Chapter Thirteen
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
DARCY PACED IN the sitting room. The door was shut, but he wasn’t speaking loudly on the off chance that either of the servants was close enough to listen in. It was mid-afternoon, after all.
“We could go and find a midwife to talk to her?” he was saying. “She didn’t seem interested in listening to either of us.”
“What if you go on your own?” said Richard. “You speak to her, just you.”
“Lord, Richard, what makes you think I’ve ever been good at talking to her?”
“Well, you’re married to her. You’ve been married for four years. You talk.”
“You’re much better at talking to her than I am,” said Darcy. “You go and talk to her.”
“Well, what am I to tell her? We haven’t even worked out between us what this will look like, our future, our…” His voice changed when he said the word, “Family.”
Darcy stopped moving. He looked up at Richard. “Can it work? Can it really work?”
Richard was smiling. “We have shared things before, haven’t we? We were quite good at sharing the guardianship of Georgiana, after all?”
Darcy smiled. “We were.”
“And we can be co-fathers together,” said Richard. “I feel certain we can.”
“And co-husbands?” Darcy raised his eyebrows.
“What’s this? You made it quite clear from the beginning that she is yours.”
“That’s because you’re putting your child in her! I was insecure. How can a man not claim a woman if he fathers a child on her?”
“Yes, but—”
“It’s only… I wish you to claim her, perhaps? I wish to give that to you both. You claim her, and she can surrender to your claim, and I shall get the joy of having witnessed it.”
“That is enough for you?”
Darcy nodded. He crossed the room to put a hand on the other man’s chest. “Go and talk to her, if you please?”
“I simply don’t know what to say, though!”
“Do I have to beg you?” Darcy’s voice had gotten sultry. His hand dragged its way down over the other man’s body. “Or convince you some other way?”
Richard’s expression went heated and hungry.
“I suppose it’s very wicked to do this in the sitting room,” Darcy breathed.
“Yes,” said Richard.
“But the door is locked,” said Darcy with a shrug.
“Is it?” Richard shifted on his feet.
Darcy’s hand went lower to find the colonel’s arousal hard and pulsing through his trousers. “We must be quiet, though.”
“Mmm,” said Richard, bending down to claim Darcy’s mouth.
They kissed in a frenzy as Darcy unbuttoned the falls of both of their trousers. He stroked Richard’s hard prick and then his own.
“Now,” he whispered, “I will do this for you, and then you’ll go and talk some sense into our wife, will you not?”
“Our wife?” Richard kissed him again.
“Ours,” confirmed Darcy, holding their members together, rubbing the sensitive undersides together as he began to stroke both cocks with one of his hands.
“You mean that, Will? You’re not going to take it back?”
“If I trust you won’t run off with her, if you’ll let me be the father to your children, then you’ll trust this, that I shall share my wife with you, that you and I shall be… sort of, I don’t know, husbands to each other?”
“Yes,” said the colonel in a strained voice. “Yes, Will, and that… that feels very good.” He looked down at their joined cocks.
“Quiet, Richard,” breathed Darcy.
Richard tried to stay quiet. He tried very, very hard to stay quiet.
But it felt very, very good as he surged and crested against the other man’s prick, while the other man stroked them both to completion.
ELIZABETH LIFTED HER face from the pillow. “Will, I have told you again and again to leave me be.”
“It’s Richard. Let me in.”
“No, I shall not be alone with you, not when my husband—”
“He knows I’m here. He sent me to you. He says I am much better at talking to you than he is.”
Elizabeth had thought this herself a number of times, hadn’t she? She groaned, sitting up on the bed. “I look a fright.”
“I don’t care about that, Lizzy. Please. Let me in.”
She hesitated and then got off the bed. “You swear he’s all right with this?”
“We both came to talk to you and he did most of the talking, but you didn’t wish to listen—”
“Well, that’s because—”
“All right, I don’t mean to rehash that,” he muttered, chagrined.
She yanked the door open to glare at him. “You’re here to deny it, I suppose, deny that you never had any desire to get me with child.”
“No, I suppose that’s true. But it’s different now. May I come in?”
“It doesn’t matter anyway, I suppose. I’m never having a child.” Tears came for her again. She turned, throwing out her hands, feeling helpless, and she walked away from the door. A moment later, she heard the door close. She rounded on him, and he was inside, door shut behind him. “I think he wants to put his prick in your arse. What do you think of that?”
The colonel blushed, tucking his chin down against his chest.
“Oh,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Well, you should enjoy each other, then. I can’t say I didn’t find it somewhat enjoyable myself, I suppose, but it seems a lot of work, what with the stretching and the grease and—”
“He convinced you to let him do that to you!”
She looked up at him.
“I shouldn’t be surprised, truly, should I? He’s good at that, is he not, getting a body to agree to let him do all manner of things with him?”
“Well…” She shrugged. “I may be easily convinced. I was curious. It was nice. That part of one’s body is very sensitive.”
“Lizzy, this isn’t what I’m here to talk to you about.”
“No?” She folded her arms over her chest.
“You’re not barren,” he said.
This made her lower lip tremble. “But I must be, because—”
“No, Will reminded me of an injury he got, one that could quite account for his inability to, erm… so, it’s more than likely his fault, you see? There’s no reason to believe it’s you.”
“He told me of that,” she said, nodding. “I said it was another reason to avoid horses!”
The colonel chuckled, affectionately looking her over. “Oh, Lizzy, you are…” He crossed the room and pulled her into his arms.
“Will won’t like this!” she protested, even as she rested her cheek against his chest.
“He will not mind at all. Besides, you said that he and I could do what we wished together, so I think all those lines are to be entirely dissolved.”
“Really?” Her heart skipped a beat in her chest, thinking of the implications of that.
“Maybe he’ll mind, but we’ll work through it, somehow. He called you ours, before he sent me up here.”
“He did,” she whispered.
“Aye, and he is ours, isn’t he, my lovely Lizzy? He belongs to the both of us? He has been mine a long time, even if I haven’t… taken him like I have recently.”
She burrowed into the colonel’s chest. “He worries, you know. He is very hard on himself.”
“Foolishly,” said the colonel. “We need to show him that we both need him, and that we would never leave him.”
“I have said this to him,” she said.
“Yes, and we shall have to say it many, many more times. But enough about him. This is about you, my darling, and you are not barren.”
She pulled out of his arms. “Well, you can’t know that for sure.”
“Perhaps not, but I wish to keep trying to get you with child. You’ll let me?”
“You… don’t wish it.” She backed away, turning her back on him.
“I do wish it, in fact. I wish it rather badly. Nothing would stir me more than seeing your belly thicken with my child growing inside you, nothing would please me more than seeing you quite round with my babe. I want it so very badly, in fact, that I almost tremble when I think of it.”
She turned back around. “It’s him, then. You don’t wish to take me from him.”
“Well, we talked,” he said with a shrug. “He says I can be there. He says we’ll be a family, the three of us?”
She smiled. “Truly? He said that?”
“Yes,” said the colonel, smiling back.
She bounded to him, throwing herself into his arms.
He caught her and kissed her.
She sighed against him, opening her mouth to accept the sweet invasion of his tongue. He crushed her tightly into his broad chest.
She struggled free. “Wait a moment, but… why would you be more successful at getting me with child than before? You spilled your seed in me a thousand times over these past weeks.”
“Well, that’s the timing business,” he said.
“The timing business,” she said, blinking at him.
“As we were saying, about cows—”
“Oh, Lord!” She glared at him, clenching her hands into fists.
“Lizzy, we are not animals, obviously, but we do… there are things… you have never been to a university or studied anatomy, but this is known. They cut up cadavers and look at women’s wombs and—”
“And what? This explains timing?” She folded her arms over her chest. “I mean, I suppose I know you can’t get me with child now, while I’m having my bleeding. Is it more than that?”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s a certain time.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t actually take an anatomy class. I was not ever going to be a doctor.”
She rolled her eyes.
“But if it’s like with cows, it’s one day out of the entire month, just a short time, twelve hours or something.”
“And you know this because…?”
“Because I have to be ready to take over for my brother if he ever keels over, and because we have tenants who raise cows, and if you raise cows, you have to breed them, and you can’t breed a cow when she’s not, you know, breedable. And you likely just weren’t.”
“Breedable?” She grinned, a warmth flooding her.
“I am going to successfully breed you, Lizzy,” he said, his voice dropping into a low and frankly delicious register. He reached out and took hold of her hand. “Trust me on that. I am going to get you with child and we are all three going to raise that child together and any other children I get on you, because I’m not leaving.” He kissed her hand.
“You really think it’s true that I’m not barren?”
“I’m practically positive,” he said, turning her hand over, kissing her in the center of her palm.
“All this talk of being bred, it’s…”
“Oh, for you too?” He gave her a mischievous smile.
“But it doesn’t matter, I suppose.”
He took her hand and pressed it against himself.
Oh. “Well, that’s very, very hard, Colonel,” she breathed.
“It is,” he said.
“Of course, it’s pointless, because I’m bleeding.”
“Yes, but we might need practice,” he said. “Just to be sure we’re quite adept at the act, when you do happen to be receptive.”
She grinned at him. “You don’t… you know I’m bleeding.”
“I’m a war hero,” he said. “I can handle blood.”
She snorted. “War hero, are you?”
He shrugged, thrusting against her hand.
She cupped him. “What about Will?”
“Should I go and get him? What do you want?”
“Well, he wouldn’t wish us to—”
“What do you wish, Lizzy?” said Richard. “Because I want you here, just you and me, while you’re bleeding, because I’ve never had a woman who’d trust me enough to let me see her when she was…”
“Oh,” she said, reaching up to touch his face.
“It’s something men do with their wives,” he said. “He says I can… but we won’t have a ceremony, obviously, and no one will ever know.”
“He says you can what?”
“Be your husband, too.”
“Nice of him to answer for me,” she said, but she was smiling.
“Yes, very sorry, Lizzy,” he said, quite serious. “Will you marry me? Will you bear my children? Take my cock now, during this, your womanly time, your secret time, and we will bind it together.”
“Bind it in blood?”
He nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, Richard, I shall marry you.”
What passed between them was unlike anything that had passed before. It was largely wordless for one thing, and much of the words they did exchange were about things like putting down a blanket beneath her because of the mess, things that should have made her feel embarrassed.
But they did not.
She saw it for what it was.
This meant they were something beyond whatever they had been before. Not simply friends, not simply engaging in something deviant for pleasure, not walking a fine line that could lead to nothing but pain and suffering between them all, but as he said, a binding.
A marriage.
He was careful with her, his touch gentle as he smoothed it over her breasts and waist and hips. When he breached her, his thick hardness pushing all the way into her body, he let out such a noise, such a sound of unbridled pleasure, that it made her feel as if she was floating.
Then, he hovered over her, their lips joining and breaking apart as they breathed together, their bodies moving in time.
She touched his face. “Richard,” she whispered.
He rested his forehead against the crook of her neck and shoulder. “I love you, Lizzy. I have always loved you.”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I love you, too.” She kissed the top of his head, kissed her way to his brow. “My Richard. My husband.”
“Yours,” he agreed. “Yours, always yours. Whatever you need from me, anything at all. Until death do us part.”
And she didn’t know if tears sprang to her eyes because she was having her bleeding and it was abundantly easy to cry during such times or because it moved her, his declaration, because she felt the bond forming between them, as sure as his prick was lodged in her, as sure as his seed was going to settle in her womb.