by Kate Moore
Lucy had not imagined her breasts capable of such sensation. From the tips he touched so gently, first with his thumbs and then with his mouth, streaks of pleasure shot to her woman’s place, making it ache and weep for him. She squirmed impatiently in the crumpled folds of her skirts.
“Now you,” she said to him.
He grinned again and slipped off the bed, drawing her after him, so that he stood at the edge of the bed in the little cove of her legs. She helped him pull the shirt up over his ribs and chest, and he tossed it aside. His hands went to the fall of his trousers, and she reached to help him.
Harry shed wool and linen in a single swift move and stood before her. He did not have to tell her to look. She gave him a very frank appraisal, even his cockstand. There was no fear or distaste in her look, only curiosity and, he thought, impatience to touch. He took her hand, putting it to his swollen flesh, showing her the rhythm they would share.
He pushed her back on the bed and tugged away the last of her clothes.
They were skin to skin at last. He put the tip of his aching flesh to hers, sliding against her slick folds, still holding back, waiting for her to arch and open under him.
Lucy needed something more. She arched up against him, and with a quick flex of his hips he accomplished their joining. It surprised her, the unexpected pinch of it, and at same time, the unexpected rightness of the way her body held his so perfectly. She was an innkeeper and she knew a thing or two about welcoming a guest and making him at home, so she waited for the burn to pass and smiled up into his face taut with pleasure.
“I love you,” she said.
He lowered himself to his elbows and kissed her, his mouth touching hers as light as air. “I love you,” he replied.
She closed her eyes at the words she’d been waiting for and lifted her hips to meet his, and together they began to move to a shared beat. She felt herself stroking like a swimmer for a distant shore, swells pushing her onward, until a great surge lifted her.
He whispered, “Now,” and as he convulsed, she shuddered with a pleasure so intense it robbed her breath. The sweet lingering note of it vibrated in her as she descended from the peak. She felt him slide from her and take her into his arms, holding her like the dearest thing he had.
* * * *
Later as they lay warm, damp, and naked in each other’s arms, Lucy stirred against his chest, her right hand tracing patterns on his ribs that he found promising. She meant to test him.
“You came looking for Adam.”
“I did. Goldsworthy had an informant who said there was an important witness we had to find, a blind man.”
“There must be other blind men in London.”
“Yes, but none who were being pursued by hired bully boys. When I found Adam, your father and I had a frank talk about the danger.”
“So my father knew you were a spy?”
“He did. We made an arrangement.” He pushed himself up against the pillows and pulled her up with him, her head against his chest. He did not mean to let go of her until they got over this rough patch of ground.
“For you to stay at the inn.”
“To keep an eye out for whoever meant Adam harm.”
“In exchange for?”
“Well, your father conceived of the idea of the Waterloo case, and he warned me that you were meant to be a lady, not a man’s fancy piece.”
“You didn’t tell him that what you wanted was Adam’s story, his testimony really.”
“No.”
Harry tried to keep his heartbeat steady. Her hand with the ruby ring now made circles around his left nipple. “Do you want to change your mind about marrying me?” It was only fair to ask, now that she knew more of the truth.
Again he waited. She flattened her palm over his heart.
“No,” she said. “I think it’s entirely fitting for a spy’s daughter to marry a spy.” And she lifted her head from his chest and looked at him with those laughing eyes. Her hair fell in golden curls around her face. “So, my lord spy, what do you mean to do next?”
He laughed and shifted her above him, taking in the pale rosy tips of her breasts, and the narrowness of her waist in his hands. “Now,” he said, “I mean to lie back and think of England.” And he pulled her down and kissed her.
* * * *
Lucy said goodbye to her inn on a beef day. While Mountjoy saw to their cases and helped Adam to dress, she went round the inn in the early light, opening shutters and doors, saying farewell to each thing she touched.
As she opened the kitchen door, a loud hoarse mewing greeted her. On the step, crouched over the body of a large gray rat, was a creature she hardly recognized, a scrawny cat whose dirt-caked fur stuck out in matted clumps. Its left ear was torn, and a long scratch aslant its face made the eye weepy.
Lucy knelt, reaching out a hand, and the creature arched into her touch, trembling. “Oh Queenie, you brought me a gift. Come inside.”
They had a brief cat and mistress debate about the proper disposal of the dead rat, but in the end, coaxed by a pot of cream, Queenie left the rat on the steps. She crouched over the bowl of cream, lapping hungrily until Mrs. Vell arrived and shrieked to see such a filthy animal in her kitchen.
Lucy coaxed Queenie with more cream to the laundry for a bath.
Harry, looking in from the laundry door, found her up to her elbows in dirty water and outraged cat. “Ah,” he said, “here’s where you’ve got to. Adam and I wondered.”
Lucy lifted Queenie, her legs extended, claws spread, onto the washboard and poured a pitcher of clear water over her. Queenie shook wildly. “Poor dear, she’s been mauled terribly. What do you think happened to her?”
“Radcliffe had someone take her,” Harry said. “He saw, as Nate did, that Adam used her as his sentry, warning him of danger. Whoever took her dumped her, in the river, I suspect.”
“Can you hold that towel for me?” Lucy asked.
Harry stepped up next to Lucy and picked up the old towel she had lying there.
She watched his eyes shift from the towel to the bath to the wet front of her gown. “You,” she said, “are not thinking of Queenie.”
He swallowed. “You know, if you need a bath, I am more than willing to hold your towel.”
“Are you?” She laughed and watched his face change again, promising that last night had been only the start of their lovemaking. She held up the dripping, indignant cat and let her love wrap the creature in the towel.
* * * *
In the end, Lucy managed to change her gown without her husband-to-be’s assistance, though she promised he could be her bath attendant as soon as they were married. Their carriage was at the door, and the inn people lined up to send them off. Adam sat on his bench with Hannah at his side. Queenie, her fur dried to an orange-and-white fluff, lay in his lap, her face pressed against his thigh, asleep with his big hands around her. Lucy kissed the old man’s gaunt cheek. He was at peace at last. They all were, the soldiers home from their wars.
Not least of the pleasures of the happy ending of the husband hunter’s hunt is the talk that now engages husband and wife in recounting the progress of their love. Who first began to love? What signs did each observe or fail to observe in the other? What mistakes were made and what obstacles had to be overcome? What irresistible longings could only be answered in a lasting union of minds and hearts? Such is the power of the story of a prosperous love that the lovers delight in retelling it though their heads be gray and their joined hands wrinkled.
—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London
Epilogue
Nate Wilde watched Miranda pour perfect rich coffee from the frothing pot into the tiny cups they used at the club. While his shoulder healed, he was teaching her how to make coffee the way the old soldier had taught him when he first left Bread Street.
With
her brains and her clever seamstress’s hands, she caught on quickly. She poured the last of the coffee into a closed pot for keeping and put the pot on the silver tray they would carry up to the club coffee room. The club was open again, and Goldsworthy wanted his new recruit to receive the club’s best. Ajax Lynley.
Goldsworthy had given Miranda a lot of credit for bringing Nate through their adventure. She had confessed to him what she’d told Nate about the note she had failed to give Jane Fawkener. Goldsworthy had looked quite grim at that, but he had told her she was a brave girl, and that she’d do.
Nate kissed her. It was agreed between them now that he could kiss her whenever and wherever their circumstances permitted until that day she came of age. Then they would marry, and Nate could love her in all the ways he had not yet let himself think about loving her. And with the club open there was a chance that even a fellow like him, born on Bread Street, could become a Sir someday and call his wife Lady Wilde.
Read on for a preview of Kate Moore’s next Husband Hunter’s Guide romance, available in spring 2019.
Of all the gentlemen in London, the attractive rogue poses the greatest danger to the husband hunter’s happiness.
—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London
Chapter 1
Lady Emily Radstock accepted a greeting from her sister’s butler Gittings and handed him her coat, gloves, and bonnet. She dispensed with Gittings’s attempt to precede her up to the drawing room. He mumbled something as she bounded past him, her package under her arm. She assured him she did not need to be announced. Gittings was sixty if he was a day, and Lady Emily was in a hurry.
As she threw open the drawing room door, her younger sister, Rosalind, sitting at her needlework, her stocking feet up on a blue velvet ottoman, looked up with a start.
“Where is she?” Emily demanded. The door closed behind her.
“Hello, Em. Where is who?” Rosalind held up a delicate white gown no bigger than a tea towel.
“Mother,” said Emily. She strode across the room to stand before her sister, looking down. Rosalind, six years younger than Emily and rosy and round with her first pregnancy, made a strikingly domestic appearance.
“Oh, Mother’s gone to Grandmama’s.”
Emily sank onto the sofa opposite her sister’s chair. “Of all the cowardly dodges. She knows she’s safe from me there.”
“What’s she done?” Rosalind asked, lowering the white garment to her lap.
“This!” said Emily, tossing the package she carried onto the small gateleg table next to Rosalind. The package made a satisfying slap against the polished wood.
Rosalind regarded it warily. “She’s offended you with a brown paper package tied up in string.”
“No. Yes. Come to think of it, I am offended by the brown paper and the string, her idea of being discreet before the servants.”
“Em, you must enlighten me. I’m growing more confused by the minute.”
“Sorry, Roz. Were you napping?” Emily realized that half the drapery over the tall windows had been drawn to shadow the far end of the room, where Rosalind had stationed a spectacular camel back sofa in a deep green and peony-patterned damask their mother had given her. The sofa had been turned to face away from the blues and golds of the room’s main seating arrangement.
“No, I drew the drapery because—”
“How are you?” Emily asked.
“Quite well really. A great many of the discomforts have passed and the terrible fatigue. That’s why Mother thought she could go to Grandmama, who really does need her more than I do at the moment. And I have Philip,” she said brightly.
“Is Phil much help?” Emily asked. “I didn’t know husbands were.”
“He is.” Rosalind smiled in what Emily thought was a rather dreamy way for a married woman about to bear a child. “But you came to tell me what’s upset you.”
“Husbands. Or rather my lack of one and what Mother chose to do about it. As if it were her problem. Open the package, Roz, you’ll see.”
“You know what’s inside, Em?”
“I do. Open it.”
Rosalind put aside her needlework and took up the little package, untying the string and pulling off the paper. She glanced at Emily and read the title on a small blue volume. “The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London?”
“You see,” said Emily, “wrapped up as if it were a gift and left for Alice to bring up with my chocolate this morning while Mama has gone off to avoid me.”
“It’s not a gift?” asked Rosalind, turning the pages of the little blue book, her gaze skimming over them.
“A gift?” Emily bounced a little on the sofa. “It’s a notice to vacate. It’s a shove out of the nest. It’s a lit fuse on a bomb.”
Rosalind looked up. “Surely, Mama means nothing of the kind.”
“Doesn’t she? It’s my birthday in three weeks. I’ll be twenty-nine. She considers me past hope. Now she’s given me a book for a schoolroom chit.”
“Do you think so? You don’t really want to continue at home, do you? You want an establishment of your own.”
“Of course I do. But it won’t be my establishment, will it? It will belong to some man, and it will be my job to run it for him.”
Rosalind shook her head. “I don’t think marriage...should be seen in exactly that light.”
Emily stared at the rather magnificent painting of a chestnut stallion over the marble hearth. “You know, Roz, I should marry the first imbecile I meet, however brainless or idle he is.”
“Darling, I don’t think you should do anything so desperate.”
The door to the sitting room opened, and a young man of fair ruddy good looks entered and stopped with a furrowed brow when he spotted Emily. “Hello, Em,” he said. “I thought...” He looked around the room as if it were a puzzle to be solved.
“Phil, dear?” Rosalind gave him one of her dreamy smiles.
He crossed the room and gave his wife a quick kiss on the cheek. “Roz,” he said, “I’m looking for Lynley. I thought Gittings said he showed him up to you, but I find Em instead.”
“Oh dear,” said Roz. “I forgot all about Lynley.”
“Where is he then?” Phil asked.
“Right here, old man.” A tall, dark-haired giant with a lean face, elegantly dressed limbs, and an indolent manner unfolded himself from behind the camel back sofa. He fixed his gaze on Emily.
“You should have made yourself known, sir.” Emily waited for her hair to catch on fire from the heat of the blush in her cheeks.
The giant moved her way with easy grace. “I think you’ve proposed to me,” he said. “And I accept.”
Emily had been trained all her life not to stare, but nothing could stop her from gaping up into the handsome, amused face staring down at her.
“Shall I put the announcement in the papers?” The giant took her hand, gave it a quick kiss, and turned to her brother-in-law. “At your service, Phil.”
With a bow and a look of supreme satisfaction, he took his leave.
About the Author
Kate Moore is a former English teacher and three-time RITA finalist, and Golden Heart and Book Buyers Best award winner. She writes Austen-inspired fiction set in nineteenth-century England or contemporary California. Her heroes are men of courage, competence, and unmistakable virility, with determination so strong it keeps their sensuality in check until they meet the right woman. Her heroines take on the world with practical good sense and kindness to bring those heroes into a circle of love and family. Sometimes there’s even a dog. Kate lives north of San Francisco with her surfer husband, their yellow Lab, a Pack ʼn Play for visiting grandbabies, and miles of crowded bookshelves. Kate’s family and friends offer endless support and humor. Her children are her best works, and her husband is her favorite hero. Visit Kate at Facebook.com/KateMooreAuthor or
contact her at [email protected].