With a hand on the back of her neck, he held her close, his lips meeting hers in a much longer, warmer caress. His mouth opened, his tongue circling hers, sending a wild swirl of excitement spiraling through her. Her senses reeled, and the soft, paper-wrapped package in her hands slipped to the caleche’s boards.
He broke off and, with a low laugh, reached to snag it and set it back on her lap. “Do you want to go back upstairs,leannan?”
“Oh, yes,” she breathed on a sigh. “But no.”
“Women.” He shook his head, bright gold in the sun, and lifted the caleche’s reins.
“Drive fast,” she urged, and then, “Faster,” until they were racing toward Cainewood at an alarming speed, considering her delicate state. “I want to be there with Cait when the babe greets the world.”
But as she was hurrying up Cainewood’s carved stone staircase, the thready cry of a newborn split the air. She paused with her hand on the gray marble rail.
Trick squeezed her around the shoulders. “Sorry we’re late, lass, but do you not think our little interlude was worth it? We so rarely have time to ourselves these days.”
“I suppose.” She gave him a mock pout. “Let’s go meet the child.”
The door to Jason and Caithren’s chamber was wide open, the room crammed with cooing Chases. Cait reclined like a queen in the cobalt-curtained bed, a squalling infant in her arms.
“For me?” she asked with a smile, indicating the gift in Kendra’s hands. “Or the babe?”
“Both.” Kendra handed it to her. “Though really it’s from your cousin Cameron. I wrote asking him to send it. Then he wouldn’t accept my money.” Looking around the noisy chamber while Caithren opened the package, she spotted Jason and Colin, but not her twin. “Is Ford not here yet?”
Jason sat beside Cait. “He sent a message from Lakefield House that they’d be a bit late,” he said, helping his wife unfold a green-and-blue plaid blanket. “Seems to think he’s on the verge of some discovery.”
“Turning iron into gold? He always did want to be Midas.” Kendra laughed, moving closer as a grinning Cait wrapped her child in the Leslie tartan.
Like magic, the babe quieted.
Swathed in its mother’s clan colors, the child looked so precious and content. Feeling her heart melt with tenderness, Kendra ran a fingertip along its downy cheek. “Everything went well?” she asked Cait while smiling down at the newborn. “The babe is healthy? And you’re fine?”
“Aye. Everything went perfectly.”
The baby grasped her finger with tiny fingers of its own. Such a miracle. Beneath the new blanket, it was swaddled in white, not blue or pink. She looked up. “Well, what is it?”
Cait gave a happy sigh. “A lad.”
“Anotherboy?”
That made three. The Chase family had multiplied in the six years since Kendra and Trick were wed.
Cait’s two older sons were bouncing on the canopied bed. Thankfully the babe didn’t seem to mind the wild ride.
The rest of the chamber was no more calm. Amy and Colin’s two boys were racing around the room, chasing Kendra and Trick’s two giggling daughters and gleefully careening off the tapestried walls. The oldest of the cousins at seven, Jewel was a bit more sedate. Of course that was because she was busy at the moment, serenading the new arrival with a lullaby—at the top of her lungs.
One of Kendra’s young daughters rammed into her knees, the result of a hopeless attempt to escape her pursuing cousins. As she lifted the girl into her arms, Trick moved close. “Chaos, as always,” he whispered.
“Yes,” she said, turning to him. “But a happy chaos, don’t you think?”
He grinned and took her mouth in a kiss, right there in front of her brothers and everyone, like their first kiss in Cainewood’s chapel so many years before.
And this kiss left her every bit as shaken.
A glorious thing, true love was, she thought as she pulled back with a smile, their daughter wriggling between them. Once, long ago, she’d promised Trick he’d find true love, and she’d followed through, hadn’t she?
A Chase promise was never given lightly.
