Linda Needham

by The Wedding Night

  She ran to him, uncertain what to do, whether he wanted her there or not. She put her hand on his back, soothed his shoulders.

  “Ah, Mairey, that feels good,” he said, sitting back on his haunches, reeling a little as he cast a sideways, squint-eyed glance at her. “Thank you,” he said, with a blink that lasted so long she thought perhaps he’d gone to sleep.

  “You’re a mess.”

  “Messy business. But it’s done for the moment.” He crawled back up the post, planted his feet apart again, and put his hands on his thighs. “I have to be back to London tomorrow afternoon. Still need to stop at the Strathfield Works this evening.”

  “Not tonight, Jack. You need rest.”

  He waggled a finger at her, nearly cross-eyed with the effort. “There’s none for the wicked, my dear.”

  The fool launched himself away from the post, looking drunk as he staggered down the hill.

  “Jack! Wait!” Mairey caught him around his waist and nearly went down with him in the next step.

  “Sorry, sweet,” he said, righting them both, leaving her face-to-face with him as she anchored him with her hands round his waist. “You have a very lovely mouth, Miss Faelyn. Honeyed. I’d like to try it again.”

  She would like that, too. “Not now, Jack.”

  He must have read right though her evasion—his teeth showed white against his smile.

  “To the train, then.” He clamped his arm around her shoulder, as possessively as if he had done it all his life. Mairey finally managed to get him to the train, only to find the private compartment noisy with two of his engineers and a mound of paper.

  He roused himself as though he’d come fresh from his morning ablutions, and he became the mining baron once again. Mairey fought sleep, but it came anyway, druglike in the rocking motion of the railcar, in the soothing rhythms of Jack’s voice beside her.

  She was dreaming of labyrinths and confusion, blackness and starlight. A soothing hand against her cheek. Warm, rugged, a saltiness against her lips.

  “Come, Mairey.” The voice was very nice, too. As nice as Jack’s. “My beautiful Mairey.”

  He was shaking her awake, lifting her hair out of her face. “We’re stopping here for the night.”

  “In Strathfield?” Mairey raised up to look out the window. The sun was gone, leaving only an orange burnish to the slate-roofed buildings. She’d been asleep for hours.

  “I’ve already been there, and finished my business. We’re in Dealing, at the junction.” His face was cleaner, but she couldn’t tell if those were deeply etched shadows or coal dust.

  He had already arranged for two rooms in the railway inn, two steaming baths, and two dinners. Separate, alone.

  “Sleep well, Mairey.” He leaned toward her in the hallway, holding himself off her with his hands above her head.

  His lingering, succulent, good-night kiss and nuzzling neck-nibbling turned to snoozing into her ear, his chin propped against her shoulder.

  “Dear man.”

  Mairey kissed him lightly, which roused him enough to herd himself to his room through the adjoining door in hers. But not before he gave an overly detailed demonstration of the lock that could only be opened from her side of the door.

  “Completely safe, madam,” he said, blinking. Then he lifted one of his brows and strode through the doorway into his room, rattling the knob in reminder after he’d closed the door.

  It was only after she was sitting in the tub that Mairey realized she hadn’t bothered to turn the key on her side, that he could walk in at any moment—and that he wouldn’t.

  She scrubbed herself clean and washed her hair twice, to remove the dinge of coal that had collected in every pore. The water was heavenly, warm and drowsing, and she only left it when she caught herself falling asleep.

  She tried to ignore Jack’s sounds while she prepared for bed, but he consumed her senses. She heard his firm footfalls and the thunk of what could only have been his shoes—first one, and then after a very, very long time, the other. A door opening into the hallway, a stranger’s voice and then Jack’s, and then a flurry of footfalls and bathwater noises.

  She listened to him even as she slipped under the covers, even as sleep tugged at her. She heard the splash of water, then he groaned like a tired mill wheel coming to rest.

  A wife would have worked the kinks out of his shoulders, would knead his ropy muscles, and kiss him wherever he needed kissing….

  Mairey woke with a nearby church bell chiming twelve. The doorframe into Jack’s room was still limned in bright lamplight, as it had been when she had fallen asleep three hours before.

  Odd. He’d been exhausted, ready to drop.

  She padded to the door and put her ear against it, listening for a full minute before deciding to knock quietly.

  “Jack?”

  Silence. Utter silence. Not even the gentle saw of his snoring.

  Perhaps he’d fallen asleep with the light on. Or he might have been dragged back to Glad Heath—his life in danger again! She opened the door a crack and peered in. A cold fireplace, an unrumpled four-poster, a writing table with a chair. But no sign of the man, no sign that he’d been there at all.

  Her heart pounding in apprehension, Mairey opened the door fully and stepped inside, ready to fetch the proprietor of the inn.

  Then she saw him, fast asleep in a long, low bathtub, breathing deeply.

  “Oh, Jack.”

  Her view was straight on and breathtaking. The man’s hard-muscled arms were hanging free of the tub, his legs inside, his knees propped against either edge. The soap was unused and sitting on the side table. He’d cradled his head on his shoulder and the back of the tub, the motion of his chest making soft ripples in the crystal clear, belly-deep water.

  He was magnificent. Bewitching. He made her pulse hum in her ears.

  “I can’t very well leave you like this.” He might drown, or freeze to death—he’d been in the water for hours. Even if he awoke and promised to bathe himself, she couldn’t trust him not to fall asleep again.

  She hurried back to her room and donned a robe and a pair of drawers for propriety’s sake. Then she went downstairs to the kitchen and ordered two pails of hot water from the matronly cook, who frowned at the lateness of the request until Mairey pleaded monthly cramps and an aching back that was keeping her awake.

  Wondering where she’d learned to lie so expertly, Mairey went back upstairs, rolled up her sleeves, then stepped into Jack’s room to study the problem.

  That problem being that Jackson Rushford was a man.

  Dear God, was he a man in every way imaginable! Darkly curling hair lay in a fine sheen across his broad chest, and arrowed its way downward to a dark patch. His penis, his ever-so classically endowed penis, was as stunning and heart-stirring at rest as it surely would be fully…engaged.

  Was that the word? No. But her thoughts weren’t scholarly at the moment. They were tender and burning and made her hands ache to touch him.

  Well, then: washing a large, exceedingly male body couldn’t be that much different than washing her own. That wasn’t quite correct. He wasn’t at all like her, he was rock hard where she was soft, and she selfishly wanted to learn every inch of him. To be tender without him ever knowing—because Jack seemed to take his tenderness very seriously.

  She answered the knock on her door and took the water pails from the sleepy kitchen girl, tipping her a shilling. Mairey waited for the girl’s footsteps to pad away from the door before she carried a bucket into Jack’s room and poured the hot water slowly into his bath. She watched him for signs of wakefulness, not sure what she’d do if—no, when he woke up.

  But he only rubbed at his nose with both fists and then slid an inch deeper into the water, letting his arms come to rest across his hips, just beneath the surface.

  Sighing with a shattering longing for her dragon, Mairey added more water until a mist rose off the surface and his skin began to pinken beneath the grime.

/>   Where to begin this purloined venture? He would probably wake up bellowing about improprieties the moment she touched him. He’d been impossibly incensed about the phallus display, so she lay a towel across his groin, masking all that beautiful masculinity—as much for her own sake as for his delicate sensibilities. Then she soaped up a cloth and knelt beside him.

  His hands. That’s where she would start. Tautly sinewed, blistered and cracked from his labors, and outlined in coal, they had taken the worst damage today, and had wrought such miracles in his life.

  Mairey slid his palm across hers, soapy and warm and so very intimate. She caressed the length of his thumb, and he made one of his rumbling sounds very, very deep in his chest.

  She was making a careful study of a ragged scar that ran like an extra heart line across the heel of his hand when she noticed that his breathing had gone from deep and untroubled to utterly still.

  Immediately wary of what she might find at the other end of all that stillness, Mairey lifted her gaze up the long length of him, from the now-floating towel and his narrow waist, over the muscled ridges of his chest, to a pair of dark eyes that glittered dangerously from beneath a thunderous brow.

  “Jack. You’re awake.” Flushed with guilt as much as with desire, Mairey tried to rise and back away, but he captured her hand with a fluid motion and didn’t seem the least bit interested in letting go.

  He crooked her closer with a flex of his arm. Nose to nose.

  “No, madam, I couldn’t possibly be awake. Else there wouldn’t be a beautiful woman lounging at my bathside, scrubbing me.”

  With that, he reached over the side of the tub and hoisted Mairey’s backside onto the broad flatness of his hand. Then he lifted her up, over, and into the water.

  She landed in his lap.

  His very naked, very wet lap!

  “Jack!—” Mairey finished the blackguard’s name and added a curse inside the sopping prison of his palm.

  “Shhhh, Mairey. Can’t have the proprietor breaking down the door in the middle of my dream. It’s far too stimulating, and I’m far too aroused to be interrupted.”

  Interrupted! “You’re not dreaming, blast you!” But her statement sounded more like Burr nuh deenie, ba oo!

  He tightened his grip and hauled her backward until her shoulders were pinned against his chest. The hem of her nightgown billowed with air, then melted into the warm water.

  Mairey tried her best to get away, tried desperately not to laugh, but Jack only clamped his free arm beneath her breasts. He shifted his hips, a great, rolling tide, and arranged her higher on his thighs, groaning like a bear just waking from a long winter’s night.

  “Another of your folk interviews, my dear?” he whispered beside her ear, taking a bit of the lobe between his lips and sending maddening shivers down her neck. “A highly unorthodox technique. One I hope you don’t use on other men, because I wouldn’t like that at all. But let me see, perhaps I can help you. Were you going to ask me what the coal miner’s word is for arousal? For that’s what you feel against your pretty backside. Me, Mairey, and my aching need for you. Do you feel it?”

  Oh, yes! She felt him like a rod of fire against her hip. She nodded immodestly beneath his hand, fascinated when she ought to be outraged and flailing.

  “That is my phallus, Mairey. Not an ivory carving, not stone, but my hard flesh—which is all your doing.”

  Mairey nodded and squirmed a little, thrilled with the sensation, with Jack’s words against her ear.

  “So full of your science and your fairy tales. Does it feel as you had imagined?”

  Better, better, better! she wanted to say, but his hand was still covering her mouth, though he was drawing his middle finger along the vale of her lips like a kiss. And, oh, all the other places she could suddenly imagine that finger.

  “Ah, Mairey, when you wiggle against this like that”—an involuntary shudder seemed to convulse him—“yes, like that, my dear, I’m only roused to want you all the more. Would you like to write that down in your fieldnotes?”

  He stirred again, raising her hips with his, setting the swirling hem of her nightgown adrift in his wake. The hand he’d held across her was now gathering up the floating linen, pushing the fabric upward and upward along her thighs toward her hips.

  “I’m not made of stone—not like your collection. And I think from your writhing that you’re not, either.”

  Mairey watched in wonder as his dark hand disappeared into the surging folds of mien, in the clear pool where her legs were spread so indelicately, her knees propped wide against his and waiting.

  Oh, yes, waiting shamelessly for his magic. She held her breath, disbelieving her anticipation, hopeless with desire for him to do whatever he planned:

  His hand swept her curling hair through her drawers, eddies of cool water and then warm, summer sunlight Sweet anticipation.

  He groaned as he cradled his hand over the wild place between her legs. A riot of wanting, a need to explore further. To take her to heaven, to keep her always.

  “Oh, Jack!” He had freed her mouth to delve there with his finger, to trace her lips and play at her tongue as he might at her cleft. He was so damnably near it!

  “Stone doesn’t quiver, sweet Mairey. Ivory isn’t hot. And it doesn’t ache.”

  “I do ache, Jack. For you. I ache like fire.”

  Jack thought he just might explode.

  She was arched against him, the antiquarian clad in her proper Victorian nightdress and drawers, her lovely, lean thighs open wide to his hands. She was breathing with little sighs and gripping the sides of the tub in a white-knuckled fury.

  “Jack, I, oh! I—Jack!”

  He ached to the depth of his soul to part the slit in her linen drawers; a garment so perfectly suited to a lover’s fingers. A husband’s, surely. But he wasn’t her husband—and that was his dilemma, as her springy curls teased at his palm, as her heat coursed up through his fingers.

  Had he the right? Had he the will to stop what he shouldn’t even have begun?

  Married. The word had meant nothing to him for so long, and now it plagued his every thought. He measured it against everything she did, everything she meant to him.

  “You need to know, madam, that you can’t just walk into a man’s room while he’s bathing.” He’d awakened stirred to the boiling point, dreaming of Mairey. Dreaming of children, Mairey’s and his to gether. She had become his life. He couldn’t imagine his library stripped of her curios, of her laughter.

  “You were sound asleep, Jack.” She sighed against his ear, grabbed for it with her tongue and teeth.

  “You can’t bathe him without his waking up, wanting you in the tub with him.” He caught her mouth with his, played at tongues and teasing.

  “You were freezing.”

  “And you can’t fondle penises, ancient or otherwise, in front of him without that man—”

  “You. I was with you, Jack.”

  “Yes, without me—reacting just as you are now. You feel the ache?”

  “In every part of me, Jack.” She wriggled her hips, gave a little gasp, and then covered his hand with hers.

  Bits of light scattered inside his skull. The split linen parted like a curtain, and he harrowed his fingers through her fleece. “Mairey!”

  “Oh, Jack! It’s wonderful! I only—” She took a gasping breath as he slid his fingers along her sultry folds and held her, kept her, wary of moving for the storm it would cause in them both.

  “You only what, sweet?”

  She had thrown her head back against his shoulder, tilting her pelvis into the cup of his hand as though she would consume him. Her nipples were dark points straining at the wet linen.

  “Oh, Jack, I—I didn’t want you to drown.”

  “You’re too late, Mairey.” He was so drugged with wanting her, he could peel off her gown and take her there in the tub.

  But he couldn’t—she was made for wedding, for vows, for a marriage bed. Unless
he lost his mind completely in the next minute and buried himself inside her.

  My God. She was bending, reaching for his scrotum.

  “Mairey, please!” He caught her by the wrist and she turned in his arms, floated and then settled on him, her nearly bare skin cool against his fire-hot erection.

  “What is it, Jack?” Her eyes were wide, and blinking.

  “Have you learned nothing in the last few minutes?”

  “Mmmmm…I’ve learned far more than I had intended.” The minx closed her eyes and took a startlingly precocious pleasure in rolling his penis against the softness of her belly. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me—”

  Me, my love. I want to be inside you, to the hilt.

  “I’m not shy of you, Jack.” She spread her fingers across his chest, then slid them up his throat to his jaw, her clear gray eyes filled with desire.

  “No, you don’t appear to be shy at all.”

  “Though I’m plagued with curiosity—”

  “The scholar in you.”

  “Now I understand the lure of the phallus through the eons. Yours in particular.”

  “Mairey!” Jack groaned, then pulled her forward in a single wave of water, covering her mouth with his, claiming her with his tongue. Hungry, so hungry! He should really stop this. But she made tiny, laughing whimpers in her throat and crawled up the front of him, slipped her arms around his neck, and let him plunder and explore.

  Until he realized that he was fighting with the third button of her nightgown, that he had breached the opening, then had a handful of lush breast, and his mouth was just bearing down on a ripely puckered nipple.

  Mairey’s eyes were wide as she watched him, astonished, as though she wasn’t certain this was happening to her.

  And it shouldn’t. Not now.

  “Sweet Jesus!” Jack yanked the placket closed, and patted her breast when it was fully covered—out of sight, but not in the least out of mind. He was out of his mind! For going this far. For stopping. Hell!

  He lifted her hips and stood her up in the well between his knees, staying hip-deep himself. Her gown was a transparent waterfall, her face flushed, her breasts high and round.