Patricia Rice (41 page)

“Mac!” She gazed at him with as much astonishment as
the baron was staring at his newfound cousin, but Mac didn’t have time
to explain.

The shining light of surprise and adoration in her
eyes gave him hope. “And how in hell did you manage to get kidnapped?”
he asked in less gentle tones. He wouldn’t let her off easily.

“Well, I was on my way to London to find you—” she started to explain.

“
You
were going to London... to find me?” He couldn’t quite grasp that—Bea, leaving her home, for
him
.

“Why else would I go anywhere but to be with you?”
she asked reasonably. “I was just beginning to learn the spirit of
adventure when the viscount—”

“Don’t even think of going anywhere without me from
now on,” he murmured as he planted a fast, fierce kiss on her mouth.
Releasing her, he strode toward the man who held their future in his
hands.

She’d been on her way to London... for him. To hell with hope. He felt damned cocky with certainty.

Pulling the ship’s papers out of his pocket, Mac
caught the earl by the shoulder and spun him around. The old man seemed
too stunned and bewildered to protest the action.

Mac shoved the papers at him. “I’m full owner of
this clipper and its cargo. I want you to use it as collateral against
the mortgage your bank holds on Bea’s estate. I’ll pay the interest on
the loan when the cargo sells, and begin payment on principal when the
fall crops come in.”

“Mac, you can’t do that!” Bea protested. “That’s
your future. You can’t sink your money into a losing proposition. Even I
know that much.”

“It’s not a losing proposition,” he said firmly.
“I’ll recover my investment and more over time. My future is here, with
you. A ship is no companion at all and makes for a damned cold bed
partner.”

Bea couldn’t believe her ears. First he said he
loved her, and then he said his future was with her? Where was the man
who had arranged his marriage around his business? Had she wanted to
hear those words so much that she’d just imagined them?

Mac ignored her questioning look in favor of
pursuing his own goals. “I want Buddy and Pamela to stay with Bea and
me,” he continued. “Your son is a drunken sot and no fit father for
them, and they love my wife. I will do my utmost to see that my niece
and nephew are brought up as my sister would have done. If you cannot
agree to that, I have it in my power to send them to Virginia, where you
will be lucky to see them again—if that matters to you at all.”

Now
that
was the man she
knew, Bea thought. Mac stood tall, broad, and square-shouldered, his
golden brown hair gleaming in the sun. With bloodstained shirt and torn
cravat, he was more rumpled than a knight in shining armor, but he was
stronger and braver than Lancelot.

The earl still looked stunned and disbelieving as he
gazed first at the papers in his hand, then at Mac, then over to his
bruised and battered son, who was being mothered by Lady Taubee and
bandaged by a maid. “Buddy?” he asked again.

“I’ll be damned if I’ll call him Percy,” Mac answered grimly.

“Percy.” The earl nodded in understanding, his
expression clearing. “Always hated my name. Told the sapskull not to
name him after me.” He looked at Mac with more interest now. “You want
to take on those two hellions? Have you lost your mind?”

“They’re not hellions!” Bea protested. “They’re
wonderful, loving, intelligent children who’ve been unloved and unwanted
for too long. Perhaps Buddy is a bit... creative... but there’s nothing
wrong with that.”

“Creative.” The earl snorted. “The brat can’t be
contained in the nursery for more than two minutes at a time. He’d make
an excellent escape artist.” He glared at her. “And you want to take in
children who don’t even belong to you? You must be as mad as he is.”

“If I am, it’s an honor.” She smiled up at Mac, who
still clenched his hands in fists. “I’ve never been told I’m mad before.
Do you think that’s been my problem all along?”

Her husband’s lips twitched, but he continued
watching the earl. “Aye, lass, and it’s a bit fey you are to be taking
on the likes of us, but it’ll pass. Are you willing or not, your
lordship? I’m an American and a Scot and I’m not likely to be raising
them with polished manners and hoity-toity airs. My father brought me up
to work and earn my way, and that I have.”

Lady Taubee heard this last, and she snorted in much
the same manner as the earl had earlier. “Don’t listen to his blather.
His mother is Lady Jane Warwick, of the Gloucestershire Warwicks. A
snobbier lot you’ll never see. And for all his father is the younger son
of a younger son and in the line of a whole succession of rebellious
Americans, there’s earldoms aplenty in that family as well. He knows his
manners. He just doesn’t use them.”

Bea snickered and stood on tiptoe to press a kiss to
the back of her husband’s neck. He reddened and tried to stiffen his
shoulders. Behind his back, she tickled him under the arm. He twitched
and continued staring at the earl.

A whole line of earls and snobs had produced her
rumpled, barking visionary of a husband. She kissed his neck again, and
he reached back to swat her. Not that swatting her petticoats hampered
her in any way. She wrapped her arms around his waist and leaned her
cheek against his shoulder, and he relaxed, at last.

The earl patted the papers against his palm, glanced
at his pleading son, and back again to Mac’s determined expression.
“You’ll let my son see them? He’s their father. He has that right.”

“He surrendered that right—-”

“Of course, if he is sober,” Bea answered for him.
Her daring no longer astonished her. It should be quite interesting to
see if it had limits, though. “And if he stays sober and shows himself
to be a willing and capable father, then of course we must all consider
what is best for the children. But for now they need security, and
they’re happy with us.”

The earl nodded and glared at his son. “You have a better argument?”

Looking ill and defeated, the viscount shook his head. “I don’t know how to deal with them. I’ve hired nursemaids....”

The earl turned back to Mac. “I won’t interfere. I’d
hoped your sister would steady the boy. I believe she tried. She was a
good girl, a wonderful mother. I’d see her children raised as she was.”

Tears welled in Bea’s eyes as Mac thanked the earl
and led her away. The children were theirs. Mac was hers. He loved her.
She wasn’t kidnapped anymore. It was all too much to take in at once.
She didn’t even look at James and Lord Carstairs. Or her aunt. She tried
to grasp one little thing at a time.

“The children are still on the ship,” Mac whispered in her ear. “Shall we go to London to fetch them?”

London. Oh, my heavens. London.

She couldn’t remember answering coherently. She
could only see the warm gleam in her husband’s eyes as she looked up at
him. She must have agreed for him to be looking at her like that. She’d
agree to anything to keep him looking at her like that.

Her heart sang as they entered the waiting carriage.

“Shouldn’t we retrieve the children first?” Bea
asked anxiously as she gazed out the window of their luxurious London
hotel room. She’d never seen so many amazing sights or eaten in so many
strange places or talked to so many strangers as she had this day.

Mac might as well have taken her to Virginia for all
this resembled the England she knew. She could see gas lamps along the
street below. Elegant carriages harnessed to prancing horses with bobbed
tails traversed the cobblestones. She’d seen windows full of beautiful
hats and gowns, and ladies garbed in trailing skirts followed by
liveried servants more garish than James had ever been. And now she was
standing in a hotel room that was adorned in velvet and silk tasseled
draperies and gilded French furniture and all she could do was gape.

“Cunningham left word that he’d hired two
governesses and put them on board. They’re fine. I think it’s time I
have a honeymoon alone with my wife.”

“Oh.” Bea swung around to gaze up at the husband
she’d not thought to see again for months. His crumpled cravat had blood
upon it, and he’d torn the seam of his best coat in his fight with the
Runner. His hair hadn’t been cut in weeks, and it fell forward over his
wide forehead in an unruly swath. Her heart ached with so much love for
him that she thought it might burst. A honeymoon!

She smiled at all that could mean, and heat began to simmer in Mac’s eyes as he read her expression. Heat and... mischief?

Untying her bonnet, he threw it on the nearest table
and reached for the mantelet concealing the neckline of her gown. “I
thought perhaps, after a long day like this, you might appreciate a hot
bath.”

A hot bath? Yes, that would probably be best, if she
could think of anything other than the hands pushing aside her lace and
reaching to unfasten her hooks. Close like this, Mac was just a bit...
overwhelming.

Bea breathed deeper to steady her beating heart as
he skillfully unhooked and unlaced and pushed her bodice down. She sank
her fingers into his waistcoat and held on tight as she adjusted to the
heat and strength of him. As he worked at her corset strings, she picked
open his buttons and untied his crumpled cravat.

He kissed her hair and her ear and the back of her
neck as he efficiently pushed her chemise and gown and petticoats to her
feet and released her corset, leaving her in naught but her
underchemise and stockings. Bea wasn’t nearly as experienced and had
done no more than loosen his shirt so it fell open across his broad
torso. He growled deep in his throat when her hands slid over his bare
chest.

“The bath,” he muttered, catching her hands before
she unfastened his trousers. “I’ve been told it is the most modern in
the kingdom and that we will all have one like it someday.”

Ah, her far-seeing husband was back, however
briefly. If he could see a future in her crumbling estate, he could see
futures in baths, she supposed. Without protest, she let him lead her to
a connecting door on the far side of the richly carpeted room.

“Your bath, my lady.” He opened the door on a pink
marble chamber gleaming in lamplight. Bubbles and steam rose above an
enormous tub sunk into the floor, with gold fixtures somewhat resembling
the pump faucet at home, but with more knobs than Bea dared disturb.
Thick towels lay across enameled chairs, and a bowl of scented soaps
awaited her discretion.

“And we will all have this in the future?” Her eyes
widened at the marvel of such a tub, and the things to which it could be
put to use.

“I want one.” Behind her, Mac threw off his waistcoat and shirt.

Bea glanced uncertainly in his direction, and almost
melted at the sight of all those broad muscles playing beneath his
burnished skin. Did he wish to go first? Or...?

He dropped his trousers, answering that question.
Bea lifted her gaze from the evidence of his desire to read his
expression. The intensity of the heat she found there nearly melted her
into the same steaming puddle as the bath.

“It’s big enough for both of us. A little water
sport for our honeymoon?” he suggested, reaching for her chemise. In a
single swoop, he stripped her and carried her to the bath.

Bea thought she’d died and gone to heaven as she
sank, naked, beneath the foaming bubbles with her equally naked husband.
Both of them, in a bath, together. Doing things that—

Bea gasped as Mac smeared her breast with soap,
lifted her on top of him, and kissed her senseless. Wrapping her arms
around his brawny shoulders, she returned his kiss, and sank greedily
where he placed her.

They’d make water babies this way.

Feeling utterly weightless and mindless of anything
but all the places where Mac was touching her, Bea murmured, “I love
you, I love you,” to the tempo of his hands caressing her breasts, and
his avid pace as he stroked inside, where she burned for him.

“I’m seeing the future, and it involves lots of
baths and wide linen sheets and the woman I love more than life itself.
Will you follow wherever I go?” he asked against her ear as his hands
evoked sensations that rippled through her skin and into her center.

“Whither thou goest, I will follow,” Bea agreed,
without hesitation. She belonged in his hands, in his home, wherever
that might be.

And then he took her where they both wanted to go right then.

***

“Papa,” Buddy solemnly greeted the man waiting for
them on the dock the next day. Holding his toy sailboat in his hands,
the boy clung to the security of Mac’s arms, and looked to Bea for
reassurance.

Sebastian, Viscount Simmons looked sadly bruised and
more than a little haunted in the bright sunshine as he greeted the
family stepping onto the boards. He looked first to a stern-faced Mac.
“I’m sober,” he declared immediately. “I simply wanted to see them.”

From Bea’s arms, Bitsy crowed in delight at the
sight of a seagull swooping to grab a fish head on the pier. “Mama,
Mama,” she chanted, before resorting to a gibberish only she understood.
The sun glinted off wisps of her golden curls and angelic pink cheeks.

Looking at Mac and the children, Bea allowed love to
pour through her and spill over to the poor man who had ripped her out
of her protected world and into the real one. The viscount’s was a harsh
world, and it would be harsher still for being denied the cheer of the
children.

Before Mac could say something rude, she smiled
forgivingly. “I think they must look a lot like their mother,” she said,
reminding both men of the bond they held in common.

The viscount nodded with tears in his eyes. Mac
would say they were from the glare of the sun, but Bea preferred the
charity of believing the man actually cared.