Desire leaped, as did tenderness. “You are the only wife for me. Let’s go upstairs, shall we?”
Their boot heels thumped on bare floors in empty rooms until they came to the second largest chamber, which occupied a corner of the house and boasted a small balcony.
“Our bedroom,” Daniel said, opening the door. “Unless you’d prefer another.”
Because the room had no curtains, light flooded through windows and French doors. Some considerate soul had left a window cracked, so the scent of the recently scythed yard blended with sawdust and the faint fragrance of lilacs.
“We have a bed,” Kirsten said, striding to the only piece of furniture in the room. “How is it we announced our engagement to George and Elsie yesterday, and there’s a bed in the vicarage this afternoon?”
A large bed, complete with sheets, pillows, and a green-and-lavender quilt that blended nicely with the sunny location and spring day.
“I suspect George and Elsie were busy this morning,” Daniel said. “When you ladies departed for the teapot last night, I was assured at great length that the earl will be pleased to get my epistle regarding our betrothal.”
Sent to Town by messenger, at George’s insistence, bless him.
Kirsten smoothed a nonexistent wrinkle from the quilt. “Nicholas isn’t one for ceremony. I think he’d be an innkeeper were his countess willing. I’d never have suspected George had the makings of a country squire, though, and who knows where Adolphus will end up.”
For Kirsten, that was nearly babbling. Daniel closed the door, and because his intended would wish it, he also locked it, though the house was deserted.
“Kirsten, come here, please.”
The imperative, however polite, caught her attention. They wouldn’t use it with each other often, but today was special. She crossed the room and stood before him.
“In your eyes, I see worry,” Daniel said, taking Kirsten’s hands and finding them cool. “You are haunted by the fiancés who have deserted you. I will not abandon or forsake you, not ever. You are everything my heart desires, and our wedding day cannot come quickly enough to suit me.”
She leaned in, her forehead against Daniel’s chest, her arms around his waist. “I could not sleep last night, Daniel. I’d doze off, and nightmares would find me. I dreamed you’d sailed away to Cathay, then I dreamed that I was married to Sedgewick and none of my dresses fit. I dreamed an enormous French-speaking hog came rampaging through the marriage ceremony. You’ll think me daft.”
Daniel’s worst dream in the past month had awakened him several times: He’d dreamed Olivia was alive, they were living in Little Weldon, and this entire season in Haddondale had never happened.
“Kirsten, dearest lady, I am yours. I would offer you more than mere words as reassurance of my devotion.” Daniel would offer his heart, his soul, his last penny, and—were he ever to be so blessed—his firstborn. His intimate affections were the smallest of the gifts he could share with Kirsten.
“You’ll think me wicked.” Said very softly to Daniel’s cravat.
Daniel rested his chin on Kirsten’s crown, the better to hide his smile from her. “Yesterday, you were bold and certain. Have my charms paled so soon?”
“I don’t want to tempt you to sin.”
“Then don’t tempt me to sin, tempt me to love.” Daniel kissed her, because Kirsten’s practical, efficient mind was trying to scale the heights of moral theology rather than accept the assurances of her beloved.
After a moment’s hesitation, Kirsten looped her arms around Daniel’s neck and kissed him back. This kiss was different from any they’d shared previously, softer, sweeter.
More awestruck.
“I trust you,” she said. “I hadn’t realized that’s what I’d lost, but you’ve found it for me, Daniel. I trust you.”
No, she did not. Not entirely, but she wanted to, so Daniel took his time, savoring when he yearned to plunder, teasing when every male part of him shouted demands. Before he and Kirsten left the bedroom, she would trust him in ways she could only imagine now.
And Daniel would trust her too.
She went after the knot in his cravat. “I have brothers, Daniel. You needn’t fear for my delicate sensibilities. I’ve longed to see you naked.”
“Will you afford me the same pleasure?”
Sometime, ten or twenty years hence, Daniel’s mind would stop automatically comparing this wife to his first one. Olivia had never allowed him to see her unclothed, had never initiated intimacies, had never sought his embrace even as a matter of simple marital comfort.
How miserable she must have been to have accepted Daniel’s proposal.
How desperate he’d been to have offered for her. Daniel’s father had seen the looming problem, but had conveyed judgment rather than concern to his son.
Kirsten dropped her hands. “You’ll have to unlace me if we’re to cavort as God made us.”
“I don’t believe I’ve ever cavorted before,” Daniel said, drawing off his neckcloth and shrugging out of his coat. “You must be patient with me if I’m slow to learn. I can manage your hooks and laces, though.”
Kirsten turned and swept her hair off her nape. “Perhaps you should recite me some of that Latin poetry you were bragging about yesterday. Or maybe French would get things off to a nice start.”
Daniel got things off to a nice start by kissing Kirsten’s nape, which provoked a lovely sigh as he undid her dress.
“You smell good, my lady, of roses and meadows.”
“Your hands are warm,” she countered. “And your lips…”
Daniel’s lips were learning the curve of Kirsten’s neck and shoulder, while his fingers tugged at the bow holding her laces together.
“I love that you let me do this,” he whispered. “I love getting my mouth on you.”
His mouth, his hands, his breath. Daniel went silently mad, indulging his every tactile appetite as Kirsten’s clothes joined his in a pile on the floor.
She was down to her chemise and stockings when Daniel started on the falls of his breeches.
Kirsten brushed his hands aside and sat on the bed before him. “You got to unlace me. I want to do this.”
Daniel paused, half-undone, entirely in love. “Are you keeping score?”
“Yes, I’m keeping score.” She dispatched several buttons. “And you’re ahead. You’ve kissed me nearly everywhere—” Four more buttons went down to defeat.
“Not nearly everywhere.”
“—and you’ve taken every pin from my hair.” The last pair of buttons surrendered to her deft fingers.
“Which is still braided.”
“And you, you’re not wearing underlinen. I had wondered. Your breeches always fit so perfectly.”
God help him, Kirsten had been ogling his breeches. “What else have you wondered, my lady?”
“About this.” She drew a particular part of him from his clothing, her hands cool and careful. “I’ve wondered a lot about this.”
Daniel had wondered if he’d ever get to use “this” again outside of self-gratification and untidy dreams.
“I’ve wondered a few things myself, madam.” Such as how his voice had acquired a rasp. “What color are your nipples, for example? I’ve pondered that mystery at significant length.”
“This is a significant length,” Kirsten said, caressing his shaft. “I suppose you want to see my—all of me?”
She was blushing, not because she held his erect cock in her ladylike hands, but because she couldn’t say the word nipple. Marriage to Kirsten Haddonfield would be interesting.
“Why don’t I show you all of me first?” Daniel asked, stepping back and peeling out of his breeches. “Lady Kirsten, may I introduce you to your husband’s naked form. You are the first woman to see me thus since my own mother had the privilege more
than thirty years ago.”
Daniel had tried for bravado, for a casual ease he didn’t feel. Olivia hadn’t wanted him, and there was no blustering past that. A moment of sorrow threatened, for the young man who’d married in such ignorance.
“Turn,” Kirsten said, scooting back onto the mattress. “Please.”
Daniel turned. Kirsten would be honest, and a man’s appearance ought not to matter so very much anyway.
“You are more beautiful than I am,” she groused, yanking at one of her garters and stockings. “I’m not sure how I feel about that.”
The slight pique in the way she abused her lacy garter reassured Daniel as no flowery sentiments could have.
“A man can’t be beautiful,” he said.
“Oh, yes, he can, and you are. Worse, you’ll age wonderfully.” The second garter and stocking joined the first on the floor. Kirsten’s gaze remained on her discarded clothing rather than on her naked fiancé. “I’m nervous, Daniel. What if I’m not good at this? It’s an important part of being married.”
Kirsten’s honesty would be the salvation of them. If ever their marriage floundered, if ever they came to serious differences, her honesty would see them through. Daniel stretched out on the bed and hauled her against his side.
“You relieve my fears, Kirsten. For years, I told myself this intimacy, this mutual pleasuring, wasn’t so very important. A marriage could survive on the basis of companionship and mutual respect, said I, but I was lying. The marriage cannot survive if the husband is dying inside a little more each year.”
Dying of loneliness, rage, despair, and plain human heartache. Had Olivia been enduring the same torment?
Kirsten climbed over Daniel and perched upon his breeding organs. The silk of her chemise whispered against his thighs in a caress that nearly crossed his eyes.
“I’m sorry, Daniel. If I haven’t said that before, I’m sorry. Olivia betrayed you, and you did not deserve that.”
The sorrow lanced through him again, because Olivia, however miserable she’d been, had betrayed him, and not only by stealing money from Letty. Even before Danny had arrived, Olivia had been distant and cool in the bedroom. She’d taken vows to love, honor, and obey, and kept not a one of them.
“This is not the talk of lovers,” Daniel said, shaping Kirsten’s breasts through her chemise. “Tell me what will please you.”
“Honest talk,” she said, curling down over his chest. “Honest kisses too.”
The latter Daniel could shower upon her in abundance, and so as the sun beamed down through the sparkling windows and lilacs bloomed in the yard below, he did just that.
Fourteen
Kirsten had got the knack of kissing Daniel, of twining her tongue with his, of sinking her fingers into his hair to show him an angle, to ask him for another kiss exactly like the last one.
Of what came next, however, she was largely ignorant. Arthur Morton had groped at her breasts and attempted to couple with her in the library on a chilly autumn day. Kirsten recalled counting the beats between lightning and thunder as Arthur had muttered ridiculous endearments and mashed his face to her cleavage.
When Daniel glossed his hands over her breasts, Kirsten could not have counted to three.
“I like that,” she said, hanging over him. “When you touch me.”
“Like this?” He did it again, more slowly, two hands, two breasts, the silk of her chemise enhancing both her frustration and her pleasure.
“That muddles me,” she said. “Like your kisses, but inside me too.”
“Here?” Daniel’s right palm glided lower to cup her sex.
Oh, yes. There. “I want to be naked with you.”
Kirsten wanted to put behind her that moment when her intended first beheld her. Daniel would see his prospective wife’s unclothed body, but Kirsten would know he studied a female form that could not manage the most basic of female functions.
“Soon,” Daniel said. “Let me hold you.”
Kirsten wasn’t the only one breathless and boggled. Daniel urged her onto his chest, though she resisted.
“I want to hurry, Daniel. I don’t know how to go on and I detest that. I like knowing what I’m about.”
He’d undone Kirsten’s braid at some point. Her hair spilled over her bare back, the sensation novel and soothing.
“Shall you hurry with your chemise on, my lady, or with it off?”
What chem—? “Off.”
“Lean forward.” Daniel carefully extricated Kirsten from her last article of clothing and set it aside, leaving Kirsten with a towering need to cross her arms.
Which she also resisted. This was Daniel, soon to be her husband. “Well?”
“You can’t know,” he said, grazing his nose along the underside of one breast. “You can’t possibly grasp how beautiful your trust is to me. Your courage, your desire, all of you. I am in love with a beautiful woman.”
Kirsten could not have children, but she could have Daniel’s love and be abundantly happy with him. Peace replaced her anxiety, for she’d finally, finally chosen well.
“I am in love with a wonderful man.”
Daniel’s smile—bashful, naughty, pleased—inspired another round of kissing. Then his bare hands were once more on Kirsten’s breasts, his touch slightly callused, warm, and…inventive.
And then his mouth. Daniel provoked raptures with that mouth on Kirsten’s breasts, with his fingers, stroking her in places secret and sweet. She retaliated by exploring his ribs, his belly, the trail of dark hair that met his erect cock.
A certain part of which was the same color as her nipples.
“I will like knowing what married people know,” Kirsten said, touching her tongue to Daniel’s nipple. “You taste of lavender.”
“You taste of bliss,” he said, rolling them and kissing her chin. “I’m prepared for a little hurry now, my love.”
Good heavens, he was strong.
“Then make haste with me,” she said, brushing his hair back. This was the wedding ceremony that counted, that made the two as one flesh. Daniel loomed over her, braced on his arms.
Not the soft-spoken vicar, but the man in his prime, sharing pleasure with his mate.
“I love you,” he said as Kirsten felt the first hot, blunt nudge at her body. “I will always love you.”
She encircled his wrists with her fingers, the better to brace herself against sensations so intimate, she regretted her request that he hurry.
“I love you, Daniel Banks, and I like this joining very much.”
Fortunately for Kirsten, Daniel’s version of haste was a deliberate, quiet advance and retreat that brought pleasure right into Kirsten’s body, into her soul. A bed rope creaked as Kirsten hiked a leg around Daniel’s flanks.
“You’re all right?” he whispered.
“I want—that’s better. When you do that.”
He’d developed a rhythm Kirsten could follow. Steady, relentless, sweet, and searing.
“Like that?”
Kirsten tried to form an answer—exactly like that—but the reins of her focus were flapping out of her grasp, as sensations welled in a high, fast-running torrent.
“Let go,” Daniel murmured, cradling her head against his shoulder. “Have your pleasure of me.”
Kirsten’s body understood even as her mind was uncomprehending. From inside, from her soul, a deluge of sensation crested over thought, words, will, everything. She clung, she keened, she clutched, and she panted her lover’s name until she could bear no more, and still Daniel did not relent.
“Daniel, I can’t—”
Oh, but she could, more intensely than ever as he drove her up again, this time hilting himself against her in his own surrender.
For long moments, Kirsten stroked Daniel’s hair, his breath harsh against her ear.
&nbs
p; Married life loomed as wondrously lovely, a new world of joy and pleasure, a perfect joining with the perfect man. Kirsten positively wallowed in the comfort of Daniel’s weight, in the intimacy of breathing in counterpoint to him, breasts to chest in seamless marital accommodation.
Daniel rose up enough that cool air eddied between their bodies. His hair was tousled, the muscles of his shoulders and arms bunched and flexed.
The pleasure had been marvelous, but the tenderness in Daniel’s gaze was the more precious gift.
“We’re lovers now,” Kirsten said. “I want always to be your lover, Daniel Banks.”
His lashes swept down, not quickly enough to hide the relief in his eyes.
He’d worried. He’d worried that his attentions would repulse her, that he’d be inadequate. Very likely, he hadn’t even named those fears to himself, but they were yet another legacy of his disgraceful, departed, first wife.
“I’m sleepy,” Kirsten said. “Shall we cuddle here for a moment before we dress?”
Daniel withdrew and rolled to the mattress beside her. “You don’t want to hop up, dress, and finish inspecting the house?”
“You are daft. Pass me a handkerchief, Mr. Banks. I’d rather spend the afternoon inspecting you.”
He reached across her, a casual intimacy that put the scent of him inches from Kirsten’s nose.
“Your handkerchief, my lady. I hadn’t meant to spend.”
Damn Olivia Banks to the nastiest circle of hell anyway. “This business of trust is supposed to go both ways, sir. I love that passion overcame your gentlemanly restraint. I love you.”
Daniel studied Kirsten’s expression for the length of two slow, deep breaths, then brushed her hair back and kissed her brow.
“You are my miracle, Kirsten Haddonfield, soon to be Kirsten Banks, whom I could not love more. Sleep in my arms in the broad light of day, and then you shall inspect me to your heart’s content.”
* * *
“Why do grown-ups get married, anyway?” Fred asked. “My parents barely speak to each other, and when they do, they’re sometimes not very nice.”
Frank pushed the dirt around with his shoe, which Digby was sure would get him a scolding on the way home from church.
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