‘So do you. Rather surprising for one of your tender years.’
Harriet chuckled as the music changed tempo and other couples joined them on the floor. ‘A woman must always be able to surprise her man. I read it in a magazine.’
She was allowed only the first dance with her husband. After that Harriet danced with Tim, then one man after another until James led her to her seat at last, gave her a glass of water and told her she looked tired.
‘At the risk of being misunderstood,’ he said in her ear, ‘I think I should get you to bed soon. You look tired.’
The moment James said it Harriet realised she was very tired indeed.
‘I am,’ she said apologetically. ‘But I don’t want this lovely day to end.’
He smiled with tenderness that turned her heart over. ‘Nevertheless, bride, I’m going to carry you off. No one will be surprised that I want to.’
James stood up, signalled to the leader of the trio, and then tapped on his glass when the music stopped. ‘My wife and I,’ he began, and grinned at the catcalls and applause, ‘thank you all for coming to share in our happy day. Please stay as long as you like to enjoy the party, but we have a journey to make tomorrow and my bride is beginning to show signs of fatigue, so—’
‘Come off it, Jed,’ hooted someone. ‘You just want to take her off to bed.’
‘You’re absolutely right, I do,’ said James, unruffled, and held out his hand to Harriet.
She smiled on the assembled company as she got up. ‘Goodnight, everyone. Enjoy the rest of the party.’
After kisses from Tim, Francesca and Dido, James took Harriet’s arm and led her from the room to the strains of the Wagner Wedding March from the trio, but once in the hall he said goodnight to the porter, and took his yawning bride out into the starry night instead of up the main staircase as she’d expected.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked, surprised.
‘Home to my place.’
It seemed a very long way across the cobbled courtyard to the stable flat. By the time they reached it Harriet was too tired to do more than give a cursory glance at her surroundings. But as James swung her feet up on a very comfortable sofa she smiled as she spotted her grandmother’s cabinet and lacquer screen.
‘Just like home,’ she said drowsily.
‘Want some tea?’ he asked, undoing his tie.
‘More than anything in the world at this moment,’ she assured him.
But when James Devereux got back with the tray Stacy had put ready for them, his bride was fast asleep. Smiling wryly, he picked Harriet up and carried her into the bedroom. With infinite care he undid the fragile dress and slid it off, decided she could sleep in what little she had on underneath, and pulled the covers over her, then kissed her cheek before going into the other room to drink tea. He grinned as he filled the delicate cup Stacy had considered appropriate to the occasion. This wasn’t exactly standard procedure for a wedding night. But now Harriet was safely married to him he was a happy man just the same.
It was late on the following day, under a sky too bright with stars to be totally dark, when James drove through the archway into the courtyard of La Fattoria, where welcoming lights shone from the windows, but otherwise all was quiet.
‘After spending time with Francesca and Tim, plus Dido the night before the wedding, I thought you might fancy a little peace and quiet,’ he said as he helped Harriet out of the car. ‘I told the Capellinis they could wait a day or two before they met my bride.’
‘Thank you for that, James. Peace and quiet sounds very appealing. I like Francesca very much, but I had to keep reassuring her that I was happy about her marriage to Tim,’ Harriet told him ruefully. ‘It got a bit wearing.’
‘I’m more interested in whether you’re happy about your marriage to me,’ said James, and picked her up. ‘Time-honoured custom,’ he reminded her as he carried her over the threshold.
Harriet smiled with pleasure as he put her down in the cool, familiar kitchen. ‘I love this place, James.’
‘So do I.’ He went out to fetch their luggage, refusing her offers of help. ‘You had an exhausting day yesterday,’ he reminded her when he came back.
‘But a happy, lovely day. I like your friends, the Mayhews. Did I tell you Lydia asked us for a weekend in the Cotswolds when we get back?’
‘Good, but don’t think about going back right now.’ James took her hands. ‘Let’s enjoy our time here first.’
‘Since this is the only honeymoon I’ll ever have I’m in full agreement.’
‘You do look on it as a honeymoon, then?’
Harriet looked up at his tense face in surprise. ‘Of course I do. After such a beautiful wedding day yesterday, what else could it be?’
‘Just a holiday, maybe?’ He looked at her very directly. ‘I rushed you to the altar so fast you might well need breathing space. To get used to being my wife,’ he added.
Harriet looked at him in silence for a moment. They hadn’t shared a bed since James had learned about the baby. After her shopping expedition with Dido their reconciliation had been sweet, but it had been followed by the celebration dinner with Tim, after which she’d been so tired that James had insisted on sleeping in the spare room before he left next day for Upcote to make the wedding arrangements. And when she woke this morning, surprised to find she was in her grandmother’s brass bed, Harriet had found to her dismay that her wedding night had come and gone, and her smiling husband stood fully dressed at her bedside, bearing a breakfast tray.
‘I can see why you might think that way,’ she said at last.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve been a pretty unsatisfactory bride so far!’
‘Not to me,’ he assured her.
Deciding that it was time to make things clear Harriet chose her words with care. ‘You made our wedding day as perfect for me as any woman could wish for, James. And today we’ve flown here first class—which was a first for me—and then we had a delicious meal in that little trattoria tonight on the way to this beautiful, peaceful house.’ She reached up and kissed him lightly. ‘If this isn’t a honeymoon, James Edward Devereux, what is?’
She could hardly make it plainer than that, Harriet thought as she followed James up the winding stairs to the tower room, where a vase of pink and white roses stood on the chest, filling the air with their perfume.
‘I’ve left the rest of the luggage downstairs,’ he said, putting her overnight bag on the settle. ‘Let’s leave the unpacking until tomorrow.’
‘Amen to that,’ she said with a sigh, and with loving care laid her wedding hat on the top shelf of the armoire.
‘By the way, I’ve got something for you, Harriet,’ said James, taking an envelope from his jacket pocket. ‘Stacy handed it to me first thing before you got up.’
She felt a little thrill when she saw the envelope was addressed to Mr & Mrs Devereux, and took out a card embellished with hearts and horseshoes, and a photograph of a beaming toddler.
‘Congratulations and best wishes from Stacy and Greg, and a big kiss from Robert.’
‘How lovely,’ said Harriet, delighted. ‘We must put it with the others. Thank Stacy for me when you go down to Upcote.’
‘Come with me and thank her yourself,’ he suggested.
‘I may well do that, now I’ve seen your flat. I love it, James.’
‘I once asked you to dinner there,’ he reminded her, ‘but you turned me down.’
She felt her colour rise. ‘I was afraid.’
His eyebrows shot together. ‘Of me?’
‘Not exactly. But I was still pretending to be Tim’s bride-to-be at the time, remember. The fiction was a bit difficult to keep up when one touch of your hand was enough to turn me to jelly. It still is,’ she added, looking him in the eye.
James let out a deep sigh and took her in his arms, leaning his forehead against hers. ‘Thank God for that.’ He kissed her fleetingly and let her go. ‘I’d better leave
you to your bath. Shall I make you some tea?’
‘No, thanks. I’m off tea, big time. I’d like a big bottle of mineral water, please.’
‘Now?’
Harriet gave him a look designed to make her expectations crystal clear. ‘Bring it when you come to bed.’
She spent such a short time in the bath it seemed ages before James came back. She smiled at him from her perch on the settle by the window, hoping he approved of the brief apricot silk nightgown she’d chosen alone one day in her lunch hour.
‘You were a long time, James.’
He smiled as his eyes travelled over her with appreciation. ‘You normally like to wallow in the bath so I had a shower while I was waiting,’ he said, and put a tray with glasses and bottles down beside the roses. He joined her on the settle and took her hand in his. ‘You looked utterly beautiful as you came down the aisle to me yesterday, Harriet.’
‘Brides are required to,’ she informed him. ‘It goes with the job description. Thank you for my bouquet, the roses were perfect. Did you choose white as a safe bet?’
‘Not at all. I consulted Dido.’
‘Did you arrange for these, too?’
He nodded. ‘But I think they should go somewhere else tonight. The scent is overpowering. I’ll put them in the other room.’
While James was gone Harriet drank some water, and sat gazing out into the starlit darkness as she thought over her glorious wedding day. She was glad James had liked her choice of bridal finery. If she’d looked beautiful for him it had been worth every penny of the outrageous price she’d paid for it all.
When he returned she got up, knowing that before she could get on with being married to James Devereux she had to give him the information that was the only cloud on her horizon.
‘I’ve got a confession to make, James,’ she said baldly.
He eyed her in alarm. ‘There’s nothing wrong with the baby?’
‘No. We’re both fine. It’s just that, well, I didn’t have a DNA test,’ she finished in a rush. ‘I was going to tell you not to have one, either, but you were too quick for me. You’d already had one.’
James let out a deep breath. ‘Is that your big confession?’
She nodded dumbly.
‘I’ve got an even bigger one.’ He met her eyes squarely. ‘I didn’t have the test, either. I just said I did to make sure you turned up yesterday.’
‘You lied?’
‘With the best of intentions,’ he said, unrepentant, and tipped her face up to his. ‘You’re mine, both of you, and if I had to lie to make sure you married me I don’t care a damn.’ He kissed her fiercely, and she kissed him back.
‘There’s something else I haven’t told you,’ she informed him, smiling at him radiantly.
‘It can’t be bad if you’re smiling,’ he said warily.
‘Our baby’s birthday will be nine months from the night you first made love to me in that bed over there.’
‘I was sure of that already.’ James picked her up and carried her over to the bed. ‘I want to make love to you in it again right now,’ he informed her.
‘I should think so,’ said Harriet, kissing his throat. ‘After all, this is our honeymoon, Mr Devereux.’
‘Thank God for that, too,’ he said as he set her on her feet. ‘At one point I had serious doubts that I’d get you to marry me, darling, baby or not.’
‘I married you because I love you, James, it’s as simple as that.’ She reached up to kiss him. ‘Besides, I’ve always known you were the father of my baby.’
‘So have I. But I was afraid, in that first, blood-curdling moment, that you were going to tell me someone else was the father, so I asked the question that could have ruined our lives. My life, anyway.’
‘Mine, too.’ She lifted her face to receive his kiss, and James touched a hand to the silk covering her breasts, and made a relishing sound as he traced the new fullness with a not quite steady hand.
‘I’ve been too long without you. Come to bed,’ he urged, shrugging off his dressing gown. ‘This thing you’re wearing is very pretty, my darling. Take it off.’
Harriet obliged, laughing, and flowed into his arms, relishing the feel of skin against skin as James began kissing her.
‘You said this is the only honeymoon you’ll ever have,’ he whispered. ‘So we’ll savour it together, my darling.’ He drew her down with him to kiss her with slow, erotic kisses that were an end in themselves instead of merely the overture to what would come next. Harriet gave herself up to the joy of his skilled, lingering mouth, shivering in delight as his hands slid over her skin to shape her breasts and hips, and move tenderly over the gentle swell between them.
‘I love you, Mrs Devereux,’ he whispered.
‘I love you, too, Mr Devereux.’
He kissed her with sudden urgency. ‘Show me how much.’
Harriet slid a caressing hand over his shoulders and down his back, glorying in the tightening of his muscles under her questing fingers. She kissed him, open-mouthed, caressing his tongue with hers, and then slid her mouth down his taut throat and caught his flat nipples between her teasing teeth before moving her lips down his flat stomach and James breathed in sharply and pulled her beneath him, kissing her with a ravening demand that thrilled Harriet to the core. She writhed in hot, delectable anguish as his seeking fingers found the proof of how much she wanted him, and pleaded with him in such husky desperation James lifted her hips and fused his body to hers. At first, in deference to the baby, he made love to her with all the care and restraint at his command, but soon his bride demonstrated a fiery urgency he was powerless to resist, and they surged together in such harmony they reached the final pinnacle of sensation in unison.
They lay locked in each other’s arms afterwards, unwilling to separate. It was a long time before James raised his head to look into Harriet’s eyes.
‘You know what, Mrs Devereux? I’ve just discovered an incontrovertible truth. Marriage is not the cure for love, after all.’
Harriet smiled lovingly, and stroked the damp hair back from her husband’s forehead. ‘We haven’t been married long enough to know, surely!’
‘You’re missing the point.’ James kissed her stroking hand. ‘I meant that the love I feel for you is with me for life. There is no cure.’
‘You mean you’re stuck with it.’
He laughed. ‘Yes, my unromantic darling, I’m stuck with it.’
‘So am I.’ She met his eyes with a look so blazingly happy it took his breath away. ‘For as long as we both shall live.’
ISBN: 978-1-4268-6358-5
THE UNEXPECTED PREGNANCY
First North American Publication 2005.
Copyright © 2004 by Catherine George.
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
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