How to Handle a Scandal (19 page)

“Enraptured?” he supplied, mischief glittering in his eyes. She would have been so much better off if he weren’t so charming.

“Um,” she murmured as his head dipped seductively closer.

“Wanting?” he whispered.

Wanting
… There were all kinds of things she wanted. She wanted this man, and she wanted a family. She hadn’t thought those two things could be reconciled, but she was having the craziest idea—and thinking that maybe it wasn’t so crazy after all.

A heavy
thunk
sounded inside the manor, breaking the spell, and Eliza stepped away from Tommy as Mrs. Hatch rushed out with a dismayed expression.

“It’s funny,” he said as they watched the housekeeper approaching. “I feel as though I was about to ravish a virgin but was interrupted by a chaperone.”

“You could hardly have ravished me in the front drive. And I’m not a virgin.”

He didn’t reply right away. And then he said, “But we never consummated our marriage.”

“If you asked the average person whether we’d consummated our marriage, they would say that what we already did counted,” she pointed out reasonably, even though all she could think about just then was whether he’d be outraged if she spoke the words she suddenly wanted to say.

“Shall I ask Mrs. Hatch her opinion?” he said.

Something wicked had come over him since she’d touched him, and now she was thinking that might actually be a good thing. But she needed to talk to him seriously, and she couldn’t do it there in the drive. “If you do, I’ll make sure you’re served fish and carrots for dinner.”

He only had time to give her a dark look before Mrs. Hatch reached them, distressed to report that one of the busts had been dropped and was now missing its nose.

“No matter,” Tommy said. “You can put it in my brother’s room.”

Eliza left with Mrs. Hatch to inspect the disposition of the rest of the sculptures. There was still so much to be done that the rest of the day flew by in a whirlwind of activity.

While the maids made up the beds with the newly purchased linens, Eliza assembled a motley collection of chairs at the dining room table. There were, at least, plenty of chairs to choose from, thanks to Flaming Beard, even if they were a weird assortment. She also put fresh candles and towels in each of the bedchambers herself, and tall vases of bright-red flowering quince everywhere, along with dishes of fragrant dried lavender.

“It smells really good in here,” Tommy said to Eliza as he passed her on the way outside to split some extra wood. “The pirates would be outraged at how hospitable the place is getting to be.”

As the sun dipped low and Eliza checked on the completed tasks, she couldn’t help pausing by the windows to enjoy the sight of her husband swinging an ax in his shirtsleeves.

It was dark by the time she’d sorted out which paintings would look best in which rooms and had a footman hang them. As the last landscape was being set in place in the room that would be Louie’s, Tommy arrived in the doorway carrying his coat, his sleeves still rolled up to reveal strong forearms. She tried fruitlessly not to look at them.

“A great improvement, don’t you think?” she asked him, indicating the room as Robert left with his tools.

“I do.” Tommy grinned and picked up a flowered pitcher from the vanity. “And don’t you want to compliment me for purchasing a vast quantity of these jug things when I was at the auction house?” They’d been delivered after Tommy arrived with the furniture.

She laughed. “It was quite brilliant of you to buy them, and they’re lovely.”

“I thought you’d like that they seemed the sort of thing to make a room less dungeon-like.”

“And so they are,” she’d said, pleased that he’d wanted to please her.

In fact, she thought as they finished a very late dinner of cold ham and potatoes and apple caramel cake (Hellfire Hall offered, if nothing else, mountains of apples for their guests to consume in one form or another), she was quite touched by his willing participation in the preparations. Here was a man—a
swashbuckling
man—who spent his days on daring missions of great import to those in power, who’d recently been knighted and might naturally expect, as men generally did, not to lift a finger in matters of household arrangements. Instead, he’d done a great deal of work.

It had been an exhausting day—and more remained to be done before their guests arrived tomorrow—but she could honestly say that she didn’t know when she’d had such a satisfying day. They functioned well together. Too bad it wasn’t going to last.

Tommy popped the last of a large piece of cake into his mouth and polished it off with a sip of wine, then pushed away from the table a bit and leaned comfortably back in his chair. He’d bathed before dinner and put on a tailcoat the color of a rajah’s rubies, and his black hair fell carelessly across his forehead, the white slash angling downward with its usual boldness. A fire blazed cozily in the hearth behind him and created a little glow around his head. As if this golden man needed more burnishing, she thought.

“We’ve done well. Hellfire Hall looks decidedly more hospitable,” he said, “though I don’t suppose our pirates would have thanked us for making it less manly and brutal.”

“I wouldn’t have thought a home could be brutal, but that was before I stood on Hellfire’s icy floors. The new carpets will mostly offer protection from frostbite, but what with the drafts and the occasional little leak when it rains, it’s still a far cry from luxurious.”

“At least it’s just family and Meg coming. And Rex, of course, though being a thirteen-year-old boy, he’s unlikely to care much about the state of the accommodations.”

She nodded and they sat quietly for a bit, though Eliza’s mind was buzzing with the idea she’d been entertaining seriously since that afternoon. She cleared her throat.

He looked at her quizzically and her heart turned over. She was more than halfway in love with him, but that could have no bearing on anything that was to come. She took her courage in both hands and said what she wanted to say.

“I want a baby.”

Tommy blinked. “You want
wha
t
?”

“I want a baby. The baby I lost…” Eliza began, then had to swallow against a thickness in her throat, “made me look at things differently. I’d thought I could never have a child. But now that I know I can, I want to try again.”

He went very still. “What exactly do you mean?”

She could see he was wary, that he thought she was asking something huge from him, that she had expectations. But the last thing she’d do would be to make him feel she expected him to care more than he did, even if her own feelings toward him already ran deep.

“I’m not asking you to change your plans,” she forced herself to say, though the words felt awful, because her heart wanted to spin so many fantasies about how things might be if he really cared for her. Perfect dreams of how they might make a big, happy family. That wasn’t going to happen, but a baby she could love would make all the difference for her.

“You’re going back to India before long,” she continued, “and I’ll be here in England, a married woman with no children. It’s different for women. Surely you see how I might want a child?”

She sensed him stiffening and got up from the table to close the curtains, just to have something to do. And maybe so she didn’t have to look at him when he said no.

“I thought you understood that I’m not ready to think about children,” he said.

She brushed an imaginary smudge from the curtain cloth. “I do understand that, which is why I want to do this on my own.” She forced herself to turn around and look him in the eye. “And I can. Lots of couples do things like this. How many of the men in India have families who live in England?”

His arms were resting on the sides of his chair, his hands steepled in front of him. Though his eyes were on her, she couldn’t read any emotion in them. “Many. But they’re not particularly happy families, and I never wanted to live like that. I always assumed that I’d have children much later, when I was ready to leave India. Why not wait a few years, until I move to England?”

“Tommy, I’m already twenty-four. If we wait too long, who knows whether I’ll even be able to have a baby when you return to England for good? I want a baby now, and I promise that I’m ready to raise a child without making demands on you.”

He gave her a look. “Anna was twenty-eight when she had Victoria. Women have children in their thirties all the time.”

“But we can’t know that it would work for me. And we can’t know what life will bring, whether you might not come home for many more years than you think…if ever. I’m getting older, as are you.”

“That may not be your best argument.” He said nothing for several moments, and she waited, trying not to hope too hard.

Finally, he unfolded his body from the chair and came to stand before her. He looked down at her, his expression serious. “You truly want to do this? To be here in England, alone with our child if we have one? Because I can’t bring a family to India—I
won’t
. It’s too dangerous, and I’m never in one place for long there.”

“I wouldn’t be alone here—you know that. I’d have Will and Anna and their children, and Judith would be a wonderful help. And Meg, too. The baby would have so many people who wanted to be family to him or her.”

She paused, hoping she was using the right words to make him understand that she had thought about this and what it would mean for both of them. “It was the way I envisioned things working out before, when I was increasing and you didn’t know. And now, with us being married, there wouldn’t be any of the problems I would have faced. I can do this, Tommy—if you agree.”

He drew in a breath and her heart hung in the balance. What if he said no? A window had opened for her with this chance to have a baby, and she knew she’d be terribly disappointed if he refused her.

“Very well,” he said quietly.

“Really? Do you really mean it?”

“Yes.”

“This is so
wonderfu
l
!” she cried, and threw her arms around his neck. “Thank you.”

He might not be excited about this, but he was willing to do it. And she was excited about it enough for both of them.

If she was ignoring the knowledge that the kind of relationship she’d just proposed would make her vulnerable to caring more deeply for him, she accepted whatever risk there might be. That trouble would come in the future, after he left, and she didn’t want to think about it now. She’d spent the last six years living a narrow, circumscribed life, and she didn’t want to live like that anymore. And maybe, if she was lucky, there’d be a baby to fill her heart with love.

* * *

Tommy wasn’t entirely convinced of the wisdom of what he’d just agreed to, but Eliza apparently really wanted a baby, and not only could he not deny her this thing that was so important to her, he was burning to touch her.

He dropped his cheek next to hers, and just the nearness of her made him feel reckless, like he didn’t know what he would do if he couldn’t touch her. But he had to make certain she’d thought about this thoroughly.

“Don’t forget, Eliza, that even when couples are hoping to have children, it doesn’t always happen. You might be disappointed.”

“Of course I know that—I’ve experienced it already. Whatever happens, I won’t be disappointed.”

“Are you sure that you won’t feel abandoned when I leave?”

“I’m not going to turn into some sort of clinging, demanding wife.” Her eyes glittered with something he couldn’t quite read. “As you’ll recall, I didn’t want to get married either.”

He glanced at the closed dining room door, then strode toward it, grabbing a chair as he went.

“What are you doing?”

He pushed the chair under the knob and came back to where she was standing.

“You’ve put yourself at my mercy,” he said, slowly backing her up to the wall behind her. “Now you’re mine to ravish.”

He took her hands in one of his and lifted them over her head, pinning them to the wall. He leaned into her, and she felt so good that it almost scared him. Thank God they were keeping things light.

“Beast,” she muttered in a husky voice that made his blood heat.

“Guilty,” he said, and kissed her neck. “I’ve already spent far too much time thinking about you spread out on this table. It’s time for action.”

“You’ve been thinking about me?”

“All the damned time,” he said. “I was getting ready to buy you a sack to wear, because all those pretty dresses seemed designed to torture me.”

Her eyes crinkled. “I’m…not sorry.”

He kept his gaze fixed on hers as he ran a hand along the top of her shoulder, taking the edge of her gown and chemise with it and pushing the fabric to the edge of her shoulder, exposing her breast.

“How am I supposed to touch you?” she said.

“You can touch me all you want—later. Right now it’s my turn.”

He looked down at her breast and groaned as he cupped its plumpness. He pinched the rosy tip.

She whimpered.

“You like this,” he said.

“Yes,” she whispered.

He bent to graze her nipple with his teeth.

* * *

Eliza sighed with pleasure and pressed herself against him. She’d never been demanding about kisses until Tommy, but his boldness freed her to respond.

He dipped his head and captured her nipple in his mouth, and she moaned and pushed into him. She kissed him back urgently, their tongues meeting in greedy strokes that told of what was to come. Though she squirmed against his grip, he only smiled against her mouth and didn’t let go. Dampness gathered between her legs.

His breathing ragged, Tommy nudged her legs apart and pushed between them, and his hard length pressed against her core. Lust—deliciously uncivilized lust—was taking them over in all its messiness, and knowing how much he wanted her only made her want him more.

He grabbed the hem of her dress and pulled it upward.

“Drawers,” he muttered. “How nice.” And then, which was not
nice
at all, he cupped her and rubbed her through the fabric.