A Most Unladylike Adventure (18 page)

‘T
hat’s it, then, we’re properly married and alone again at long last,’ Hugo Kenton said to his bride the following evening as they finally ran up the steps of the elegant Palladian-style villa a few miles outside Brighton that he’d hired for the next week or two. ‘And hopefully there’s nobody else who will have the gall to try to keep me from my new wife and my clear marital duty to seduce her until she can’t recall her own name, let alone those of our enemies and anyone else who might feel they have the right to interrupt our honeymoon.’

‘I was beginning to wonder if I’d have to climb out of a window again to get you to myself,’ Louisa replied.

‘Perish the thought,’ he said sternly.

‘You don’t have much faith in my abilities, do you?’

‘I’m sure you could give the most furtive cracksman lessons, but I don’t think my nerves would stand it.’

‘Faint heart, but I promise not to climb anything more dangerous than those stairs yonder, so long as it isn’t a dire emergency, and you wouldn’t want me to sit about dithering if it was one of those, now would you?’

‘Well, that’s something, I suppose; all I have to do now is keep you away from burning buildings and marooned kittens and my hair might not have to go white overnight after all.’

‘I think you’d look very distinguished, and you have to admit that if I hadn’t done it in the first place we would never have met again.’

‘That’s something else I must learn to be thankful for then, I suppose,’ he said with a lugubrious sigh and such warmth in his silver-blue eyes she wondered how she’d ever thought them cold, but she couldn’t let the topic go, despite the temptation to just let that warmth wash over her and waft them both up stairs and into a dreamy night of kissing and caressing and an awful lot more.

‘But the way we met for the second time,
the way I behaved that night and the next, meant that we had to get married, Hugh,’ she said seriously, for it still rankled that in rescuing herself she’d trapped him.

‘And are you regretting that already?’ he asked gruffly.

‘Of course not, but you must have mixed feelings about taking another wife.’

‘You make me sound like a pasha who has far more than just the one wife about the place and just thought he might casually add another to his stock of them.’

‘Don’t get any ideas and don’t change the subject. You know very well what I mean and you haven’t exactly won yourself a prize in me.’

‘By the time another day dawns, you won’t have a single doubt left in your stubborn head as to how much I want you as my one-and-only wife, Louisa,’ he threatened deliciously and she went breathless with anticipation as he took her light cloak and draped it carefully over a gilt chair, before pulling out another from the laden dining table and seating her with one or two apparently accidental touches that threatened to melt her from the inside out.

‘Ooh, I shall look forward to that, then.’

‘Not too much I hope, considering we have
our delayed wedding night to plough through somehow or another first,’ he said and she laughed and felt the shocks and upsets of yesterday recede at last, leaving behind them the delicious tension of anticipating the longed-for night to come.

‘I expect you’ll find a way to get us through it,’ she told him blandly.

‘Plainly I’ll have to, since bold and beautiful Eloise La Rochelle was only a figment of our heated imaginations.’ He slanted her an untrustworthy smile and she pencilled ‘ruthless pirate’ back on to her internal picture of him and shivered with delighted anticipation.

‘You could teach me how to become more like her,’ she suggested.

‘And have half the West Country beating a path to our door to try and wrest you from me? Not in a million years.’

‘I meant in private,’ she protested. ‘And Eloise and her pirate captain never really got to know each other properly, did they?’ she added wickedly. Seeing how his gaze went blank, then lit with fire at the idea, she filed it for later and allowed all her love and wanting back into her own gaze. ‘I will never look at another man, Hugh,’ she promised him solemnly at last. ‘Why should I when I have you?’

He took her hand and played with her beautiful rings as if to remind himself of all the promise and promises between them, then he met her gaze and deliberately let his guard fall until she could see something of the hopeful young man he’d once been, before he raised those barriers to protect himself from a loss and grief and fury that must have felt nigh intolerable to him.

‘If everything hadn’t happened just as it did, I wouldn’t have met you one dark and fateful night, Eloise-Louisa, and just think how boring my life would have been. Now I really hope you’ve finished eating, because I’m fast discovering love is a very poor preventive of amorous intent and other husbandly lapses of consideration.’

‘I never wanted to fall in love,’ she said with a reminiscent shrug for her once-guarded self.

‘Do you think I ran round London dancing with glee when I found out why I couldn’t get you out of my head day or night? You’re one of the most beautiful creatures I ever laid eyes on, and I only have to feel you enter a room to want you mercilessly.’

‘When I first met you I thought you were dark and dangerous and there was something in your eyes that promised me you could
make me feel things I have never wanted to. No wonder I dreaded ever setting eyes on you again.’

‘Aye, well, at least I can understand that much, having felt something very similar myself.’

‘Then understand this, Hugh Darke, or Hugo Kenton or whoever you happen to be calling yourself just at the moment. I meant to seduce you that first night at Kit’s house, when I found you so castaway and gruff and bearlike and completely, unimaginably desirable that I wanted you so badly that it hurt to draw back.’

Louisa saw him doing his best not to let his eyes cross at the very thought of her so rampantly predatory and filed away that idea for future reference as well.

‘Why did you, then?’ he asked hoarsely.

‘What would you have done then if you woke up next morning to find me in your bed and remembered you’d just taken my virginity?’

‘I’d have railed at you for giving it away so lightly, I expect.’

‘You railed at me anyway,’ she pointed out with a half-smile, half-frown for the drunken antics of unregenerate rakes.

‘It was obligatory after the weeks I’d endured longing for you with almost every waking and sleeping thought. But since you want to know, if I’d woken to find you in my bed like that, I would have dragged you off to my lair and had my wicked way with you again and again for our very mutual pleasure, until Kit came back and found out what I’d done to his precious little sister and killed me. After that, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything much.’

‘Good point.’

‘I like it, although I wouldn’t have done if it had actually happened.’

‘Now I’m confused, but to get back to that night, even though I was so tempted to be an ex-virgin and escape Uncle William and Charlton forever, I nobly resisted your stubbly kisses and sweaty embrace.’

‘I remember that bit,’ he grumbled.

‘Are you sure?’ she sniped, then reminded herself they were having a very serious conversation here and frowned at him severely.

‘Even if I was dead I would remember that bit,’ he confirmed as if it was engraved on his heart.

‘I wish you’d stop harping on death. I want you alive, Hugo Kenton.’

‘So you can have your wicked way with me?’ he asked hopefully.

‘So I can make you regret ever being born if you ever take up with the likes of Eloise La Rochelle again. But now we’re on the subject of Eloise once again, I knew that I’d put myself in the most ridiculous situation with you by pretending to be her and I wanted you so badly it almost made my bones ache, yet I couldn’t have you because if I did then you’d know I’d lied and wasn’t Eloise at all. Then you were followed and I was so scared, Hugh. I was so terrified, so utterly afraid they’d succeed in capturing and killing you and that I’d lose you, that I didn’t care about such a little thing as whether or not I was a virgin anymore, I just wanted to be as close to you as I could get.’

‘So you cared about me a little bit, even then?’

‘I cared about you so much it felt like a betrayal of every promise I had ever made myself not to follow in my mother’s footsteps, not to love blindly and never to need a man so much I’d put up with anything he did or said to just so I could have the privilege of carrying on loving him.’

To her furious amazement, Hugh laughed at
this agonised confession and tugged her out of her chair with an impatient glance at the cold collation under their uninterested noses.

‘You’re no more capable of blind adoration than I am of wanting it in the first place, my own particular virago,’ he informed her firmly. ‘Do you imagine any fault I rejoice in will ever go unrecorded and ruthlessly reformed by my wife, because I can assure you that I don’t,’ he said as he towed her back into the hall and stopped in front of the fine pier table and the large gilt-framed mirror above it. ‘Look at yourself, Louisa,’ he urged, gently turning her face from his towards their reflected selves so she could examine her own face, or she could have if she hadn’t been so busy devouring his with hungry eyes. ‘No, really look at yourself; you have my full permission not to take your eyes off me once we’ve got this last ridiculous folly of yours out of the way, but concentrate for now.’

Reluctantly she obeyed him and stared at her own reflection, surprised at how different she looked under the spell of passion, but otherwise unimpressed. ‘What am I supposed to be looking at?’

‘Not what, but whom: this woman is Louisa Kenton, she is recklessly brave, ridiculously
determined not to divulge to anyone how afraid she sometimes is of climbing out of windows and playing the female buccaneer, and she would throw herself to the lions if they showed signs of wanting to devour someone she loved instead of her. Her besotted husband knows her to be the most enchantingly lovely lady he ever laid eyes on, and he very shortly intends to lay more than his eyes on a whole lot more of her, by the way. He adores her quick wits and her bold tongue and even finds her short temper and pithy turns of phrase amusing most of the time.

‘No doubt, in time and after a lot of brim-stone-and-bluster temper tantrums of his own, he’ll learn to control his fury at her unruly habit of running herself straight into any danger that happens along, hopefully before he’s ground his teeth to stubs and bitten his nails to the quick. One thing he will never do, though, is expect her to follow any of his commands without at least an hour’s debate about it, or encourage her to believe he’d like her better if she was a passive doormat of a woman he could swagger off and forget about while he was busy drinking or gambling or carousing himself into an early grave.’

He raised his hands to caress her shoulders
and the woman in the mirror now looked as if she’d been presented with the moon and stars as his gaze softened with what she knew was true love.

‘I don’t doubt your mother was a good woman, Louisa,’ he carried on more gently. ‘Or that she suffered a very great deal for indulging her youthful passion for a man who clearly didn’t deserve her, but you are not your mother.’

‘No, I’m not, am I?’ she agreed as she finally believed it.

‘And before you start another avenue of self-flagellation, you’re nothing like your father either. Somehow they gave life to four remarkable people in you and your brothers and sister, so their ill-starred marriage clearly wasn’t in vain. I would have out-waited and out-snarled and out-stamped your brother, even after he’d beaten me to a pulp for taking your maidenhead, if he’d opposed our marriage, Louisa. I’d even have taken the battering I undoubtedly deserved from your gigantic friend Ben Shaw’s mighty fists when he came home, if that was what it took to marry you. In fact, I think I would have done anything to gain you as my wife, so look what a lionheart you’ve gained in me?’

‘More of a chicken-heart that first night I’d have said at the time, if you’d only asked me,’ she teased and stroked the side of his face, feeling a slight suggestion of beard under her appreciative fingers and bringing back sensual memories of that first night and a very stubbly Hugh Darke, and the wild woman who’d descended on him out of the night and would have fallen into his arms like the wanton she’d claimed to be, given even a smidgen more encouragement.

‘Shrew,’ he whispered as he shivered with desire and anticipation from that one exploring caress.

‘Not a mouse, then?’ she asked as his mouth seemed to come satisfyingly close, then disappointingly firm and evade hers as he seemed to despair of ever getting her upstairs under her own steam.

‘Never a mouse, my love, more of a tigress,’ he informed her just before he hefted her over his shoulder as easily as if she were a sack of feathers rather than a healthy young woman and started up the stairs while she was still startled about seeing the world from upside down.

‘I’ll certainly scratch your eyes out for you if you don’t hurry up and put me down, you
toad,’ she protested furiously, but he carried on doggedly getting her where he wanted her by the fastest method possible. ‘Insufferable, intolerable weasel that you are,’ she raved at him, secretly wondering which of them would be the more breathless and lightheaded by the time he reached his destination, then he did and she found out.

‘Isn’t it lucky that some considerate person left the door to the master suite wide open for us, my dear?’ he asked her as if they were taking a leisurely stroll about their luxurious temporary home. ‘Otherwise I might have had to dump you into the nearest chair whilst I wrestled with the door and that would have quite ruined the mood, don’t you think?’

‘Dump me…’ she spluttered before recovering a few of her wits. ‘You uncouth beast.’ She hit what part of him she could reach with her fist as he turned round with her still writhing about on his shoulder to survey their extravagantly furnished bedchamber with such leisurely appreciation she knew he was enjoying himself a little too much at her expense.