Untamable Rogue (Formerly: A Christmas Baby) (13 page)

Ash gave her a sardonic smile. “Explain.”

“After your grandfather passes—if either you or I, or both of us, chooses—we will be free to go our separate ways. You would be due your freedom, if you wished it, after the way … my father tricked you.”

“And you, what would you be due?”

“Recompense, for my suffering.”

“What suffering?”

“You must realize that I am … fearful of being hurt by the act necessary to creation. I am not partial to the idea of all that blood and pain just for a babe, though I do love Micah, and I am certain I could love a child of yours.”

“If you tried very hard,” Ash said, aware of the bite in his rejoinder. Yet, about his wife there suddenly existed a broken doll quality that he had certainly not glimpsed at the pub, or later when he brought her home. The fragility seemed to emerge as he peeled away each hardened layer of her hopes and dreams, layers of a past that might break a lesser being.

Ash saw the defenselessness in her, because he had experienced it on rare occasions in his own lifetime—and not just as a child. As a man, he considered himself a failure when he experienced dejection, because the male of the species were not supposed to feel, much less acknowledge the susceptibility toward vulnerability.

Nevertheless, in Lark, the frailty called to him, as if some invisible thread connected them, a sturdy thread he wished he might cut, for in many ways, he ached where it tugged at him. He disliked understanding her pain, seeing her helpless. He abhorred her mirroring his powerlessness, even more than he detested the weakness in himself.

“One more problem,” she said. “I do not know precisely what to do to get with child, so you will have to teach me.”

“I would have thought that living at a pub with transient “guests”….”

“Exactly.” Again her chin came up. “While I suspect that I know what to do to
keep
from getting with child—as the result of an incident I have tried to put from my mind—’tis the brutality of conception that seems to have slipped utterly through the fabric of my education.”

There, he saw it now. Through Larkin’s pain-filled eyes that broken doll vulnerability regarded him.

“I would rather a minimum of pain and blood,” she said, “if you please.” She went to gaze out the window, too pensive by half, her spine and shoulders bent with the ugly weight of the single brutal conception she remembered, however distorted.

Dear God, if she wept, in the way his mother had been wont to do, to get her own way, he could be done for. Then again, he did not intend to become bitter over the effort to touch his wife, as some men did. One way or another, easy or difficult, theirs would become a true marriage. He could be patient.

To his great relief, she turned to him, her shoulders firm, her tense tiger’s eyes becoming as inflexible as tiger eye stone, calming him, for the fissure in her broken-doll-porcelain seemed to be healing of its own accord. “And when I am with child,” she said, punctuating her words as if he should heed them, “you will stop coming to my bed.”

A strike to the solar plexus. A loss of breath. Her final condition hit him hard. Ash rubbed the back of his neck, scrubbed his coarse-stubbled chin. Now he knew, by God. Larkin Rose Blackburne could outfox him in a trice while remaining even more coldhearted and unemotional than he. Good God, what had he gotten himself into?

Whatever the depth of his predicament, he must remain strong, for this woman could break him. He knew it in his bones. “Fine,” Ash said, firming his spine, for his immediate goal sat more heavily on his shoulders than his absurd wish for an enduring physical relationship with his wife, though he’d not relinquish the notion. “We start now.”

“Now?” The sudden lack of color in his wife’s cheeks softened her and reassured him that she was not totally lacking in sensitivity. “But this is the middle of the day?” she all but wailed.

“You think what we did last night cannot be done in the middle of the day?”

That fast, scarlet washed her flour-paste skin. “What we did last night can hardly make a babe,” she said. “There was not a drop of blood anywhere.”

“No but there were drops of that which really counts.”

She colored and turned back to the window. “I do not know what you are talking about.”

“Fine. Then get you up the stairs and strip to the dress God gave you, because I am about to teach you.”

“Just like that, so cold and … brutal?”

“You are the one who requires no emotion. A hard cold bargain you offer and a hard cold bargain I accept.”

“Well, there is no emotion between us, is there? Ours is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a love match.”

“Perhaps not, but what happened between us last night seemed rather intimate to me. I thought at the time that it might make for a good beginning.”

“A beginning to what?” His wife’s face flamed. “What did we do last night? Do you not understand that I have no name for what happened between us? I do not even know. I did think I’d surely die and go to hell for whatever it was, for it seemed supremely wicked to my mind, and I was honestly surprised I woke this morning … alive.”

‘Twas not her innocence that made Ash laugh, but his own at doubting her, and the harder he laughed, the angrier his wife became, until she ran from the room and out the front door.

“Here we go again,” Ash said, chasing her as far as the spinney at the far edge of his estate.

She was weeping when he caught up with her and that seemed to make her madder, but she was out of breath, almost as winded as he, and so she remained by the stream, sitting on a rock. He sat beside her, took her into his arms, and let her weep against his shoulder. “About time you had somebody to lean on,” he said. “Life’s not been easy on you, has it, Larkin?”

“It’s not been terrible bad,” she said. “Except for never knowing my mother, and losing my sister, and wanting to make a better life for Micah.”

“Micah will come to us, as soon as may be arranged,” Ash said, concerned over his ability to become a proper father to the boy, considering his own mischievous childhood … and adulthood, come to that. “I shall send for him today if you wish.”

Lark wiped her eyes. “You would take him on, before I am with child?”

“He has a home with us, if you never get with child.”

“Could that happen?”

Most assuredly, Ash thought, with the haste they were taking on this baby-making business. “We will have to try frequently to be certain it does not.”

Lark looked at him suspiciously.

“I suspect you experienced pleasure last night, did you not?”

Lark’s face flamed and she hid against his frockcoat, though to give her credit, she nodded honestly.

“Good, and so did I, but the pleasure could have been greater, sharper, if we were, ah, hmm, how to explain this. You must have seen animals mating at one time or another?”

“Of course. Horses, dogs.”

“Like other animals, a man becomes hard when aroused so he can “mate” with a woman. You touched me there, remember, and helped me spill my seed.”

“So that’s what that was?”

“Only we wasted it.”

Lark’s face turned pink. “All over the place.”

“Hmm.” Ash grinned for the wicked candor in her comment, a frankness that would make a woman of society swoon. “So you understand that I would have to insert that hardened part of me inside of you to plant my seed.”

Like a shot, Lark flew from his arms and off their perch, then she was running once more, Ash chasing behind.

Finally, he stopped, gave up the chase, and watched her disappear from sight. He shook his head as he bent and rubbed his legs. “I am going to die young from pursuing my bride about the countryside.” He dropped into the grass to await her return and reclined to watch the clouds.

Before ten minutes passed, she stood over him, arms crossed, foot tapping. “It will
never
fit.”

“It will.”

“That’s what made my sister bleed. He split her in half. I’m convinced of it.”

“He forced her. There’s the difference.”

“What?”

“Come down here and let me explain.”

Lark lay beside him in the grass and Ash rolled over to cup her center through the skirts of her dress. She gasped in surprise, moved her legs as if to dislodge him, but he didn’t take his hand away, and she didn’t make a point of asking him to. Ultimately, she seemed to relax.

After a time of staring into each other eyes, his hand firm, there at her center, he felt her begin to throb. “The difference,” he said, is a simple one. “The other night, you wanted my hand on you, here, as you want it now, as you did in the tree.”

“I do not. I did not.”

“You did. You do. I can tell.”

She harrumphed and looked away from him. “So?” she said, turning back after a minute.

“Two people wanting to mate with each other makes the difference. Even now, you’re readying yourself to receive me, with a moist pulsing that will ease my way inside of you here.” He stroked her. “You feel almost as good as you did last night before you let me touch you, and you would feel better if I did touch you, beneath your clothes, and altogether better, again, once I slipped inside you.”

“I am not certain I can believe you.”

“Because I am a man.”

“How did you know?”

He placed her hand upon the swelling in his trousers, pressed her palm against him, felt the jolt of pleasure. “I have proof.”

She smiled at his jest but stroked his turgid length as if measuring him with her thumb, and he took to stroking her in return and drifting into pleasure.

“I think we have a problem,” she said, shattering pleasure and returning him to earth with a rude rush.

“
I
certainly have a problem,” he said, tongue in cheek. “I am set to explode.”

“
That
is entirely too big to fit where you say it must go. You feel about the size of a stallion, and believe me, I am no mare in heat.”

Ash groaned at the analogy, and to make matters worse, he found himself inconveniently and uncomfortably stimulated by it. “You overrate my size, Lark, and if you do not rein in your imagination, I fear you will be sorely disappointed when presented with the sight of me.”

“I will only be disappointed if you are larger than a thimble.”

“Then you are right. We have a problem. I am larger than a thimble, thank the gods, but I am smaller than a stallion as well.”

“A parsnip? A carrot?”

“Are you comparing my manhood to a vegetable? Parsnips and carrots come in all sizes, as you very well know. Besides you held me in your hand last night.”

“But I could not
see
in the dark. It felt inordinately huge.” Lark rose and took his hand to drag him up.

“Neither were you of a mind for looking,” Ash said. “And thank you for the compliment. Where are we going?”

“The root cellar. You’re going to show me a root vegetable that precisely matches your manly size.”

“Surely you jest.”

“I most certainly do not. This is a serious business and I must be properly prepared, unless you want another beating like the one I gave you at the pub before we married.”

Ash pulled up short. “Excuse me, but as I remember it, ‘twas I who won that battle.”