My Wicked Marquess (31 page)

“Well,” she conceded with a sensuous sigh, enjoying his warm nibbling at her earlobe, “you do have a penchant for getting into trouble. Are there any other scars that I should know about? Being as I am your wife and all.”

“Why don't you keep looking and find out for yourself?” he breathed by her ear.

“You really are wicked, you know.”

“Not past redemption, surely?”

“I didn't say I thought it was a flaw.”

He let out a low laugh and slid his arms around her waist, kissing her in earnest. Daphne reveled in the satin glide of his tongue against hers and caressed him everywhere, caught up in his intoxicating taste.

She sensed, heard, breathed in the quickening of his breath as her fingers inched over his bare skin, savoring the sculpted hardness of his abdomen, upward to the muscled swells of his chest.

She curled her hands in lustful awe over his powerful
shoulders, and then raked her nails in teasing lightness down his enormous biceps. Meanwhile, he had slid his clever fingers under the edge of her satin dressing gown, slowly pushing it down off her shoulders.

He tore his lips away from hers and let his kiss now follow where his hands glided. Daphne moaned softly as he nibbled her bare shoulder, but when his lips moved up the curve of her neck, his hand roamed down to cup her breast through the thin cloth of her chemise.

She tilted her head back as his thumb began teasing her nipple to burning erectness. Leaving her breast temporarily, he grasped her hips and shifted her up onto her knees astride his lap. This brought her breasts right up to his face. Immediately, he returned to lavishing them with his attentions. Her dressing gown was now hanging about her elbows, but she was still dressed in her linen chemise.

Kneeling on the fabric, she grew impatient to be rid of it, but there was such pleasure in straddling him, feeling the heat and the hardness of him between the juncture of her thighs.

Her breasts strained against the linen restraint of her garment, but Max did his best to work around it, kissing her chest where the scoop neck of her chemise left her skin bare, and teasing her breasts into aching response through the fine paper-thin cloth.

Raking her fingers through his thick dark hair, she moved against him in a subtle rhythm; her body sought a closer fit with his. She didn't think they were going to find it on this chair, but, God, he was driving her mad.

Her restless blood clamored for a deeper fulfillment.

As he gripped her hips and helped her grind against him, she suddenly couldn't take it anymore. God, she had burned for this man from the first moment she had laid eyes on him, looking like sex incarnate coming out of that brothel.

She wanted to know tonight exactly what her libertine could do.

With sweet, carnal memories of his mouth between her legs, she captured his chin and drew his rapt kisses away from her breasts. “Max,” she whispered breathlessly. “I
need—a drink of wine.” With a vixenish stare, she climbed off his lap and stood up a trifle unsteadily.

She let her blue satin dressing gown fall to the floor with an idle shrug. He watched her with an avid, wolflike stare as she turned away, going to steady her nerves with a final swallow of wine. Before she reached the vanity where she had left her cup, she felt him watching her and glanced back at him over her shoulder. There was a look on his face almost of pain as he stared at her.

She paused and turned around. “What is it?”

“Your shift is quite transparent when you stand before the fire.”

“Oh?” She glanced down at herself, blushing slightly. “Well, then. I don't suppose I need it anymore.” With a surge of brazen daring, she sent him a sultry smile and lifted the chemise off over her head.

She heard his whispery groan as she shook out her hair and dropped the filmy garment on the floor. Standing in place for a moment, she let him look, then casually turned away and walked over to retrieve her wine.

In the mirror of the vanity, she could see his stare devouring her nude body. She was not sure what had gotten into her. Only that she wanted him.

The one thing she was beginning to understand was that these physical pleasures gave her a way to reach him more deeply. When he was engrossed with her in the giving and receiving of amorous bliss, he forgot about keeping his guard up; the mask he wore came down.

Even now, his desire seemed to reach out to her from across the room like a stream of powerful heat.

She turned and watched him watching her, drank the last swallow of her wine, and then, instead of going back to him, walked slowly over to the bed.

His stare intensified, but he held himself back as if with a leash. She drew the covers back and climbed into his bed. “Mm.” As she slid down between the silky cream-colored sheets, she was enveloped in luxurious warmth from the coal-filled bed warmer already spreading its heat.

Reclining on the pillows piled against the headboard, she crooked her finger at him. “Come here, husband.”

He rose and went to her. She held his stare, leaning back on her elbows. The look on his face was that of a man who had got what he wanted and knew that, at last, the long-relished time had come to enjoy his prize.

He had been holding himself back for the sake of her sensibilities, she thought, but she hoped he saw now that if he wanted, he should take.

And he definitely wanted.

With his gaze locked on hers, he reached the bed and slowly joined her, moving on all fours atop her. Daphne quivered, waiting for his kiss in the darkness. She tilted her head back, offering her lips.

He swooped down and claimed them as though he could not withstand another second of denial. He consumed her mouth, her breath, her soul, in ravenous need, one hand cupping her head, the other reaching down to free himself from his breeches.

Daphne was swept away as she returned his kisses, running her hands up and down his silken sides. She helped him push his breeches down past his hips, unbearable excitement rising in her. He lay between her legs.

She was acutely aware of the softness of her quivering stomach against his hard, chiseled abdomen, her satiny breasts against his muscled chest. Their mouths were joined as their bodies soon would be, her fingers twined behind his neck.

He reached down to stroke her gently and moaned to find her core already soaked with her readiness for him.

“I need you,” he panted.

In response, she drew him closer into her embrace. The next thing she knew, she felt him slowly, carefully entering her. Her heart thundered as he mounted her, but behind her closed eyes, she was wild with yearning for him.

His fevered panting rasped against her cheek as he overwhelmed her maiden barrier. Her hands tensed atop his shoulders, but she did not cry out.

He dragged his lips across her brow in a savage remnant
of a kiss; having fully invaded, he now stopped. Already in full penetration of her, he could go no farther, could only wait for her virginal body to accept the depth of his taking, the width of his grand incursion.

She barely dared breathe.

“Good girl, good girl,” he panted, soothing her ever so seductively.

Daphne willed her body to open completely to him. It was pleasure. It was pain. It was sheer intoxication. The pain passed, trickling away by the second while a floodtide of desire rose anew and engulfed them both.

He began to move, awakening her with a blissful friction of their bodies. The undulant waves of his taking built toward a crescendo of resounding power. She wrapped her legs around his hips, gifting him with a surrender that only seemed to take him higher.

“Oh, God, Daphne.”
They both were shaking with frantic need. His iron arms clenched around her waist as he claimed her in a frenzied, driving consummation. She thrashed beneath him, wanting all he had to give, letting him unleash his storm. The cries of wrenching pleasure that escaped her filled the room as he ravished her.

Sweet heaven, this was how she wanted him, all his cool control stripped away, ravenous, aye, desperate for her, not hiding behind his clever wordplay, his sardonic humor, his quicksilver mind.

There was no hiding for either of them in a moment like this. She did not even mind that he was slightly rough with her, because in this moment, he was so raw and utterly real. The darkness that he tried to hide, the depths in him that he would never give voice to, all were revealed in every touch, every kiss, every thrust as he claimed her for his own. His body gave expression to what his silver tongue refused to share.

They reached their climax in furious unison, writhing, burning, locked in a searing kiss, her hips lifting to meet each slamming stroke from him. He stopped as he, too, was overcome, throwing his head back, his arms rigid around her. He arched his spine, buried to the hilt inside
her passage. Reality pulsated with pleasure like a racing heartbeat.

Their ecstasy blotted out the world; his low groan as he filled her with another powerful spurt of his seed harkened to her out among the cosmos, where her mind, as ravished as her body, had been floating briefly.

Time had been suspended…

Then he sighed, such a sound, deep, soulful, from his core. “Oh, Daphne,” he breathed. He pressed a shaken kiss warmly to her lips.

“Max.”
She wrapped her leaden arms around him as he laid his head down on the pillow just above her shoulder.

She turned her face at length to look into his eyes. There was nothing more to say; it was the closest she had ever felt to him. No words required.

She touched his hair wearily, and smiled as he closed his eyes with a look of total bliss. She went on caressing him until he fell asleep, yet she was still haunted by the words he had confided in that stable.

No one has ever loved me.

Gazing sweetly at him in the silence, she kissed his brow.
My love, there is a first time for everything.

W
ake up, sleepyhead,” Max whispered in her ear the next morning.

Daphne shifted luxuriously beside him. “It's early.”

“There's something we need to take care of before we leave Town.”

She rolled onto her back and gazed at him. “What is it?”

He just smiled. “Come with me.”

Thus began their orphanage project, in which Daphne and he assembled a team of helpers and accomplished what amounted to a month's worth of work in roughly a week.

First Max summoned Oliver Smith, Esquire, along with the property agent for the boarding school. They all drove out to Islington so His Lordship could personally inspect the premises.

Finding it all in reasonably good order, with only a few repairs needed, Max took the property agent aside to negotiate the deal. This was quickly accomplished, but before the children could move in, a considerable number of preparations had to be completed.

While Daphne was responsible for listing
what
the children needed, he put himself in charge of the
how
.

He quickly marshaled up an army of resources to help get the boarding school ready for the orphans. First he recruited his butler Dodsley, at the head of his entire domestic staff, to
clean the boarding school from tip to stern.

Second, since the orphans' caretakers had long been overwhelmed, Max hunted down and rehired a number of the kindly spinsters who had worked there when it was a school.

Daphne summoned the older boys and girls who had been apprenticed out or hired all over London to come and work for a day helping to get the place ready.

Papa and his gentlemen friends spent a day watching footman William and one of Max's coachmen fix up the two old wagons and the governess cart that they had contributed for the cause. Lord Falconridge donated an enormous sum to stock the orphanage's pantry with long-term stores of food. He also pitched in for a slew of books and chalks and slates for the classroom. At the same time, the Duke of Warrington pitched in with a delivery of coal stores sufficient to warm the orphanage all the way through to next summer.

Jono and Carissa went around to all the toy shops in London and coaxed the toymakers into handing over some of their wares for the children to play with, hoops and balls and pull toys, dolls and stuffed animals.

Oliver Smith was given the task of making arrangements with a shop full of seamstresses and another team of cobblers to outfit the children with their new clothes and shoes.

It occurred to Daphne that Penelope had the perfect talents to help organize all the activity on move-in day. Since the location no longer entailed the dangerous environs of Bucket Lane, her stepmother agreed to help, too, and even brought Sarah and Anna to come and assist.

Penelope herself took charge of stocking the medicinal cabinet with plenty of herbal remedies and potions for warding off the children's sniffles. Even Albert Carew's elder brother, Hayden, the Duke of Holyfield, made a contribution before heading off on his holiday in France with his expectant wife, to enjoy the pleasures of Paris before the birth of their first child.

By move-in day, everything was ready. The new caretakers were in place, all smiles at the prospect of their charges' arrival. A receiving line of seamstresses and cobblers waited
at the orphanage to measure all the children for their new sets of clothes and shoes. Penelope bustled around making sure everything was in order and quite reveling in her newfound role.

At last, the fixed-up, newly painted wagons rolled into Bucket Lane to transport the children to their new home. Small faces peered out of every grimy window as their makeshift army of concerned citizens arrived: Daphne and Max, the two Willies, Oliver Smith, Dodsley. Warrington and Falconridge had also come along to keep the local ruffians at bay.

Before long, they left Bucket Lane behind forever, and as the wagons full of cheering orphans arrived at their new home, Daphne's eyes filled with tears at all the joyous hubbub. There were children running about everywhere, never having been set loose in a country meadow before. The seamstresses were hard-pressed to still each wriggly toddler long enough to be measured.

The little girls were immediately crowding around the huge gentle draft horses, petting them, and the boys were chasing one another around the fenced-in garden.

At length, however, their energies flagging, the children were herded into their new home, going single-file into the doorway over which hung a placard that read:
The Emma, Lady Starling, Home for Orphans.

It had been Max's idea to dedicate the place to Daphne's mother. Watching him all week, she thought him extraordinary, but what surprised her the most was his natural way with the children. In fact, Daphne thought, he seemed to have surprised himself. When one giggling two-year-old escaped the old cobbler who had been trying to measure her tiny feet, Max dashed off after the escaping urchin and swept her up into his arms.

The toddler hung down, trailing her arms limply, and laughing her head off as he carried her back snugly to the shoemaker. He also befriended Jemmy, the thirteen-year-old who had run away from two apprenticeships that Daphne had managed to arrange for him in the past.

The lad was so much in awe of Max that he agreed to
come with them to Worcestershire, where there were any number of openings for him in the many projects her husband had under way.

By teatime, watching the children finally begin to settle into their new home, Max put his arm around Daphne and pressed a kiss to her head. “How could I have failed to understand you?” he whispered as she wiped away a sentimental tear at the sight of her mission accomplished. “To think I gave you sapphires? There are no jewels perfect enough to add one iota to your beauty.”

She turned and hugged him tightly. “Thank you—for all of this.”

“I was glad to do it.” He was silent for a moment, remembering the pain of lack during his own childhood, she suspected. “I think, in all, they're going to do quite well here.”

“Yes, indeed. Between Oliver Smith and my stepmother, I sincerely doubt that any detail shall ever fall between the cracks.” She tilted her head back and gazed lovingly at him. “
Now
,” she added, “we can go to Worcestershire.”

And so they did.

They took the Oxford Road out of London the next day, passed the dreaming spires of the university town, and pressed on westward through Cheltenham, where he pointed out the elegant new terraces with an array of shops as fine as any in London, and the spas like those in Bath, where one could take the medicinal waters.

From there, they proceeded north to the capital of his county. He showed her the medieval grandeur of Worcester Cathedral and the open Market Hall that had sheltered trade of all kinds since the Renaissance.

Daphne was eager to see her new home, however, so they did not linger in the big town, but headed into the surrounding countryside.

October in the Midlands offered green rolling panoramas in the rain-soaked pastures, and tree lines painted with all the patchwork colors of the autumn.

Berries adorned the hedgerows, attracting large flocks of rooks, while partridges, woodcocks, and wild turkeys pecked among the stubble corn. The wild fowl, in turn, drew
the hunters. They saw the rosy-cheeked huntsmen trudging through the fields with their fowling pieces at the ready and their bird dogs bounding along with them, ready to retrieve any feathered game that the hunters brought down for their supper tables.

Quaint villages along the way were blocked out with rows of stone cottages, roofs either of gray slate tiles or of traditional cozy thatching. Here and there stood a timber-framed house of Tudor origins, tidily maintained since Shakespeare's day.

To while away the time on their long journey, Max discussed with her a little about his investments in the local textile mills, potteries producing high-quality ceramics, as well as his shares in a few canals and an ironworks farther up the Gorge. He also owned the land on which a great wool merchant raised his herds of sheep, which in turn produced wool for the textile mills.

Hearing him speak so ably and authoritatively on matters that other males of the aristocracy would consider hideously beneath them helped her to understand another reason that, perhaps, the ton had viewed him as an outsider.

But for her part, she respected his initiative and was intrigued by his affection for the ordinary people, whom he called the backbone of England. He nodded to some peasants picking apples in a distant orchard as they drove, others plowing the soil to get the fields ready for the sowing of the winter wheat.

The countryside hummed with all the activities of another year drawing to a close. Beekeepers taking in the honey, a shepherd boy minding his flock. A rustic, red corn mill sat alongside the river, its huge round stone grinding flour, powered by the busily turning waterwheel that dipped again and again endlessly into the water's placid but relentless current.

“We're almost there,” Max said, nodding ahead as the driver turned his traveling chariot off the country road, through a pair of giant, wrought-iron gates.

A long drive lined with large, graceful beech trees led up to a house of giant proportions.

A perfectly uniformed staff streamed out of the princely
entrance of the house and rushed into formation to welcome their lord and his new lady home. Footmen in powdered wigs were clad in dark red livery coats and black breeches; the maids wore black dresses with neat white aprons and caps.

When the chariot halted, Max handed her down and presented her with her new home. He announced her to the staff, introduced a few key members, and then led her into the black and white marble entrance hall.

It was mainly white, with occasional black diamonds in the floor and large black greenery urns, a stunning formal contrast of creamy walls with scalloped niche alcoves, each housing a life-sized statue of black bronze.

The dazzling entrance hall set the tone for the whole house, she soon found out: painted ceilings, colorful patterned rugs, fine furniture, and porcelain on display. She saw the same Maltese white cross displayed in the family chapel, along with the ceremonial shield and helm of the first Baron Rotherstone, whose broadsword was on display in the Town house.

Then Max led her out onto the terrace that overlooked the extraordinary formal gardens. The sweeping expanses and precise lines of the exquisitely manicured formal gardens awed her. Conical topiaries flanked the graveled walks. Triangular parterres were packed with colorful masses of autumn marigolds and phloxes, Michaelmas daisies and China asters.

Beyond that lay a sprawling park bounded, in turn, by woodlands crisscrossed, he said, with pleasant walking paths.

Max stood with her and explained that it was a working estate with three villages, twelve farms, two churches, three schools, two pubs each brewing its own varieties of celebrated ale, and one market. The dowager cottage, he added, had been converted into a pension house for wounded veterans returning from the war against Napoleon.

The crops had been harvested, but the pastures were filled with the estate's prize cattle, plump sheep, and the dozens of horses that populated the Rotherstone stables. He explained that he fostered friendly competition between his farms to
produce the best livestock.

The whole estate, she thought, was a gleaming jewel of excellence in the English countryside.

The fact that Max had been absent so much of the time made it even more remarkable how well everything ran, from his lands, to his investments, to casting his absentee votes in the House of Lords even while he was off traveling the Continent, expanding his business ventures and collecting works of art.

At least now it made sense to her how he had prepared his so-called bride list. It seemed nothing was lost on the man. No detail was too small to escape his notice.

She was beginning to think this new husband of hers was altogether remarkable. But in light of all this, the one thing that made less and less sense to her was his wicked reputation. None of this fit with the usual devil-may-care neglect of a libertine.

They went back inside, and she walked around agog at all she saw. She could not have imagined it, and even now that she was looking at the Rotherstone holdings, it had never sunk into her brain before now they would be like rulers of a tiny kingdom, or that she would be living almost like a princess, just as Papa had claimed when he had first unveiled the arranged match.

In the dining room, Max showed her the formal chimneypiece with a bare spot above the mantel that awaited, he declared,
her
official portrait.

“My picture, there? But, my lord, any guests we have will think me terribly immodest.”

“No, they will think you terribly beautiful, and me, rightfully proud to have snared such a prize. Come.”

As their tour of the house continued, they came to the drawing room that had a gleaming pianoforte in front of a bank of windows overlooking a beautiful farm view of the horses in the meadows. Daphne gazed wistfully at the graceful instrument.

“Another pianoforte,” she remarked. She had seen one in the morning room as well.

“I told you, I'm an avid listener.” Max gestured to it. “Why don't you give it a try?”

“But I don't play.”

“That's not what your father told me.” He cast her a knowing smile and walked away. “Let me show you the upper floors.”

“I am certain I shall get lost in here,” she remarked, her head spinning after the dizzying ascent up the cantilevered staircase that seemed to float, weightless, in the air. “How many bedrooms does the house have?”

“Thirty bedchambers, my lady,” said the taciturn head butler, Mr. Chatters.

She flicked a devilish look in her husband's direction, and whispered to him, “That should keep us busy for a while.”

“You haven't even seen the gardens yet,” he answered just as softly, a lecherous gleam in his eyes.