Flowers From The Storm (72 page)

He leaned forward, his lips close to hers.

“Maddy,” he whispered. He brushed the corner of her mouth.

Her hands gripped his hard. She turned her head and met his kiss with sudden greedy recklessness, unschooled and ardent. He pulled her toward him until their bodies pressed together and her legs enclosed him. He searched deep inside her mouth and felt her respond zealously, just as fervent in her passions as in her virtues, little thee-thou duchess.

She made him smile—a hard thing to do in the midst of a highly erotic kiss. He had to break away and lower his face.

Her back stiffened. “Thou art laughing at me!” she said, trying to pull her hands free.

“Loving you.” He retained them, grinning at her, changing his method to light butterfly touches of his tongue across the soft curve of her chin and cheek beneath her bonnet. “Kiss you.” He caught the tie and tugged it loose, tossing the stiff cap away. “My love.” He held her cheeks between his palms. “My sweet life. Three horses own—two coaches— velvet—chambers—cushions—bed… my kisses. All my kisses.

All to be… for thee alone.”

Having missed their Christmas dinner last year, the tenants of Jervaulx Castle appeared determined to double their celebration for this one, and the duke full glad to triple it. In the Great Hall, two days before Christmas, on a wooden floor put down over the stone, it was feasting, drinking, music, dancing, reveling and kissing from noon until half past midnight. Even Maddy was put up to dance, against her laughing protests, carried bodily onto the floor and left there in the center, with Jervaulx facing her. He led her through the stately steps of a quadrille with Durham and Lady de Marly, to music and vast merriment—but it was friendly laughter, growing to a roar when Jervaulx took her by the shoulder and the top of the head like a solemn puppetmaster and rotated her back from a turn the wrong way.

At the end of it, he bowed to her. Maddy, with a shy smile, put out her hand to shake his. He accepted it gravely, and then pulled her up to him and kissed her, in the middle of the hall and everyone, with frenzied applause and music beating in her ears: a long, hard, branding kiss, a hot silence of their own amid the clamor.

“Now,” he murmured next to her ear, “we make… a graceful exit.”

She kissed her papa, and even got a peck on the cheek from each of the duke’s family, his mother, his sisters—and from Lady de Marly a snapping complaint that it was high time the duke and duchess withdrew: Maddy had allowed this nonsense to go on much too long. They left her tapping her stick to the music and leaning over to Papa, informing him that he was old and ought to go to bed.

“Come with me,” Christian said to Maddy, leading her away from the staircase out the other end of the hall. Maddy went gladly. All the passages were lit with flaming torches, smoky and bright, until she and Christian came to the quiet apartment set aside as a nursery.

He opened the door softly. Jilly sat up in the anteroom with a shielded lamp, all dressed and hopeful.

She jumped to her feet and curtsied. Christian nodded at her, and she broke into a grin and curtsied again, hurrying out of the room to join the party. When she was gone, Maddy watched him look through the open door into the darkened bedroom beyond.

She’d tried, in the past year, to live according to the Light, even amid the grandeur and luxury—and found in full Lady de Marly’s meaning when she’d spoken of nerve and courage. It had not seemed difficult, on a small income, to know what was right to do. She’d kept enough for her and Papa to live upon, and what little was left—and it was little—went to collection at Meeting.

Now, with so much, it was daily a decision: what was necessary, what was frivolous—one might dismiss half the footmen, but as Jervaulx noted dryly, he would then be paying for their support on the parish. It was so much gray—so little black and white; for a year she’d spent more of her time questioning herself and how she lived in Truth than she had done altogether in her life. She had her own projects, and the ones she had pressed upon Christian—his Good Works, he called them, winking at her as he wrote the checks—huge stunning checks that were a weight of responsibility she quailed under.

But it was not all uncertainty. She had her one confidence: the service that she knew with every fiber of her heart she’d done as it had been meant to be done.

Whatever the future, whatever the world might call disgrace—Diana was a gift, and if she grew up seeing what was in Christian’s face as he looked in on her asleep, she would always believe it.

He pulled the door closed to a crack and came back to Maddy. The distracted cast had vanished from his eyes somewhere in the year gone, so gradually that she could not tell when. He was not what he’d been, to his own agonized impatience—meaning, Maddy thought wryly, that what had used to take him a moment to analyze or say or decide now took him two—and he could only deal with one topic instead of several at a time. But he looked at her with full perception. She did not appear to confuse him at all as he carefully released the pearls in her hair and took down the braids.

He drew his fingers in a whisper across her cheeks and down her bare arms. “I’ve seen this gown before,” he murmured.

“One ball gown is enough,” she said firmly, as he worked at the hooks of the silver dress.

“But think of the starving seamstresses.”

“Thou shouldst not mock. It’s true that many starve.”

“So don’t order a new dress,” he said into the curve of her shoulder. “Just send them… some of my money.”

She put her hand against his cheek, feeling the hard shape of it. “Better that thou shouldst speak to the government and pass a law to see them fairly paid.”

He lifted his head. “Of course. I’ll… pass a law. How simple… in the land of Free Trade.”

She smiled at him, tracing the faint scratchy groove of muscle from his cheek to his mouth. “I have some numbers from—”

He put his face down against her throat and groaned.

“We’ll speak of it tomorrow,” she said.

He groaned again, slipping his hands up beneath her breasts, pushing her backward. Jilly’s bed was narrow and soft. When he kissed her, she forgot gowns and laws. When he came into her she held him hard and close—this was hers, outside of all worldly concerns. This was sweet unity and kinship, her charge to love, strong and overflowing joy in every part of it.

In the dawn of Christmas Eve day, the Great Hall was a disaster of littered benches, burned-out candles, fading mistletoe and dragging red ribbons. The Yule log still burned in the mammoth fireplace, warming a deserted room. Christian smiled at Maddy’s exasperated face when she caught sight of Devil atop a long table, gnawing on a ham hock trapped between his front paws. Cass was demurely lapping at melted ice in the big silver wine cooler that stood in the middle of the floor.

He whistled. Cass came, but Devil only looked up at him and went back to work.

“What dog is that?” Maddy asked in surprise.

Christian turned. On the hearth lay a huge staghound, its rough gray fur almost lost against the daylit silvery stone.

He took her around the waist and guided her toward the staircase. “Just a dog.”

“I never saw it before.”

“It doesn’t come in often.”

“Oh.” She mounted the step, glancing back. “I suppose someone let it in last night. It’s certainly a large animal.”

“A good dog,” he said, following her. “Never bites. Loves children.”

“Ah. Maybe when Diana is a little bigger—” She yawned. “She could have it for a pony.”

Christian stopped, pulling her against him. He leaned back on the curving wall of the stairwell. As he bent his head to kiss his wife, he could just see beyond her to the hearth.

The staghound rose. It stretched and turned to glance at him for a moment.

He closed his eyes in the kiss. When he looked up, there was a flash of plumed tail disappearing from view: Devil’s or Cass’s or imagination, it was impossible to tell.

But Christian knew. Maddy stood in his arms, her cheeks flushed, bemused and sleepy-eyed. She leaned her head against his chest and yawned again.

He smiled down at her. He knew. A buffle-headed bad wicked man he might be—but he could recognize a miracle when he saw one.