Chapter Ten
Where longing bleeds into trust.
Lovemaking had never left Dom with knees too weak to support him.
Never. Not once.
Shifting gently on the bed so he didn’t wake her, he drew Louisa closer even as his shoulder screamed. It had been cramping for the past hour, but he wasn’t letting her go.
Not when his fantasies were swirling like morning mist around him.
The moonlight spilling across them was poetic, swathing the lush body draped across his in ivory fire.
The gorgeous mass of hair he’d dreamed about—yes, dreamed—was everywhere, shackles he wanted encircling him.
With his free hand, he lifted a silken strand that lay on his chest and wrapped it around his finger.
The world beyond those murky windowpanes was simply lost to him.
As it had in the Great Fire of 1666, London could have burned to its studs in the past hours for all he cared.
His only concern was a ramshackle manor in Marylebone and a new wife Dom worried he was becoming too attached to.
He breathed through the creep of panic, the scent of her, of them, blending with the hearth’s smoky aroma to permeate his senses.
Drowsy, sated bliss had never felt this fucking good. Or this fucking scary.
Bringing the crimson lock to his nose, he added the fragrance of lemons to his inventory of the evening’s pleasures. He’d never known a woman’s hair to smell so delightfully like citrus.
Before she woke and conceivably demanded another go—as had happened earlier, when he’d been certain the first had been it for the night—he rose on his elbow to gaze down at her.
She was artlessness in repose, every bit of obstinacy, and there was a lot of it, absent from her face.
Her body, oh, what a delight it was. Her breasts, more generous than he’d realized beneath layers of genteel confinement, were bared by a sheet that lay tangled about her waist. Her nipples, darker than dawn but lighter than sunset, called his eye.
His lips tingled to taste them, but he held back, lust he needed to master if they were to leave this bedchamber anytime soon.
He knew she was going to be trouble.
Possibly the kind that would break his heart.
His chest gave a dull ache, a fearful ache that he tried to rub away.
Stepping into a wedded union with love attached hadn’t been the plan.
Much of the reason he’d married was to restore the damage he’d done to his family and the viscountcy.
Her reasons, although he knew some of them, were her own.
Nevertheless, the fact that he was her boy in the bookstore unnerved him, adding an element of fate to a fate-less tale.
His wife had expectations he wasn’t certain he could deliver upon.
He had a history of disappointing the people he cared about, especially when they mattered.
She was important to him, beyond his fascination and rampant yearning.
Happiness lay just outside his reach when he was with her, and he believed he was close to grasping it for the first time.
And, bloody hell, did he want to make her happy.
You see, he wasn’t afraid to love her, he was simply afraid to lose her.
“You brood after sexual congress, is that it?” Louisa said, shifting onto her side to face him.
She propped her jaw on her fist, her smile beatific, amusement nullifying the sting of her words.
The stone in her ring glittered, casting prisms across the ivory sheets.
He felt a certain inalienable possession seeing the emerald on her finger.
“I don’t want separate bedrooms,” he announced without design, a notion circling his mind for days.
Her hair slipped silkily through his fingers as his gaze focused on a mirror on the wall behind her.
The gentle curves of her back looked quite stunning in the reflection.
“I know it’s the way society couples lump along, but I want you here, with me.
Or in any bedchamber that you choose to make ours. ”
“Deal,” she whispered, stretching like a cat waking from the finest nap of its life. Her smile grew and a minuscule dimple dented her left cheek, something he’d never seen before. His heart gave a hard thump to realize there were pieces of her yet to discover.
His gaze traveled, roaming helplessly from her slender feet to her glowing green eyes. “Deal?”
Leaning, she pressed her lips to the hollow in his throat, over what he assumed was the visible flicker of his pulse. The muscles in his arms twitched as he fought to keep from reaching for her. “Isn’t that the way gamblers talk?”
“I’m not a gambler anymore,” he whispered, his voice breaking as she took a patch of skin between her teeth and sucked. She was coming to know what he liked; it was no surprise she was a fast learner.
“We can wager here, Dom, just the two of us.”
Considering the various ways he could take her, he rolled his bottom lip beneath his teeth, immeasurably gratified when she tracked the movement with a hushed breath.
“If you keep talking like this, and touching me, biting me, I’m going to do everything I whispered in your ear before I came the last time.
Wagers be damned, this will be the match.
Only, a small respite—food, sleep—is in order first.”
“Came,” she murmured. “Such a simple word for…” Her throat bobbed as she swallowed, her fingers clenching in the sheet. “A moment of ecstasy too brilliant to describe, that losing of mind you mentioned. I suppose you’ve had many opportunities to describe it.”
Dom’s lids lowered, but only for a second.
He wasn’t hiding from a conversation he’d known was coming.
Louisa wasn’t the type of woman to let him dodge a reckoning, especially when the tally of his bed partners was in question.
“It’s nothing like you imagine, like the broadsheets hinted at.
They only sought to continue my brother’s legacy. ”
She frowned, an adorable furrow settling between her eyebrows. It was perverse, but her show of jealousy sent a puerile bolt of satisfaction right through him.
She shoved his shoulder, rolling him to his back. “Don’t laugh, Dominic Beckett, don’t you dare laugh!”
His arm came around her, tucking her against his chest. He kissed the crown of her head, her wild tumble of hair tickling his cheek. “There were three brief affairs during the gaming hell days and a gentle introduction, an untried bit of fumbling, in my youth. Just before Oxford.”
She exhaled noisily, her crossness fluttering like silk across his chest. Her hand tensed, fingertips digging into his hip.
Her touch, however unintended, was starting to drive him mad.
His cock was doing things beneath the sheet he wasn’t going to be able to hide for long.
“If we ever attend an event and that silly baroness is there, I swear, I will tell her exactly what I think about what she said about you. Incomparable,” she whispered, the word as sharp as a blade.
Dom held his smile. Was that what she’d said? It was nice enough, gratifying really. Nothing loathsome about it. (When he could barely even remember the chit.)
“You’re a cad.” Louisa stiffened in his arms, the opposite of the melting in his arms he’d rather come to adore. “You like this.”
What he’d liked was his wife ripping off a waistcoat button trying to get him out of the garment, doing irreparable damage to his shirtsleeve.
Reluctant to admit this while considering her current mood, he paused, sifting through his options before finally deciding on the truth.
“Would you rather she said I lacked skill? Harcourt, for example, has a very disheartening standing in that arena.”
Louisa grunted uncharitably, a sound no duke’s daughter ought to make, precisely why he worshiped her.
“If I tell you my last secret, darling Lou, will this prove you’re it for me?” He dusted his lips over the wrinkle on her brow, smoothing out this and her temper, he hoped. “No one else. Only you.”
She shrugged halfheartedly. “I suppose.”
“Well, this part isn’t really a secret, but it might demonstrate how much I wanted this marriage, wanted you.
Griff and I combed London and the surrounding boroughs quite frantically for a week in search of a manor with a stone outbuilding of some sort, one able to withstand minor detonations.
I must have inspected twenty residences before selecting the one. ”
This got her attention.
Rising in a fluid movement, her gaze met his. Another surprise. Tiny flecks of brown ringed the outer edges of her irises, lending them a careless, almost cavalier air. “My lab.”
“Hmm, yes, your bureau of chemical mischief. I knew when I saw it, even needing work, that it was perfect.” He laid his index finger over her lips when she made to speak—thank him, most likely.
If he was going to tell her the next, he didn’t want gratitude lingering, leaving a too-easy jump to pity.
“You know about my reading issue, and my parents, particularly my father, finding this deficiency unacceptable. ‘What man lets words on the page defeat him,’ he said to me countless times. He called it lethargy of the mind and the spirit. Griff tried to help, but…”
Dom gave a humorless laugh and rolled to his back to stare at the ceiling.
It was level, surprisingly, without a ripple in sight.
“The first time I gambled at a hell, the first time I won, I should say, I’d just had an argument with my father.
A physical altercation, an occurrence my brother doesn’t and will never know about, if you please.
He’ll hate himself for not stopping something he couldn’t stop. ”
“Of course,” she whispered and laid her head tenderly on his shoulder.
“I’d just been tossed from Oxford and that night at the hazard table, I conquered the fear guiding my life. Winning was like a rush of opium, courage a direct shot to the veins. So, I went back the next night. And the next.”
“Dom, you don’t—”
Leaning, he caught her mouth with his own, silencing her while taking comfort in her nearness.
“I do, Louisa. I need to tell you that it wasn’t enjoyable, even if the gambling helped me endure those months.
Truth is, I was never the reprobate people think.
I was the quiet one, Griff the gregarious Beckett.
I was more comfortable in a library than a gaming hell, though books always intimidated me.
They still do. And yet there I was, with all the noise and din, the chaos, night after night. ”
Her hand rose to cradle his jaw, and he angled into the touch, his heart racing. “I hated myself for craving it, but I need you to know, without a doubt, that I don’t crave it anymore. It’s not me, it never was.”
Louisa let only seconds pass before she climbed atop him, her long legs tightening around his hips with surprising strength. Hearing the catch of his breath, she slid her softness over his firm length and silenced his low moan with a kiss that offered acceptance he hadn’t known he needed.
His hands shot to her hips with a groan that was half surrender, half challenge.
She shivered in reply, and he knew there’d be no more talk tonight—only the surety that their honeymoon was far from over.