Untamable Rogue (Formerly: A Christmas Baby) (26 page)

“We both need money, remember? That’s why we married.”

Lark took her luscious bottom lip between her teeth, making him want to bite it himself, or perhaps he should bite his own, come to think of it, because her sad eyes and sudden silence made him nervous of a sudden.

She rose quickly, placing certain parts of him in perilous danger of annihilation. Ash caught his breath, then expelled it in relief, and tried not to be distracted by her pert breasts and fine bottom. He watched her rummage, and blush, until she covered herself to her thighs with his shirt.

He had to raise his knee to keep her from seeing how alluring he found her wearing it, or she’d find something else to wear. She seemed that annoyed, though he didn’t know why.

“Brian called me a name for the way I treated you in the nursery,” he said to make her smile, though he seemed rather to bring a more thunderous frown to her brow.

“Good,” she said. “It means she has a true understanding of your personality.”

Ouch. “I know,” he said, rising, “that I acted like the hind end of a—” He caught her ludicrous expression. “What?”

She regarded his raging manhood with something akin to annoyed amazement. This time it was him who blushed. “Sorry. I forgot.”

“You can forget something that big? You could trip on it, for pity’s sake.”

Ash stifled a chuckle. “I’m trying to get your attention here.”

“You have succeeded, believe me.” She sounded no less forgiving, despite the tease, while he did not understand for what he needed forgiving.

Too many silent minutes passed, the two of them facing each other, her thighs beneath that shirt looking perfect and welcoming, his body ready to have them around him.

“Why the bloody blazes do you want my attention?” she snapped.

Ash started at her tone and knew that a confession of love at this juncture would seem insincere, especially as his old uncertainty over the emotion had risen, like a demon from the sea, in the past few minutes. “To tell you that I … missed you when you left the nursery yesterday.”

Lark made a strangled sound deep in her throat, her cheeks strawberry-bright, her eyes filling again. “Will you please put on your clothes?” She grabbed them from the floor to toss his way.

“I’d rather you beat the devil out of me than cry,” Ash said, ignoring his clothes, going for his dressing gown. “You never cry.”

Lark sat on the bed, so forlorn, he sat beside her. “What is wrong, Larkin? You are not acting yourself.”

“It is just that….” She accepted his handkerchief and wiped her eyes. “It is … everything of a sudden. Look, I’ve torn the pretty new dress Olive made for me.” She pulled the dress off the floor and showed its torn overskirt.

“How can I teach Brian to act the lady if I act the ragamuffin? I cannot even read as well as she does, or do sums as well as Micah. Ash, my children have to help me learn my lessons. And you, you’ve ruined me by trying to make me into a lady. Now I do not even feel like beating you bloody, when you deserve a good throttling so very much.”

“Why do I deserve it?”

“Rat’s whiskers, Ash. If I knew, I might be able to work up the enthusiasm to do it.”

Ash received a letter from Reed Gilbride St. Yves, which he read to Lark at breakfast the following morning. “
Dear Ash, You will forgive our tardy congratulations on your marriage. Our brood has kept us quite busy, and I now find myself pleased to inform you that we have increased our numbers by two. Yes two. Chastity, never happy with keeping things simple, gave birth to twins on the 18th of May.

Since I am also a twin, Chastity insists I accept at least half of the blame. Their names are Jillian and Meggie by the way; did I tell you they were both girls? Mark will never forgive us for giving him more sisters, though he agrees that they are the most beautiful babes imaginable.

Thank you again for your service on our wedding day. We think of you often.

Until the rogues gather once more, fare well. Your faithful friend, Reed Gilbride St. Yves.”

“They sound like a wonderful family,” Lark said, a bit envious, given her own lack of friends.

Ash nodded, accepted another cup of tea, and sipped it thoughtfully. “Any news of the rogues makes me miss the ruddy lot of them.”

“I’d love to meet them,” she said wistfully, then she regarded her tattered dress and sighed. “We have not been “at home” to visitors, I know, because I have not been willing to have the dressmaker in, but … perhaps we should.”

“I thought you hated the notion.”

Lark pushed a piece of egg around her plate. “Brian will need dresses, I think, judging by the way she fingered your mother’s broach the day I wore it, and once she asked about my petticoat, and I … would not want to shame you in front of your friends, Ash.”

“You never could,” he said standing and coming around the table to kiss her neck. “I will be happy to send for the dressmaker from St. Albans, if you wish, and as soon as your new clothes are ready, I shall invite Hawk and Alex to visit. They are our nearest neighbors among the rogues and you may practice your social skills on them before we are “at home” to the locals.”

“Where do the gossips come from, if the village is made of your tenants?”

“The gossips are the women of society who live in the larger houses between here and St Albans. They have nothing better to do, you see, but report, and embellish their neighbors’ actions to each other.”

“Sounds frightening.”

“Alex will be an enormous help to you in preparing for their invasion, though Sabrina would be better since she did not begin as a Lady, herself, though we aren’t like to see her and Gideon unless we go to London for the Season.

Lark squeaked in pure terror. “Please do not say we will. I had hoped we’d missed the Regent’s Ball.”

Oh we did, since you maimed your dancing master, but you will not escape society that easily, my dear. I hope to take you to an assembly in St. Albans at some point in the future.

“Damn,” Lark said beneath her breath.

The dressmaker arrived in the middle of July, a tall, robust woman, mammoth of bosom, but tiny of waist and hips, which made Lark wonder why she did not fall on her face from the weight she carried up front.

Lark fidgeted as she stood on the dressmaker’s platform while the woman pinned and prodded, pricked and poked. “I am not certain that this is necessary,” Lark said.

“Well, my Lady, his lordship has hired me to do a job, and that means you must stand still and I must measure and pin, if you don’t mind me saying so. Many’s the lady who’d be delirious getting fitted for so many beautiful new clothes. His Lordship says you must have everything—corsets, petticoats, nightshifts, ball gowns, morning dresses, carriage dresses, riding habits, skirts and bodices, gloves, redingotes, bonnets—”

“What do you find so amusing my dear?” Ash asked, coming in with Micah beside him and Brian trailing stubbornly behind.

“I have never worn a corset or bonnet in my life.”

Lark ignored the dressmaker’s gasp to regard the three people she most cared about. Ash, his brow raised, Micah and Brian, eyes twinkling with amusement. A family.
She
had a family.

“Make double the amount of dresses she orders,” he told the dressmaker. “My wife is too thrifty by half.”

“Morning, afternoon and evening dresses, Ash? Carriage dresses? Rat’s whiskers, was a time I wore the same clothes all day, and all night too … all week, come to that.”

“I remember it well,” Ash said, but Brian took to regarding Lark with a more interested gaze.

“I’ll grant that I prefer bathing and changing clothes daily,” she said for the girl’s benefit, “but changing every hour seems to border on the ridiculous.”

The fact remained, Lark knew, that if she refused the clothes Ash felt she needed, she would never become the “Lady” wife
he
needed. She owed him that much at least and more for her trickery in bringing their marriage about.

The children depended upon her as well to make something of a life for them all. Besides, if she fussed, fidgeted and complained too much, Brian would surely change her mind and refuse to be fitted for dresses of her own, and Lark would feel guiltier than ever.

“Bother,” she said beneath her breath, a mild oath, considering how she felt about this fittings business. She had a good argument prepared too, one that involved the funds necessary to this extravagant endeavor, but with Brian awaiting her turn, as if prepared for her own hanging, there was nothing more to be said, and Ash knew it.  

Ash sent the letter inviting Alex and Hawk to visit that very day, and within minutes of telling Lark so, he was pleased to find that she became aggressively interested in learning her lessons, all of them, but especially in ladylike deportment, and in becoming a gracious hostess.

It did help that Brian took “lady” lessons along with Lark and that the girl often remembered, from her earlier years, how things should go on “in society.” It also helped that Brian broke as many china teacups as Lark did, and that Brian’s guttersnipe vocabulary emerged a bit more often than Lark’s, when things went wrong.

Ash made Micah his unofficial assistant estate manager, since the boy’s proud head for sums became a helpful asset, and Lark named Brian her unofficial assistant hostess, for strictly speaking, Brian had more experience than Lark.

Both children flourished under Lark’s motherly care and Ash could not help note that she showed no preference to her nephew. She scolded both children as needed, coddled both as needed, and loved both with a capacity for that emotion Ash envied.

He craved the ability to love as she did, as he craved her unconditional love for himself, and was shocked out of mind to discover it.

“I am proud of you,” he told her one night after they’d made love.

“Because I have surpassed your expectations in baby-making?” she asked. “Not that we’ve succeeded in making a babe, I mean, but that I’ve excelled in learning the rudiments necessary to the attempt.”

Ash grinned. “Because you have surpassed my expectations in your “lady lessons,” as you irreverently call them.

Lark kissed his chin, the closest spot she could reach with her head on his shoulder. “No darling, if I were being irreverent, I would speak aloud the name I have given my lessons in my head.”

“Which is?”

“
You
will never know, because I am too much the Lady to say it.”

Ash barked a laugh, brought her over him, and worked very hard to turn his Lady into a quivering mass of begging pleasure.

Lark vomited, she was so nervous, on the morning the Duke of Hawksworth and his wife Alexandra were due to arrive for a visit.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Lark was appalled that Ash held her hair back as she heaved into the chamber pot, then he insisted on seeing her climb back into bed for a longer sleep.

“I am going to have Mim come to clear this away and cook come to see if there is something she can fix that might settle your stomach,” he said, “and if you are not better by tea time, when my friends are due to arrive, you will receive Alexandra here. She will understand.”

Lark moaned and needed the chamber pot again, and Ash became the more upset. “Have you eaten something that disagreed with you?” he asked sitting on the bed and taking her hand.

“I am about to receive my first visitors as Lady Blackburne, Ash. Do you not understand how frightened I am that I will make a horrible blunder or prove an abominable hostess and give your friends, and you, a disgust of me?”