“You said I could have you,” Irene reminded him. “Haven’t I been patient enough?”
“You haven’t been patient at all.” He regarded the red half moons her nails had left on his shoulders, then caressed her neck, the hollow between her breasts where he’d kissed. “But neither have I.”
So they came together then, she wet and hungry for him, he hard and tender all at once. They fit in a familiar way, Irene’s body remembering things her mind didn’t even recall. How to move her hips to take in all of his length. Where to touch to help bring herself to pleasure as he moved within her. How the muscles of his backside bunched hard. And where his skin was so sensitive that a light touch could turn his thrusts from deliberate to frenetic.
They worked each other, played with each other, their bodies heated and spiraling toward climax, and then a great final push, a cry, and she was cresting around him, carried away from herself by the force of her own pleasure. Jonah looked at her, glassy and wondering, as he thrust again, again, then pulled free to spill outside of her, the whole length of his body shuddering.
Breathing hard, they lay side by side on the bed. Jonah’s big arm slid across the mattress, hand feeling about until he caught her fingers. “Mmm.” He made a noise deep in his throat. It sounded like satisfaction. Contentment.
Home.
Irene clenched her fist, holding his hand fast in her grip. She’d promised to stay, but what if he was the one to leave? She blinked, surprised to find her lashes wet.
She was growing maudlin and worried. There was nothing to fear. He had come to her and told her to have him. He had told her he was sure of her.
She rubbed her eyes with her free hand, then turned to face him. Their laced fingers lay between them, a linked chain. Beneath them lay Irene’s dressing gown, creased and rumpled.
Rubbing their joined hands on the purple fabric, Irene laughed. “My dressing gown will never be the same. Did you spend on it?”
“I’ve no idea. Pulling out of you was all I could manage.” Jonah’s lids were half-closed, his voice drowsy.
“I’m glad you did.” He always remembered. He’d always done this, ever since she’d asked him to on their wedding night. Life was too unsettled to take the chance of children yet. But someday they would, she’d always assumed.
Someday, they’d both kiss their firstborn on the forehead. She just wasn’t sure when.
As his eyes drifted closed, Irene freed her fingers from his and slid from the bed, tugging her dressing gown from beneath his form.
That poor dressing gown. He’d spilled on it, all right, and they’d thoroughly creased the fabric. They’d sweated on it and loved on it and probably ruined it.
Well, that was what it was for. Front-lacing and frothy, it was meant for seduction. She hung it over the back of a chair to keep it from getting any more rumpled, then went behind the privacy screen to clean herself. She pulled on a shift to sleep in and wrapped a silk scarf around her hair, then doused the lamps and returned to bed.
Jonah lay on his side, legs gently bent. Irene carefully tucked herself against him, back to belly like nested spoons. His body heated her back, and his arm heated her front, and his breath heated her neck. And it was safe. It was loving. They belonged together.
Maybe this could work, the two of them, without Irene losing anything of herself. Maybe with Jonah, she could build something she hadn’t trusted in for far too long.
A family.
Chapter Thirteen
“I do apologize for the state of your study. We didn’t know you were coming.” The butler’s voice rang out from the dining room.
Yawning and eager for a strong cup of tea, Irene halted before she reached the doorway. Bright, the butler, was clearly in a state.
It was too early to deal with someone who was in a state.
“Should you have to know? Shouldn’t you be ready for me anytime?” The reply in a masculine voice was brusque. “It’s not usual to travel on a Sunday, but as I’d already begun my journey, I assumed the Lord above would understand.”
“He’s forgiving of our faults, lucky for us,” replied another male voice. “Let’s hope our loved ones are too.”
This voice was American-accented. This voice was familiar.
This voice belonged to Victor Baird.
Her head cleared at once.
Irene pressed herself against the wall beside the dining room doorway and glanced inside, quick as blinking. In an instant, she took in the room, then whipped back, considering.
It was a room full of men. The butler was in there, of course. And Jonah. And a beetle-browed man in a wheelchair who could be only Sir William Chandler, facing Irene’s handsome wastrel of a father across the table as if they were old friends.
Where was Susanna? Or Laurie, for that matter? Irene pressed at her temples. How long had she been asleep? Had she fallen into a fairy story or a new century? If this sort of bizarre gathering was what came from seducing one’s husband and sleeping late into the morning, then…
…it was still worth it. But damnation, she hated being caught unprepared.
So she pretended to be prepared.
Smoothing her pinned-up hair and everyday blue gown, she adopted an expression of polite courtesy and swept into the dining room. “Good morning, everyone. I hope I’m not late for breakfast.”
Victor and Jonah stood by way of greeting. Ignoring her own father, she leaned over and held out a hand to the gray-haired man in the wheelchair. “You must be Sir William. I’m Jonah’s wife.”
Heavy brows lowered over hazel eyes, the color of which he’d passed on to his oldest offspring. “Irene, isn’t it? Jonah mentioned you were a mulatta.”
She raised a brow. “Does that matter to you?”
“Does it matter to you that I use a wheelchair? Probably not, but you’d be hard pressed not to notice it the first time we met. Especially if it took you by surprise. Am I right?”
He was, not that she’d tell him so. “You don’t like being surprised?”
He looked at her thoughtfully. “It depends on the occasion.” And he took her hand as if to shake it, then bowed his head over it—the gesture of a well-bred gentleman for a gracious lady—before releasing it again.
It was rather sweet. Unexpectedly so. And now she was unprepared again.
She cast a glance over her shoulder at her husband. “What else did Jonah tell you about me?”
“That he’d married you and that you’d left him.”
Ah. Yes. Well, that was the truth.
“He didn’t tell me that you’d found each other again,” the baronet added, “but I could tell. You’ve met up over the years, and I could always tell when it happened.”
“Because he seemed happier?” Yes, she was fishing for a compliment.
“Less so. He’d disappear for a few days and come back—”
“Grumbly,” Irene finished. “That’s how I always feel when I have to leave him.”
“You can talk to me,” Jonah said. “I’m right here.”
“And being grumbly,” Sir William pointed out. “Yet your wife’s here too. What’s your excuse this time?”
As Jonah rolled his eyes, Irene suppressed a smile. She hadn’t expected to like Jonah’s father, knowing only that the baronet kept Jonah pinned to the stud farm in Newmarket and, more recently, that he’d fathered a child he’d never met. But every fact had nuance, and every circumstance had its reasons. If the baronet wasn’t unkind, if he treated Irene with respect, then yes, she thought she could come to like Sir William quite well.
Bright fussed with the dishes on the sideboard before departing the room, and Irene was reminded that she hadn’t yet breakfasted. As she walked around the table, Victor said, “You could give your old dad a hug and a hullo.”
Quickly as that, her appetite was gone.
She gave him a halfhearted squeeze about the shoulder. “Hullo, Father. I didn’t know you were coming to London.”
“I always
wind up here eventually,” he said cheerfully. “There’s no better place for a man of vision than London. Plus, your mum told me you were here too, and I thought…well, family reunion!”
Victor Baird looked much the same as when she’d last seen him, a glancing encounter that had ended in harsh words on her side and affable condescension on his. This was her father—red-blond hair shot with gray, twinkling blue eyes under sandy brows, a smile of straight teeth with creases in his cheeks slightly too shallow to be called dimples.
In a word, he was handsome. He always had been and always would be. Irene sometimes wondered what people would look like if their outsides reflected their true selves. Victor would be sleek as a mirror, looking like whatever he needed to in the moment. Jonah…
Jonah wouldn’t change at all. Inside and out, he was a bit craggy, a bit rough, and utterly dependable.
He pulled out a seat for Irene beside him, and gratefully, she sat. As she poured out a cup of tea, she asked, “Where are my mother and Laurie?”
“At church,” Victor answered. “They’ll be back soon enough. Toast?” He pushed a rack toward Irene as if he were her host.
Her stomach turned. “Just tea. You’ll be leaving soon? As a man of vision, and whatnot?”
“Ah, my Reenie. So much like me.” Victor beamed. “We neither of us can tolerate the ordinary for long.”
Sir William eyed Victor sharply, then turned his attention to a piece of toast. Cutting it into squares, he said, “There’s not much that’s ordinary about this family.”
“For better or for worse,” Jonah said dryly.
“Oh, for better.” Sir William pushed two of the little squares to the side of his plate. “Definitely for better. Our horses did very well in the race meet.”
“Did they?” Jonah relaxed. Irene hadn’t even known he was tense, yet his posture eased at the mere mention of horses. “Did Golden Barb win again? He was heavily favored, but sometimes that works against a horse.”
The conversation between father and son became decidedly equine. The horse named Golden Barb had won. The filly called Long Meg had come in second in her maiden race. Unfortunately, the colt with the unlikely name of Eggs-and-Butter had false-started several times and eventually been disqualified.
“With a name like that,” Victor contributed, “he was bound to be beaten. Eh?”
Jonah and Sir William both stared at him.
“Did you…just make an egg pun?” Irene asked.
Victor smiled modestly. “You loved it.”
Sir William shook his head slowly, then said to Jonah, “I’ll never understand why you like training more than racing. Don’t you want to see your work pay off?”
“My work does pay off. Every day. And I came to London for a purpose, if you recall. Your purpose.”
“You weren’t sorry to come.”
“No,” Jonah agreed quietly, taking Irene’s hand under the table. “I wasn’t sorry at all.”
With strong features and powerful shoulders, father and son resembled each other physically, but their demeanor couldn’t have been more different. Sir William put himself forward, arranging the conversation as deliberately as the food on his plate. Jonah simply was. If he were put forward, fine; if he hung back, fine.
If he was next to Irene, best of all. Under the cover of the table, she slid her hand to the side and found a long line of thigh. A knee. The thigh again, roving, before Jonah stilled her hand with his own.
“I thought you weren’t hungry,” he murmured, making her choke on her tea.
“Um,” she covered her spluttering. “What is it like being a baronet, Sir William?”
He poured a precise amount of tea into a cup, topping it off drip by drip. “Depends on the baronet. Are you wondering what you’ve got into by marrying Jonah, now that you two are being aboveboard about the matter?”
She nodded.
“I don’t think you need to worry. We’re not part of the ton, and we like that even more than the ton does.”
Sir William, Irene knew, had clawed his way into fortune through horse breeding and racing. Jonah had been almost grown when his father received the baronetcy after providing much-needed cavalry horses during the first war with Napoleon. The title had come with no land or tenants, but Sir William had had land aplenty already, and the only tenants he’d wanted were equine.
This was a relief, Irene thought. The ton was full of people like her student Seraphina James. People who thought their birth meant they deserved every sort of privilege. People who thought they could decide who else deserved—and who didn’t.
Not suitable, Seraphina’s parents had called Irene. It was hardly the first time she’d been sneered at simply for existing. No one sneered at her parents, as far as she’d seen, because they simply had nothing to which to compare the marriage of a white American and a black Englishwoman.
It was more difficult for the children, maybe, being born in-between. Irene had had to find her own place in a world that would rather shoulder her aside. This had never been easy for the offspring of a rogue who took everything from others and a seamstress who could discard nothing. If Irene could save Laurie the same struggle, she would.
Thus her determination to get him into Harton. A boy who attended Harton always had a place, ever after.
“I’m glad,” Irene said at last, “that you’re not part of the ton. That you’re just you. All of you.”
“Thank you,” Victor said brightly. Before Irene could decide whether to correct him, her mother appeared in the doorway of the dining room with Laurie in tow.
“Ah!” Victor sprang to his feet. “My darling wife”—he gave her a smacking kiss on each cheek—“and my dear son.” His hug for Laurie lifted the boy off his feet.
Laurie laughed, wheezing, “You just saw us an hour ago!” His sweet gap-toothed grin flashed like a mirror catching the sun.
Victor chucked him under the chin. “That was before Sir William arrived! Come, meet our host.”
“Am I hosting you?” Sir William said mildly. “I suppose I am. Hullo, Mrs. Baird. You’re the woman who cluttered up my study.”
Sir William didn’t look welcoming or pleasant, but he didn’t look the reverse either. He looked…honest. He placed his whole attention on whatever was before him, and nothing else for that moment existed. Discussing race results with Jonah. Arranging the food on his plate. Adjusting some lever on his wheelchair.
And just now, studying Susanna. Irene’s mother lifted her chin. “If you want to call it that, yes.”
“A study?”
“Clutter.” She raised one shoulder, an elegant shrug. “I think of it as a collection.”
“Rescued items,” Laurie added.
“Rubbish,” Irene said under her breath.
The world wavered, slightly unreal, as Sir William faced Susanna, and Susanna and Laurie flanked Victor like a consort and dauphin about a monarch. These were worlds that weren’t supposed to collide. These were lives that ought to remain separate. Hadn’t she and Jonah worked hard to keep them so?
As Susanna expounded on her so-called collection, uncertainty crept through Irene. Why had she and Jonah kept their families separate from their lives? Was their love so fragile that it could survive only in their solitary cocoon?
She knew, she knew. She was the one who’d insisted it be constructed. But now, she wondered if she’d made a mistake. The parents had met. The world hadn’t imploded.
“You make a good argument,” Sir William said to Susanna. “But I still can’t get my wheelchair into the study. That can’t be argued with.” He regarded her curiously. “What sort of work do you do, that collecting is so important to you?”
“I’m a seamstress.”
Irene shook her head. “She’s more than that. She’s a…what is the female word for wizard? She’s that, with fabric.”
“She’s got a wonderful gift,” Victor added. “One of Madame Challon’s finest workers!”
“Chalfont,” Sus
anna replied quietly.
“Right, right.” He beamed. “But her name isn’t as important as what you do for her.”
Irene folded her arms. Enough. “What do you want here, Father?”
Victor spread his hands expansively. “To be a part of your life, of course!”
“And why couldn’t you have been a part of our lives last Saturday, when I had to pawn my wedding ring because you’d taken Mama’s rent money?”
He waved this off. “I needed the money to pay a debt so that you wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore.”
Somehow, Irene was always caught wrong-footed when she spoke to him. “You mean you gave the rent money to the bank at Barrow-on-Wye?”
“No, this was a different debt. You’ll never have to worry about it!” Now Victor looked at Jonah, whom he’d previously ignored. “So good to see you again. Thank you for taking such good care of my little girl.”
Jonah’s arm came around Irene’s shoulders. “You say ‘little girl,’ but I believe you mean ‘grown woman who’s been making sure your wife and son have a home while you gamble.’”
“To a father, his daughter is always a little girl,” said Victor fondly. “And no one could regret a failed investment more than I. But that’s the nature of investment, isn’t it? A gamble. I didn’t force anyone to place their money with me, and really, I lost more than anyone else.”
“You invested your own money?” Jonah sounded skeptical. Irene had been prepared to ask the same thing, disbelieving, but was relieved that someone else was pushing back against Victor’s glib excuses. Certainly her mother and brother never did. They treated Victor’s every arrival like the coming of a theater troupe, a special event to be celebrated. And for all Irene knew, Victor’s air of fondness was no more than a performance.
He was a damned talented performer, though.
“I invested every cent I had.” Victor put his hand over his heart. “If a man hasn’t his integrity, he has nothing. I’ve been trying to make things right ever since.”
“We could use a stable boy,” Irene said. “If you need a job.”
His Wayward Bride (Romance of the Turf Book 3) Page 14