by Lauren Smith
“Nathan, you must move. I think I shall die.” She was quite certain something infinitely wonderful was so close to the surface within her, but she was afraid she’d lose it if he didn’t move.
His laughter rumbled through her. “I’m afraid if I do move, I might die, but let it be said I’ll never deny you anything.” He lifted his hips away, his shaft drawing out of her almost entirely before he thrust back in, and the sudden fullness made her breath catch. She curled her arms around his neck clinging to him as he rode her slowly, taking his time until she was moaning in desperation beneath him.
“Please, Nathan, you are torturing me.” She dug her fingertips into his shoulders, urging him on. He answered with faster movements, thrusting harder, deeper, until she felt a feeling of physical perfection that swelled within her, and she cried out as it came to a blinding peak. Then she simply shattered and fell away into the dust of pleasured dreams. Nathan continued to move a second or two longer, and then he stiffened and hoarsely cried out her name.
They collapsed on the bed in a tangle of limbs and sated smiles.
“Was it everything you hoped for?” she asked him.
“It was . . . something beyond compare to anything I’ve ever experienced. What about you?” he asked with concern. “Did I hurt you too much?”
“No.” She smiled and cupped his face. “There was only a little at the beginning, and the end . . .” She blushed. “Well, I want to do that again very soon, husband.”
“Insatiable minx,” he teased and kissed the tip of her nose. “Give me a moment to recover myself, and I shall oblige you, my love.” He pulled back the blankets of their bed, and they both crawled underneath them.
Nathan tucked her into his arms, and she rested her chin on his chest with a contented sigh.
“Is it strange to say that I feel as though I could sleep a hundred years? I feel that at peace right now.” She pressed a kiss to his chest, so much more comfortable now with his nakedness and her own than she’d ever imagined she could be.
“Me too.” He stroked her hair. “I felt lost in a storm for so long that it’s hard to trust the shore I’ve landed upon, yet it feels sturdy beneath my feet.”
“Mine too.” She offered a lazy grin that made him laugh.
They lay together for a while before making love a second time. When it was nearing midnight, the moonlight suddenly appeared so bright and white upon the balcony of their room that it was as clear as daylight.
“Let me go shut the curtains.” Nathan slipped out of bed and pulled on his dressing gown against the chill. Then he moved to the balcony. Drawn to follow him, she gathered her own dressing gown, which lay over the back of a chair, and she joined him at the windows.
Wrapping an arm around her, he pulled her against his side as they stared out into the snowy moonlit world.
“Will you be happy with me?” he asked.
“Deliriously happy. And you?” She crinkled her nose in concern.
“Ridiculously happy.” He stroked a fingertip down the length of her upturned nose, winning a genuine smile from her petal-soft lips.
“We are fools in love.”
The hazel hue of Nathan’s eyes was so heated that it made her heart gallop at an uneven pace.
“Lucky fools,” he agreed.
They’d wasted so much time without each other. But never again. They’d never let each other go.
As he started to pull the curtain closed, she caught a glimpse of two turtledoves resting on the edge of the balcony railing. She sensed they were the same pair from the terrace overlooking the gardens where she and Nathan had been reunited. The two doves cuddled into each other. One dove’s eyes were closed, the other’s at half-mast, as though lost in the pleasure of simply being close to its mate. They seemed happy, as happy as two creatures made for each other could be. Thea knew exactly how they felt. She tucked herself into Nathan’s side as he turned back toward bed, with a heart so light it threatened to float away upon a light breeze. Nathan took her in his arms and claimed her mouth with a kiss that promised only good things to come, and as she dreamed that night of her future, she saw the two of them, nestled together like the turtledoves.
On the second day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, two turtledoves and a love everlasting.
Thank you so much for reading The Duke’s Dove! I hope you’ll check out the next book in the series A Fowl Christmastide by Sandra Sookoo!
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Turn the page to read the first chapter of A Fowl Christmastide!
A Fowl Christmastide
By Sandra Sookoo
Chapter One
Christmas Eve morning, 1818
Hillmorton, County of Warwick, England
Miss Isabelle Fletcher—Belle to everyone who’d every known her—carried a bowl of cracked, dried corn outside the rectory and into the garden. Her breath clouded about her head in the chilly air, and with every step she took, newly fallen snow crunched beneath the soles of her half boots. The majesty of winter was certainly in evidence.
“Good morning, girls. Come for breakfast.” She clicked her tongue, for the three French hens were usually prompt for the morning feeding. When a suspicious silence met her ears, Belle moved over to the cozy coop where the hens liked to bed down in the copious amounts of straw that filled the dark interior. As she peeked inside, her stomach dropped into the toes of her boots. The hens were gone. “Drat.”
In vain she glanced about the garden, but there was no trace of the vanished fowl. Cold foreboding circled through her insides, for she knew where the recalcitrant birds had gone. The same place they always did when they escaped… Hastings Hall. It was the home of the angry baron, and the man she had no choice but to call upon once a day to retrieve her wanderlust-struck hens. And every day she received a lecture on her inability to keep her property in line.
With a sigh, she scattered the corn over the ground and then cast a glance toward the baron’s manor house. Two fields and a meadow separated his estate from her father’s rectory, and if she squinted, the snow-covered rooftops of his home came into view. Thanks to the baron’s generosity, her father had a living, which meant she shouldn’t willingly antagonize said gentleman, but oh, how he deserved a dressing down! It wasn’t her fault the hens had a mind of their own. Perhaps they’d been struck with wanderlust or merely needed a change of scenery.
How I can empathize.
“There’s nothing for it. I’ll have to go over there. Again.” She tucked the empty bowl beneath her arm and headed back into the manse. “I’ll have to talk with the baron. Again.” As she pushed open the kitchen door and entered the blessed warmth of the house, she sighed once more, but for an entirely different reason. “And I’ll have to endure his angry tirade about how much he hates my hens. Again,” she told the empty room.
Yet, there was a certain anticipation in the need to retrieve those birds, for though the baron had a habit of souring the day, she couldn’t help the fact that every time she found herself in his company, certain feelings washed over her she’d never experienced from any of the men in the village.
“I heard that sigh all the way in my study.” Her father came into the kitchen just as she placed her empty bowl in the cupboard where she kept supplies for her hens. “What ails you? It’s Christmas Eve, the start of the season of miracles. There should be no maudlin thoughts to mar the moment.”
“Oh, it’s the same problem, merely a different day, Papa.” She smiled at her parent, noting his mussed dark hair that stuck up at weird angles, for he had a habit of running his fingers through it when writing a sermon. He’d never seemed to acclimate to his long angular body. Because of this, he appeared as all limbs at times, except when he donned his best dark suit each Sunday morning. But he was as jovial and happy as any man of the cloth should be, and he truly cared about everyone in his small flock.
“Ah.” He nodded. “I gather the hens have escaped?” When he set the kettle onto the stove, he glanced at her. “We really should devise a way of keeping them in the garden.”
“I don’t wish to keep them under lock and key.” They’d been a gift from a visiting duchess three years before. Due to their impressive pedigree and their pretty coloring, Belle rather suspected she treated me as pampered pets instead of laying hens. “They’re not bad birds. They just enjoy exploring is all. Even if we installed a fence or wall, they would merely fly over.” She whisked off the apron she wore when working about the house or looking after Rachel—her older sister’s—children. When she hung the garment on a peg behind her, she frowned. “However, I do wish they’d choose a different destination than Baron Hasting’s manor.”
When her father grinned, it was as if the world was immediately a better place. He always had that effect. “You don’t care for our nearest neighbor?”
“Define care,” she hedged.
“I would have thought by now you and he would be friends. Those hens of yours have been going over there for nigh onto two years.” His lips quirked in the beginnings of a grin.
“Two years. Has it been that long?” A trace of heat infused her cheeks. “It’s not that I don’t like him. It’s that he’s always angry. That is quite off putting.” Though the baron was a fairly young man for the area—most men she encountered in the small village were much older—and he was certainly handsome enough, she could never let herself fall for such a man. How long life would seem if one constantly harbored anger in his heart. “I simply don’t understand what he has to be so incensed about. My escaped hens notwithstanding.”
“Perhaps there is a good reason for the emotion. I’ve had the opportunity to talk with him on a few occasions. There’s more there than you might think.” When he shrugged, it was as if an unseen hand jerked on the collar of his jacket. Her two other sisters had inherited his angular bone structure and height, but she took after her mama with a more rounded figure, God rest her soul these past five years.
“I think he shouldn’t come the crab over a few hens.” But that didn’t lessen the heat in her cheeks.
“Sometimes men hide their true selves out of fear, embarrassment, or even as a sense of protection. I rather think we shouldn’t be so quick to judge.”
Is that what she’d been doing—judging him? “I do try, but you never see him when I retrieve the hens. He acts as if he’s been royally inconvenienced when they decide to congregate on his doorstep or in his garden. As if I’d trained them to do such a thing to aggravate him.”
“You do have a wild imagination, I’ll give you.” Her father laughed. “Belle, listen. Try to see the other side of the situation. Why should the baron need suffer your hens when you can’t keep them where they belong? After a while, anyone would be a bit cross to find hens constantly on their doorstep.”
“I suppose.” She shook her head, for the baron remained a puzzle. One she might wish to try and puzzle out… if he weren’t so crotchety. “My hens aren’t troublesome. They are curious. Perhaps they’re even bored here.” Belle frowned at her father as he removed the kettle and then poured the hot water into the china teapot that had been part of her mother’s trousseau. When that blue and white teapot made an appearance, all was right in the world. How odd, then, that she remained at sixes and sevens regarding the baron? “Why do you suppose he keeps himself hidden away in the country? I doubt he ever travels to London. Shouldn’t a man of his ilk wish to go about Town with his contemporaries or find a bride?” Which would be too bad, for she’d been enamored of him for at least a year. She couldn’t help it. “He’s quite handsome enough. Any woman would snap him right up, I’d imagine.”
“There are as many reasons a man wouldn’t want to hang about London as there are men. It’s quite a noisy, dirty city.” He rummaged about the cupboards, and upon finding a tin of biscuits, he popped them onto a wooden tray with the teapot and a teacup.
“But it’s this side of sinning to bury himself in that manor house when he’s got the looks that would take the beau monde by storm.” In her mind’s eye she saw his chestnut hair that might curl if he encouraged it, his rugged jaw made even more sculpted by his scowl, and his startling blue eyes that might be the exact color of what an ocean must look like when the sun shone upon it. “If only he wouldn’t come the crab all the time.”
“Perhaps he doesn’t, but that’s all you see.”
“Pish posh.” Moving among the upper crust of the London ton was both a mystery and a dream to her. In all her nine and twenty years, she’d never seen the latest fashions except for in her monthly copies of La Belle Assemblée periodicals. She’d taken a subscription years ago, and that was when she’d asked everyone to call her Belle. It made her feel more sophisticated and glamorous than she truly was. “London must be exciting a little bit, though.”
“That largely depends on a person’s mindset,” her father murmured as he tinkered with the teapot.
“Perhaps.” Neither had she known the joy of what it must feel like to dance at Almacks or have an iced confection at Gunter’s—outings she’d only read about in her father’s copies of The Times. To say nothing of what it must feel like to attend a lavish society affair while clad in luxurious fabrics. No, her life had been spent keeping her father’s house once her mother died and playing nursemaid or governess to Rachel’s children depending upon their needs. Lord knew her brother-in-law’s butcher shop didn’t bring in enough coin to recommend hiring help.
Her middle sister, Cassandra, had married the man of her heart. He was a soldier and had returned from the wars with a missing arm. He now had less to his name than when he’d left to fight Boney, but her sister loved him fiercely. She didn’t care about the sacrifice. Any additional funding that came into her father’s keeping went to Cassandra to keep her tiny household afloat. Soon she would welcome her first child.
Starting a family was something else Belle had never known; probably never would, for matrimonial prospects at this point in her life had long ago slipped away.
“Life really hasn’t turned out as I’d hoped as a young girl,” she whispered to herself. But oh, how she would have liked to hold her own babe in her arms. As silence met her statement, she gasped and came out of her wayward thoughts. Her cheeks heated when she glanced at her father and he flashed her a knowing look. “I beg your pardon, I was woolgathering. What were we talking about?”
“Baron Hastings,” her father said with a grin.
“Ah, yes. He’s handsome and wouldn’t have issue with attracting a baroness. Perhaps someone needs to encourage him to spread his wings, so he’ll fly back to Town. Then he wouldn’t cause havoc in my life.”
“Are you interested in the baron for yourself, Belle?” Her father’s expression sobered. “I realize your life isn’t an ideal one, and I’m the one to blame. I don’t have the coin to help matters along, and the years have slipped away from you without a match—”
“Stop, please. I had love once. Perhaps it was enough.” Belle held up a hand as embarrassment added more heat to her face. Five years ago, she was engaged to a solider from the same regiment as Cassandra’s husband. She’d accepted his suit and waved to him as he’d left for war… but he’d never come home. In fact, he perished in the first battle he’d joined.
That was the end of her dreams of the future.
Except she persisted in dreaming about the baron from time to time. As if someone like him would look twice at someone like me in a romantic capacity.
“You’re allowed to find love again,” her father said quietly.
“I’ve long ago accepted I’m on the shelf and only useful for what I can do in someone else’s household.” Quickly, she busied herself with pulling a cloak from another peg and settling it around her shoulders. Did it bother her that she still wasn’t wed and playing with babies of her own? At times. Did she want to have a husband to look after and spend time with an
d know what a proper kiss felt like instead of a chaste peck to the cheek? Of course. Any woman would. However, she was also practical enough to see the options just weren’t there for her in a village so small, especially after the war had taken so many male lives. None of it negated the bouts of loneliness she battled with even when surrounded by her family. “My existence is a good one. Some women have it much worse than me.”
And that was the truth of it. No sense dwelling on what could have been.
Softly, her father cleared his throat. “Regarding the baron…”
“Yes?” It was time to set aside her maudlin thoughts and go do what needed to be done. Belle turned and met his twinkling brown eyes. She took after him in that regard. “Do you have a message for him? I must go and retrieve the hens before he does something drastic, like try to sell them.” She gasped. “Or cook them!” Surely not even the baron would dare that.
“Calm yourself. He’s not going to do anything so drastic.”
“You don’t know him,” she countered with worry hanging in her voice.
“Neither do you, so give him the benefit of the doubt. There might be other things at play in his life that he either hasn’t overcome or he struggles with behind closed doors.” He pointed to a tray of fruit tarts she’d baked yesterday. “Take him one of those as a Christmas gift. It’s been my experience that men always soften at the sight of food.”
She snorted. “The baron is never happy to see me, and I doubt a fruit tart will help matters.”
“Take one anyway, child, and perhaps a miracle will accompany you.”
Excitement and dread both twisted down her spine to knot in her stomach. “Very well.” But she shook her head. “Would you like to come with me? You could personally invite the baron to your service tonight.” Then he’d see for himself just how unpleasant the man was.