“Do you not appreciate beauty?” she asked him, tipping her head a little to one side.
Another accusation.
“Of course I do,” he said. “You have looked very pretty today.”
It was only a slight exaggeration. He had found his eyes straying to her even more than was necessary on such a day. She had been bright with animation as she mingled with their guests. She had been vibrant with
smiles and laughter.
She had looked happy.
In the moonlight he could see laughter light her eyes now.
“I meant the beauties of nature,” she said. “I was not fishing for a compliment. I know I am not pretty.”
“You also do not know how to accept a compliment when one is offered,” he told her.
The laughter died from her face.
“I am sorry,” she said. “Thank you for your kind words. Your mother chose my dress and the color. Cecily chose the hat.”
Nobody, he realized with sudden insight, had ever called her pretty. What must it have been like, growing up in a family in which her siblings were all extraordinarily good-looking while she was not? And yet she could still smile and laugh at life.
He set one forefinger beneath her chin and leaned forward to kiss her briefly on the lips.
“Well,” he said, “now that I look, I can see that they are rather pretty too.” The dress and the hat, that was.
“Oh, well done.” She laughed. She also sounded rather breathless.
He had been celibate for far too long, he thought ruefully. He was very ready to proceed with the wedding night. Which was, he supposed, a good thing.
“We had better go into the house,” he said. “Unless you want more refreshments, I will show you to your room. Your maid will be waiting for you there.”
“My room?” she said.
“I will visit you there later,” he told her.
“Oh.” He was certain she was blushing, though the moonlight hid the evidence from his eyes. She was, he guessed, very close to being a virgin.
They were silent again then as they covered the remaining distance to the front door and he opened it to allow her to precede him inside. The caretaker and his wife were in the hallway ready to greet them, but Elliott soon dismissed them for the night.
He led Vanessa up the stairs, well lit by the candles in the wall sconces. She was his wife, he thought. He would bed her tonight—within the next hour, in fact—and for the rest of their lives there would be no one else but her.
It was a private vow he had taken very recently, though he was surprised that it had taken him so long to know his own mind. After his marriage, he had decided even before his return from London, he would be unswervingly monogamous, no matter how satisfying or unsatisfying he found his marriage bed to be. There was too much pain in the alternative.
He had only to look at and listen to his mother and his grandmother to understand that. His father and his grandfather had done them irreparable harm. And both ladies feared he would follow in the footsteps of his ancestors.
He would not. It was as simple as that.
It was not necessarily a happy resolution considering the identity of his bride. But it was a firm one nonetheless.
He stopped outside her dressing room and bowed over her hand as he raised it to his lips before opening the door. Her maid was busy inside there, he could see.
He turned in the direction of his own room.
13
VANESSA’S room overlooked the lake. The moon still shone across it in a wide silver band. The view was really quite breathtaking. And the house itself—the little she had seen of it anyway—was lovely.
But her mind was not really on either the moonlight or the house, which she would explore tomorrow.
She was in her room.
As opposed to his.
Or theirs.
She and Hedley had shared a room from the day of their marriage. She had assumed that all married couples did. With Hedley—
But she would not think of him tonight. She must not. She belonged to someone else now.
He had actually called her pretty on the way here. Very pretty, to be precise. He had almost joked with her, telling her that her clothes were pretty too—meaning that she was prettier, that it was she he had noticed first.
What a thorough bouncer! She sighed even as she smiled.
But he was capable of humor, even if only of a very dry kind. He was not inhuman.
Well, of course he was not.
She set her forehead against the cool glass of the window and closed her eyes.
The bed behind her had been turned down for the night. She was very aware of its presence. Perhaps she should be lying in it. But she kept remembering how he had accused her a month ago of offering herself like a sacrificial lamb. She would look like one—she would feel like one—if she lay there waiting for him.
She felt like a virgin awaiting the deflowering, she thought in some disgust. She was not a virgin. She was an experienced woman.
Well, almost experienced anyway.
And if her brain did not soon cease its incessant chattering she would surely go mad.
There was a tap on her door and it opened before she could either cross the room or draw breath to call out.
He was wearing a wine-colored dressing gown that covered him from the neck to the ankles. He looked menacing. And gorgeous too, of course.
His face was blank of any nameable expression. His eyelids were half drooped over his eyes, as they had been the first time she saw him. He was looking steadily at her and she could not help thinking of the very different reaction she must be provoking in him.
She did not often wish for the impossible, but just sometimes she wished she were beautiful. As she did now, for example.
She was wearing the ice blue silk and lace nightgown that had been chosen specifically for tonight—by her new mother-in-law, not by her. She thought its low neckline too revealing. And she very much feared that if she stood just so to any particular candle, a beholder would be able to see right through it.
She might not have minded so much if there had been something worth seeing.
She hated being self-conscious about her figure—or her lack thereof.
“I suppose,” she said, “we will grow accustomed to this.”
His eyebrows rose.
“I suppose we will,” he agreed as he stepped into the room and came toward her. “You are not nervous by any chance, are you? You are the experienced one, are you not? The one who knows how to please a man—in bed.”
If that was a joke, she was in no mood to laugh.
“You know that was a boast,” she said. “I admitted as much. It would be unkind of you to throw it in my teeth at every turn.”
Strangely, he looked even larger and more powerful in dressing gown and slippers than he did in his great-coat and boots. Or perhaps it just seemed so because he was in her bedchamber and it was their wedding night.
“Well, Vanessa.” He lifted one hand and cupped her neck and one side of her face with it. “It is time to discover just how much of a boast it was.”
He had shaved. She could smell his shaving soap or his cologne. Whatever it was, it was a masculine scent that made her want to keep on inhaling.
She swallowed.
And his lips touched hers. Though it was not really his lips. It was the soft, moist flesh inside them. His tongue pressed hard against her own lips, and she parted them. It pressed deep inside her mouth.
She inhaled sharply through her nose. Sensation darted like an arrow into her throat and downward through her breasts and her abdomen to set up a throbbing between her inner thighs.
She recognized the feeling for what it was—pure, raw sexual desire. She had felt it out by the lake at Warren Hall the day she asked him to marry her. She had denied it to herself then. It was impossible to do so now.
He drew back his head a few inches, and she realized in some shock that he had not yet touc
hed her anywhere below the neck. He had hardly even started.
“It is to be hoped,” he said, “that you do know how to please me since you are my wife and my bedfellow for life.”
His eyes were still heavy-lidded, and the voice he used was a bedroom voice if ever she had imagined one. It was pure velvet.
“The master has spoken,” she murmured. “It is to be hoped that you know how to please me, since you are my husband and my bedfellow for life.”
He looked steadily at her for several moments, his face expressionless. And then the hand that had been cupping her face and neck slid lower and along her shoulder beneath her nightgown and on down her arm. The nightgown, having nowhere else to go, went with his hand until her shoulder and breast were exposed.
And then his free hand pushed the garment off her other shoulder, and since it was a loose thing that was anchored in place only at the shoulders, it slithered its way down all the way to her feet.
Only her feet were covered. It was small comfort.
He held her just above the elbows and took a step back.
And looked.
Well, she supposed she had asked for this. She had challenged him and he was giving his answer without the medium of words.
A man’s way.
She gazed steadily back into his face as she raised one hand and pulled loose the sash of his dressing gown. It fell open.
He was naked beneath it.
He raised his head to look directly into her eyes again and lowered his arms to his sides. Ah, an invitation. She lifted both arms to push the dressing gown off his shoulders. It fell to the floor without even having to slither its way down.
Oh, gracious heaven.
He looked like a classical sculpture of idealized Greek manhood, except that he was no sculpture. He was bronzed from head to toe. His broad, firmly muscled chest was lightly dusted with dark hair. And he was alive and warm—she could feel his body heat even though they stood several inches apart. She could see his chest rise and fall with each breath.
He was slim-hipped and long-legged. His thighs were powerfully muscled.
He was aroused. And that part of him was large and powerful too.
She looked back into his eyes. She had been looking him over as frankly as he had been doing with her, she realized.
How horribly mismatched they were physically.
But he was aroused.
She touched her fingertips to his chest and then slid her palms up to rest on his shoulders.
She had never been more terrified in her life.
“It seems,” he said softly, “that I have something to prove.”
Her inner thighs and the passage within throbbed with something that felt more like pain than the simple anticipation of pleasure.
“Yes,” she said.
But instead of waiting for her to walk toward the bed, he bent down to pick her up and carry her there before setting her down in the middle of the mattress. He peeled back all the bedcovers before joining her there.
Naked flesh had touched naked flesh. She felt as if she were on fire.
He did not extinguish the candles.
This was not, then, something that was going to be accomplished surreptitiously under cover of blankets and darkness.
He lay on his side next to her, raised himself on one elbow, and leaned over her to kiss her again. She opened her mouth to him this time, and when his tongue came inside, she suckled it, then sucked harder to draw it deep and pulsed her teeth against it.
He made a low sound in his throat.
His hand explored her, strong and warm and nimble-fingered. He found her nipples again, as he had by the lake, and rolled them as he had then between his thumb and forefinger, but harder this time until the raw ache she felt below spiraled upward into her throat too.
He ended the kiss and moved his head to one of her breasts, taking it into his mouth, sucking on it, teasing the swollen nipple with his tongue until she buried both hands in his hair and gripped hard.
Not that she had been idle. She had turned half onto her side and moved her leg along his. She moved closer to him and rubbed herself against him, circling her hips as she did so.
And when he raised his head from her breast in order to nuzzle her in the hollow between her shoulder and neck, she took his erection in her hand, caressing him lightly, tightening her fingers about him, causing him to make a sound rather like a growl.
One of his hands was exploring her too, his long fingers pushing between her legs, parting folds, caressing, teasing, reaching up a little way inside her.
She was wet, she realized. She could both feel and hear the wetness.
Desire became pure agony.
And then he turned her onto her back again and came over on top of her. He was big and heavy.
Wonderfully big.
Wonderfully heavy.
His knees pressed between her thighs and pushed them wide. She lifted her legs and twined them about his as he slid his hands beneath her, raised her, and came all the way inside her with one long, firm thrust.
She drew a deep breath and then could not seem to expel it.
There was no pain, but she felt stretched, filled, invaded. She had not known there was so much room inside her.
Foolish thought!
He held still for a moment while he slid his hands free, and she hooked her legs more firmly about his, tilted herself, and relaxed about him. There was room, and there would be for what was about to happen, and she wanted to feel the whole of it.
She tightened her inner muscles about him. He was rock-hard.
It was his turn to inhale sharply.
And then he moved.
It was pure, raw carnal delight. Each thrust and withdrawal both aggravated and soothed the ache of her desire. And each thrust came deeper than the last—or so it seemed. There was a rhythm to the act, and Vanessa learned it and adjusted her own movements to it, contracting and relaxing inner muscles to give both him and herself delight.
What she had told him had not been an utter boast.
She did know how to please a man.
And he had not boasted at all, of course.
She wanted it to last forever, this sensual delight that was beyond anything she could possibly have imagined. But of course it did not. And finally she was glad it did not. She would, she felt, have gone out of her mind if there had not been a sudden convulsive clenching of her muscles that refused to unclench themselves until something—it was impossible to give it a name—came flowing softly but inexorably up from deep inside where the muscles were and burst through them and through her until she was trembling with wonder and then limp with a satiety that also defied words.
He had fallen still, she realized.
But then his hands were beneath her again, and he was pumping into her hard and fast until he stopped abruptly again, deep inside her, and she felt a flow of heat at her core.
She wrapped her arms about him. He was hot and sweaty.
So was she.
How strangely enticing the smell of sweat could be.
She felt suddenly cold when he disengaged from her and moved off her to lie beside her. She shivered, and he reached down and pulled the covers up over them. His one arm came beneath her neck while the other lay heavy across her. And she was warm again.
And sleepy.
And then asleep.
And so it was done.
He was married before the age of thirty, just as his grandfather had expected and he had planned. For convenience he had married one of the Huxtable sisters. Now the other two could make their debut into society and he would feel no further responsibility for them.
He was married, his marriage had been consummated, and soon, it was to be hoped, his wife would be with child. And if he was fortunate, that child would be a boy, and another duty would be done.
Duty! It was something that had weighed him down for more than a year now. How he longed sometimes to have his old carefree life back. But it
could not be done, and now he had fulfilled his most pressing obligations to his family and his position.
Elliott lay awake for a long time.
Even tonight she had wanted to quarrel with him, staking her claim to be his equal. If she must please him because she was his wife and bedfellow, then he must please her for the complementary reasons.
First Came Marriage Page 19