“I admit it used to be easier to fit into an old pair of trousers and a shirt when I snuck out,” she said.
“When you snuck out,” Maximilian repeated. He could not seem to take his gaze from those breasts, thrusting against their thin covering as if struggling to escape. “You will not sneak out when you are my wife.”
“No, Max,” she said. She rested both hands on his chest and began running them over his muscles. He sucked in a sharp breath.
“It is time for you to go home, Charlotte,” he said firmly.
She shook her head. “No, I really think it better to do the deed now. Then I will not be nervous about it tomorrow, you see.”
Maximilian raised his eyebrows. “You look about as nervous as a cat in heat.”
Charlotte giggled. “But you know me, Max. I am at my most brazen when I am scared to death.”
“All the more reason for you to go home to your own bed tonight. Now, get off of me,” Maximilian said, recognizing in the same breath that he had never expected to say anything of the sort to his fiancé.
“No. I think not,” Charlotte said, her mouth curving up wickedly. Then she lifted her cap and shook out her hair in one smooth movement. Golden curls poured out, glittering in the moonlight like soft cotton about her face.
Maximilian stifled the air that rushed into his lungs. How long had it been since he had seen her hair down, wafting about her face so sensually? “You seem awfully sure of yourself,” he said roughly. Although he swelled against her, he maintained his casual pose.
Charlotte said nothing, her eyes meeting his and holding his gaze. Then before he knew what she was about, she raised her arms and lifted her shirt over her head, tossing it carelessly aside.
They were freed, her large and milky white breasts, and Maximilian jerked underneath her at the sight of them. What could he do? She offered herself to him, leaning toward him so that they swelled before him like so much ripe fruit, but a few inches from his face.
Maximilian made a noise in his throat, a feral sound, and lifted his hands. They fell into his large palms and spilled over, bounty too beauteous to be contained. He thumbed the wide nipples, and Charlotte arched back, sighing softly into the night air.
Oh, holy God, he thought dimly. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew he ought to toss her out of his bed. This was all wrong. He had a responsibility to his bride to not touch her until their wedding night...and he was nothing if not responsible.
With a groan, Maximilian dropped his hands to her thighs and tried to move her, but somehow, instead, he impatiently kicked away the sheet that covered him. She nestled against him once more, and he could feel the soft folds of her trousers against his hardness.
There was something wildly erotic about Charlotte, naked from the waist up and dressed in men’s clothing below, and he rubbed against the material that separated them. If he could just... He pulled her down on top of him, taking her mouth in a hot, wet, fierce kiss hungrily, like a starving man, like a man wholly unlike himself as his hands molded her breasts, her luscious breasts...
She answered him, meeting his tongue with her own, moaning softly, her low sounds at odds with her sweet innocence. He slid his hands into that hair, crushing it between his fingers, so soft... He groaned. He made sounds he had never thought himself capable of making, and Charlotte joined him, whimpering as each desperate moan was torn from his throat.
He slid his hands over her shoulders and along her back, where the skin was fine and sleek, and then down. His fingers found the waistband of her trousers, and he slid a hand in to close over her naked buttocks, absurdly titillated by the pants, so alien and yet somehow seductive.
Someone was groaning again, and he suspected it was himself, but he could not stop. He kissed her throat and then eased her up so that her breasts fell toward him, the wide nipples bobbing like lodestars in the night. His mouth found one and he took it, sucking as if he could never get enough, first one then the other, while he pressed her against himself, grinding, gasping, until he had to take a breath and get his bearings.
He rolled her onto her back and looked down at her. Moonlight glistened on the golden sheen of her hair, tossed about her shoulders in wild disarray. It sparkled on the edges of her eyelashes, resting against her flushed cheeks, and on the moist curve of her lips, parted as she took in low, shallow breaths. It gleamed along the creamy curves of magnificent breasts, full and rich and glistening from his mouth.
With a hand that trembled in its eagerness, Maximilian unbuttoned the fall of her trousers and slid his hand inside. Wet. He shuddered and stroked her, his fingers finding the rhythm that made her gasp, made her whimper, made her move purposefully against him. Then, impatient, he pushed the trousers down to her knees and bent his head.
His tongue traced slowly at first, with the patience that had earned the praise of his mistresses, but she was too much of a feast. His command deserted him and he took her with his mouth, tasting and sucking. He heard her whimpers, felt her writhing in his hands, and he gripped her still and slid his tongue inside her. She jerked, taut beneath him, crying out his name.
He tugged off the trousers, spread her legs and positioned himself. Oh, God, finally... He tried to enter slowly, but she was so hot, so tight, that he could not help himself. With a groan, he drove himself in fully, and still he pushed, trying to reach farther. She was gasping, and when the sound penetrated his brain, he stilled. Trembling like a boy, he opened his eyes and realized, he was deeply embedded in the vicar’s daughter. Dear God...
He must have made some sound, some look, because suddenly, Charlotte was whispering to him. “It is all right, Max. I am fine, really, I am. It had to be, and now it is over.” She lifted her mouth to brush against his brow, his cheekbone, his jawline, and he realized that she was trying to comfort him.
“Charlotte...” He meant to say something, truly he did, but words failed him. He tried to concentrate, but he could feel the press of her breasts against his chest and her body tight around him. Was she lifting her legs to encircle him?
“Charlotte... Oh, yes, Charlotte, yes, do that...” Was that his voice murmuring approval? He was mindless, caught up in pleasure such as he had never known, as he lifted her luscious bottom, drawing her closer, nudging himself that much deeper. “Oh, yes, Charlotte... You are so hot, so tight, so...” He withdrew, nearly all the way out, and then plunged deep again.
She made a sound under him. And then he was lost, moving inside her, aware of nothing but the golden, wet heat of her. He tried to whisper his love against her shoulder, but all that came out was her name, a litany on his lips as he lifted her hips, taking her with him at each stroke. Hotter, deeper, harder, until he found surcease, shuddering in her arms, gripping her to him so that he was fully embedded in her warmth and then collapsing in a breathless heap upon her.
When he finally recovered enough to realize that he was lying heavy upon her, gasping against her hair like an oaf, Maxmilian lifted himself upon his arms. His voice did not seem to work properly. “Are you all right?” he croaked.
She nodded. Her lips were wet and swollen, and the curls around her face were tiny swirls, damp with exertion. “I love you, Max,” she whispered. “I love to see you lose yourself in me.”
The words made him swell again. “And I love...to do it,” he said, giving her a crooked smile. He held himself perfectly still. Now was the time to end this. They were not yet wed, deuce it all! It was getting late, and she had sneaked from her home—a vicarage, yet!—to come to him. Tomorrow would be time enough...
“I spoke with Sarah,” she said softly, a wicked smile teasing her mouth. She lifted her hands and speared her fingers through his hair, drawing his face closer to her. Sarah? For a moment his mind was blank before he recalled Charlotte’s older sister. “She told me all sorts of interesting things,” she added as her toes ran a sensuous path down his calf.
“Charlotte...”
“Let us do them all, Max,” she urged. She
brought a long lock of his hair to her lips, and it was a dark shadow against the moonlit planes of her face. “Show me...”
With a groan, he rolled onto his back and let the vicar’s daughter straddle him again. Just one more time, he thought dimly. Then he would send her home. He would make certain that she was home sometime before sunrise, sometime before their wedding...
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Maximilian watched his bride flit among her friends and family, happiness shining from her lovely features, and he felt an overwhelming sense of having come home at last. It was odd, to say the least, for the scene before him looked nothing at all like what he once would have considered normal.
Tables had been spread out upon the great lawns of Casterleigh, and mingling in the same rarefied air as Raleigh and his sister were Alf and the baker’s boy. In truth, there were more people from the village than from the ton, and everywhere there were children, darting among the guests, laughing their musical laughs and shouting in their high-pitched voices.
Compared to your typical London wedding, it was bedlam.
And yet, just as he had begun to appreciate dinners en famille at the vicarage, so Maximilian found himself enjoying the antics of those about him. He had refused to join in a game of ninepins played by one group, but suffered one pretty little girl to sit upon his lap until she fell asleep and her mother, highly embarrassed, came to fetch her.
Despite the din, the atmosphere was warmer and friendlier than any he had known, and he found himself relaxing. He smiled as he saw Charlotte’s great-aunt Augusta, looking as hale and hearty as a woman half her age, laughing with her nephew, the vicar. The nuptials had obviously done much to improve her health, Maximilian noted.
“Kit,” he called out to the blur in brown that tried to slip past him.
“Yes, my lord?”
“Set down that piece of cake you have behind your back. You have had enough cake for one day, and no matter how much I would like to indulge you, I refuse to have you heave-ho at my wedding breakfast.”
“Yes, my lord,” Kit said. Looking disgruntled, he produced an enormous slice of the bride’s cake tucked into one small hand.
“Put it on the table.” Maximilian watched, approvingly, as Kit followed his direction, but before Maximilian had time to draw another breath, the boy wiped his fingers, white and sticky with icing, down the sides of his new coat.
Maximilian sighed. “Not quick enough, am I?” he asked rhetorically. “But I am learning. Run into the house and wash your hands, and have cook clean up your jacket. A gentleman does not wear his dessert upon his person. But before you dash off, tell me, who is that rather seedy-looking fellow who has been eyeing daggers at me all afternoon?” Maximilian cocked his head toward a young man who was lounging insolently against a tree.
“Oh, that’s just Billy Hobson, the miller’s boy,” Kit said. “Sarah said he’s a bad-tempered sort, but Papa said we must not speak ill of others.”
“And what did Charlotte say?”
Kit paused as if dredging up the appropriate response from his memory. “She said she wanted nothing to do with him.”
“Aha! A spurned suitor. That would certainly explain his black looks, if not his ill manners.” Maximilian spoke his last words to the air as Kit shouted at another boy and raced off toward the house. Only years of good breeding prevented Maximilian from yelling a reminder to the boy about washing.
With an amused sigh, Maximilian turned his attention from the vicar’s son to the vicar’s daughter. He caught sight of her, deep in conversation with her sister, and he grinned lazily their way. Charlotte sent him a slow, heart-stopping smile that told him exactly what they were discussing, while Sarah, the prim elder sister, was actually blushing to be caught instructing her sister in some fine point of married life.
Maximilian lifted his brows in such a manner as to truly embarrass the girl. It served her right, he decided, since she had never treated him with any warmth. Still, he was grateful for the information she had been kind enough to pass on to her sibling. Was she adding to Charlotte’s knowledge right now? Maximilian felt himself quickening at the thought.
As if Charlotte needed instruction... Maximilian was aware that his lovely young bride was gifted with instinctive skills that rivaled any courtesan’s. He was also aware that her plan last night had failed miserably. She had seduced him so that he would not be so anxious to bed her today, but, unfortunately, their romps had only whetted his appetite. He suspected that he would have to spend a week in bed with his wife to get his fill. He would have to consider postponing the wedding trip to Greece...
Charlotte looked across the lawn at her new husband, saw his lips curved in that provocative manner and felt her heart knock against her ribs in a frantic beat. She could not take her eyes from him. He looked so very handsome and elegant, even more so than he had ever seemed in London, perhaps because he was more relaxed. It lent an ease to his features and grace to his body that had been lacking in town.
“Charlotte!” Sarah’s voice made her finally stop staring at her husband. “Did you... Surely, you did not say anything to him about our conversation, did you?” Sarah’s usually calm, low voice was high and strained, and Charlotte glanced over to find her sister turning crimson.
“Whatever is the matter, Sarah?”
“The matter! The matter is that your husband is looking at me in the oddest fashion.”
“Oh, pay him no mind. He is probably anxious to be done with the party and on with the wedding night.”
“Charlotte!” Sarah gasped. “Your plain speaking was not seemly alone with me in the vicarage’s kitchen, so it is most assuredly out of place here, among your guests.”
“Botheration! I suppose it is too early to retire...”
“Charlotte!”
“Oh, there is Billy, looking as if he would like to strangle Max. Who invited him?”
“Who? Oh, the miller’s boy. Stay away from him, Charlotte. He grows wilder every year, and has harbored ill will for you ever since you refused his suit.”
Charlotte made an inelegant sound. “As if I would want to go out walking with a boy as mean as Billy. He has always been a bully!” She paused to stare at the young man. “Botheration! I hope he does not plan some sort of disruption. Max has been heaving great sighs of relief all afternoon, thinking that he has at last brought me to heel and will have no more scrapes to enter on my behalf.”
“Ha!” Sarah said callously. “He does not know you well enough yet, does he?”
Charlotte pulled a face, but was prevented from saying more by the crush of the Watkins family, who wanted to press kisses upon her and view her costly gown more closely. She let them, but her thoughts were racing toward the hour when she and Max could be alone again.
Afterward, Charlotte berated herself for not being more alert, but she was far too distracted. After all, it was her wedding day. She was surrounded by family and friends and not far from her husband, who, despite his elegance, could hold his own in everything from fisticuffs to duels. The vigilance that she had maintained in London slipped here in Sussex, making her easy prey.
It happened when she went into the house to wipe a spill from her gown and to pin up her hair yet again. The morning had fled and for once she was not surrounded by well-wishers. She felt a sense of relief to be alone in the quiet of her room and sighed, suddenly tired from her wild night and busy day.
Then she smelled an odd odor, and something came over her mouth, forcing her to breathe a strange smoke. Her brief sense of panic was overwhelmed by a strange lethargy before nothingness enveloped her like a cloud.
* * *
When Charlotte awoke, it was to a lingering sickening smell that churned her stomach. It was not until she regained all her senses that she realized she was on a boat. She closed her eyes again, thinking that her dream of a leisurely ride down the Thames had turned into a nightmare.
But this was no dream, and she was not upon the Thames. Although Charlo
tte had never been to sea, she realized that the choppy movement of the ship could only be due to the ocean waves. Memory was slow in returning. Were they already on their way to Greece?
She rose upon one elbow. “Max?”
Her quavering question was greeted with a low denial. “Put him out of your mind, Charlotte, dear. He can no longer control you. You are free of him at last. And we are together, just as we always should have been.”
With the bile rising in her throat, Charlotte turned her head toward the voice. She took one look at Sir Burgess, reclining back upon the seat with what must be an opium pipe, and she vomited up her wedding breakfast.
Somehow Charlotte survived the Channel crossing, but she was too ill to even consider escaping from her captor. He solicitously tucked a blanket about her and whisked her away in the low light of dusk, and all she could do was lie back in the coach and long for the feel of the ground, unmoving, beneath her feet.
She did not even protest when he carried her into a château. Too quiet to be an inn, it presumably was a private residence, but, since they were beyond the niceties of propriety, she cared only that her bed was solidly anchored to an unmoving floor, and that the door had a stout lock. She locked it, lay down in her less than pristine wedding gown and slept like the dead.
When Charlotte awakened, she was served by a quiet, sour-looking French girl, who managed to prepare her a bath and help her into a new gown that fit reasonably well. The maid, however, refused all questions and conversations, announcing only that “monsieur” was in the morning room, awaiting her presence.
Charlotte thought briefly of escaping through the window, but since she was not sure where they were, and her French was not all that it should be, she decided to risk an interview with Burgess. Perhaps she could talk some sense into him. Perhaps he had abducted her in some opium-induced fit. Mayhap he did not realize that she was married, or that Max would surely kill him if anything happened to her...
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