Lady Louisa's Christmas Knight (24 page)

“You have that Wilmot fellow on the brain.”

“No, I do not. I have something else entirely—someone else—on my brain.” He spoke gently, but there was happiness for him in what he contemplated. Louisa could hear it in his voice.

“Joseph, there are things we must discuss.”

He untied the top bow of her nightgown. “We can discuss them naked.” A second bow came free. “We can discuss them tomorrow.” A third, a fourth. “We can discuss them naked tomorrow, but, Louisa, you are my lawfully wedded wife, and the time has come for me to pleasure you to the utmost, which I am enthusiastically willing to do.”

Those were not lines penned by any long-dead earl. More of Louisa's bows came undone, until there were no more bows to undo. Joseph pulled the covers up around her shoulders and slid a hand across her bare belly. “I did not feel the cold in Surrey, Louisa, not as long as I thought of what these moments with you might hold.”

God in heaven. “Joseph, what am I supposed to
do
?”

He shifted back to regard her, his dark brows drawing down. “You do whatever you please, with one exception.” He kissed her collarbone, a sweet little tasting that might have involved the tip of his tongue. “You do not think your way through this, Louisa Carrington. A plague on me if you're able to cling to ratiocination at such a time. You put your prodigious mind with all its thoughts, languages, ciphering, and blasphemy aside, and let the damned thing rest while I love you.”

The words—
while
I
love
you
—were muttered against Louisa's neck. She liked the sound of them, even if the meaning in context was more biological than romantic. The idea of allowing her intellect to remain idle, however, was novel and vaguely disquieting.

“You still haven't told me what—”

He kissed her, and just like that, she did put her mind aside, except in as much as she perceived her husband shifting over her, straddling her, and surrounding her with the naked, lavender-scented length of him.

“You are such a lovely, warm sort of wife. I suppose you could kiss me back. Just a suggestion.”

He slid a hand under her head and recommenced with the kissing, but he was devilish about it, making a slow, kissing inventory of her features so she wasn't
able
to kiss him back.

She drew her toes up the back of one hairy, muscular calf, reveling in the feel of Joseph's skin against the bottom of her foot. He paused in his kissing. She repeated the caress with her foot, and at the same time, arched up to join her mouth to his.

He growled. She smiled, and he retaliated by tracing her bottom lip with a slow, wet stroke of his tongue.

Sensations and intentions piled up, collided, and scattered in Louisa's awareness.

Joseph's erection, rigid and hot between their bodies.

Louisa's nightgown disappearing down between the covers.

A groan—his—followed by a sigh—hers.

And his weight, his lovely, blessed, utterly enchanting weight, pressing Louisa down into the mattress, anchoring her as arousal lifted in her blood.

“Husband, I want…” She pulled on a fistful of his hair at the back of his head and pressed up against him.

“Kiss me, Louisa.” His lips swooped to cover hers, and Louisa's tongue charged into his mouth, intent on plunder and victory.

His hand, big and warm, settled on her breast, and the sensations resulting were so exquisite—comfort, pleasure, shock, anticipation—that Louisa broke off the kiss entirely.

He applied the slightest, most wonderful pressure to her nipple. Louisa gripped his buttocks with an answering squeeze. “That is… that is… again, please. More, Joseph.”

Her body recalled this, recalled the pleasure and wonder of Joseph's ability to tease and soothe and delight—also to shock, as when he bit her nipple gently and began to nudge at her sex with his cock.

“Louisa?” He put the question to her as he dragged his nose up her sternum. “Wife?”

“Yes, Joseph. Please, yes.
Now.
”

He straightened his arms, which meant their bodies touched only where he would join with her.

“I want your weight…” Louisa tried to drag him back down to her, but he was steadfast.

“In a moment.”

The words were tight, grim almost, warning Louisa that for Joseph, the immediate demand was for reserves of self-restraint. She closed her eyes and put one hand over his heart. The other she wrapped around his wrist and held on.

“Breathe, Louisa.”

Yes, breathing, something she'd been neglecting for some moments. She drew in a deep breath and let it out on a sigh. Joseph snugged himself right up against her sex. On the next gusty exhale, he pushed his hips forward, and on the third, he was penetrating her heat, bringing with him strange and pleasurable sensations.

“Husband…”

He held still, their bodies barely beginning to join. “You're all right?”

“I want you so. More,
please
.”

But the damned, dratted, dear man would not hurry. Louisa's nails were anchored in his buttocks, her breathing was ragged, and her body was silently roaring with desire for completion of this joining with her husband.

“Joseph Carrington… you are tormenting me.”

He lowered himself to his forearms. “I am loving you.” He got his hand under her head again and cradled her closer. “Move with me, Louisa. I'll hold off… Holy
God
.”

She gave one glorious, sinuous roll of her hips, gloving him and retreating. “Like that?”

“Jesus have mercy. Exactly like that.”

His voice was harsh against her ear, harsh and… awed? She slowed her movements, the smooth counterpoint of their bodies contrasting with their increasingly ragged breathing. He did not increase the tempo. For lovely, long minutes, Louisa moved with her husband, learning his rhythm, learning how to withstand an onslaught of pleasure from several directions at once.

“Louisa, I'm not sure I can…”

Something inside her gathered tightly, then more tightly still. She laced the fingers of one hand with his against the pillow, and like a bolt shot from a crossbow, pleasure pierced her being. The feelings were much, much more profound than what she'd known with him before the wedding. Much more intimate, more…

Her mind could not form thoughts. Her body took over, begging her husband to prolong the bliss then join her in it, to sunder them both from everything except the pleasure to be had in each other's arms.

She felt the moment when he stopped fighting his own completion, when his thrusts became just a little wild, a little more fierce and pleasurable to them both.

Loving him like this, being loved by him, it was beyond description, beyond… poetry. Beyond everything.

When the passion ebbed and Joseph lay quietly in Louisa's embrace, there was more pleasure. The pleasure of stroking her hand down the muscled plane of his back, the pleasure of matching her breathing to his, the pleasure of smoothing her fingers through the silky tangle of his hair.

“I should move.” A soft, possibly awestruck growl accompanied by some teeth applied to Louisa's earlobe.

She patted his bottom and kissed his cheek. “Not yet.” Not when she was still so overwhelmed with intimacy that the idea of turning loose of him struck like grief.

He kissed her temple a few minutes later. “Louisa, we'll make a mess if somebody doesn't find us a damned flannel.”

“My thoughts are a mess.” And she did not mind that in the least—another novelty. She dropped her arms from around him, and he eased up, his cock leaving her body in a soft, damp caress.

“Don't look so woebegone, my lady. The night is young.”

She watched as he strutted over to the basin, wrung out the cloth, and made brisk ablutions in the region of his genitals. “You are not delicate with yourself.”

“I need not be. You are another matter.” He looked positively piratical as he surveyed her in the bed. “A cloth, madam?”

“For?”

“To deal with the mess of your husband spending his seed.”

No poetry there, but she approved of the bluntness of it. This was how she wanted her husband to speak of intimate things with her—openly, with one eyebrow lifted in challenge. “A cloth would be appreciated. A husband under these covers to keep me warm would be appreciated more.”

“There's bound to be a husband around here somewhere.” He
swaggered
back to the bed. “He'll probably accommodate you for a bit, if you promise not to steal all the covers.”

She wanted to steal his heart. “The cloth, if you please.” Something damp was indeed making itself felt in an intimate location. How… curious, and
married
the sensation was.

Joseph passed over a soft, dry flannel and climbed on the bed while Louisa tended to herself.

“I take it you intend to linger in this vicinity, Wife?” He was peering at her in the gloom. Louisa pitched the cloth to the night table and had the sense Joseph was trying to see her without revealing much of himself.

“I had planned on sharing this bed with you for the next forty years or so, Joseph Carrington. If the notion does not appeal—”

He was over her in an instant. “
Sixty
,” he growled. “Sixty at least, or seventy. There are people who have lived to be a hundred, though much more of this conjugal bliss, and five-and-thirty might be a stretch. I sustained wounds on the Peninsula, you know.”

Louisa wrestled the covers up over him. “I married a ridiculous man.”

He sighed and dropped his forehead to hers. “A ridiculous brute. Are you all right, Louisa? We became more impassioned than was perhaps wise for a first encounter.”

“No, I am not all right.”

He pulled back, real concern—even panic—showing in his gaze. “Wife, I am abjectly sorry. We'll rouse the servants and order you a hot, soaking bath. I most humbly beg—”

She put her hand over his mouth. “You are being ridiculous again, Joseph Carrington. I am not merely all right. I am most pleased. I am most definitely pleased.”

And besotted. She was most definitely besotted with her husband too, though that was hardly convenient, dignified, or worth mentioning.

He subsided against her on a grand sigh. “I am most pleased, as well.”

Some moments later, when Louisa was drowsing on the pillow that was her husband's chest, a thought occurred to her.

“Is there more to that poem by Wilmot?”

At first, she wasn't sure Joseph was awake enough to reply. His hand passed over her hair in a slow caress, though, then his fingers traced her facial features, one by one.

“Thou art my life—and if thou but turn away

My life's a thousand deaths. Thou art my way—

Without thee, Love, I travel not but stray.

My light thou art—without thy glorious sight

My eyes are darken'd with eternal night.

My Love, thou art my way, my life, my light.”

He fell silent, his hand stroking over her hair. Louisa leaned up and kissed him, lest she say something besotted to a man who gave her both poetry and pleasure in the darkness.

And in the measured, sonorous lines of sentiment he offered her, in the tenderness of his hand caressing her hair, Louisa found hope that even her husband—her dark, limping, occasionally ridiculous husband—might be a little besotted too.

***

“An embarrassment of feminine pulchritude graces my table.” Joseph seated his wife first, then Amanda, then Fleur, bestowing a kiss on each lady's cheek. From his perspective, expecting the children to behave properly at table was likely to ruin both their meal and his, but this morning, if his wife had asked to dine with Lady Ophelia at the table, Joseph would have fetched the sow himself.

“What did Papa say?” Fleur leaned closer to Louisa to whisper her question, glancing at her father uncertainly as she did.

“He said there are so many pretty ladies joining him for breakfast, it makes him wish he were handsomer,” Louisa explained.

Which wasn't quite what he'd meant—or was it?

“Papa's handsome.” Amanda looked troubled by the idea that he might not be.

“Most observant of you, Amanda. Louisa, perhaps you'd pour us each a cup while I fix plates for our daughters.”

But what did children eat? He resented that question, and resented that he did not know the answer. Another father, a truer father, would know.

As he surveyed the sideboard, inspiration struck.

“How would you ladies like to break your fast? We have buttered toast, an omelet with our own white cheese, kippers, beefsteak, oranges, ham, bacon—the best bacon in the realm, if I do say so myself—and are these crepes, Louisa?”

“They are. Let's start with tea, toast, and eggs, and perhaps an orange.”

Petty of him, but it was gratifying to know those would have been his choices for the girls, as well. Joseph served for everybody—the footman being mysteriously absent from his post—and sat at the head of the table, intent on ignoring his children's clumsy attempts at manners.

“May I please have cinnamon on my toast?” Fleur's childish soprano interrupted Joseph's effort to rain cinnamon over every buttery particle of his toast.

“Of course.” He might have passed her the cinnamon, but she held up her plate.

The entire meal went like that, with near misses, stumbles, and crossed signals that all seemed to right themselves somehow. And yet, breakfast hadn't been an ordeal, exactly… not in the sense Joseph had expected.

“After riding all day yesterday, Husband, I'm wondering if you wouldn't like to stretch your legs a bit.” Louisa patted her lips with her napkin. Fleur and Amanda mimicked her with sober precision.

Husband.
She called him that as if it was the only form of address to which he ought to answer.

“I generally do,” Joseph said. “Riding out has no appeal today—it looks to try to snow again—but a short visit to the livestock starts the day off properly.”

A cavalryman looked after his own horse. For the first time, it struck Joseph as suspect that a proper English gentleman looked after his own children only indirectly.

Amanda speared her father with an expectant look. “May I be excused?”

“Of course. Put on your boots and fetch your cloaks.”

“May I be—?” Fleur began.

Joseph waved a hand. “Away with you, both.” This was a mistake, a misstep, because Fleur's little face fell, and Louisa's lips flattened.

Nerve-wracking, to be so at the mercy of multiple females.

“Though I do hope you will both grace the breakfast table again soon. I don't know when I've enjoyed a meal more.”

Smiles greeted him all around, though it had been a near thing. When the girls had walked to the door then thundered down the corridor to the stairs, Joseph topped up his wife's teacup and his own—his flask not yet being to hand.

“I would like my marks, if you please.”

Louisa stirred sugar and cream into both of their cups. “We all managed fairly well, but it wasn't a test, Joseph.”

“Then what was it?”

She slid his cup close to his hand and patted his knuckles. “It was breakfast. When they're confident with breakfast, we'll add the occasional luncheon. By the time they're dreaming of putting up their hair, family dinner will be no challenge at all.”

His wife was a handsome, even beautiful woman. In the morning light, her skin had a luminous glow, her green eyes sparkled, and the sun caught fiery highlights in her dark hair.

But she was also… lovely. Lovely in the way of a woman who took the time to notice and understand children, lovely like a woman who'd kept her arms around her new husband the entire night. The sense of being protected—

Joseph took a sip of his tea and knew it for the craven stalling it was.

He set his teacup down and glanced out the window to the chill, gray snowscape. “They are not mine, Louisa. Neither one of them.”

“They are ours.” She patted his hand again, but he turned his palm up and trapped her fingers in his.

“I am not their father. Amanda was born not eight months after the wedding—I was in Spain, and my wife did not immediately notify me of the birth, but I happened to see the parish records. I questioned the midwife and was told Amanda was full term. The midwife also verified the day of Amanda's birth, about which my wife had dissembled by a margin of nearly two months.”

Louisa did not withdraw her hand. He loved her for that. For that and for many things.

“And Fleur?”

“I hadn't seen my wife for a year when Fleur showed up. I should not have spent such a long time in Spain without leave—Wellington could be reasoned with in this regard—but it was easier…”

Louisa was gripping Joseph's hand rather snugly. The sensation might have made him feel trapped, but instead it comforted. “Are you blaming yourself, Joseph?”

“Of course I blame myself. Cynthia was desperate to marry me, a fellow she'd known only briefly, a man beneath her socially. I should have realized her situation and spared her marriage.”

Louisa's eyes narrowed. “She had family to look after her. Are these Lionel's daughters, Joseph?”

He shook his head. “Honiton denies it, and he was in Scotland when Fleur would have been conceived. I do not know who their father is, and because I never questioned my wife on the matter, she had no opportunity to tell me.”

“Well, then.” Louisa took a measured sip of her tea but kept her hand in Joseph's.

“I'm sorry. I should have acquainted you with matters before you spoke your vows to me.”

And why he hadn't done so was not something he wanted to examine too closely.

Louisa set her teacup precisely in the middle of its saucer and aimed a frown in the direction of their joined hands. “I don't see as it makes a difference, Joseph. They were born to your wife. Legally, you are the only father they will ever have. You love them. They love you. What matters anything else?”

He reviewed her words in his mind to make sure he had the sense of them, for sense there was, in abundance.

“I am the only father they will ever have.” He brought Louisa's hand to his lips and kissed her palm. “And you are the only mother they will ever need.”

“Exactly. More tea?”

He did not want to swill more tea. He wanted to take his wife upstairs and make love to her all over again. He wanted to thank her for easing a weight he'd carried on his heart for years; he wanted to go down on his creaky, unreliable knee—

Above stairs, a door banged. “No more tea, thank you. We'd best be donning our mittens and scarves lest we delay our scheduled outing.”

She nodded, smiling faintly, and let Joseph assist her to her feet. He paused with her by the door, mindful that two pairs of small, booted feet were making a racket on the main staircase.

“Louisa, thank you.”

She peered up at him. “Their manners were quite up to the challenge, Husband. All I did was issue an invitation and provide a few reminders.”

He couldn't say if she was deliberately misunderstanding him or if the fact that they were raising some stranger's children was truly of so little moment to her.
You
love
them; they love you. What matters anything else?
He made one more try.

“Thank you for that, as well.”

When he offered his escort, she twined her hand onto his forearm and let him lead her out of the breakfast parlor. Outside, snow threatened, and the sky was a leaden gray, but in Joseph Carrington's heart, the sun was trying to break through the clouds.

***

Louisa boosted Fleur over a board fence then clambered over in her wake, only to find her husband glowering at her when she jumped to the ground.

He was handsome even when he glowered, and he was handsomer still when he confessed, his blue eyes full of bewilderment and hesitance, that he'd provided a home to children not of his blood.

“You must not worry.” She held him back when he would have gone stomping off in pursuit of the children.

“The pond may not be frozen solid, Louisa, and at their ages, warnings are pointless.”

“We will keep the girls within eyesight and earshot, but that's not what I meant.” She looped an arm through his to keep him from striding off across the snow. “In a proper merchant's household, such a thing as a cuckoo in the nest would never be tolerated.”

“I am a merchant, a purveyor of fine pork, in case you hadn't noticed.”

“You are soon to be a baron, you married a duke's daughter, and among titled families, these things are taken in stride.”