by Laura London
His warmly animate glance strayed to her firm lower lip, to the faint vibration of the pulse on the incline of her throat, and then to the swell and fall of her breasts. The golden eyes were strained as they returned to hers. “Merry, if I can’t be with you now, I don’t know how I can stay intact for one more day. Whatever was there that helped me not to take you before has gone. It seemed to vanish on the Joke on the way to England. When I heard your laugh across the deck, when I turned to look at you, I wasn’t sure each time that I could keep myself from going to you.… Love, I need you. Will you come to bed with me?”
His naked urgency shocked her as much as his readiness to show it to her. From Devon the last thing she would have expected was this blunt, almost shaken plea. Her blood flamed in answer—her breasts ached for the offered caress.
“I don’t think so,” she said, trying to maintain an expression of cool reserve. “I’ve just come from bed, and I can’t think of a single reason why I’d like to go back.” Reserve fled as he combed her with a curious smile and went to shut the door. She scampered like a hare behind a chair-backed settee near the window bench.
She had surprised him. That much was evident. He folded himself into the nearest chair and studied her impassively. Finally he said, “You could put down the flowerpot, Merry pet. I can see this won’t be a simple adjustment for you, but you’re not on the Joke anymore. One shout from you would bring the entire household and half the garden staff at a run.”
“You’re the Duke of St. Cyr. Your servants would gainsay you nothing!” she said and then immediately felt rather embarrassed. Even for her current state of burning sensitivity it sounded a little theatrical.
“You’ll find out,” he predicted. A dry smile hovered on his lips. “They’d gainsay me in a second if I tried to force myself on a woman. Whatever you might think of me, these are very respectable people. They’ve known me all my life—I was concerned they’d keep you awake for hours telling my baby stories.”
She stared at him. Then, “As a matter of fact, they did tell me one or two.”
“I hope it wasn’t the one about the time I ingested my name in alphabet tiles?”
“No. The baby cap.”
“The alphabet tiles will come.” He sighed. “Anyway, there you are. Safety.” He gave her a fresh smile that went straight to her heart. “I have an idea.”
She watched him lever himself upright, trying to concentrate on anything but the sensual promise of his limber body as he crossed the room and began to dig in a lower drawer of the desk. From a tangle of pottery marbles and ivory spillikins he collected playing cards into a deck and came to her, shuffling them.
“My mother hasn’t straightened a drawer in twenty-five years,” he said. “Don’t run. Watch.” He set the deck on a small tripod table beside the settee. “Cut them.”
He was calm suddenly, and there was a playful curve to his erotic mouth. Warily she looked at the cards, and then at his face. “Why?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute. Go on.”
She bent forward and divided the deck with an exasperated snap. “Now what?” she asked, gazing suspiciously at the back of the cards, which carried a picture of a dog balancing on a ball, jauntily tipping a striped top hat.
“Now,” he said, fanning out the cards, “we draw. One card each and the winner has his or her choice about our conjugal arrangements.”
“That’s the most preposterous thing I’ve ever—”
“Be practical, Windflower,” he interrupted with what seemed to Merry like heartless good nature. “We have to find some way to settle things. Do you have a better idea?”
“You might agree to leave me alone.”
His smile this time was new to her, breathtakingly soft and lush with whimsy. He lifted a hand to the warmth of her throat, his fingers moving in gentle inquiry over the delicate curves of her flesh. “Love, it’s the only chance I’m likely to give you. You’d better draw.”
Her heartbeat was tolling furiously. “How do I know you’d abide by the draw if I won?”
“Because I wouldn’t have proposed it if I didn’t intend to carry through.” His palm came down on the back of her hand. His fingers spread hers, lacing through them, to cup into her palm and carry her hand to the cards. In a soft imperative: “Do it.”
Pink mist rose in her cheeks as she shook off his hand. Her fingers wavered over the cards and then quickly flipped one over. Nine of clubs.
He looked at the card as though in thought before he reached out to draw his own.
“W-wait!” She herded the cards into a pile, picked them up, and studied them. They seemed to be a regular deck; but she shuffled them thoroughly and spread them out once again.
Devon’s eyes had suddenly filled with laughter. He turned over a knave of hearts.
“It’s a trick. I know it!” she said, grabbing up the cards and carrying them distractedly to the window, examining them under the dappled sunlight. One at a time she stared at them. She laid four in a row and stared at them. The same. The dog pictures appeared to be all exactly the same. The cards fell from her fingers, and she dropped her face into the open cup of her hands.
“Shall I undress,” she choked out, “or would it suffice if I lean my back to the wall and draw up my skirts?”
He moved behind her. His hands came to rest on her shoulders, sloping carefully inward to the bare skin at the base of her neck. His thumbs sought her nape, caressing her with steady ease. She could feel the soft displacement of her hair as his lips touched at random among her curls.
“What I’d like,” he said softly, “is to walk with you out-of-doors. Will you come?”
Out-of-doors was not the manicured and slightly aloof formality of Grecian summer houses, velvet lawns, and sternly perimetered flower beds edged in topiary. Devon’s home was a working farm and one of the loveliest spots on earth. The house itself, a cottage orné in pink brick peeping between strawberry trees and a weeping ash, was called Teasel Hill, for the teasel his mother grew to invite goldfinches. Yellow roses climbed busy outbuildings around a courtyard of rosy sandstone gravel where harness brasses jingled on returning teams. The scent of the forge, of buttermilk, applesauce, and clean straw mingled warmly, and through the open door of the barn Merry heard the hiss of the thresher’s flail. Colored ribbons untied and caps atumble, a group of little girls were playing trey-trip by the dairy while across the yard beneath an ironwork hoop heavy with deep-violet clematis their elders were admiring the much cross-grained block of elm resting on a farm sled that had been chosen for this year’s Yule hearth. Men stripped off their hats, and white aprons began to bob in curtsies as they saw Merry with Devon, their smiles ebullient and welcoming. Merry was discomposed by the gleam of moisture in the eyes of many of the older people as Devon introduced her to them.
Suddenly a group of five women, young wives and girls Merry’s own age broke, laughing, from the rest, and crying, “Quickly, Your Grace! This way!” they seized Merry and pulled her at a run around the delicate gray-blue spire of a juniper and through a maze of buildings to a kitchen garden. A chinked stone well crouched in a burst of azure-blue and fluffy white asters, and drawing water forth swiftly from the well, they bade Merry to drink it at once. Nervous, because teasing pranks of this sort on the Black Joke sometimes had rough endings, Merry drank and was applauded gaily.
“Look! The gentlemen are coming, and too late now!” said one young woman, whose lilac-pink dotted skirts swelled prettily with the evidence of her advancing pregnancy. “ ’Tis the marriage well, Your Grace, and it’s said that whichever spouse drinks here the soonest after they wed will rule the marriage. When I wed my Robin, he ran here straight away from St. Andrew’s Church.”
“He was the first to drink then?” Merry asked.
“Nay,” said the girl with a sparkling glance, “for I’d carried a bottle with me to the church!”
Devon received a good deal of keenly witty commiseration on his defeat from the men, as well
as laughing self-reproaches that they had forgotten to remind him about the marriage well. In the end Devon had taken Merry’s hand in his and said laughingly that all he wanted out of life was to be ruled by this small hand. Probably, Merry thought cynically, it was all for show, though the kiss he pressed into her palm tingled sparklike in her breasts.
An irresistible lad in skirts with blackberry stains on his lips was tugging on Devon’s coattails, and Merry watched Devon lift the child into his arms, telling him with a smile that he’d grown two feet at least. As though it were an old joke between them, the boy answered that he’d always had two feet, and did His Grace know that he was to have his first real trousers on Michaelmas and that Hannah More had had kittens? In a whisper: Did His Grace think the new duchess would care to see them?
The toddler’s sharp-eared grandmother was quick to say sternly that the duchess would not want to be crawling around in hay barns looking for kittens. The blackberry stains began to droop at the corners, and Merry protested impulsively that she would love to look for kittens, particularly when they belonged to such an illustrious mother.
Beaming smiles rewarded Merry’s words. Both intimidated and warmed by the delighted affection in the faces around her, only beginning to understand the intense emotion the people on Devon’s estate would feel for his wife, Merry tried to listen with an air of intelligence to a lively discussion on the genealogy of Devon’s cats while one of the young women fetched a quilt of blue plate printed textile to protect Merry’s gown for the expedition.
Hannah More lived in a distant meadow inside the thatched barn that housed feed for the cattle pastured there in the winter. Country folk were busy on the driveway near the farm; the sunburnt hedger worked among hedgerows daintily scattered with red hips of the wild rose; the milkmaid in her yoke balanced on the stepping stones of a stream whose banks were overhung with herbs and flowery shoots. A plowboy’s whistle lilted through green boughs weighted down with ruddy-cheeked apples.
The sky was a rich oiled blue, and sunny breezes licked the harvest stubble and Merry’s skirt as Devon led her through a field. Alone with him amidst the melody of thrush and blackbird, passing under plump hazelnuts on high branches, she was becoming increasingly aware of a restlessness in her body and of the closeness of his.
The barn was in a vale beside a small chestnut wood. Primroses and harebells grew near the door, and inside Devon found the kittens in the loft. Merry pulled off her pink-dyed kid shoes and silk stockings to climb the ladder and sit with him on the wide quilt.
Kittens, she discovered, loved Devon. A tiny calico ball bravely climbed his chest with unfurled claws. Shiny black paws batted at his hair, and peachy small tongues tasted his cheeks. Hannah herself slipped through the great hills of fragrant hay to sit at Devon’s hip. Black except for an immaculate white spot on her nose, she groomed the fur on her chest until apparently she felt the visit had been long enough and then carried the kittens off one by one, her tail waving proudly in the air, the end bent like a banner.
Devon had stretched out on his side, his head resting on the lazy prop of a long-fingered hand. He didn’t speak, and neither could she, but she felt the flesh on her cheeks and chest burn. The wind had tousled his hair like a lover’s hand, and in his sculptured face his eyes had an intent, sleepy glow. Through the outline of fabric she could see the long elegant muscles of his body, pressing in places against the cloth. Light poured from a high, narrow window to form a veil of woven silver touching the symmetry of his cheekbones, his shoulders, his upper thighs. Twice her eyes strayed down the line of his body and then lowered in a shaken way.
His voice, though quiet, was startling in the silence.
“Why do you look away?”
Sitting on her heels, caught in the throes of an embarrassment that was, for once, strangely pleasant, she said, “I don’t know.” As she inspected the quilt it occurred to her suddenly that his stillness was deliberate. He must be wondering whether another approach would provoke another retreat. There had been a very real curiosity in his question, and the need to search out the delicate shift of her mood. For a moment she was exasperated with her own complexity and rather ashamed that he was forced to cater to it; then she forgave herself because when it came right down to it, he wasn’t exactly simple himself. But here they were at last, married, and warily together, and in spite of everything, wanting each other. Or at least she wanted him, and he said he wanted her. Grateful, and frustrated that he had chosen this, of all times, to be patient, she plucked at a blue pucker in the quilt and said, “Devon? What does it make you feel when I look at you?”
The half smile was warm, a little rueful, and very human, his features no longer those of a beautiful and soulless idol but of a man, with his own sensitivities.
“Pleasure,” he said.
She stretched a hesitant finger and lightly stroked a fold of his white lawn shirt. “And if I touch you?” she whispered.
His eyes widened in response. In a low tone that had a faintly breathless quality to it, he said, “Touch me. I’ll try to describe it for you.”
Desire long denied was rioting in her veins as he moved invitingly closer. Her trembling fingers loosened one by one the mother-of-pearl buttons of his shirt as she watched the soft tumbling fabric open over his taut sun-gilt skin. Shy inside, and numbly aware that not much more than an hour ago she had denied hypocritically any desire to be with him, she stood up, her feet apart, her toes curling for balance on the thick quilt with its undependable foundation of hay. Devon’s gaze was passing over her in light inquiry; she saw his lips part and catch a hard breath as she put her hands behind her and began to open her gown. In a love daze she slid to her knees by him, clad only in the slippery silk and white lace of her chemise, its openwork hem teasing her thighs. Her fingers caught his shirt, spreading it slowly over the rise of his chest and the tight-knit modeling of his stomach. Beautiful, the fresh expanse of naked flesh looked beautiful to her, though she wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. But the wind-dusted fragrance of his skin was so sweet to her senses that it was making her head reel. Like one of the kittens might have done, she lay at his side, nuzzling her face into his firm belly just below his lowest ribs. Underneath the velvet luxury of his skin his chest muscles contracted harshly. He said her name once, a ragged inhalation as she showered exuberant, inexpert kisses between each rib and over the delicately fleeced curves of his chest.
“Describe it,” she whispered with husky cheerfulness, trailing the pink tip of her tongue upward, and then descending in earthy, lacing patterns.
“The word that—” His rough murmur failed. Her body pressed close to him, her breasts a soft, unconsciously thrusting caress against his hips. “Merry—” he whispered thickly. He sought her cheek with an unsteady hand, the fingers penetrating her hair, the little finger wandering lower to find and stroke the elaborate inner surfaces of her ear. “My love, the word that comes to mind”—his breathing sharpened again as her hands slid over his thighs—“is torment.”
Putting her head back with a slight laugh, she looked up into his face with its satiny eyelashes and love-flush. “You needn’t think I’m completely ignorant about what happens between men and women,” she said. With slumberous satisfaction she added, “I’ve talked to Cat.”
“Have you?” He was gently massaging her earlobe, his smile a luxuriant haze. “A masterful source. You probably know more than me. What approach did he take—skyrockets and roses, or gears and pulleys?”
His little finger wandered across the lift of her cheek to her nose, circling the petallike nostrils with his fingertip, then dropping downward to her upper lip. Her lips parted under his gentle probing and her eyes drifted closed as his fingertip barely entered her mouth, exploring the wet silk interior, carrying the moisture outward to dew her breath-dried lips.
Against his fingers she said, “Neither. We used Latin words.” Suddenly she rolled a single revolution away, her eyes brilliant with laughter. “I’
d better run back to my valise for my notes.” Stumbling upright, she swung on her heel. She stood poised as though for flight, her foot sunk within the quilt into a furrow in the surface beneath. As she shifted her feet slightly apart to catch her balance she felt Devon’s hand encircle her ankle from behind. His grip was ever so soft, a caress.
His lips touched her ankle, his breath feathering over her skin. Expert fingers began to massage her calf. The other hand stroked higher; she drew a soft, shuddering gasp as palm and fingers spanned the back of her thigh, his finger grazing the swell of her buttock. Touching his mouth to the hollow behind her knee, he pressed lightly nipping kisses there, his hair brushing the flossy softness of her thigh. Any desire she’d had to play and be silly faded into an intense need that grew dizzily under the pressure of his exploration.
“Every part of you is so dear to me,” he whispered. Kneeling behind her on the quilt, he slid a steadying arm around her waist, over the slick fabric of her chemise, its hem riding up to fan daintily at her hips. “Lovely… lovely Merry… your legs are beautiful”—the sensitive male fingers followed the silken line of her thigh upward—“so straight and strong. You can’t know how long I’ve wanted them to hold me.”
Agonized by the pressure of his arm so close to her breasts, she caught his wrist in shaking fingers and dragged his hand to her aching flesh, gasping as his fingers cupped her. Through the glossy cloth his thumb sought her nipple, prodding it to erection. The other hand slipped between her legs, caressing the heavy satin of her inner thighs.
Her eyes had drifted closed, her hands clasping his arm and wrist for support, absorbing its gentle motion as it shaped and lifted her breast and then wandered to the creamy plane above. His hand cradled her throat, soothing her thundering pulsebeat when his other hand slid under her chemise up the trembling flesh of her leg to the silky curls there. Very gently he let his fingers enter her, though not deeply, and felt the hard shivers rack her slender body and the clench of her fingers on his arm.
