Rose shivered at his seductive touch but felt a frisson of fear as well. Her brother was renowned for his legal mind. Oh, she had no doubt there was something Reed could do about their hasty marriage. Especially as they hadn’t yet consummated it.
As if reading her mind, Finn lowered his head and kissed her, sweeping his tongue into her mouth without warning, stealing her breath and her senses as he always had. His hand left her back and slipped inside the opening of her silk dolman, his fingers brushing across her blouse to tease her breast beneath.
As usual, she wanted him desperately. And as usual, she denied them both.
Leaning back, Rose shook her head. “I’m sorry.”
Finn gave a groan of frustration and sat down on the bed with her still in his arms.
Resting upon his muscular thighs, she nestled against his chest and tried to calm her rapidly beating heart.
“When, Rose?”
“When everyone knows about us,” she promised. “Besides, it’s too late to do anything about it tonight. If you go away tomorrow, and I’m with child, there won’t be a shred of me left to come home to after my family finds out.”
“Don’t be silly,” he said, nuzzling her neck and causing fingers of pleasure to run up and down her spine. “I’ve listened to your stories about them. They love you beyond words. As I do. When they find out you’ve fallen in love, they’ll be happy for you.”
Rose wanted to believe that. Except her mother was never going to like the fact that Finn’s father was a joiner working in yards on the rugged coast of Maine or that Finn made his living as a shipbuilder and would sometimes go out to sea on test sails. That was the part Rose dreaded most — the times he would have to leave her.
Moreover, this was the first such sailing since they’d met five months earlier.
She still found it hard to fathom it had been a mere five months. From the first, her heart had cried out for him. Her body had followed suit, tightening and pulsing in all the right places whenever he was near. She’d been walking where she shouldn’t have been, on the East Boston docks with her best friend, Claire, after eating lunch at the Maverick House.
There, across the harbor in Eastie, they had decided to view up close the spectacular cruising vessels at the Cunard dock, dreaming of a time they, too, might take a long sea voyage. Finn worked on merchant vessels on a nearby dock.
As Rose and Claire strolled, some unknown movement momentarily blocked the sun. That was when she’d spied him climbing the rigging of a tall ship, looking like a modern-day pirate. Shielding her eyes from the sun, she’d stood and simply stared at the fine specimen of a man until Claire stopped walking, realizing Rose was no longer beside her.
Somehow, Finn had caught sight of her as well, staring right back. Later, he told her he felt she’d bewitched him with her dark-haired beauty. He had climbed down while she’d grabbed Claire by the hand to continue walking. Within a few moments, however, he’d chased her down, asked her name, and made sure he could find her later. Under Claire’s watchful eye, Rose had flirted, as was her wont, all the while thinking she’d never again see the brash sandy-haired man, full of dash-fire and spirit.
Rose had not only been wrong about never seeing him again, she’d married him. Why exactly, she couldn’t say, except that nothing in the world could have stopped her. From the first moments they spent alone together, when he’d ambushed her the following Sunday afternoon as she came out of her house to visit friends, she’d felt as if Finn were hers, and she, his. When he was anywhere close, both her body and her brain were always aware of him. Indeed, she swore when he entered a room or even glanced at her, she knew with a prickling sensation.
Their courting involved picnics out of town and far away from anyone who knew her. They took carriage rides in her father’s old enclosed brougham hidden from prying eyes, walked the East Boston docks as Finn pointed out vessels he admired, or shared a bottle of wine in his room.
Between them was a current of understanding, of like-mindedness, and of the deepest desire to enjoy each other and to make the other one happy.
True, Rose was a tad impetuous. Some would say more than a tad. Yet standing before a judge, just the two of them, with only Claire knowing about the marriage beforehand, Rose had felt it to be precisely the right thing to do.
Telling her family, however, had seemed impossible, and Finn had not pushed it, until now.
He rolled backward onto the bed, taking her with him. Splayed across his chest, Rose let out a peal of delighted laughter.
“I suppose you’re right,” Finn said, surprising her. “I wouldn’t do that to you, leave you in such a precarious position. If only you had let me go to your family ...,” he trailed off when she climbed to a sitting position, straddling his thighs and looked down at his handsome face, gazing into his eyes which seemed to her to be the color of a stormy sea.
“I can’t think straight, love,” he admitted, “with you sitting on me and looking at me like that. All I can think about when I have you in my arms is kissing you. And a few other things.”
Rose smiled demurely, and he grinned back. However, she simply couldn’t give herself to him, even though he was her husband of nearly a month, not without her mother’s approval of their marriage first. She’d had no idea she would want that approval so desperately, yet she did. Like Reed with his beloved Charlotte and like her two older sisters, one with a banker for a husband and one with a doctor — Rose wanted her husband to be not only accepted but also welcomed and loved by her family.
She could not simply spring on them her shipbuilding man, with his tar and resin and solid oak scents that she’d come to love as part of him. All things she feared they would despise.
“Maybe when you return,” Rose began, but he shook his head.
“Don’t think about it now. In a month, we’ll deal with it. I know what you worry about, sweets. I know I’m not exactly a Brahmin. Still, I’ll make a good living for us and our family. You’ll see.”
She knew he would. She would start to prepare her family for the shock of her being the wife of a shipbuilder while he was away. After all, at the young age of 24, he was already a quarterman, not an unskilled laborer, not a small cog like a riveter in an iron shipyard. Whereas some men his age were still assigned cordage duty, he was helping to design and build.
When he returned, she would take him by the hand and march up to her mother and confess that her heart was taken by this incredibly kind and intelligent man. That he looked like Michelangelo’sDaviddidn’t hurt either.
A month — not that long to wait really. Yet as she looked down at his relaxed face, with his quirky smile and single dimple, she felt a foreboding wash over her. A whole month — it was an eternity.
