“Brigham!” she cried through her teeth.
He kissed her noisily on the forehead and mounted the
front steps. Then he turned to face his staring daughters, forcing Lydia to face them, too. “Tell Jake I'll be wanting a hot bath right away,” he said, with a jovial grin.
Charlotte gave a sudden, trilling laugh and bounded around the side of the house to obey, with Millie close on her heels.
“This is reprehensible!” Lydia hissed.
Brigham opened the front door and stepped over the threshold. The inside of the house was shadowy and cool, and a quiver of desire stirred deep in Lydia's being as he started up the stairs. “Remember our agreement, dear,” he said pleasantly. “When I want you, I'll have you.”
“Shhhh!” Lydia whispered, mortified. “Someone will hear you!”
“It's no secret that I'm taking you to my bed, Mrs. Quade,” he pointed out as they reached the first landing and proceeded up from there.
Lydia shook her head in bewildered wonder. She'd started out to collect her salary and let her husband know he couldn't bully her, and ended up being carried away like so much pirate's loot. And the awful part was, she couldn't seem to summon up the will to fight.
“What will Charlotte and Millie think?”
He didn't even pause, but proceeded along the upper hallway to the door of his room, then through it. He dumped Lydia bodily onto his bed before replying. “They're innocent children. They'll think we're kissing.”
Lydia bunked and sat up as Brigham closed the door of his room and began unbuttoning his shirt. He was right; the girls would giggle and speculate, but it was unlikely that they would know what their father and stepmother were doing.
Brigham dragged off his shirt, tossed it over a bedpost, and went to the marble-topped washstand, where he poured tepid water from a pitcher into a matching ceramic basin and began to wash his face, hands, and chest industriously.
Lydia calculated the distance from the bed to the door and knew immediately that she wouldn't even gain the threshold before he whirled around and caught her. Brigham was a big man, but he was far from awkward.
“I don't suppose it makes any difference to you that I think this is scandalous, and that I want to leave?”
Her husband snatched a towel from the bar across the top of the washstand and dried his face and chest exuberantly. He'd merely rearranged the dirt, rather than washed it away, and Lydia felt a peculiar softening of the heart as she looked at him. “Of course it's scandalous,” he replied. “And you don't want to leave.”
She scooted backward, against the headboard. “I don't?”
Brigham shook his head. “No. Maybe you don't want to want my lovemaking, Lydia, but you do. You've been tossing and turning in your spinster's bed for weeks, thinking about all the sweet things I could be doing to you.”
Lydia began to perspire. What he said was true, but she wouldn't have admitted it to save her skin. “Stop it. All I was thinking was that you're a bastard.”
He laughed, caught hold of one of her feet. “You were quite right about that,” he drawled, clasping one hand around her ankle, just above her high-button shoe, and sliding it slowly up to the back of her knee, where the skin was very sensitive. “I am a bastard, but you want me. Can you deny that?”
Lydia drew in a quick breath as his fingers moved from her knee to her inner thigh, skimming lightly beneath one leg of her drawers. Arousal clamped inside her like a springing trap, and she bit her lower lip while she fought for control. “Yes,” she lied.
He found the nest of moist curls at the crux of her legs and petted her in whisper-soft strokes. “Oh?” he inquired, propping her foot on his shoulder and beginning to unfasten the buttons of her shoe with slow, deft movements of his fingers. He tossed the shoe aside, then unrolled her stocking and threw that away, too. He parted the folds of her femininity, gave her a light, teasing flick with the pad of his thumb, and began telling her in excruciating detail what he meant to do to pleasure her. He said one climax would not be enough, no matter how ferocious it might be; he wanted her to respond over and over again. He wanted to watch her while she strained toward one fulfillment after another, and to hear her cries.
He put both her legs on his shoulders and teased her with one finger while his thumb caressed the quivering rosebud he had uncovered earlier. His other hand supported her bottom, which was trembling with Lydia's effort to keep calm.
“My sweet Yankee wife,” Brigham murmured, turning his head to kiss the bare skin of her ankle, which he'd made vulnerable by removing her shoe and stocking. “Were you telling the truth when you said you thought you might be carrying my baby?”
Lydia was tossing her head back and forth on the pillow in an involuntary reaction to the nibbling warmth of his lips against her ankle. She hadn't the strength to lie. “Yes,” she gasped. “Yes, damn you, I was telling the truth!” Her hips were moving to the meter he set for them with the slow plunge and withdrawal of his finger.
He pushed back her skirt and tasted the fragile flesh behind her knee, making her moan softly. “If my son isn't growing in you now,” he vowed, “he will be by the time this night is through.”
Lydia whimpered. She should tell Brigham Quade to go to hell. She should free herself and storm out of that room, out of that house, never to go back again. The trouble was, she needed his touch as much as air and water, and since her knees had already turned to jelly, there was no point in trying to escape.
“You have to—take your bath,” she pointed out, in a last desperate effort to save herself from her own passion.
He lowered her gently to the bed, removed her other shoe and stocking, then her drawers. Her skirt billowed around her waist, and she felt her petticoat slide down over the smooth skin of her thighs. “And I will. But I mean to get you dirty first.”
Lydia trembled as he bent over her to open her bodice and free her breasts from the thin muslin camisole that had confined them. She arched her back, unable to keep from offering herself, and he bent with a throaty chuckle to sample a reaching nipple.
At the same time, he parted her legs with his hand and began to stroke her again. His face and hair left smudges of dirt on Lydia's breasts, but she was past caring.
Brigham left her nipple only to burrow into her neck, where he whispered of the different ways he would arrange her for taking. Then he attended her other breast, at great leisure, before sliding downward to kiss the top of one of her thighs.
She knew what he was going to do, and she wanted it so badly that she couldn't break away. He knelt beside the bed, finally, hooked his hands underneath her knees and parted her legs, then pulled her forward onto the waiting fire of his mouth.
Lydia arched her neck and choked back a cry of scandalized ecstasy.
Brigham nibbled and tongued her until she was half mad with the need of release. “Once won't be enough, Yankee,” he rasped between greedy forays. “Once won't be nearly enough. I won't be satisfied until you've given me everything.”
“Brigham,” she pleaded, the word muffled by the hand she'd clasped over her mouth to keep from shouting like a savage woman rolling on the ground with her mate.
He stopped, began kissing the insides of her thighs, where the flesh was moist and ready. He soothed her until she'd settled down a little, until her breathing was even, and then he brought her back to the brink. At the last possible moment he denied her again, rising reluctantly to his feet.
“After my bath,” he promised, admiring her naked breasts as the tips hardened. “I trust you'll be right here, waiting for me?”
Lydia both loved and hated Brigham Quade in that moment. He had made her want him desperately, and they both knew she would wait. Until he was ready to attend her. Until hell froze over.
21
AS HAD HAPPENED EACH TIME BEFORE, BRIGHAM'S LOVE-MAKING left Lydia in a stricken daze. A long interval had passed before she returned to herself, remembered how to make her heart beat and her lungs dr
aw air, and finally spoke.
“I need to know if it's true, what they're saying,” she whispered into the moist warmth of Brigham's bare shoulder.
Brigham gave a long, contented sigh and settled himself more comfortably to the mattress. “I guess that depends on what's being said,” he replied after a long pause.
Lydia felt the first stirrings of anger as reality settled over her mind like a net of gossamer cobwebs. “You know,” she told him, with a small but fierce nudge to his ribcage. “It's that Clover O'Keefe, over at the Satin Hammer. People say she's your mistress now.”
There was another sigh, but this one was ragged. “Cl—Miss O'Keefe is a friend of mine,” he acknowledged reluctantly.
Lydia's heart was teetering on the edge of some stony precipice, ready to topple over and smash to bits on the rocks of truth below. She knew Brigham would not lie to her; he always said exactly what he was thinking.
“I have a wife,” he said at last, his embrace neither tightening nor growing slack, one hand spread possessively over Lydia's bare bottom. “As yet, I've seen no need to take a mistress.”
Relief flooded Lydia's soul, but so did fury. It was hard to face Brigham's power over her, let alone accept it as fact. Some primitive feminine instinct declared that she held equal sway over him, but she dismissed that as wishful thinking. She tried to rise, but her husband held her in place with gentle but inexorable strength.
“It's been over a month since—since we were together,” she said. Something in her wanted, needed, to fight, to drive Brigham back beyond walls he'd already scaled, away from ground he'd long since conquered.
Brigham laughed. “I've been celibate for longer periods of time than that, my dear wife,” he said after his amusement had waned a little. In a sudden but maddeningly graceful move, he pulled her on top of him and flashed his white teeth in the triumphant smile of a dark-haired Viking claiming the spoils of battle. “Don't you believe me?”
Lydia was wonderfully, miserably conscious of the hard, rough, and entirely welcoming maleness of the body beneath hers. Her nipples had tightened, and there was a sensation of something warm tumbling in the depths of her. “Of—Of course I believe you. You haven't the good grace to lie, not even when it would be the kindest thing to do.”
He laughed again, and the sound rumbled under her like an earthquake. “As soon as I work out whether that was praise or damnation, I'll respond.” He spread his hands over her buttocks, now quivering with renewed sensation, and pressed her to him. His erection seemed as magnificent and elemental as one of those giant trees he'd felled, and Lydia felt herself expanding to take him inside her.
“It was damnation,” she answered, but she had already grown breathless. His hands moved from her bottom to her hips, raising her, positioning her. She gave a tremulous cry as the gentle but inevitable invasion began.
While she straddled him, Brigham traced each of her nipples with the tip of an index finger. “Are you really carrying my baby?” he asked in a low voice. He was still entering her, making slow but incredibly pleasurable progress. “Or was that just a ploy to get under my skin?”
Lydia drew in a sharp breath and held it to keep from crying out in the sheer wanton glory of Brigham's leisurely seduction. “There—is really—a baby,” she replied grudgingly, her breath fast and shallow now. She tried to move upon him, but he held her hips firmly, stilting her as the pillar of fire rose inside her. “And it seems to me—oh, dear God, Brigham—that you're—under my skin—”
He let her have a little more of him, a tantalizing fraction of an inch, then raised his head far enough to drink languidly from one of her breasts. “Indeed I am, Mrs. Quade,” he replied in a low voice, gruff with both passion and amusement.
“Oh, Brigham, please—”
He lowered her farther and farther onto his shaft, until she sheathed him completely. For the first time the fact that his own control was finally slipping was audible in his voice. “This won't—this won't hurt my child?”
Lydia was touched, but the passion had gone too far for her to stop and indulge in tender emotion. The needing was in her blood, coursing through her system like a fever, and Brigham offered the only antidote. “No, Brigham,” she managed, with a certainty that came from some deep, unexplored part of herself. “Your son is safe.”
At her words, Brigham's powerful body buckled beneath her, like a stallion trying to throw off a rider. Lydia clamped her thighs on either side of his hips and stayed in the saddle. The sweet battle went on and on, until Lydia and Brigham broke through the invisible barrier, their low cries intertwining like ribbon as they streamed toward the ceiling.
When they finally had their fill, Brigham and Lydia drifted off into fitful slumber, their perspiring bodies still tangled in each other and in the sheets. Lydia awakened with a start somewhere in the deepest folds of the night, thinking a lantern had been lit.
Instead, the light of a late-summer moon was shining through the window, bathing her and Brigham and the whole bed in a silvery glow. Lydia's heart tightened at the beauty of it, and the plain hopelessness of loving the man who slept beside her.
She had to rally her strength, she thought miserably, and save some part of her soul for herself. If she didn't, her identity would mingle with Brigham's, then dissolve entirely, and she would have no more substance than the reflection in a looking glass.
She disengaged herself from her husband, cautiously, limb by limb. He stirred, and she waited, her hand resting soothingly on his side, until he settled into deep sleep again. Then she rose from the bed, dressed with quiet awkwardness, and slipped from the room. Part of her spirit stayed behind, nestled close against Brigham's side.
She wept silently as she made her way down the darkened hallway and the rear stairway, through the kitchen, which was spilling with moonlight, and outside into the night. The sounds around her were companionable ones; a night owl hooted in a tree, and she could hear the faint rustle of the water as it broke on the nearby shoreline. Crickets sang their summer chorus in the grass, and a calico cat rushed past, intent on some urgent feline business.
Lydia would have gone straight back to her cottage if she hadn't seen the light burning in a window on the second floor of Quade's Harbor's brand-new general store. Polly lived there now, in a couple of spacious, unfinished rooms above the mercantile.
Polly might be ill, Lydia reasoned, hurrying in the direction of the large, clapboard store. But even as she went over all the dire possibilities, her friend being with child and all, Lydia knew she was fooling herself. She was not going to Polly to lend aid, understanding, and reassurance, but to ask for those things.
She climbed the outside stairway, smiling as she passed the hand-painted letters on the raw wooden wall. QUADE's MERCANTILE, the ornate words proclaimed. DEVON AND POLLY QUADE, PROPS.
On the splintery landing outside Polly's door, Lydia's resolve faltered a little. It was thoughtless of her to intrude this way, she concluded. Here it was, the middle of the night…
The door swung open before Lydia could shuffle back down the stairs and disappear into the few shadows available on such a brightly lit night.
“Lydia,” Polly said. In the shimmer of the lantern inside, and the silver splash of moonlight, Lydia could see that her friend had been weeping. The realization caught Lydia by surprise, partly because she'd been so caught up in her own problems, and partly because Polly seemed so strong and optimistic in the daytime. She had a definite knack for running a business, and sometimes it almost seemed that she didn't care if Devon Quade ever came back.
Now, seeing Polly's face, Lydia realized she'd been wrong.
“I saw your light,” Lydia said lamely as Polly stepped back to admit her.
Polly closed the door, then embraced her midnight caller for a moment. “Come and sit down. We'll have some tea.”
Lydia nodded. She had no better place to be, except in the warmth and safety of Brigham Quade's bed. Just the thought of returning to her co
ttage filled her with loneliness, even though she knew she would eventually have to go there.
Polly's quarters were tidy and very sparsely furnished. There was a wood cookstove, a changing screen of silk painted with a delicate Oriental design—no doubt purloined from the main house—a table and two chairs, a chest of drawers, and an iron bed. The covers were rumpled, as though Polly had tried to sleep and failed.
“Have you heard anything at all from Devon?” Lydia asked quietly, accepting a seat at Polly's table while her hostess went to the stove, where a kettle of water was already simmering.
Polly's lovely dark hair was wound into a thick braid that trailed down her still-slender back. “No,” she said, without turning to meet Lydia's eyes. “He's got to be the stubbornest man God ever breathed life into.”
Lydia smiled in spite of herself. “Second stubbornest,” she corrected. “I think Brigham taught Devon everything he knows about being hard-headed and unreasonable.”
Polly scooped loose tea leaves into a crockery pot, then added water from the kettle. She left the brew to steep while taking mismatched cups from a cupboard fashioned of stacked shipping crates. “Sometimes I think I should just go and find him,” she told Lydia distractedly, “and drag him home by the ear. I declare, he acts like a little boy in need of a spanking.”
The image of the suave, powerfully built Devon being hauled up the wharf by an earlobe made Lydia smile. All the same, her words were uttered in a sad tone. “Wouldn't it be a luxury just to be weak sometimes?” she reflected. “I mean, Devon and Brigham aren't monsters. Why can't we just let them steer us blissfully through life, the way so many other women let their husbands do?”
Polly sighed heavily, and her answering smile faltered on her lips. “I guess because once you're forced to learn to survive on your own, you don't ever forget it.” She brought the teapot to the table, along with sugar and milk and the unmatched cups, and sat down across from Lydia with another sigh. “Besides, I'm not sure Brigham would be attracted to you if you were nothing but a wilting violet, waiting to hear his will so you can act on it.”
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