Linda Needham

by The Wedding Night

  He slid the trunk back into place, then sprinted down the hall toward Mairey, calling her name again and again. He reached the jumbled room at a run, expecting to find her distracted by her notes and her burrowing.

  “Mairey!” His heart slid to a stop, then dropped into his gut.

  She was lying face up on the floor, her limbs bent like a string puppet’s and her face sickly white, an enameled bowl fallen from her hand.

  “My God, Mairey!” Jack scooped her into his arms, raw panic surging through him. He couldn’t lose her to some stray illness. Her arms hung limp as a rag while he bent to listen to her heart.

  “Thank God!” It thumped solidly against her chest, a blessing from the heavens. He cuddled her against him, brushed her dry lips with his mouth and stayed to feel her warm, strong breath against him.

  “Mairey, wake up!” The woman had fainted dead away. But she was already blinking awake, wetting her lips with her delicate pink tongue, and making sighing, good-morning noises in her chest. She yawned broadly and stretched, as contented as a fairy princess roused by her prince’s kiss.

  “We really shouldn’t be making love here, Jack.” She reached up and ran her fingers through his forelocks, twirled a hank and pulled him closer with it, whispering, “Not in the basement of the British Museum.”

  Light-headed with relief, Jack stood with her in his arms. “We weren’t making love, Mairey. You fainted.”

  “I don’t think so. I must have been overcome by your kiss. Snow White in reverse, my prince.” She wagged her finger at him. “I know my fairy tales.”

  Undoubtedly, but at the moment she was in no shape to diagnose her own condition.

  “A healthy woman doesn’t just faint without reason. You’ve looked ill for a week.”

  “I feel perfectly fine now, Jack. You can put me down.”

  “Not on your life.” Taking no chances with his lady love, Jack carried Mairey and her satchel up the stairs and out of the museum. He gladly suffered more of her kisses on the step, but didn’t set her down until he had dropped with her into the seat of a hackney, where she seemed intent upon finding a way into his trousers.

  “Doctor Timson, in Kensington,” he called to the driver. “Quickly!”

  Jack listened outside Timson’s examination room, his ear stuck blatantly to the panel. Timson’s murmuring monotone. Mairey’s clear voice, made unintelligible through two inches of oak and the swooshing of blood in his head.

  Though he’d known Charles Timson since returning to England, the doctor had steadfastly refused to allow Jack in the room while he was examining Mairey. Certainly Jack trusted him, one of the few in the British Empire who was both a physician and a surgeon. Jack had consulted with him on the destructive health effects of mining, and together they were working on a bill to put through the Commons.

  But hell, Jack had seen every inch of Mairey without her clothes. And she was the least modest woman he’d ever met. He just wanted to know what had been plaguing her and how he could help.

  He rapped on the door with his fist. “Hurry up in there!”

  Silence. He paced the labyrinthine pattern in the oak floor, glared out the window, studied the roadway of blood vessels on the ghoulish diagram on Timson’s wall, then stuck his hands into his pockets.

  The Willowmoon Knot! Bloody hell, he’d forgotten! He fished the piece out to study it, but he was too wracked with questions and worry, and the symbols were gibberish to him. Mairey would have to translate.

  Mairey. He paced some more while he carefully wrapped the Knot in his kerchief and buried it safely in the bottom of his deepest coat pocket.

  He’d surprise her with it when this was all over. Tonight, after dinner at the lodge, when everyone was asleep and they were alone in the parlor.

  The latch clicked and Timson came through the door, drying his hands on a towel. Jack peered past the man’s shoulder, fighting the urge to shove him out of the way. Mairey was sitting on a padded table, her small, straight back to the door. She turned and met his gaze, wide-eyed as a doe in a meadow.

  “She’ll be out in a minute, Jack.” Timson shut the door, closing him off from Mairey.

  “Damn it, Charles! What’s the matter with her? What do I need to do? Will she be all right?”

  “Eventually.” Timson removed the spectacles that hid his gray eyebrows and buffed the lenses with the corner of the towel.

  “What the hell does that mean?” Jack’s stomach reeled with apprehension. Mairey sick, suffering. “Tell me now!”

  Timson stuck his spectacles back on and peered owlishly at Jack over the end of his nose, relishing a secret of some sort. “It means, Jack, old man, that you’re going to be a father.”

  “I’m—” The whole blessed world stopped on its axis while Jack held his breath and waited for the humming of his heart to settle. “What?”

  “Miss Faelyn is pregnant.”

  A father! And a husband. “Ohhhh, yes!”

  A surge of joy drove him through the doorway of the sunlit examination room. Mairey was standing in the middle of the room, shoving her arms into her jacket.

  “Mairey, my love!” As sylvan and beautiful as the woods she adored, the rhythm of his pulse and the meaning of his life.

  “Jack. I’m—” Her eyes were brilliant stars and lit with wonder; her cheeks glowed. “We’re going to have a baby.”

  “Yes, my love, we are.” He couldn’t help his grin, or his belly laugh as he gathered her into his arms and drew her scent to the center of him. Here was where he wanted to spend his days. He was truly inside of her now, his blood and hers mixed and making everlasting magic. “Ah, Mairey, I love you.”

  “Jack?”

  He held her tightly, not wanting to hear her objections, knowing that they would not stop him from protecting his child, or this woman that he loved. “You’ll marry me, madam. Today. Our child will know its father.”

  “Oh, Jack, I—”

  He raised her chin sharply, never so serious in all his life, for his dewy-eyed Mairey and the flower that was budding inside her were everything to him. “I’ve lost one family to my carelessness, Mairey; I’m not going to lose another.”

  Mairey’s heart reeled with her love for Jack, for the silken thread that connected them. He wasn’t a careless man; he was principled, and his love, imperishable.

  “Well, madam?”

  I’m sorry, Papa. But the Willowmoon will have to stay hidden for now.

  She couldn’t risk looking for it. Not with her husband and their child to protect. The Knot had been safely gone for two centuries. And though she was filled with a dark foreboding, it would have to keep while her children grew, while her marriage bloomed.

  “Marry you, Jack?” She put his warm hand on her belly, where their child was sleeping, then slipped her arms around his neck, met his spectacular kiss, and gave him all her dreams. “In a heartbeat, my love.”

  Chapter 18

  “Are you a princess now, Mairey?”

  “She’s my countess, Caro.” Mairey’s intoxicating husband, the vastly handsome Viscount Rushford, looked more like a sagging Christmas tree decorated with squealing little angels than a titled bridegroom freshly home from a hurry-up wedding.

  Caro was in his arms; Poppy was perched on his shoulders, her arms caught round his head like a mane; and Anna was stuffing a fistful of daisies into every hole in his jacket.

  She’d never seen a man so brimming with peace. Mairey felt it, too. The moment they had married, a great calm had swept through her. The driving wind stopped, and all the voices. Leading Jack away from the Willowmoon would be critical in the next few years. He would grumble his frustration, but he would follow her lead.

  And if she did find it in the bottom of some forgotten barrel, her pocket would provide a safe refuge for it until she could take it safely home.

  Jack would never know.

  His grin filled his face and lit his eyes.

  Aunt Tattle was beside herself with h
appiness. “Lord Rushford married your sister, Caro. That makes him your brother-in-law.”

  “I have a brother!”

  “A big brother,” Anna said, giving Mairey a bouquet of daisies and a buss on the cheek.

  “Just imagine: the pair of you sneaking away today to be married.” Tattie dabbed at the corners of her eyes. “Pretending you were off on one of Mairey’s humdrum trips to the museum, when you might have had a celebration.”

  “I’m sorry, Auntie.” Mairey gave the woman a guilty hug and looked at Jack across the parlor. “Perhaps we’ll have a reception later. You can plan everything.”

  “I suppose that will do.”

  “In the meantime, Mairey and I will be spending tonight at the main house.” Jack’s eyes never left Mairey’s, even as he let Caro to the ground and disengaged Poppy’s arms from around his neck like a grinder and his long-armed monkey. “The rest of you must stay here and pack.”

  “Are we moving away?” Anna looked stricken.

  “Into the main house.” He planted a kiss on top of the girl’s head. “In the morning.”

  That set off a wave of jumping and whooping.

  “Now upstairs with you, girls.” Tattie winked at Jack and raised her brows at Mairey, then gave them a little shove toward the door. “You two go along, as well.”

  Leave-taking took a bit longer and included the story of the Princess and the Pea in which Mairey was the princess and Jack played the pea and everyone ended up on the floor in a laughing tangle. But as soon as the lodge door was closed and they were safely in the yard, Jack lifted Mairey into his arms.

  “I can walk, Jack.”

  “Yes, my love, but not fast enough.” He was already on the wooded path, his shoulder deflecting the overhanging branches while Mairey hung on to his neck.

  She tucked his hair behind his ear to better tease the delicate ridges with her tongue, taking full advantage of his inability to fend off her teasing, which made him sigh and squeeze her closer.

  “Are you in a hurry then, sir?”

  “Indeed. To plow you thoroughly, my countess.”

  Mairey liked being carried by her husband. And she liked his plow. “Your seed is incorrigibly potent, Jack. Probably a boy.”

  “A son. God bless us, Mairey.” He swung off the main path and charged through the understory.

  “A shortcut, husband?”

  “Privacy. I want to kiss you before I burst.”

  “An admirable idea.” The woods were dewy with the coming night, the highest branches still gilded by the sun and the pale gentian violet of the sky.

  Mairey knew the place he was taking her to: the streamside with the enormous, fallen beech along the bank, one side on dry land, the other in a few inches of brookwater. The thick roots were heavily branched with sinewy twists and tucks. Its smooth gray skin was springy with moss.

  He had already kissed her here twice before. Once at twilight, when the girls were out in the stream catching fairies. That had been just a chaste buss against her cheek, and she’d dreamed about it for the next week. They had been alone for the second kiss, which was longer, deeper, toe-curling.

  “Now that we’re married, Mairey, I can confess that I have imagined you entirely naked, alone, and waiting for me right here in this very spot. On that very tree.”

  “Truly?” All that imagination from a man whom she once thought only understood digging holes into the earth.

  He set her on her feet, bent down, and picked up her stockinged foot. “What happened to your shoes?”

  “I lost them down the trail.”

  He kissed her fully but too briefly and then let her go. “I’ll get them. Wait here.”

  “I promise.” Jack disappeared through the brush, his greatcoat slapping at his calves, off to rescue her shoes. Her very own dragon. Let’s see, that would make his child a dragonet.

  Though she shouldn’t care, Mairey hoped for a boy, a strapping young lad who would grow up to be his father’s reflection. And besides, Jack would indulge a daughter’s every whim, and she would grow up hopelessly spoiled.

  “Did you really picture me naked here on this tree, Jack?” she called.

  “Entirely naked, madam,” he called back to her from somewhere down the path.

  Mairey grinned and swiftly began working the buttons of her shirtwaist, applauding this imagination of her husband’s. Hers was more risqué and might shock the man to his socks, but she doubted he’d complain.

  She tossed aside her shirtwaist and her camisole.

  “What exactly am I doing in this imagination of yours?” The air was chilly and nipped at her bare breasts. “Just standing there?”

  He stopped his brush rattling for a moment. “You are recumbent on the trunk, my love. Waiting for me.”

  “Ah!” Recumbent.

  Mairey tried not to laugh too loudly as she stepped out of her skirt, petticoats, and drawers all at one time. She listened carefully to Jack’s tromping as she rolled her stockings off and dropped them on the pile of clothes.

  She felt wickedly beautiful, a wood nymph awaiting her satyr. Elfin revels. All the sensuous delights of the late summer forest—dappled shadows and bright water and dancing breezes. Jack’s hands, oh, his mouth. Despite the hint of an early autumn, Mairey’s skin felt as warm as if the sun were playing on her.

  “Exactly how am I recumbently awaiting you, husband?”

  “Lounging exotically, my love, an arm here, a leg there.” He was on his way back, all twig-snapping footfalls. “And skin, Mairey—lots of your lovely skin.”

  “It sounds complicated, Jack. And uncomfortable.” She draped herself just so on the fallen tree, an arm lounging exotically along a jaunty root, a leg bent demurely, coyly. Lots of skin and other features that she knew Jack would enjoy.

  Her unsuspecting husband came crashing through the underbrush. “I found both shoes, Mair—”

  He came to a full, jolting stop.

  “Recumbent like this, Jack?”

  He blinked. Shook his head. Blinked again. And then his eyes grew huge.

  “Mairey!” Her shoes hit the ground, forgotten. He was with her in a roaring twinkle, straddling the log and her thighs, his greatcoat a glorious tent that trapped his warmth and his spice.

  His kisses fell everywhere, expansive and tongue-wet and branding. He coiled her hair in his fist, collected it and scrubbed it over his face. Mairey moaned in her glory as he suckled at her breasts, now so deliciously tender and receptive. He formed his hands like a cradle and murmured against her belly, spoke of precious treasures and miracles.

  “Our babies, Mairey.”

  She opened to him as a moonflower, moaning against his mouth.

  She was free to be open with him now, and she was truly laughing for the first time in a very long time. Jack’s powerful coiling, his wreathing her with his love, hadn’t bound her. It had made her free. Free to love him, free to be loved by him.

  He smelled of a night ride through the woods, his shoulders dusted with bits of moonlight and silver weed.

  She started working at the buttons on his trouser front, hoping he wouldn’t notice. Surprise was the order of this amazing day. Surprise strategies. Surprise babies and weddings.

  His buttons were nearly free, and he was bulging against the top of his drawers. So eager. So marvelous. Her hands ached to hold him.

  He raised up from where he’d been laving her breasts, her very hungry-eyed husband.

  “Good God, Mairey, have you any idea what you do to me?”

  “I do.” The last button, and he sprung free. Aching to explore him to the fullest, Mairey took all of that long, velvety thickness between her hands, bent over his hips, and took him directly and firmly into her mouth.

  “Ohhhh.” Jack thought his brain had shot out the top of his head. He braced his arm on the tree behind him and jammed his heels against the soft ground, which bucked his hips upward and drove him deeper. “Mairey! I want—”

  He wanted her to
stop—to wait until—no!

  “Oh, yeeesssss!” He held his breath and tried to see more than darting stars and Mairey’s moonlit hair in his lap. But she had her hand inside his gaping trousers and had scooped up his scrotum; was playing and fondling there while she suckled and tasted and encircled him with her lusty fingers. Oh, the heavens, and the bounteous earth.

  “Enough, Mairey.”

  She sat up and kissed his mouth. “I’ve been thinking about this part of you for too long, Jack.” Then she went back to her cavorting.

  She thinks about my penis! He wanted to hoot but all he managed was a strangled growl while his wife drove him to lunacy.

  “Enough, enough, Mairey!”

  He lifted her face between his hands and steadied his breathing while she asked, “Is this what you imagined, Jack?”

  “I never, never got this far, Mairey. Not nearly!” His commonplace imagination had stopped on the blunt edge of reality, his erotic fantasy arrested by the classical painters of reclining nudes. Lamentable painters with only their art to move them, lacking the smokey fragrance of moss crushed by Mairey’s rosy bottom, the silky sleekness of her skin beneath his hands, the feel of her tongue—

  “Oh, Jack, I love you!”

  And those miraculous declarations of her heart riding on the night wind.

  Never had he imagined that he’d find a wife who would tease at his senses in the woods. But that was what came of marrying a nymph.

  Mairey had draped her legs over his thighs, leaving her open to him, to cradle his erection and let him tease there, while he made love to her mouth. She unbuttoned his braces at the front and tugged his trousers down his hips.

  “Here in the woods, Jack?” She took him into her hands again, made him growl again and shudder. “To celebrate our marriage?”

  “You’ll have me baying at the moon, love, and waking everyone up.”

  She laughed. “Just starters then, and the rest of our wedding night at home, in our bedroom.” A tilt of her hips and she had him poised against all that luscious slickness, on the brink of thrusting himself into her. He spanned her slender waist with his spread fingers, his arms quaking with restraint. But he had to tell her, to make sure she understood.