Untamable Rogue (Formerly: A Christmas Baby) (10 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

A few nights later, before dinner, Ash took Lark for a romantic stroll through the avenue his mother used to call her
ghostwalk
. It was a shadowy quarter-mile arch of trained hemlock, a gothic cathedral formed by nature, from which they emerged upon the orchard, a breathtaking sight at dusk with blossoms lacing row after row of trees.

He’d left his cane at the house so he could use the excuse of needing her arm on uneven ground, and wondered what justification he could give in a week’s time, two weeks? Perhaps he’d pretend she hurt him more than she thought with that pistol shot.

Then again, his agility would surely show in bed—providing he ever managed more than sleeping with her—and the pretense would be over.

He’d decided to get her a little drunk that night, because he was damned well going to consummate this bloody marriage. A good stiff drink, or three, just might help her to relax, maybe enough for him to tell her the whole sordid story of his grandfather’s ultimatum.

Christmas was only eight months away, after all, and though he need only
get
her with child by then, Ash knew that the process sometimes took more than one try. He intended on trying often, of course, but damnation, he needed to begin as he meant to go on, did he not?

After their walk, he gave her claret before dinner, champagne with dinner, and port afterwards. Later, he poured her a brandy in the library over a game of cards, after which, they retired to opposite chairs in front of the fire. He refilled her glass twice more before she relaxed enough to initiate a conversation.

“I was glad you survived the war,” she said out of nowhere. “I prayed you would.”

Ash sat forward, a little muzzy from the drink. “You did not know me before the war, did you?”

She laughed. “We met when I was eleven.”

“Refresh my memory.”

“I was running, fell, and you picked me up, there at the Picked Barrel. You wiped my tears, dabbed at the blood on my skinned knuckles, and kissed them, all three, then you said I was a brave little lady.”

Ash was certain he’d picked up any number of fallen children over the years, calling them either brave ladies or soldiers. “I must have been all of twenty-one, and that was you?” he said, as if he did remember. He wished he did. She must not have dressed like a boy then, if he’d recognized her as female. “You’ve been at the Pickled Barrel all these years?”

Lark nodded, head high, tears filling her eyes. “I was born there.”

Did she weep because she realized he didn’t remember, Ash wondered, or had life been that insupportable at the pub?

“I always thought you were different, better, more honest,” she said in a sleepy voice, her words unguarded and dangerously earnest, Ash thought.

“Honest, I might agree, for I pride myself on it, and I have the utmost respect for honesty in others, but better? I think not. I know not. Better than who?”

“The other men who came to the pub.”

“I am not, believe me.”

“You are better in every way. Better than one most of all.”

“Which one?”

“The one who hurt my sister and gave her a babe.”

Good grief. How hurt? Had her sister been brutalized by some man? “What happened to her?”

“I saw naught but blood, and before a few months passed, she was fat with a baby. My father threw her out, but I found a family in the country for her to live with.”

Bloody hell, no wonder she had been afraid when he approached her on their wedding night, no wonder when she awoke with a “man” in her bed. “How old were you at the time.”

“Fifteen; my sister was sixteen.”

Worse and worse, and then he understood. “Was that when you stopped dressing like a girl?”

“My sister said if I looked like a boy, most of Da’s customers would leave me alone.”

Most, but not all. “And did they?”

She placed her brandy on the table, rose, wavered and lost her balance. Ash lunged and caught her before she hit the floor and pulled her onto his lap.

She curled right into him as if he would keep her safe.

Ash had never been more shocked or awakened by anything. His body took to trembling, accepting her presence with all the enthusiasm called for in a husband. No question of holding up his responsibility, if consummation were called for at this moment, except that it most assuredly was not.

He had realized some time ago, of course, that he could perform with her. And tonight, well, if she were curling into him that meant he’d got her too drunk for a gentleman to take advantage. Damnation.

No matter, her story would have stopped him dead anyway. Then again, she might not have told it without the drink. He was a cad. She needed time. This new wife of his was skittish as a purebred filly and with good reason.

Her sweet-smelling hair and delicate features only made her appear the more fragile. Did she understand the significance of his fast-beating heart beneath her hand? It mattered not, for she needed comforting for her sister’s agony, and for her own resulting anguish, perhaps for the first time.

Ash closed his arms about her, slow and easy, to give her an opportunity to escape if she chose, and held her like a frightened child.

The other night, before she bruised his ballocks, he had kissed her and lost his head to passion. He would not make that mistake again. He would be patient and consoling, show her that she need not fear him in any circumstance.

She sighed and closed her eyes, knowing full well where she found herself.

Ash closed his own and wondered where her sister had ended, but he dare not ask. She had not mentioned her or the babe further. He must draw his own sad conclusions.

“Are you tired?” he asked, some fifteen minutes later, when she readjusted their positions and got close enough to bruising his ballocks once again to make him sweat.

“It’s the drink. Makes me sleepy.”

“I take it you’re not afraid of me anymore?”

“Not so much, and you look sleepy too, I can tell. I do not like the way drinking makes me feel.”

“I do not I will drink again,” he said, meaning it. She’d just frightened the urge right out of him. “I believe I’d rather keep my wits about me from now on. No wonder you pulled that trigger and shot me.”

“I’m just glad I only pulled it once.”

Ash barely stopped trembling over her answer when a snuffling sound made him realize his bride had fallen asleep in his arms. If not for the drink, she would never have let her guard down this much. He knew her at least that well.

Ash rose and carried her up the stairs and toward her bed—his wife’s bed—the bed of the woman with whom he was supposed to sleep, he thought, with a bit more and less regret today than yesterday for his hasty marriage. And ‘twasn’t regret so much for the marriage now as for the way in which he married her, because damn it, he was beginning to like her, and she deserved better than a husband who’d brawled with her on her wedding day and scared the life out of her on her wedding night.

When Ash lit the candle, he saw stars, silver stars of all sizes, the ones she’d brought from the Christmas decorations, hanging by uneven lengths of sewing thread from her curtain tops to dangle in the windows and catch the sun by day or the candlelight by night, as if she were keeping Christmas in her heart.

He placed her atop the covers, brought them over her, and looked down at her. No consummation with his Christmas-in-April bride tonight, he thought, his eager body disagreeing with the pronouncement. But how could he leave her and go back to his own bed when he had set the rule that he would stay?

He needed to follow through and sleep with her every night from now on, or she would realize that a sad story, and a sleepy bride, could turn him away. “No,” he affirmed aloud. He must keep to his strategy, as Wellington would say, and sleep with her.

As Ash unwrapped her, she curled into a ball, for the bedchamber had gone cold. He wrapped her warm again, stirred the embers to flame and placed another log on the fire. He undressed himself as the chamber warmed. When it was toasty, he rolled Lark onto her back to undo the buttons down the front of her gown.

“What are you doing?” she asked, too sleepy to open her eyes or care.

“Getting you ready for bed,” he said, taking her arms from the sleeves of the cream and burgundy gown he’d encouraged her to take. “I shouldn’t have given you so much to drink,” he said as if to himself.

“I know.” Lark sighed, rolled to her side, and raised a knee, which made getting her gown over her hips and down her legs a little more difficult, but he managed.

He found her wearing her threadbare chemise, with no corset, of course, or stockings—oh God—and proceeded to strip that from her as well. Then he fetched his great grandmother’s night-rail, the one she’d chosen from the trunks upstairs, looked it over, and decided against it.

Throwing back the covers, Ash placed his wife naked beneath them. “I do the work to undress you, I make the choices,” he whispered, as he kissed her brow. “You’re a fine figure of a woman Larkin Rose Blackburne.”

Then he went around the bed, removed his dressing gown and slid beneath the covers in the same naked state as his oblivious bride. Ash slid to the center of the bed, took Larkin into his arms, and she burrowed into him—for body warmth, at least—a fine state of affairs, until she went back to sleep.

His body had no intention of resting; it had other pursuits in mind. Hard pursuits that would take a great deal of throbbing attention, and if he moved her just right in his arms, like so, he could at least snuggle that aching part of him there, at the warm moist apex of her, where he and she would be the most comfortable.

She arched when he did, not taking him in, quite, but nestling him more snugly, so that his man part did a small dance, joy and enthusiasm in one tightly-wound package, a great deal of energy with no place to go.

Ash cursed and ignored the pointless pulsing thrust, and took to savoring the feel of his bride’s skin beneath his hand, like silk or satin, unblemished and perfect. He skimmed the cleft of her spine starting at her shoulders, learned the breadth of her hips with his palm, the better to embrace and stroke. Her shoulders were wide, her waist trim. Her breasts crushed against his chest, he had yet to explore, other than in the bath, oh, and in the tree, which had nearly got him killed.

Nevertheless, he wanted a breast in his mouth. Now.

His body agreed.

He moved her again, found himself a handful, and tweaked the nipple with his thumb.

“Ash,” Lark whispered, giving him greater access.

“Lark?” he said. “Do you like this?”

She found his mouth, no doubts there, she’d initiated the kiss. As he kissed her back, he continued to tease her nipple, budding it and torturing it, and her hips came for his, not once, but twice, then a third rhythmic time.

“Lark, do you want this?”

She surged again, her hips begging for his, her breast pouting for more attention, her mouth open and greedy. Lord, she could be sensuous, but he wished she were awake.

He tried to tuck her face into his neck, pull her back into his arms, to settle and sleep. “Not tonight,” he said, for both their sakes.

When the day came that he finally took her, he wanted her to know what he was doing to her, no matter how much she seemed to appreciate sexual byplay in her sleep—her drink induced sleep, he must remember.

But she would have none of it. She whimpered and threw a leg over him, tossed her head back and her breast forward so that there was nothing he could do but take it into his mouth. A man would have to be mad to refuse such a gift.