Howard Haskell Takes A Bride (The Brides of Paradise Ranch Book 0) (8 page)

By the time they reached the first major curve, Jonas was more than twenty yards ahead. All his years of physical activity hadn’t prepared Howard to keep up with a runner of Jonas’s skill, but then, he didn’t need to. He only needed to stay in sight.

Or at least stay in sight until Jonas ventured a look back. He checked over his shoulder as the road curved. His face was red with effort, but as soon as he noticed Howard falling further and further behind, he grinned. Howard was certain he even heard the man laugh. Satisfied that he was well in the lead, Jonas redoubled his efforts and shot ahead. He didn’t see Howard’s matching grin or the look of victory that burned in his eyes.

At the second curve in the road, Howard leapt of the path and jumped into the trees. Now the real race began. He darted and dodged between oaks and maples, searching around to get his bearings. The woods were wild, but civilization was only a breath away, waiting, crawling forward to overtake the wilderness. The city was a microcosm of what was happening with the West, his heart’s true home. The wilderness was still there, but for how long?

Howard burst out of the trees and into the back lawn of some urban farmer. No one was out working the long rows of domestic crops, so he cut across the fields, past outbuildings and the house, and on until he reached the street. He jogged further, until reaching a street sign. The second he knew where he was, he changed directions and rushed on to the intersection with Cherry Street.

His timing was perfect. Cherry Street was only a few minutes away, and as he rounded the corner and skidded to a stop, panting, there was the Ayers’s carriage. The driver, Moses, stood on the bench at the sight of Howard.

“Miss Elizabeth,” he said, rapping on the carriage top.

A moment later, the door opened, and Elizabeth stuck her head out. “What?”

Moses pointed, and she turned in time to see Howard rushing toward her.

“Howard!” Her face lit in wonder, then she burst into laughter.

“Elizabeth, my darling.” Howard sprinted the last few yards to the carriage, then leapt inside through the open door.

He tumbled into Elizabeth’s lap. She embraced him, crashing against the seat with him. Laughter from both of them filled the air.

“What are you doing?” she gasped, squeezing his arm, laying a hand on the side of his sweating face to make sure he was real.

“I’m winning, my love,” he answered, then scrambled to sit straight. He knocked on the top of the carriage. “Moses, take us to the Ayers estate.”

Moses hesitated, glancing in through the window with a doubtful frown.

“Please take us home,” Elizabeth seconded the command. “This is all part of the plan.” She pulled back into the carriage as Moses tapped the reins over the horses’ backs. “It
is
all part of the plan, isn’t it?”

“Indeed it is,” Howard laughed. He grasped Elizabeth’s hand and kissed it. “In fact, this
is
the plan. And it will succeed beyond your wildest fantasies.”

E
lizabeth could hardly catch
her breath through the excitement that coursed through her as Moses drove them home. Bless him, her faithful driver urged the horses on as though the house was on fire and only she could save it. In fact, there was a fire blazing, but it wasn’t the house.

“Howard.” Elizabeth breathed his name between kisses.

Every bump and rattle of the carriage pushed them closer together. They hadn’t untangled from the moment Howard leapt into the carriage, and now their arms and legs were twined together in a hopeless knot. She curled the fingers of one hand through his hair while gripping the hard, heated muscles of his side with the other. He’d slipped one hand under her skirt and now fiddled with the tie holding her stocking and garter in place. His fingertips brushed against her thigh, calling to mind the sensuality of that morning.

After a few minutes, Elizabeth gave up the struggle to maintain any sense of decorum. She pushed off the carriage floor with her free foot, hiked up her skirts with one hand, and straddled his sprawled legs. When she resumed kissing him, her knees were jammed against the back cushion of the carriage seat and her arms were braced against the wall. If not for Howard’s hands around her waist and backside—one over top of the fabric of her gown and the other decidedly underneath every layer of fabric—she would have spilled to the floor.

Just as the ache between her legs was becoming unbearable and her head was beginning to spin for lack of air as their mouths fused and explored, Howard burst into laughter. The vibrations fueled the glorious longing in her core.

“What a fine pair we make,” Howard laughed. “We’re each as shameless and hot-blooded as the other.”

“Are we?” Elizabeth panted. She arched to sit straighter, blinking rapidly. The sinuous curve of her body against Howard’s sent further sparks through her veins. “Oh, dear, I suppose we are.”

And did she mind? Not one bit.

With a desperate sigh, she leaned into him once more, closing her mouth over his and sliding her tongue along the smiling line of his lips. Howard responded with a deep growl. He met her passion with a fire ten times as bright, claimed the nectar of her kiss with firm possession. His hand reached across the cotton of her drawers, gripping her backside and pressing her hips down to meet the growing stiffness of his masculinity. She groaned at the feel of it, of him with his arms, his heat, and his soul all around her.

The carriage turned a corner, thrusting them off-balance. Elizabeth laughed and clung to Howard, but he pitched to the side, rolling her half to her back, wedged against the side of the carriage. The turn changed more than just their position. Howard stroked his hand down her leg—she felt her stocking sag as his fingers brushed bare skin—and hoisted her thigh up to hook over his hip. The jostling of the carriage caused his stiffness to rub intimately against her in frustrating imitation of what he could not do with his trousers and her drawers still in place.

“We are mad,” she sighed with delight, clasping her arms around him. “We are perfectly, ridiculously mad.”

“We’re in love,” he answered her, kneading the flesh of her thigh. “Love is madness, and it is perfect sense.”

She didn’t have a chance to reply before he kissed her again. The sensation of his tongue invading her mouth was strange and new and overwhelming, but it stoked the fires of her passion higher. Her nipples grazed against the fabric of her chemise and corset as he pressed down on her, and the wildness he’d unleashed inside of her wanted him to grab hold of her bodice and rip the fabric from her body. She had no doubt he would be able to accomplish such a scandalous, romantic feat.

The carriage lurched to a sudden stop. The shift to stillness and silence highlighted every passionate sound and sensual movement she and Howard were making. They didn’t truly stop until Moses knocked hesitantly on the side of the carriage.

“Uh, Miss Elizabeth? We’re home.”

Elizabeth gasped, more from lack of air than from the fact that she could hear the embarrassment in Moses’s voice. She pushed against Howard, forcing him to sit up straight and straightening with him. Every fiber and sinew of her body wanted to keep going with their reckless behavior.

“Thank you Moses,” she panted instead.

“Ma’am,” Moses mumbled. “I’ll just, uh, leave the carriage here for a moment, if you’d like.”

“Clever boy,” Howard rumbled as they listened to Moses’s footsteps hurry away across the gravel.

“What do you mean?” Elizabeth tugged at her skirt, patted her hair, and did her best to fight the losing cause of straightening her appearance.

Howard laughed. His eyes sparkled with desire and mischief, and his color was high. “Your man knows when to leave his mistress alone.”

“What?” Elizabeth pressed a hand to her heaving chest. “Do you think he knows what we were—”

“Of course he knows.” Howard stretched toward the door handle, using it to pull himself upright, then turning it and thrusting the door open. “He’s old enough to have engaged in shenanigans himself.”

“Shenanigans.” Elizabeth breathed out the word, liking the way it sounded. “Is that what we’re doing?”

“Absolutely.”

His answer was so confident and powerful that Elizabeth tingled. He climbed out the door, then turned to give her a hand down. As soon as her feet were on the gravel of the drive, he swept her into his arms and kissed her again, one hand closing unapologetically over her breast. The gesture was forward, base, and blatant…and Elizabeth loved it.

“Quickly,” Howard said, breaking away from her and taking her hand. “We haven’t got as much time as I would like.”

“Time?” The thrill of behaving like a madwoman was on its way to being overtaken by complete bafflement.

Howard twisted and turned, looking around the drive and the garden. “You said you prepared the tool shed for us?”

“Yes.” She tightened her grip on his hand and pulled him off the drive and across the grass, leading him to the shed. “But why haven’t we got much time?”

Howard laughed, eyes bright. “Armstrong is full of himself, but even his arrogance can only assume I’ve fallen behind instead of fallen out for so long. He’ll realize I’ve abandoned the race, and when he does, he’ll go searching for your father.”

“Papa. Oh, no.” Elizabeth paused in horror at the thought.

Howard darted ahead of her, keeping hold of her hand and taking the lead. The shed was in sight by that point, and he knew where he was going.

“It will take him some time to find your father,” Howard went on. “That crowd at the starting line wouldn’t stay there once the race had gone on. Some of the spectators will have ridden on to the Mill Creek bridge. Others will likely go all the way to Coleman’s estate. Reginald Coleman is a friend of your fathers, is he not?”

“He is.”

They reached the shed door.

“Then my guess is that he will have gone on to that point, meaning Armstrong will have to continue on his way past Mill Creek to Coleman’s estate before finding him. Unless one of his friends was clever enough to bring their carriage along the path of the race, he’ll either have to wait for a ride or go ahead on foot.”

“Why, then, we have plenty of time.” Elizabeth reached for the shed door. “It could be an hour before they meet up, and even then they will have to work out where you have gone.”

“Exactly.”

Elizabeth opened the shed door and stepped inside. Howard took a step after her but stopped. His grinning mouth dropped open in shock as he took in the interior of the shed.

“Elizabeth! What is all this?”

His eyes went round as he took in the clean, sturdy walls of the shed, the well-ordered shelves filled with pots of flowers, and the cushioned chaise lounge she’d brought down from the house that morning with Trudy’s help. A skylight in the shed’s ceiling let light into the cozy room. In truth, it looked more like a miniature receiving room than a shed.

“Do you like it?” A burst of self-consciousness poured over Elizabeth. “I had to take the garden plow and the lawn scythes out this morning. There was the wagon that our old gardener used to use to find a new place for as well, but overall it wasn’t that hard—”

Howard tugged her into his arms and kissed her soundly before she could finish her nervous explanation. In an instant, her mind and body hearkened back to the carriage, back against the shed wall, her body screaming for release and pleasure once more. This time, Howard seemed intent on delivering it. His hands worked at the fastenings closing the back of her dress.

“My darling,” he whispered, low and dangerous, as he undressed her. “Do you know how long I have craved the comfort of your body?”

Elizabeth let out a wild sigh, reaching for the buttons of his shirt.

“Do you know how desperately I have wanted to cover every inch of your flesh with kisses?”

“Seven days?” she suggested, hardly able to think.

“Seven
lifetimes
,” he answered with a dangerous growl. Her bodice sagged loose. He grasped the front neckline with both hands and tugged.

The top of her dress came loose with a rip. The violent sound thrilled her, shooting fire through her limbs and molten lava to her core. She let her arms drop long enough for him to push the short sleeves of her gown down, then reached for his suspenders. He shrugged out of them one by one as she pushed, then reached around to the back of her waist to untie her skirts and underskirts.

Her dress and petticoats were in a heap around her feet by the time she thought to stop. “Wait, wait,” she panted. Her fists were full of the linen of his shirt, pulled up out of the waist of his trousers, which sagged without suspenders to hold them up. “What are we doing?”

“We’re ripping each other’s clothes off, my love,” Howard answered in a passionate growl.

The answer was so honest and sensual and absurd that she laughed. “I know that, but why? It may not take Jonas so long to find my father. Mama may have decided to come straight here to check on my headache. We could be discovered at any moment.”

“I most certainly hope so,” he said with vehemence, reaching to unhook her corset.

The brush of his fingers against her breasts was so intoxicating that she let him work his way nearly all the way down her corset before continuing.

“But surely we will not be able to keep silent enough for anyone in the garden to mistake what we are doing.” She drew in a deep breath that left her as dizzy as ever as he dropped her corset to the ground and reached for the hem of her chemise.

“Let them hear us all the way in California,” Howard insisted. “It’s all part of my plan.”

He swept her chemise up. She raised her arms, glad to have her breasts free to his gaze and the warmth of his hands at last. She untied her drawers herself, pushed them over her hips, and stepped out of them herself, as brazen as any woman of the night.

“But what is your plan?”

Howard rewarded her boldness and answered her question by stepping into her. His hand went straight to the curls between her legs, delving between them as if he owned them. She cried out in bliss at the touch, at the invasion of his fingertip, inadequate as it was. Her hands fumbled around his to undo the fastenings of his trousers.

“This is my plan,” he hummed against her neck, kissing his way from her shoulder to her ear. “This and nothing more.”

He rolled his hips as she worked to push his trousers down over his legs. As her palms caressed the curve of his backside, his staff leapt free of its confines. He pressed his heat into her belly as his hand teased her wet folds.

Elizabeth sighed, throwing her arms over his shoulders and wriggling closer to him. “This is your plan? To ravish me in a garden shed?”

He withdrew his hand from the part of her that sang for him long enough to lift her off her feet. A few steps was all it took for him to carry her to the chaise and lay her across its length. Like a lion stalking its prey, he advanced on her. He kissed her lips, one hand seeking out the heavy flesh of her breast to knead and tease it.

A gentleman would have, perhaps, been tender and conscientious with her. He would have tickled and caressed her, maintaining her modesty as he coaxed her to open like a flower. Thank God above that Howard was no gentleman. He nudged one of her legs until it slipped off the edge of the chaise, opening her hips. As his lips teased and tortured hers, tongue flickering in and out, he rolled her nipple with his thumb until it was tight and aching.

As if that wasn’t enough to leave her light-headed and gasping with desire, he broke away from her lips and shifted to bring his mouth down over her neglected breast. She arched off the cushion as he nipped with his teeth.

“Howard,” she gasped, fingers tangling in his hair. His passion was brutally raw, the way she imagined a dock worker would make love, and it sent her soaring to the edge of infinity. He held nothing back, so she held nothing back as well, moaning in delight at every touch, pinch, and kiss.

He shifted again, bumping his hip against her other leg. It was no accident. He pushed again, and that leg slipped off the other side of the chaise. That left her with her legs spread impossibly wide, her feet unable to gain purchase against the floor. With another powerful shift, he jerked further down her body. He planted a quick kiss on her abdomen below her navel. A moment later, his lips made contact with the wet flesh between her thighs.

She gasped and balled her hands into fists in his hair. She tried to arch her hips, but with her legs splayed and dangling on either side of the chaise, she was helpless. Helpless as his tongue explored her most intimate parts. Helpless as he flicked across the aching nub of her desire. Helpless as he closed his mouth over that nub and began a wild combination of licking and sucking that ripped the cries from her lungs and brought tears stinging to her eyes.

Her body burst into orgasm with so much strength that she thought she might lose her mind. She bucked against his constraining grip on her thighs, unable to do anything but feel the power of wave after wave of pleasure overtake her.