“Please, Mama! It would be ever so much fun.”
“I won’t have any fun at all. And since I don’t know how to shoot a gun, what would be the point?”
“I’m thankful I never taught you how,” Michael said softly.
Clarissa pinkened.
“But you’ll be with
us
,” Harry added with his boyish enthusiasm.
“So I will. I’ll think about it. Now why don’t you all wash up and change for dinner. Cook said we are having a feast.”
“That means we’re having ice cream,” Harry said.
“How do you know?” Andrew asked.
“When you’re going to feast, you have ice cream. Isn’t that right, Mama?”
“With peaches from last summer. Cook saved some just for such an occasion.”
“And what are we celebrating?” Michael asked.
Clarissa was saved the rejoinder when Harry butted in. “It’s for your welcome home.”
Michael smiled and fortunately said nothing else. Her temperature had risen to alarming degrees. She felt overexcited and nervous sitting next to him. She had no doubt what he was thinking—about them, about what she’d done, about what he’d done to her. Her doubts involved the future. Were the scandalous pleasures enjoyed in a London brothel sufficient to convince him that she was woman enough? That they still had passion and fire left in their marriage? She wanted to press her cool hands to her face. Or plunge her flesh into an ice-cold Highland stream.
Clarissa stood and her well-mannered men did the same. “Well, I’d better check with Cook. All of you now, off you go. You know how cross Cook gets when we’re late for dinner.”
“Andrew, fetch William from the stalls. He’ll need extra time to clean up.” The boys giggled and rushed from the room.
Michael lingered.
He clutched her hand and brought it to his lips. “It’s good to be home.”
It would have been easy to pretend that nothing was wrong, especially with the children hovering about.
He lowered his warm hand to her neck and then slid it up and back. He slipped his fingers into her hair. His thumb stroked from her jaw to her ear. The slight pressure forced her gaze to his.
Breathless anxiety thrummed in her chest.
Every day she’d imagined the conversation. From cajoling to anger. From humiliation to forgiveness.
“I have something for you.”
“Oh. A present?” Even her voice sounded girlishly high-pitched and not like the composed countess.
“I want to give it to you when the time is right. When you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that everything I need to tell you is true.”
The air in her lungs struggled for freedom. “All right. I’m listening.”
“Not yet. I don’t want to spoil my first night home, our night together. I want to enjoy my family and my wife and home in peace. But know this, everything that happened—”
A quick rap on the door had them both looking in the same direction.
“Lady Dunnaway, your pardon.” The girl bobbed a curtsey.
Clarissa jerked away from her husband. “Yes?”
“I’m sorry, my lady. Cook requests your presence in the kitchen.” Another bob and she was gone.
“I’m sorry. Please excuse me.”
Once outside the room, she started to breathe more normally. If ever there was a conversation she did not want to have, this was it.
The crisis in the kitchen involved nothing more than a decision on apple butter or honey butter for the bread.
At the dinner table, the boys were polite if a bit talkative. When they were old enough to join them at the table, Michael encouraged intelligent discussion and laughter, but he was never one to tolerate horseplay. Clarissa allowed the dinner to wend away much slower than normal, in no hurry to face the coming confrontation.
And when the last bowl of ice cream had disappeared, Michael coaxed everyone to the billiards room. He and Harry took on William and Andrew. After the fifth game, Clarissa kissed the boys good night. Conveniently, Michael took the opportunity to kiss her again and led her to the door.
“Might I escort you to your room?”
The boys heard the request. “Papa, we’re behind. You can’t leave yet,” Harry said.
“Good night, Michael. Good night, boys,” she said.
The chorus of voices rang behind her as she made her escape.
As she ascended the staircase, she glanced toward the door and Michael still stood, staring after her. She didn’t imagine his wolfish gaze.
A storm broke outside and the lightning flash filled the foyer with blue light, making him look sinister and ominous. For a brief moment, she considered running to her room and locking the door.
And just as quickly, the flash was over and he smiled with boyish timidity.
Neither sight gave her any comfort or insight into what he was thinking or going to do.
Her bath waited, steam coming off the top of the water. Towels were stacked neatly on a stool beside the tub and her robe hung in the ready. After Clarissa was naked, she dismissed her maid. Michael’s return had made her ravenous for intercourse, not that she’d allow him to touch her until every word of her displeasure and hurt had been laid out before him. The dildos Madame DuPuis had given her remained safely hidden. She was not in the mood for debauched pleasure. She wanted the gasping, needy desires caused by a naked body covering her and a stiff cock inside her. She wanted loving hands and hot kisses.
She wanted Michael, but would not give him the satisfaction of so easily conquering her after such a tremendous wound to her and the marriage. Five weeks was not enough time to heal. Five years wouldn’t be long enough if Michael truly did not see what she had done out of her love for him.
* * * * *
When she woke, it wasn’t to the sight of the dawn sun cascading in her window. The room was dark, only the dim glow of the fire she had requested as the room had cooled down from the rain that had started early last evening while she had bathed.
A heavy weight pressed into her.
Michael’s hard body had her trapped underneath him. His hot mouth pressed to her neck, his mouth and tongue sending sweet sensation coursing through her body and causing the tips of her breasts to tighten painfully. The material from her gown was worked up past her hips.
His hips and thighs forced her legs open. Already she could feel the compulsive thrust of his body as he prepared for taking her.
Fucking her. Because there couldn’t be love in what he was doing.
The thick heat of his erection prodded and then thrust into her slick, hot center. He groaned loud and long until he entered her fully. Deeply. Her body wanting all that her mind had rejected.
She didn’t turn her face to kiss him.
His mouth latched on to her breast through the flimsy material of her nightgown. The raspy feel of the cloth and the wet heat from his mouth made her feel as though she wore wool in the rain. Her betraying hands worked at the ties of her gown and then separated the folds of material. She grasped her breast, pushing the fleshy mound upward, offering it to him.
When his mouth descended on her bare, sensitive nipple, she gasped. Her hips lurched to meet him as he set a pounding rhythm that had her moaning and thrashing on the bed. She wanted it deeper, harder, faster—anything to soothe the disquieting, wrenching, frightening need that built inside her.
The betrayal was complete. She didn’t know her own mind or body, let alone that of her husband.
In her lust, in her craving for a hard, long orgasm, she would allow him anything he wanted. In the dark of the night, when she didn’t have to look at him, when she didn’t have to see the triumph in his eyes, she knew she was every inch the whore for her own husband.
The forceful pumping propelled her toward her shattering goal. Michael grabbed her wrists and pinned them to the bed. He filled his mouth with her breast and suckled.
She heard and felt the groans that emanated from inside him as he pumped and labored over her. He slowed, withdrawing fully and sinking deeply, an aching groan ripping from him with each thrust.
Clarissa’s cunt had swollen, the nub of her clitoris sensitive. The hood of his penis raked across her responsive sheath and lips until she panted. On the next deep push, she squeezed. The agonizing retreat of his thick cock brought her torrents of pleasure. She gripped again. The soaring, searching need caused her spine to arch. Michael shoved into her, starting to climax.
Air rushed from her lungs as one all-encompassing wave washed over her, sending her higher. Michael surged and jerked again, this time accompanied by a painful wail of relief.
She shattered—a hundred pulsing, beating, breaking spasms ripping through her, all caused by the hunger for the cock inside that fed her to satiation.
Their chests pumped up and down in unison as they both sought to catch their breath.
Michael pulled his cock from her and rolled to his side.
His face was barely visible in the dim light.
“Don’t try to hide from me, Clarissa.” He kissed her forehead and then retreated from the bed before departing for his room.
When she heard the door shut, she remembered that she had locked both entrances before she’d climbed in bed.
Chapter Ten
Michael allowed Clarissa one afternoon of avoidance. He’d even shrugged at the locked door. He had the key.
When a horse threw you, you got back in the saddle. Simple as that. Any delay in the resumption of their sexual activities would set an unhealthy precedent. With a fully functioning cock and an extreme, almost perverse need for his wife, he wasn’t about to let a day go by without sex.
The startling knowledge that he’d been fucking his own wife the entire time was both disturbing in its brazen, intimate revelation and extremely, uncontrollably arousing. He could barely think of anything else. He was no better than an old goat.
He’d already wasted too much time, and he never should have sent Clarissa away. The sheer magnitude of pleasure that was in store for them, well, he wasn’t going to throw away this second opportunity.
However, there were still wrongs to right and hurts to forgive—all of them stemming from his behavior that had only grown more egregious over the past year.
Clarissa missed breakfast, but he fully expected her to seek him out and express her indignation over the midnight tupping.
And before she got too angry, he’d remind her that her orgasm nearly squeezed the life out of his cock.
Thirty minutes later, she knocked at the library door.
He leaned back in his chair. “Come.”
He stood as she swept into the room. The door closed behind her with a solid latch and then a catch of the lock. The blush already stained her cheeks.
“Michael—”
“Last night was wonderful. Thank you.”
“I…I—”
“Yes?”
“My door was locked for a reason.” Her brows rose, along with her voice.
“To keep me out?”
“Yes.”
“You know that’s not legal in England. A husband has a right to his property.”
She nearly sputtered in outrage. “That’s how you think of me?”
Michael inched toward her. “Of course it is. Because that’s how you should think of me too.”
He caught her hand and started kissing her fingers. “Forever yours. Bone of my bone. Flesh of my flesh. One body.”
He gazed at the slimness of her neck and smiled at the rapid pulse beating near her ear.
“I… You…” She tugged at her hand, trying to extricate herself. Michael held fast, his kisses reaching her wrist. “You cannot expect me to welcome you when you have hurt me beyond measure.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” He kissed her palm and then led her to the leather couch that faced the fireplace. He resisted the urge to pull her into his lap for fear it would look as if he wasn’t serious.
He’d never been more serious in his life.
“Just like that? I’m to forgive you for an
I know and I’m sorry
? What about the year of worrying why you didn’t want me? What about your treatment of me that last night and why you forced me to leave London without you?”
“I’m an ass. An ass who desperately loves his wife and who made all the wrong decisions about his marriage.”
She huffed and turned away. Her fingers played in the folds of her dress. “You have no idea how I felt.”
“Tell me.”
“Tell you? A simpleton could understand how a woman feels when the man she loves rejects her. And you are not a simpleton, so there had to be another reason.”
The reason. The awful truth of his unmanly condition. It would take a stiff drink and Clarissa in a soft mood to hear the reasoning behind his truth. He still had the same fears about why he couldn’t perform.
“Why did you go to Madame DuPuis’? Why, when you knew the danger and the potential scandal?” he asked instead.
“Maybe you
are
a simpleton.”
“Madame DuPuis implied the same thing.”