What a Lady Needs for Christmas (22 page)

“We aren’t a courting couple.” She perched beside him, back straight, and ran a hand over the green velvet of her dressing gown.

“Then why is every single soul at this house party behaving as if we are? Why are we getting married in less than a week?”

The questions were meant to be rhetorical, to get Joan to
look
at him.

“That’s a lovely dressing gown,” she said. “Brown is a neglected color, but it becomes most men. Silk makes a much warmer lining than satin.”

She’d
looked
at his dressing gown. The wilted feeling sank lower, to something worse than bewilderment, though he’d sensed tumult behind her growing quiet at meals. “How are you, Lady Joan?”

Her gaze went to the escritoire, where some crumpled attempt at correspondence sat on the blotter amid sketchbooks and letters neatly sealed with her papa’s waxed crest.

“I am tired. My sisters came to call.”

“Tell me.” Because in her present mood, Dante would take any conversational gambit. He’d forgotten that marriage entailed this sort of work, and he’d never been very good at it—not with Rowena.

“Dora and Mary Ellen and I are not…not close. I’m the oldest, and because I’m tall, Mama seemed to think by the time I was fifteen, all my interests would be in common with hers.”

Dante risked taking Joan’s hand again. “She shares your interest in fashion.”

Joan shook her head, some of the starch leaching out of her posture. “Mama likes to
wear
fashions, she has not the first clue how a dress is constructed, or which fabrics have what personality. Mama also overdresses—her wardrobe should be quieter, more elegant, but she likes noisy, fussy clothing.”

Joan had probably grasped the difference between elegant and fussy by the time she was learning her letters.

“When your mother singled you out, your sisters resented it. Might we have this discussion under the covers?”

Now she looked at him, and not with the reckless glee of the prospective bride. “Under the covers, Mr. Hartwell?”

For
the
love
of
God.
“Dante will do, seeing as we’re private. You’ve banked the fire. Your feet have to be getting cold.” So to speak. Her entire room was cooling down, for that matter, suggesting she’d banked the fire some time ago.

She studied her toes as if they’d arrived on the end of her feet all of a sudden. “I suppose sharing a bed with you should become a habit.”

The notion appeared to confound her.

“A comfort,” he said, “something to look forward to at the end of a long and sometimes trying day.” Though he and Ro had never quite arrived to such a state.

When Dante expected dithering and equivocation from Joan, she crossed the room and turned the covers down on the side of the bed closest to the fire. His respect for her rose, also his liking.

And his desire.

“Do you miss that? Climbing into bed with your wife?”

He came around to the opposite side of the bed, so they had the expanse of a big mattress between them, all cozied up with pillows, plaid coverlets, and tartan blankets.

“I’ll explain it as best I can. Will you take your dressing gown off?” He shrugged out of his, which left him in a pair of black silk pajama bottoms.

“You don’t wear a nightshirt?”

“I rarely wear anything to bed. One gets hot, and a nightshirt twists up, and then one wakes up and thrashes about.” He sounded like Hector delivering a report, so he shut up.

Joan did not climb up into the bed, but rather, turned, sat, and swung her legs up together. Then she lifted the blankets and slid beneath them, all still wearing the green velvet dressing gown. She came to rest reclining on banked pillows rather than curled up under the covers.

“My sisters came to offer to help with my wedding dress. They surprised me.”

Rather than hop up onto the mattress, Dante did as Joan had. Sit, lift, spin, tuck—which left them nearly a yard away from each other—rather like a married couple.

“An olive branch?” The headboard behind Dante’s bare back was cool, and that was a fine thing.

“An olive branch I could understand. My family suffered a blow with my brother Gordie’s death, and we’ve never really come right. Between my sisters and me, it’s as if we all stopped maturing when Gordie died. I’m still seventeen, ready for my come out, Mama fussing at me incessantly. They’re fifteen and fourteen, resenting me for something I cannot help.”

“I had not thought you’d be lonely for the company of women.” At the mill, the employees always seemed to be chattering and bantering with one another, casting sly looks and falling silent when Dante came into their midst, then bursting into more chatter—and laughter—the moment his back was turned.

“I’m not lonely, not exactly.”

She was profoundly lonely. Dante hoped her husband could do something about that.

He rose from the bed and made a circuit of the room, blowing out the candles, one by one. “You asked about my first wife.”

“I understand you loved her and you miss her.”

The last candle brought him to Joan’s side of the bed. He left that one burning. “Move over. If we’re under the covers to keep warm, then a certain proximity will aid that goal.”

Now, he sounded like Spathfoy. The earl’s ability to acquit himself adequately under the mistletoe notwithstanding, Spathfoy was
English
.

“You want to
cuddle
?”

“Yes.” For reasons he could not fathom himself.

She moved over, and he situated himself immediately beside her, then looped an arm around her shoulders and scooted down. Her dressing gown meant he was embracing mostly velvet, with a few inconvenient buttons and a tightly knotted sash.

“What are your expectations of this marriage, Joan?”

She shifted up, managing to elbow him in the process. “Are you having second thoughts? I hardly see how permitting you into my bed—”

“No second thoughts,” he said, pressing a finger to her lips. “But I’d be lying if I said our nuptials never crossed my mind.”

She subsided, her head on his shoulder. Her hair was still in a tightly braided coronet, and a hairpin jabbed into Dante’s shoulder.

“Our nuptials are never far from my thoughts. I hope we shall suit, Mister—Dante.”

He extracted the hairpin then found another. “It’s hell when a husband and wife don’t suit.”

“I thought you loved your first wife.”

“Love developed.” More hairpins yielded to his questing fingers. “Rowena made it plain that she was marrying me to secure the mills and to secure children. She’d been an only child, and then lost her mother early. I eventually understood that this history made her unnaturally keen on having both her own way and a family of her own.”

“She married you to provide her heirs. There’s something of the old-fashioned aristocrat about that.”

“Let me—” Joan turned her face into his shoulder, without his having to explain, and he searched out the last of her pins. “There. You don’t typically sleep with all those pins in, do you?”

“No, but my evening routine is disrupted.”

She settled back against him, her posture more relaxed. Dante let his fingers tunnel through her hair again, as if searching for pins, but in truth he was simply enjoying the feel of her less tightly bound hair.

“That’s lovely,” she said on a sigh. “Tell me about your wife, for I’m an aristocrat, and I want children.”

These parallels hadn’t occurred to him—not consciously, but perhaps they’d driven him to seek her out late at night, when privacy was possible.

“How much do you understand about the conception of children?”

She yawned, delicately, of course. “That part is undignified, but quickly over. One need not belabor the specifics. My mother suggested it can become enjoyable, but Mama’s given to exaggeration, and…she’s loyal to my father, in her fashion.”

Low expectations in a prospective wife were not a bad thing—were they? And yet,
undignified
and
quickly
over
…well, they’d have time to work on that too, God willing. Decades of time.

“In the early years of our marriage, Rowena resented the hell out of me, and yet she expected marital intimacies with me. This created a befuddling awkwardness for me to which she was not sympathetic.”

A beat of comprehending silence went by, which was fortunate. Dante could not have explained the peculiar challenge of his early married years any more articulately if he’d been, well, the Earl of Spathfoy.

“Oh, you poor man. And here I am, nearly a stranger, in want of the same intimacies so my child might have the fiction of legitimacy. What a muddle.”

A tension in the pit of Dante’s belly eased. However sheltered she’d been, Joan grasped the fundamental challenge of a man expected to regularly swive a woman who on some level resented the hell out of him.

“I want us to be friends, Joan. I want at least that, and friends are honest with each other. Will you bestow a friendly sort of kiss on your fiancé?”

***

Edward’s letter sat two yards away, a crumpled-up ball of malice and cheerful innuendo Joan had put from her mind for the duration of her sisters’ visit.

Friends
are
honest
with
each
other.
Mr. Hartwell’s words brought the letter and its ramifications slamming back to Joan’s awareness with all the subtly of a hem ripping at high tea.

And yet…Joan’s prospective husband was asking for something, something that had nothing to do with Edward’s sly intimations. Snug in her fiancé’s embrace, Joan felt a sense of security that she thought she’d left behind in Edinburgh, possibly forever.

“You want me to kiss you?” Joan was glad he’d asked, for chaste pecks on the cheek had only made her miss his kisses—his other kisses.

“We’ve kissed before,” Mr. Hartwell said, drawing the covers around Joan’s shoulders. “Kissing seems like a good place to start.”

“To start—?” She thrashed up to her elbows, her dressing gown thwarting her for a moment. Mr. Hartwell lay on his back, his expression unreadable in the candlelight, but in his eyes… Hope? Expectation?

Vulnerability?
Joan felt an abrupt and happy dislike for the late Mrs. Rowena Hartwell, though in all likelihood, the poor woman had been raised with the exaggerated propriety of the newly wealthy class.

And Rowena had had no brothers to give her even a passive understanding of the male of the species.

“Just a kiss,” Mr. Hartwell said. “I’ve had one wedding night I’d as soon forget. With you, I’d like to try for a happier start to our marital life.”

“Tell me about your wedding night—your first wedding night.” Joan situated herself against him and wrapped her arm around his waist. The sensation of his bare skin against her forearm was odd, but…friendly, in a married sort of way.

“A gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell, but suffice it to say, matters progressed with a great deal of awkwardness, tension, and silence. I was banished across the hall shortly thereafter. In the morning, I gave Rowena a pearl and gold bracelet, and she gave me a lot of dirty looks.”

Clearly, he was telling Joan this because he wanted something better for them—as did she.

“We will improve on that memory.” She kissed his cheek for emphasis, then decided to make her point more emphatically.

Her next kiss landed closer to his mouth, and Joan got a whiff of tooth powder. This close, she could also catch the scent of his shaving soap, and the smoothness of his cheek suggested he’d shaved as well as bathed before paying this call.

Her damned, dratted gown fought her, but Joan managed to arrange herself so she could kiss his mouth. The hand she’d draped across his middle slid up his chest—more smooth warmth—until her fingers encountered—

Abruptly she drew back. “I beg your pardon.”

He took her hand in his, and used her index finger to trace his flat male nipple. “Think of me as a bolt of cloth, something expensive, that you can make into only one garment—a husband. Explore my every facet and quality as you decide on the design of that garment.”

Beneath her finger, his flesh puckered.

“I like that, Joan. Kiss me again.”

She liked the rasp that had crept under his burr. Liked the warmth of his skin, and the way his tongue flirted with her lips. By the time Joan recalled the need to breathe, she was lying half on top of her prospective spouse, her lips had developed new and exquisite sensitivities, and she’d come to loathe her dressing gown.

“Shall we anticipate our vows, Mr. Hartwell?”

He rose up like a sudden wave of half-naked male, inexorable and overpowering, rolling Joan to her back. “Do you know what it does to me, when you call me Mr. Hartwell and look at me like that?”

Whatever it did to him, he liked it. His eyes shone with approval and something more passionate, suggesting he liked
her
.

The next kiss was
not
friendly. It was hot and wonderful and noisy. Joan sighed and whimpered and bit him on the shoulder, then the ear, then the jaw. She squirmed in the confines of her velvet robe, and arched against her fiancé, and generally appalled herself with how easily she rose to the challenge he’d set her.

Every inch of his smooth, warm skin, every scent and contour of his body—she wanted to own them all, with her hands, her mouth, her mind, and even—miraculous to discover—her heart.

“I understand what Mama was trying to tell me,” she panted.

Fifteen stone of adult male was braced above her on his knees and forearms, his fingers brushing gently across Joan’s brow.

“What did your mama tell you, lass? For surely no one has had to explain to you about kissing. You grasp that quite well.”

Mama’s exact words eluded Joan’s recall. “She said it might take time, but if my husband’s efforts in bed were well rewarded, mine would be too. Your wife—your first wife—she probably had no one to tell her what to expect. That could not have aided your wedding night.”

He kissed her nose in a thoughtful manner. “Hadn’t considered that, and Ro would never have admitted her ignorance. Not aloud. She thought me ugly, you see.”