Ash closed his arms about her, slow and easy, to give her an opportunity to escape if she chose, and held her like a frightened child.
The other night, before she bruised his ballocks, he had kissed her and lost his head to passion. He would not make that mistake again. He would be patient and consoling, show her that she need not fear him in any circumstance.
She sighed and closed her eyes, knowing full well where she found herself.
Ash closed his own and wondered where her sister had ended, but he dare not ask. She had not mentioned her or the babe further. He must draw his own sad conclusions.
“Are you tired?” he asked, some fifteen minutes later, when she readjusted their positions and got close enough to bruising his ballocks once again to make him sweat.
“It’s the drink. Makes me sleepy.”
“I take it you’re not afraid of me anymore?”
“Not so much, and you look sleepy too, I can tell. I do not like the way drinking makes me feel.”
“I do not I will drink again,” he said, meaning it. She’d just frightened the urge right out of him. “I believe I’d rather keep my wits about me from now on. No wonder you pulled that trigger and shot me.”
“I’m just glad I only pulled it once.”
Ash barely stopped trembling over her answer when a snuffling sound made him realize his bride had fallen asleep in his arms. If not for the drink, she would never have let her guard down this much. He knew her at least that well.
Ash rose and carried her up the stairs and toward her bed—his wife’s bed—the bed of the woman with whom he was supposed to sleep, he thought, with a bit more and less regret today than yesterday for his hasty marriage. And ‘twasn’t regret so much for the marriage now as for the way in which he married her, because damn it, he was beginning to like her, and she deserved better than a husband who’d brawled with her on her wedding day and scared the life out of her on her wedding night.
When Ash lit the candle, he saw stars, silver stars of all sizes, the ones she’d brought from the Christmas decorations, hanging by uneven lengths of sewing thread from her curtain tops to dangle in the windows and catch the sun by day or the candlelight by night, as if she were keeping Christmas in her heart.
He placed her atop the covers, brought them over her, and looked down at her. No consummation with his Christmas-in-April bride tonight, he thought, his eager body disagreeing with the pronouncement. But how could he leave her and go back to his own bed when he had set the rule that he would stay?
He needed to follow through and sleep with her every night from now on, or she would realize that a sad story, and a sleepy bride, could turn him away. “No,” he affirmed aloud. He must keep to his strategy, as Wellington would say, and sleep with her.
As Ash unwrapped her, she curled into a ball, for the bedchamber had gone cold. He wrapped her warm again, stirred the embers to flame and placed another log on the fire. He undressed himself as the chamber warmed. When it was toasty, he rolled Lark onto her back to undo the buttons down the front of her gown.
“What are you doing?” she asked, too sleepy to open her eyes or care.
“Getting you ready for bed,” he said, taking her arms from the sleeves of the cream and burgundy gown he’d encouraged her to take. “I shouldn’t have given you so much to drink,” he said as if to himself.
“I know.” Lark sighed, rolled to her side, and raised a knee, which made getting her gown over her hips and down her legs a little more difficult, but he managed.
He found her wearing her threadbare chemise, with no corset, of course, or stockings—oh God—and proceeded to strip that from her as well. Then he fetched his great grandmother’s night-rail, the one she’d chosen from the trunks upstairs, looked it over, and decided against it.
Throwing back the covers, Ash placed his wife naked beneath them. “I do the work to undress you, I make the choices,” he whispered, as he kissed her brow. “You’re a fine figure of a woman Larkin Rose Blackburne.”
Then he went around the bed, removed his dressing gown and slid beneath the covers in the same naked state as his oblivious bride. Ash slid to the center of the bed, took Larkin into his arms, and she burrowed into him—for body warmth, at least—a fine state of affairs, until she went back to sleep.
His body had no intention of resting; it had other pursuits in mind. Hard pursuits that would take a great deal of throbbing attention, and if he moved her just right in his arms, like so, he could at least snuggle that aching part of him there, at the warm moist apex of her, where he and she would be the most comfortable.
She arched when he did, not taking him in, quite, but nestling him more snugly, so that his man part did a small dance, joy and enthusiasm in one tightly-wound package, a great deal of energy with no place to go.
Ash cursed and ignored the pointless pulsing thrust, and took to savoring the feel of his bride’s skin beneath his hand, like silk or satin, unblemished and perfect. He skimmed the cleft of her spine starting at her shoulders, learned the breadth of her hips with his palm, the better to embrace and stroke. Her shoulders were wide, her waist trim. Her breasts crushed against his chest, he had yet to explore, other than in the bath, oh, and in the tree, which had nearly got him killed.
Nevertheless, he wanted a breast in his mouth. Now.
His body agreed.
He moved her again, found himself a handful, and tweaked the nipple with his thumb.
“Ash,” Lark whispered, giving him greater access.
“Lark?” he said. “Do you like this?”
She found his mouth, no doubts there, she’d initiated the kiss. As he kissed her back, he continued to tease her nipple, budding it and torturing it, and her hips came for his, not once, but twice, then a third rhythmic time.
“Lark, do you want this?”
She surged again, her hips begging for his, her breast pouting for more attention, her mouth open and greedy. Lord, she could be sensuous, but he wished she were awake.
He tried to tuck her face into his neck, pull her back into his arms, to settle and sleep. “Not tonight,” he said, for both their sakes.
When the day came that he finally took her, he wanted her to know what he was doing to her, no matter how much she seemed to appreciate sexual byplay in her sleep—her drink induced sleep, he must remember.
But she would have none of it. She whimpered and threw a leg over him, tossed her head back and her breast forward so that there was nothing he could do but take it into his mouth. A man would have to be mad to refuse such a gift.
Larkin whimpered and moaned as he suckled her, begged him to continue, if only she knew it, with each thrust of her hips. He was near to spilling his seed, but he’d only given her half his attention, and it did not seem fair.
“Lark,” he said to wake her. “Lark, love, wake up enough to know what you want.”
“Ash?” she questioned and he knew he’d gotten through.
“Lark, do you want me to touch you?”
He moved his hips to indicate his meaning. “I’ll only touch you if you want me to.”
She looked frightened for a minute, half asleep then half scared to death in two beats, but he took her hand and guided it between them, closed her palm around him. “There is nothing to fear. I am only made of flesh, see?”
Her hand on him felt divine. He could spill in a blink if he let himself. In the shaft of moonlight crossing the bed, he saw her fear recede; saw her beauty trebled the same way. His wife, he thought, almost breathless. His wife was truly beautiful.
She moved her hand along his length, tentative at first, then with a surer knowledge. She saw when she’d moved him, acknowledged the change in his breathing with a feline smile.
“Do you know what you’re doing to me?” he asked.
“Perhaps,” she said. “Is it good? Am I doing good?”
“It’s very good.” A beginning, he thought and slid his hand slowly up her leg, waiting for her to stop him, though sh
e never did. He stroked near her center, caught a throat-squeak of appreciation, stroked closer. She gasped, inviting him with a single hissed breath.
He found her nether lips, stroked them, all the while she worked him, slow and easy enough to make him burst. He turned his attention her way, knew by her reaction when he found her perfect center, worked her with the same easy rhythm she worked him, until she indicated she wanted more and faster.
Again she initiated a kiss, open-mouthed and hungry, and her tongue met his for the first time. She reached the stars then, like a cataclysm, with a scream and a gasp of shock, and then she whimpered and rolled into him, as if she had done something terrible. He soothed her and called her his own, and asked her to let him do it again, which made her regard him with wonder.
“Let me,” he said. “You liked it.”
She nodded and he touched her again, tried to go slow but they’d started from a higher plane and she reached her peak fast, then he lowered her and called her beautiful and gave her release two more incredible times.
“No more,” she finally said. “No more. I cannot anymore, er, no more. It’ll kill me.” She rolled to her side, away from him, likely embarrassed of a sudden by her hearty reaction.
Ash chuckled and curled up behind her to hold her close, him throbbing so hard ‘twas a wonder he hadn’t spilled all over her.
She looked back, likely distracted by his urgency, by his … knocking at her door, so to speak, because she looked him full in the face and furrowed her brow. “Ash, is there something more to this, for I could swear that your manhood is prodding me to action.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ash felt his face warm for the first time in twenty years. Not since a randy fourteen-year-old, invited to the hayloft by a world-wise maid, had he felt so uncomfortably embarrassed over the evidence of his arousal. “‘Tis only me, that ugly man part of me, that’s all, wanting attention too. Ignore it, it’ll go away.”
“Did I not give it enough attention? What more does it want?” she asked even as she slipped a hand between them to pet his excited man part as if ‘twere a docile kitten. And before Ash could answer, she took him in her hand again, as she had been doing while focused on her own pleasure, and she began to focus on his.
Ash groaned at the amazing amount of gratification her inexperienced hands wrought, more than he had ever experienced at the hands of even the most practiced of women. Then again, this was Larkin Rose, his own guttersnipe bride, pleasuring him. At the notion, his ecstasy increased and multiplied. Praise be, she was awake now and knew what she was about, more or less. At least she now freely gave the rapture consuming him, which made her touch the more spectacular.
“Teach me what to do,” she said, leaning over him, her breasts there for his eyes to feast upon, her nipples budding and waiting for his tongue, her offer nearly enough to bring him to culmination. Ash groaned, amazed, so grateful for her determination to gratify his sexual needs that he took her up on her offer and showed his bride how to pleasure him.
When his brilliant pupil exceeded his expectations, Ash took that budding breast into his mouth, and placed his hand at the junction of her thighs to stroke her essence in an effort to raise her with him, and so he did—so they both did—to unimagined heights. And when his bride shuddered and cried his name—Ash spilled his seed in a culmination that rocked his world.
A damned good beginning, and then some, he thought, which boded well for a consummation and marriage that might prove better than he dreamed. Sated and hopeful, Ash drifted to sleep, entwined with the Innkeeper’s talented daughter, the scent of sex all around them.
His grandfather could make enough noise to rouse the dead, Ash thought, wondering how his grandmother had stood the overbearing old rattle so many years, until he realized that his grandfather’s booming voice must mean he was here at Blackburne.
Larkin sat up as well, obviously awakened by the same burly commotion. “What is it?”
“Blast it,” Ash said. “My grandfather’s on his way up. Kiss me please and no arguing. I’ll explain later.”
Ash had no sooner taken her into his arms, and opened his lips over hers to swallow her predictable objection—for she could be contrary—when she gave him her cooperation, shocking him to his marrow, as his grandfather burst in on them.
“Well, is she with child yet or not?” said the prattling old patriarch.
Ash swore and Lark squeaked and slid beneath the bedcovers.
Annoyed to have been interrupted, when Lark had rare cooperation in mind, Ash nevertheless thanked the saints that he woke in time to present the picture of marital bliss. Judging by his wife’s thunderous expression, however, he might not have wholly managed it.
Was it the kiss—which spoke of mutual participation—the memory of the night before, or his grandfather’s crude query, that brought the heat of battle to his reluctant bride’s tiger eyes?
“Grandfather,” Ash said pulling the covers over his wife’s creamy shoulders. “That is scarcely a civilized question in mixed company.” To punctuate his pronouncement, Ash added a reproachful sound.
Nevertheless, rather than regard his grandfather as if he were daft, his bride awarded him that silent appellation with all the censure in her gaze.
A rare grin cracked the old man’s stony expression, then, as he looked from a one of them to the other. “How many weeks married?” he wanted to know, his wink blatant.
“Four,” Ash and Lark said together.
“Christmas is coming,” the aging meddler warned with a vile cackle, a more civil admonition than Ash expected, actually, and favorably vague, praise be.
Now, Ash thought, planning his next move, if he could move the old reprobate from their bedchamber before Lark gained a precipitous knowledge of the final stipulation contingent upon his becoming heir, he and his grandsire might both escape with their skins intact.
“Yes,” Ash said. “Christmas is coming, so why not go down to the dining room and get Grimsley to serve you a celebratory breakfast. I’ll be down directly to join you and discuss the situation.” He turned to Lark. “Man talk, Darling. Business. You wouldn’t care to—”
“Yes I would,” Lark said.
“Yes she would,” his grandfather echoed, and just like that, the thorns in his side appeared to unite against him.
His grandfather requested kippers for breakfast and ate mounds of them, with toast and strawberry jam, of all things, and tea and Scotch eggs too, by God. He seemed pleased as Midas that Lark preferred toast, and Ash cringed at the reason he must suspect, while the wily old codger regarded his only grandson as if he doubted Ash’s ability to perform that blasted duty.
“Christmas,” the old coot said again, pointing a chiding fork his way, in answer to which Ash simply shook his head. “No need for her to be suckling it or any such thing,” the old man added. “Just get it in the oven, will you, before the day, and you’ll be the wealthier for it.”
Caught and gutted, Ash thought, hanging his head in defeat.
Lark raised hers. “Excuse me?”
“That’s my terms. Got to follow them or forfeit the blunt,” the old man said. “Your choice, m’dear. Do not take up the gauntlet then lie down on the job.” His grandfather cackled, this time at his questionable wit, and Ash asked Grimsley for something to strengthen his tea.
Lark shook her head, reminding him of his promise the night before to drink less, and Ash sighed and shook his head after all when Grim approached. Need to be up on all counts for this at any rate, he thought.
Lark laced her hands together on the table linen and regarded his grandfather and then him, in turn. “Grandfather,” she said. “Please explain the terms of your will to me as if I had never heard them before. You know how forgetful Ashford can be when it comes to details.”
His grandfather shook his head sadly and Ash wanted to strangle her for falling in with reprobate’s age-old “remiss grandson” tirade.
“Well, as you must be aware,
” his grandfather said, forking another piece of kipper. “After Ash’s mother—my dear daughter … faded away, Ash’s no-good father gambled away the family fortune, which had actually been brought to the marriage by my daughter.”
“Right,” Lark said, as if she had known.
“And Ash, being of the same unfortunate blood as his sire, has the same regrettable tendencies, I am sorry to admit.”
Lark shook her head with regret, much as his grandfather was wont to do, Ash thought, regarding his cunning bride with daggers in his eyes. At least he hoped she could see the daggers he shot her way.
“Besides gambling too much, Ash drinks to excess as well,” she added.
“Aye, that he does, and I’m that hopeful you can break him of his filthy habits.”
“God knows I’m trying.”
His grandfather patted his wife’s hand, while Ash watched, dumbfounded as she covered those gnarled old penny-pinching fingers with her own. “Poor Grandfather. Such a trial Ashford must be. And to help him overcome his failings, you set some rules, did you not? As I said, give me the details again, if you please, in the event the unfortunate boy forgot to impart them all.”
“Damnation!” Ash said as he rose, but the two at the table ignored him, more or less.
His grandfather pointed to Ash’s chair with his fork, and Ash looked to the heavens for guidance and sat, determined to stand—or sit—his ground.
“I did it to grow him up, mind,” his grandfather said. “He needs a great deal of growing up.”
“And so he does,” Lark agreed.
“As you know, the matter is a simple one,” Ash’s grandsire told his hellcat bride. “All Ashford needs to become my heir—with your cooperation, of course, my dear, now that he has found a bride of good sense—is to get you with child before Christmas.”
To give Lark her due, Ash thought, though she paled somewhat, and appeared as if her breakfast were about to make a return appearance—which foolishly pleased his grandfather—she did not tell the old man that her husband had withheld that last appalling stipulation. Instead, she took a breath and nodded for him to go on.
Untamable Rogue (Formerly: A Christmas Baby) Page 7
