Linda Needham

by The Wedding Night

  “I don’t hate you, Jack.” Lunatic. He didn’t know that she couldn’t possibly hate this part of him, the lost boy who was searching for his family. Not when she wanted to be his family.

  He tilted his head, and squinted at her through one wickedly smiling eye. “Not even when I’m an inconsiderate ass?”

  “Not even then, Jack.” What the devil had gotten into him on his wild pilgrimage? He certainly hadn’t been drinking; he smelled of soap and starch.

  “I’m exceedingly glad of that, Mairey.”

  “Well, then, sir. If you were not out looking to bludgeon Dodson for his crimes against you, where did you go?”

  “I was hunting for ghosts.” He looked quite serious, the way a headmaster might as he was explaining the tidal effects of the moon. “I felt like a damned ghoul, last night and all the day long, tromping through every graveyard in Manchester.”

  “You went to Manchester.” Mairey smiled hugely, relieved that he’d found at least a little hope tucked away in his outrage. “You really hadn’t spent the day stalking Dodson.”

  “Bastard—he’s not worth the trouble. I had a more precious mission.”

  “Your mother.” Her heart swelled and grew lighter for him, though it still ached. She bundled his hand between hers. “Oh, Jack, you’re wonderful—”

  “Don’t, Mairey.” He brought their clasped hands to his lips and set a kiss on her fingers, his gaze fastened fiercely to hers as it so often was of late. “And don’t beam at me like that with your eyes all misty, as though you believe me to be the perfect son and protector. I am not.”

  He needed sleep—or something. But getting the enormous man up the stairs and into his bed was going to be a mighty challenge. Leaving him there—alone—might prove impossible.

  “Jack, you are a perfect son and brother. I know of no one who could have been a more exemplary protector, given any circumstances.”

  “Do not indulge me, Mairey. I’ve been a damned fool.”

  Oh, how she could count the ways—and be at the task for weeks! But Jack had never been anything but honorable and courageous in his devotion to his family. He had been their battle-ready champion from the day his father died, and long, long before that, if she knew the boy as well as she knew the man.

  “Whatever you say, Jack.” The man was not ready to admit to his goodness; battering him with it would only make him more stubborn. She left him and went back to her worktable. “I only meant that I was glad you saw your mother’s grave.”

  “I didn’t.” He thrust himself out of the chair, stuffing his thumbs into the back of his trousers and pacing the room in his giant’s stride. “I couldn’t find the bloody thing.”

  Her spirit sank into the mud; she leaned against the table. “At St. Simon’s Chapel?”

  “You didn’t say which church.” He sliced her a self-directed indictment as he paced past her toward the bank of windows.

  She followed him, feeling guilty. “I’m sorry, Jack—”

  “Don’t you dare, Mairey!” He abruptly turned back to her. She ran into his chest nose first and stayed there to sniff a little of his starchy tang. “The fault was mine—all of it. I should have damn well asked you where she was before I went storming off. Instead I raged at you like a feral beast, accused you of…what was it I accused you of?”

  “Nothing that matters, Jack.” Nothing mattered but his shamefaced smile and the shadows that planed his jaw. “I understand—”

  “You couldn’t possibly.” He planted himself on the edge of her desk, leaving Mairey standing between his spread knees. “But I am belatedly and enormously grateful for your trying to knock some sense into me, and entirely unworthy of your persistence. And I’m damned sorry for being a jackass, though it won’t be the last time. I’m notoriously stone-headed.”

  “Indeed, you are.” But he had a heart of bread pudding, sweet and soft and impossible to refuse. “As for Dodson, I would have kissed you if you had given him a good wallop.”

  “Kiss me now, Mairey.” His voice was rough, filled with longing, and he tugged her closer. He gazed at her mouth as though he’d been lost in a desert and she was a cool oasis. A kiss wouldn’t be very wise, not with the way her hands were trembling, the way her heart was pounding. He was leaning forward, had cocooned her nearly completely in his arms as he rested his hands on his knees. His cheek was soft, scented with citrus.

  He was whispering feathery things to her. “Home, Mairey. Beautiful Mairey. Forgive me, Mairey.”

  “I do.” If she didn’t kiss him soon and be finished with it, the kiss would become his, and outright volcanic.

  He was so very close, nudging her ever nearer, stealing her pulse and the air between them, until she found his mouth and covered it with hers. Oh, such a soft and impatient place.

  He made a sound like her name, a plea, an exaltation that made her want to sing. Then he was growling low in his chest, his breath shuddering past her lips.

  “God, Mairey, I want you.” He plowed his fingers through her hair, tilted her face to him and plundered her mouth. “I want you forever.”

  Forever? Oh, yes, Jack! She wanted him completely, wanted to stay and stay, wanted children with him and to putter in his garden. But his life was mining and hers was already claimed by secrets and silver and that blasted village that she loved, and her lovely and sheltered family.

  It isn’t fair, Papa! But it was fact. And as dreadful as death.

  Mairey scrambled to her feet and backed away from him, her arms aching from the need to hold him.

  He was shaking, his grip on his knees a white-knuckled clench, and his breathing like a horse after the Derby.

  “You’re exhausted, Jack Rushford.”

  He straightened from the desk in all his rumpled, quaking wonder. “I was.”

  “You need to be in bed.” Mairey bolted away from him and ran a few steps up the spiraling iron stairs that led to the mezzanine—and then across to the back door of his room.

  “We need to be in bed, Mairey.” He stood in the middle of the library, a glint-eyed, unsated dragon looking too pleased for his own good.

  Her heart was racing, thrilled when his ringing footfall hit the landing a few steps below her.

  “That wasn’t my meaning, Jack.”

  “Oh, but it is mine, Mairey. I want to make love with you in my bed. Our bed, if you please.”

  “Ours?” What was the man talking about?

  “Or in the lodge where you keep your heart.” He started up the stairs relentlessly, his eyes fixed on hers, making her pulse thunder against her throat. “Or in the woods, or here in the library.”

  “You didn’t sleep at all last night, did you, Jack?” That was the reason for his intimate confessions—not a passion for her. Certainly not love, as Tattie had suggested. Jack had said nothing about love.

  She’d be lost completely if he ever did.

  “I did sleep, Mairey,” he said, closing in on her and her very illogical idea of getting him safely into his bed. “Dreaming always of you and the priceless gifts you’ve given me.”

  Odd, but she couldn’t remember a single one. “How much sleep did you get?” She spun away and scooted up the stairs, five steps ahead of him. Then only two.

  “I got enough.”

  She stopped at the mezzanine and turned to him. An even greater mistake. “Enough for what?”

  He scooped her up in his next stride and started toward his room. “Enough to make love with you till next Tuesday.”

  “Jack!”

  “Till Wednesday, then, if you like.”

  She liked Wednesday too, too much.

  “Jack, put me down.”

  “No.”

  His chamber door loomed—immense, shiny mahogany, and a fat brass latch that opened too easily to a room bathed in the dim light of slumbering lamps. She saw starry glints of gold and emerald and ruby glittering in the periphery. His bed was as huge as he was, tall, oak framed, and four posted, heaped with pillows an
d overlain with an undulating sea of autumn-hued counterpane.

  Heaven on earth—a place to sprawl, wild-limbed, and collect his kisses wherever he cared to lay them.

  “You wanted me in my bed, Mairey.”

  And everywhere else, Jack!

  “Well, here it is.” He let go of her legs and caught her up against the length of him, so warm and so vibrantly hard in so very many places. “Here I am. And damn me, if you’re not wearing your nightgown.”

  His smile was loose and tilting and far too charming; and he was watching her through half-lidded eyes, with a pulse-pounding, possessive hunger that she had badly mistaken for exhaustion.

  “Jack, I just came to the library to get a book. And I really shouldn’t be…oh. Oh, yes.” Mairey sighed long and deeply as he trailed his beguiling mouth and then his tongue down the column of her throat; she watched in dizzying expectation as he slipped his splendid fingers past her coat and into the neck of her nightgown, then lifted it aside, exposing the yearning hollow of her throat to his spice-steamed breath and the fevered tracing of his mouth.

  “Ah, Mairey, I missed you. Wanted you. Wanted this.” His huge and gentle hand cradled the underside of her breast through the linen of her gown. But she might as well have been as naked as the dewy morning for the bliss he caused, for the exquisite aching between her legs as though his hand was toying there again.

  He was besieging her nipple like licking fire, and Mairey climbed to meet him. He nipped her and touched her deeper, and plied his excellent torture through the linen of her gown. She suddenly wanted to be free of her coat and her nightgown, skin to skin with him.

  “Oh, Jack, you…oh!” She wanted to be possessed by her very own dragon, but it was imminently dangerous to her secret strategies against him. Baring herself to him like a common jade, delighting in his growls of adoration, taking tiny little gasps inside her throat, grabbing his shirttails and urging his hips and his feral hardness against her belly wouldn’t help her cause, either.

  He’d get a wholly wrong idea about her intentions.

  She was getting a wholly wrong idea about her intentions!

  Mairey closed her eyes and banished the voices that warned her to run from him, from the man she loved, who made her laugh and rented his woods to the fairies. She let her stolen joy and Jack’s scent fill her.

  He was her phantom kingdom, a sanctuary where dragons were princes, where there was no such thing as the Willowmoon Knot, no silver mine or slag heaps or open pits.

  “Did you mean it, Jack?”

  He backed away a step, leaving an aching confusion of drafts between them. His shirt hung open where she’d freed the buttons, white against rippling bronze.

  “Did I mean what?” His breath tore out of him and his thick arms flexed beneath his sleeves, his hands clenching as though he’d been checked in the midst of a fistfight.

  “That you wanted to make love to me tonight.”

  He shook his tousled head slowly, grinning slyly. “I meant every night, my love.”

  Oh, my. “Then make love to me, Jack. Please.”

  Wasn’t that what fairy tales were for?

  Chapter 16

  A bolt of raw, fire-tipped lust jolted through Jack, nearly driving him backward with its power. He’d been fighting to hold on to common sense, a window of sanity, while he put together the right words to propose. Assuring her that he had the most honorable intentions would take careful thought and finesse—and at the moment he was lucky to be thinking at all. His heart was galloping, pumping molten blood through his veins and into his groin, but not a drop was going to his sodden brain.

  He’d taken refuge in the library in order to dissuade himself from breaking down the door of her room. Yet somehow he’d conjured her in her bedclothes, this guileless apparition who had turned his life upside down.

  The belt at her waist had come loose, and her coat hung off her shoulders as though it wanted the floor. She was covered to the cleaving of her breasts by her nightgown, and standing in a too-big pair of muddy boots. Boots and bare feet and a plain, plain gown—and still the magic swirled around her.

  “God, Mairey, you’re beautiful.”

  It was a diminishment of all she meant to him, but she laughed kindly and gave a bashful assessment of her slumping clothes.

  “This old thing?” Touching that hollow between her perfect breasts, she turned him a coy hip and a side-bent knee.

  His brain seized up. “Every inch of you, Mairey.”

  “These too?” She jiggled one boot off and then the other; stood in her bare feet on the leaf-strewn design of the carpet.

  “Especially those.” He was utterly undone, ready to take a boring of this precious mine, to sink a shaft and lose himself inside her. “But”—he hung onto the shredded remains of his sanity—“I ought to take you back to the lodge while we’re still dressed and able.”

  She put her hands out as though to stop his words; shook her head as though she didn’t want to hear. “No, Jack, no. I want this. I want tonight to last forever.”

  Forever. Beginning here and now, my love, not a one-night roundabout. He would peel her of every stitch, find delicate inroads, secret pathways to the treasure she had become to him.

  “Forever it is, then, my love.”

  She watched him from under her exquisite lashes as she shoved the coat off her shoulders and let it fall to the floor. Her fingers absorbed him as she unfastened the pearly buttons that ran down the front of her pale nightgown to the joining of her thighs—one button and then the next, and then two more, till the gown was hanging off one shoulder, teasing him, taunting, till he couldn’t stand the wait.

  “Let me.” He threaded his fingers through the tumble of her hair and made love to her mouth, then stepped back to slide her gown down her arms, to simply stare. He’d watched her breasts tease against her shirtwaist for so long that he knew them intimately, loved them dearly. They were marvelous, creamy, high and lush, rose-tipped and just full enough to cradle in his hands, to crest with his thumbs.

  “Oh, Jack, that’s—” She inhaled hugely, and threw her head back. Her upward motion pressed her closer, allowed him to catch a budding nipple between his lips. She gasped and impatiently shook off the prison her gown made at her elbows, then clutched the back of his head, tugging him closer. “Yes, there. How wonderful you feel to me.”

  “And this too?” He pulled the sweet morsel into his mouth, between his tongue and teeth and set her to mewling, reaching for handfuls of his hair. Her mouth, her breasts, her belly. She writhed and danced against him, and he held her hips to keep them still, then took her mouth again to keep himself from dragging her to the carpet and filling her with his seed, with his hopes.

  Marry me, my love. Be my wife, tonight and always.

  “Jack, I want you closer.” Her gown was still caught up on the fine bones of her pelvis, soft contours of alabaster, hiding that sacred font he would kneel to worship before the night was over. Even as he loosed the maddening thought, even as he was kneading the span of her waist, she covered his hands with hers and guided him over her hips, pushing the bunched-up linen off the gentle slope to drop to the floor in a puddle.

  She was lamplight and ivory, sleek and rounded, dazzle-eyed and blessedly eager, peeling him out of his own shirt, tasting across his shoulders, his collarbone, the hollow of his throat, leaving him breathless and grunting like a boar.

  “God, Mairey!” He shrugged out of the other sleeve, then filled his arms with her splendor, lifting her off the ground and against him.

  “Ah, much better, Jack. Your chest to mine.”

  “Your heart and mine.”

  She wrapped her legs around his waist and held his face between her hands, tracing the abundance of her mouth across his eyelids and against his lips.

  Sweat beaded his forehead and ran down his back while his hands were laced together beneath her bare and quivering flanks, forced by physics into idleness; supporting her when he wanted to be
teasing at the seductive cleft pressed so sublimely against his belly. There were still barriers between her sultry heat and his raging urgency, wool and linen and cotton aplenty. But his sense of memory was crystal clear—the exotic fragrance of her on his fingers, soft folds and slick heat.

  His serendipitous lot was to just stand there and take it, to count backward from a hundred while she rocked against him and made rampant love to his mouth, murmuring something about secrets and dragons and longings.

  He’d been in a nearly perpetual state of arousal since he’d met the woman. He was currently, everlastingly, rock-hard and throbbing, on the verge of some good old prurient thrusting.

  “Your trousers, Jack.”

  Oh, excellent—she was a mind reader. “What about them?”

  “Take them off, please.” She spoke against his ear, with tongue and teeth and no small amount of humid heat.

  God in highest heaven, he’d found a treasure. Naked and open and more precious than all the gold in the Yukon. He carried her to the edge of the bed, almost mad with the need for her. Her fingers were already on top of his, brushing them away from his own buttons.

  “Let me, Jack.” She sighed as she smoothed her fingers across the fabric at his groin, which bulged, barely holding back his erection.

  He grabbed her wrist, kissed her palm. “Too much exploring, love, if I’m to last long.”

  “Please, Jack.” She was looking up at him, an unclad sprite with deviltry on her mind. “I won’t touch until you say I can.”

  “Hardly a comfort to me, Mairey. I’m already this aroused for you.” His unsubtle sprite smiled, and he took in a breath that cleared his head. “You may help.”

  Her fingers were quick and sped ahead of his down the front placket. She freed the last button. “There!” Then she sat back on her hands, as though she expected his penis to spring from his pants and dance for her. She looked perplexed and very impatient.

  Before her virginal but very accomplished hands could find him inside his drawers and work her wiles too quickly, Jack shucked the works: trousers, drawers, socks, and shoes, while she looked on from her backward-sprawling, provocative pose on the edge of the bed, roundly appraising and waiting for him.