“A,” Richard said, apropos of nothing.
Blake glanced at him. “What was that, Rich?”
“Neuf,” Africa chirped.
“Seventeen seventy-six,” Percy countered.
Richard shrugged. “Nothing, just something the birds like.” He began stacking the discs back on their spindle.
Blake’s gaze narrowed as he glanced to the French-speaking Africa. “Richard, do me a favor, will you? Keep track of what your birds are saying. See if there’s a pattern.”
Her brother nodded and happily withdrew a sheaf of paper from a desk drawer.
Jocelyn was thrilled at Blake’s patience, even though Richard would understand little of her husband’s obsession with war and codes. “Richard, do you know French?” she asked, wondering if he could even write out Africa’s nonsense.
“Antoinette talked in funny words,” Richard said with a shrug. “I learned them.”
“Antoinette?” Uneasy, Jocelyn glanced at Blake, but he seemed lost in thought. Surely . . . No, he could not think her brother’s wife had anything to do with codes. “That’s ridiculous. Antoinette always irritated the birds. I think she is using them as an excuse to see the house.”
“Maybe so,” Blake said with a shrug. “But you’ve given me an idea.”
She hoped it was about Charlemagne and not her sister-in-law. “I take it that the birds and present company keep your brain leaping about like a frog until, ultimately, you hope to cross the pond?” Jocelyn asked, not expecting him to follow her nonsense any more than she did his.
“It’s the reason I work the mind teasers,” he agreed, sitting up and propping his shoulders against the shelves, draping his arm over a bent knee in a purely masculine pose that took her breath away. “It takes an agile brain to stay out of ruts.”
“I don’t suppose you could apply your agile brain to costumes we might make for the masquerade?” Jocelyn plucked Percy off Blake’s hair and placed the obnoxious bird on his perch, feeding him a nut kernel to persuade him to stay put.
“Ghosts, and we put sheets over our heads?” Blake asked hopefully.
She threw a walnut meat at him.
“Saint Francis of Assisi,” Lady Carrington murmured. “Although I believe Jocelyn would then have to dress as a dove or a donkey.”
“A soiled dove,” Jocelyn said mischievously.
“Virgin Mary, more like,” Blake countered, shoving to his feet and towering over her. “Saint it is, thumbing our noses at the anti-Catholic bigots. You may wear feathers on your wings.” He plucked a gray one from his coat sleeve.
“Saints don’t have wings,” she protested uneasily as he took her elbow and turned her toward the door.
“Saints, angels, who knows the difference? Either one is likely a bore.” He bowed to her mother. “I beg your leave, my lady. We have plans to pursue.”
He steered Jocelyn out of the study and closed the door behind him without waiting for any reply, apparently already accepting he wouldn’t get one from her less than social family.
“My brothers-in-law pitched fits when Richard let his birds loose in the house,” Jocelyn murmured nervously, as he maneuvered her toward the stairs.
“I might protest a chicken on my head, too,” Blake pointed out. “Percy, however, I’ve grown used to. He’s easily trained and responds to various signals. Quite fascinating, actually. Who taught them to speak French?”
“Not Richard. We had a French tutor but she fled after about six months in our mad household. Antoinette, perhaps. She’s had them these last years.”
Blake seemed lost in thought after that comment, but he led her inexorably up the stairs. Jocelyn considered fighting him off. But her heart fluttered in anticipation, and she knew everything worked against her, including herself.
“Did you wish me to prepare a room up here for you?” she asked, refusing to let him push her any farther than the door. “The carriage house must be difficult to heat.”
His eyes were shadowed as he gazed at her, and she had to look away from the knowledge in them. And the desire.
“I’ve slept alone all my life. Cold doesn’t bother me. If you want me to sleep outside, I will.”
He waited. This was where she should smile vacantly, tap him on the chest, flap her lashes, and tell him good night.
She swallowed back the falsities. Blake had been nothing but honest with her. It was time her new mature, responsible self learned to be honest as well. She simply didn’t know how to begin.
“You have given me everything I’ve dreamed of,” she murmured, hoping this one truth would prime the pump. Forthrightness did not come easily to her. “And all I’ve done in return is shoot your toe and spend your money so you cannot have what you want.”
“I am not looking for payment,” he said in a tone that could have reflected annoyance—or hurt. “I have made my choices deliberately. You owe me nothing.”
It was hard to imagine such a large, self-assured man feeling insulted, so she sought other meanings. “I . . . I thought we had a business deal.” She picked nervously at her gown, still too frightened of herself to face him. “I didn’t keep my end of the bargain.”
Blake traced his finger along an escaped lock of hair resting against her jaw. Jocelyn shivered at the tenderness of his touch—and the yearning he stirred inside her. She had never known tenderness and had not realized how she craved it.
“It’s not as if there are any guarantees you will keep the house,” he reminded her. “So my end of the bargain has not held up, either. I regret that I could not give it to you free and clear. But I think . . . I hope that we have gone beyond that bargain, haven’t we?”
She wanted so desperately to believe that—but she could not trust dreams and wishes. Jocelyn hugged herself and dared to look up. The light of a single candle wasn’t sufficient to see more than the deep sockets of Blake’s eyes and the flash of silver in his thick hair. Her insides heated with desire with just those brief glimpses.
“I haven’t been honest about my feelings for so long that I cannot know how I feel anymore,” she admitted. “It has always been easier to smile through adversity, tease people out of their rage, and look uncomprehending when they ask too much. The only thing I know right now is that I’m frightened. Fear overwhelms all other emotion.”
“You sheltered your mother and brother from reality as your father once did.” He nodded acknowledgment of her reasons for hiding. “And now you fear I will add to your burden.”
She bent her head in shame. “I’m sorry. I know I’m being selfish. But I’m so tired—”
He tipped her chin up with his finger. “You are one of the least selfish women I know. I had hoped I had given you enough time to trust me, but I can see where you might have doubts.” His tone was wry. “I want to beat my fist against the wall and kick something right now. You have a right to be wary. I am not always civil.”
She laughed shakily. “Or civilized. But you are a good man. I trusted you enough to marry you.” She took a deep breath, straightened her shoulders, and met his gaze. “It is the future that frightens me, not you. I have suffered one too many disasters in my life, and I keep waiting for the next to hit.”
Blake reached past her and opened the bedroom door. Warmth and the delicious scent of lavender emanated from the chamber. “My mother keeps expecting me to die, and in consequence she would wrap me in batting and store me in a wardrobe if she could. Living in fear is not living. The world is made for exploring.”
Enticed from the drafty hall, Jocelyn drifted into her room. A blazing fire lit the grate. In front of it, water steamed in a large hip bath. Candles illumined every surface. Her kitten had curled into a fuzzy ball and fallen asleep in her chair.
The bedcovers had been turned back, and a bouquet of late autumn roses dropped their pink petals on her pillow.
He’d set the scene for seduction.
28
Blake clenched his molars and wished he was a praying man. His l
ust for his wife was so powerful that he’d been tempted throughout the day to heave her over his shoulder and haul her off to bed. Any bed. Or sofa. Or patch of grass. He ached with need. He just might conceivably die of lust, humiliating as that might be.
But the more he knew of Jocelyn, the better he understood that while pouncing on her might give him momentary respite, it would not generate the future he wanted. She might acquiesce because she thought she must, but devil take it, he wanted her to want him. He might as well shove a knife between his ribs and carve out his heart as to admit such a weakness.
He was praying that a modicum of patience would achieve his goals. Solving puzzles was one of his favorite things to do, and his wife was a puzzle he might explore forever, if he took extra care while she was still skittish.
She trailed her fingers through the hot bathwater and gazed at him with such wide-eyed doubt that Blake knew he had to study the situation carefully. She’d revealed some of her true self tonight. She wasn’t the blithe, confident sophisticate that she portrayed to the world. She was barely more than a terrified girl who carried too much weight on her slender shoulders.
Oddly, that didn’t reassure him as it ought. He’d never taken care of anyone but himself.
“There’s . . . a dressing screen, if you would like a bath,” she said hesitantly. “I had not thought how cold it would be for you to wash in the carriage house.”
Blake bit back a groan of dismay. That she mistook any offer of comfort as belonging to someone else told him enough of her upbringing to make his heart ache.
“The bath is for you,” he said. “I think it’s time someone looked after you for a change, instead of the other way around.”
Her eyes widened even farther. “We have servants to look after me,” she said in puzzlement.
“And you would not order them to fetch a hot bath because you know how much work it is,” he pointed out, beginning to understand her even more. “Even though I assume we pay them well and they are happy to do it.”
She looked startled, began to say something, then shook her head. He prepared for a vociferous argument. Which was foolish, because she never argued. She presented her back to him.
“Unhook me, please.”
She didn’t have to ask twice. Still wary of such unexpected success but unable to resist the opportunity to stroke her velvet skin, Blake crossed the room in two strides. His fingers felt large and clumsy on the frail fabric and tiny hoops. He wasn’t a rake like Atherton. His women of choice had been bored matrons and paid prostitutes, women who came to him in dishabille. He was almost as much a virgin at this seduction business as his wife.
With a lifetime of sensual delight as the prize, he would learn this lesson as well as he learned all others and enjoy it a thousand times more.
He eased the bodice sleeves off, then pressed a kiss to her bare shoulder as he untied the ribbons of her outer chemise. Blake burned to carry his kisses lower, to nip and taste and arouse, but he restrained his building passion. Unwrapping his wife was far more absorbing than solving a puzzle, and she deserved his attention.
When she did not object to his ministrations but merely held the sagging folds of cloth to her bosom, he unknotted the laces of her stays.
The ache in his loins demanded that he shove all the hampering fabric to the floor and claim what was his, but once the laces were unfastened, Blake fisted his fingers to prevent further depredation. “Tell me what you would like,” he said hoarsely.
“The . . . dressing screen, I believe. To keep the heat in.”
He’d rather break the screen into kindling if she meant to put it between them, but he dragged the heavy frame over to the fire and set it around the tub.
By the time he returned, she’d dropped her garments and stood only in a gossamer shift, with her back to him. Blake’s cock swelled against the restraint of his buttons. His, primeval instinct cried. Delicate skin, sumptuous curves . . . His. And he daren’t touch. Yet.
“Shall I wash your hair?” he suggested politely, slamming a mental fist into his primeval instincts and knocking them down.
She cast him a startled glance over her shoulder. Firelight danced shadows over her bare slender back, silhouetting her curves beneath the linen. Strands of light locks tumbled to her shoulders, and he fought the urge to fling her hairpins into the fire.
“Take off your coat,” she whispered, rewarding his patience. “It will get wet.”
Blake eagerly complied. By the time he’d peeled his arms from the sleeves, she’d dropped the shift and climbed into the tub. Before she sank into the water, he was given a heavenly glimpse of smooth, fair skin, a shapely back that narrowed, then curved in perfect globes below the waist.
He was a lucky, lucky man.
She covered her bosom with her arm and kept her back to him but did not demand that he leave. After all, he’d seen most of her in bits and pieces. Just not whole, like this, like Venus rising from the sea. Blake swallowed hard.
“My hair?” she inquired cautiously.
He would trade his right hand to touch that glorious mane of silvery gold, but she already owned too much of him, so he kept that sentiment to himself. Kneeling beside the tub, he gently sought and removed each pin, digging his fingers through thick silk and trying not to groan too loud with pleasure.
“Perhaps you should take off your waistcoat and shirt so they won’t get wet?” she suggested once her hair tumbled to cover her back and shoulders.
In a surge of delight that his wife wasn’t shy—and that she didn’t object to where he hoped this was going—Blake threw his old leather waistcoat across the room, then unwrapped his neckcloth.
She peeked daringly over her shoulder to watch. Pretending not to notice, he peeled his linen from the band of his trousers and slowly drew the shirt upward, revealing his bare chest one rib at a time, stretching his arms over his head so she could see all of him.
He feared his trouser buttons would pop when she gasped and hurriedly returned to splashing in the water. Inordinately pleased that she seemed to appreciate what she’d seen, he let his shirt join her gown on the floor and reached for the pitcher beside the tub. “Duck and let me pour this over your hair.”
She obeyed, probably for the first and last time, Blake thought with a mental smile as he soaked handfuls of flaxen tresses.
“Are you staying warm?” he asked, taking the scented soap she handed him.
“Yes, very,” she said in a husky voice.
He wasn’t a man who smiled often, but he thought he might crack his face with the grin spreading across it. He had her hot and naked. One step at a time. . . .
“Will you bathe when I am done?” she asked as he pressed suds through her hair.
And terrify her with his great throbbing rod? He didn’t think so. “Another time.”
She pondered that, or kept her mouth shut so soapy water didn’t drown her. Blake applied all his vast concentration to removing every bit of soap from her hair. And still his gaze drifted over her shoulder, to the wet globes of her breasts. Suds ran down the curves, lingering at aroused nipples, and he didn’t know how much longer he could withstand temptation.
When she bent her knee and propped her foot on the tub’s edge so she might run a soapy cloth over her leg, Blake learned the limits of his restraint.
Rubbing the cloth over her knee, Jocelyn didn’t think she’d teased her husband on purpose. She was many things, but a wanton was not one of them. It was just . . . Blake was behaving with such composure that she needed to know if their passionate wedding afternoon had been a fluke or if he truly desired her.
She didn’t have a great deal of experience with desire. She simply knew she was naked, and he wasn’t touching her. And she wanted him to. Very, very much, she wanted his hands on her skin. Her body seemed to require it, even though she suspected she shouldn’t encourage him or herself. She leaned over farther to scrub her toes.
She was a simple woman with simple hungers. Per
haps just this once . . .
No. For many reasons, that was a very bad idea.
At his hungry growl, she hastily returned her foot to the water.
“The towel, please,” she said stiffly, having no idea how she would smile her way out of this predicament.
She was about to oppose a very angry man. One justified in his anger. She felt guilty that she had not opposed him from the start. He’d offered her this lovely bath and been all that was kind and said wonderful things—for Blake, anyway. And because he said them, she knew he meant what he said. It wasn’t polite flattery.
She had wanted to please him. But she couldn’t.
What she was about to do was unconscionable. And she had to do it, for her family’s sake as well as her own.
Instead of handing her a towel, he began drying her hair with it. Jocelyn wanted to weep at his attentive care. Blake had the ability to apply his entire concentration to what he was doing. It would be so wonderful to give herself up to his ministrations. . . .
“Please, Blake,” she murmured helplessly. “I cannot do this. I simply cannot.”
His comforting strokes froze, then resumed, a little more cautiously. “Do what, precisely?” he asked without inflection.
“Anything!” she said in exasperation at her inability to express herself. She smacked the water, splashing droplets onto the rug. “It doesn’t matter what I want. It’s just that I cannot.”
“You’re afraid I’ll hurt you?” he asked in that professorial tone he adopted when addressing a problem. “Has someone else hurt you?”
That last sounded a little more explosive, and Jocelyn waved her hand to dismiss whatever he had in his head. “No, never. Just give me the towel, please. We’ve discussed this. I thought I could, but I simply can’t. I have to think of my family first. You may not want me to look after you, but they need my care.”
He stopped rubbing her hair, and Jocelyn refused to glance over her shoulder. She had blatantly asked that he strip to his trousers, and now she would have to suffer the consequences if she looked or touched. Her husband was a powerful male animal, and she didn’t have the willpower to resist him. Although if he was scowling at her . . . she might simply die of heartbreak.
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