But as fate would have it, sleep and reflection were not foremost in his mind.
It occurred to him, as MacKenzie’s train rumbled out of the station, that he was finally, for the first time in this journey, alone with his wife—a woman he was legally permitted to strip naked and worship at his leisure, though his conscience bid him to keep his hands and other interested parts to himself. Of course, “alone” was a figurative consideration, at best. The yard at the local inn was elbow-to-elbow with men making boastful wagers on the outcome of the annual horse race in nearby Wetherby. The smell of spilled ale and sweating bodies hung thick in the air. Apparently unwilling to wait for their sport, two men had stripped off their shirts in a corner of the yard and were exchanging punches in front of the jeering crowd.
He promptly abandoned his initial hope of procuring two rooms and instead insisted on one. Because there was no way he was leaving Julianne alone in her room tonight, given the way his temper flared against the ungentlemanly whistles that followed her into the inn.
His gesture seemed a little less gallant, however, when he saw the room they were given. Patrick tossed Julianne’s bag onto the narrow mattress and eyed it with a groan. His hope for two beds had come to naught, it seemed. Gemmy faced a more peaceful night than he did, already curled up in a pile of straw in the stables at the direction of the innkeeper. He ought to join the terrier there. But one look at Julianne, and he knew he wouldn’t. He’d not missed the speculative looks cast her way by the men downstairs, nor appreciated the stab of jealousy such attention spiked in his blood. The lace shawl draped over her shoulders provided some cover, but it could hide neither the low cut to her bodice, nor the fact that hers was an impressive bosom, by anyone’s estimation.
“Were you going to prepare for bed?” he asked, already unbuttoning his own shirt. The noise of the crowd could still be heard below stairs, but the solace of the room promised some respite from the muffled roar of inebriated patrons.
She averted her gaze to the hopeful white curtains that hung on the room’s windows. “Perhaps you could go down and instruct them to send someone up to help me undress.”
Patrick shrugged out of his shirt and unbuttoned his trousers, even though his fingers itched to be offered access to a different set of buttons.
Namely the ones on his wife’s bodice.
“Given the crowd we left below, I doubt they can spare someone tonight,” he told her. “I can help you with your gown.”
Two bright spots of color stained her cheeks, whether as a consequence of his emerging state of undress, or his offer to facilitate a similar state for her, he couldn’t discern. “You are an earl, Patrick. ’Tis unseemly to be engaged in such menial tasks. And if you explain your position, they’ll likely do anything you ask of them.”
Her presumption that undressing a lady was something a man considered menial was something he itched to correct in action, if not words. “My title is uncertain until I petition the Crown and present evidence of my claim,” he pointed out. “And while they might leap to do my bidding below stairs, you saw the crowd they are facing. I would not ask it of them tonight, not when they are so busy.”
“Your claim is presumed when the line of succession is direct. I daresay a petition isn’t even needed, unless you plan to take your father’s seat in the House of Lords. And if you had been a little more forceful below stairs, it seems assured we would be enjoying the pleasure of two rooms tonight instead of arguing here in one.”
Patrick kicked off his boots, then stepped out of his trousers. She couldn’t know it, but petitioning to take his father’s seat was not just important—it was an outright necessity, according to MacKenzie. And just as concerning, Julianne’s obvious worry over the single room told him that she was as hesitant to repeat their wedding night as he was. Of course, his hesitancy was because he didn’t want to hurt her.
Hers was because he already had.
Tomorrow would see them delivered to Summersby, where they would face the disaster of her father’s outrage and his own uncertain reunion with his mother and sisters. He would be distracted at best, arrested at worst. If he was to convince Julianne that their marriage bed was more than a duty, this room and this night might be the only opportunity he would see for weeks. A selfish part of him wanted to prove he was a better man than the fumbling idiot who had hurt her on their wedding night.
Patrick stepped toward her, and was relieved when she did not shrink from his approach, although those flags of color on her cheeks expanded to suffuse her entire face. He leaned in, sliding past the temptation of her flushed skin to find her ear.
“What bothers you more, Julianne? That your husband doesn’t act like an earl?” He took her earlobe between his teeth and laved it gently, enjoying the gasp of surprise the simple motion wrenched from her lips. He released his prize to whisper, “Or that you might discover the sharing of one room is far more pleasurable than two?”
“Most definitely the former,” she said, but her words ended on a breathy undertone.
He leaned back to a safer vantage point and studied her, from the flush expanding southward down her neck to the curve of the ear he had just held between his teeth. She was a mind-numbing set of contradictions, a living puzzle he was not sure he could ever sort out. She housed an armada of inappropriate frocks in her bag, any one of which might have been worth more than his entire year’s salary as a veterinarian in Moraig. And yet he’d also seen her give an entire guinea to a ragged child begging at the entrance of the Glasgow train station. She claimed she was uninterested in the sort of pleasure he was offering, but the cues of her body were telling him otherwise. These details had begun to define her as someone different from whom had he expected when he had taken those damnable vows.
But they did not yet provide a clear picture of who she was.
“If you would simply trust me, and turn yourself over to what I have in mind, you might find you actually enjoy it,” he told her.
For a moment, her mouth opened in surprise. But then her chin thrust out and she offered him an indelicate sniff. “Well, whatever else you have in mind, I pray it involves your bath.”
A raucous cry of victory went up in the yard, just outside their window. Someone had won a round, apparently. It was clear Julianne thought she had won too. He smothered his own answering grin as he turned toward the washstand.
His wife would soon learn that winning a round was not the same as winning the fight. The state of his hygiene was something he could fix.
And given that this room was roughly the size of a pauper’s cell, she was just going to have to bloody well watch.
Julianne struggled to remind herself that this was her husband pouring water from the pitcher into the washbasin not two feet way. She’d spent a frustrated few days, wishing for even a single moment of privacy in which she might apologize and beg his forgiveness.
But always, always, there was an audience. A public room meal, taken elbow-to-elbow with veritable strangers, or else Mr. MacKenzie’s constant, grating shadow, interrupting what she needed to say. And at night, when she ought to have been sleeping in her husband’s arms, there had been solid walls and turned keys, ensuring her confession must hold for another day.
Now they were finally alone, but Julianne was hard-pressed to find the presence of mind to form a complete sentence, much less a carefully constructed apology. In this tiny room, Patrick’s every movement was delivered in perfect, torturous focus. And while she couldn’t decide if she recommended the experience, she lacked the good sense to avert her eyes.
He dragged the cloth over his chest, and her eyes wanted to linger over the way his muscles bunched and knotted across his back. The other men who had paid her court these past three Seasons—well-groomed men, appropriately pale, the silver buttons on their waistcoats already straining against the soft middle that would eventually claim them—had never made her body tighten in such delicious anticipation.
She was acutely aware of
the rattle of the windowpanes in response to the crowd below, but that was nothing in comparison to the scrape of her pulse. Her senses were heightened to the point of pain. Even the usual press of her clothes felt heated and unnatural.
He completed the cursory swipe over his shoulders and neck, small rivulets of water running down his back and disappearing into the waistband of his smallclothes. And then—unbelievably—he wrung out the washcloth and turned around to face her.
“You cannot be through,” she protested.
A slow grin claimed his mouth, and he held out the washcloth. “If you have something different in mind, by all means feel free to provide a demonstration.”
Julianne’s stomach churned, though it was an agreeable sort of distress. “That isn’t the role of a wife.” Although truly, she had no idea whether it was or not. She had no maternal figure to ask, and this was not the sort of thing one asked a father.
“You would relegate the business to a servant then? Perhaps the maid you asked for earlier?”
He was teasing her, of course. She was beginning to sort out the nuances of his tone, the stern disapproval from the humor that ran below his stony surface. Somehow, the thought of Patrick disrobing in front of a servant made her feel oddly ill. She swung her legs off the bed and stalked toward him, aching with a strange, sullen need to show him—in no uncertain terms—she would not be compared to a maid.
Or, at the very least, she would not be compared to one and found lacking.
She snatched the cloth from his outstretched hand and plunged it into the washbasin. With hard, jerky moves, she began to scrub him down. He stood stock-still for her, letting her do her worst. She focused on his back a good minute, reasoning that if he couldn’t reach it properly, she would. She refused to let her hand—or her imagination—wander too far afield. It seemed safer, somehow, to stick to the obvious parts.
But as she moved around to his chest and its scattering of light brown hair, she began to forget the indignity of the task she had been assigned. Her hand slid over the architecture of his torso, traced the masculine contours of muscle and bone, and she felt a complementary tightening in her core, a feminine spooling of want that left her mouth dry and her fingers shaking.
“Ah . . . you might . . . that is, I think my chest is now quite clean.” He lifted a hand and motioned in a southerly direction. “Were there other parts you felt needed washing?”
His voice pulled her determined focus from his chest and aimed it toward the more perilous parts of his person. He was practically daring her to touch him.
The feel of his heart thudded below where her fingers clasped the washcloth. The promising start to their wedding night had been eclipsed by messiness and pain by the end, but tonight she felt tossed back to those beginning strains of desire. The rhythm of his heart beneath her palm, the in-and-out cadence of his lungs, these things had hold of her now. And so despite the fact she had no idea what to expect, or what to do with what she might find, down his abdomen she went, the cloth tripping over ridged planes of muscles that brought to mind a washboard.
Not that she knew what to do with one of those either.
Her free hand dipped scandalously under the drawstring of his smallclothes and, after a moment’s hesitation when she warred with her instinctive aversion to all things . . . well . . . messy, her fingers closed over his heated, hard length. It surprised her, this first touch of this most private part of him. She’d paid it scarcely any mind that first night. It was smoother than she had imagined, and far more potent in its capacity to disarm her.
She tightened her fingers, almost experimentally, and caught his indrawn hiss of breath that suggested her touch had surprised him too. He wanted her. This was no nagging suspicion, no beautiful doubt. She held the evidence firmly in her hand.
“What do you want, Julianne?” His voice was a question, and yet it was a demand.
What did she want?
More. The word whispered in her ear.
She wanted this marriage to be more than a solution to save her from ruin, more than a means of forcing Patrick’s return home. She wanted his forgiveness, and yes, his admiration. Since leaving Moraig, she’d been plagued by the unsettling certainty that her reputation had not, in fact, been in imminent danger. All during three long days of travel, she’d sat in the coach beside him and wondered what he was thinking behind his serious mask.
And all through two lonely nights, she’d slept in a bed without him and wondered what he was thinking behind his private walls.
Why had he married her, if not to preserve her reputation? Could he have wanted to?
Could he have wanted her?
The clinical scent of the soap provided by the posting house breached the space between them, and she felt nicked by the sharp, unfamiliar edges of the fragrance. She slowly withdrew her hand, afraid to continue touching him in this way without voicing these thoughts. She could grasp what should come next. Marital relations were part and parcel of being a wife, perhaps the only part of the position she truly understood. She had viewed the loss of her virginity on their wedding night as something wholly necessary. Her innocence had been dispensed with in proper British fashion: quickly, the completion of a contract, an apology issued thereafter.
But the way her heart was flinging itself against her ribs felt nothing like a contract. And now that she hoped his emotions ran deeper, the idea of repeating that intimacy felt wrong without some explanation of her feelings, some acknowledgment of what she had done.
She dared to meet his eyes.
It was like being pulled from a dark hole and flung into full-on daylight. Whatever composure usually defined this man had been stripped clean away. This was not the man the rest of the world saw. In this moment, he appeared neither the complicated, serious veterinarian nor the scowling, resentful second son. This was the man she knew existed beneath that clinical exterior, the man who had flirted with her on a dance floor and who had shown her hints of passion on their wedding night.
And then he was crushing her up against his very bare, very clean chest, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that her imagination was a pale shade of truth compared to the actual man.
Chapter 10
As seemed to be the rule where this woman was concerned, Julianne’s kiss was a welcome madness. Then again, whatever madness she was inflicting upon him seemed to have possessed her in some small measure as well.
Patrick encountered a good deal of frustrating fabric in his quest to pull her closer still, but the layers and flounces were secondary distractions to the heat of her mouth. The din outside their door receded into nothingness, muffled by the blood rushing through his veins.
A distant part of his mind regretted not taking the time to unwrap her properly, but the control required to reach for the buttons that marched down the back of her bodice refused to be found. She had driven him to this state of derangement merely by her ministrations with the washcloth, and the heat and taste of her mouth now sent him pitching straight over the edge.
He backed her against the wall, their lips separating for the merest fraction of an inch to refill starving lungs. And then they were back to that frenzied rush of a kiss that sucked all the air from the room and all the logic from his brain.
He lifted her against him, pulling her legs around his waist and pressing her back against the wall. His hands found purchase in the folds of her gown and shoved the layers up rudely. The thought of the lush, soft curves waiting just behind the infinite expanse of silk threatened to unhinge what minimal hold he retained on his sanity. The feel of her body became a jeering taunt, and he broke briefly away to explore the boundaries of her neckline with his mouth. As if agreeing with his frustration, her hands twisted in his hair—whether to find an anchor, or to punish him for waiting too long, he could not be sure.
“Patrick.” The single, gasped word seemed to drop from a height of some ten thousand feet, bouncing off his lust-hardened thoughts. As inconceivable as he might have onc
e found it, he liked the sound of his name on his wife’s lips.
He abandoned the fragrant temptation of her neck, the sweet curve of her jaw, to submerge once more in the pleasure of her mouth. “What do you want from me, Julianne?” He spoke the words flush against her lips, and he felt her tremble in response.
“I want you to listen a moment.”
He stilled. “Now?” he asked stupidly. In the name of all that was holy . . . he had her pinned against the wall. If not for the indignity of so many skirts, he would already be inside her.
“Yes. I need to say this now, before we do this. Again.” It was a whispered hitch of a word, one she seemed to reach for.
He smoothed his way up her body with hands that ought to have no right to touch her, lingered over the generous swell of breast that waited above her corset. He could think of a dozen things more important to do at the moment than talk, and all of them involved removing her clothing. “Are you quite sure this conversation cannot be delayed an hour?”
Her face bloomed up at him, her skin a beautiful, flushed rose. “Regrettably, yes.”
Comprehension dawned, nudging its way between them. With it came the return of their surroundings. The shaking floor, from whatever revelry had commenced below stairs. The distant shouts and whistles from the yard outside.
His stiff, frozen wife, who only moments before had been molten in his arms.
She was not jesting. Julianne wanted to have a conversation before he tupped her against the wall. At least she claimed to regret the decision.
He lowered her legs to the ground, though his body almost groaned in protest. Her heels made audible contact with the floorboards. With that sound came the merest sliver of shame—he hadn’t even given her time to remove her shoes. And yet, he couldn’t quite find the decency to regret the mindless, rutting beast she turned him into.
His gaze lingered over her rising chest, her flushed skin. He could see the pulse point on the curve of her neck, the unspoken evidence that the blood rushed in her veins. Not that such evidence of her arousal mattered . . . she was likely still healing from his rough handling on their wedding night, and the experience they’d been grappling toward tonight was anything but gentle. So instead of kissing her again, he waited.
Moonlight on My Mind Page 11
