“I am trying to tell you I want you to be happy. I don’t think I will make you happy.”
He didn’t say anything.
“We could still be friends.”Friendth.
There was a long silence.
“Well,” Phineas said. He continued to walk at the same pace. He reached out with his free arm and snapped off a twig from a shrub next to the gravel path. “I think you’re a very intelligent woman, darling. Far more intelligent than I am. I deeply respect your thinking. And what you say. And I want you to say more things to me. A great deal more. I want to hear everything you think. So it is with great regret that I, as your friend, have to tell you what you just said is a cartload of rubbish. Complete and utter rubbish.”
He crushed the twig in his hand, threw it away, and stopped walking and turned to her, taking both her gloved hands in his. “I know a great deal about what will make me happy, Caro. My own happiness is really the only thing I know anything about. And I have arrived at the conclusion that what will make me most happy is you. And making you happy. Will you marry me tomorrow?”
She did not know what to say. He was so sure. How could he be so sure?
He leaned toward her, looking down at their joined hands, and without thinking, she bent her neck and put her forehead against his in the middle of a path in Hyde Park.
He sighed and spoke softly. “Darling, if you don’t say yes, I am going to take you to the nearest inn, lay you down on a bed, and make my next argument more convincing with the strength of my tongue. Friendship be damned.”
She felt the corners of her mouth turn up but with their foreheads together she knew he couldn’t see. “Only your t-t-tongue?”
“After our shared chastity over the last three months, I think it will be highly likely my cock will be involved, too, once I get you to say yes.”
“I’ll marry you,” she whispered.
“Damn,” he said and took his forehead from hers and gazed up into her eyes and grinned. “I was looking forward to the convincing.”
“Tomorrow.”
“Yes. Tomorrow, my sweet. I’m filled with the most wonderfully frustrating anticipation. And I’m sure the wedding will be a lovely occasion as well.”
Twenty-Four
The weddingwasa lovely occasion. And afterward, there was a lovely wedding breakfast at the town house of the Marquess of Sudbury. Everything had been flawlessly arranged by the new Countess of Burchester.
After the breakfast, the Earl of Burchester took his wife to his rooms and showed her the bedchamber next to his that had been prepared for her.
“I’ll see about renting a proper town house next Season, Caro. But will this do for now?”
She nodded.
The shipwreck painting hung next to the dressing table. Jones must have brought it over during the wedding breakfast. Caroline crossed to it and gazed at the foam on the churning waves, the threatening sky.
In a way, she was more nervous than she had been when she had gone into Phineas’ bedchamber in her father’s house and taken off her nightdress. That had been about one night with a man she would never see again. Now she was trying to lay a pattern she hoped would keep her husband in her bed for as long as possible.
She felt Phineas come up behind her. His arms wrapped around her middle, his warm body pressed against her back, a kiss was placed on the nape of her neck.
“Darling.”
His hands ran down her hips to her legs. She shuddered as he brought them back up the front of her body to her breasts.
“Are you as hungry as Phin is?
She swallowed. “H-h-how h-h-h-hungry are y-y-y-you?” Every word a stammer. She hadn’t stuttered so much around him in a long time.
“Ravenous,” he purred into the skin of her neck as he pinched her nipples. “Phin is starving for his Caro.”
She leaned back into him. “G-g-good.”
“I’m going to undress you now, darling. For the first time. And then I want to take my wife to bed.”
