Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
There is room for Gabriella right here at the Hall and certainly room for her in my heart.
Alice had never heard such blessed, beautiful, luminous words. Better still, she could rely on them wholeheartedly because they came from Cam. She kissed him back, for relief, for joy, for hope, and then for sheer animal pleasure.
He knew what he was about, did the baron, and Alice knew what she wanted.
“The bedroom,” she said when fifteen stone of amorous peer had somehow arranged himself atop her on the sofa. To be fair, Alice might have wrestled him to that location, and he might well have gone all unresisting. “We should remove to the bedroom.”
Cam levered up, looking disheveled and determined. “You will marry me, won’t you, Alice? I will happily live with you in an irregular union if that’s what you prefer, but I would much rather be your husband.”
He was learning to ask, and Alice was learning to adore being asked. “We will marry each other, and by special license if you like. Kiss me some more.”
He got up, scooped Alice into his arms, and carried her to the bed, whereupon he deposited her. While Alice struggled to her elbows, Cam locked the bedroom door.
He stood at the foot of the bed, hands on hips. “Now then.”
So fierce, and all hers. “Now suits wonderfully. You might want to remove your boots. I could certainly do without mine.”
His expression suggested boots were a complicated concept not relevant to anything of interest, but he sat on the side of the bed and slid Alice’s skirts up to her knees.
“Lacy garters. Miss Singleton, you shock me.”
“See if you might return the favor, hmm?”
He laughed and made short work of her boots and stockings. To Alice’s chagrin, he could shock her, simply by stroking her knees, and then higher, and ever so impossibly more delicately, and higher still.
“If you do not remove your own boots,” she panted, “I will fling you out the window.” He’d brought her to a state of urgency that justified giving orders and making threats.
Cam rose and dispensed with his boots, then kept going.
While Alice watched, one article of clothing after another was draped over the vanity stool.
He unwrapped himself like a holiday gift all done up in bright paper and colored string, slowly revealing an article of beautifully worked oak.
A treasure box, a puzzle of a healthy, aroused, male treasure box.
“Madam is overdressed,” he said, all naked nonchalance. “Might I be of assistance?”
Alice struggled briefly in search of a witty retort and found only more urgency. He was magnificent, and they were to be married, and they would have years…
“Please.” She lifted her wrist for him to undo the cuff. “And be quick.”
He was the opposite of quick, bless his contrary nature. Camden Huxley was capable of making a lady’s wrist the site of raptures, of tickling her ribs and collarbone and nape with his nose, and what he could do with his hands…
Alice was floating on a sea of pleasure when it occurred to her that the negotiation had so far gone all Cam’s way. She bestirred herself to try an experimental caress over his bum, and the whole, entire fifteen stone of him went still.
“Shall I do that again? I daresay I shall.” What glorious fun to learn him as he’d been learning her, to indulge and explore, to taste and tickle.
Alice was not nearly through with her investigations when she again found herself on her back and her favorite blanket in the whole world draped over her on all fours.
“My baroness is imaginative.”
“She’s half mad with desire,” Alice said, circling his wrists with her fingers and undulating luxuriously. “Completely mad.”
Two people could travel to a place beyond madness, where all was light, pleasure, oneness, and joy, and that was precisely where Alice and Cam took each other.
Though the second time, Cam might have led the way. Alice was too overwhelmed, too replete with emotions as varied as they were enormous. She dozed off in a fog of peace, Cam spooned around her and all right with the world, or soon to be made right.
“What the blooming…?” Cam’s arms withdrew, and Alice became aware of a soft tapping.
“Somebody is knocking on the sitting room door.”
“Somebody with a pressing need to be heaved over the Dales.” Cam nonetheless rose from the bed and retrieved a dressing gown from a hook on the bedpost. “Stay right where you are, please. I have plans for you.”
Alice sat up, unease threading through her languor. What could be so urgent that it warranted disturbing the lord of the manor as he ostensibly packed for a hasty departure?
“Bernard is paying a call,” Cam said, returning a moment later. “Beaglemore says the vicar looks intent on seeing me sooner rather than later. I’m sorry.”
Alice slogged to the side of the bed, feeling more comfortable in her own skin than she’d ever thought possible. Cam had done that. Being with him had done that, rather.
“Might we see him together? If we’re engaged, he’s probably the first person we should inform.”
Cam’s brows rose. “I envy your ability to think. I want to toss dear Cousin into the North Sea and resume anticipation of our vows.”
Alice indulged in a yawn and a stretch. “We can anticipate them again soon. And often. I seem to have misplaced my lady’s maid, and you lack for a valet. Let’s contrive as best we can, shall we?”
Despite a few kisses and caresses, dressing each other proceeded efficiently. Whatever business Bernard sought to discuss could not be good news. The urgency Alice had felt earlier in bed had been quite thoroughly satisfied.
But a new urgency, an anxiety, had taken its place. When Cam would have lingered to make up the bed, Alice instead led him out the door and down to the family parlor. They found Bernard pacing and muttering and in a very unvicarish frame of mind.
“Humble apologies, Lady Josephine, but the stage is delayed.” The innkeeper’s wife positively smirked that announcement from behind her standing desk in the inn’s capacious foyer.
Such disrespect was what came of fraternizing with the lower orders. Had Mrs. Chudlow not also been the postmistress in Farnes Crossing, Lady Josephine would have fashioned a scathing reply.
Instead, she sighed patiently. “I suppose it cannot be helped. Perhaps if the coachman wasn’t so fond of his flask, the schedule and these good people might not suffer so.”
The good people looked to be middling sorts. A yeoman and his wife and small son. A pair of dowagers in outdated carriage dresses. A bankerish sort of fellow whose jacket was shiny at the elbows and whose boots needed new heels.
“This lot’s on the next Flyer into York. You asked after the Crossbow to Leeds, Manchester, and Liverpool. We have one inside fare and one outside fare left, but horses will go lame, and accidents can happen. Won’t see the Crossbow for an hour, maybe two.”
Two hours to idle about Farnes Crossing… a penance. A sheer, undeserved penance, though at least it was market day.
“The traveler will be a child.” The weather was fine, and many a child rode safely on the roof of a stagecoach. Outside fares were usually half the cost of an inside seat, and the open air up top was healthier too.
Lady Josephine caught Mrs. Chudlow exchanging a glance with the older ladies. They would all remark the parsimony of begrudging a child—a girl child, at that—an inside seat.
“The inside fare will do.”
“Luggage?”
“One satchel.” Why any small girl needed three dresses, spare boots, a night dress, three pinafores, a shawl, and a coat, in addition to stockings, underlinen, and handkerchiefs, Lady Josephine did not know, but such was the wardrobe of every girl at the home.
Mrs. Dumfries would not be reasoned with.
Surely hoarding clothing like that qualified as a sort of gluttony or greed.
“With the satchel, inside, one unaccompanied minor…” Mrs. Chudlow named a fare that Lady Josephine was certain included vales for the coachman, guard, horses, and grooms.
Her ladyship nonetheless passed over the coins. “A window seat, please. It’s not every day a child gets to see the marvelous breadth of her homeland.” Probably for the first and last time.
Mrs. Chudlow wrote something on a printed slip of paper and passed it over.
“You should be here at the stated hour for departure, even if the stage is delayed. The coachies do their best to make up lost time, and the roads are quite passable at present. Provide the child some tucker. The fare at a few of the inns west of here isn’t fit for dogs, and a body hasn’t time to both use the jakes and eat the slops. ”
A glint in Mrs. Chudlow’s eyes suggested she positively delighted in inflicting vulgarities on her betters and in telling them what to do.
No matter. Let her have her little stratagems. For a sum certain, Mrs. Chudlow tampered with the king’s mail, which was malfeasance sufficient to put the inn out of business, if handled adroitly.
“Thank you ever so kindly,” Lady Josephine said, smiling. “One appreciates the generous advice of an expert. I do wish I could send the child in a private conveyance, but those are in short supply at the vicarage.”
“I’m sure they are, your ladyship.” Some of Mrs. Chudlow’s smirk faded. “I’m sure they are.”
“Until later, then.” Lady Josephine beamed at the assemblage and left.
Disrespectful fools, the lot of them.
“Miss Singleton, my lord.” Bernard offered two bows. “My apologies for intruding at an unfashionable hour.”
Cam did not know his cousin all that well.
Bernard, in addition to being several years older, had always held himself somewhat aloof.
Bernard and Alexander had been friendly, but Cam had never known whether that was simply Alexander’s general good-heartedness extended to a family member or a true bond.