“Hello,” she said with a shy smile.
The changes in the kitchen suddenly didn’t matter.
He walked over to her and pulled her against him. She squeaked at his abruptness, but the sound was lost against his lips as he kissed her. She returned his embrace after only a moment’s hesitation.
“I like this,” he said when they finally parted. He toyed with a button on her blouse.
She blushed. “You are very easy to please.”
“Actually, I am rather difficult to please.
Very exacting.
Very particular.
You just happen to be perfect.”
She made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a snort.
“You don’t believe me?”
She shook her head. “It’s funny, though, your brother just said the same thing about you being particular.”
“Did he? For once Sebastian is right.” He caught her hips and walked her backward across the kitchen until her bottom hit the edge of the kitchen cupboards.
Her surprised laughter filled the room, a sweet, joyous sound.
Rhys smiled down at her. His pelvis and his hands pinioned her there against him and the counter.
Her
smiled faded, and she looked up at him with wide, serious green eyes.
“You keep doing that. Giving me reactions very different than the ones I’ve been aiming for.”
She smiled, although it was only a bittersweet half smile. “I’m sorry, this is all just so new to me—and I’m just sort of flying by the seat of my pants here.”
His smiled broadened at her description. “Why do you feel that way?” he asked.
“I…” Her cheeks grew pink. “I really liked what we did earlier…”
“
Mmm
, I did, too.”
Really, really liked it.
He leaned forward to steal a quick kiss.
Pink deepened to red. “But I think we shouldn’t do it again.”
His smile disappeared.
“I know I told you that I didn’t want to wait—but I think we should. Wait. Until we are—until our situation is different.”
Jane didn’t know how she’d expected Rhys to respond, but it definitely wasn’t the reaction she got.
He spun away from her and shouted, “Sebastian!” in a loud, commanding voice.
He waited for a moment and then shouted his brother’s name again.
After several seconds, Sebastian strolled into the room, looking as though he hadn’t even heard his brother’s wall-shaking bellow.
“Good God, Rhys,
haven’t
you ever heard of simply walking into the room where the person you want to speak to is— and talking to said person in a normal voice?”
Rhys didn’t answer him, instead saying, “Please tell me that we have at least one servant who isn’t away on holiday.”
“What? Why?”
“Because Jane and I need to go to the vicar—this instant.”
Sebastian threw a bewildered look at Jane.
She shook her head. She had no idea what to say or do. But apparently Rhys had agreed to wait until the circumstances were different. He just intended to change the situation as soon as possible by getting them married. Too bad that wasn’t the circumstance she hoped would change.
“A servant?”
Rhys asked again impatiently. “I don’t intend to show up at the church with Jane and me on the back of the same horse.”
“Well, there aren’t any servants. So you will just have to wait,” Sebastian told him flatly.
Just then the kitchen door opened, and a hulk of a man with a bald head and neatly trimmed goatee entered the room. He glanced at everyone, but his face remained impassive.
“Mick,” Sebastian greeted,
then
gestured to the two white plastic sacks Mick had set on the floor. “T
hank
s.”
Mick nodded and started to turn to leave.
“Mick?”
Rhys said.
The hulk stopped and looked back at Rhys.
“Mick,” Rhys repeated. “You work for us.”
Mick did raise his eyebrows in response.
“T
hank
God, man.” Rhys walked over and clapped the giant on the arm. “Ready me a carriage.
Immediately.”
At that, Mick’s brows shot up even farther, an almost laughable expression of perplexity coming over his stoic features.
Sebastian stepped forward. “No. Don’t ready—a carriage, Mick.”
“Okay,” the huge man agreed, the word rumbling low in his throat like the distant echo of thunder.
Rhys turned to glare at his brother.
“Why ever not?”
Sebastian hesitated for a moment,
then
stated, “It’s after
.
Too late to go to the vicar.
He will be asleep.”
Rhys pondered that,
then
nodded. “Perhaps you are right.” He turned back to Mick. “But please do have a carriage readied first thing tomorrow morning.”
Mick looked at Sebastian, who nodded. The hulk nodded, too. “Okay,” he said again, confusion clear in the low rumble.
“T
hank
s, Mick,” Sebastian said.
“Okay,” Mick said once more, then left.
Rhys crossed back to Jane and caught her hands, rubbing his thumbs back and forth over her knuckles. “We will go to the church first thing tomorrow morning and get married.”
Sebastian came up behind him. “You can’t do that.”
Rhys glanced at his brother over his shoulder. “Yes. We can.”
“No. You can’t.”
Rhys released one of her hands and turned to face Sebastian. “And why can’t we?”
“Well…” Sebastian rolled his eyes upward for a moment as if he was inspecting the kitchen’s high ceiling. “You just called the banns,” he blurted out, then smiled smugly. “It’s still going to be over two weeks before you can be married.”
Rhys glanced at the floor, considering that announcement.
Sebastian cast Jane a quick look, wiggling his eyebrows proudly.
Jane forced a slight, bemused smile back. The argument would have been quite funny if it hadn’t been so odd.
“I will go to the archbishop and tell him that a special license is required.” Rhys gave his brother a significant look, although Jane didn’t understand the significance.
Sebastian gaped at Rhys. “You would do that? You would besmirch Jane’s reputation like that?”
Rhys gave Jane a sheepish look.
Jane stared back at him, stuck on the fact Sebastian had actually used the word “besmirch.”
“I would, of course, require the vicar’s discretion on the details of the ceremony. But I do, in fact, think Jane stands a larger threat of being ruined if we wait. After all, she has no chaperone—not
even
a servant. And she could very well be with child already.”
Jane gaped at the brothers. Rhys was suggesting that they had to marry because she might be pregnant! Her heart did several somersaults in her chest. She
could
be pregnant.
She sank back against the counter, her sudden movement drawing
Rhy’s
attention to her.
“Are you all right?” he asked, his eyes scanning her face.
“You don’t really think I’m pregnant, do you?” Her voice sounded reedy,
not at all like her own
.
How could she have been so careless, so—so dumb.
She could be pregnant. Of course she could.
Rhys gently squeezed her fingers. “It is certainly a possibility.”
She blinked up at him, shock still making it difficult to comprehend much of anything. Then she noticed Sebastian over
Rhys’s
shoulder. He adamantly shook his head and waved his hands repeatedly, while mouthing the word “no.”
She frowned. What was he trying to tell her? She tilted her head and gave him a confused, questioning look.
“Sebastian? What the hell are you doing?” Rhys asked sharply, following her gaze over his shoulder toward his brother.
Sebastian immediately dropped his hands, his mouth snapping closed. Then he said in an offhanded voice that belied the fact that he’d just been motioning like a mime gone mental, “Fine. We will get a special license, but let me do it. I’ll go to the archbishop, and then I can bring the vicar back here to perform the wedding. That will decrease the risk of scandal.”
Rhys considered that plan,
then
nodded. “That is probably a good idea.”
Sebastian breathed out a sigh of relief. “Good. Now, if there are no further crises, I think I should head to the club.”
“Another good idea,” Rhys agreed.
Sebastian shot Jane a reassuring smile, then left the room.
She remained against the counter, her hand in
Rhys’s
, feeling more than a little dazed by the events of the past few minutes.
“Janie, you are all right, aren’t you?”
She swallowed and forced herself to meet
Rhys’s
riveting, amber gaze. Could she really be pregnant with this man’s child? The chances were slim—but not impossible.
“Yes, I just hadn’t even considered pregnancy as a factor when we…”
He smiled. “We weren’t thinking about much aside of each other.”
“No.”
“Listen, you must be starving. Why don’t you see what we have for a simple
meal,
and I will go in the library and start a fire. We can dine there.”
She
nodded,
still feeling too stupefied to consider eating.
Rhys leaned down and captured her lips, giving her a tender kiss, only the gentle caress of skin against skin.
“It will be fine,” he assured her again.
She forced a smile and watched him leave the room, his walk graceful and confident.
She took a deep breath—just when she thought things couldn’t get any weirder. She doubted that she was pregnant. It wasn’t the right time of the month—she didn’t think. She’d never thought about the ins and outs of getting pregnant. She’d never needed to. But she should have been more cautious for many reasons.
It was as if she saw Rhys, and she lost her mind.
“Good, you’re alone.”
Jane popped out of her reverie to see Sebastian, peeking in the doorway.
“Yes.”
He stepped inside the kitchen. “What the hell brought on the sudden and immediate need to get married?”
Jane didn’t really want to talk about it. As far as she was concerned, Sebastian already knew too much about her sex life. But as he didn’t seem to be leaving without an answer, she finally admitted, “I tried to tell him that we should stop being—intimate until our situation changed.
Meaning his memory loss.”
“But he, of course, thought you meant your marital situation.”
She nodded.
Sebastian chuckled. “Well, you gotta be sort of flattered about that. He was going to marry you tonight to get you back in his bed.”
“Yeah, that was real flattering,” Jane agreed dryly.
“In a crazy Regency sort of way.”
Sebastian’s grin slipped. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to make light of this situation.”
Jane sighed. “Okay. But I do think he needs to see a doctor soon.”
He nodded. “I agree.”
He picked up the two plastic shopping bags that Mick had left by the door and brought them to the counter. “Here is some food.”
“T
hank
s,” she said, staring at the bags, but her mind was back on the stupidity of having unprotected sex.
As if Sebastian was reading her mind, he gently touched her shoulder and said, “Don’t worry. You aren’t pregnant. Rhys can’t have children.”
“He can’t?”
“No. He had a bad—animal attack when he was younger.
A—bat.”
Jane frowned.
A bat?
“How—”
“The bat was carrying a disease that rendered Rhys sterile.”
Severe sun and food allergies, amnesia and sterility.
Rhys was exceptionally unlucky. “That is—unbelievable.”
“Yeah.
You don’t even know the half of it.”
Relief with a hint of disappointment mingled in her stomach. She was honestly glad she wasn’t pregnant. This was not the time or the circumstance for that. But she did feel bad that Rhys couldn’t father children.
“Okay,” Sebastian said. “I’m headed to the club. I hope things go smoothly the rest of the night.”
So did
she
.
Jane finished arranging her turkey sandwich on a plate and added a handful of potato chips. She reached back into the open bag for two more slices of bread,
then
stopped.
Rhys didn’t eat bread. Just protein drinks and raw meat.
She shuddered and popped one of the salty chips in her mouth for good measure.