Ever His Bride

by Linda Needham

  He thought suddenly and irrationally about the long week gone by. Lying sleeplessly in his lonely bed, dreading his return, worried that she might turn him out of his own house?

  “You’re very handsome, Hunter.” Her eyes were smoky as she played untamed hands down his chest, slid her fingers across his belly, until she reached for the root of him.

  “Woman, you—” But he hadn’t been prepared, and hissed and rocketed to his knees as she wrapped her fingers around him.

  He made some animal growlings in his throat and clenched his teeth together as she caressed him, blinding him with her random ecstasies. He fell to his hands on either side of her head, whispering for her to stop, and kissing her. “Please, Felicity. I’m too fond of this.”

  “You are very large. And very warm.” He took a sharp breath as she fit the tip of him against her.

  There was something seductive about watching, knowing with certainty where he left off and she began, opened to him, a spreading flower. Then she was tilting her hips to meet with that final barrier, the one she’d offered him so boldly.

  “Please come to me, Hunter.”

  “Oh, yes!” He was at the end of his tether, could last no longer. “One moment’s suffering,” he said, hoping to draw off the pain of his entry.

  “Never in your arms, Hunter.”

  “Oh, sweet!” He thrust firmly and the very tip of his shaft disappeared just inside her creamy tightness. A miracle of blending; his heart aching and his muscles cramped.

  “Hunter!”

  “Are you all right?”

  She arched her back and hissed a ‘yes’, then took him deeper still. Her breasts thrust out to him, to his mouth, giving him focus against his beleaguering need to thrust and thrust. His arms quaked as he drew a straining nipple into his mouth, curling it between his teeth and tongue, until she was shuddering and calling his name again.

  And she was weeping, tears sliding out of the corners of her eyes and across her temples.

  When he started to pull out of her she grabbed his hips and held him. “No, Hunter.”

  “Not painful?”

  “A wondrous stretching.” She lifted her hips an inch, an irresistible invitation and a long throaty growl.

  He was lost, propelled himself mindlessly the rest of the way, till he was joined with her fully. God, how he had dreaded his homecoming; yet now this rapture, this overwhelming need to lose himself in her forever! He was seething, muscles cramped, his groin on fire. She was tightness itself, and he would have ground into her if he dared.

  He suspended himself above her, his mind a muddle of lavender and sweat and sighing. His wife was staring up at him with misty sea eyes, and she was tilting her hips in a quiet, pulsing rhythm.

  “The point of no return?” she asked.

  “Long past, my sweet.” He kissed her mouth and her eyelids, riding her hips as his heart rode her pulse. “Long past.”

  Felicity loved this wild, earth-fragrant dance they were pursuing, the hot pleasure that licked and spiraled upward between them, like riding the currents in a balloon. She clutched at her husband’s broad-muscled back, at his backside, sweat-drenched with his straining. Her breasts had ripened under his mouth, he’d turned her skin to sunlight, and implanted that driving urge to thrust her hips to meet him again and again.

  Her stiff-collared husband looked the perfect savage in the hearthlight, his face no longer masked but animated in exotic elation as he reared and roared, drew himself from her and returned. He was chanting her name against her ear, ever lifting her senses toward something that he held in reserve for her, something that now made her buck and strain against him, and with him—and because of him.

  “Come with me, sweet.” His voice was low and thick and curled around her mouth. “Look at me, please.”

  She found his shining, dark eyes, and wondered where he meant her to follow. Her husband trembled violently above her, and the great, heated heaviness between her thighs spread like a wildfire through her belly and out to her limbs. A splendidly potent rippling began and built where she was joined to him, making her gasp. Unrefined, undefinable bliss pounded through her, and she was launched free of the earth to soar the skies, to tumble on the clouds and ride the sea.

  His name spilled out of her in a prolonged melody that rose and fell with the waves and waves of impossible pleasure. He was the cause, and the cure.

  “Dear Felicity, I—” Hunter reared up on his hands, and thrust himself into her till their bones met and she was moaning, and still she pulled at him and drove him deeper. And then he finally seemed to let himself go, surged against her like the violent sea.

  Felicity thought she’d reached that last great height, but she felt him stiffen and thicken inside her, heard his sharp intake of air, and then he was pouring something of himself into her, something hot and thick, something that filled her with languor even as it boiled her skin. She slipped up and over another cloud, called out to him one last time, then came floating downward, spiraling and weary, slick with his sweat and hers, her nostrils sharp with a new and heady fragrance.

  He brushed her lips with his and smiled lazily. “Not hours, I’m afraid.” His ragged breathing seemed to keep him from saying more. Her own breathing wasn’t much easier, but she hadn’t been laboring like a stallion as he had been. “Next time, my sweet, I’ll try to hold back.”

  “Yes, next time, Hunter.” She had never seen his gaze so very genuine and smiled.

  Next time. He would hold her like this again, another time, another day. This sweetness wouldn’t be their last; perhaps he was learning. He was still buried inside her, still large and ultimately intriguing, and they were swathed in dampness.

  “Oh, God.” His eyes were glazed and watery, and held his weight above her, on arms that quaked. “You are beautiful, Felicity Claybourne.”

  She couldn’t remember him ever saying her name with his own attached, certainly never without his scorn. She kept it in her heart, to save and examine whenever her doubts might surface.

  Whatever happened, they were married now— really and truly married.

  And perhaps now she could start counting forward from the day they were married, instead of backward from a year.

  Chapter 18

  “I ain’t about to read no books for babies, miss!”

  Giles slapped the storybook onto the table and stuffed his fists into his pockets.

  “Very well, Giles.” Felicity refused to coddle the boy in his prideful tantrums, especially with all the other children looking on. They adored him, worshiped him, and she wouldn’t have them picking up the worst of his habits. “If you don’t know how to read—”

  “You know damn well I can read this baby stuff!” His cheeks flamed like cherries when he was angry. “I just don’t want to! I got things to do.”

  And she was pretty well sure he meant to do them in Threadneedle Street.

  “I’ve only asked you to read aloud to the others. They so like to hear you. And the job pays three pence, for a half-hour of your precious time. Where else can you find that kind of work—guaranteed?”

  Andy wrapped his arm around Giles’s waist. “Read to us, Giles. Please!”

  “‘N’ read like a pirate!” Jonathan said, cuffing Giles in the arm. “Growl up your voice like ya do!”

  Felicity smiled at Giles across the heads of his admirers. He narrowed his eyes at her and frowned.

  “All right, miss. But I’ll have my pay in advance.” He stuck out his grimy hand and she wondered if she would ever get him into a bath again. He’d looked so clean when they left Blenwick. But at least now Giles had become a regular here at the Beggar’s Academy, and it made her proud, relieved that he was eating well, wearing boots with solid soles.

  “I pay when the job is done, Mr. Pepperpot, per our usual agreement.”

  He fixed her with a stare, then reeled in his hand. “Fair ‘nuff.”

  The children cheered, but he was still frowning as they drew him t
o the front of the schoolroom.

  Their clothes were cleaner now, their faces shining and filling out. She’d had the walls whitewashed and chinked, had provided adequate food, found a sturdy worktable, and assisted Gran in developing and running a more rigid program of learning. But every week, twenty or more new children asked for help and had to be turned away for lack of space. Short of a miracle, all she could do was care for the lucky ones who fit inside the small building.

  Hunter had been wrong about her: if her charity was truly self-serving, she’d have felt better at the end of each day, instead of worse. As it was, she now worked longer hours than ever, sometimes returning home after her husband, and she had learned to beg castoffs from merchants in the name of the Beggar’s Academy.

  Dear Hunter. The thought of him always made her heart gallop. She hadn’t slept in her own bed since the night he’d returned from his travels. And she awoke each morning, wrapped in his embrace, and ever more certain that his heart was changing—that after their first year together ended, another would begin. And that they would have unending years to follow.

  Their peace had lasted nearly three weeks. The subject of the slums remained untouched between them; he allowed her the time and a generous amount of money, and she never took home the misery or the stench that he hated so much, but would hail a private cab on Shoreditch and behind the closed shades she would change out of her muddied boots and wrap them in oil cloth, removed the frumpy overdress she wore to protect her clothes. She would wash her face and hands with lavender water from the canteen she carried, inspect her clothes and scrubbed off any hint of Bethnal Green.

  She never mentioned Betts or Andy, Giles and least of all, the Beggars Academy. He knew nothing of her work here, not even that the place existed. Not secrets that must be hidden from him, but to ward off the shadows they would conjure between them.

  “What have we here, Mrs. Claybourne?” Gran lifted her new spectacles and peered into one of the filthy wooden barrels Felicity had uncovered during the whitewashing. The woman lifted out an old book. “Millstone’s Reader.”

  Felicity laughed and reached in for more. “You must not have opened those barrels in a long time.”

  “And why would I? I’ve been here seventeen years, and until last week, the pair were holding up our worktable, even way back then. Could have been hiding the crown jewels and I’d not have had a notion.”

  “More like a feast for the bookworms! What a sad waste.” Felicity blew a nest of mildewy paper-castings off the bindings.

  Gran snorted and fanned the air. “Can hardly read the title through the green. Not much to save here.”

  “You never know, Gran. Must be pictures to salvage and—”

  “I’ll leave you to your quest, dear. It’s time I see to heating up our lunch.”

  Felicity retrieved the rest of the books from the barrel, then sat at the new table, leafing through the brittle readers, feeling a bit melancholy as the edges of the pages broke off between her fingers.

  The students had written their names and the dates on the inside covers, just below where ‘Beggar’s Academy’ had been stamped in watery black ink. Most of the books had at least five names, and the dates went back as far as twenty-five years.

  She wondered where these grown-up children were right now—which ones had learned their reading and arithmetic, and escaped the squalor of Bethnal Green. And she wondered which of them still lived in these same twisted lanes; which had died too young of the cholera or whooping cough.

  So far, she had found little to save. Refusing to give up, she flipped open another book.

  And then her world went a little topsy-turvy.

  The inside cover was like all the others, yellowed and faded, the edges worn to a roundness. Three different untutored hands had scrawled signatures across the page, one below the next—yet one name stood out, proud and defiant, the letters every bit as bold as they were today.

  HUNTER CLAYBOURNE, OCTOBER 1831.

  “Hunter?” Her tears blurred his signature, as if conspiring to hide the familiar hand from her.

  But this couldn’t be right!

  In 1831, Hunter would have been about eleven, a young man sent off to boarding school, like all the other sons of his social class. He’d said he hadn’t attended Eton or Harrow, but surely he had been schooled at one of the other fine English seats of learning; his father would have insisted on it.

  This Hunter Claybourne couldn’t be hers. Impossible.

  But for this one indisputable truth, this mildewed, pauper-schoolbook, with its telling signature wedged between two other names, suddenly made everything she knew about her husband fall into place: his illogical intolerance for the wretched, the scars she’d felt on his feet, those on his knuckles, his paralyzing panic at the workhouse, his disgust at the smell she had brought home on her clothing …

  Hunter had grown up in Bethnal Green. Dear God, he’d been a child of poverty, not privilege!

  The room around her had begun to reel.

  “Are you all right, Felicity?” Gran was at her elbow.

  She snapped the book shut, raising a cloud of musty mildew, and stood up. “I’m fine, Gran.”

  “You’re as pale as these walls.”

  She turned the fragile book in her hands. Hunter’s book. He’d had no tutors in Latin, no frowning headmaster. Yet he had succeeded beyond all possible expectations. How proud he must be of all he had become! How proud she was for him!

  “You’ve done too much today, Felicity, my dear.” Gran was patting her hand again. “You haven’t rested for a minute. Perhaps you should go home.”

  “Yes. I think I will. My husband and I have a dinner party tonight, at Lord and Lady Meath’s. I needed to leave early anyway.” She faltered and leaned against the table.

  Gran reached toward the book. “Here, then, I’ll put this with the rest of—”

  “No! Please.” Felicity hid the book behind her, unwilling to share her secret, Hunter’s secret, with anyone. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bark. I just thought I’d keep a copy of one of the old readers—just for reference.”

  “Very well, dear.”

  Giles met her at the door, a frown of worry on his forehead. “Are you sick, Mrs. Claybourne?”

  She wanted to hug him for asking, but only smiled and slipped the book into the pocket of her shawl. “Just a bit under the weather, Giles. I’ll be fine in the morning. You help out Gran today in my place, won’t you?”

  Giles nodded very seriously. “‘Pon my word, miss. Won’t cost you a sou.”

  Felicity accepted hugs from all the children as they clung to her blousy muslin overdress, and finally ran out into the noisome riot that pulsed just outside the peace of the Beggar’s Academy. Even in the brightness of day, and in all the commotion, everything was dampened in shades of gray and the fetid drab of hopelessness.

  But today, instead of closing off her nose to the stench, and veiling her vision from the implacable indignities of such poverty, she walked slowly and purposefully through the byways of Bethnal Green, imagining the boy that Hunter had been, trying to see the world as he had lived it.

  A clever boy with large dreams would have loathed the tumbled-down houses, the shuttered-up windows, the rooms that darkened like rat holes off the doorways. Idleness was a corruption to him, and he had met it firsthand here on the street corners, in the gin-sodden eyes of bricklayers and bonemen. Wicked commerce in the byways, selling flesh and stolen silver. Half-naked children squalling at their mother’s milkless breasts. Had he slept cold in alleyways; had his lips cracked with the untended fevers of childhood? Had his soul been broken here?

  If her Hunter had been the boy whose name was scrawled in the schoolbook, he must have felt his life always and forever falling in on itself.

  And yet Hunter had raised himself out of it, and walked away.

  No wonder he’d never wanted to return.

  “Ah, a good day to you, Mrs. Claybourne!” Tilson brightened
when she opened the door to Hunter’s outer office.

  Everything seemed so normal here, the mighty hub of the Claybourne Exchange: enduring, efficient, making her wonder why she had been compelled to visit. The name in the book just couldn’t be the same Hunter Claybourne who gave his counsel to the Bank of England, the man who had skillfully maneuvered her into marrying him to gain another railway, and who now was poised to take a lofty position on the Board of Trade.

  Surely the Hunter Claybourne she had married was born to this kind of financial intrigue. He was nurtured and groomed for it. How else could he have learned his business with such proficiency?

  “You’re looking very well, Mrs. Claybourne.”

  “Thank you, Tilson. And how is your wife?”

  Tilson smiled fondly. “Oh, very happy. She thanks you most kindly for the raisins and dried figs. A most unexpected anniversary gift.”

  “The gift is from both my husband and me—”

  “Yes, of course, of course. And you must be here to see him. He’s inside, meeting with a panel of investors. Very, very important. I don’t know how long he’ll be, or I’d—”

  But the door to the office clicked open and Hunter was standing in the doorway, handsome and roguish, and very sure of himself. His half-smile harbored an intimacy that was so abundantly apparent to Felicity that she could imagine him nuzzling her breast.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Claybourne.”

  Her heart fluttered as if she were a schoolgirl with a mad crush on a handsome Haymarket actor. “Good afternoon, Mr. Claybourne.”

  He stepped forward and stretched out his hand to her; he was financier and husband, the foundations of the earth. She had been foolish to come here seeking her answers. It didn’t matter where he’d come from.

  “What an unexpected pleasure, madam. I am delighted.”

  He jerked his head at Tilson, and the man scooted out into the mezzanine and closed the door, leaving them alone in the outer office.

  “I hope I’m not disturbing your work, Hunter.”

  “Madam, you can be one hundred miles from me or across the sea and still disturb my work.” He lifted a curl and wound it round his finger.