Chapter Twenty #3
“Well, it’s to your credit, believe me, that you are not familiar with her establishment. Oh, Adrian. She owns a School of Venus.”
He burst into unrestrained laughter.
“Listen to you,” she said in a disparaging voice. “That isn’t even all of it.”
He sobered. “There’s more?”
“Yes, and it’s so disturbing. Charlotte has expressed a wish to become a writer.”
“That sounds harmless enough.” He waited a moment. “Doesn’t it?”
“Not when she wishes to chronicle the social history of the Boscastle family,” Emma said as if he were supposed to have read her mind. And Charlotte’s letter.
He whistled, then said, wisely, or so he thought, “I don’t know what to say.”
“I’ll say it for you,” Emma said, her color rising. “There are some social histories that should remain secret. There won’t be a single chapter, nary a page—a paragraph—that does not detail some scandal.”
He glanced up guardedly at the sky, then back at her.
Her delicate ears and nose blushed pink from the wind.
Her strawberry blond hair had uncoiled from its chignon.
She looked a little wild. How he loved his wife.
How glad he was to be done with a life of fighting and fevers and wandering about.
His future would be breeding a family, perhaps horses, and he would stuff himself every winter on Christmas pudding with a woman who made him wear his coat to keep him warm.
“Let’s have a look at the lodge,” he said on impulse, taking her hand. “Cedric mentioned it’s in dire need of repair and is being used as a barn.”
She wrinkled her nose. “A barn? Oh, I don’t—”
“It’s going to rain, Emma,” he insisted. “Can’t you feel it in the air?”
“No.” she said, lifting her brow. “And I don’t see a cloud in the sky, either.”
“That’s because you’re too short to see as high as I do.”
She laughed indignantly. “Toplofty, are we, your grace-to-be?”
Toplofty and a lord of temptation.
Several minutes later he’d lured her into the lodge that overlooked the lake.
As she was dutifully taking tally of the bolts and beams that needed to be replaced, he advanced on her from behind and gently jostled her onto a bed of straw.
It wasn’t a fair fight. The woman was half his size, and his motives were inarguably impure.
“What are you doing?” she said in dismay. “I can’t go back to the house with hay in my hair.”
“I’m the lord of the manor,” he said in a gruff voice. “And you’re to do what I say.”
“And if I refuse?” she asked breathlessly, sprawled out under his shadow.
He frowned. “I might have to spank your soft white backside.”
“As if I’d let you,” she said, laughing.
He pinned her beneath him. “As if you could stop me.”
He settled down and kissed her, his bare hand slipping under her skirt. “Are you an obedient or disobedient servant? There’s a vast difference.”
“That depends on whom I have to disobey.”
“Obey me.”
She laced her arm around his neck, smiling wickedly. “Only if you promise not to tell the master about this.”
He cupped one cheek of her tempting backside. “We’ll keep it our secret, sweetheart. But you can’t let on to your husband, either.” He closed his eyes, swallowing a groan. “My God, Emma—”
She went very still, whispering, “It isn’t my husband we have to worry about. Adrian, let me go. There’s a man standing in the door. We’ve been found.”
“A—who is he?”
“I don’t know. Does it matter? We cannot be discovered tumbling in a barn.”
They disengaged, Adrian swearing to himself, Emma looking embarrassed as the intruder strode up to them with a pitchfork in his hands.
“Excuse me,” the middle-aged arrival said in a wry voice. “I’m Robin Turner, the lodgekeeper. Can I be of service to the pair of you?”
Adrian whisked Emma to her feet. “As a matter of fact, this is my wife and we’re—”
“The new help?” the grizzle-haired keeper guessed. His dark eyes softened with empathy. “Well, ’tis a hell of a way to start service, but I suppose there’s no harm done as long as you’re presentable when you meet the duke. His heir is come home and we’re all to be on our best behavior.”
“You’re a generous soul, sir.” Adrian stood in front of Emma so that she could straighten her skirt and smooth away the pieces of straw that clung to it. “I’ll try to repay the favor.”
The lodgekeeper shook his hand. “Go on, both of you. Just do the job you’re hired to do. I’m not so ancient that I don’t remember—oh, hell, get out of here. I’ll say nothing of this to the master.”
And he didn’t.
Not even when, only two hours later, he met with the duke to discuss what repairs were needed on the estate’s outbuildings, and was introduced to Lord and Lady Wolverton.
Adrian thought he and his new ally Turner did a convincing job of pretending not to know each other, despite the fact that Emma winked saucily over her shoulder to the lodgekeeper as he turned to exit from the hall. Adrian’s mouth dropped. Turner nearly walked into the wall.
The duke gave a puzzled laugh. “Have I missed something?”
“Emma and I made an inspection of the lodge earlier today,” Adrian said evasively, his gaze lingering on his wife. “Isn’t that what you wished for us to do?”
“Do you know what I wish for before I die?” the duke asked, a canny gleam in his eye. “Come along with me for a minute. I’ll share my final request with you, Adrian.”
Later that same evening, Adrian laid preoccupied in bed with his wife, she tossing and turning until he finally glanced down at her and asked, “Do you have something on your mind?”
She surfaced from the depths of the Queen Anne pinewood bedstead and asked, “Do you?”
He slid beneath the covers until they were nestled together, his hand curled around her hip. He enjoyed sleeping thus, his body protecting hers. “Explain.”
“Your father’s dying wish,” she said in concern. “Is it something you are honor-bound to keep secret?”
“Actually, no.”
He rested his chin against her cheek. Her body tempted him, her spine arching beneath his hand, her skin soft as cream. She waited. So did he, a smile he could not hide surfacing at her question.
It seemed that he’d fought this moment from the day he had run away from Scarfield.
He was stronger now, his only need, his only weakness the woman in his arms.
And finally that woman drew away from him and demanded, “Then are you going to lie here smiling at me all night, or give me my answer?”
“He would like us to present him with a grandchild before he dies. He’s stubborn enough to see his request fulfilled, too.”
“I see,” Emma said, her voice reflective. “And what did you tell him?”
He cleared his throat. “I assured him that we were doing our part to perform that ducal duty.”
“You didn’t,” she whispered, laughter in her voice.
“Yes, I did. But not in detail.”
She ran her hands down his lean, muscular flanks. “A duke always keeps his promises.”
His mouth captured hers. “I’m only a duke’s son. Do you suggest an interim form of etiquette to satisfy the situation?”
She closed her hands around the thick column of his manhood, climbing atop him. He lay back on the bed, staring up at her, his breathing suddenly uneven.
“Practice,” she said with a taunting smile. “Hours and hours—no, days and nights of diligent practice.”
He laid his hands upon her thighs, his manhood swelling in her fine-boned fingers. With a soft moan of pleasure, she balanced on her knees and guided his engorged penis into her moist cleft.
And sank slowly downward, impaling herself to the hilt. “My diligent wife,” he murmured, his hips surging so that she gasped and would have fallen back had he not wrapped his arms around her arse to steady her.
She groaned in slow-rising pleasure. “Adrian—”
“You’ll have to forgive me,” he muttered as he pumped his hips harder, “but there’s really no polite way to do this.”
Thus the future Duke and Duchess of Scarfield applied themselves to fulfilling their most important ducal obligation. In Adrian’s wicked estimation, the fulfillment could not be drawn out long enough. As his wife had said, details meant everything, and one must practice to do a decent job.
A little duke’s heir would need brothers and sisters to keep him company.
After all, Emma enjoyed nothing more than taking care of others.
She’d grown up with six siblings. Even if Adrian had played a sneaky trick on her brothers to win her, a trick that might easily have backfired, he was grateful that her guardian demons had kept the predators at bay until he had found her. Or she had found him.
Leaning forward, her rosy nipples teasing his chest, she took his mouth in a sweet, sensual kiss. He rocked harder into her body. She rose with each thrust and rode him until he exhaled in an agony of pleasure.
“If this is a duty”—He closed his eyes, groaning as her buttocks slapped down against his groin. Pearly moisture seeped from her cleft to dampen his stones—“may I die fulfilling it.”
She straightened her spine, her body undulating, splintering, so beautiful and uninhibited that he could not stave off his own climax for another instant. “I love you,” she said. “And I will love our children—”
“I love you, Emma,” he whispered as he fastened his hands around her bottom and flooded her with his seed. A son. A daughter. Duty or desire. It did not matter to him as long as he had his dainty dictator to keep all of them in line.
A minute or so later they broke apart. Untangling limbs and bedclothes, they kissed once or twice before settling back into bed.
“In the end,” she whispered, wrapped tightly in his arms, “it all comes down to family. And you’ve certainly married into one of the most—”
“—loyal and loving families in England?” he finished for her.
She smiled. “I was actually going to say infamous.”
He looked down at her, his eyes brimming with love. “In that case, I’d say there is little reason to expect propriety from the next generation.”
“I think we’ll manage,” she said, smiling in contentment.
He laughed. “I can manage anything as long as I have you.”