by Eloisa James
Merry rose to signal the ladies’ retirement to the drawing room, judging that the gentlemen had learned as many intimate details as they cared to about their wives’ toilettes.
Bess showed her disgruntlement with the mention of her fading hair by sweeping the squire’s wife onto a settee for a chat, leaving Merry with Lady Peel.
“Young Kestril is gaping at you like a trout trying to catch a bug,” Lady Peel observed. “My goodness, but that man is as foolish as they come.”
“You don’t suppose that he thinks I might return his regard, do you?” Merry asked.
“Oh no. He realizes that you’re newly married, and anyone can see yours is a love match, even if all the newspapers hadn’t told us as much. Did you see how he’s drinking himself into a standstill? He’ll wake up one of these days, as dry as a raisin, and realize that he’s been yearning after a married lady who hasn’t the faintest interest in him. I shouldn’t be surprised if he went off to India for a spell.”
“That seems extreme,” Merry said, taken aback.
“Everyone is saying that he’s lost the estate to creditors. A gamester, but not in the usual way, since he put his money behind an expedition to bring back an orchid as big as a dinner plate.” She snorted. “As if such a thing existed!”
That made sense. Trent invested his money in a flint mine and now a steam engine in Philadelphia, whereas Kestril bid on a dream flower bigger than his head that might exist in a land he’d never been to.
“I like what you’re doing with the grounds,” Lady Peel said, leaping from exotic to domestic horticulture. “I’ve told my gardener that I want raised cabbage beds.”
“You are the third person tonight to mention cabbages,” Merry said with some amusement. “I certainly hope the beds live up to their promise.”
“That remains to be seen,” Lady Peel said. “God knows what the soil is like in America.”
Merry started to defend her country’s soil, when Lady Peel gave a bark of laughter and patted her hand. “There, there, Your Grace. I only meant that there’s a powerful amount of clay in the Buckinghamshire soil. We’ll be watching like hawks to see how your experiments work out.”
“Oh,” Merry said, stunned by the idea her gardens were being so closely watched.
Lady Peel gave her a sympathetic look. “I imagine it will take some getting used to, being an American and all. The Duke and Duchess of Trent are as close to royalty as we get around here. If you decide to eat a blackbird for breakfast, there won’t be a single black feather left within ten miles. Everyone will insist on dining on a songbird that very night.”
“Why on earth would I eat a blackbird?” Merry asked, startled.
“Don’t,” the lady declared. “I ate one once and it was all bones. Better in shrubbery and out of sight—like drunken young men, now I think of it. Hopefully your duke is wresting the brandy away from Kestril. He suffered quite enough of that behavior from his brother and father, I should think.”
Did everyone know everything, here in the country?
Lady Peel’s next comment confirmed that the countryside did indeed know all about everything. “I approve of all that time you’re spending out of doors. You’re likely already carrying the heir, after all, and my mother always maintained the fresh air was best for a woman in that condition. None of this shutting ladies up in stuffy bedchambers, as they do in London.”
She hoisted herself up from her chair. “You’ve turned pink,” she observed. “I suppose that’s owing to young love. I didn’t experience it myself, thank goodness. It seems an uncomfortable condition, based on Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels, at least. Now if you will excuse me, I must visit the retiring room.”
Merry took her ladyship’s arm and helped her down the corridor.
“I had doubts about you,” the lady said, a few steps later. “An American and all. As a duchess—our duchess!”
Merry cleared her throat. “I apologize.”
“But you’ll do,” Lady Peel went on. “The way you’re holding my arm, for instance.”
“Yes?”
“The former duchess wouldn’t have soiled her fingers.” She hadn’t an ounce of resentment in her tone. “High and mighty as the queen herself, she was. My family goes back to fat Henry—you know, the Eighth—but that wasn’t far enough for her. I don’t suppose you know the difference, do you?”
Once again, Merry couldn’t decide on an appropriate answer, but it didn’t matter, as Lady Peel just kept talking.
“The Duchess of Trent wouldn’t know Debrett’s from a book of sermons. The world’s a queer old place.”
There didn’t seem to be anything to be gained from announcing that she had memorized Debrett’s all the way through H, so Merry held her tongue.
“You ain’t a duchess in the old mold,” the lady said. “But I’ll be jiggered if I don’t like the new mold even better!”
Trent had watched Kestril grow more inebriated throughout the meal. With every glass, he threw another longing look at Merry, until Trent had a nearly irresistible urge to toss him out the front door.
After the meal, Trent endured Kestril’s lecture about orchids until the clock finally inched to the time when he could bid their guests farewell.
When they had seen the last of them off, and the Pelfords had retired to their chambers, he followed Merry upstairs, adjusting his pace because it was difficult to walk after a four-hour cockstand. Along the corridor. Through the bedchamber door.
Closed the door, trying not to slam it.
As if they were magnetized, they flew at each other, Merry laughing and Trent too overcome to laugh, buttons flying now and then, the wall brought into use.
Afterward, he hung over her, panting, sweating. She was so damned beautiful. He couldn’t decide the color of her eyes, because they were always changing, different in candlelight, after making love, when laughing.
Later they lay face-to-face, their legs entangled, and talked.
“What was your father like?” Merry said, following some train of thought in her head.
Trent didn’t care for the question. He ran one hand in a caress down his wife’s back, sweeping up the gentle slope of her arse, but he didn’t answer.
“Jack, I asked you a question!” Merry said it severely, but he saw a gleam in her eyes, and her bottom wiggled under his hands.
“My father was a drunkard,” he said, squeezing the words from a mind that was going foggy with desire. “Drunkards are . . .” He shrugged.
“Are what?”
“They’re all the same,” he said, getting on with the explanation because he wanted it over. He rolled on top of her, elbows braced at her sides. “Cedric and my father were very different when sober, but not when they were drunk. One fuddled man is just like another: ill-behaved, quarrelsome, and often vulgar.”
“Cedric’s behavior at the Vereker ball was certainly not admirable,” Merry acknowledged.
“His worst self,” Trent said. “My father was the same when he was soaked.”
Merry’s legs moved restlessly under him, desire expressed without words. “What does that feel like?” he asked.
“What?” she replied, her breath catching as he rocked against her.
“This.”
“Oh.” Her forehead creased. He pressed forward again. Pink was rising in her cheeks and her fingers curled, holding tightly on to his shoulders.
“Empty,” she whispered. “I suddenly feel empty, as if I remember that you aren’t there and I need you so much.”
Trent’s grin went all the way to his toes. “Let me help you with that,” he said hoarsely.
The following night, words flowed out of Merry like a stream, something about a plant called the Campanula portenschlagiana that she had read about in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine.
“Some sort of rare plant?” he roused himself to ask. He found it hard to think after making love to Merry, whereas she became more talkative. It turned out that she was talking about the bellfl
owers that could be found on any roadside.
After years of having no one to listen to, he discovered that he loved listening to her. Some people didn’t like American accents, but he thought her voice sounded like water in a river, light and sparkling.
Their discussion wandered into uses for gravel (bellflowers require excellent drainage), and from there to farming methods in Wales compared to those in Massachusetts. Then innovations in plumbing and whether they might work for garden irrigation—and by extension for field irrigation.
That led to canals, not as a means of transport, but as a means of helping to control flooding.
One night, they found themselves talking about his father again until Trent managed to change the subject around to her father. Merry was lying across his chest, her hair trailing off the edge of the bed.
“He was an inventor and a diplomat,” she said, “but I just thought of him as my father. Do you know what I find one of the hardest parts about his death?”
Trent shook his head.
“We never said good-bye. I saw him at luncheon, and we only talked about silly things. I had a doll named Penny and I was trying to persuade him to build me a small boat so that I could sail her on Boston Common. All the boys had boats and the girls didn’t.”
“Was he good at building boats?”
“He could make anything,” Merry said, her voice husky with sincerity. “I do think he was a genius, Jack.” She lifted her head from his chest so she could meet his eyes. She kept talking about her father, but Trent lost the thread . . . because she was so damned beautiful.
“Beautiful” wasn’t the right word. It sounded merely physical, whereas everything about Merry glowed from inside. He was thinking about that when he realized that she’d paused and was looking at him expectantly.
“Ah.”
She dropped a kiss on his nose. “The last thing that my father said to me was that he’d be home to tuck me into bed. Do you remember what yours said?”
He did remember. His father had been drunk, very drunk. He’d called Oswald a goatish pignut, and then he called the coachman a lout. Cedric had tried to stop their mother from getting in the phaeton and their father had turned on Cedric and called him lily-livered. And worse.
“No,” he said. “I can’t remember.”
He saw in her eyes the moment that she decided not to challenge his fib. “It must have been so difficult to lose both your parents at once. I can’t imagine.”
Cedric had engaged in public bouts of weeping. Trent had not.
He ran a hand down her slim back. “My father was a drunkard, Merry. No one mourned him.”
There was a flash of sympathy in her eyes, but rather than speak, she decided to kiss him and make it better.
Trent had never liked drinking. But if drinking were like Merry’s kisses, he’d be a drunk. His head spun when their tongues slid against each other, and she made that achy little sound in the back of her throat . . .
He was drunk on her.
Besotted by kisses.
At the beginning of July, Thaddeus decided that given the French navy was back in operation, delay would mean a risky journey. So he and Bess took off for London and thence to America, promising to return the following spring. Later, Merry cried, and Trent kissed away the tears and seduced her out of her sadness.
She taught Trent about the intricacies of hothouses, and he taught her that a woman’s time of the month was no reason to avoid intimacy, after which Merry taught her husband that laughter makes the most awkward of situations more easily borne.
There were moments to treasure: the time when his wife appeared in the study and asked him to spare a few minutes in the greenhouse to consult about new plantings. Or the evening when the bedroom door closed and Merry dropped to her knees and ripped open his placket.
It was mildly humiliating to realize that he wanted more than her body. A man’s worth is measured by his sense of self. Or by his title. Never by what his wife thinks of him. Yet he went to the greenhouse in search of Merry when he came up with a new scheme to make the local gravel pit into a going concern.
Of course, they were friends, which explained it. Trent actually found himself wondering if he’d had a true friend before Merry; he even told her about the uncertain years after he inherited the dukedom, when he had been forced to leave Oxford and fight to return the estate to profitability.
For Merry, as far as Trent could tell, lighthearted behavior came naturally. One day they took a blanket and pony cart and went just far enough away from the house to be out of sight—which turned out to be in the middle of field of flax blooms, as blue as the sky.
As blue as the violet in his wife’s eyes.
He spread the blanket and devoted himself to worshipping her body. He tried to memorize the sultry curve of her hip, the low rise of her back above her arse, the perfectly shaped bones of her feet.
“Your ankles are as beautiful and fragile as ivory,” he told her, lying on that blanket later in a haze of sun and satisfaction. He was tucking periwinkle-blue flax blossoms between her toes.
“That tickles!” she protested. And then, “Did you know that we think of ivory as coming from an elephant, but the same word refers to the tusks of a walrus? Or a wild boar?”
“I did not,” Trent said. He was having trouble concentrating, because her slim hand had slipped below his waist.
She leaned closer. “If you were an elephant, you would have a magnificent tusk.”
That was life with Merry: one moment they were laughing, and then next they were kissing, starved for each other, fumbling, panting with the need to come together.
Chapter Thirty-one
That evening, Merry lay in her bath staring at her toes. For the last few days, she’d been in the grip of a horribly unsettling feeling.
In the first few weeks of marriage, she’d found herself thinking a lot about the moments when Trent would pull her through the bedchamber door, into his arms, and crush her mouth under his. Frolicking, as Aunt Bess called it, was a brand-new activity and had quickly become her favorite.
Sometimes it was more interesting than the raised beds Boothby was constructing in the kitchen gardens, though it felt like betrayal to admit it, even to herself.
But these days she didn’t think merely about bedding her husband; she thought about him.
All the time.
A few days ago, he had taken her down to the kitchen in the middle of the night. They had sat at the kitchen table and ate rough brown bread that tasted even better than Mrs. Morresey’s crumpets, along with a cheddar cheese that bit the tongue.
She had even drunk some of his ale. It frothed and went up her nose and tasted like liquid bread. But she loved it because he loved it.
That was the problem.
She had the odd feeling that she was falling off a precipice, turning into someone else. A new person.
The next morning she woke up early, though not as early as Trent, and watched him work at the desk in his chamber. She knew perfectly well why he was sitting there, writing in his smalls.
He was waiting for her to wake up. His mouth would soften when he saw she was awake, and he’d push away from the table as if whatever he was working on was irrelevant. He wouldn’t even finish the sentence.
Then he would say in a growling, morning voice, “Good morning, Beautiful.” By the time he got to the bed, she would be already tingling behind her knees.
Testing her hypothesis, she sat up, pushing a mop of curls behind her shoulder.
Sure enough, Trent’s quill dropped, and then he was striding toward her. His body . . .
She could write a thousand lines about the way his stomach rippled when he tore off his smalls, the way he was doing now. About the way he wrapped her up in his heat and passion so that she couldn’t do anything but moan.
A half hour later, he rolled over and ran a finger down her sweaty, undoubtedly red face, and asked her how she was.
As if that wasn’t ob
vious.
“I am very well.” She grinned at him. “You?” She peered down his body. “Do you realize that I almost never get to see you looking tired? It’s so much smaller in this state.”
“Smaller?” He looked taken aback. As she watched, that part of him surged with life again.
“Do you call it your lance?” she asked. “Aunt Bess made a joke about that once. Or would you prefer poker? I heard that word in the stables.”
Trent snorted, and Merry poked him in the chest. “Young women are never taught about a man’s body, you know.”
“I can teach you,” he said. The look in his eyes was pure wickedness, designed to make a woman weak at the knees. “What would you call these?” He curled his hand around himself. Two parts of himself.
Merry could feel herself turning pink, which was ridiculous, considering what they had just done. But she was discovering that talking could actually be more intimate than intimacy itself, a fact that seemed to surprise Trent as well. “Gooseberries.”
“You must be joking.” Laughter rumbled from his chest. She shook her head. “There might be other words, but the only one I know of is gooseberries.”
“I have a problem with that,” Trent observed. “I am neither green nor pea-sized.”
“But you are hairy,” she said with a giggle.
He rolled his eyes.
“What word do you use?” she prompted.
“Testicles, if you want to be precise. Stones. Or bollocks.”
“Bollocks!” she cried. “I knew that was a naughty word, but I could hardly ask someone what it referred to.”
Trent moved his hand. “Penis. Cock. Shaft.” Watching that big male hand circling, pulling at himself, was one of the most erotic things she’d ever seen. “There’s nothing feminine about the word because there’s nothing feminine about this.”
Merry rolled her eyes, and he tipped her onto her back, cupping one of her breasts. “So am I holding some sort of fruit?”
