Two hours later, while Alec played the piano, Joy moved through a lively Scottish reel, partnered first by the viscount and next by the earl. She finished the last step with a dainty spin and a merry laugh. She dropped onto a brocade settee and said, “You’ve worn me out, my lord.”
“The pleasure was mine, Your Grace.” The earl bowed over her hand and held it just a bit longer than seemed necessary.
“I say. We’ve taught her all the country dances—the ecossaise, minuet, contredanse. I believe that is everything.”
“Except the waltz,” the earl said.
“Do you suppose there’ll be any?” Neil asked. “You know Prinny prohibited the waltz at his last ball.”
“Our regent changes with the whip of the wind. Talk was that Cathcart’s ball was a blinding success because Lady Jane dared to play waltzes all night. I suspect Prinny will have a waltz or two, and I’ll be happy to offer my services to teach Joy to waltz.”
“Stuff it, Downe. You had the last dance. ‘Tis my turn.”
“Stop!” The pianoforte keys banged in loud discord.
Joy turned toward Alec, who had risen like an angry specter. “I will teach her.”
No one said a word, but she thought she saw a look of pleasure cross the earl’s face.
“You can play,” Alec said to the earl, who sauntered over to the piano and sat down, clearly amused by his friend’s outburst.
Joy looked up at her husband, who stood in front of her so tall and rigid, and placed her hand in his outstretched one. His skin was hot, and she cast a quick surprised glance at their joined hands. He had been strangely quiet since they’d entered the music room. She had assumed he was still angry and didn’t want to dance with her, partly because she was so unschooled in social graces.
“Put your hand on my upper arm.” He slid his warm hand around her waist. “Come closer,” he said, pulling her forward until she was too close. “‘Tis three-quarter time, like the dance with the allemande. Do you remember?”
She nodded.
The earl began to play the loveliest melody she had ever heard. It caught her off guard, and she turned to watch him play with more feeling than any musician she’d ever heard. “He plays wonderfully.”
“Yes, he does. It’s one of the few things he still appears to take seriously.” There was a look of pity in her husband’s eyes that she knew would have sent the earl into another bout of careless drinking had he looked up from the keys at that moment. Alec’s hand squeezed her waist. “Ready?”
She nodded, her head filled with music as wonderful as that at her beasts’ ball, and a magical moment later she was swirling across the marble floor in the strong and steady arms of her love.
“I say! You caught on quickly!” Neil called out.
The music played on, sweetly, gently, the notes flowing like satin ribbons in the air. She looked up at her husband, seeking his approval. His face was stone serious; the light in his eyes said he was fighting some silent battle, and losing. If this had been a dream, she would have hoped he was fighting a battle with his heart, but this wasn’t a dream. Surely the battle was with his anger, or possibly with his shame at his choice of a wife. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly.
From the expression on his face, she knew her remark had confused him.
“This must be humiliating for you,” she clarified.
“Why would you think so?”
“Because you’ve had to teach me how to act around your friends.”
“The members of the ton are not my friends, Scottish.”
“Oh,” she said lamely and was surprised when he pulled her even closer, then closer still, until her breasts just grazed his chest with each swirling turn. His hand flattened against her back and inched downward until it rested scandalously low. His warm fingers tightened on hers, and his breath brushed her forehead.
She stared at the studs on his shirt, wanting to look up but unable to do so. The heady scent of him, the almost scorching heat of his hand, the sound of the music, and feel of his breath ruffling her hair filled her senses until there was nothing in the room but the two of them. She finally raised her gaze to his and saw a need that made her heart catch in her throat.
His silver hair looked like moonlight in the golden glow of the chandelier, the shadow of his beard showing just enough to make her remember the rough and erotic feel of it on her skin. His hand moved slightly, a mere inkling of a stroke across her waist. It was like dancing into a dream where the air was a living, breathing thing and the music a tune to make love by.
Her eyes drifted closed and in her mind she relived her intimate moments with Alec: his head bent as he took her breast into the depths of his mouth and his rough tongue over the tip of her, him above her, his skin damp and glistening from the thundering movements of his body inside hers; the feel of him filling her so full that she wasn’t sure where her body ended and his began; that one magic moment in which nothing existed but the wonder of them together.
He pulled her closer and spun, then dipped, and her eyes shot open in surprise. He was looking at her mouth, intensely. She looked at his, remembering the feel of his lips and the taste of his tongue.
Kiss me, kiss me and end this yearning.
As if her wish had come true, he lowered his head slowly, watching her, daring her to break eye contact before his mouth met hers so softly, just a sweep of his lips, a tease. Her own lips parted in surprise, for she had expected passion of the same vibrant intensity that his eyes promised.
Silently, he was asking her if she wanted more. She did, and her fingers tightened on the hard strength of his upper arm. A second later his lips, as hot as fire and moistened by a quick flick of his tongue, were on hers and he pulled her flush against him, never once breaking step, never once missing a beat.
If anything their spins were faster, their dips deeper, each anticipating the other’s motion before it happened. The tempo of the music increased and the volume grew. With each turn, his tongue flickered over her lips, with each dip it sank into the depths of her mouth, filling her in a perfect imitation of the way his body filled hers. The mood of the music changed, the pitch descended. Then the melody changed, climbing higher and higher, swelling in volume and intensity until it reached a peaking crescendo.
It was the kiss of a lifetime, but it ceased a brief moment later.
The music had ended.
“Scottish,” he whispered her name in an aching plea.
Joy opened her eyes.
And Alec lost consciousness.
“The measles? Impossible!” Alec arrogantly raised himself up in the bed. “I cannot have the measles.”
Joy sat in an overstuffed chair near her husband’s bed. She was terribly relieved, but her husband’s sharp tone and scowling fevered face told her that he was not the least bit pleased with the physician’s diagnosis.
“And take that bloody candle away from my eyes. You’re going to blind me with that thing.”
“Does the light bother Your Grace?”
Alec looked at the physician through bloodshot eyes that narrowed in suspicion. “Why?”
With a small shake of his head, the physician pulled the candle away and gestured to his patient’s chest and belly. “The rash is the measles. Once it spreads, Your Grace’s fever will drop.” He set the candle down on the bedside table and picked up his case.
“I have never been ill a day in my life,” Alec said to the room in general, as if by making this announcement he could make the illness go away.
“If Your Grace had had measles as a child, Your Grace would not have them now,” the physician said with infinite patience. “This is a rather severe case, I’d say, considering the high fever and the widespread rash.” He closed his case with a snap. “Keep warm and stay in bed until the coughing ceases.”
“I haven’t been coughing.” Alec’s tone was so belligerent that Joy winced.
“You will. Your eyes will stop tearing, and your nose will stop running. Recov
ery will begin a day or so later.” He turned to her and said, “In the meantime please keep him warm, Your Grace.”
She stood. “I will, thank you. We’ll take fine care of him.” She ignored her husband’s unaristocratic snort and walked with the physician into the sitting room. “Is there anything else I should know?”
“No. As I said before, it is imperative that he be kept warm.” He gave her a look of pity. “I suspect he won’t be a very cooperative patient.”
“I’ll make sure he stays warm.” She gave him a warm smile, hoping to make up a bit for Alec’s poor manners and thanked the man again as Henson escorted him out.
She reentered the bedchamber. Although she would have thought it impossible to look arrogant when one was ill, Alec managed it. He was enthroned among the monogrammed pillows, his chin up, his arms crossed in a manner that said, “I am a duke and therefore I am not ill.” His expression, to say the least, was not pleased.
She sat on the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry you don’t feel well.”
He just glared at her.
She tried again. “I was very frightened, you know. One moment you were standing there and the next you had collapsed.”
Silence.
“‘Twas the fever, I suspect.”
Brooding silence.
“You should get some rest.”
“I am not tired.”
She sighed and reached for the bellpull. “Should I have something sent up to you? Water? Soup? Are you hungry?”
He coughed, once, twice, then tried to suppress the next one.
“Alec, you do have the measles.”
He blew his nose. “I know, dammit!”
“Are you warm enough?”
“No.”
She shook open a blanket and added it to the pile already on the massive bed. “There. Is that better?”
He grunted a response she assumed was a yes.
She stood there a minute, then shook her head and gave up. “Well, since you don’t need me—”
“Don’t go.”
She stopped and turned around, surprised.
“Read to me.” He pointed to a book on the table.
She picked up the book and read the title, The Gentlemen’s Guide to Selecting and Breeding Prime Horseflesh. “This?”
“Yes, the page is marked.” He leaned back into the wealth of pillows and waited expectantly.
She opened to the marked page and began to read. Half an hour later, Joy had learned that horses can be cow-legged, bowlegged, or pigeon-toed, that a sloping croup means lack of power in the hindquarters and a straight croup means less power in jumping, and that horses suffered from such afflictions as ringbone, seedy toe, and bog spavin—which sounded like something a witch might use to cast a black spell.
“I’ve been thinking,” Alec said, cutting off the latest tidbit of information. “I realize I have been rather rigid about your . . . your problem.”
“My problem?”
“Yes.”
Now he’s going to bring up that incident at the Frost Fair again, she thought, deciding that if he did she would not hit him with the stack of blankets Roberts had supplied.
“I realize you cannot change what you are any more than I can change what I am.”
She nodded and waited for the rest.
“I suppose if your magic can do some good, ‘twould be acceptable, every so often, for you to use it.”
She clamped her gaping mouth shut.
“Not in public, of course, but in private, behind closed doors, when only you and I are present.” He looked at her expectantly. “Like now.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“I am giving you permission to zap the measles away.”
For a second she had to think to make sure she’d heard him right. Then she burst out laughing. “Oh, Alec!” She collapsed onto the chair in a fit of giggles. “You can be such a hypocritical prig sometimes.”
“Me?”
She bit her smile back. “Yes, you.”
He looked down his nose at her, then winced and scratched his chest. “I’m waiting,” he said.
“I cannot.”
“What do you mean you cannot?”
“A witch cannot just zap an illness away.”
“Why the hell not?”
“‘Tis not one of our powers.”
“Bloody hell,” he muttered, then sank back against the pillows.
Well, husband, she thought, you might never have been a child, but today you are acting like one. She forced herself to keep from laughing and asked, “Shall I continue reading?”
“Yes,” he barked, then leaned his head back and closed his red-rimmed eyes.
Halfway into the next chapter he was sound asleep, and Joy was thumbing through the pages of the first interesting and enlightening chapter “What to Look for in a Breeding Stallion.”
Joy’s face haunted the duke’s fevered dreams. Alec could almost feel her touch, the way her fingers combed his hair and tugged it when she became excited. Her finger grazed his ear, circling it with featherlike softness. He could feel her warm breath, feel her mouth nuzzle the back of his ear.
“Scottish,” he groaned and turned toward her.
She wheezed.
He froze. His bloodshot eyes flew open.
Two beady brown weaselly eyes stared back at him.
“God Almighty . . . my hair!” He shot upright, grabbing his scalp, picturing in his mind the pink skin on the back of Henson’s head. He bolted from the bed like a man crazed, not stopping until he reached the looking glass in his dark dressing room. He fumbled for a flint to light a lamp, his hands shaking from the heat of his fever. He struck the flint and lit the lamp, then leaned close to the mirror, turning his head this way and that.
Although it was tousled from a fevered sleep, his hair appeared to be all there. No bald spots. He picked up a hand mirror and turned, angling it upward so he could see the very back of his head. A second later he sagged in relief against the dresser.
Now more angry than ill, he turned and strode back into the bedchamber, plucked his wife’s snoring rodent off his pillows, and crossed to the adjoining door. He opened it, crossed the sitting room, and went into Joy’s bedchamber. The plump little weasel lay back in his arms and watched him through sly eyes that slowly moved from his face to his hairline. As if reading the duke’s mind, the rodent licked its lips.
“Don’t even think about it.”
The animal wheezed; then its lips curled in what Alec supposed was a grin. Resisting the urge to drop it, he put the damn weasel in its basket and turned, but he stopped short of leaving.
The room was dim, the drapes drawn over the windows, but the bed draperies were open, hanging loose near the carved bedposts. A flicker of light from a guttering candle twinkled from the lamp at the bedside table and he moved closer. His wife lay sound asleep atop sheets that glowed almost golden in the candlelight. That long curtain of deep brown hair fell to one side and spilled down over the side of the bed. It drew him like silken threads of need that bound him to her, as it always did, as it had the first time he’d ever seen it.
It was odd that he noticed things about her that he could not remember noticing about other women. In his eyes, women were either beautiful or not beautiful. He had never noticed a woman’s eyes or nose, the wistful tilt of her lips, a determined chin, the thickness of her brows, the delicate shape of a small ear. Yet he had with Scottish. And it hadn’t stopped there. He’d noticed the motion she made with her hands, hands that he had held and rubbed and examined so closely when he had thought they were frostbitten. It leveled him somewhat to realize that he even knew the pattern of the lines on her palms, whereas he could only guess at the color of Juliet Spencer’s eyes.
He closed his eyes and found himself longing for those old familiar times before Joy had entered his life. What had happened to the man he used to be? Little more than a few weeks ago everything had been simple, predictable, routine; there w
ere no surprises in his life back then, and no complications. It had been so simple.
Looking back at his sleeping wife, he knew that nothing would ever be simple again, and he wasn’t certain how he felt about that. He had to ask himself what he really wanted. He wanted Scottish. Yes, he wanted her, wanted her with a need so strong that many times he had turned away just to prove to himself that he could fight it.
But the fact remained that he was drawn to her as if she had cast a spell that somehow linked them together. He didn’t want to admit it. But he knew it. It was there to haunt him every time he felt a sexual need. It wasn’t lust, but he wanted it to be, because lust he could control. This elusive thing that bound him to her was something he could not control, because it was not something he could name.
She breathed in the deep, soft pattern of one who was sound asleep. A book, tented across her chest, rose and fell with each whispering breath. He bent forward and picked it up, giving the cover a cursory glance: The Dastardly Duke.
He knew he should be angry with her, but he wasn’t. He shook his head at his own inability to be what he thought he should be, what he had always been—a man who prided himself on his control.
He started to turn away, but stopped and looked down at the book in his hand. He bent over the bed and picked up a small silver bookmark that lay in the tangles of her hair. He marked the page and set the book on the bed table.
His still feverish head began to throb with the pain of an illness that had the audacity to strike the Duke of Belmore. He blew out the lone candle and returned to his own room, where he could wish for a simpler time and regain the strength he needed to control his marriage and the strength he needed to fight his unreasonable need for a small Scottish witch.
The evening of the Prince Regent’s ball arrived on a frozen wind. Spindly winter birch branches scraped and scratched like grasping fingers against the eastern wall of Belmore House and a liquid fire of golden light poured down from the windows, spilling over the tree trunks and onto the icy flagstones below.
But in her upstairs dressing room Joy saw only darkness.
With This Kiss: A First-In Series Romance Collection Page 30