Harlequin Historical May 2020--Box Set 1 of 2

by Sophia James

‘Mostly, I barely sleep at all,’ he returned, his hand finding hers as his glance went to the window, calculating the time by the moon. ‘It’ll nearly be three.’ He tipped his head to listen to the noises.

  ‘I heard a church bell before?’

  ‘St James’s in Piccadilly. You will have heard the two “new” quarter chimers, though they have been there for a while.’

  ‘At Athelridge there are no ringing bells.’

  ‘Just silence? I’d probably like that better.’

  He rolled towards her and turned her so that the length of his body warmed her back and she felt his hardness.

  ‘You are cold, Adelia.’

  ‘I was just thinking the opposite.’

  His hand fell down to the wetness between her legs, and she moved to allow him access.

  ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’ Quiet words given in that particular clipped accent he used when he was being careful.

  ‘You won’t.’

  One finger followed the next and she stretched out, wanting more, breath hitching in her throat. When he found the hard nub inside she groaned, his movements there making her understand just how easily he might rouse her.

  He had the covers off them in a moment and was lifting her, so that his mouth now lay where his fingers had. The shock of what he did had her trying to stop him, but he held her hands bound behind her and carried on, the rhythm quickening and lust ruling.

  She was wanton and shameless and unrestrained, the same feeling as last night rising within her until she could control nothing, but merely let herself be carried away with him to a place of only response. There were no words here or thoughts, only reaction and heat, and then tears as she fell to earth again entwined in his arms, his hand in her hair soothing, making her know that everything was just as it should be and that he would always keep her safe.

  * * *

  When she awoke next the sun was well up in the sky and Simeon was no longer in her bed.

  She sat up in pure alarm. My God, what time was it and how had she slumbered all of these hours uninterrupted? Her next thought was of Charlotte and Flora. Had they been asking for her, had the servants seen her here in this tangle of sheets and naked, her hair a wild riot of curls all around her?

  She looked down at the red marks on her breasts where he had suckled hard and at the blood that stained the bed beneath her. Not much of it, but there.

  Had Simeon seen this? Would he know?

  The next thought was of the night. They had made love again after he had taken her with his mouth and again at some time in the light of dawn, slowly and languidly, without words.

  She was immodest and abandoned and licentious, like her father probably, his blood running in hers and ruling flesh. Was that why Simeon had left her, a husband who had wanted a proper wife and received a bawdy lust-filled desperate bride instead?

  There had been nothing mentioned of love.

  Pulling her fingers through her hair, Adelia tried to tame the curls. Her lips felt swollen and dry and the place he had touched the most was sore and aching.

  Wanting less? Wanting more? She could not tell. All she did know was that if he were to return right now she would open her legs and welcome him in, welcome his thickness and his heat and his clever fingers stroking places that made her rise with the promise.

  She lay back in the feather pillows and pulled a silken sheet across her, enjoying the feel of the fabric on her body, sensitive from all his ministrations. With care her own fingers went where his had lingered and she writhed at the touch, wet and hot and ready.

  ‘Simeon.’ She whispered his name and felt her nipples tighten and then the door opened and he was there, seeing all that she felt.

  He shut the door quietly and locked it before turning, his fingers quickly undoing his necktie and unbuttoning his waistcoat and shirt. His shoes were off before he had gone another footfall and then his trousers. His beauty in the light of day took away her breath and she pushed back the sheets, the rise of his manhood growing before her very eyes.

  So easy to want him, so effortless to simply open her legs and feel him slip in, swollen and large. When he tilted her hips she helped him edge in farther, their flesh joined completely.

  He threw back his head and pumped hard and fast, no finesse this time in the face of need, no tarrying, and when he climaxed she felt the heat of it inside her. Closing her eyes, she joined him in a place that was only theirs, everything pulsating through her body, no control in it.

  * * *

  She was insatiable and so was he. He had noted the blood of her innocence on the sheet and seen the marks he had placed upon the pale ivory of her skin from the night before. Yet she did not rebuff him, did not close off and tell him that it was too much, this lust, and that there would be no more.

  No. She had welcomed him in with her hooded eyes and her ready body, with her tight nipples and her wetness, welcomed him in and used him as he had her, with no thought to propriety or decorum or modesty.

  This marriage of inconvenience had become one of a startling opportuneness that he could barely contemplate. She was a Venus wrapped in the wants of a siren. She was a modern Helen of Troy with a face that might launch a thousand nights of lust and he could not believe his luck and good fortune.

  She was asleep again, he saw, her eyelashes motionless on her flushed cheeks, her hair all around them in pale and unkempt curls. She had let her guard down and the careful prickly wife who had forced him to marry her had softened and opened.

  Adelia trusted him. That realisation made him smile, for he remembered arriving at his uncle’s house and sleeping for a week when he first had been rescued. A sanctuary of safety, a place of hope. Was it the same for her here with him?

  The gold cross she always wore caught the light as he moved away from the bed, towards the window. She still wore his ring, too, and he smiled.

  His wife. To have and to hold. For ever.

  Did she love him? Could he ask?

  He shook his head and placed a finger against the cold of the glass.

  Could he say it to Adelia or would it frighten her? She’d wanted distance and had been most insistent on the concept of a marriage that was not in any shape or form a normal one.

  Had that changed now?

  Had he rushed her? Would it have been better to get to know her properly, to feel the slow rise of emotion that a girl of her standing would have been far more apt to expect?

  He had taken her to his bed and deflowered her, then continued to use her time after time and hour after hour, leaving no moment for confessed closeness or love. They had barely talked at all, each joining a separate and heady copulation that had left no time for the truth.

  He looked back and frowned. The bed was untidy, her nightgown strewn across the floor and the thin see-through shift she had worn was ripped along the side seams.

  He remembered tugging it off her, wanting so desperately that he had pulled too hard, the tearing egging him on and blinding him to the proper manner of taking a virgin.

  Like a beast. Like a man from the world he had been born into, a rougher, turbulent and coarser world. Women like his mother had been playthings for men, females to ride on and mate with, a warm body on a cold night in a flea-filled bed, no emotion attached to the act apart from lust.

  Had she thought him the same? This morning when he had come to tell her breakfast was waiting, all thoughts of food had left on the first sight of her and he had feasted on Adelia instead. The marks of desire, the blood, the quick, hard ride to orgasm, no care in any of it save completion.

  Hell, he wanted her again right now even thinking of it, wanted to rouse her and enter her and know the deep damp of her inside, his seed spilling into her womb.

  He’d always been so circumspect in lovemaking, always kept a great deal of himself back and maintained a certain distanc
e. With Adelia he had simply vanished into her so that he could no longer tell where one of them began and the other one ended. And it came from her generosity of allowing him anything.

  His hand pushed hard against a new and growing arousal.

  He did not want to leave the bedroom or her bed. He should go, grab his clothes and walk out, but nothing could make him do it. Instead, he climbed under the sheet and took her into his arms, rousing her, his manhood fitting like a glove into the place between her legs.

  Home. Here.

  He began to move again as she did and the world about them simply fell away.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Charlotte and Flora were full of their outing with the governess into the streets of London to purchase gifts for Simeon’s birthday, which was a week away.

  Adelia had not known his birthday was so close and the gaiety and humour which the girls brought back to the town house was in direct contrast to her own less certain thoughts.

  She hadn’t seen her husband since the morning. He had not returned for lunch when she had risen and bathed, nor for the early dinner, which the girls had partaken in. Mrs Hayward had mentioned something of a business meeting, but when he still had not returned by eight o’clock she wondered if he ever would.

  She’d sat in her sitting room fully dressed with the door open and waited for him, but by eleven o’clock she could no longer stay awake, so had given up and gone to bed.

  * * *

  At breakfast the next morning he still had not returned and she was becoming increasingly worried.

  Charlotte was telling her something of walking across to the park to pick some flowers with Flora and in the haze of concern she had nodded and watched the two girls go accompanied by the governess.

  She sat there after they left and tried to pull herself together, but all she could think of was that the beautiful red-haired mistress had managed to snare her husband again and drag him back to her bed.

  A foolish thought, but one that arrived and stuck. Twenty minutes later she heard a shout from the road and stood to walk to the window. The governess was suddenly there, crossing the road alone, and alarm flared. Was it safe here in this part of London or did the verdant green of the trees and the peacefulness of the area disguise something she should have known was not quite right?

  Calling for Mrs Hayward, she began to walk to the front door.

  ‘I can’t see the girls, Mrs Hayward. Did they return to the house?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Mrs Morgan, but I will check.’ She called to Harris, the butler, and he shook his head.

  Mrs Hayward was catching Adelia’s own concern just as the governess came through the door breathless and upset.

  ‘The girls are no longer with me. I can’t find them.’

  Adelia was running now, picking up her skirts and making her way to the park. It was a big space, but the children knew the part of it that they were allowed to play in. In a few seconds she determined that no one was where they should be. She frantically looked further afield—St James’s Park Lake was an added worry—but there wasn’t a sign of anyone.

  It was a punishment, she thought next, for in her life any happy moment had always been counterbalanced by an unhappy one. This was happening because of her time spent with Simeon yesterday. From the pinnacle of joy to the crashing fear of loss, no middle ground in it, only dread.

  Harris was calling and so was Mrs Hayward and the governess, their voices attracting notice until a small crowd had gathered.

  No one had seen the girls. No one had noticed them leave. No one could remember any other person in the vicinity during the past hour. It was a mystery.

  The sun still shone through billowing clouds, but the world had changed. She had lost them and now they were unprotected. It was her fault, her penance—there was no other way to look at it.

  Simeon chose that moment to reappear and instead of rushing to his side and imploring his help she could only shout at him like some demented crone.

  ‘Flora and Charlotte have disappeared entirely and it’s our fault. This happened because of us. They have gone. For ever.’

  When he came forward, she lifted her hands to ward him away.

  ‘No. Don’t touch me or we will never get them back.’

  She knew it was a crazy thought, but she believed it implicitly.

  ‘We will find them, Adelia.’

  His voice was calm as he spoke with Mrs Hayward and the governess to try to put the facts of what had happened into some order, a man of control and discipline and self-restraint who had little time for histrionics.

  She saw him call for the carriage and leave without looking back, even as he instructed his servants to take her back inside and watch over her.

  ‘Charlotte,’ she screamed once and then twice more, not caring who saw her or what they thought. She wanted her little sister back in her arms with a dreadful and urgent ache and she needed Flora there, too, with her dark eyes and her terrible history. A child who had been ruined by her own father’s hatred.

  Nothing made sense. Nothing felt real. In a few hours the dark would come and the children would be lost for ever.

  Tossing off the hands of the housekeeper, she began to run towards the other side of the park. She would find them herself. She would hunt in the streets of London until she was ancient and wizened and she would not stop until she found them. There was no sense left in her, only the panic of loss. Simeon. Charlotte. Flora. All gone because of her.

  * * *

  Simeon returned home an hour later. Mrs Hayward met him at the door.

  ‘Was there any sign, sir?’

  ‘No. They were not on the other side of the park or anywhere on the main road. I went as far as Hyde Park.’

  ‘You waded in the water, sir.’ Her eyes looked at the wetness of his trousers.

  ‘The Serpentine. I thought…’ But he stopped because he did not wish to voice exactly what he thought. ‘Where is my wife?’

  ‘Your wife, sir?’

  Exasperation rose. ‘Mrs Morgan. Can you ask her to come down to see me please, Mrs Hayward?’

  ‘She is not here, sir. She left directly after you did. I imagined you to be together, looking.’ She stopped and took in a breath.

  ‘You are saying she is not in the house?’ he said urgently.

  ‘I am, sir.’

  ‘Damn it.’

  He’d spent yesterday with Tom, moving him into rooms he owned in Kensington and ones more suited to his needs given the severity of his injuries. Then he had visited his old friend from Manchester and his son in Whitechapel to thank them for their help in finding those responsible for Tom’s injuries. One drink had led to another until at midnight he had thought it better if he stayed with them and made his way home in the morning, for he was worse for wear from drink and exhaustion.

  There was another reason, of course, for such an out-of-character decision, but he did not want to dwell on his need to be away from Adelia.

  He had thought that twenty-four hours would give her time to understand what had happened between them and determine which way she now wanted to proceed.

  And instead he had arrived home to chaos.

  ‘Which direction was she headed when you last saw her?’

  Mrs Hayward pointed towards the park, but even as she did so a small figure could be seen walking towards them.

  ‘Flora.’

  He was out of the door and along the road without pause and the girl came into his arms crying, her eyes swollen and the skirt of her dress torn.

  He lifted her up to check her, to see that there was not a worse harm, but everything seemed to be in order and he thanked the Lord for that.

  ‘Charlotte was taken, Uncle Simeon, in the trees of the park, for he was waiting there. The man got her and dragged her away and I tried to stop him, but
he was too strong, so I followed him across the main street and on to the road where the big church is with the bells. But then I did not see them again and I got lost and I could not remember where I was and everything looked different and the clouds got darker and I couldn’t ask anyone how to get home because Mama said I was never to talk to strangers.’

  She burst into tears and the redness of her eyes was made redder again.

  ‘It’s all right, Flora. It’s all right. I know where you went and I will go and get Charlotte. It is quite all right.’

  Mrs Hayward was beside them now and he carefully gave the child to her. ‘Take her home and comfort her and if my wife returns make sure she stays there. Don’t let her come out again. I want to know where she is and not have to worry. I will find Charlotte.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’ The child went to the housekeeper and snuggled in. For that at least Simeon was grateful.

  * * *

  Adelia heard the bells of Westminster Abbey chiming close by and knew a moment of panic. She had been out here for an hour searching and had found nothing, the words of a prayer recited again and again to a forgiving and loving God. Please let me find them. Please let me find them.

  The rain was here now, small spots which she knew would become harder ones given the colour of the clouds above. Charlotte would be terrified and Adelia had always been there for her in the scary times of her life. Now she was not. Now her sister was lost in the streets of London, Flora with her, the streets where miscreants and criminals lingered and where poverty made people do things that were unspeakable.

  She couldn’t go back to the house empty-handed. She would never be able to go back if she could not find the girls. Desperation made her shake.

  She knew who the man was the moment he approached her.

  ‘Alexander?’

  He was walking north and she knew he had come to meet her. She also knew without a doubt that he had taken the children.

  ‘Where are they? Where are Charlotte and Flora?’

  ‘Your sister is in my room. She wants you. She is safe. I don’t know about the other girl. I didn’t see her.’