The Summer Bride (A Chance Sisters Romance)

by Anne Gracie

  He found the tiny nubbin between the creamy folds and circled it with his tongue, giving it the same treatment as he’d given her nipples earlier.

  Her breath caught on a series of rising hitches. She arched beneath him and he felt her thighs begin to tremble. He slid a finger inside her and took her to climax, then as she lay, loose and soft and sleepy-sweet with passion well spent, he stripped off his clothing.

  She watched him with appreciative eyes.

  “I never knew a man could be so beautiful, Flynn,” she murmured and ran a lazy hand down his spine when he sat on the side of the bed to pull off his boots.

  He turned and looked at her. “Beautiful?” He snorted. “Men aren’t beautiful. If you want to see beautiful, look in a mirror, girl.”

  It was Daisy’s turn to snort.

  He didn’t bother trying to argue. She didn’t see, didn’t understand how special, how precious, how beautiful she was. He could spin words with the best of them, but words would never convince her. A lifetime of experience, a lifetime of being unwanted and used and let down was more powerful than any words he could give her. He’d just have to show her, over and over. And hope that eventually she’d trust him—and herself—enough to say yes.

  He’d almost lost his temper when she’d first shown him that little room, so carefully constructed to hide away an illicit affair. He didn’t want an affair, illicit or not—he wanted to build a life with her, raise a family. He wanted to have her walking openly on his arm, to show her off—this is my wife!—to stroll in the park, to sit down at the table, to be announced as they entered a ballroom, as Mr. and Mrs. Patrick Flynn.

  When she’d first shown him the room, so carefully and lovingly prepared, her eyes glowing with shyness and uncertainty in the candlelight, the frustration had almost boiled over. He’d wanted to seize her, throw her over his shoulder in the most primitive fashion and drag her off to some . . . some cave where he’d make love to her until she understood finally where she belonged. Who she belonged to.

  But she was so sweet and brave, tough on the outside and yet so vulnerable, and true—she hadn’t led him on, hadn’t promised him anything, but was offering him a priceless gift—herself, and at some risk—and he’d managed to leash the wild man within him.

  Now she lay watching him with eyes soft and dark with the remnants of spent passion and a hint of growing arousal. She was giving him all she thought she had to give. It was up to him to show her she was wrong, that there was so much more—for both of them.

  He made love to her then, intent, focused. She was ready, more than ready for him. He entered her with one smooth, slow thrust. Her hips rose eagerly to meet him. She held him tight, like a slick hot glove, her legs locked around him.

  He paused, buried deep within her, his senses flooded with her scent, her taste, the silken soft heat of her, then loosened the wild man within him, taking her a little bit rough and a little bit wild.

  She clutched at his shoulders, thrusting her hips with each movement, tightening her grip to bring him deeper, pulling him in, holding him hard, scratching, biting, bucking, kissing. The muffled noises she made fired his blood as the age-old rhythm caught them both.

  He took her fast and hard, sweaty and slick and glorious.

  His blood thundering and roaring for release, he felt her climax begin and heard himself give a triumphant shout as he shattered deep within her. And slid into oblivion.

  He came to himself some time later. Daisy still slept, pale, sweet and vulnerable, her cheek pressed against his chest, her palm loosely curled over his heart, her legs still twined around him. He pulled the bedcovers over them and tucked her more closely against his body.

  He wanted to spend the whole night with her here, where the outside world didn’t intrude. But she would stir soon, muttering about getting back to work, or having to get home to Lady Bea or dinner or some other damned thing.

  Above them the slanted roof window let in the last of the cool grey evening light. A spatter of tiny raindrops heralded the change of weather. But inside their tiny attic room all was golden, warm, cozy. Daisy slept on, her breath warm little huffs against his skin, her small, soft body curled trustfully against him.

  Half a loaf was better than no loaf at all, his mother used to say.

  But sometimes all it did was make you realize how hungry you really were.

  * * *

  In the following weeks Daisy’s life passed in a flurry of activity. Dream-of-a-lifetime or not, it wasn’t all beer and skittles. It was harder than she’d expected, forming a group of women into a team.

  In the first week she had to sack one girl for nicking things, and another smelled so bad the rest of the girls complained. It turned out that she and her family lived in one room in a slum dwelling and the poor girl had only one dress to her name, and no place to wash, let alone money to buy soap. But she could sew like a dream.

  Daisy immediately provided her with some lovely rose-scented soap, hot water, privacy and two complete changes of clothes and the problem was solved. Though of course then all the other girls wanted rose-scented soap as well.

  Still, she now had the best-smelling seamstresses in London.

  Then there were the accounts. Bartlett’s nephew, Edgar, came three days a week to do the books, pay bills and write out invoices—he had an elegant hand, much nicer than Daisy’s—but there was still a lot of paperwork, and Daisy struggled.

  “Would you like me to do that?” Louisa Foster said one day when she visited and found Daisy swearing over an account. “I used to keep the books for my husband in his later years. I quite enjoyed it.”

  “Enjoyed it?” Daisy stared at her. “You want to do this? Are you sure?”

  “Positive. I’m rather bored, if you want to know the truth. The Season is all very interesting and enjoyable, but time does hang heavy on my hands, I confess. So if you don’t mind . . .”

  “Mind? I’d love you to do the rotten things.” And within the week, Louisa had taken over all the paper administration, leaving Daisy to handle the staff, design the clothes, and deal with customers.

  Customers were the hardest. Daisy was perfectly comfortable doing fittings and discussing designs with clients, and she was good at selling. But there were times when she was “less than tactful” as Louisa put it—not takin’ shit from snooty bitches was Daisy’s version—and after a couple of weeks, Daisy realized she needed an assistant.

  She interviewed a few and tried out several women, but none of them suited—they either put on false airs and the kind of pseudo-gentility that made Daisy want to strangle them, or groveled to the customers in a way that made her want to smack them.

  Louisa Foster would be perfect—she’d helped out a couple of times—but she didn’t want to work full-time. And besides, it would be awkward, waiting on ladies she knew socially.

  In the end, Daisy found the solution right under her nose.

  Polly the maid, back from Wales with Jane, was so interested in the shop she couldn’t keep away—even visiting on her afternoon off. Daisy was frantic that day—there were several customers waiting, getting impatient.

  Polly took in the situation at a glance and stepped in, soothing and placating and showing the ladies some of the new designs, quite as if she’d worked there forever. Her handling of the rich difficult ladies couldn’t be bettered—she’d spent a lifetime doing it, after all—and at the end of the afternoon Daisy offered her a job, much to Lady Beatrice’s disgust.

  “Poaching my maids now are you, missie? Next you’ll want Featherby and the clothes off my back.”

  “I made that dress of yours for you, and no, I don’t want it back,” Daisy retorted. “And I couldn’t pinch Featherby from you if I tried. He’s already turned down handsome offers from half the nobs in London!”

  Lady Beatrice’s eyes almost popped. “He has? Good heavens! And he refus
ed? Well, well . . . I must increase his wages.”

  The launching of her business was endlessly exciting and challenging, but the thing Daisy most looked forward to in her week was making love with Flynn in stolen moments after all her workers had gone home.

  He was completely discreet, making the arrangements by dint of a handwritten message delivered by a servant. Needed, best quality gentleman’s glove. Do you stock?

  And she would send a reply, depending on her situation, quoting a price that was code for a time. He would wait until her girls had left and the shop locked up, enter by the back door and go quietly up the back stairs.

  She claimed pressure of work as the excuse for her lateness in returning to Berkeley Square, and Lady Beatrice, though clearly not happy with the situation, said nothing about it. Thankfully, planning Jane’s wedding was taking up most of the old lady’s attention.

  The evenings were getting longer and warmer, and it was heavenly to lie in bed after making blissful love with Flynn, looking out over the rooftops of London, and talking. They never ran out of things to talk about.

  She was learning more about her big Irishman—not just the things he could do with his hands and mouth and tongue, and what he liked her to do to him—but about his life before he came to London.

  He was a born storyteller and was happy to tell endless tales of the Far East, exotic islands, strange and fascinating—and sometimes horrifying—peoples that existed in far-flung lands, though she wasn’t sure whether the story of his narrow escape from the cannibals was real or made up.

  He talked of how he first met Max—they were shipmates, and didn’t like each other initially—and how their friendship developed into something that changed both their lives. Max taught him how to read and write and do sums on paper—Flynn had always done them in his head—and Flynn taught Max the ways of the sea, and about the foreign places they visited. They were new to Max, but not to Flynn. The two men were much the same age, but Flynn had been at sea since he was twelve, whereas Max sailed for the first time at eighteen. “We taught each other the necessities of life—’tis a grand thing indeed to be able to read and write—and I taught him how to fight like a pirate, not like a gentleman.”

  “Did you fight pirates?” Daisy was wide-eyed, imagining it all.

  He laughed. “We fought lots of people, but it depends what you mean by pirates. Some of the worst pirates I’ve met look like respectable gentlemen.”

  She snorted. “And some wear earrings to prove it.” She eyed his earring sourly. She’d never liked him wearing it, made him look common, she reckoned, but Lady Bea liked it, and so did Flynn, so the blooming earring stayed.

  “I know why you wear that thing,” she said. “It’s to get up their noses.”

  “Whose noses?”

  “The toffs. You dress like a toff but you wear that”—she jerked her chin towards his earring—“to let them know you’re nobody’s tame tabby cat, to let them know you don’t give a toss whether they accept you or not. That you play by your own rules.”

  He fingered his earring fondly and grinned down at her. “Clever little puss, aren’t you? Come to think of it, Miss Daisy Chance, you’re somewhat of a pirate yourself, the price you charge me for those waistcoats. Don’t I even get a discount now you have a shop and workers?”

  “Nobody’s makin’ you pay me prices—go elsewhere if you like. But it’s worth it at half the price—I mean double—”

  “My point exactly.”

  They both laughed and that led to another round of making love, this time filled with teasing and banter and laughter. Nothing was ever routine with Flynn. She wasn’t just becoming addicted to his lovemaking, she craved his company almost as much, and his stories.

  He told her how he first became a trader and later taught Max how to bargain, and how to spot unusual items that would resell well elsewhere. “You’re a magpie, you’ll understand,” he told her one evening.

  She stiffened. “Who are you callin’ a magpie? Noisy rotten birds. And they swoop.”

  He laughed. “Settle down, hedgehog, it wasn’t an insult. I’m one too.”

  “Oh?” She waited, unconvinced.

  “When I first went to sea, whenever we landed, the other seamen headed for the whorehouses and spent what they had on women and drink and gambling. Not me. I liked to pick through the markets and little shops in the Orient, collectin’ anything that took me fancy. Later I’d sell them on in some place where people had never seen such things. Turned out I was good at buyin’ and sellin’—and the rest is history.” He smiled. “See, we’re magpies, you and me—we have an eye for the unusual. Makes us a good match.”

  She avoided that one. She usually changed the subject when he brought up marriage. But she loved hearing his stories, learning about his life, picturing him as a young seaman, poking through the markets. And showing young Max the ropes.

  Rarely if ever did he mention Ireland, or why he left it, only that he was never going back there. “There’s nothing for me there,” he’d say whenever she pushed to know more, and then he’d change the subject, usually with some funny story.

  Then one evening when the air was soft and warm with the promise of summer and they were sitting on the roof, Daisy snuggled up against him, his arm around her, watching the sights below, Flynn stiffened.

  She followed his gaze to a woman pushing a cart containing a man who looked to have lost both legs. Behind came five ragged little children, following like a string of bedraggled ducklings, each one smaller than the last. The littlest one was being carried by a girl not much bigger.

  Flynn stared for a moment, then with a muttered oath, put Daisy aside and abruptly stood.

  “What is it?” she asked, but he left without a word.

  She saw him a few minutes later, crossing the road and talking to the man and woman. He passed them something and the woman started weeping.

  He left them as abruptly as he arrived and a moment later he returned, seized Daisy, pulled her onto the bed and made love to her with a focused intensity—all without a word—giving her climax after climax before pouring himself into her with a groan that sounded so pain-filled it tore at her heart.

  Afterwards he lay with his head pillowed on her breast, silent and withdrawn. She lay stroking the thick dark hair from his face—he needed a haircut—listening to him breathe, hearing the distant sounds of the city coming in through the open door.

  It caught him like that sometimes, afterwards, left him bleak and silent and withdrawn. Lost. She felt at the same time closer to him and more distant. He never would talk about it, and most of the time she was content to accept it.

  Not this time. “Who were they?” she asked finally.

  For a long time she thought he wasn’t going to answer—nothing new there—but then he sighed. “No one—just one of the many poor bastards tossed on the scrap heap, and their whole family with them.”

  “Did you know them?”

  “No. But in a way, I did . . .” And then he told her about his father, who worked with horses when Flynn was a boy. He’d had a real way with them, like magic, it was, until the day he was kicked in the spine and never walked again. He told her how his mam had slaved to keep them all—five kids there were—fed and warm, and how it was always a losing battle.

  The rich man who his dad had worked for was sorry about the accident, but said it was God’s will, and nothing he could do. He’d given Mam a few pounds one day and the next day his agent came with the news they had to leave the cottage they’d lived in all their lives. The cottage was for able-bodied workers and their families, not useless cripples.

  “Me mam found us a couple of rooms in a hovel, and after a bit I left home to look for work in Dublin.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Twelve. I was the eldest, so it was down to me. No jobs in Dublin for a skinny kid, so I b
ecame a wharf rat, sent home whatever I could every week through the parish priest—just a few coppers here and there. Not enough. Never enough.”

  Daisy smoothed his hair back. “You did your best.”

  He shook his head. “After about a year I went home—something wasn’t right, I felt it in me bones, even though the messages came through from Mam the same as ever.” His voice was bitter. “Neither me mam nor I could read or write, you see, so it was the priest writin’ the messages . . . They didn’t sound like Mam at all.”

  She waited, holding him, stroking him, feeling the tension, the anguish in him.

  “Turned out they’d all perished of the cholera—every last one of them, Mam, Da, Moira, Mary-Kate, Paul, Rory and wee Caitlin. They’d been dead and buried for months.”

  The raw pain in his voice shattered her. “And no one had told you?”

  He shook his head. “The priest had kept taking me money and making up the messages from Mam—he said he was using it for the good of others but I could smell the drink on his breath.” He swore again. “So I hit him. A mortal sin that is, I reckon.”

  There was a long silence. He wasn’t finished yet, she could feel from the tightness in his body.

  “I couldn’t even find a grave—they were all tossed in a pit—buried with strangers, dozens of people all together. ‘A cholera outbreak in the slums, you see, boy. Nothing else to do.’”

  “Oh, Flynn.” She hugged him tight, wishing she could ease his pain. No wonder he said there was nothing for him in Ireland. Just bitterness and grief. And the unreasonable guilt of a thirteen-year-old boy who blamed himself for failing to save his family.

  “So I left, walked back to Dublin, down to the docks and sailed away on the first ship that would take me.”

  “And you never went back?”

  “Never. There’s nothing for me there. I’ll make meself a new life, a good life here, and you’ll be part of it, won’t you, Daisy-girl?”