Linda Needham

by The Wedding Night

  She seemed startled to see him standing so near her in the small well created by the labyrinth, his arms filled with an iron trunk like Atlas holding up the world.

  “Thank you, sir. But I’ve already opened that one.” The exasperating woman gave him a placating smile, then turned away and leaned forward across the top of a chest, apparently trying to read the label on the far side. Her perfectly rounded, wriggling bottom was shaped in spectacular detail beneath the pull of her skirts, which lacked the fashionable, copious crinolines.

  No wonder she wore plain, practical clothes and no stays; she was an acrobat. Jack shouldered the trunk onto another, thankful for a place to put his hands. They wanted to be up her skirts.

  “Just more Prerogative Court records,” she said, righting herself so quickly that she would have bounced off Jack’s chest if he hadn’t caught her around her waist—a two-hand span of warm, curvaceous flesh, hinting at the soft cushion of her breasts, the gentle flare of her hips.

  “Have a care, madam.” As he must, else he’d soon be ravishing her here in the Wakefield Tower.

  “It’s very good to have you with me, my lord.”

  “You’re welcome.” Jack did his best to seem indifferent, but in the next moment she used his shoulder for a hand support and hoisted herself to the top of the nearby crate, putting him eye-level with her backside. She rose on her toes, reaching toward a box on top of a locked cabinet, and teetered off center.

  He had no other choice, and no better grip, than either side of her hips to steady her.

  Jack expected a well-placed kick in the chest for his impropriety, but the woman not only accepted his aid with a “thank you” but used him to reach even higher, until her skirts fell away from her pale-stockinged calf.

  A hot bolt of desire surged through him and lodged itself in his groin.

  “Got it!” she said, dragging the box toward her and handing it down to him. The lock popped easily, and she laughed when she opened the lid.

  “Quills,” she said, shutting it again. She was cobwebbed and dusty, and glowing pink with exertion.

  Jack could only sweat.

  She continued her search, undeterred by dust and dampness and lack of light, accepting his aid when he was near enough to help, and forging on alone when the passages grew cramped and excluded him.

  He had accompanied Miss Faelyn to observe her methods, fully expecting to find flaws and inefficiencies, fully prepared to institute changes for the sake of the project. But for the moment she seemed to know far more about this business than he did. It was an inscrutable maze, and all he could do was stand and hold the string while Miss Faelyn looked for the way to freedom.

  He wouldn’t always be around to escort her. He would make random forays with her, but the job was really hers. Though she spun silk-webbed stories as tightly as a spider in springtime, he had to trust her research—though he would keep guard against her equivocating.

  As he would keep guard against the meadowy scent of her skin and the tempting display of her legs.

  Jack spent the next three hours bridling his passion for the eccentric woman, unlocking chests for her and unscrewing parchment presses, while his agile partner passed judgment on the contents. She touched him often in her enthusiasm, unconscious of its effects on him. It was only when they reached the end of a corridor of chests stacked nearly to the ceiling that they found a stash of barrels, and finally the one they had been seeking.

  “Henrietta!” she shouted.

  Queen Henrietta Maria of France. The label was burned unceremoniously into the side of the barrel.

  “Success, madam.”

  “Oh! You can’t know how much, Rushford.” Tears again, huge and streaming. And then a great wracking sob that she clutched against her chest.

  It seemed the most natural thing in the world to wrap himself around her, to fill his arms with the funny sobs that he felt so responsible for. She was much smaller than he’d expected, her fierceness belying her delicate bones. He wasn’t at all certain what this was all about, but he planned to ride it out with her.

  It wasn’t until he was pressing his lips against the top of her head, where all that sweet, golden hair grew wild, that he realized he’d been wondering what their children would look like.

  Chapter 7

  “Good God, woman! Sumner told me you were hanging paper in the conservatory. I thought he meant wallpaper!”

  Mairey smiled up at Rushford and his familiar scowl, and she clothespinned another mildewed page of Henrietta’s personal letters onto the waist-high maze she’d constructed from table and chairs and twine. He looked every inch the mining baron this morning, in his long black coat and gray trousers. He was Hades in hard male flesh, the giver of riches, the author of this particular miracle of musty history. A feat her father could never have wrought.

  “The barrel was delivered this morning, by Mr. Walsham himself.”

  Rushford snorted and entered the web of twine. “I’m not surprised, Miss Faelyn, the way he flattered you without end.”

  There was something wildly erotic and inexorable about him as he prowled his way toward her through the maze. “I’m not interested in Mr. Walsham.”

  “He was very interested in you.” Rushford painstakingly followed the rickety, winding path she had laid out, when he could have so easily carved a swath through the forest of chairs and knocked it all down.

  “Yes, I know, my lord. I’m not blind.” Though she was having some trouble concentrating on her work. “I grew up in a college town, surrounded by randy young men who had only one thing on their minds.”

  “Not mathematics.” His eyes were darker in the morning light, but clearer and questing.

  “Definitely biology.” Mairey stooped and pinned up another page, letting its cheerful mustiness flutter away in the warm breeze that came in from the pair of doors that opened onto the garden.

  Rushford reached her at the center, and gazed intently down his long, straight nose at her, nostrils flaring. “Do you have a young man of your own in Oxford?”

  Mairey met his frown, wondering where its fierceness had come from so quickly. He smelled of bergamot and soap; his hair was still wet from his bath.

  “What are you asking, sir? If I’ve ever succumbed to the sweaty charms of an undergraduate? If my maidenhead is intact?”

  All that towering masculinity went crimson, and stammered, “I—I—damn it all, madam, I would never ask that.”

  Men. So easily threatened by a little honesty from a woman. She was a social scientist. However unmentionable the subject was in polite society, human sexuality was the key to human behavior. She’d had many a discussion with her colleagues about fertility rites, sacrificial virgins, ritual circumcision, and polygamy. She wondered what Rushford would think if he knew she kept a collection of carefully cataloged phallic artifacts in a box in the library.

  “Not that it’s your business, sir, but I am virgo intacta. Qualified to tame unicorns and tend the vestal fires should the need arise.”

  The man was near rattling, his breathing gone ragged, but his chest was taller than a tree. “Madam, that wasn’t my question. I only wanted to know if you have a young man in your life.”

  “I don’t.”

  That made him frown more fiercely. “Well, then,” he said, finally. “I’ve been called to Cornwall today, Miss Faelyn. An emergency at one of my foundries. I’ll not be home until very late tonight.”

  Mairey searched for relief at the prospect of being free of the man, but found only an alarming disappointment. He’d been almost—well, very charming at the Tower, despite his impatience with Walsham, despite the thrill of having his large hands wrapped round her waist a bit too long. They had walked in the garden twice, and had taken meals together in the breakfast room. He’d become a perilously agreeable presence in the library, reading the Times or studying one of her books on antiquities. She wouldn’t miss him—exactly.

  “Lord Rushford—” She opened her mouth
to tell him that her sisters would be arriving this afternoon, but the words just wouldn’t come. “Do have a safe trip.”

  “Thank you.” He left the conservatory with too much arrogant grace.

  An emergency. She could just imagine it: miners striking for better pay, for safer working conditions, for schooling for their children, for food and clean water. A cave-in, an explosion—Rushford trying to minimize the loss to his profits.

  As soon as Mairey finished hanging the queen’s musty letters in the conservatory, she went back to the library and set about raising her defense against the pillaging dragon. She had already faced her side of the desk to the center of the room to keep him from peering over her shoulder. She mislabeled noteboxes, and created false bottoms inside them so that she had a safe place to store any evidence she uncovered that might lead him toward the Knot. She had two sets of journals—one to show to him regularly, the other, written in the oghams and runes of the green world, to hide away from his prying.

  She even wrote a short report for Rushford, making suggestions for sources and listing items she needed, then put it on the top of the desk in the adjoining office.

  By midafternoon, with a bit of help from Sumner and his assistants, her father’s chair was tucked up against her desk, and the two gouged and stained worktables separated her part of the library from Rushford’s.

  A very small part, indeed. His sumptuous, overly male furniture sprawled across a meadow of woolen carpets, a rival to any library at Oxford.

  But so comfortable, scented with the honey warmth of beeswax polish and leather, and the drift of roses from the beautiful windows that opened to the garden.

  A lovely place to raise a family.

  A family of her own. Children and a husband. A fairy tale of ungainly proportions, but one she longed to have come true. Of course, it could never be. Mairey had long ago decided that she would never wed, could never. She was pledged to the Willowmoon, which left little enough room in her life for her sisters, let alone a husband and children of her own.

  She shoved away the terrible yearning; marked it off to the fact that Rushford was, without question, the most compelling man she’d ever met. The compulsion to reproduce was unstoppable; what woman wouldn’t want to mix her blood with the very robust Jackson Rushford’s?

  Biology. That’s all it was. Resistible and finite.

  And he was her enemy.

  “Your pardon, Miss Faelyn.” Sumner was standing at the library door, his usually starched exterior wrinkled around the edges. “There are three young ladies here and a—”

  “Maireey!”

  Pandemonium broke around Sumner like raging water rounding a boulder. Crinoline and squealing and shouts of joy flowed toward her as Caro and Poppy and then Anna tumbled into the library.

  “My loves!” Mairey met them in the midst of the furniture-stuffed room. Poppy launched herself into Mairey’s arms and snuggled into an embrace.

  “Are you a faerie princess now, Mairey?” Caro asked, squeezing Mairey around the middle.

  “Not even a mortal princess, I’m afraid.”

  Poppy turned Mairey’s face with her sweat-sticky palms. “Caro said we shall live in this castle for ever and ever afterward. But how can we, Mairey, if you’re not the princess?”

  “Is there a knot garden, Mairey?” Anna had already purloined one of the yellow roses that grew in profusion along the foundation of Drakestone. “The grounds look big enough for three.”

  “Come here, Anna! Look!” Caro had bolted away from Mairey and was standing on a chair at the window, pointing wildly. “A giant’s garden!”

  “Ah, there you are, Mairey, my girl.” Aunt Tattie brushed past Sumner, throwing the stunned butler an irritated glance and handing him a hatbox. “A bit showy, don’t you think?”

  “You’re a brave woman, Auntie. You made it here in one piece with these three little baggages.”

  “And all our belongings. Which are still outside in the cart.” The woman dragged her spectacles to the end of her nose, glared again at Sumner. “What’s this all about, Mairey Faelyn?”

  “Miss, if I might speak with you a moment?” Sumner was still standing at the door, crooked forward from the waist but apparently fearful of actually coming inside and being drowned.

  “Ah, yes. Sumner, this is Mrs. Titania Winther, my aunt.”

  “Madam.”

  “Mr. Sumner.” Tattie sniffed her suspicion.

  “The young lady who plundered the rose is my sister Anna.” Anna had already found the water cruet, but managed a bobbing curtsey—not exactly the correct salutation to offer a butler.

  “And this is—Caro, sweet, please don’t rock so hard in Lord Rushford’s chair. My sister Caroline.” Mairey kissed Poppy’s wind-tossed mop of curls. “And this is Persephone—we call her Poppy.”

  Sumner hadn’t moved a muscle, save for the un-Sumner-like slackening of his jaw. She’d seen the same look of disbelief when one of her folk-study subjects was telling her of their first sighting of a commune of fairies cavorting in the midnight mist. The eyes played tricks in the moonlight.

  Rushford’s reaction would hardly be as guarded.

  “Will Mistress Tattie and the young ladies be staying for dinner tonight?”

  “I like ’snips,” Poppy said, “an’ carrots.”

  “Parsnips,” Mairey explained to Sumner.

  “And carrots.” The man closed his mouth and nodded. “I shall inform the cook, Miss Poppy.”

  “Mairey, there’s a pond!” Caro was rattling the locked latches and would have thrown open the door if Tattie hadn’t grabbed her around the waist. “And ducks!”

  “May Caro and I go out to the garden, Mairey?” Anna had poured water from the cruet into Rushford’s empty crystal inkstand. “Can we, please?” She dropped the rose into the vessel.

  They were home. For good or ill, dragon or no.

  “Soon,” Mairey said, gathering her sisters into her arms.

  “Then they will be staying for dinner, Miss Faelyn?”

  “Actually, Sumner, my family will be staying with me in the lodge. We’ll manage dinner there.”

  “Through the week’s end, miss?”

  Through eternity, she wanted to say. “Indefinitely.”

  “Ah!” Sumner cut a wide-eyed glance toward the foyer, as though Rushford’s hearing were superhuman and reached all the way from Cornwall. “Does his lordship know about…your plans?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I see.”

  But settling her sisters into the lodge proved as difficult as squeezing cider back into an apple. Tattie took command of the lodge kitchen and settled into a bed-sitting-room, while Mairey helped the girls unpack. Anna had her own room for the first time in her life; Caro and Poppy shared the garret next to Anna, just below Mairey’s own bedroom. She prayed that the ceiling plaster would hold with all their stomping, and made them promise not to bounce on the beds.

  By the time they returned from exploring the duck pond and the creek and the fairy woods, there wasn’t a spot on anyone that wasn’t matted with mud, or leaves, or feathers.

  And Mairey was as happy as she’d ever been.

  Welcome home, my loves.

  Jack climbed the stairs to Drakestone in the blue-gray invisibility of the spring twilight. He didn’t particularly like Cornwall; hated the noise and the heat of the foundry, and the bellowing furnaces most of all. And yet the process of coaxing iron and tin out of bare rock fascinated him; it had done so since he was a boy.

  He’d spent the day in an interminable meeting, moderating the safety issues between his engineers and the men who would run the newly designed forges. Jack had worked all sides of the process, from sweating at the furnaces and shoveling coke to engineering better fuel consumption systems. All of which made him aware of whom to invite to the design table when changes were needed. Those college-bred engineers who balked at sitting across from a good furnace man didn’t last very long in Jack’s employ.
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  Today had been long, but productive. He was disappointed not to find the gold-rimmed glow of lamplight spilling from the library. Miss Faelyn had been in the fore of his thoughts all the way home. And all the way to Cornwall, and no less than a dozen times an hour through the day.

  Virgo intacta. She’d ambushed him with that—left his head spinning and his blood sizzling.

  He could have stayed the night in Exeter as usual when he was called away, but tonight he’d wanted to come home to Drakestone. To Mairey. He’d been so long without anyone to come home to that he hadn’t recognized the pull until he was halfway to London.

  He’d imagined finding her sorting through Henrietta’s papers, ready with her odd stories and her laughter. He needed no pretense to seek her out tonight in the lodge; he had a perfect excuse tucked in his coat pocket: an invitation to visit Windsor whenever she liked.

  Jack caught himself whistling as he dropped his attaché on the desk in his office, scattering the stack of mail.

  He picked the top letter off the pile.

  Rushford, it said. The writing was familiar, and he touched it to his nose, sniffing the whisper of her scent. Lilac and—he sniffed again—rose. His heart pounded absurdly as he went round the desk, wielding the letter opener like a sword against the seal. He bent his knees, prepared to sit down for a leisurely read.

  His butt hit the floor just before he noticed his chair was missing.

  “Bloody hell!” Jack dragged himself, cursing, off the ground and stared at the empty space behind his desk. It was always there! Designed for him to fit perfectly in the foot-well of his desk! Where the devil—

  The library. Miss Faelyn had probably absconded with his chair and was using it for a drying rack.

  He unlocked the library door, expecting to find the familiar labyrinth of crates, but all was neat and orderly. Miss Faelyn’s corner looked particularly stalwart, prepared for a battle.

  But his chair was nowhere to be seen.

  However, there was a yellow rose plucked from his garden, floating in his inkstand, water dribbled in a ring around his blotter. Next she’d be using his shoes as coal shuttles and his necktie as a lamp wick.