The Regency Season Collection: Part Two. Кэрол Мортимер

       Chapter Twenty

      ‘I love you, Luke. So very much,’ Chloe said in a shaky voice, stirring at last as the fog of bliss brought on by becoming Luke’s wife in every sense of the word dissipated enough to allow her sufficient spare breath to speak.

      ‘Good, it took you long enough to realise my sterling worth and agreeable temper was exactly what you needed to make your life complete,’ he joked, with an echo of her own wonder in his eyes.

      ‘Pompous idiot,’ she said with a wifely look he seemed to find fascinating.

      ‘Wife,’ he murmured huskily, fascinated by a curl of red-gold hair trailing across her bare shoulder. He tested that word again on is tongue. ‘My wife,’ he murmured and she opened heavy-lidded eyes a little wider to take him in, naked as Adam and insufferably complacent about life as he currently appeared, and she sighed with contentment.

      ‘What is it?’ she asked sleepily.

      ‘You are my wife,’ he informed her as he kissed the disordered tumble of her wildfire hair over that satin-smooth shoulder, then eyed her as if tempted to work his way downwards and catch her in the sensual web he’d woven round so effectively last night once more. ‘Lady Chloe Winterley is my wife,’ he added, gloating over the fact of her as she stretched her sleek and very bare body luxuriously against his own naked form. ‘My lawfully wedded wife,’ he added for good measure.

      ‘I think we have already established that fact,’ she murmured, still half-asleep, but very willing to wake up to a new and very alert husband in her bed.

      ‘Not to my complete satisfaction we haven’t,’ he argued, even as the gallant impulse to leave his new-made wife to recover from his amorous attentions seemed to fly out of the window and she put all the provocation she’d stored up over a decade into kissing her one true love back. ‘I love you,’ he distracted himself by saying as soon as he could. ‘I love you, my Lady Chloe.’

      ‘You haven’t leapt out of bed and downed a pipe of port or a cellar full of brandy while I was asleep, have you, Luke? You sound drunk, even if you don’t taste it,’ she observed with a self-satisfied smile he took very personally indeed.

      ‘I’m only drunk on you, love. Merry as a grig on my first taste of housekeeper and very personal companion,’ he informed her with a smile that truly freed the wolf in him for the first time in ten years and, oh, but that wolf was hungry.

      ‘I like the sound of being employed so intimately by my Lord Farenze—do you think he’ll make a hard-working female like me a good master?’ she whispered and let her hand wander towards a very rampant piece of evidence he would be a very attentive one, if this newest Lady Farenze ever acknowledged any man her master and they both knew that was very unlikely.

      ‘I know Mrs Wheaton drove him nigh mad with need of her every time he laid eyes on the impertinent female. Shall we see if he can return the compliment?’ he whispered in her ear as he taught her the erotic potential of that delicately made organ with his busy tongue. She surprised a groan of delight out of him when she retaliated by exploring his manhood with a delicately curious fingertip.

      ‘Mrs Wheaton wanted you back, Luke; she wanted back you so badly that she used to pace her room at night for the pent-up frustration of wanting you in her bed and not being able to have you there. She cried herself to sleep with missing you more times than she wants to remember right now, poor lonely, lovesick female as she was. I longed for you with every fibre of my being, when I was so young I couldn’t imagine how anyone could want a man so much and not have him and for a whole decade after that. On nights when you slept under Lady Virginia’s roof for one night, or even a slightly less miserly two of them, I shook with need in my lonely bed and wept for all we could never have.’

      ‘And I had to leave after a few nights because I couldn’t sleep for longing for my great-aunt’s housekeeper in my bed. I wanted you so much I ached with it every time I was within thirty miles of the Lodge and you, Chloe. I had to stay away. There was no other way for me not to have you. You had a child to bring up alone and you were my great-aunt’s housekeeper and another man’s widow. How could I stay when you would have ended up my mistress and I knew that was less than you ought to be?’

      ‘If I’d known you wanted me back like that, I don’t suppose I’d have been able to stay away,’ she confessed with a blush beyond the rosy flush of need already spread across her cheeks and down to places where she hadn’t known she could blush until last night. ‘Even for Verity’s sake, I couldn’t have stayed away if I’d known you wanted me as much in return, Luke,’ she said and abandoned teasing for a moment to stare into his eyes with her heart in her own. ‘I love you, you great gruff, noble idiot,’ she said with wet eyes and a shaky smile. ‘I love you so much I won’t be able to pretend I married you because you were obliged to right Lady Chloe in the eyes of the world. I can’t counterfeit polite indifference and yawn my way through the odd evening when we happen to have no engagements if we spend a Season in London. If you don’t want me to give away the fact I feel as if half of me is missing whenever you’re not near; that I long for you so deeply that the world is less shining and wonderful when we’re apart, then you’ll just have to leave me behind. In Somerset or Northumberland I can be Lord Farenze’s besotted wife, who thinks about you every moment of her day, but you and Eve will have to leave me there while you go to London if you want to be fashionably indifferent to me in public, Luke.’

      She reared up and dragged the bedclothes with her, since it was still only March and not even love could keep them warm when the fire had gone out hours ago and the chill of an early spring morning pervaded this splendid old bedchamber. Chloe propped herself above him as he lay prone against the bank of down pillows covered in fine and snowy linen and forgot what she had been going to say next in her fascination with watching him, her husband of a day.

      ‘So dark,’ she whispered as she swept a fingertip along the stern arch of his brow. ‘So determined...’ she lingered over the hard firmness of his jaw. ‘So tempting,’ she gasped as his lips parted to nibble that fingertip and his grey eyes heated to silver and steel and a hard flush of need swept over his cheekbones.

      ‘So yours,’ he rasped with such love in that dear gaze of his that she moaned in sheer awe. ‘So ready to let the wide world know I love my wife, will always love her and have loved her for far too long in silence to ever be quiet about it again. Now I have my ring on your finger and you in my bed for the rest of our natural lives, I shall never be able to pretend I’m not fathoms deep in love with you. We won’t be walking in Virginia and Virgil’s footsteps, my darling. We’ve got our own road to travel, but I want the world to know we’re every bit as besotted with each other as they were and intend to be so for as long as we live. Polite society will just have to accustom itself to that fact or keep away, wherever we are.’

      ‘It sounds wondrous,’ she told him with a dreamy smile.

      ‘It will be,’ he promised as solemnly as he had the day before, when they stood in front of the altar and made their vows before God.

      ‘Well, that’s all right then,’ Lady Farenze informed her enthralled lord, then blinked and eyed him a little doubtfully. ‘Are you sure the servants won’t come in until we ring the bell?’ she asked, as all sorts of possibilities suddenly suggested themselves when he gently shifted her over his prone body and she wriggled delightedly at all the wildly sensual ideas he was putting into her head with such promise in his wolfish