My American Duchess (26 page)

“Do you like this?” he asked. There was something about her desirous murmur that reached into his chest and squeezed his heart: his funny, articulate wife, caught in an emotion, an experience, that she couldn’t explain.

Lost in desire—for him.

“You are mine,” he whispered, as one finger slipped through silky sweet, wet flesh in a way that made her visibly tremble and her hands clench even harder.

“You must stop, Jack. We can’t do this here.” Her voice was thin, airy.

Merry’s body had taken possession of the space where her brain used to be: the world narrowed to Trent’s smiling eyes and the way he was stroking her with his callused fingers. “I really can’t,” she whispered, falling forward and burying her face against his chest. “We mustn’t.”

This raw emotion, fire under the skin, surprise and desperation—no one had talked of this. Aunt Bess had never said that she might find herself in a greenhouse with her skirts pulled up and her legs disgracefully apart, air cooling her skin, unable to pull away.

Frolicking had nothing to do with a feeling so powerful that she kept shuddering closer to her husband, heart thudding in her chest as if she’d run a furlong at top speed.

With her face buried in his waistcoat, she could smell Trent, coffee and starched linen, a whiff of horse and male sweat, a touch of his skin and soap.

He was bent over her now, one arm curving around her back, his cheek resting on her hair. He provided the walls that she needed as he pushed a second, broad finger into her, past swollen flesh that should have been tender but somehow wasn’t.

He held her in the privacy of his arms, shielding her and trapping her at once, making what the two of them
did—what they were doing—into a strictly private matter, not for the open air and green lawns that stretched in all directions.

An orgasm slammed into her, making her cry out and shudder from head to foot, coming in a storm of craving and heat.

“I have you, Merry,” Trent said, voice dark and reassuring. “I have you.”

She hardly heard him, drunk with pure physical pleasure, clinging to him, her mind fixed on the last shaking streaks of pleasure she felt. His fingers slid in liquid heat and he growled her name.

She answered with a sound, not a word, not even a syllable. Just a note, like a bird in its nest.

“Again,” he commanded, and his hand moved, his palm rubbing a voluptuous caress to her most sensitive part, fingers sliding easily now, hard and slow and utterly controlling.

“I couldn’t,” she cried, but the honey mead on his fingers changed everything. She gasped and shook her head, but he was relentless, his fingers owning her body.

“You can.” His voice was like steel wrapped in velvet. He wrapped his free hand in her curls and tugged gently so that her head tipped back and he could kiss her again.

Merry lost sight of everything, everything but the aching, empty feeling that had her rocking against his hand, her breath choppy, her tongue desperately mating with his.

She was dimly aware that he was tearing open his breeches with his left hand. They were about to make love in a greenhouse, where anyone might walk in. But she didn’t care. She just pulled him closer, moving her legs apart like a wanton.

“Do you want me?” he said, his voice raw.

All she could do was groan because of the clever press of his fingers. Blood rushed through her body, making her head reel as if she’d started to move in circles, faster and faster until she was spinning like a drunken top, legs wide, cries swallowed by his mouth, her body jerking, shaking, taut.

In the middle of that storm his hands came around her hips and he thrust forward. Instinctively Merry curled her legs around his hips and pulled him closer. She was so wet that he came into her in one smooth stroke.

It was like the stroke of a hammer, breaking and reshaping her, body and soul. “Jack!” she cried, hands touching him, caressing him, wherever she could, mouth seeking his. “Jack,” she whimpered against his lips because he was rocking into her, thrusting so hard that the table was groaning under her. No pain, just fullness, wild fullness where before there had been emptiness.

Pleasure burned through her in waves, not so much leaving, as settling into her bones like the echoes of a lingering joy. Trent had his hands braced on the table at her sides, his hips grinding into the cradle of her legs. His face had taken on a ferocious severity, a beauty focused on one point.

His eyes were so beautiful, thickly lashed, intelligent, the gaze of a man in his prime. But she thought she saw something else there, too: a recognition of
her
, Merry, with all her weaknesses and strengths, all the confidence she had, and the frailties she hated.

“Merry,” he said, his voice deep as a well. “My wife.”

She was wrong about the echoes of joy: in fact, those twinges were the harbingers of new pleasure. They caught fire at the look in his eyes and the slow, pounding motion of his hips, and even the sobbing breath in her own throat.

Her fingers curled into him like claws. He groaned and slammed into her once more, pushing her into some other
place where there were no gentlemen and ladies, no countries, no polite society, just Merry and Jack and an old wooden table.

She closed her arms and legs around him, and came in pulses that took away his control just as he had taken hers.

As he came, he jerked forward with a low cry that came from clenched teeth, his face buried in the curve of her neck and shoulder as his body shuddered again and again.

And again.

M
erry decided that while she was very fond of the greenhouse, she wasn’t as appreciative of what followed lovemaking in what may as well have been the outdoors.

Trent was no comfort when she pointed out that one of her sleeves had ripped.

“It probably happened when you were pulling at me like a woman possessed.” He’d buttoned up the placket on his breeches, run a hand through his hair, and dropped onto an old wooden chair. He now looked precisely the same as when he’d entered the greenhouse, if decidedly more satisfied.

Whereas there was an unladylike gloss of perspiration on Merry’s brow, her hair had come loose from its pins, and of course her dress was torn.

“Come sit with me,” Trent said coaxingly. He shifted his
weight. “On second thought, better not. This chair won’t survive it.”

She shook her head and went back to looking for hairpins. Her hair was so thick that she knew from long experience that two pins—all she could find—would never hold it in place.

“I like your hair down,” her rascally husband said.

Merry pounced on a pin. Three would have to do.

“I adore your breasts in that dress.” His voice was deep and worshipful.

“Don’t even think about it,” she told him. “How I will ever face Lucy without fainting from pure humiliation, I don’t know.”

“You never faint.”

“Well, spit!” she cried.

“What?”

“There’s—” She stopped. They had been intimate, but this was private.

He got up, came over, and kissed her ear. “What?”

“Something wet,” she muttered. Turning her back to him, she used her chemise to dry her leg.

Trent wound his arms around her from behind before she realized what was happening. Then he said, in her ear, “I love the way you smell. But I love the way you smell even more now because I can smell myself on you.”

“Oh, ugh!” Merry cried, wiggling. “I shall run all the way back to the house and take a bath.”

They left the greenhouse on a bellow of ducal laughter, and walked around the house, following an uneven brick path. George ran ahead of them, occasionally crouching and pouncing at something only he could see.

“I had no idea that the gardens had been allowed to deteriorate into such a wilderness,” Trent apologized.

“I shall enjoy restoring them. Do you see that section
over there?” Merry waved toward a stone wall overgrown with vines and lined by gnarled rose trees. A semicircular recess in the wall held the remains of a moss-covered stone bench, which had cracked into two pieces and fallen over, though flower urns on either side remained upright.

“Those rose trees aren’t dead,” she said, beaming. “Mr. Boothby and I went about with a penknife, and he proved to me there’s life there still. The strongest roses have actually thrived on neglect.”

Trent asked the obvious question. “They look half dead to me. Why not plant new ones?”

She tugged him off the path and led him to a great tangle of branches hanging over the wall. She pointed to a fresh green patch where Boothby had scraped away the bark.

“Come summer, this will be a fountain of roses,” she told him. “My uncle’s head gardener, in particular, had very fixed notions and wouldn’t listen to me half the time.”

“Whereas Boothby is well under your thumb,” Trent said, yielding to impulse and pulling her snugly against his side.

Merry couldn’t argue with that; she already knew that Boothby and she would be great friends. He didn’t care that she was American, and he didn’t particularly care that she was a duchess, either. “Your only gardener hasn’t been able to do more than keep a small kitchen garden going,” she told Trent, “but we have great plans.”

“You may hire however many gardeners you like.”

“I should like an architect as well, the sort of man who works in landscape gardening. I adored Humphry Repton’s work in Kensington Gardens, for example; perhaps we could lure him here. I could use my money—”

“No. Your inheritance will go into a trust for our children.”

She stopped. “But—”

“I will support my own wife,” Trent said, suddenly looking very ducal indeed. “Your inheritance will ensure that our second son has an estate of his own, which,” he added with a touch of ruefulness, “might prevent the sort of resentment that Cedric has always felt. Last year I stopped paying his bills, which just made him angrier.”

“You were trying to force him into financial prudence?”

“If Cedric were to decide to live within his means, he would live comfortably, and support a wife. If he were to marry an heiress, he would be extremely well off.”

Merry digested that. “Yet he has extravagant tastes.”

“He might do better away from England. The constant comparison with my estate was galling. It ate at him.”

“Where did you say that he went?” Merry asked.

“He left for the Bahamas,” Trent said. “I hope he will thrive there.”

Merry wasn’t so certain, and given the reserve in Trent’s eyes, neither was he, but the last thing she wanted to do was ruin their afternoon by talking about Cedric. “I do not have extravagant tastes,” she promised, leading him back onto the path. “The greatest expense in a garden is the head gardener, and I wish to perform that role myself. Mr. Boothby doesn’t mind,” she added, a bit defiantly.

“You are the Duchess of Trent. You may do precisely as you wish.”

Sunshine glinted on her husband’s hair, lending the strands surprising depth and revealing hints of amber here and there.

“May I infer, then, that you have so much money that you don’t need my inheritance?”

He gave a crack of laughter, his eyes lighting up. “I suppose I shall grow accustomed to your American bluntness.”

“I hope so,” Merry observed, slipping her hand through his elbow.

“Men of my rank are supposed to live on the income from the estate. But when I inherited, I saw that fields alone could never take us out of debt, and I invested the income rather than putting it back into the estate. Only in the last two years have I been able to put money into the land.”

“Of course.”

“There’s no ‘of course’ about it. My brother was furious.”

Merry briefly considered how Cedric would have greeted her gardening plans: with fury, most likely. She intended to get her hands dirty every single day. Yet Trent didn’t seem to mind. He was like some sort of dark melody that she couldn’t quite place: unpredictable, unknowable. Fascinating.

“I imagine that you appalled your brother on a regular basis. Cedric told me that no one but shopkeepers wear brass buttons, and here you are with just those buttons.”

He responded to her teasing glance instantly, pulling her into his arms and not bothering to answer before he ravished her mouth.

When he finally stopped, her breath was coming in little puffs and she was trembling again. She managed to push him away. “You mustn’t . . . in public!”

“‘Public’ would be the town square,” he pointed out. But he drew her off the path again, to another, duplicate alcove in the wall. The stone bench in this one, though equally mossy, had not collapsed. He sat and pulled her onto his lap.

“Trent!” she gasped. “This is so improper.”

“The seat is less than pristine,” he said, shifting backward so he was leaning against the wall and she was snug in his arm. He tilted her chin and said, “I have two demands for our marriage—no, two
requests
. Will you grant them?”

“Your Grace, I’m sure you know as well as I that one should never agree to a demand without first hearing the nature of it,” Merry said, giving him a mock-severe look.

“Make that three requests.”

She sighed. “You English are terribly inclined toward rules. I had to make up a list just to survive the season.”

“A request is not the same as a rule,” Trent said.

“It will be once I have agreed to it.”

He thought about that. “What if I told you that if you were ever to address me again as ‘Your Grace,’ I will resort to violence? Would that be a demand, a request, or a rule?”

“Violence? You?” She wrinkled her nose. Obviously, she knew that he’d sooner cut off his right arm than inflict violence on any woman, let alone his own wife. “You’d have to give me an idea of the kind of violence . . .
Your Grace
.”

He moved as swiftly as any wild animal, bending her back over his arm like a bow, kissing her until she was gasping. Her three hairpins gave up the fight and her hair fell down again.

“That kind,” he growled.

“I’ll take it into consideration,” Merry gasped.

“My second request is that you never fall in love with anyone else.”

The words hung on the air and in the interval she heard the twitter of birds and the distant sound of a horse clopping down a dirt road.

He thought she might be unfaithful? He was of the opinion that she was that sort of woman?

But her own lamentable history flashed through her mind. She had never given anyone reason to trust her constancy, so she could scarcely be insulted by the hard truth of it.

“I shall not,” she promised, keeping hurt out of her tone. “I may not have known to whom I gave my wedding vows, but I did make them, and I never break my promises.”

His smile eased the awkwardness between them. “Oh, I know that. I do not refer to your bedding another man; rather, I don’t want you to give your heart away.” His lips smiled but his eyes were wary. “Our friendship means a great deal to me.”

“I shall not fall in love,” she promised. “It seems to me that you feel love when you are expected to, in other words, when a handsome man kneels at your feet and recites parts of a Shakespearean sonnet.”

“If I see any man dipping toward the ground in your vicinity, I shall punt him out the door,” Trent promised.

“I have no intention of ever falling in love again,” she said flatly. “So far, I think your requests reasonable. What is your third?”

“When you have a new greenhouse built, I would like a daybed in one corner.”

“For goodness’ sake, why?”

He bent his head close and his teeth tugged at her earlobe for a moment, sending a stab of sensation down to her belly. “I have the distinct impression that my wife will be spending considerable time in the greenhouse, will she not?”

“She will,” Merry whispered, tipping her head up so his lips skated across her jaw to her mouth.

“I’ve had a cockstand all morning, Merry. Have you any idea how uncomfortable that is?”

She shook her head.

“I want you to walk into the greenhouse and glance at the daybed, and remember being there with me. I want you to crave me, the way I craved you all morning. Per
haps the memory will drive you into the house in search of me.”

“I would never interrupt you for such a motive!” she cried, feeling her face warm.

“Even if I
request
you to?” he murmured in her ear.

“Intimacy belongs in a bedroom,” she told him. “Whereas you . . . on a
daybed
?”

He swooped in and kissed her, whispering about how he’d like to make love to her in a field of daisies, and on a riverboat. Merry was quite certain that she was as red as an apple by the time he drew her to her feet again.

But he held out his elbow to escort her back to the house as if they’d been engaged in nothing more indecorous than discussing how to prune a rosebush.

“George!” she called.

There wasn’t even a yip in reply.

Trent hardly raised his voice. “George.”

The puppy erupted from some overgrown grass, looking even dirtier than he had before. He headed straight over to the duke and began trotting more or less obediently at his heels.

“I find that very annoying,” Merry observed. “Snowdrop has completely fallen in love with you, and now George obeys you.” She bent down and scratched the puppy’s ear. “Don’t you understand, George, that Americans
never
obey the English?”

Arms wrapped around her waist and a wicked voice said, “Never, ever?”

By the time they began walking again, George had disappeared.

“Speaking of riverboats, I am considering investing in another canal,” Trent said, as if those kisses hadn’t happened.

Merry scarcely heard him; she was trying to pull herself
together sufficiently to reenter the house. It was becoming clear that married life meant one had to accustom oneself to storms of desire. “Why would anyone dig a canal?” she asked, willing the flush in her face to go away. “Is it for moving goods, like a river? The Charles River, in Boston, has some ships sailing up from the harbor, but I believe that most goods are sent by mail coach.”

“Rivers don’t always flow where the merchandise must go, and the mail requires carriages, drivers, horses, exchange of horses, places to stop along the way, food for the horses. A canal, on the other hand, can go directly between two points and carry much heavier goods than can a carriage.”

“Uncle Thaddeus is quite interested in the development of steam engines,” Merry said. “Did you know that the first steam engine was built back in 1698 by an English engineer? My uncle has invested in an engine being designed by an American, Peter Evans; Thaddeus is certain that goods will be moving all the way from Boston to the Carolinas in carts pushed by steam rather than horses.”

“I have read something about them,” Trent said slowly. “I believe steam is already powering boats.”

They had reached the house and later that day—after Merry had startled the household by taking a second bath—they enjoyed their first supper as a married couple. They ate at a small table in the morning parlor because Trent told Oswald that the dining room was all very well when they had four or more, but it was entirely too gloomy for an intimate meal.

They spent the first course discussing the particularities of steam engines. Because Thaddeus talked of little else than inventions that might or might not become important, Merry turned out to know considerably more than her husband about the new engines.

By the time the third covers were taken away, Trent had pulled out a screw of paper and was jotting down notes.

“Do you know what I like about you?” he asked sometime later, stowing the paper away.