“You definitely put a lot of thought into this,” she said.
“Oh, no. This was Arabella. All of this was Arabella,” he said. “She insisted.”
Hyacinth blinked at that. The woman apparently had quite the hedonistic streak in her. But she didn’t want to talk about Arabella. In fact, she didn’t want to talk at all. “You know, if you set me down, I can begin the very arduous process of removing my gown.”
“And deny me the privilege of unwrapping my gift?” he asked, as he set her on her feet.
Before Hyacinth could respond to that, he spun her around and began artfully working the small pearl buttons at the back of her gown. Very artfully. “You’re very good at that. Have you been practicing?”
He laughed. “Only in my mind… and only ever to visions of you.”
Within seconds, the bodice of her gown gaped wide and slipped to her waist. He gave it a slight push and it slid lower until it formed a puddle of ivory silk at her feet. When she stepped free of it, he draped it over a chair. “Perhaps one day, our daughter may choose to wear that gown for her own wedding,” he said.
Their daughter. She wanted to bear him children. To give him sons to teach and bring up to be the same kind of honorable, beautiful man that he was, and little girls to spoil and dote on as she knew he would. But even those thoughts were fleeting, forced from her mind by anticipation of what was to come as his nimble fingers tackled the laces of her stays. Petticoats, chemise, and then she was standing before him in silk stockings, with embroidered blue velvet garters and a pair of heeled slippers.
“This is what you wore that night in the library,” he said, his breath hot as it fanned over her neck. “You stood there before me wearing nothing but your stockings and I thought you the most beautiful, tempting creature I had ever encountered in my life. And tonight has only reaffirmed that opinion.”
“You have me at a distinct disadvantage, Husband. You know precisely what is hiding beneath my garments… and other than your rather remarkable chest, I’ve not seen the rest of you. Will you deny me yet again?”
He didn’t reply, but Hyacinth could hear the rustling of his clothing as he removed it. Her eyes closed and a breathless sigh escaped her. Finally. Finally.
He moved behind her, standing so close that she could feel the heat of his skin, the slight prickling where his chest hair rubbed against her skin, and lower, his hardness, thick and heavy, pressed against her. Then she was once more being lifted into his arms, carried to the bed and laid out before him. But she didn’t mind. It gave her an opportunity to look at him, to drink in the perfect masculine form that inspired her to such wicked and carnal thoughts.
Ian climbed onto the bed, his hands coasting over her legs, and then her hips. Then he was trailing his fingers along her inner thighs to the golden curls that shielded her sex. Hyacinth parted for him eagerly. She’d been starved for his touch.
“So perfect,” he whispered. “So beautiful.”
Then his mouth was upon her, driving her to familiar heights and Hyacinth could do nothing but cry out her pleasure as she clung to him. Her hands fisted in his dark hair, holding him to her as she strained ever closer to his wicked, skilled mouth and the satisfaction he could give her.
When she crested, he eased back from her and then, in a rather unexpected move, he gripped her ankles and pulled her down the bed to him until he was nestled between her parted thighs. She could feel him against her. There was no fear and no hesitation. She wanted him to be part of her, to feel him inside her. Boldly, Hyacinth lifted her legs, locking them around him.
“Make me your wife in every way,” she urged him. “I can’t wait any longer.”
“I thought I could,” he said. “But I was wrong.”
Hyacinth watched, enrapt, as he closed his hand over the rigid length of his shaft and guided himself into her. There was no pain. It was strange at first, and an odd but not unwelcome sensation. Then he pressed deeper. There was a slight sting, and then it was gone, too. All that was left was a deep connection to him, the feelings of their bodies joined together as if they had been made for one another. They had, she thought. Together, they were whole.
Thought faded as pleasure began to take over. Hyacinth could feel the tension in him, his muscles taut and firm against her. And then he began to move, stroking into her again and again. Slow, fast, then slow again. And with every thrust, he marked her response. If she cried out, he repeated it, if she arched against him, he’d do it again. He mapped her pleasure and then built a rhythm around it until all she could do was cling to him and sob brokenly as her entire body wound tight on that glorious precipice.
And when he kissed her, his lips pressing to hers and his tongue sliding against her own in a rhythm that matched that of their bodies, she tumbled over the edge. For the first time, he was with her. She felt him stiffen, felt his muscles draw taut as a bow string, and then he shuddered against her and she could feel the warmth of him spilling inside her.
“Now, I am your wife,” she whispered. “In every way.”
“Mine,” he said. “You are simply mine. And I am yours… always.”
Hyacinth wrapped her arms about him, holding him close to her even as their hearts thundered together in the wake of such pleasure. She hadn’t thought to have the kind of love that Primrose had found. She had expected to grow old alone, a spinster aunt to the children of her siblings. But Arabella had known better. That canny, cagey and calculating old woman who talked enough to sail a ship with the amount of air she stirred through speech, had spared her that fate and given her the greatest gift of all. She’d put Hyacinth on the path to true love and then turned a blind eye to propriety to let her find it.
“If we have a daughter, we should name her Arabella.”
She felt his smile against her shoulder. “We will. And, as I’m fairly certain that woman will live forever, I vow to you in this moment, she will never act as our daughter’s chaperone.”
Hyacinth laughed at that, but her laughter quickly faded as he kissed her again. “Surely not so soon?”
“I’ve been waiting for a very long time, Wife. Now, hush. Let us use our lips for better things than talking.”
“Convince me,” she said with a wicked grin of her own.
And he did.
Additional Dragonblade books by Author Chasity Bowlin
The Hellion Club Series
A Rogue to Remember
Barefoot in Hyde Park
What Happens in Piccadilly
Sleepless in Southhampton
When an Earl Loves a Governess
The Duke’s Magnificent Obsession
The Governess Diaries
The Lost Lords Series
The Lost Lord of Castle Black
The Vanishing of Lord Vale
The Missing Marquess of Althorn
The Resurrection of Lady Ramsleigh
The Mystery of Miss Mason
The Awakening of Lord Ambrose
A Midnight Clear (A Novella)
Eleanor
Sydney Jane Baily
Dedication
To Marliss Melton
the Eleanor to my Beryl
Acknowledgments
My heartfelt gratitude to Kathryn Le Veque for inviting me to be in this collection of Gothic stories with these talented writers. An honor to be among them. And to Violetta Rand, my editor and an excellent writer, for finding my flaws. And, as always, to my mum, Beryl Baily, just for being there.
Chapter One
Bedfordshire, 1852
“There is my wild, untamed friend,” were the words that welcomed Eleanor Blackwood to Angsley Hall under a dreary, gray sky.
As soon as she stepped out of her coach, the wind whipping at her cloak, she was enveloped by her dearest friend, Beryl, who had recently married a pirate, or so she liked to say.
Since Eleanor knew very well that Captain Philip Carruthers was a perfectly upstanding sea captain, she ignored Beryl’s teasing accusations reg
arding her husband, though it would have been an exciting notion—her friend capturing and marrying a dangerous pirate.
Together, she and Beryl Angsley Carruthers had made up many exciting tales in the five years they’d known each other, growing from gawky girls to polished young women. Perhaps no tale was as good as Beryl’s true-life adventure, being kidnapped by Chinese pirates and rescued by her dashing Philip, who then married her.
The captain, himself, was right behind his wife, ready to give Eleanor a hug as soon as Beryl released her.
By happy chance, they were visiting Beryl’s parents in the Angsley family home in Bedfordshire. Though Eleanor’s final destination was her sister Maggie’s home, Turvey House, barely a couple miles away, she couldn’t pass up the opportunity to stop in and see her best friend.
Besides, Beryl and Philip were expecting a child, and from Eleanor’s experience with her two older sisters, after a woman reached a certain size, she simply wanted to go home and stay there. And home for the Carruthers was hundreds of miles southwest on the coast of Cornwall, where Beryl and her sea captain husband resided in a house on the water’s edge. Thus, Eleanor might not see her again for many months, if not a year.
“How was your trip?” Beryl asked. “I cannot believe you came by yourself, all the way from Sheffield.”
True, it was a three-day journey from the north, but as the baby of the family and a mature nineteen, Eleanor thought she’d been coddled long enough. Or stifled, as she sometimes saw it.
“You went all the way to the Orient,” she pointed out to Beryl as they sat in the parlor with tea and lemon cake, the happy parents-to-be seated side by side on the sofa.
“I was with my father and the British Navy,” her friend declared. “You’ve done something I’ve never done—stayed in a country inn alone.”
They all laughed, but, in truth, Eleanor had felt both unsettled her first night traveling and also very grown up, while eating her meal alone at a roadside inn.
The Earl of Lindsey, married to Eleanor’s eldest sister, Jenny, had chosen every stopping point and sent her in his luxurious coach with a driver and a footman, both armed. Thus, Eleanor had been as safe as if she were in her family’s home in Sheffield.
Both in the carriage and at each inn, she had devoured her favorite Gothic novels. Some, she had read many times, such as Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the Brontes’ Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Others, she was reading for the first time, including Castle of Otranto and Mysteries of Udolpho, which Jenny had given her for the trip.
Alone in the carriage for hours, with the unnerving tone of the stories filling her head, Eleanor had felt goosebumps each time the wind rattled the windows. And each evening, in a strange bedchamber, she had firmly closed the shutters and the drapes, keeping the bedside lamp lit late into the night, while the notion of dark and drafty castles filled her brain.
“I’m so glad you could stop here before going on to see Maggie,” Beryl said.
Eleanor would stay a couple days until Beryl and Philip left, and then carry on to her middle sister’s home. Maggie had married Beryl’s cousin, John Angsley, the Earl of Cambrey, and was the reason Beryl and Eleanor had first met. Luckily, the Angsley brothers, Beryl’s father, Harold, and his older brother, Gideon, the former Earl of Cambrey, had kept their estates—Angsley Hall and Turvey House—so close, making it easy for Eleanor to visit first her best friend and then her sister.
A flash of ginger-orange heralded the arrival of Leo, the captain’s cat, which went everywhere with him, including out to sea. Suddenly, it jumped onto the sofa, walked across his lap, using him as a steppingstone to get to Beryl.
“Oof,” Philip exclaimed. “Damn cat has pile-drivers for paws. He got me right in the—”
“Philip!” Beryl exclaimed, rolling her eyes before stroking Leo as he wedged himself between husband and wife and settled down into a ball.
“He’s beautiful,” Eleanor said.
All at once, Beryl turned to her husband of just over a year. “You’re being awfully quiet.”
“I am the same as always,” Philip told her, leaning back, crossing one ankle atop the knee of his other leg. “When you are in the room, there is no need for me to speak.”
Both girls stared at him. Eleanor wondered if her friend would take offense. Beryl did tend to chat as much as a magpie, but it was something Eleanor cherished about her. They could talk all day about nothing and everything, and never tire of it.
“Hm,” Beryl mused, then smiled at him. “Because you are captivated by my beauty whenever you’re near me?”
“Precisely,” he said, and they shared a lover’s glance, which nearly made Eleanor feel as if she were intruding.
Bringing them back to a less romantic subject, she asked, “When are you next going to sea?”
Her friend often went with her husband, who was responsible for taking Beryl’s father, Lord Harold Angsley, the queen’s ambassador to Spain, across the Channel and through the Straits of Gibraltar. Beryl had promised someday Eleanor could go, too. She probably had to stand in line behind her friend’s five younger brothers and sisters, whose voices, even then, Eleanor could hear in various parts of the manor.
“She is not going until after this baby arrives,” Philip answered. “And that’s final.”
Apparently, they had battled over this. Eleanor was sorry to have brought it up. She didn’t know much about the give-and-take—or downright battles—of married couples. Both her sisters had married happily, though they’d had a few rocks in their paths along the way to matrimonial bliss.
In any case, Eleanor had encountered no gentleman during her first or second Season with whom she was interested in battling or giving her heart. At least, not in London. Moreover, she had particularly missed Beryl during the past year. The stifling rigidity of the social events was bad enough, but to go to endless balls, picnics, dinner parties, and the like without her favorite companion had made it worse.
Everyone in her family knew London’s Season might not suit the youngest Blackwood sister. Known to her family as a nature lover, Eleanor preferred the outdoors in all types of weather to gleaming tiled floors, and she chose sunlight and moonlight over crystal chandeliers. She could be found sketching or reading at all hours, sitting under a tree, perfectly content.
It had been difficult to get a peaceful moment trying to sketch in Hyde Park or Kensington Gardens with hundreds of Londoners and visitors strolling or riding around her. St. James’s Park had been hardly any better. And the smoky, foggy air always seemed to choke her at night.
When Eleanor retired to one of Angsley Hall’s guest rooms that evening, a heavy thunderstorm still raged across the landscape on an early autumn wind and refused to let up. Accompanied by lightning and silvery sheets of rain, she sat next to the window overlooking the back terrace and gardens, feeling peaceful.
Bedfordshire was bliss, with so much greenery and the lovely River Great Ouse flowing through both her sister’s Turvey House and the Angsley Hall estate. Eleanor had caught fish in it when visiting Maggie in the past, and she hoped to catch more in a few days during her extended stay with her sister and her sister’s husband, the Earl of Cambrey.
More importantly, she was also looking forward to being once again in close proximity to the raven-haired Grayson O’Connor, the Turvey House estate manager, who looked more like Eleanor’s idea of a pirate than Beryl’s captain. Or perhaps Grayson reminded her more of an anguished inhabitant of a dreary castle from one of her beloved Gothic novels. Whatever the case, in her regard, he was beyond anyone she had met in London.
Grayson was born right there on the grounds of Angsley Hall to the Angsleys’ seamstress. However, he had lived at Turvey House from the time he was a boy, as a companion to young John Angsley, then the heir and now the Earl of Cambrey. Over the course of one spectacular Season, the earl had fallen desperately in love with Maggie—as most men did—making her his Countess of Cambrey.
How for
tunate for Eleanor as that meant she had been introduced to Grayson.
Each and every time she had encountered Grayson, she found she liked him more. His humor was to her liking, as was something about his slightly lopsided smile, which appeared often and was always reflected in his dark eyes. He’d taken her riding and fishing and didn’t mind spending hours pointing out birds and plants on the Cambrey estate, around Turvey House.
Then there was his sensual mouth, which she truthfully hadn’t noticed until about two years earlier, and now found impossible not to look upon when he spoke.
She sighed. Grayson was certainly not a man to be found in an insipid, stifling ballroom!
At that moment, a flash of lightning split the sky, directing her attention to the fields, where…she gasped, a lone horseman rode hell bent toward the very manor in which she was residing.
As the lightning’s glow faded, she could barely see more than a dark, four-legged shape coming ever onward, obviously drenched.
Gracious! Who would be out so late and in this weather? And why? A shard of lightning could mean instant death for the rider and the horse.
Standing, she tried to keep her eyes trained on the horseman until he disappeared into the shadows near the stables. She waited a while to see the man emerge but didn’t. Perhaps he was still tending his horse, or perhaps he had slipped out of the stables, and, in the pitch darkness, she’d missed his passage.
Though her room was on the third floor, Eleanor listened intently, thinking to hear the mysterious intruder come into the manor, perhaps seeking sustenance as well as shelter. Surely, the servants would be roused if not Lord and Lady Angsley, Beryl’s parents.
All remained eerily silent.
Eventually, Eleanor climbed into the four-poster bed with its thick, soft mattress and settled in, trying to imagine why someone would come so late and yet not come indoors.
The Midnight Hour: All-Hallows’ Brides Page 54