Marriage Made in Hope

by Sophia James

  Tonight. Her eyes went to the clock above the mantel, only a matter of hours until it came, and he winked as he saw her interest there.

  ‘Can we walk to the top floor of the house and see the view?’ Anna asked this of Francis.

  ‘Are you scared of heights?’

  ‘No.’ Anna’s voice was becoming more and more certain and today her ill-cut hair was held back by a hairband. It suited her. So did the smile that came as Francis held out his hand and she reached for it.

  * * *

  The two of them ate that night at a table set for a king. There were lilies on the sideboard, from London Sephora supposed, their scent heavy and compelling. The silver was well polished and the plates were Sèvres, bordered in gold and aqua and monogrammed in the middle—the letter ‘D’ hung with greenery and colourful tiny flight-filled birds.

  The Earl of Douglas was almost as decorated as his plates, his jacket of green velvet and his waistcoat of a burgundy-and-saffron-embroidered silk. She had never seen Francis St Cartmail in anything other than dark and sombre hues before and though he looked well in those the bright and striking colours of tonight’s garb were breathtaking. The cabochon ruby on his little finger shone against the candles. As if he recognised what she was thinking he lifted his glass in a toast.

  ‘“A wife of noble character who can find? She is worth more than rubies.”’

  ‘I would say a man wrote that line, my lord.’

  He laughed and paraphrased quickly. ‘My wife of noble character is worth more than rubies and I have found her.’

  They both sipped at the red wine after that, a short distraction while they garnered their wits, Sephora thought, and was glad the footman hovering at her shoulder had gone. Hovering as Richard always had. She pushed the thought away and reached for a new question.

  ‘How old are you, my lord?’

  ‘Thirty-four.’

  ‘And you had not thought to marry before?’

  ‘No.’ Simply said. The dimple on his undamaged cheek was shadowed in the candlelight and there was humour in his eyes.

  ‘I saw you once before I met you properly. You were in a garden kissing a woman and not all that politely for she looked more than amorous. It was a ball, if I remember correctly, and I had stepped outside for a brief moment to gather air.’

  ‘It is the plight of a bachelor, Lady Douglas, being pounced on like that. But you have rescued me from such folly forever and I thank you for it. I never saw you at all in society. Perhaps it was because I tried to attend as few events as I could justifiably manage.’

  This was how flirting worked, Sephora suddenly thought. This cut and thrust of pleasure and coquetry. If she had had a fan she might have flicked it across her face in the practised way she had noticed others manage. A small diversion. A studied amusement.

  She felt more beautiful than she ever had before.

  ‘I’m certain I shall have to do so again, Lord Douglas. Rescue you, I mean, for I have heard your name whispered by many hopeful females after all.’

  He finished his glass of wine and set it down. ‘When I make a promise, I always keep it.’

  ‘That is indeed a comfort, my lord.’ She could not quite interpret what he meant by that. The promise of tonight? The promise of forever? The troths were all getting mixed around in her head and in the pit of her stomach another more languid feeling was growing.

  She pushed back the lacy golden shawl from her shoulders and saw his eyes flare. This dress had been carefully chosen to be within the barest whisper of modesty. At the time she had sworn she should never have the courage to wear it, but now...

  Now she rounded her shoulders and leaned forward, the ample flesh of her breasts pressing against the thinness of fabric. Francis St Cartmail’s reaction almost made her smile, but she shook away mirth and concentrated on something far more dangerous.

  ‘Richard Allerly told me he loved me constantly. The words are easy to say, you see, and when I failed to eventually believe in his sentiments I thought I should never ever wish to hear them again. Not like that. Not worthless and without value. Not parroted without any meaning whatsoever.’

  ‘You wish to know in other ways?’ His voice was silky and rough, and if they had been sitting closer she might have reached out then and touched him, to hold his fingers tightly in her own.

  But distance had its own appeal, too. A suspended moment. A deferred intimacy.

  She took another sip of her wine and watched him.

  * * *

  God, his timid innocent wife was turning into a practised siren, in her golden almost nothing sheath of a gown and with her surprising confessions. She knew how she was affecting him and that was the worst of it. He had been chased down by women ever since he could remember, but none who set his blood to boil like this one could, the words of her disclosure on love spilling into disbelief.

  She did not wish for him to give her the troth? She wanted to feel it instead, the breathless pull, the intimacy, the scent of desire.

  Go slowly, he commanded himself as the betrayal of his body filled unhearing flesh and the shock of connection drew his skin into goosebumps. There was still the whole dinner to get through, the second course only just coming from the kitchens in the capable arms of a handful of footmen bearing platters.

  Sephora pulled her lacy shawl upwards at the intrusion and smiled, the fabric settling across fine breasts and hiding the swell beneath gossamer silk. But he had seen. He knew what had been there, was there still. The sweat on his upper lip prickled with heat and he used the starched linen napkin to wipe it away.

  He had lost his appetite for everything save her, but she was thanking his man for the portion of meats just served, and he could do nothing but watch.

  ‘It is a wondrous feast,’ she said and looked up, the pale blue of her eyes in the candlelight almost see-through.

  ‘It is,’ he answered and knew he did not speak of the food.

  ‘Like artistry?’

  ‘Exactly like it.’

  When she picked up her eating utensils the light from the chandelier above caught on a tine of the fork, sending beams of colour into her hair.

  An angel. His angel.

  The thoughts of ravishment dimmed a little under this realisation and settled into a place that was more manageable. He was pleased his serving staff had withdrawn into the kitchen as he had asked them to do.

  ‘I want heirs.’

  He knew he had shocked her, but two could play at this game and he’d had far more years of practice.

  ‘How many, my lord?’

  Hell, at that moment Sephora Connaught reminded him so much of a seasoned courtesan that he laughed. A surprising twist. He could barely keep pace with the reactions of his traitorous body and he was struggling with the changeover, whereas she seemed to be relishing them.

  ‘Would four suit you, my lady?’

  ‘Two girls and two boys? A considered choice? Prescriptive. Accounted for.’ The smile was in her eyes now, too. She was teasing him, provoking him, taking his words and turning them around into something else entirely. It was so seldom that anyone else had ever managed to do that, that he was speechless.

  Shifting back in his seat he took account of what he had learned tonight about his unusual wife. She was beautiful, of course. However the beauty lay not only in her outside appearance, but inside in kindness, humour and honesty. She was also clever, ruthlessly so, a woman who might turn a conversation completely on its head and smile through his confusion.

  The third thing worried him the most. She was so damned sexy he felt like taking her then and there on the rug in the dining room in front of a burning fire, just to see how the flame glowed on the white of her skin and the sheen of her breasts and the pale gold in her hair.

  ‘So, you wish for a fruitful marriage without any mention of love? The act but not the words?’

  ‘The truth rather than the falsity.’ She was quick with her reply.

  ‘When I see Winbu
ry next time I think I am going to knock that damn head off of his shoulders.’

  She laughed, but quietly, as if in his troth she found a certain solace.

  ‘I would hope that you do not. He is a man whom I have left behind, a weak man I think, and half a lifetime is too many years to regret. If I could ask you for anything it would be for honesty.’

  He smiled. ‘Honesty can have its bite, too, Sephora. What would you say if I told you I want to take you to my bed right now and show you the true beauty of what can be between a man and his wife?’

  She stood then, taking the linen serviette from her lap and placing her fork and knife carefully on her plate.

  ‘I would say, my lord, that I am finished with dinner.’

  * * *

  The Earl of Douglas made her brave and different. He did not hide behind words but said them to her face in a way that she could not fail to understand the meaning. He wanted her and she wanted him, but the wants were not coated in falsity or childishness or arrogance.

  She did not shiver or shake or cower either. Perhaps it was the wine or the fire or her meeting with Richard Allerly yesterday. Most certainly it was the look in Francis St Cartmail’s eyes and the way he smiled, without any hint of deceit, a man who knew his wants and needs and let her know it too.

  He did not move up beside her to thread his arm through her own but waited for her to come to him. Her choice. His acceptance. The superfine of his jacket sleeve beneath her fingers was soft and they went up the stairs without speaking into his bedchamber.

  His was a big room; the double-hung French doors leading to a balcony that looked out over the countryside and the lake. But it was not this vista her eyes went to. The four poster bed was hung with tapestries curled onto mahogany rods and plaited with multicoloured ties. The coverlet was of embossed blue velvet to match the shade of the walls. Eight-hour scented candles burned quietly on each side table next to it.

  A Lord’s bed, an earl’s lair, for the whisper of history was imbued in the oil portraits on the walls and in the intricacy of the old wooden carvings.

  But he did not rush her. Rather he crossed to a small cabinet and poured out two glasses of wine before drawing her over to an alcove before a fire.

  ‘Here is to you, my beautiful Lady Douglas. May we grow old together in lust.’

  She liked his toast, the truth of what he said in his eyes, just as she liked the taste of the wine and the feel of the fire. Draping her shawl across a nearby chair she turned to face him. Perhaps it was her turn now to talk of the truth. She drained her glass and placed it down.

  ‘I have not ever...’ Her glance went to the bed.

  ‘Then we will go slowly.’

  ‘And I worry...’

  He stopped those words with a finger full drawn against her lips. ‘Shh. There are no rules.’

  The same finger began to trace a different path, across her top lip and around one cheek before falling to her chin and neck and then lower. She shivered, but it was not from the cold. All she knew was burning heat and closing her eyes against the intensity of him she simply felt. No rules he had said, neither right nor wrong.

  The pad of his finger rose across the swell of her breast and then the flimsy silk was parted and he found the heavy weight of flesh and measured it in his palm. Relentlessly, quietly, his fingers now around her nipple, playing with the nub so that a thousand other feelings burst inside her and she pressed closer.

  ‘Let me have you, Sephora. Let me love you.’ These words were breathed against her skin, whispered and desperate, the shock of them crawling up her spine before bursting open.

  ‘Yes.’ She found her reply and gave it, her want the echo of his own and naked with hope.

  His teeth came down over one breast, taking exactly what he willed. A considered vanquish, a well-thought-out triumph. It was not anxiety that consumed her now but bliss and her fingers came through the length of his hair, the tie gone as it fell down around his shoulders in a thick and midnight black.

  Her husband. Her lover soon. Every thought melded into one until there was no logic left as he lifted her in his arms and placed her down upon the bed.

  * * *

  She was small and he was large. He was dark and she was fair and in her pale eyes he could see both acceptance and fear in equal measure. But she lay there still, looking up at him, her bodice falling about her waist, her breasts exposed to the candlelight and the firelight and the moon.

  He wanted to see her when they came together. He did. He had never liked the darkness and she was far too beautiful to hide in it.

  Pulling the skirt of the golden gown upwards his hand spilled under silk, past gossamer stockings of white, past the satin ribbons at her thigh. Up into the very warmth of her, a single lace barrier that he disposed of quickly before he came in.

  She gasped and began to ride him, head thrown back and her bottom rising, no longer fearful only questing, her breath louder, the veins at her neck stretched. He laid his other fingers splayed upon her stomach and pressed down, feeling himself beneath in the flesh of her, detecting movement. Harder. Quicker. Deeper.

  She came like a flame burst, all heat and light and burning, the muscles inside tightening as she took what he gave her without reserve, low groans of pleasure breaking over the final stillness. The wet of her ran through his fingers and there were tears on her cheeks and astonishment in her eyes when she opened them.

  ‘Now you are ready for me.’

  ‘There is more?’

  He laughed, but the sound held more lust than mirth. ‘Ah, Sephora, love, but we have only just begun.’

  She watched as he undressed himself, too languid to help. The jacket and shirt came first and then the neckcloth, the snowy unwound whiteness revealing the dark crimson scars beneath.

  ‘From a rope,’ he said as he saw she watched him. No more details. No more emotion. Just the plain fact as to what had happened across the terrible truth of the result.

  She wanted to reach up and touch him there, to reassure him, to comfort him, but he had moved now to the fall of his trousers and the tug of his shiny black boots. And then he was naked, his skin golden in the firelight, muscle defined and sinew rising. Other old injuries, too, showed up on his body; a slice of wound beneath the reddened injury from the bullet and two more parallel scars at the top of his arm.

  A warrior’s body, beautiful, strong and defined.

  But when her eyes dropped lower she forgot to think at all, the full and aroused masculinity wondrous and terrifying. She knew what a naked man looked like because Maria had found an old broadsheet folded into a book with a lewd drawing upon it. The illustration on the page, however, had not quite explained the truth of flesh and desire in a man like Francis St Cartmail.

  Her fingers of their own accord reached out and touched him, the rock-hard warmth of smoothness less worrying within her palm, fitting there as though it was meant. When he groaned and stretched she knew she was doing to him as he had done to her and her fingers explored further. The light touch of knowledge drawing a picture for her, understanding his secrets.

  And then his hand came across her own and he drew her up against him, the golden sheath of her gown falling as liquid to the floorboards, a small puddle of the last veil between them, the final revealing. She could see it in his eyes that he thought her beautiful, but it was his hands that traced her outline, down the side of her breast and on to the curve of her waist and then lower into the warmth between her legs.

  This time he simply sat and lifted her onto the hardness of him, slowly slipping in, one inch and then two, until resistance loosened and he was buried far inside.

  She cried out as the pain stung, but he did not release her. Rather he moved slowly and by degrees, allowing her the familiarity and the fullness, the feel of him stretched across her flesh until she thought she might simply break open like a peach falling from the fruit tree in the late summer.

  Split with ripeness.

  He mo
ved again and another feeling warred with the first. Not as sore now, not as hot, and he always returned to that first final deepness.

  ‘Feel me there, Sephora. Feel me wanting you.’

  Whispered words, against the heavy beat of her heart and the shallow pulls of breath, the quiet ease of gentling against the sharp edge of triumph.

  His other hand grasped her bottom as he began to move, with force, with strength, no soothing movements now but the full measure of lust.

  And instead of pain came ecstasy, thin and quiet at first before crouching to spring fully formed into every part of her body, tearing away restraint as she cried out loudly.

  But still he did not allow her rest.

  ‘Come with me, sweetheart, come with me now.’

  And the light filled her, like honey and sunshine, shimmering through the heat, taking will and purpose and preference, the urgency from him at odds with all that was languid inside of her as he pressed in one last time and stiffened, breath gone and eyes closed against the light, the beaching waves of release covering each of them, pulling them home.

  Neither of them moved, still coupled together, a new union rising from the separate.

  ‘Sephora,’ he breathed out when he could finally talk. ‘I think that you just took me to Heaven.’

  And she laughed at that and felt him leave her, a residue of wetness that had her reaching down though his own hand fell to cover hers.

  ‘No. Take me in. Take me inside when you sleep.’

  And so with only a gentle push of a different fullness and a slight shift of her body, she did.

  * * *

  When Sephora awoke, Francis was no longer there and the light from the opened curtains told her it was well past her usual time of waking.

  The realisation of why had her turning into the pillow. She had been wanton and shameless, the ache in her lower body underlining her thoughts.

  In the night, when the stars were still high in the sky, she had reached out for him and drawn him in yet again, startling him into wakefulness as she had played with sleeping flesh until new purpose had formed.

  She had sat above him pushing back the covers so their skin was limned in moonlight, the long lines of flesh and bone made unreal somehow by the dimness. He’d kissed her afterwards, his tongue finding hers and they had shared breath and warmth and safety.