The Scarred Earl (26 page)

‘Dear scold,’ he said on a mighty laugh he
had to lose in the tender skin between her neck and shoulder as he did exactly as she bid him and took his wife in a great surge of love that bore them both to some new wonderland she was breathlessly eager to explore.

Feeling him fight himself for control again once he was deep inside her and she came to terms with her maidenhead being a thing of the past, she concluded the brief moment of sharp pain as he breached it had been worth every second to feel as if he was somehow taking up her whole world now, within and without. The sense of fullness and a seductive completeness, as he tried to hold himself still inside her and allow her to get used to so much breathtaking novelty all at once, held her for the briefest of moments on an edge that needed exploring fully some other time, just not this one, when there wasn’t time to spare for such luxuries. Now he was inside her and the wildest of needs and passions was drawing her to shift and long under his formidable control and want to break them out of anything tamed and held back into a fury of driven loving.

‘I won’t shatter, Alex,’ she whispered as she let internal muscles she hadn’t even
dreamt she had before flex around his mighty manhood and find it as perfectly designed to pleasure her as the rest of him, as he stretched her to the most exquisite fullness to take his mighty shaft in so tight and sweet a fit.

‘I might,’ he informed her shakily, as if this was everything he’d ever needed and never dared hope for.

‘Try,’ she encouraged him shamefully, riding a wild euphoria now she finally had her lover between her legs and he was about to plunge them both into infinity, together this time.

She began to move experimentally in the rhythm he’d taught her last time and found it sent surges of delight right through her when he gave in to the drive and infinite sweetness of it all and took over, to pace them with strong, deep thrusts that sent those surges growing and gathering ever more power with each rise and fall inside her, with him. His mouth was on hers, his hands braced and his eyes open under sensually heavy lids as he gazed into hers, as if neither of them could bear to shut themselves off from so much when they could share it instead. She did her best to tell him with every sense and thought
she loved him and loved fully making love to him. However, he’d already taught her greed and infinite need, so could he please get on with taking them both to the ecstasy she learnt last time, plus so much more satisfaction now they could ride it together.

Then his pupils dilated and his densely blue gaze seemed to go almost black as he changed the drive of his body to a new depth and slowness. The deeply sensual pace now took her with him, to feel first that contortion of delight he’d already shown her, then a full-bellied contraction of utter pleasure as he convulsed with her and they soared into some sort of heaven together and melted utterly into each other. It was the most sensual and spiritual experience of her life all at the same time and the joy of it made her heart sing with delight, but the best part of all was sharing this exquisite ecstasy with him. Knowing everything with him, feeling every pore and beat of him centred on her and giving all of herself back in return.

For long, lovely moments they lost themselves in each other, his eyes looking deep into hers, his breath short and harsh as he gasped in air and she felt him suck life down into his lungs, heard and felt his heartbeat as
he let his arms take most of his weight, but couldn’t seem to deprive them of Alexander joined intimately with Persephone, Earl in his Countess, lover within lover.

‘There, we’re still whole,’ she murmured as if she somehow needed to offer him comfort, and after all that ecstasy of wild pleasure as well.

‘You might be, my love, I’m not so sure I am,’ he told her as an echo of his old self-doubts and uncertainty he could be lovable surfaced.

Chapter Eighteen

‘Y
ou are everything to me, Alexander Forthin, and don’t you ever dare doubt it again. I won’t let your father and your wretched brother go on convincing you from beyond their graves that you’re less than worthy of being loved. If it takes me the rest of our lives together, I’ll make you see our love for what it is—you deserve love, my darling. You have love and you do love, whether you want to or not.

‘My family love and value you for yourself and not your pretty face, and we are going to adore any children we bless each other with so immoderately you’re going to see for yourself how different a family ought to be from the one you grew up with. Moreover,
you have me to nag and worry you into knowing yourself better, Alexander Matthias Geraint, and, if you don’t realise how much of a wonder that is for both of us very soon, I shall make myself kick you out of bed until you’ve learnt to know yourself as deeply loved as my beloved Lord Calvercombe should.’

Grinning like the sultan she’d likened him to earlier, he hugged her close and rolled her over so she rested against his powerful chest and couldn’t escape the fact he was already more than ready to show her a lot more about herself, at least if his increasing state of arousal was anything to go by.

‘Unfortunately it’s about time I kicked myself out of it, unless you really want the whole of Ashburton to know what we’ve been at this morning, my loved and lovely Lady Calvercombe?’ he told her with the very cocky knowledge he could set her crooning with delight if she even tried to make him go back to his lonely bed against his inclination, and hers.

‘Best if we don’t,’ she said after a long moment of consideration. ‘My mother would never forgive us if we cheated her of her eldest daughter’s wedding, especially now
Marcus is back to give me away, and it looks as if he and Antigone will be following us up the aisle as soon as their banns have been read.’

‘They can wait, they’re young enough. Since we went through our few weeks of hell waiting to wed and bed each other, they might as well learn what it’s like to burn as well,’ he said unsympathetically, as if someone else ought to suffer after he’d spent so long tortured by needing his woman in his bed and not having her, because of an unwary and unknowing promise he’d made to her sly devil of a cousin.

‘What makes you think Marcus has the slightest intention of burning for his love all that time, Alex?’ Persephone asked, and he looked grim for a moment when he realised Marcus hadn’t given any spur-of-the-moment vows not to lay a hand on a lady Jack had never met and couldn’t guard, as he himself had done.

‘I pity the poor idiots who fall head over ears with Helen and Penelope,’ he said unwarily.

‘If you think only idiots fall in love with Seaborne women, you are in the wrong bed, my lord,’ she informed him as haughtily as
any woman could when the movement of a certain Alex Forthin laughing under her prone body was tickling her all-too-responsive nipples with the abrasion of the swirls of midnight dark hair finely spaced over his wide chest.

‘On the contrary, only the most deserving and dashing of gentlemen will ever be good enough for a single one of them,’ he said solemnly.

‘I told you to believe in yourself, not become a swollen-headed turkey,’ she chided as she fought an attack of the giggles and risked not caring if they tumbled over one another and straight into another loving.

‘I will try to become your perfect lord, if only you will practise to be as aloof and lovely as the Northern Lights to all other men but me, my love. If you smile at a single one as you just did at me, I might have to go mad with jealousy or ferociously call him out to eat grass for breakfast.’

‘Don’t you dare. I will only ever look at you, Alex, and there will never be another man for me. We Seabornes love for life, or don’t love at all—there are no half-measures so far as we are concerned.’

‘And us Forthin men would as soon imagine
the sky falling on our heads as we would love any other woman but the one and only, my Persephone,’ he assured her very seriously indeed.

‘Easy for you to say when you’re the only one left, but we’ll rewrite the sad history of your wretched family between us, my darling. You can start a tradition of strong and faithful men who show that the ones who went before them were the exception to the rule and not you, lover.’

‘I suspect my cousin intends to start one for the female line, as well, so perhaps there are some wild and romantic Forthin traits in me to go with the Welsh ones my mother bequeathed me, after all,’ he said half-seriously.

‘I’m glad you found them, Alex, even if your cousin Electra does seem likely to drive anyone forced to spend more than half an hour with her halfway to insanity. They are family and you sadly lacked much of that once your grandfather died,’ she said, finally giving up on coaxing another loving out of this over-gallant husband of hers as he reluctantly rose from her bed to dress with a heavy sigh.

‘I did when Annabelle left home anyway. I wish we had managed to find her as well as
Antigone,’ he said with a frown for the gap his first cousin had left in his life.

‘We will find her one day, my love,’ she reassured him, her faith in her eldest brother probably even greater than his own in Annabelle, since she knew Rich had so much of their father in him, even if he didn’t as yet realise it himself.

‘I hope so. Although I don’t know how much more joy one man can take in his life, it would be pleasant to have the chance to try.’

‘And perhaps I will have both my brothers back one day as well,’ she said wistfully and he hugged her close, risking all the clothes he’d hastily scrambled back in place as the urge to offer and take comfort nearly got burnt up in his endless need for his wife.

‘Until then, we’ll just have to make do with loving one another,’ he told her solemnly and grinned at her when she batted him with a half-hearted smack on his noble chin.

‘As a consolation prize?’ she suggested with a roguish look she wished would make him have second thoughts about leaving her.

‘As an Olympic triumph, my Persephone,’ he argued and there was sincerity in his dear
eyes, as well as teasing, as he knotted his mangled cravat about his neck and shrugged into his coat and waistcoat in a fashion that would horrify the men who made them so lovingly. They fitted him with a perfection of muscular power she admired almost as much as his mighty form without a stitch of clothing on it, but only almost.

‘I don’t think my namesake was as lucky as I am with my prize,’ Persephone said gently, all her love and admiration for this once-wounded warrior of hers in her own willow-green gaze as she let him see into her very heart and soul now she could look at him openly with the eyes of love.

‘Or her prize with her. But I must go, love, or all that creeping about in the dawn will be wasted and my mama-in-law will hate me from the outset of our overhasty marriage.’

‘Go, then,’ she said grumpily and gave up on testing his will-power by shrugging into her dressing gown and accompanying him to her door.

‘Until later, Wife,’ he whispered, after one last kiss to make her long for him even more bitterly until they could do it all again.

‘Do you want me to hate you, as well?’ she asked grumpily and pushed him out of
the door before she could drag him back in and devil take the rest of the world.

She closed the door on him, leaving him to make his way somehow from her room to his in Jack’s wing of the house, as if that was what Earls always did at this time of day. If he could talk his way out of the disgraceful state of his usually immaculate linen and the almost-dressed look of a rake well satisfied, he surely deserved his one-time reputation.

He did deserve that anyway, she decided as she lay back in her feather bed with a foolish grin on her face; he deserved it so richly she would have to make sure he was thoroughly occupied satisfying his wife for the next fifty years or so. She stretched sensuously against the satin bedcover and felt the odd twinge and ache in the deepest secret places of her body whose fullest potential he’d shown her so thrillingly, and sighed with contentment.

Who would have thought on that heady moonlit night in June she had met her love as surely as Jessica had finally found hers in Jack? Thank heavens Alex had come here looking for his cousin, she decided, as the terrible deprivation of not having him in her life bit into her state of lazy contentment
like some terrible nightmare. She finally understood the absolute risk of loving as she thought of her mother deprived of her father when they should have had so many years left ahead of them. It would be sheerest agony to lose Alex and she flinched away from the very idea, but decided in the end it would be worth even that pain rather than never meeting him again in the first place.

Somehow luck turned out to be on his side, Alex concluded when he reached the splendour of his borrowed bedchamber in the Duke of Dettingham’s private wing of the great house. It had been turning his way ever since he had met a spitting virago in the dark last June, he decided with a reminiscent smile. He considered the bitter, scarred and disillusioned man he’d been back then and met his own eyes in his shaving mirror to see if love had expunged the physical marks of his ordeal at the hands of a zealot.

No, they were still there, but somehow lesser than they had once seemed. He wondered if time had faded the marks of hatred left on his skin, or if the eyes of a loving wife made him see they never had been as bad as
he thought they were to start with. Whichever it was, he accepted they were part of him now and he might as well live with them as best he could.

He contemplated the fuss and flutter his second wedding to his beautiful wife would generate and wondered where the reclusive Earl of Calvercombe had gone off to when it only seemed a welcome second chance to vow to love and share everything he was with her for life, rather than a hideous ordeal. Sparing a thought for his cousin Annabelle and Rich Seaborne, he hoped they were even half as happy together as he was with his newly made wife, and decided to trust them to each other, wherever they might be. He’d come here earlier this summer to find the only member of his family he had ever felt close to, and found a whole new one instead. Annabelle would be sure to regard that as a blessing and wish him happy.