His Cinderella Bride

by Annie Burrows

  However, he had gone to great lengths to ensure tonight would be nothing like anything she could have imagined.

  His heart skipped a beat as he handed her into the coach for the short drive to Challinor House. This was such a new venture for him. He hoped he was not about to make a colossal fool of himself. He bit down on the selfish desire to preserve his own dignity with disgust. In the face of Hester’s need, what did his own pride matter? He had already been rewarded for reining in his lust on their clandestine night together. She had walked down the aisle with her head held high. If she had not been a virgin, she would have felt such a fraud her guilt would have been plain for all to see. Knowing she was free of Snelgrove must have been a great source of comfort to her, too.

  Hester darted a nervous glance at Jasper’s brooding profile. He had withdrawn into his granite shell and she didn’t know how to reach him. And she was so very aware of the size of his body in the close confines of the coach. The very air she breathed was redolent of his distinctive and intoxicatingly male scent. She was glad when the coach finally stopped, a grinning footman opened the door and she was able to get out. Jasper was in a very strange mood, veering between stony silence that spoke of a simmering anger, and a noble attempt to be conciliatory towards her. Did he know what he wanted from her at all? Because if he didn’t, how could she ever learn to be the kind of wife he wanted?

  She blinked up at the magnificent façade of Challinor House. Liveried servants, each holding a torch, flanked the steps. Every single one of them eyed her with frank curiosity, and many of them, as she passed, grinned at their master in what looked like a conspiratorial fashion.

  What was going on? What kind of household did he run here? She entered a beautifully appointed hall with a sense of bewildered wariness, wishing that she had made the time to visit before entering this house as its mistress. She should have made a point of getting to know the staff she would be governing, more of whom had gathered about the foot of the stairs. They were all smiling, however, so her lapse had apparently not caused a breach before she had even come amongst them.

  ‘Haven’t any of you anything better to do than loiter in the hall?’ Jasper suddenly bellowed, scattering them in a flurry of suppressed laughter. She recalled Em’s assessment that his groom regarded him as a benevolent despot in the stables. His household staff clearly felt the same way.

  Jasper opened a door on the left of the hall, asking her, ‘Would you care for a nightcap before we retire?’

  He looked…apprehensive.

  It was the last straw.

  ‘Can’t we just go straight to bed?’ she pleaded.

  ‘Ah.’ Jasper looked at his feet. ‘Hester. I have to tell you…I’m not…’ He looked at her beseechingly, as though for understanding. ‘I won’t ever ride roughshod over your feelings.’

  ‘I know that.’ But she also knew that whatever he felt, or didn’t feel for her, he had married because he wanted an heir. ‘But it is my duty to give you children.’

  ‘Very well.’ Her hand still clasped in his, they slowly began to mount the stairs. ‘I take my duty very seriously.’

  Well, she knew that already. Duty was what had driven him to take her, rather than one of her prettier, more amenable cousins, after all.

  ‘There is one duty that I am particularly keen to carry out.’

  She clung harder to his hand as her foot almost missed one of the risers. She couldn’t believe how much it hurt to hear that he regarded getting her pregnant in the light of carrying out a duty. Particularly since his words the morning before in the park had given her hope that he might really want her for herself.

  ‘A husband’s duty to cherish his wife.’

  They had reached the first landing, and she paused reflecting on his last words. ‘Cherish?’ she finally managed to whisper.

  ‘Cherish,’ he affirmed, leading her to a second flight of stairs. ‘And to that end, I have spent some considerable thought on the decor of your room here.’ He led her along a carpeted landing, and pushed open the first door on the right.

  The sight that met her eyes made Hester gasp in amazement. She stepped, enchanted, into what looked like a moonlit forest glade. There was not a single stick of conventional furniture in the room. The walls were handpainted with the most realistic sylvan scene: trees and delicately perfumed flowering shrubs apparently surrounding a small glade. A moon glowed over its reflection in a crystal-clear pond.

  ‘How did you…?’ She craned her neck to examine the ceiling, which had been made to look like a starlit night by means of hundreds of tiny candles refracting through crystals, which were suspended somehow on a canopy of black velvet. The moon was similarly a lantern suspended behind a screen of gauze.

  She couldn’t resist kneeling beside the pond, trailing her fingers through the shallow water, then over the grass-effect cushions that surrounded it.

  ‘It is not real grass, alas.’ Jasper’s voice sounded strangely hoarse. ‘But the velvet is a close enough approximation.’ He closed the door behind him. ‘I wanted a waterfall as well, but the carpenter went on at great length about the necessity for reinforcing joists, and warned me that the noise that the pump needed to keep the water circulating would ruin the romantic atmosphere I wished to create.’

  ‘Romantic?’ Hester gazed wide eyed at the man who disdained any show of emotion, pacing about the room, twitching a frond of fern nervously between his fingers. ‘This is supposed to be romantic?’

  He went still. ‘Isn’t it?’ He frowned. ‘I have never attempted anything like this before, so I wasn’t sure. I just wanted the bridal chamber to be perfect for you. There are no windows, see?’ He gestured towards the screened and painted walls. ‘I wanted you to feel safe, utterly safe with me, here tonight.’

  Hester got to her feet. ‘There is no bed, either,’ she pointed out.

  He cleared his throat, crushing the fern frond completely as she faced him, her head tilted to one side. ‘Ever since our first meeting, I knew you were different from anyone I had ever known. You are not a predictable, domesticated product of civilization. You are…a creature of nature. When you came to London, and tried to conform to all the strictures my mother placed on you, it was like seeing a wood nymph bound in chains. Hester…’ He took a step towards her. ‘You don’t belong in a drawing room, mouthing meaningless platitudes. You belong outside, my little dappled fawn.’ He drew nearer still, reaching out to run one finger over her freckled nose. ‘Far away from all other men, the men who would frighten you, and hurt you.’

  He drew her to what looked like a grassy knoll, and pulled her down beside him.

  ‘All this…’ he waved his hand to indicate the room ‘…is the proper setting for you.’

  The knoll was incredibly soft. ‘Is this stuffed with feathers?’ she asked as she sank into it.

  He nodded, murmuring, ‘You are too rare to dwell in the dreary, commonplace world of men.’ He raised her hand to his mouth, and began to kiss her fingertips. ‘This poor mortal would worship at your shrine, if you will permit.’ He turned her hand and pressed a fervent kiss in her palm.

  ‘W…worship?’ The kiss had sent heat directly to her womb, leaving her melting between the velvet cushions and the hard strength of his body.

  ‘With my body I thee worship,’ he repeated, stunning her by dropping to his knees before her and raising the hem of her gown to his lips.

  ‘I will never take, in the way Snelgrove threatened to take from you. I will only ever give.’ Her heartbeat increased as he drew off her gold satin slippers.

  ‘Don’t be afraid of me.’ He began to kiss her toes. ‘I won’t push you where you don’t want to go.’ One by one, he drew them into the heat of his mouth. Hester sank deeper into the cushions, as her whole body turned to liquid heat. ‘I will wait as long as you need before consummating our union fully.’ He reached up and removed the diamond tiara from her hair, tossing it carelessly aside so that he could plunge his fingers into her hair. It
splashed, unheeded, into the artificial lake as Hester wound her arms about his neck and drew him down.

  ‘I am not afraid of you,’ she declared, bravely planting a kiss on his mouth.

  He smiled sadly. ‘My darling, ever since I forced you into that secret marriage you have not been able to look me in the face. I made you confront your fears when I bathed you, and…’

  ‘No. No.’ She took his face between her hands, and looked him straight in the eye. ‘I was not afraid of you. Only your rejection. Every time I looked at you I could feel your hands on my body, and then the awful coldness of your rejection.’

  ‘What rejection? I didn’t reject you.’ He swore. ‘Was that what you thought?’ he groaned. ‘It wasn’t a rejection, my sweet innocent. I was trying to spare you. When you quivered under my hands I very nearly exploded with reciprocal lust. I dared not touch you. I would have taken you with such brutality it would have undone all the trust I had begun to build.’

  Hester’s face lit up. ‘You wanted me then?’

  ‘I ache with wanting you, but don’t worry. I can control my lustful urges. I am not like Snelgrove.’

  She thumped his shoulder. ‘Jasper, you great idiot. I know you are not like Lionel. The very first time you kissed me I understood that it was not kissing that filled me with disgust, but him. He wanted to humiliate and degrade me, so his touch sent me straight to a hell of his own devising. But you…’ she laid her open palm against his cheek ‘…you transported me to heaven on our secret wedding night. Because I love you. And,’ she added shyly, ‘I ache with wanting you too. Now that everyone knows we are married…’

  ‘Are you sure?’ He tensed, kneeling over her, gazing deep into her eyes for any sign she was only sacrificing herself to please him.

  Hester smiled and began to undo the buttons of his waistcoat.

  ‘You don’t have to…’ His words choked out as she determinedly pushed the garment off his shoulders and set to work on his neckcloth. With a groan, he scooped her into his arms and brought them both down next to one another on the mound of artificial grass.

  ‘God, Hester, tonight?’ He buried his face in the mass of hair that was tumbling about her shoulders. ‘This is so much more than I had hoped for.’ With hands that trembled, he unbuckled the clasps that held her gown together, and pushed the fabric from her shoulder. ‘I would have waited,’ he panted between the kisses that he trailed along her collar bone, ‘a humble penitent—’up her neck ‘—at your feet—’he found the sweet, moist haven of her mouth and ravaged it thoroughly ‘—for all eternity.’

  A gurgle of the most seductive laughter he had ever heard issued from her throat. He bent to kiss it again as she said, ‘Humble! You?’

  ‘Loving you has brought me to my knees,’ he confessed, pushing her dress to her waist and demonstrating his need by suckling her breasts.

  She was not quite so lost to sensation that she missed that. ‘You love me?’

  Jasper tensed, rolled on to his back, and laid his arm across his face, hiding his eyes. ‘I didn’t mean to say that.’

  Hester knelt up and tugged at his arm. Her heart was beating so fast now she felt as if it might burst through her rib cage. ‘Then why did you say it? If you didn’t mean it?’ His arm didn’t budge. She climbed astride him to get a better purchase. She had to see his face.

  Suddenly, he seemed to accept defeat. His arm flopped to his side, and he lay gazing mournfully up at her. ‘Oh, I mean it. That’s just the trouble. I love you so much I have to resort to this sort of tomfoolery to demonstrate it.’ He waved despairingly at the elaborately constructed bridal bower. ‘I have spent a small fortune constructing what has to be the most ridiculously romantic bridal bower any groom has ever dreamt up to woo his bride. I had hoped to preserve some dignity by holding out until you presented me with our first son before confessing to feeling such a vulgar, unfashionable, lowering emotion.’ His face grimaced in self-disgust. ‘Since meeting you, my behaviour has become increasingly erratic. I brawl in taverns, kick down doors, hold up stagecoaches, kidnap innocent maidens…’

  Hester cut through to what she saw as the heart of the matter. ‘How were we ever going to get a son if you planned to wait patiently to the end of time before consummating this marriage?’

  ‘Ah…the flaw in my logic. You see what you have done to me, Hester? My brain does not function correctly any more. The only part of me that seems to be working at all efficiently, in fact, is this part.’

  It was a gamble to take hold of her hand and draw it to the front of his breeches, but with her sitting astride him, her breasts bared to his gaze, it was too great a temptation to resist.

  Her eyes widened as she felt the full extent of his desire pulsing beneath her hand. For a fleeting second, the very size of him induced a thread of fear. Then she looked into his eyes and saw his longing, and hope, his very heart open to the risk that she might reject him.

  ‘Idiot.’ She sighed affectionately, leaning forward and kissing his forehead tenderly. A look of profound relief washed over his taut features, just a split second before he very naughtily gathered the breast that dangled so temptingly close to his lips deeply into his mouth. As he suckled, Hester gave way to curiosity, tentatively exploring the explicitly masculine contours that lay beneath her hand.

  ‘I can’t help noticing,’ Jasper said after a while, ‘that you are getting well acquainted with my one fully functioning part.’

  Hester blushed and hid her face in his shoulder. ‘Jasper, I have to admit I am still a little afraid. Before I met you I was terrified at the prospect of ever becoming completely a woman.’ She raised her face to look at him, casting all caution to the winds. ‘P…please, my husband. Won’t you chase all my fears away? For good?’ Deliberately, she tightened her fingers around the length of him.

  With a rather wicked smile, he rolled her on to her back and gazed down lovingly into what for him was the most beautiful face in the world.

  ‘It will be good. That I can promise. My whole life will be dedicated from this moment forth to chasing your fears away. On a regular basis.’

  Just before his mouth claimed hers she whispered her thanks.

  Then he set about making good his promise.

  ISBN-13: 9781460349656

  His Cinderella Bride

  Copyright © 2007 by Annie Burrows

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