The Regency Season Collection: Part Two. Кэрол Мортимер

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СКАЧАТЬ of housekeeper and very personal companion,’ he informed her with a smile that truly freed the wolf in him for the first time in ten years and, oh, but that wolf was hungry.

      ‘I like the sound of being employed so intimately by my Lord Farenze—do you think he’ll make a hard-working female like me a good master?’ she whispered and let her hand wander towards a very rampant piece of evidence he would be a very attentive one, if this newest Lady Farenze ever acknowledged any man her master and they both knew that was very unlikely.

      ‘I know Mrs Wheaton drove him nigh mad with need of her every time he laid eyes on the impertinent female. Shall we see if he can return the compliment?’ he whispered in her ear as he taught her the erotic potential of that delicately made organ with his busy tongue. She surprised a groan of delight out of him when she retaliated by exploring his manhood with a delicately curious fingertip.

      ‘Mrs Wheaton wanted you back, Luke; she wanted back you so badly that she used to pace her room at night for the pent-up frustration of wanting you in her bed and not being able to have you there. She cried herself to sleep with missing you more times than she wants to remember right now, poor lonely, lovesick female as she was. I longed for you with every fibre of my being, when I was so young I couldn’t imagine how anyone could want a man so much and not have him and for a whole decade after that. On nights when you slept under Lady Virginia’s roof for one night, or even a slightly less miserly two of them, I shook with need in my lonely bed and wept for all we could never have.’

      ‘And I had to leave after a few nights because I couldn’t sleep for longing for my great-aunt’s housekeeper in my bed. I wanted you so much I ached with it every time I was within thirty miles of the Lodge and you, Chloe. I had to stay away. There was no other way for me not to have you. You had a child to bring up alone and you were my great-aunt’s housekeeper and another man’s widow. How could I stay when you would have ended up my mistress and I knew that was less than you ought to be?’

      ‘If I’d known you wanted me back like that, I don’t suppose I’d have been able to stay away,’ she confessed with a blush beyond the rosy flush of need already spread across her cheeks and down to places where she hadn’t known she could blush until last night. ‘Even for Verity’s sake, I couldn’t have stayed away if I’d known you wanted me as much in return, Luke,’ she said and abandoned teasing for a moment to stare into his eyes with her heart in her own. ‘I love you, you great gruff, noble idiot,’ she said with wet eyes and a shaky smile. ‘I love you so much I won’t be able to pretend I married you because you were obliged to right Lady Chloe in the eyes of the world. I can’t counterfeit polite indifference and yawn my way through the odd evening when we happen to have no engagements if we spend a Season in London. If you don’t want me to give away the fact I feel as if half of me is missing whenever you’re not near; that I long for you so deeply that the world is less shining and wonderful when we’re apart, then you’ll just have to leave me behind. In Somerset or Northumberland I can be Lord Farenze’s besotted wife, who thinks about you every moment of her day, but you and Eve will have to leave me there while you go to London if you want to be fashionably indifferent to me in public, Luke.’

      She reared up and dragged the bedclothes with her, since it was still only March and not even love could keep them warm when the fire had gone out hours ago and the chill of an early spring morning pervaded this splendid old bedchamber. Chloe propped herself above him as he lay prone against the bank of down pillows covered in fine and snowy linen and forgot what she had been going to say next in her fascination with watching him, her husband of a day.

      ‘So dark,’ she whispered as she swept a fingertip along the stern arch of his brow. ‘So determined...’ she lingered over the hard firmness of his jaw. ‘So tempting,’ she gasped as his lips parted to nibble that fingertip and his grey eyes heated to silver and steel and a hard flush of need swept over his cheekbones.

      ‘So yours,’ he rasped with such love in that dear gaze of his that she moaned in sheer awe. ‘So ready to let the wide world know I love my wife, will always love her and have loved her for far too long in silence to ever be quiet about it again. Now I have my ring on your finger and you in my bed for the rest of our natural lives, I shall never be able to pretend I’m not fathoms deep in love with you. We won’t be walking in Virginia and Virgil’s footsteps, my darling. We’ve got our own road to travel, but I want the world to know we’re every bit as besotted with each other as they were and intend to be so for as long as we live. Polite society will just have to accustom itself to that fact or keep away, wherever we are.’

      ‘It sounds wondrous,’ she told him with a dreamy smile.

      ‘It will be,’ he promised as solemnly as he had the day before, when they stood in front of the altar and made their vows before God.

      ‘Well, that’s all right then,’ Lady Farenze informed her enthralled lord, then blinked and eyed him a little doubtfully. ‘Are you sure the servants won’t come in until we ring the bell?’ she asked, as all sorts of possibilities suddenly suggested themselves when he gently shifted her over his prone body and she wriggled delightedly at all the wildly sensual ideas he was putting into her head with such promise in his wolfish gaze.

      ‘Come now, love, this is one of Mantaigne’s friend’s households we’re staying in whilst he’s up in London, getting ready to be fashionably bored for the Season. Please be serious, wife,’ he scoffed.

      ‘Rakes, the lot of you,’ she condemned.

      ‘Not rakes, my love, wolves. A rake is a care-for-nobody seducer of any woman who presents him with an intriguing enough challenge. We lone wolves mate for life, which makes us all the more dangerous to unwary ladies like you.’

      ‘Ah, but I’m not unwary any more,’ she said with all sorts of untried promises in her violet eyes. ‘Can we really?’ she added as he splayed her legs over his narrow hipbones and she felt the full force of his arousal against her over-heated feminine core once again.

      ‘I don’t know, can we?’ he whispered with a plea in his dear eyes to say how very much he wanted to, and a promise behind it that they would not if she felt too new at being a wife to ride to paradise in his arms like this.

      ‘Yes...’ she breathed as she solved his dilemma in the best way she could think of. ‘Ooh, yes,’ she gasped raggedly as she rose eagerly, then sank down on to the rigid and impressive length of his manhood and felt the fire and sweetness of mutual possession roar through her once again. ‘I knew I needed to wake up with you, my lord, but until today I didn’t know exactly why,’ she told him as she held his fire and thunder-shot grey eyes with hers, saw the same flash of burning colour on his lean cheeks as she felt on her own.

      ‘Ah, but you see, I did,’ he managed to say and thrust up into her wet silken depths at the same moment as she bore down.

      Chloe felt her breath hitch even more, her heart thunder in her breast and her core tighten on him as they strove together towards ecstasy and this time she knew what was coming and yearned for it, even as she knew a lick of sadness that, with that lovely, trackless completion, their congress would end, for now. But it ended so gloriously; so passionately, as she bowed back and moaned in extremity and he bucked and shouted his ultimate fulfilment as he shot his seed so high up inside her that spasms of their loving still rocked them when she sank down on to his heaving torso, feeling even more boneless and full up with wonder than last time.

      As she lay splayed across him where their last flex of bliss beached her, she spared a brief thought for the sad, bereft Chloe of ten years ago who longed so desperately for love she had even fantasised over her mistress’s stony hearted great-nephew.

      ‘As well for me that I didn’t know,’ she observed СКАЧАТЬ