‘No, Robin, he is three and thirty. Only a few years older than me. Not old at all, and he has no other children, since he has never been married before.’
‘That’s good.’
‘Yes, I suppose so, but I expect he will want a son of his own, then,’ Ned contributed.
‘Well, Lord Ventris’s title and estate can pass through the female line – it came to him through his aunt. So he would like to have a child, yes, quite naturally, but it need not be a boy. A girl could inherit.’
Robin’s face reflected his horror at this new idea. ‘Not just a nasty, smelly baby, but a girl!’ He made a noise suggestive of profound masculine disgust.
‘Mama would like that,’ Ned said unexpectedly. ‘I expect she has been lonely, especially now we are away at school, and Miss Naismith has left to marry Mr Muncaster. Is that why?’
‘Partly,’ she said resolutely. ‘And I admit, I would like a baby, now you are both grown so big.’
‘A puppy would be just as good,’ grumbled Robin. ‘And much more fun. Dogs candothings, even when they’re quite young. Babies just…’ He waved a hand to encompass all the chaos of which babies were capable, and knocked over a cream jug.
When order was restored, it was plain that the boys – or Robin, at least – had tired of the subject. They went outside together and walked about a little, chatting of this and that, and then it was time to return them to school and set out on the long drive back to Armstrong House. Viola embraced them, when they were certain nobody was looking, and watched as they went inside, heads close together as always.
They had taken it as well as she could have hoped; Robin would be won over if no baby was immediately forthcoming and if Richard involved him in suitably masculine pursuits, and Ned… Ned knew she had been lonely, wanted her to be happy, and would be to a large extent placated if he saw she was. His own relationship with Ventris would have to be built more slowly and cautiously.
But would she be happy in her new marriage, even if her boys were? How could she possibly know?
6
THE WEDDING NIGHT
Viola sat in bed, propped on pillows with her hair loose about her bare shoulders, and pretended to read. It was most unlikely that a woman in a situation such as hers would really be able to concentrate on the pages of a book, however gripping, and indeed she couldn’t; the words were a blur to her. But she was damned if he was going to come in, when he finally did, and find her meekly waiting for him. If she picked up a volume when she heard the connecting door between their chambers open, he’d know she’d done it just for show. He’d be able to tell that she’d just been moving – he had a hunter’s instinct for that sort of thing; she knew in her blood. Of course he did – it came from how he had chosen to live his life. Whatever he’d been when he was a youth, now he was a big, beautiful, sleek animal, a predator, and she would not be his prey. Not ever.
So she heldPride and Prejudicein front of her, open at some random page, and tried to breathe calmly. If he thought to tease her by asking her about the story, and he might, she was prepared. She’d read it before, upon its publication; given its premise, she and her sisters might have been said to have lived it. She wondered idly – her thoughts were buzzing about like flies trapped against a windowpane – if the lady author, whoever she might be, had ever envisaged that her clever book would be read in such scandalous circumstances, by a naked woman who was both dreading and longing for the arrival of the man she had married only a few hours since, and in many ways hardly knew.
The door opened at last, and he lounged in, closing it behind him. He was wearing a black silk banyan, carelessly done up – as if anything he ever did was careless – to expose a tantalising V of bare, muscular chest, and the dark hair upon it. He was the embodiment of every fantasy that a lonely woman had ever had at night (assuming she was not inclined to take Mrs Constantine’s advice, and take it exclusively, in the matter of bedfellows). She would not lick her lips, though she wanted to. She closed the book with a little snap that sounded excessively loud in the quiet room, and set it down, and looked at him in silence.
The banyan now concealed much of his athletic frame, those hard thighs, the lean hips and the broadness of his shoulders, but his day clothes did not, fitting his form with tailored precision. The current mode for tight pantaloons and breeches meant that all of a gentleman’s masculine endowments could quite easily be seen and assessed, not just the muscles of his thighs and torso but much, much more than that. When a man was aroused, it was shockingly obvious. Never discussed by ladies, at least not in public, but plain to see. And he had been visibly aroused earlier today. Provokingly, she became aware that her nipples were peaking, her breasts tightening, and not because the room was cold. Even ladies gave signs of arousal that they could not always hide. Foolish to imagine that those dangerously observant grey eyes would not have noticed.
He said, ‘I confess I did not expect to see you already naked, my lady.’ His voice was very deep, his tone caressing.
She replied with composure, ‘I did not care for the idea of you undressing me, and still less did I care to undress myself while you watched, as if at your command. So I saved us both a little time.’ When she had finished speaking, she threw back the covers before she lost her courage. To give him credit, he did not blink at what was revealed.
‘But we have nothing but time. We have all night. All week. Longer. Or do you imagine,’ he said, unfastening his robe and letting it fall, then crossing the room to her side, ‘that I intend merely to fall on you like a thunderbolt, take my selfish pleasure from you, and then leave you alone and unsatisfied? I would expect that a woman of your experience should know better. Even from our last encounter, you should know better.’
She shrugged, taking a little wicked pleasure in the way it made her breasts move, and the way his eyes followed that movement. He was very close now, naked as she was, and it took a conscious effort not to let her gaze linger on him: his strong shoulders, his chest, the tautly muscled torso with the line of dark hair leading down to his proudly erect member. ‘You don’t doubt your ability to satisfy me, sir?’
It wasn’t a fair gibe, or even a logical one, and she knew it. She did indeed have evidence that he could give her pleasure, from their explosive meeting when they’d agreed to marry. And that was not all. Nature had been generous in the gifts she had given him, as she could see for herself, and rumour had it that he had made good use of those gifts over the last few years, soshedidn’t doubt it for a second – but there was no need to tell him that. He didn’t need to be any more smugly confident than he already was.
‘Was that a challenge?’
Viola had a temper, she would have been the first to admit, and sometimes, it led her to say things she later regretted. For reasons she didn’t care to dwell on, this man of all men riled her into incautious speech whenever she met him, which was perhaps a shame, since she’d just married him. ‘Ventris,’ she said crisply, ‘we have wed for the purpose of conceiving a child. I have reason to believe that you need no instruction in the methods usually employed to do so, and you will be aware that I am similarly enlightened. And here we are, both naked and, to all appearances…’ and now she did allow her eyes to linger, to caress and to appreciate, ‘Ready. I assure you, I need no fine words, no delicate persuasion, no slow wooing. Shall we…?’
Before she had finished speaking, he was on her.Be careful what you wish for, she thought, as he moved between her legs – which had not before been spread wide to accommodate him between them, but somehow now mysteriously were, though he hadn’t yet laid so much as a hand on her – and covered her body with his. And stopped. His member was at her entrance, nudging, seeking, but he stopped. They were belly to belly, hot skin to hot skin, his rough chest hair tickling her breasts, his arms taking most of his weight so that he did not crush her, his face close to hers. His breath caressed her cheek as he said, ‘I cannot decide whether you need to paint me as a brute and a villain, perhaps in your own mind as much as anywhere else, or whether you really are… impatient. Again. If it is the first, I refuse to give you that particular twisted satisfaction, and if it is the second, well, despite appearances, I am not myself so hasty. You must know that good things come to she who waits.’
And then, silkily, ‘I promised not to kiss your lips, and you reminded me of it earlier today when I forgot for a moment. In the spirit of fairness, I will extend that to your lovely face, lest you think that I am likely to be carried away and make a sneaking attempt on your mouth. That would be underhand; I shall not do it, however tempted I might be. But I made no undertaking not to kiss any other part of you. Did I?’
‘No,’ she said steadily. ‘I did not ask that of you.’ She had undertaken the formal marriage negotiations herself, though her father’s old lawyer, who still looked after her affairs, had been so scandalised that he had almost died of it. He’d been there to put her stipulations into lawyers’ dry words for her, but she had not stayed absent like some blushing virgin whose future could be decided for her behind her back. Not this time. Three men had been present in the dusty panelled office with her, two lawyers and Ventris himself. She had said baldly, careless what any of them thought, ‘I have told you already that I will not kiss you – Mr Carlyle, I want it to be very clear, I will not kiss him,’ and had it written into the agreement. Insisted upon it, or she would not have signed. If she’d said,I do not want your lips anywhere upon my body, the old man would have fallen down dead of an apoplexy on the spot. And besides… didn’t she want that? Why deny herself such pleasure when she knew just how good it could be?
She could tell somehow that this provoking man she’d married was smiling. She could not see his face, because he was kissing his way down her neck, tiny butterfly kisses, and occasionally a nip of the teeth, just to unsettle her. His warm breath on her throat, the slight caress of his lips, the sudden, unexpected sharp jolt of his teeth… It had been so long. She would not moan. She would not whimper, gasp or sigh.
He’d reached her breast, and now his tongue came out and teased her nipple, the very tip of it, and she bit her lip, hard, in order to keep silent. She would not bury her face in his hair and drink in the scent of it, clean and masculine, no matter how much she wanted to. And then he made some wordless sound and took her whole nipple in his mouth and began sucking on it, laving it with his hot tongue, while his hand came up and began playing with her other breast, its erect peak stiffening even further at his touch.
And her resolution snapped. She had never promised or even intended to lie there like a log while he explored her body; so now her fingers tangled in his silky hair, and she wrapped her legs around him tightly. This was a sign, it seemed, for him to stop holding himself back too; he let his whole weight fall on her, pressing her urgently into the soft bed, and she welcomed it with a fierce emotion that she refused to describe as joy even to herself.
