She slipped his breeches off him, nothing beneath, and took him captive, all naked, his wavy hair mussed, his amber pupils dilated with lust, his big-boy hard as the proverbial rock.
When he knelt over her and made to nuzzle her breasts, she slugged him hard, in the shoulder.
He reared back, puzzled, speechless.
“Mercy!” she said, raising herself on her elbows, arching so as to point her breasts his way and keep him focused. “We’ve yearned for each other, leapt on each other, feared being caught, and got interrupted more often than not, and now you want to make it last? Are you addled? I want sizzling, spicy, star-bound lovemaking, both of us reaching the firmament together, Kendrick. I want the old Gabe, and I want him now! You’re not trying to make it last, you’re tryingnot to lose yourself to passion, and I won’t have it, I tell you.”
“But I keep remembering what Clara said, and we’ve talked about her a lot tonight.”
“She lied. She told me in the letter that she made sure you didn’t live as husband and wife. She turned from you for us.”
He ran a hand through his hair, put on his dressing gown, and went to the window, all the old guilt rising up to eat at him. “Do you mean that Ididn’t frighten her with my advances?”
“No. She loved her husband in a bold, physical way. I knew that from the day she married. Before she married. Girl cousins raised like sisters talk, you know. When she came to you, she was likely still mourning him.”
Gabriel wanted to scream in frustration, shout in triumph, and for the first time, he wanted to make love without guilt and with every racing beat of his heart. He wanted mutual love, a sharing of bodies until the ultimate release, both of them together. He turned to her, sitting as demurely as a naked goddess can sit in the middle of an empty bed.Hisbed.His wife.
“I want what you want, Lace, passion, with no emotions lacking,” he confessed. Ignoring the heart-skip the insane statement brought, he approached her as if he stalked her.
Lace squeaked and scuttled backward on the bed until her back hit the headboard.
He grinned. “You wicked, impatient seductress. Hard and fast, say you? You asked for it. Passion unleashed.” He climbed on the bed on all fours, growled for good measure, found her so royally sexy, the former Lady Lace, his bride, that he had to keep himself from swooping in and devouring her. “Just a small bite,” he said.
“Big bites now, hard and fast, slow and tantalizing nips later.”
“As you say.”
He kept going, inspired by her anticipation, and perhaps even a frisson of fear that she’d loosed an animal, so he knelt before her, his eagerness rampant. “Have at me, my love.”
“Glory, glory,” she said, her gaze focused on his sex.
“Why, thank you.” And while she blushed, he grew more rigid before her widening eyes.
“More, please,” she said.
“Insatiable seductress, too late for savoring. I’m giving you what you desire.”
“Oh,” she said, still focused on the nest of his arousal. “Just let me touch . . . everything.” She stroked him slowly, took him into her greedy hands, raised him to the precipice, and turned him into her dutiful slave. She handled him with gentle reverence, kneading and nuzzling with fingers and lips, growing him, breath by gasping breath, stroking her cheek against his arousal, nibbling with her lips, until he got so close to spilling, he pulled her away and atop him.
Still on his side, he slid into her, in one fast, incredible thrust, burying himself to the hilt, satisfying a longing so sharp, it hurt to achieve, yet it burst so wondrous, he could hardly bear the pleasure. He wanted the same wild and unexpected bliss for her and more. He wanted to make a wedding memory that would last.
She came almost at once, making him slick, easing his heaving way. When he caught his breath, when they both did, he rolled her to her back, still inside her, and rose over her. “That’s one,” he said. “Hard enough?”
“Harder.” She arched, pulsing tight around him, milking him into a sensual haze of eagerness.
“Greedy,” he said, rising to the occasion and going for two, pretty certain that trying to satisfy her by giving her as many orgasms that she could take,before his turn came, would about kill him.
She wrapped her incredible legs around him, legs that only he had the privilege to see, kiss, stroke, and lick, always hidden by her gowns, except inhis bed. Her gorgeous legs tugged him forward, worked him deeper, the muscles of her womanly sheath pulling and swallowing him, kneading and pulsing. He began to move faster; he had no choice.
She was milking him, wringing sanity from him with every pulsing beat, every rotation of her hips with each stroke of her palm and scratch of her nails. She came again, praise be, and he’d survived, reeling, exhilarated, and breathing shallow. Impossible, but he fell deeper beneath her spell with her every explosive orgasm and the way in which she took full and uninhibited pleasure. Have mercy!
When Gabe thought he couldn’t take a second more of her torture, when he pumped so intensely into her, afraid he’d hurt her, Lacey reached between them with both hands, cupped his bollocks, and held them firm against them both.
Gabe groaned and he growled, begged her to stop, begged for more, and he knew once again, with the wisdom of the ages, that no other woman would ever mean as much to him as Lace.
He shouted his triumph, cursed her, and kissed her as if to devour her and spilled his seed in a climax that made anything previous seem like nothing in comparison.
If he lived, he thought—heart beating in his head like a drum—he would survive to be a hundred because he was a lot tougher than he’d imagined.
“Lacey?” He pushed himself up in a panic and fought dizziness. “Oh God, I’ve killed you.” He’d pinned her to the bed, crushed her when he lowered his full weight on her, her face pale and still. She wasn’t even breathing.
He rolled off her, called her name. “Lacey? Lace, speak to me.”
“Shh.” She failed to open her eyes. “I’m floating.”
Gabe laughed and collapsed, pulled her against him, and buried his face in her neck. “Thank God.” He allowed himself to float as well, until the air in the room nipped a chill along his nether regions and his pounding heart settled to become softer than the wind outside his window.
He grabbed a blanket, pulled it over them, felt Lacey’s slowing heartbeat, the gentle way she breathed as she slept.
As he warmed, Gabe replayed every incredible fly-me-to-the-stars moment since their wedding . . . and before. Since the day they met. Lady Lace, age seven. The vicar’s ragged son, age eight. He’d adored her from the start.
She hated him as fast. The more she berated him, ordered him around, the more he loved her. A life of mixed messages was the best way to describe their courtship. But their marriage, he could sum that up in three words. Hard, fast-loving. Or . . . Happily ever after.
Unless Prout had her way.
What could she do to them now? Her threat had been empty. He’d bet his life on it.
No . . . he would not.
Lace woke to his talented hands raising her again toward that star-sprinkled place where he’d left her. “Yes.” She stretched like a cat so tremendously content it couldn’t bear to leave that spot of sun below the window. “Now,” she said, all but purring. “Now it can be slow, sensuous, lay-me-on-a-cloud lovemaking.”
Gabe laughed and kissed her. He kissed her with the slow-easy experience of a lover. “More, she wants, after she’s about slayed me with lust.”
“You suffer so at my hands,” she admitted, stroking his brow.
“Aye, I do.”
“You know what you did tonight? You finally accepted passion as a beautiful physical expression of love.”
“I’ll admit to forgetting the first passion we shared and its power.” He stroked her bottom with the same attention she gave to his brow.
“We’ll have to make love in the big copper tub,” she said. “The next time MacKenzie’s
away.”
Gabe pretended to pass out from exhaustion, but when she manually lifted his eyelids, he laughed and pulled her atop him. “Good thing I didn’t know you were insatiable or that you knew all those tricks, or I’d have been walking around embarrassing myself for weeks.”
“But you did.”
Gabe growled. “Tell me no one noticed.”
“The Scoundrels noticed,” she said. “Perhaps a few others.”
“Prout,” he admitted with a sigh. “Let me set you up with a hot bath. I’ll set the copper tub in front of the fire, so you can soak. You must be sore.”
After he hauled up the tub, then the hot water, she fell asleep in the tub. He fell asleep in the bed. And sometime later, she must have climbed in with him.
They went downstairs looking for breakfast right before teatime. They made their own and sat on the porch to eat.
“I need a nap,” Gabe said, and Lacey laughed.
“Seriously, they can’t find usstill in bed.”
“Lace,” MacKenzie called from the kitchen. “Have I come home too soon?”
“Hmm,” Lace said. “She must have come in the front door. I’ll be right back.” She got up and went inside.
Mac jumped when she saw her and pressed a hand to her heart.
“I opened it,” Lace said.
“You understand that Bridget will be labeled if it comes out.”
Laceyknew how it felt to be labeled and exiled. “If I had not come back— MacKenzie, you were prepared to go to your grave with this?”
“To keep our girl respectably titled and acceptable in the eyes of society? Aye, I would have burned the note and died with the knowledge.” Mac wrung her hands. “I love you. I always have. You know that?”
“It killed me that you went to Clara when I had just suffered the loss of my child.”
Mac’s eyes filled. “Don’t hate me.”
Lacey was no less affected. “I never could. You did what was best for my child, though I thought I could go away and raise her. I was young, and in love, and wrong about my daughter’s future.”
Mac began to cry softly and Lace took her old nurse in her arms. “Thank you, MacKenzie.”
Gabe came in with Bridget just then.
“Nick brought her home,” he said, as he and Lacey examined their daughter—theirs, not stillborn. They must have looked like they’d burst into tears or into song.
Lace took her daughter by the hands, and she danced her around the kitchen until Cricket giggled uncontrollably, and Gabriel and MacKenzie chuckled with her. Though Mac found it necessary to wipe her cheeks with her apron.
Gabe wasn’t too far behind.
On one of her dance passes, Lace picked up the baby sacque and sat with Bridget. “You used to wear this, sweetheart.” Lace unobtrusively peeked inside the hem.
Cricket patted her cheek and set her little head on Lacey’s shoulder, a whimsically concerned look on her face. “Can I call you Mama, now?”
Gabriel picked them up as one and carried them to the settee in the best parlor. He sat Lace beside him with Bridget on his lap.
Bridget told them about her sleepover, and she talked about the wedding, and how wonderful it was to have a Mama and Papa, both.
Mac came to get Bridget for tea, though it was difficult for Lace to give her up. “Our girl is to be given a large piece of toffee after tea, NannyMac, with a glass of milk and a song, if you please,” Lace said.
When they were alone, they became newlyweds again.
“I can’t believe that you gave up twenty thousand pounds for me. I had no idea I was worth so much.”
“That money would have belonged to the church, not me. You’re as poor as a church mouse, Lace.”
“No, I still have most of my inheritance from Ivy, don’t forget.”
“Oh, good, we’ll be homeless, but we won’t starve.”
She pulled from his kiss. “Where will we live until you find a new parish? We have to be out of here tomorrow.”
“There’s always the Towers. It’s a last resort, and today’s post might have an assignment for me. I haven’t thought to look yet.”
“I wonder why,” she said.
So he looked, but there was nothing. He did not want to move to the Towers. He did not want to keep his wife in this unforgiving town one minute more.
Mac knocked on the parlor door. “You’re little one is ready to be tucked in. Tired, she is, after a night of giggling and no sleep.”
“Me, too,” Gabe muttered beneath his breath. “We’ll be right up.”
After tucking in their daughter, they went back to their own bed. They even slept for a while.
What they woke to the next morning was a pounding at the door.
They heard Mac grumbling as she came down the stairs from the third floor. He and Lace dressed quickly and followed. Gabe checked his pocket watch.
“It’s too early to get up.”
Lacey giggled. “Because I made you cry for mercy. You used to be up with the birds, remember?”
He followed her down the stairs. “I think you ruined me.”
She winked. “I love raising the devil in a holy Scoundrel.”
Again, the knocking. Impatient. Determined.
Old Lady Prout pushed past MacKenzie at the door, her namby-pamby Olivia following.
“We’re on our honeymoon. I suggest you take up your complaint with the new vicar, whenever one is found. I no longer work here.”
Lacey entered the hall behind him, her hair a crown of well-nuzzled ringlets, curled by the steam from her bath, her face aglow with the satisfaction of a good loving. Gabe turned back to Prout and grinned.
He had a wife who looked . . . sated.
Gabe knuckled her cheek and Prout screeched. “One night of passion is a high price to pay for a life of regret,” the greedy old lady said. “Everyone in Arundel knows that according to the Duchess of Ashcroft’s will, the man who marries her daughter, Lacey, will receive a hundred thousand pounds.”
Lacey gasped and the light left her eyes.
Prout preened. “No wonder you gave upmy twenty thousand. Now you can put up a new church to buy back your parish, and you’ll have money left over for yourself. You’ll be the richest vicar in the kingdom.”
“What, here?” Gabe asked. “When hell freezes over.”
CHAPTER TWENTYFIVE
At the news that Gabriel married her for her money, Lacey gasped, and turned to walk away. She needed to make sense of this.
Before Gabe could get rid of Prout, Lace had run out the back door with a questioning Bridget, who had just come down for breakfast.
Fortunately, they got Ivy to feed them in the gypsy wagon, and Lacey asked him if he knew about the inheritance from her mother.
He did, and he saw her face when he admitted it.
Ivy tsked. “If you’re running away two days after your wedding,I’m doing the driving.”
“I’m not so much running as looking for a place to think, in peace, without Gabriel muddying my thoughts.”
Ivy harrumped. “Eat up, Cricket, then it’s up on the seat beside me for you. Your mama will ride inside because she has tothink. And while she does, she should consider the possibility that Gabe might be one of the few who didnot know about the inheritance from her mother. Your PapaGabe doesn’t approve of gossip, as the gossips well know.”
Ivy received Gabriel’s note to find Lacey right before he left to drive her in circles. Gabriel had written, “She can’t have gone far,” and Ivy aimed to keep it that way.
When they stopped for, Cricket went over to see some horses, over a fence, and Ivy got down to the issue at hand. Prout and her money. Gabriel and Lacey’s mother’s money. “So,” Ivy said. “Do you know where we’re going?”
“No.”
“I’m for you going to the church to discuss it with your Maker. It’s Sunday. Service doesn’t start for an hour, and I can get you there fast. Life is never perfect, but it can be good when it’s
shared with love.”
“Take me to St. Swithin’s, then, will you? Do you still keep those dark hooded capes in the wagon to wear to disguise yourself behind makeshift stages for when your larger stage won’t fit?”
“Aye, I do.”
“May I borrow one for me, and a small one for Cricket, please?”
She and Cricket slipped into the last pew at the very back of the church, the one nearest the door. She wouldn’t see Gabriel because, well, this wasn’t his church anymore, but she could speak to her Maker and perhaps learn forgiveness from whoever did preach.
The church filled up fast, and no one seemed to notice them as they crouched, heads down, in the beggar’s pew. Cricket thought this a game and played along splendidly.
Lacey hugged her often, though her head bobbed up too many times to be comfortable.
Unfortunately for her, ’twas the bishop who took the main pulpit, a man with no sense of time who could ramble shamelessly, and so he did, too long for Cricket not to fidget, but long enough for Lacey to mourn the loss of her husband.
With her head down, shushing Cricket, she didn’t know what prompted people to begin a whisper that nearly became a roar, until she looked up and saw him—Gabe finishing his march down the aisle, in his cassock, his collar in his pocket, his buttons open so it flared behind him like a greatcoat.
So manly, so sumptuous he looked in that way, with his hair mussed as if he’d run his hands through it a thousand times. Writing a sermon is what he’d been doing. She saw the signs.
He climbed to the minor pulpit and interrupted the bishop with barely a nod, mid-sermon to take up where the slack-jawed church leader left off.
“It appears to have been common knowledge,” Gabe said as he began, “that the man who married Lacey Ashton was to inherit one hundred thousand pounds from her mother the Duchess. Is that true?”
Most of the congregation nodded.
Gabriel sighed. “Well, I am among the few exceptions, I see. I didnotknow. And if Idid, I would NOT have married her. So . . . I suppose I am glad that I did not know because I love Lacey Ashton Kendrick. I have loved her since I was a young man, and you should know before I go on to my new parish that I am sick for my part in sending her away.
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