling up inside her again. “Never in the wild, so to speak.”

  Only one leg lay over her, but holding her gaze, he shifted just enough so that his warm tool pulsed against her thigh.

  “Yes,” Joan said, her mind so fogged with desire that she couldn’t think of anything to say. “That.”

  “Yes, that,” Thaddeus said. Leaning his head down, he nipped her lower lip.

  But Joan couldn’t play this cat-and-mouse game of desire any longer. She opened her mouth with a soft sound from the back of her throat and whispered, “Thaddeus.”

  “God, I love it when you say my name,” he groaned. His mouth came down on hers again, urgent and possessive.

  They kissed until the sunlight slanted so low that Thaddeus’s hair turned from barley to gold, until the grass lost its sunlit warmth, until Joan’s whole body was pressing against his, wanting to feel more, know more.
/>   “Time to go,” Thaddeus said in her ear as she caught her breath.

  “No.” The word was plaintive, because desire was filling her lungs, and her blood, and every bit of her.

  His weight lifted, and she choked back another protest. “Joan,” Thaddeus said, brushing a lock of hair away from her eyes. She had braided it to fit under a man’s wig, but many of the pins holding her braids in place were lost.

  The world snapped back into place around him: the sky, the grass, the castle off in the distance, out of sight. The world.

  And she, on her back, pleading with a man who couldn’t marry her to ruin her instead.

  “I suppose I can’t take your virtue,” she said, sighing, instinctively avoiding anything serious.

  She would die before she would let him know that she was in love with him.

  Hopelessly, foolishly, completely in love with him.

  She’d laughed at Anthony Froude for protesting how much he loved her after they shared a few kisses. Now she wasn’t so sure the man was shallow. Thaddeus’s kisses were potent. She felt as if he spoke to her of love in every kiss. Which he didn’t.

  So kisses were lies, which she should have known since her own kisses—those she offered to Anthony Froude, for instance—were false.

  “Desire is a potent emotion,” Thaddeus said, his thumb rubbing against her cheek. His eyes looked as if he knew what she was thinking. “Easily mistaken for another.”

  The words sent cold water down her spine.

  Perhaps he was guessing that she had fallen in love with him. Perhaps he could—a humiliating thought—see a besotted expression in her eyes. She rolled on one side and summoned up the expression that he claimed didn’t affect him.

  Ha!

  It did affect him.

  His eyes darkened just a fraction, and he leaned toward her an infinitesimal amount.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, keeping her tone perfectly light. “I told you how many men I’ve kissed, Thaddeus. I think . . .” She paused teasingly and tapped her chin with one finger. “I think that I’ll judge you on the basis of this kiss, rather than the one we shared in the snake tent or those on the island.”