“Because you’re not a true Kimball?”
Lachlan shook his head. “I can’t imagine that part of it even matters to her. No, it is the way I look. Apparently, my resemblance to my real father is startling.”
“But that’s not your fault,” protested Charity. She pushed away from his chest and sat up straight, her arms crossed in indignation. “That’s horrible!”
Lachlan gave her a fond smile, charmed by her fierce loyalty and the fact that she was apparently prepared to do battle for the man she’d considered her foe only a few short days ago. “It’s all right, kitten. I’ve become accustomed to it. She’s the reason I traveled to London to find a wife. She sabotaged the only relationship I ever began at home, one with a pretty young girl from the village who certainly did not deserve the interference. My mother does not want me to marry, and she definitely does not want me to have a child. Especially not now.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because when my father died, none of us were aware that he’d drawn up a new will. Everyone always knew that the title, the keep, and the entailed lands would go to me in the event of his death, but according to the will he’d executed when he married my mother, a large portion of his estate was to go to her. For some inexplicable reason, a very short time before he died, he changed it. He left everything, including control of my mother’s portion, to me.”
Charity sat silently chewing on her lower lip. Lachlan allowed her a few moments with her thoughts. When she finally looked up, her face was carefully blank. “Do you still love her?”
“My mother? Of course I love her. But I don’t
like
her very much.”
She fidgeted. “No,” she clarified. “I meant ‘the pretty young girl from the village.’ ”
A slow grin broke over Lachlan’s face. When she saw it, she scowled.
“Are you jealous?” he asked.
Charity colored. “No.”
He crooked a finger under her chin and tilted her face up. “You are. You’re jealous.”
She swatted his hand away. “I am
not
jealous!”
Lachlan laughed and scooped her up from the seat beside him, pulling her over and onto his lap. He leaned down and whispered in her ear, his warm breath stirring the tendrils of hair that curled there. “I think you’re adorable when you’re jealous, my lady.”
His voice crept deliciously through her mind, low and tender, and she quite forgot that she was annoyed with him. She nuzzled her face into his neck and kissed him there, breathing in his scent, reveling in the scratchiness of a growth of beard against her cheek. It took a moment for what he’d called her to register. With a start, she realized that in a very short time that’s what she would be: a lady.
Before she could fully process that reality, the coach pulled to a smooth stop. Charity lifted her head and looked around.
“We’re here,” said Lachlan. “Are you ready?”
Twenty-two
Charity?”
Lachlan’s voice came to her as if from a distance, and Charity reacted slowly. She felt numb and disconnected from reality. On some level, she knew what was happening around her; she was simply unable to cognitively participate.
When her eyes met his in a blank stare, Lachlan abruptly decided she’d had enough for one day. Instead of putting her back into the coach and continuing another hour to Asheburton Keep, he decided to take them a room in Gretna Green. Meeting his mother was the last thing he wished to thrust upon his wife now.
It had started when they first emerged from the coach into the late afternoon sunshine. The easy conversation they’d shared up to that point had abruptly evaporated, and he sensed her drawing away into herself. She followed him into the blacksmith’s shop and repeated her vows with his footmen as their witnesses, but her voice lacked its characteristic spirit and the life had drained from her cerulean eyes.
She’d sat quietly through the dinner he ordered and ate little. When he addressed her, she smiled and responded but her words were few and softly uttered. His concern mounting, he led her to the rooms he’d taken for the night.
“I’ll be right nearby,” he said, and pointed at the door connecting their chambers. “If you’d like, I’ll leave the door open.”
“That would be fine, my lord,” she replied, and then sat down on the edge of the bed to stare off into space. After a long, worried look, he left her there and went into his own room to get ready for bed.
Two hours passed and he heard nothing from her room. No rustling of bedclothes, none of the sounds that would normally accompany a person preparing to retire for the night. He’d completed his own preparations and climbed into bed, stretched out on his back with his hands propped behind his head, his mind too occupied with Charity’s odd withdrawal to sleep.
It couldn’t be that she feared the wedding night. He’d gotten them two rooms and been very clear about it. His logic was the same as it was the entire trip north: he did not intend to consummate his marriage until he could do so at home, in his own bed. There were both emotional and practical reasons for this decision. From a practical standpoint, he wanted no question as to the legitimacy of the child. Unfairly coloring her son’s child as a bastard was not beyond Eloise, he was sad to say, and he would take every step to avoid such accusations. The emotional reasons for waiting were much simpler. He wanted her virgin’s blood on his sheets, in his home, not spilled on the bedclothes of some inn on the road between London and Asheburton Keep.
Given Charity’s odd descent into silence, he now wondered if he should have taken a single room and spent the night trying to draw her out or comfort and reassure her. She was a strong-minded and strong-willed young lady, but the events of the past few days would have shaken a woman twice her age with ten times her experience. Instead of taking care of her, he’d left her alone on her wedding night in a strange country, abandoned her to understand and deal in solitude with a future that held only questions.
Cursing, Lachlan sat up and swung his legs out of bed to sit on its edge, staring through the darkness toward the open door between their chambers. With a sigh he stood, pulled on a pair of trousers, crossed through and then stood beside Charity’s bed, staring down at the small English girl he’d married.
She was curled atop the coverlet, still clad in the dress she’d worn all day—her wedding dress, as it turned out. Lachlan felt another small twinge of guilt. She should have been courted and coddled and danced attendance upon in the weeks leading up to their marriage. Instead, they’d spent most of their short acquaintance sparring with one another. She should have had a lavish London wedding in a church before everyone she loved, with glowing descriptions of the glittering reception that followed printed in all the newspapers the next morning. Instead, she’d been married in a blacksmith’s shop with only his servants to witness, her dress crushed and wrinkled from several days’ travel.
The moonlight streamed in through the room’s lone window to caress her face, peaceful in sleep, with a gentle glow. Her features were delicate and fine, and though Lachlan knew all too well her stubborn resilience, he couldn’t help but think that she looked like a fragile doll tossed in the center of the large bed, broken and discarded.
Something wrenched inside him, and he reached down to smooth her tousled curls, washed nearly blonde by silver moonbeams. At his touch she stirred and he straightened, watching as her eyelids began to flutter open. With a little sigh, she stretched and then looked around the room in momentary confusion. Her eyes settled on him, and she pushed herself to a sitting position.
“We’re married,” she said in a voice thick with sleep.
Lachlan nodded, a small ironic smile briefly touching his lips.
Her gaze dropped from his face and traveled down the bare expanse of his chest. Somewhere deep inside herself, she knew she should register shock at being alone in a room with a half-dressed man, even if that man was now her husband, but she couldn’t take her eyes from him. “You’re beautiful,” she breathed. Unable to stop herself, she reached out to touch the hard, flat plane of his stomach.
Lachlan caught her hand with his own before she touched him, before her innocent caress was his undoing. “Charity,” he said hoarsely, “I don’t know what I’ll do if you touch me there.”
Her eyes, wide and utterly without guile, lifted again to his and she shook her head. “But I thought you came to do what wives do with husbands.”
Oh. God. How he wanted to.
“Is that what was bothering you earlier?” He sat down beside her, more as a means of hiding his growing arousal than in an effort to be closer.
Her face clouded, and she withdrew her hand from his. “No, my lord,” she answered quietly. “It’s that you
had
to marry me. You did it to protect me, because you’re friends with the men who married my sisters . . . I’m so sorry I put you in that position.” She raised eyes brimming with unshed tears to his. “Amity and I were going to get married together and live near one another in Pelthamshire. It was what we always planned.”
“Oh, little kitten.” He scooted across the bed, pulled her into his lap and softly kissed the top of her head, reveling in the fact that, no matter how he held her, she always fit perfectly against him, every single time. “Listen to me and know that I’ve never been more serious in my entire life
than I am right now: You did not put me in this position. I am here with you entirely by choice and completely because of my own actions. Do you believe that?”
“But if I hadn’t—”
He cut her off. “If you hadn’t, this is still exactly where we would have ended up. I’m sure of it.”
Charity closed her eyes, wanting with all her heart to believe, but she held her tongue, afraid to say the words she felt fluttering around inside her chest.
When she rubbed her cheek against his chest, Lachlan groaned and tried to ignore the way his body responded to her innocent movement. “We got here together, love. Believe me when I tell you I have never been more aware of a woman in all my life, from the very moment we met.”
He paused, and when he spoke again, she could hear a smile in his voice. “I remember the day I first saw you so clearly. Do you remember it? In Hunt’s foyer?”
She nodded.
“We both tried to fight it, and we each had our reasons. But time and again, we have ended up right where we are now: in one another’s arms. There must be a reason for that.”
She finally spoke, her voice so low that he had to tilt an ear to catch it. “I like it when you kiss me, my lord.”
Lachlan’s heart slammed into his ribs. Although he knew he was starting something he did not want to finish here, in this inn, on this night, he slid down in the bed, taking her with him. Ignoring the warning bells going off in his mind, he turned her in his arms and took her lips in a kiss.
Instant fire erupted between them, and their embrace was anything but gentle. Charity, fueled by longings he’d awakened in the past, didn’t hold back any longer. She
kissed him with all the fervor and eagerness she’d kept in check before. This time, she cupped his face in her hands, pressed herself close, and touched her tongue to the crease between
his
lips. This time,
she
tasted and coaxed until he moaned and opened. And, when she tentatively teased the edges of his teeth with the pointed tip of her tongue, he did the same, slanting his mouth across hers until she whimpered and willingly surrendered ownership of the kiss.
Lachlan forced himself to lift his lips from hers but pulled her fiercely against him. “Do you have any idea how rare this is, kitten?” His voice was gruff, tight, and he fought to control the urge to take her and make her his in every imaginable way.
“No,” she answered honestly.
It hit him, then. She really did not know, had no idea of the power she held within her delicate hands.
“No, I suppose you don’t,” he said ruefully, staring over her head into the darkness, wondering how much she knew about the acts performed in the marital bed. He sat up, gave her a quick kiss on the forehead, and pushed her off his lap.
She laughed a little. “Watch it there!” Rolling off the bed, she shook out her skirts, which had become all twisted around her legs, then climbed back on.
Lachlan grinned. “Would you like me to stay here with you for the rest of the night, or go back into the other room?”
“I was actually wondering why you did get another room, my lord. This bed is awfully large, and I know you can afford it but the expense is entirely unnecessary and I don’t mind sharing and . . .” She eyed the comical expression on his face. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
It was becoming increasingly evident that she had no idea of the more intimate pleasures in store for them. “Did your sisters ever talk to you about marriage and children?”
She furrowed her brow. “Well, I assumed we would have some children. But since Amity and I didn’t really give them a chance to talk to us about marriage before we each ran off to get married, it hadn’t really come up.”
Lachlan looked uncomfortable. “So you have no idea how we would”—he cleared his throat— “
obtain
those children?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Why are you asking me this?”
He watched her carefully. “Because husbands and wives typically go about the business of creating a baby together, in bed. And it involves a lot of kissing and touching and cuddling.” His body tightened at even the thought. Ruthlessly, he continued. “What you need to know is that I do not want it to happen
here
. So, no more kisses tonight. If you don’t think you can stop kissing me, I’ll go into the other room.”
Charity sat down and contemplated that. “So . . . we’ve already started making a baby?”
“Well, yes,” he answered. “In some ways, we have. And I promise to tell you everything that is going to happen before it does so that you are not frightened or surprised.”
“All right.” She shook her head in mystification and then bit her lip. “Will it be hard to sleep in here and not kiss me?” The look on her face was a beguiling combination of earnest sincerity and confusion, and it was in that instant, in the darkest hours of his unconsummated wedding night, that Lachlan realized a truth, one he’d thought only hours before might be an impossibility for him: he was in love with Charity.