Ever His Bride (34 page)

“They shouldn’t even be there.” Yet he
couldn’t remove them any more than he could evict her from his lap,
though his knees were beginning to ache.

Her brow flickered and she opened her
sea-green eyes. “But we’re married, Hunter. The courts recognize
it. We kissed on it. I have a ring. . . .”

“Felicity.” He wondered how she could remain
so unruffled; most women would have swooned to find him so
inflamed, would not have pressed against him for more. But she
wasn’t just any woman: she was unbridled passion, and magnificent
curiosity, and would soon have him howling at the moon if he didn’t
stop this. And yet he wanted to stay here, and stray, and he
imagined her writhing beneath his hands.

“Oh, Hunter! Yes, that’s lovely.”

Dear God, he’d been sliding his hands ever
upward, skimming over her silken ribs, and he’d caught his thumbs
beneath the gentle rise of her breasts. Sweet, soft mounds that
begged his touch, his lips.

“Please, Hunter.” Then she settled a kiss on
his mouth.

Please? Hell, he was already drowning in her
clean, cool breezes, his resistance having flown away long ago. And
she was holding his face between her honeysuckle scented hands,
feathering her mouth across his brow and over his cheeks.

“Felicity, you’re making it very difficult
for me to resist you.”

“Why would you?” She was making contented
little noises that hummed inside his chest and caused her to sway
like milkweed in the wind.

“Ten minutes ago you were screaming for me to
unhand you, and worried that I might see a bit of skin.”

She giggled against his ear. “Ten minutes
ago, I didn’t know what I was missing.”

“Oh, God.” Keep a cool head, man. His wife
had become a lunatic—a captivating one, but a lunatic all the
same.

“You’ll have to show me.” She slipped her
hands over his and dragged them upward to cup her breasts. “Ah,
yes! You see, I’m a woman, Hunter.”

Her nipples pressed like compact miracles
into his palms. “Yes, I know you’re a woman, Felicity.”

“And as a woman, I’m allowed to change my
mind.” Her eyes were closed again, and she had the look of the
angels on her face as she swayed. “And your hands feel very good
there, Hunter, as if I were standing on a cliff without a stitch to
hide me from the eyes of the world; and you are the rising summer
breeze that wraps me in splendor.”

“Madam, you are fully clothed.”

She opened her eyes. “Yes, but I think I’d
rather not be.”

His head was light from lack of air. His jaw
ached; he commanded his thumbs to be still when they would ride the
honeyed peaks. He was a single breath from taking her there on the
carpet.

“Hunter? Are you interested in making love
with me? We’re way overdue.” She stood suddenly and began to
unbutton the neck of her gown.

“Overdue?” Entranced and speechless, he
staggered to his feet and watched button after button fall to her
fingers until nothing held her gown together across her shoulders
but the weight of the linen.

“Are you, Hunter?”

“Interested?” he hissed, his brain boiled by
a conversation that no man could ever survive. “With all your
squirming and your drunk-making kisses? Madam, I want nothing
more!”

“But are you willing?”

“Am I willing?” He’d tried patience. Had
hoped anger would serve, because that was all he could muster. “You
incite me to the brink of ravishing you, and you have to ask such a
question?”

“Well, I do, because I don’t know—”

“Of course I’m willing!” he bellowed.

“But will you?”

He opened his mouth to answer and couldn’t.
He was damned to hell either way. Serve his passion and he would
probably lose her goodwill; serve hers, and his fate would be same.
He hadn’t bedded or even kissed a woman in years. He’d kept himself
aloof from the daughters of society and their trap-setting mothers.
And he would have nothing to do with prostitutes or other women
whose moral code might put the Claybourne name at risk for a
scandal. He had lived without intimacy of any kind for so long, he
had thought himself immune to the need.

Oh, but God, he had the need right now . . .
and it was for her, for his vagabond wife. He couldn’t risk a real
marriage. His heart would betray him, and she would come to hate
him, then she would turn on him in anger and disgust.

But at the moment, he was standing in his own
chamber, wrapped in a heady cloud of her scent, quaking like a
tempted vicar, his extraordinary wife begging his hand to her
breast.

His wife.

She had waited up for him, turned down his
bed, put away his clothes, uncrated his life, greeted him with
honeysuckle . . . and had forgiven him.

Why did he want to weep?

“Hunter?” Now she was looking up into his
eyes with that sympathetic inquisition of hers. “Are you all
right?”

His throat worked and his mouth grew dry.
Sweat wicked through his shirtsleeves. “I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?” She frowned and felt his
forehead. “You’re sweating like a racehorse, but you have no
fever.”

“Like hell, I don’t,” he murmured.

She reached up a hand to his chest but he
stepped away, a coward, and turned his back on her.

“Hunter?”

He fought the urge to turn back, to gather
her into his arms and do just as she had asked. But he knew the
risk, and he dare not take it. They had made a bargain; signed a
contract. He was the right-thinking one.

“This won’t do, Felicity.” He wiped at his
brow with an unsteady hand and stared down into the flames in the
grate.

“Won’t do?”

He could see her in his mind: her hair
tousled from his over-eager fingers, her mouth still pouting from
her unspent kisses. “I’m sorry, Felicity, I’ve let things develop
between us that shouldn’t have.”

“Why shouldn’t things have developed between
us, Hunter? It’s only natural.”

“You know as well as I—”

“That we are temporary; yes, I know. But not
so temporary that we haven’t already become . . . well, friends, at
the least.”

He turned then, too astounded not to. She was
stunningly puritanical and practical again in her plain nightgown,
now buttoned up tightly. “Friends?”

“When this is over, Hunter—our marriage, that
is— I’m quite sure I shall still consider you a friend.”

“A friend?” he said, not believing his
ears.

“At least a friend. A very good friend.
That’s been an unexpected development between us. And I’m glad of
it.”

He willed his heart to keep a steady pace,
but it bounced around inside his chest. Yes, she had become a
companion, a friend, a quickening. Someone to come home to—and he
suddenly couldn’t imagine the day she would walk out of his life
and not return. “Yes, things have developed unexpectedly.”

And he wasn’t yet sure what to do about it,
the risks. The idea needed cold analysis, not her heated
kisses.

“We were married quite inconveniently,
Hunter, but I think we’ve made a success of it so far. Gotten over
the bumps better than most. And I thought that we were developing
an unexpected . . . intimacy—”

“Damn it, Felicity! Intimate or not, friend
or not, I won’t leave you unchaste for your ‘real’ husband. The one
you will marry next.” He looked back at the hearth and his steaming
bath kettle, convincing himself that the heat that braced his neck
was from the fire and not from a sudden fit of jealousy.

“I see.” There was a tremble that rattled
around in her sigh and made him feel guilty. “Not that it matters
to you, Hunter, but I doubt that there will ever be such a
man.”

He turned abruptly. She had retied her robe,
and, except for the flush on her cheeks, she looked as virginal as
ever. And he ached all the more.

“What do you mean?” he asked, shamed to admit
that he had selfishly hoped that when their marriage ended she
would live a single life, instead of falling in love and giving
children to another man. He felt a bastard for allowing the thought
to remain a hope. But with every passing hour, the idea of Felicity
taking up residence in another man’s life seemed utterly
unthinkable.

“I doubt I’ll ever have the opportunity, Mr.
Claybourne.” She picked up one of the pillows that she had hurled
at him and clutched it to her chest.

“Why not? Any man in the world would want
you, Felicity.”

“Oh, would they?” she said as she efficiently
plumped the pillow and set it against the headboard. “Can you see
yourself wedding a virginal bride who had been married once before?
What kind of a recommendation would that be for a husband?”

“The explanation of the circumstances of our
marriage should be sufficient to any man worthy to claim you as
wife. If not, I could certify the situation myself.” The words
stuck on his tongue, and sounded patently false as they stumbled
out. He could hardly see himself describing the intimate details of
their marriage, least of all Felicity’s virtue, to some
disapproving, disbelieving husband-to-be.

“Thank you for the offer, Hunter, but no.”
She stalked past him, leaving her scent on the air and his hands
aching to reach out to her. “What kind of woman is so repugnant to
a man that she is incapable of tempting a passionate man like you
to her bed? I’d rather not face the shame of trying. Good night,
Hunter.”

“Felicity—”

She had opened the door and was halfway down
the hall before Hunter had realized she was leaving.

“Damnation! Come back here!”

When she didn’t, this time he followed.

H
e crossed the hall
in a dead run, and slipped on the new carpet runner. He barely
caught himself, only to slam into a spindle-legged table that now
waited outside her chamber door. Bric-a-brac clattered, but he
remained upright and launched himself into her room.

She was turning down the lamp at her
desk.

“Madam, were you truly hoping to tempt me to
your bed tonight.”

“Frankly, Hunter, I don’t know what I’m
hoping for. I’m very confused. I’m your wife, and yet I’m not.”

“You
are
my wife.” But she never even
spared him a glance as she whisked past him on her way to her bed.
He felt like a schoolboy suffering a drubbing by his lady love.

“Hunter, I know that I said that I ought to
save my chastity for a real husband, but you seem quite real to me
at the moment.”

“Do I?” His palms still burned with the shape
of her breasts, still sweated with the memory.

“As I figure it, if I’m to be damned for the
perception, I might as well be damned for the deed.”

Her eyes were clear and honest, and brutally
trusting.

“So, I’ve ruined you already?” he asked.

“No, Hunter, I’m the only one who can ruin
me.” She lowered the wick on the bedside lamp to a gentle glow and
turned back to him. “I just think it would take an unusually
open-minded man to want me after . . . you know.”

He wanted her all right—wanted to touch her
hair, and wrap his arms around her, but he had become more and more
certain that it couldn’t possibly stop there.

“I may never have another chance to have a
man make love to me, Hunter. So I thought perhaps you could show me
what becomes of all this wanting stuff—sometime, when you have a
minute—”

“A minute!”

“Well, however long it takes.” She dropped
her robe off her shoulders and draped it across the end of the
bed.

“Done right, wife, it takes hours.”

She straightened the counterpane with her
precise efficiency. “Hours?”

“The longer the better.”

“Really?” She turned from her fussing and
raked her gaze, as hot as a furnace, down the length of him,
lingered recklessly below his waist, and then lighted brightly on
his face. “Can a body endure hours of that sort of thing?”

“It can,” Hunter said, between clenched
teeth. “With a great deal of concentration.”

“There, you see, Hunter?” She climbed into
her bed and pulled the counterpane up to her waist. “What a dolt I
would seem to my next husband! ‘Aren’t you finished, Robert? Aunt
Agatha is waiting downstairs for her tea.’”

“Robert? You have this man picked out
already?” He would kill him.

She flung her limp arms across the pillows
and sighed. “‘What’s taking you so long, Hugh?’”

He swabbed the damp from his brow and
growled. “Who is Hugh?”

“‘Horrr-aace, I thought we’d be finished by
now—’”

“Enough, woman!” He stood over her, filled
with a volcanic hatred for each of these imaginary husbands of
hers. God knew what he’d feel about a husband of flesh and
bone.

“You see how very stupid I would seem.”

He turned away in his helpless fury. “What
would you have from me, Felicity?”

“Well . . . instruction, I suppose.”