Mrs. Abeel had explained the act so Elizabeth wasn’t tense her first time, despite her innocence. But the profound connection she felt in Clun’s embrace was overwhelming, its power frightening. He surged into her and receded again and again. And she let him sweep her up and away. Off she floated, clinging to him, holding him deep within her. Sweaty and panting, both cried out with relief when her tension finally exploded and ebbed away in lingering pulses. Not long after he, too, found his release.
After the maelstrom, he lay next to her, holding her close. She nestled into his warmth, tired yet more alive than ever before.
“Are you exhausted, poor old Lord Clun?” She stroked his heaving chest as he lay on his back, an arm flung overhead.
“Dare I admit it?” He replied. “And you?”
“No, I am over stimulated.” She toyed with his closest nipple. It was the tiniest button on a broad, sweaty slab of muscle. Just below his ribs she found a silvery puckered scar the diameter of a shilling.
“What’s this?” She touched the scar.
“I was shot once and twice blessed.”
“Blessed to be shot?”
“No. Blessed that it missed my lung, and that I don’t remember a thing. Seelye brought me back behind our lines somehow.”
“You’re much larger than he, how’d he manage it?”
“Won’t say. Told me I’d disapprove his methods.”
“How could you disapprove?”
“If he says I would, I know not to ask.”
She hummed and caressed him until another thought occurred to her, “Why is adultery called ‘criminal conversation’?”
“It’s a euphemism, Bess.”
“Well, obviously,” she snorted. “But talking would only distract from the experience, which is—”
“Hmm?” He smiled.
“Unforgettable,” she sighed. “But there should be a better term.”
He fell silent for a time. “Ill joy,” he suggested at last. “Illicit joinery.”
“That’s carpentry, Clun, I think not.”
“Then I leave it to you,” he whispered sleepily.
“But I welcome your opinion.”
“In which case, it’s my opinion we marry with all speed. In London,” he whispered into her ear. “Everyone here, except Roddy and Cook, thinks we’re married. I’d rather not upset the staff. As for a better term for adultery, it’ll never apply unless you plan to cuckold me.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said, soothed by the rumbling good humor of the big, warm, whimsical man beside her. She slung her arm across his broad chest. “I’ve grown rather fond of dear, old, decrepit Lord Clun.”
“You have my sympathy,” he whispered and kissed her forehead. “I am a trial.”
* * *
Waking first the next morning, Clun leaned over Elizabeth as she lay gloriously naked in his bed. Her hair tumbled over the pillows and she still glowed from their lovemaking. He could happily hover like a moth and watch her for hours. It was a trite simile to be sure but no less true. He couldn’t resist her.
Clun finally pulled himself from their bed, dressed and hurried to the kitchen to have bath water heated. He, Roddy and the handful of servants in residence soon hauled up enough hot water to the baron’s suite to fill a large tub for her.
Elizabeth burrowed shyly under the eiderdown to hide among the rumpled sheets smelling of lavender and their lovemaking.
“Your bath awaits, my lady,” Clun whispered to her when they were alone.
Chapter 36
In which the cats play while the mice are away.
As tired and sore as she was, Elizabeth never felt more cherished than when Clun emptied the last copper of steaming water into the tub and came for her. He rolled up his sleeves, threw back the covers and lifted her from the rumpled bed as if she were a wisp (which she wasn’t). After he settled her into the hot, scented water, he lathered a bar of soap in his hands. She sighed for as long as she had breath when he began to bathe her.
Had she not known it to be a physical impossibility, she’d have sworn his ministrations reduced her bones to aspic.
What she liked best, though, was his concentration. He focused all his attention on her. He gazed in wonder everywhere his big hands touched her as he bent to his task. He soaped her shoulders and breasts, taking excessive care with her nipples till she giggled and swatted his hands away. He stroked lower to her belly and teased at her navel. Lower still, he stroked gently between her legs and sent renewed waves of desire pulsing through her. She moaned and held his hand still against her. He looked up at her, worried.
“Oh, Clun,” she sighed.
“What? Did I hurt you?”
“No.”
He bowed his head and murmured, “Perhaps I was over-enthusiastic last night.” He became engrossed with washing her arm, caressing it in a firm, soothing, soapy grip from shoulder to fingertips. “It was your first time, I should’ve been gentler.”
She shook her head ‘no’ and pulled his face to hers for a kiss.
Mistaking her denial for forbearance, he said, “I’ll do better next time, Bess.”
“Heaven help me if you do,” she moaned and sank nose deep in the bathwater. She blinked at him, the corners of her smile just above the water’s surface.
It was as if the heavens opened and lit his face. Clun smiled back at her in a way she’d never seen. Before her eyes, happiness settled over him. She saw it relax his features. It softened his lips into a teasing, boyish half-smile and deepened his solitary dimple. And it warmed his dark eyes as he held her gaze. She felt inordinately proud of herself for having inspired that grin.
* * *
With most of the staff in Wales packing up the baroness’ personal effects for removal to the Ludlow dower house, Clun and Elizabeth were left almost completely on their own at The Graces. They wore two of his shawl-collared dressing gowns all day — hers engulfed her but she loved the scent of him next to her skin. They played catch-me, catch-me and kiss-chase in the unpopulated rooms and echoing corridors. While at play, they thundered up and down stairs and through communicating rooms, laughing so hard the captured could not kiss properly when caught. They ran in bare feet chortling and roaring like manic children escaped from their dour nanny. They did, that is, when they managed to venture from the vast, rumpled baronial bedstead.
Before the New Year, Clun managed to take care of some estate business. He sent a formal letter to commission Sir Thomas Lawrence for a portrait and sent word to Fewings in London by express courier telling him to ‘warn’ the baroness something was afoot at the castle to bring her bustling back.
It was time he faced the Fury.
Venturing into the study that afternoon, his lady proposed a game of hide-and-seek. The lord of the manor agreed, provided the seeker earned a boon upon finding the hider. To this, the lady agreed with some misgivings. The lord of the manor also graciously volunteered to seek first and began counting rapidly to 50 without further warning.
His lady squealed in outrage and scampered off while he continued to count at what she yelled was a “grossly unfair speed.”
Clun heard her patter up the stairs from the second floor and started following her by the time he was rattling off “35-36-37-38.”
“Cheater!” echoed down from the hallway above. “Of all the devious, dirty tricks. Wretched scoundrel!”
“All’s fair, love,” he called out as he stormed up the stairs finishing the count as he started his search.
He heard an answering squawk and indignant mutterings continue in the distance. Sound carried beautifully in the empty corridor. He sought her by taunting her and then listening for muffled grumbles of irritation coming from furniture in each room.
At the end of the hall, he detected barely audible grumblings as he listed possible boons.
“I have it,” he concluded. “I shall pour cream in your navel, love, and lap it up like a cat.”
On tiptoe, he crept up to an obs
treperous wardrobe and threw open its doors. She squealed. He demanded his boon even before she could unfold herself from the armoire. She refused flatly to serve as his saucer of cream, pleading ticklishness. Naturally, his boon involved allowing him to find every hidden, ticklish place on her body. Not surprisingly, their game stalled when opponents made thorough, languid love on the unused bed.
* * *
After the exhausted pair revived themselves from Cook’s larder, Elizabeth became the seeker and Clun the sought.
Not being a “wretched cheat like a certain someone who shall remain nameless,” she gave Clun the full count to 50. She regretted it immediately. After searching fruitlessly for the baron through the saloons on the first floor, and the unoccupied second and third floor bedrooms, she headed back to the baronial bedchamber to await his triumphant reappearance. Instead, she discovered him sprawled atop his bearskin rug.
“What took you so long?” He huffed.
Clun lay on his back, his hands behind his head, wearing a smile. Nothing else. Lounging at his ease, his upper arms and chest bulged with muscle. Her eyes swept slowly downward. She took in the sleek ripples of muscles across his belly and followed an emphatic line of dark hair from below his navel lower to where his cock rose proud from its lush nest.
“It’s a vast place, you beast.” She sauntered toward him slowly and watched his erection respond.
“Being such a clever puss, I expected you to find me in no time. I’ve been here so long I had to light a fire. A naked man prefers not to lie around in the cold, Bess,” he confided. “Bad things happen to his best parts.”
She couldn’t help smiling back at him.
“Ah.” She let her borrowed dressing gown slip from her shoulders and placed her feet on either side of his hips. “It never occurred to me to look here.” She swept her long hair over one shoulder to stare down at him.
“Learned that from you, to go where I’m least expected.”
His eyes slid up her inner thighs and lingered at her downy sex. Although they’d sated their hunger for each other many times already, the way his eyes devoured her made her feel at once overwhelmed and powerful. She stood over him like the Colossus of Rhodes and in his avid gaze she felt like one of the Seven Wonders of the World. How she loved him for this, too.
“Unfair of you to use my own strategy against me, my lord,” she murmured.
“But clever for a lummox.”
“Mmm, very. What am I to do with you, William?” She sighed.
“I’ve not the slightest idea, but I fear you must do something!”
“I suppose I must.”
* * *
Clun stared up at the glorious Amazon straddling his body.
“Perhaps it’s best I leave our future in your capable hand,” he said and moaned as she slowly settled on his thighs and grasped him firmly. “Name your boon, madam.”
His lordship flexed his hips suggestively and let her do with him what she would. She wished first to map with her fingertips the engorged, branching veins that fed his erect length. She made a thorough exploration of his organ from its swollen head down to delve gently between his legs. And she cupped his sac, weighing and rolling him softly in her palm. She sent bolts of lust crackling through him. He remained still with great, trembling effort. But not silent. There was no biting back his throaty moans, as she touched him, tasted him and committed him to memory.
Gently, he drew her down to lie on his chest and her hair fell in a silken curtain around them. In that bower, he made love to her again.
Several days passed riotously as they occupied themselves in all manner of games. They laughed and loved almost as much as they dodged about squealing and taunting. It was a time out of time. The years rolled back and they frolicked with each other, happy as they’d never been as children. Dressed or not, especially when not, they studied one another with the unselfconscious curiosity of young lovers.
Having anticipated their wedding night, repeatedly, Clun assumed there would be no harm in anticipating some of the honeymoon as well. So without explanation one clear, wintry day, he took Elizabeth up before him in the saddle and together they rode to the woodsman’s cottage. He said nothing even as he opened the low door for her.
She balked on the threshold. “Clun, we mustn’t. It’s occupied.”
On the table sat a basket with a bottle peeking out, cloth-wrapped packets of meat, cheese and a loaf of bread. Tall beeswax tapers burned and illuminated the small, clean room. Embers glowed in the hearth.
“No, it’s not.”
She took in the cloud-like eiderdown at the foot of the bed, made up with clean, pressed linens and a drift of pillows at its head. The counterpane was turned down in welcome. She turned back to him to argue, “But someone’s refurbished it.”
“At my direction.” He drew her inside and closed the door. “I’d thought to bring you here after we wed. Then you came to your senses and refused me. So, I had to haul you back to London instead.”
“Oh, Clun.” She kissed him sweetly and whispered in his ear, “Make a roaring fire, I want your parts at their best.”
The day after New Year, the baroness descended on The Graces. Penfold showed her ladyship into Clun’s library, where she found her son, looking smug as a fishmonger’s cat, and Lady Elizabeth Damogan, in a similar, self-satisfied state. She blinked from one to the other. No one offered an explanation so she spat out, “Well, what is the meaning of this?”
“This? Well, Bess and I have—” he trailed off and looked at his betrothed.
“Negotiated our differences,” Elizabeth supplied before choking on something.
“Not this,” Lady Clun waved her hand dismissively back and forth between them. “This couldn’t be more obvious. One can hope for an heir, at least.” She fixed her son with her coldest gaze. “No, I refer to the castle. Where are my servants, Clun?” She demanded. “And what are your servants doing there?”
“They are doing my bidding, Mother.”
“In point of fact, they have overrun my castle.”
“My castle.”
“The castle where I have spent my entire life since I was eighteen and newly wed, Clun, do not be obtuse. What’s more, you’ve turned off my staff.”
“Not most of them.”
“Those who remain are insolent and disobliging. I will not have it.”
“No, you won’t have to. Your familiars now staff the hall in Ludlow.”
“Ludlow! That’s…It’s been shuttered since— Oh. You expect me to live in the dower property?”
“And embark on the next phase of your life as the dowager baroness. In the Ludlow dower house. Just as custom and I require. Of course, you may make use of the place in London.”
“That will do nicely. I much prefer North Audley Street.”
“Not my place, the house on Russell Square.”
“Russell Square,” she strangled saying it. “You cannot mean for me to live on the fringe.”
“Life is full of disappointments or so you’ve always told me.”
She was silent for a moment.
“And surprises,” Lady Clun pursed her lips and gave the couple a thorough once over. “I am not pleased, Clun. No one on earth can make Russell Square comme il faut,” her ladyship declared. “And what of my birds?”
“I expect you’ll want to have some with you. To lend an exotic flare to your new address,” he said. Having feasted on love to his heart’s content for days, Clun found himself in a magnanimous mood. “If anyone can make Russell Square fashionable, Mother, it’s you. What’s more, I shall underwrite the renovations you deem necessary. See if that doesn’t bring ton friends to your door.”
She sniffed and Clun arched an eyebrow. She swallowed her retort.
“Lady Clun, I hope you will attend our wedding,” Elizabeth said, “after you’ve had time to settle in.”
“To be clear,” Clun interjected, “we will not postpone the wedding for any reason, Bess.”
Elizabeth smiled back at him and confirmed, “As you say, we’ll marry in London without delay.”
“I will,” Lady Clun replied her mouth puckered as if eating lemon peels. “Thank you for asking, though it seems rather after the fact.” She huffed and looked away.
“If there is a whisper to that effect anywhere, from any quarter,” Clun spoke in a slow, menacing tone, “you will find the Russell Square place sold out from under you and no alternative but Ludlow for life.”
She blinked her pale aquamarine eyes. “Of course, I understand, no need for theatrics.” She paused, as if there was something else she wished to say, shook her turbaned head and set her plumes writhing. “Well, there’s much to do. I can make Ludlow by sunset if I start immediately.” With that, she swept from the room.
“Perhaps there’s a nicer option for your mother among the London properties in my dowry.”
“First let her accustom herself to our convenience. In a year or two, you’re welcome to offer her another place.”
The day before Twelfth Night, Clun returned Elizabeth to the Earl of Morefield’s London residence for the second and last time. (Her maid Washburn rode in a second carriage so he could be alone with his Bess.) In this instance, his betrothed did not fling herself from the moving carriage risking life and limb to escape him. This was progress, he noted with satisfaction. She also kissed him like a wanton in the privacy of the closed carriage before descending from it like a lady with his help.
Soon, he and Elizabeth sat on one side of the earl’s vast book-stacked desk in his library. The earl sat in his chair on the other side.
When Elizabeth told her father she’d decided to marry Clun after all, the earl’s face stiffened.
The Baron’s Betrothal: An On-Again, Off-Again, On-Again Regency Romance (The Horsemen of the Apocalypse Series) Page 30
