Ever His Bride

by Linda Needham

  He gave a grudgingly small morsel of laughter. “Please don’t.”

  Felicity turned to him and frowned grandly. “Then, you prefer her kisses to mine.”

  He shrugged. “I’ve never kissed the woman.”

  “I suggest you keep it that way.” Felicity felt exceedingly bold, and suddenly very possessive of her husband. She stood up and faced Hunter, hiked her elegant, green velvet skirt and all her petticoats to her thighs, then climbed onto his lap to straddle his hips with her knees.

  He looked startled. “What do you think you are you doing, wife?”

  She scooted forward and wrapped her hands around his neck. “I’m staking my claim—if I might employ one of my scheming uncle’s favorite phrases.”

  “Dear God.” Hunter should have cared that she was crinkling his shirtfront, but he was just roundly relieved that she was still speaking to him, and burning with pleasure. His blustering hadn’t scared her away, and now she seemed to be making a claim on his attention for the evening. He laughed out loud.

  “What’s so funny, husband?”

  “You.” But he caught his breath between his teeth as she tightened her knees around his hips. He thought of those drawers of hers, trimmed in delicate ribbon, primly opaque, and yet split right up the center, where his hand could find her dampness if he dared, where she squirmed naked against the lustfully rising wool of his trousers.

  “You taste very good tonight, Hunter. Lime aftershave.”

  Her kiss seemed too worldly and sent a shudder through him as he imagined her hot mouth on him. “God, woman!”

  And was it any wonder where his thoughts had strayed? She had unbuttoned the front of his trousers and was fondling him through his drawers and squirming against him.

  “Hunter?”

  “Yes, love.” He groaned as her fingers came around him.

  “I have a very strange urge to kiss you here—as you’ve so often kissed me.”

  She tightened her hold, and he went still for fear of spilling himself between her fingers. “Not now, Felicity,” he hissed. He grabbed her hand and stilled it when she began to move it again. “Please.”

  She sat up, looking prim and seductively innocent. “You mean it’s a reasonable thought, Hunter? To take you into my mouth, right here in the brougham, with Branson sitting on the driver’s bench?”

  “Dear woman, it’s such a reasonable thought that I will be thinking it unceasingly as I watch you sip your turtle soup.”

  “Truly?” She looked far too eager.

  “God help us if Lady Meath seats me beside you.”

  She smiled and drew a finger across the ridge of his upper lip. “If she doesn’t, then we shall just have to meet under the table, shan’t we?”

  Chapter 19

  Hunter watched his wife from across the ostentatious expanse of china and crystal and linen. Her face was gilded by the light from two candelabra. Her smile was radiant, taunting the stars in the heavens, taunting him when she cast it in his direction. The gown’s velvet was the green of her eyes, and draped across her breasts as boldly as it fit her to the waist. Her shoulders were bare and honey-pale, and his need for her had become a solid throbbing.

  He had been so sure it was all over, that she had found him out and was about to expose his fraudulent past. Pauper turned pirate turned prophet of finance. But he must have been imagining things. He would learn to keep his temper in check, and redirect her thoughts to more pleasurable pursuits. She had certainly redirected his during the ride over. Another few minutes alone in the carriage and they would have been beyond hope, and arrived at the Meaths’ drive-up in the fragrant flush of passion fulfilled.

  Now his wife was sitting across from him, flanked by Lord Oswin, a most influential member of the Board of Trade, and by the Comte de Auriville, one of Hunter’s most grateful and high-placed investors. He heard snippets of conversation and stored them away to digest later. His concentration was on his wife, and he was jealous of the time she spent without him. He spoke with Oswin’s wife and Lord Spurling’s widowed daughter, but found them pale and uninteresting in the presence of Felicity, who seemed to hold every male eye at the table. She had even managed to charm the ladies with her genuine interest in the antics of their children.

  Children. He’d purposely let the matter of fertility cycles drop, had put the book back in his library the morning after he’d made Felicity his wife in truth. He couldn’t have kept himself from her, couldn’t have checked his passion and still shared the house with her. He was falling like a fool. And he had stopped fighting it.

  And now he had discovered a swaggering pride in the fact that she would be leaving with him tonight, hopefully assaulting him in their carriage, and sharing his bed and his breakfast. She had made a game of touring him through each newly turned room in his once-dark house. She would lock the door behind them, show him leggy sofas and brass pots, and then she would seduce him there on the floor, or in a chair, until he could stand it no longer and he would lose himself in her exquisite passion. Not even the new herb garden, with its heady scent of thyme and rosemary, had escaped her attention.

  She slipped a teasing smile to him across the linen and over the cutlery, a smile that reminded him of her wish to meet him under the table. It was a ridiculous notion, but one that made him burn to the roots of his hair, and roused him when he should be most in check.

  “Dear ladies,” Lady Meath said, as she rose and clapped her hands together, “let us leave the gentlemen to their pipes and port, while all of you follow me outside to the glasshouse to see my new stand of bamboo. It’s come straight from China. There’s nothing quite like an excursion to the garden after dinner rather than a stuffy old drawing room.”

  Hunter rose with the other men, but excused himself to tend his wife. He had an insatiable need to kiss her, and thought he could manage a moment as the other women donned their cloaks.

  Felicity was the last into the butler’s cloakroom. Her shawl had fallen to the floor and was now a jumble of folds. Hunter took it from the housemaid and turned toward his wife, tumbling the shawl in his hands to find the hood.

  “Did you enjoy your meal, Hunter?”

  She was smiling at him, a palpable and provocative greeting that made him decide to have Branson take the long way back to Claybourne Manor.

  “The company was lacking, my dear, but I did enjoy the view.” He covered her lush mouth with his own and stayed overlong, till her breath and his were heated. The others had left the cloakroom, and the chambermaid had tactfully padded away.

  They were quite alone in this house full of people.

  He felt her hand in the middle of his chest; her fingers slipped through the buttons of his waistcoat and through his shirt. Her eyes glinted in the sultry light spilling in from the hallway.

  “Now, how am I to leave you here, Hunter?”

  “Perhaps we’ll just close this door …”

  Instead, she pulled him down to her by his buttons and browsed his mouth with her lips and with her lavender scented fingers, until he was sucking them and she was melting hard against his arousal.

  “Hmm. And how will you leave now, Hunter? They’ll certainly know what we’ve been doing in here.”

  He kissed her palm and then turned her away from him. “If you’ll stand here and protect my reputation, and … Mrs. Claybourne, mind your manners.” He lifted her hand from the front of his trousers, when he would have rather moved against it.

  “I missed you, Hunter. And dinner was tedious. As will be Lady Meath’s stand of Chinese bamboo.”

  “But we must both do our duties to our hosts. Your shawl, madam.” As Hunter reached up to drape it over her shoulders, a small book fell out of the folds, and her gaze raced to the floor after it.

  He stooped to retrieve the book, but she was there before him, blocking his way with her palm laid across it. He put his hand over hers, trapping it against the back of the musty-scented volume. Her smile had fled, replaced by a flush of pa
nic.

  “I’ll get it, Hunter.”

  His heart stuttered, his world reeled to a stop. A lover’s message locked between the pages? A tryst in the planning? Nothing less could have caused her sudden pallor.

  “Allow me,” he said through his teeth—through a flash of impotent, baseless anger.

  “It’s nothing, Hunter,” she whispered, her eyes downcast and ashamed as they never were when she spoke to him. “Just an old book.”

  She was lying. And like a madman driven toward the brink of a cliff, he yanked her precious book from under her hand and stood up, raising a dank, mildewed darkness between them. She rose more slowly, but took a step deeper into the cloakroom, away from him.

  He couldn’t still his fingers, or catch enough air.

  Not a lover. Please, God, anything but that.

  He rode a chill as he turned the book over in his hands.

  “It’s what I found it today, Hunter, at the school.”

  Her whisper boiled like the demon sea, and the years washed over him, dark and fetid and stifling, swept him away from the shore. He was a child again, crammed into a sweltering room with fifty other wretched children; struggling again to make sense of the letters, trying all over again to incant the spell that would transport him out of that hell.

  He knew the book’s faded red cover as he knew the map of scars across the breadth of his hands. The stilted vine, deeply embossed and trailing down the spine and across the face of it; the smudged, pencil-drawn train wheels in each of the corners.

  “Your name is written inside, Hunter.”

  But he already knew it would be. His hands shook like a drunk’s as he opened the cover.

  There it was. The indictment. The evidence of his fraud, and the instrument of his demise.

  Hunter Claybourne.

  The stink filled his nostrils, came rolling out of his gut.

  “No one else knows about it, Hunter. No one but me.”

  She touched his hand, and the pain shattered him.

  “Damn you!” He jerked his arm away and turned from her, but she came to him like a shadow; stood behind him, ready to slip her accusations between his ribs—so ready with her incisive inquisition.

  “Hunter, please.” Her voice was caressing—the soft-spoken Judas.

  He couldn’t look at her. She knew all about him, knew what he was and what he had been.

  “Hunter, it’s nothing but a book.”

  “Just a book, Miss Mayfield? Then why bring it here among my enemies?”

  “Your enemies, Hunter?”

  The book was still in his hands, fused there, new fingerprints meeting old, fiercely cold and piercing him. “Did you plan to brandish it in front of them?”

  “How dare you think that! I would never do such a thing!”

  “You wouldn’t threaten me with exposure?” He turned toward her, dread solidifying to certainty as ice poured through his veins, as he pressed her backward against the unsteady wall of coats and camphor. “Not even to regain your father’s railway—”

  “Hunter Claybourne, I ought to slap you for that!”

  She tried to shove past him then, but he took hold of her arm. He wouldn’t be toyed with. She wanted something from him, but her plan must have gone awry.

  “If it isn’t the railway, then what is it, Miss Mayfield?”

  Her eyes had grown large and as innocent as a false April morn, the kind that coaxed tender buds, only to kill with the next day’s frost.

  “I want you to stop calling me ‘Miss Mayfield.’ I’m your wife. Felicity Claybourne.”

  And then he finally understood. The thing she had hated him for from the beginning—their marriage. The one he’d forced upon her. Well, then, she could have it. He slid his hand down the column of her slender throat, then wrapped his fingers in the strand of pristine pearls and pulled her close.

  “Will it be a divorce. Miss Mayfield, or a quick annulment? The choice, it seems, is yours.”

  She obliged him with a scowl. “I don’t want either, Hunter. I want to see Lady Meath’s glasshouse.”

  “What is it you want, then, Mrs. Claybourne? Your share of my staggering wealth? If that’s the case, you’ll have to play along for a while. One word of my ignoble past, and these scions of Britain will desert me quicker than rats off a blazing ship. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

  “I don’t want your money, Hunter! I would never say anything to anyone. You must trust me.”

  “Trust you?” He dropped his hand; it had begun to shake again. He couldn’t seem to get enough of her eyes, that sea-storm green he’d come to crave. He wanted to believe her; he wanted that more than anything he’d ever wanted in his life.

  “Claybourne! Here he is, Meath.” It was Lord Oswin, laughing gaily. “Ah ha! Enjoying a private moment with your lovely bride, I see.”

  Hunter froze. Shame and guilt and blood-scorching anger melted muscle to bone.

  “Who can blame the man?” Lord Meath’s voice seemed to come from some great distance.

  He turned slowly, feeling exposed and groveling. “Your pardon, milord—”

  “Heedless love, Claybourne. Suffered it once or twice myself. I envy your youth, and again I applaud your choice in wives.” Meath winked as if he understood this woman and the measureless power she had over him.

  “I’m afraid I’ve kept my husband from his brandy, your lordships.” She patted Hunter’s elbow as if he were her gouty grandfather, then sauntered past him out of the cloakroom. “Please forgive me. The catch on my shawl has stuck, and Hunter was about to fix it for me. Perhaps you could help me, Lord Oswin. Over here in the light.”

  There she was, preparing him for his death scene. The book had grown heavy in his hand, its moldering breath roiling up his arm in gray tendrils. She’d left him to dispose of it, hadn’t snatched it back. But she didn’t need to. A whisper into the proper ear, to her publisher, or to one of her reporter friends— to Lord Meath, himself—and the truth of his birth, his coming of age in the squalor of Bethnal Green, would make the front page of the Times.

  He felt a peculiar recklessness in watching her flirt with Meath and Oswin. The disaster hadn’t happened yet, but it would, and she would be the agent. The book wouldn’t fit into his jacket pocket, and he’d brought no overcoat of his own. Carrying it on him was no longer an option, if he meant to keep his mind on the evening’s events. He would give her back the means to his destruction; it seemed the only way.

  “Allow me, gentlemen,” he said, stepping between the men.

  She seemed confused when he slid the book back into the pocket of her shawl. Let her wonder at his motives; let her wonder how this evening would end. He closed the catch at her neck and led her to the garden door.

  “Do what you will, my dear wife,” he whispered into the silky curls at her temple. He even set a kiss against her cool skin. “But be prepared for the consequences.”

  “I’d very much like to kick you, Hunter. But I’m afraid of breaking my toe.” She fixed an angry scowl on him, then hurried after the other ladies.

  “Come man, we’ve important business to discuss.” Meath stood at the hallway and raised a beckoning hand.

  And Hunter passed through the parlor door, a fake and a fraud.

  “Brandy, sir?”

  The footman’s servile bow denounced Hunter, made a mockery of his deceitfully high station. Come morning, they would all know. His wife would stumble somehow, would use his weakness against him.

  But he couldn’t let his thoughts wander from the moment. Ruin might be close at hand, but much was riding on this night, spent in the company of these ranking officials of the Board of Trade.

  He took the brandy from the footman and scanned the room. Focus had been an integral part of his survival—that ability to concentrate on the structure of a problem, to pinpoint risk and consequences. As he had done as a young boy, sitting in the corner of a coffeehouse, learning the shipping news and investing his hard-earned cash in a s
hip’s cargo, then re-investing those profits, living on what he could steal, what he could measure.

  And now his life, his fortune was in the hands of a scheming enchantress. His fault. He’d allowed her to unfocus him, to send him careening off track. Had set him up with this mindless, unexpected contentment, and then yanked him backward to the time of his greatest shame.

  “Pittman’s resignation becomes effective at the end of the week.” Meath clanged the bowl of his pipe against the back of the fireplace screen.

  Focus, he needed focus. Meath looked gregarious tonight.

  “And I was much impressed, Claybourne, with your presence of mind at the accident. A glowing report from the inspectors.”

  “I am an ordinary man. I did only what anyone would have done in the situation.”

  Oswin laughed and took another port off the butler’s tray. “You are hardly what I would call an ordinary man, Claybourne, given your extraordinary luck in business.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Hunter willed his face to remain immobile when he would have snarled at the man. Luck. Luck was for amateurs, for dabblers. He had survived and grown because he had planned every step of the way.

  Meath chuckled. “Well, let’s get on with the business of the evening, gentlemen. What we’re asking, Claybourne, is if you’re amenable to a nomination to the position vacated by Charles Pittman.”

  Hunter granted Lord Meath a steady smile, though his gut twisted and his lungs lacked air. “It would be a pleasure, my lord. I am honored to be on your list of nominees.”

  Oswin clapped Hunter on the back. “On the top of the list, eh, Meath?”

  Meath slipped an imaginary piece of paper from his breast pocket, scrutinized it with exaggerated drama, and then looked up at Hunter. “By God, it’s seems that Claybourne’s is the only name on my list.”

  Everyone laughed, and Spurling lifted his glass of blood-red port, then gave Hunter a nod. “To Hunter Claybourne!’

  Hunter raised his own glass and swept his hollow gratitude around the room. He had no delusions that any of the five gentlemen would continue their support if they knew they were toasting a man who had begun his trade plucking spilled coal and bits of wood from the foul mudflats of the Thames.