He bent his head and took one nipple into his mouth through the thin lawn, suckling softly at first, then with greater insistence when she uttered a low moan and threaded her fingers into his hair. The fabric grew damp beneath his tongue. He could feel the hardened peak beneath it, could feel how her body answered every pull of his mouth with a fresh tremor. At length, he drew the nightrail up and over her head, casting it aside.
She lay bare before him, and he was still for a moment, simply looking. Her skin was flushed from throat to navel, the dark tips of her breasts peaked and sensitive, and at her abdomen, the early, unmistakable swell of the child she carried. He set his palm there, briefly, carefully, with a gentleness he had not planned and did not examine, and felt her go very still beneath the contact. He raised his eyes to hers. She was watching him with an expression he could not entirely read, between wariness and wonder, as though she had expected the sight of her increasing to diminish his wanting and was not yet certain that it had not.
He kissed her to settle the question.
He kissed a path downward after, along the sternum, beneath the soft swell of one breast, then lower still. When he settled between her parted thighs and set his mouth to her, she gave a soft, broken cry and clutched at his hair as though to anchor herself against the sudden flood of sensation.
He was unsparing in his thoroughness. Tongue and lips and the lightest graze of teeth. Slow circles, then rapid flicks, then long, languid strokes that drew her hips upward to meet him. He slid two fingers inside her, curling them against the place that made her sob his name, and worked her with mouth and hand until her thighs closed about his head and her whole body bowed in a long, shuddering paroxysm of pleasure. He held her through it, laving her gently as the aftershocks coursed through her frame, until at last she lay spent against the pillows, breast rising and falling, eyes wide with stunned wonder.
Only then did he rise above her once more.
He divested himself of shirt and breeches with a calm he did not feel. When he settled between her thighs again, the broad head of him nudged her entrance. She reached for him, slender fingers wrapping about his length and guiding him with a boldness that stole the breath from his lungs. He entered her in one slow, inexorable thrust, feeling her yield and clasp about him in hot, liquid welcome. She was tight, silken, and the sound she made, half moan and half sigh, was the most exquisite thing he had ever heard.
He paused when he was fully sheathed, forehead resting against hers, allowing her to accommodate him. Her legs rose to encircle his hips. Her heels pressed into the small of his back. He began to move, long, languorous strokes that dragged against every sensitive place within her, careful of his weight and of the life between them, finding an angle that drew her breath in sharply and kept it. She met him, hips rolling in a rhythm that grew less restrained, less governed with every passing minute.Her nails marked his shoulders. Her breath came in ragged gasps against his mouth.
When she tightened about him again, inner walls fluttering in warning, he quickened, deeper, pursuing the precipice with her. She shattered first, crying out against the curve of his neck, and the rhythmic clench of her body drew him over the edge after her. He buried himself and spent with a low, guttural groan, pulsing deep within her as pleasure tore through him in blinding waves, and he knew he had made the right decision. There was no walking away from the fair Josephine.
They remained joined for long moments, breathing hard, hearts pounding one against the other as he held himself up with his elbows, careful not to squash her or the baby growing in her womb. There was a nature to the stillness that followed, her breath warm against his throat, her hands open now against his back where they had gripped and urged and demanded, that he was unwilling to disturb. He had expected satisfaction. He had not expected this variety of it, the kind that did not immediately send a man’s thoughts elsewhere, that asked instead to be simply and quietly inhabited.
The rain spoke for them.
“I had no notion,” she said at last, her voice quite stripped of its customary reserve. “I had believed … I had concluded that the fault lay with me.”
He understood her meaning at once. A cold, flat anger moved through him, not directed at her, never at her, but at a man who had taken a young wife to his bed and left her persuaded that her own nature was wanting rather than confess his own want of skill or generosity.
The anger settled low and hot, like coals banked for a long burn, and he was profoundly glad he had never stood face-to-face with Uncle Jerome. He had inherited the man’s title, hisdebts, and his widow. Of the three, only Josephine was worth the keeping.
“The fault was not yours,” he said, rolling off to the side.
She turned her head upon the pillow to regard him. “No,” she agreed after a moment, the single word carrying the weight of a long-held belief at last set aside. “I begin to perceive that it was not.”
The awed wonder, as she adjusted a truth she had held as fixed, lodged itself deep within his breast without leave. He was not certain what to do with it. He pressed his lips to her temple, tasting salt and candle-smoke and the faint sweetness that was hers alone.
His own wonder was evoked when she unexpectedly turned into him, fully, tucking her face against the curve of his throat, deliberately making a decision rather than seeking comfort. Her hand settled flat against his chest. He felt her exhale slowly, and the tension that had lived in her spine every waking hour he had known her was, for this moment, entirely gone.
He held her and did not speak.
He had intended to keep a certain clarity of mind about all of this. A man of his temperament and experience could manage pleasure without entanglement. He had done so before, at sufficient distance from home that it required no management at all. But Josephine had gray eyes and chamomile in her hair, and those words she had uttered …not wholly… kept running like a refrain beneath everything, and she had just turned her face into his throat as though it were the most natural place in the world for it to be, and he was discovering that clarity of mind was considerably easier to maintain before a thing happened than after.
He gathered her carefully against him, and she settled at his shoulder, her hand curled loosely at his ribs. Her hair spread across them both like spilled honey in the firelight.
He stared at the carved canopy while his mind, never truly quiet, resumed its work.
The grandmother. He could not simply allow the situation to persist. The woman could not be permitted to continue treating Fortunestone Hall as her sovereign territory with him a mere inconvenience to be outlasted. He had been lenient thus far, extending the benefit of fresh grief and advanced years. That lenience had an end point, and he was approaching it. He would need to address it before London, ensure that Beckwith had sufficient authority in his absence, that Josephine had clear instructions and the confidence to act on them, that the girls understood matters had changed and would not revert. The household required a settled order before he could leave it, and it did not yet have one.
His mother would require a letter he had been avoiding since his arrival, and there was no doubt his sister Charlotte would find the entire situation enormously entertaining. He would allow her that.
And London. Always circling back to London, the contract, the figures that would not stay still in his ledgers because everything depended on them. The Hollingford & Goss deal was not merely a commercial opportunity. It was the scaffolding on which everything else rested. The mill’s expansion. The canal improvements that would cut transport time and command better prices. And now Fortunestone Hall itself, which had absorbed six decades of inattention and was going to require serious capital before it rendered a return. The estate had potential. He could see it now, past his initial resistance. The land was prime, badly managed but not irreparable, the kind of agricultural neglect that had a solution if one was willing to apply money and sense to it in the right order.
He needed the contract. He needed London. He would leave soon.
Josephine’s breathing had grown slow and even against his chest. The rain persisted, its rhythm unchanged, patient and thorough in the way of Yorkshire rain in March.
He pressed his chin to the top of her head and let the accumulated weight of the day carry him, at last, toward sleep.
CHAPTER 12
The boy from the mill arrived at a quarter before five in the morning.
