“I do love you, Ambrose. I do trust you. I just don’t know the way back to where we were.”
“Shall I show you the way?” he suggested with a smile, sitting back on his heels.
Shall I show you the way..?
As Ambrose spoke, a vanished horizon seemed to reappear from the darkness and open up again in Frances’ mind.
Smiling, Frances reached out and caressed her husband’s jaw, presently smooth but sometimes slightly rough with stubble in the mornings when she rolled over in bed and kissed him. Ambrose pressed his face into her palm and looked at her with those midnight-blue eyes that were equally capable of melting her heart and other portions of her anatomy.
Everything again felt as though it might be possible, as long as Frances could reach out and take Ambrose’s hand metaphorically as well as literally.
“My love,” she said, keeping her hand pressed to his face until he turned his lips to kiss her palm, and the warmth that only Ambrose caused began to suffuse her body,. “Ambrose, I…I want you. I need you to make love to me. I need to feel you in me again. That is the way back, isn’t it?”
“Your wish is my command,” he growled low in his throat, scooping Frances up from the chair in a display of that protective strength that aroused her at a primal level and drew an immediate sigh of longing from her lips.
Kissing her lips, Ambrose carried her to that familiar sheepskin rug where he had already claimed her so many times and with such pleasure that the very sight of it made her heart rush and her belly spark with lust.
A further powerful wave of love and lust swept over Frances in Ambrose’s arms, remembering how Ambrose had dashed Oswald Keeton away from her at the folly and sent him flying, bloodied, across the ground. This man was hers and he was willing and able to love her and protect her.
Safe now in this understanding, Frances’ lips parted easily to Ambrose’s tongue and her thighs to the caresses of his hands. Soon she was yet again in that state of hot, sticky excitement where she knew Ambrose liked to hold her as long as he could.
Frances gasped her longing both for the peak of her pleasure and the entrance of the manly shaft, so hard and hot in her hand and then in her tight velvet passage. Her bottom bumped on the soft rug as Ambrose filled her, Nothing then mattered but the unionof their bodies, the spasming of her womanhood and the leaping of Ambrose’s seed deep within her.
“I love you, my beautiful wife,” Ambrose whispered in her ear as they came to rest.
“I’m yours,” Frances murmured back, wrapping her legs about his waist to hold him inside. “I’ve come home.”
Epilogue
“Winnie was so pleased to be able to see all the ladies in their ballgowns, wasn’t she?” Frances laughed, looking to Ambrose as she told Beatrice and Lydia of her little stepdaughter.
Winifred had been allowed to stay up late with her governess and sit on the upper landing, watching through the bannisters as the guests for Frances’ first Westall Park ball arrived.
“She was very happy indeed,” Ambrose agreed, lightly squeezing his wife’s waist. “I expect she will draw some of them for us tomorrow.”
“I shall save my flowers for Winnie,” Beatrice announced, touching the small nosegay pinned to her white dress. “Ah, Captain Elverton, I would love to dance, thank you.”
Lydia too was soon swept off with a partner and Lord and Lady Scovell were already dancing. Among the couples of their agethey were the lightest on their feet, and for affection they could easily rival twenty-something newlyweds. It no longer pained Frances to see her parents like this.
Now she was both able to recognize love and appreciate that lovers did not need to be perfect, nor the road of love entirely straight. Nor were there enemies to be feared or avoided in the ton any more.
Lord Mulford had gone to South America a few weeks after his trespass at Scovell House. Miss Sinclair, meanwhile, was reportedly banned from London by her family for the foreseeable future. With Ellen Yates carousing in Italy with the Duke of Redford, and little chance of finding a maid as competent and morally flexible, Annabelle Sinclair found her ambitions and activities rather curtailed.
Circulating among their guests, Frances was ever conscious of Ambrose at her side, from breathing in the scent of his cologne and feeling the solidity of his arms, to hearing and appreciating his easy conversation and light humor. A year ago, she would have thought it impossible to love a man as she loved him.
Each time she turned to kiss his cheek, or pressed his arm with her hand, she wondered how many others in the room felt the same about their spouses. How many other women were looking forward as much as Frances to being alone with their husbands in a locked bedroom after the dance..? Her eyes shone as they caught Ambrose’s gaze.
“What are you thinking about, Duchess Frances?” he asked in a low and mischievous tone, bending down to her ear. “Surely not still what I did twice with my tongue this morning before I finally took you?”
“I haven’t been able to stop thinking of that,” Frances admitted with a pleasurable sigh.
“You read Winnie a bedtime story,” Ambrose pointed out. “That must have provided some distraction.”
“Yes, I read the story but all the while she was telling me that you would be the most handsome and well-favored man at the ball and I was agreeing with her.”
They laughed together for a few moments before the opening bars of a waltz sounded.
“Ah, this one is our dance,” stated Ambrose. “I know you were too tired for the reel or the country dance but there’s only one woman I ever want to waltz with.”
