by Eloisa James
“He’s caught a cold,” Esme said, her voice strangling on a sob.
Sebastian could see that she had obviously been crying for a long time. He put an arm around her shoulder and peered down at William again.
His rosy little lips opened in a snore.
“There! Do you hear it?” Esme said.
“He’s snoring,” Sebastian said. “Did Miles snore?”
“That’s not a snore. He’s caught a cold…probably inflammation of the lung,” Esme said, tears rolling down her face. “Now I’ll only have him with me for a few days at most. I knew this would happen; I knew this would happen!” Her voice rose to a near shriek.
William stirred. He could hardly move, he was wrapped in so many blankets.
“I think he’s hot,” Esme continued, and the broken despair in her voice caught Sebastian’s heart. She put a trembling hand to the baby’s head. “I keep feeling his head and one moment I think he’s caught a fever, and the next he seems to be perfectly all right. What do you think, Sebastian?”
“I’m hardly an expert.” He cautiously felt William’s forehead. It felt sweaty to him. “Do you think he might be wearing a few too many blankets? There’s quite a fire in here, after all.”
“No, no,” Esme said, tucking his blankets around him even more securely.
“Why don’t you ask your nanny?” Sebastian asked, inspired.
“I sent her to bed. She’s too old to be awake at night.”
“The nursemaid, then? Surely you have some help at night.”
“I sent the woman away. She just didn’t understand babies. She didn’t understand William, not at all. She never forgave me for nursing him myself, and she was always trying to bathe him in the midst of a cold draft.”
“Oh,” Sebastian said. He fished in his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief.
Esme wiped her eyes. “She kept talking about strengthening him. But William is far too frail to be exposed to drafts, or to the fresh air. Why, she actually wanted to take him outdoors! She was being grossly imprudent, and I had to tell her so.”
She sniffed, and a few more tears rolled down her cheeks. “And then—and then she said that William was as fat as a porkchop and didn’t have a cold at all. It was as if she’d never been around babies at all! Any fool could hear that William was having trouble breathing when he’s asleep.”
William snored peacefully. Sebastian looked closely at Esme and was shocked. All the generous lushness in her face was gone, replaced by a drawn exhaustion and a brutal whiteness. “Poor darling,” he said. “You’re all topped out, aren’t you?”
“It’s just that it’s so tiring! No one understands William, no one! Even nanny keeps saying he’s a brawny boy and I should just leave him in the nursery at night. But I can’t do that, Sebastian, you must see that. What if he needed me? What if he were hungry? What if his cold worsened, or his blankets slipped?”
Sebastian pushed himself back against the headboard and then gently pulled Esme into his arms. She leaned back with a great, racking sigh, her head falling on his shoulder.
“He’s a bonny lad,” he said.
“Yes.” She was utterly exhausted. He could see violet shadows under her eyes. Slowly he curled an arm around her and eased her back more comfortably against his shoulder. “Rest,” he said softly.
“You shouldn’t be here!” she said, sitting up again. “My mother—well, surely you met my mother at dinner. She’s come for a visit.”
Sebastian had decided not to say a word about Esme’s mother. “She can have no idea that I’m in your chamber. Rest, Esme.”
William snored on. After a few moments, Esme’s long eyelashes fluttered closed and her body relaxed against his. Sebastian waited for a few minutes more, eased her back against the pillows, and gently took William from her arms.
Esme’s eyes popped open. “Make sure you hold his head up,” she said blearily. “Tuck in his blankets.”
“I will,” Sebastian said soothingly. “Lie down.”
“You mustn’t forget to prop up his neck,” she insisted, but she was already toppling to the side, her whole body a testament to acute exhaustion.
Sebastian experimented cautiously for a moment and discovered what she was talking about. William’s head seemed to be too heavy for his body. “I hope you outgrow this problem,” he told the baby, walking over to the rocking chair by the fire. Perhaps it was just because the child was sleeping.
In the light thrown by the firelight, he could see two things. One was that William was definitely overheated. His hair was damp with sweat and his cheeks were rosy. But it didn’t look like a fever; it looked as if four blankets were too much. He gently loosened some of the blankets, and it seemed to him that the baby was a little more comfortable. The second thing he noticed was that William did indeed look like Miles Rawlings. His eyes were closed, of course, but surely those were Miles’s plump cheeks and Miles’s rounded chin? Even the fact that William had no hair seemed evocative of Rawlings’s balding state.
So Sebastian, Marquess Bonnington, rocked the baby in front of the fire and thought hard about how much he wanted the child to be his, because he hoped that if the child was his, Esme couldn’t deny him fatherhood. But fatherhood wouldn’t be enough anyway. He looked over at the utterly silent mound of womanhood in the bed. He didn’t want Esme as a wife merely because she felt it necessary to give his son a father.
He wanted Esme to love him for himself, love him so much that she braved scandal. It was almost comical. How on earth had it happened that he, an excruciatingly correct marquess whose ideas of propriety were so rigidly enforced, had ended up asking a lady to disregard social mores, cause a scandal of profound proportions, and marry him?
And more to the point, how was he to get her to that point? He knew instinctively that it was no use asking her to marry him again. She cared only for William at the moment. Somehow, he had to bring her around to see him as a man again. And herself as a woman, as well as a mother. Sebastian rocked and thought, and William snored.
35
Lady Beatrix Entertains
Since Bea had never allowed a gentleman to repeat the experience of bedding her, she had no idea whether she was expected to articulate a further invitation, or whether Stephen would take it for granted that he could knock at her bedchamber door. He had given no sign of his intentions over dinner. But fairness led her to admit that there was little he could have done, since he was seated between Arabella and Fanny. The two ladies spent dinner hissing insults around his shoulders, and ignoring his attempts at polite conversation. Bea’s own enjoyment in the meal was dimmed when she distinctly heard Esme’s mother reproach Arabella for allowing Bea to live in the same house with the pure little soul in the nursery.
Bea clenched her fists at the memory. Could she possibly marry Stephen? She, with her tarnished reputation and a malevolent influence that apparently extended to babes in the nursery? She dismissed the thought for the four hundredth time. Tonight was just another seduction, not a wooing. And she had dressed for that seduction—or undressed, howsoever one wished to put it. After all, her flimsy negligée was, well, flimsy. And she was painted, and perfumed, and curled to within an inch of her life. The only thing that seemed to calm her was applying another layer of kohl to her eyelashes, or adjusting the candles so that they fell on the bed just so. For a while she lay on the bed in a posture that displayed her entire body to its best advantage, but her stomach was jumping so much that she had to hop off the bed and pace.
There was nothing to worry about. The candles were lit, and she was perfumed in every conceivable spot that he might wish to kiss. She’d even placed a glass of water next to the bed, as she’d felt appallingly thirsty after their encounter in the goat pasture. But should she have arranged two glasses of water there, offering him one? Or would that look too rehearsed?
By the time the knock came on her door, Bea was more overwrought than she’d ever been in her entire life. “One moment!”
she croaked, flinging herself toward the center of the bed. To her horror, the edge of her trailing sleeves caught the glass of water. It arched through the air, splashing water as it flew, and ended up on the bed next to her hip.
“Damnation!” Bea cried, under her breath. There was another discreet knock on the door. Of course Stephen didn’t want to stand about in the corridor: what if he were seen by Helene, Esme or—a rather more terrifying possibility—Esme’s mother?
“Enter!” she called hoarsely, rolling on top of the wet spot and positioning herself on her side with a hand propping up her head. Her hair was falling in the right direction to be enhanced by the pearl blue of her negligée, but she was uncomfortably aware of dampness soaking through the said garment.
He walked through the door looking as urbane and composed as if he often conducted this sort of excursion. Which, of course, he did, Bea reminded herself. Stephen was the man with two mistresses and a fiancée, after all.
“Good evening, lovely Bea,” he said, closing the door and walking over to the bed.
Bea cleared her throat. “Good evening,” she managed, with reasonable serenity. She looked surreptitiously down her body and was horrified to see that the silk of her negligée was apparently soaking up the water from her coverlet. Just at her hip there was a spreading patch of dark greenish–looking silk. Quickly she pulled the silk behind her and rolled onto her back so that her bottom covered the spilled water.
“And how are you, sir?” she said, smiling up at Stephen. He had seated himself on the side of the bed and was looking at her with a rather quizzical expression.
“The better for seeing you,” he said.
What was that in his eyes? Bea wiggled a little. Her bottom was growing distinctly damp. Who would have thought there could be that much water in one glass?
He leaned forward and dropped a kiss on her forehead. “My word, that’s a very elegant perfume you’re wearing,” he whispered against her cheek.
He was hovering above her. Perhaps she should give him a kiss? She brushed her lips over his, but he pulled back suddenly and sneezed. Bea sat up, realizing as she did so that she was now damp all the way to the small of her back. If she didn’t change clothing, she would be sneezing as well.
“Excuse me,” he said, bracing a hand on the bed and reaching into his pocket, presumably for a handkerchief.
Bea shivered. His shoulders…and the way his neck rose out of his shirt. Who would have thought Stephen Fairfax-Lacy was a symphony of muscle under all that linen? She was trembling, literally trembling, to take off his clothes again. She leaned toward him. “I missed you during dinner,” she said. The naked longing in her voice was rather embarrassing. Why hadn’t he given her a proper kiss?
He frowned, held up his hand and said, “Bea, your coverlet appears to be rather damp.”
Bea bit her lip. “I spilled a glass of water.”
“Ah.” He bent close to her again and—sneezed. “I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I’m terribly sorry to say that I—achoo!”
“You caught a chill in the pasture,” Bea said, her heart sinking.
“Not I.” He looked at her and smiled. For the first time since he entered the room Bea felt a rush of confidence. His smile said volumes about the cut of her bodice. She shifted slightly, just enough so the neckline fell off her shoulder.
The look in his eyes was dark and seductive. Bea quivered all over. Her knees suddenly felt weak, and her breath disappeared. A strong hand rounded her ankle, and the melting sensation crept up to her middle. He was on the bed now, leaning over her; Bea raised her arms to pull that hard body down on hers and—
He sneezed again.
“You are ill!” Bea said with anguish as he pulled away again.
Stephen almost wished he were. But there was no way he was leaving the room without tasting Bea’s perfect little body. “It’s the perfume,” he admitted.
Bea’s eyes widened. “My perfume?”
He nodded.
“One moment. I shall—” She scrambled off the bed and headed toward her dressing table and the pitcher of water that stood there. She began pouring water into a bowl.
Stephen swallowed. The backside of her negligée was drenched. The wet silk clung to the middle of her back, clung to the round curve of her ass, to a secret curve that turned inward, drawing a man’s eye. He was off the bed in a moment, splaying his hand across that sweet bottom, eyes meeting hers in the mirror.
“Stephen!” she cried, shocked.
“Yes, Bea?” he said with a grin, his fingers slipping over the wet silk, letting the cool fabric rumple against his fingers, against the smooth skin of her bottom as he curved his fingers in and under. Silk met silky flesh and her head fell back against his shoulder. Stephen reached around her with his free hand and scooped water from the bowl.
“This may be chilly,” he murmured, opening his hand on the smooth column of her neck. Her eyes flew open and she began to protest, but he had her now, wet silk over one breast, and wet silk below, and both hands slipping and rubbing. Her head fell back again and she made that little throaty moan he loved. It sounded different in a bedchamber than it had in the pasture: less thin, more deep with womanly delight. She was liquid in his arms, and the chilly silk was taking heat from her burning skin.
She turned in his arms, and her curious eyes, always so vigilant, so watchful, so wicked, were dazed. He kissed her fiercely and she begged him without words, so he cupped her bottom and pulled her hard against him.
But he couldn’t concentrate because of the damn perfume, so he pulled the negligée over her head in a moment, took more water, and used his fingers as a facecloth. He started at her neck, at the smooth skin just under her ears, water dripping from his fingers, shaping her body, singing over her skin, licking kisses from his fingers. Over her collarbone, down her arms, back to her breasts, further down…. He was on his knees, and the water came with him, cooling her burning skin until he worked his way up her legs and there, then and there, his control snapped.
Bea was throbbing so much that she felt unable to speak or move. She hardly noticed when he picked her up and put her down on the wet part of the bed. She scarcely realized that he had shed his clothing. She was too busy twisting toward him. But then he was pushing her legs apart, and that dark head was there, and she was quivering, crying, pleading….
Then he cupped her face in his hands and pressed his lips to hers, and she opened to him as gladly as she wound her legs around him, as joyously as she surged against him, with as much urgency as she shattered around him, waves of pleasure flooding to the very tips of her fingers.
36
Because It Takes Courage to Admit a Mistake
The following afternoon
Marchioness Bonnington was having a most unusual sensation. It took Honoratia quite a while to identify precisely what it was: not an incipient warning of gout, not an attack of indigestion, not a premonition that rain would soon fall. It wasn’t until the gentlemen had retired to take port and the ladies to take tea in Lady Rawlings’s private sitting room that Sebastian’s mother knew exactly why she had a queasy feeling in the back of her stomach. There was a chance—a slim chance, but a chance nonetheless—that she was Making a Mistake.
An odd sensation, Honoratia considered. One with which she, for obvious reasons, had very little familiarity.
Mistakes seemed to generate an oddly bilious sensation in her middle section. She had it every time she looked at Lady Rawlings, who had joined them for supper on the first occasion since her child was born. She was astonishingly beautiful, that girl. Her skin had a magnolia creaminess to it. The ripeness on those lips didn’t come from a bottle. Overall, though, the marchioness thought that Esme Rawlings probably gained most of her appeal from her nature, from those clever, laughing remarks of hers. From the way her eyes lit up with pleasure when she mentioned her baby.
Fanny clearly did not approve of her daughter’s nature. She visibly stiffened every time Lady
Rawlings laughed. “Modulate your voice, my dear,” Honoratia had heard her snap during dinner. “A lady finds little to laugh at in a strident fashion.”
“I’m sorry, Mother,” Lady Rawlings had said instantly. She was trying so hard to make this reconciliation a success. But Honoratia thought the chances were slim.
“I find that dress rather unappealingly low in the chest,” Fanny announced as soon as the ladies seated themselves.
Lady Rawlings gave the bodice of her gown an uneasy little tug. “It’s only because my bosom is enhanced by the situation.”
“Yes, you have gained some flesh,” Fanny said, eyeing her up and down. “Perhaps a brisk walk every morning. A diet of cucumbers and vinegar can be efficacious. Dear Mr. Brummell confided in me that even he has occasionally undertaken a slimming project.”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that,” her daughter said with a smile. “Mama, may I give you a lemon tartlet?”
“Absolutely not. I never partake of sweets in the evening. And I certainly hope you won’t take one yourself.”
Honoratia swallowed a smile as Lady Rawlings quickly transferred the tartlet she was about to put on her own plate to that of Lady Godwin.
“Why should you not try a cucumber diet?” Fanny insisted. “I judge you to be in rather desperate need of a slimming plan.”
“It’s not advisable for nursing mothers to undertake such a drastic step.”
Lady Bonnington had always counted herself dear friends with Fanny, but as it happened, this was the first time they had encountered each other at the same house party. It was a bit demoralizing to realize that after a mere two days, she already recognized the thin white lines that were appearing next to Fanny’s mouth as a sign of temper.