Page 56 of Lord Garson's Bride
Chapter Twenty
“Our arrival in Town is no longer a secret.” With a mixture of bewilderment and anticipation, Jane set down her teacup and surveyed the pile of invitations that had arrived in the morning post.
They formed a tottering pile on the mahogany table in her sitting room, where she and Hugh had just finished breakfast. During the three days they’d been in London, she and her husband had taken their meals here. It had the advantage of being closer to the bedroom than the elaborate dining room downstairs.
“We don’t have to answer them.” Hugh sent her a lazy smile from the leather couch beside the blazing fire. He wore only his crimson silk dressing gown and a loose pair of cotton trousers.
“That’s not polite.” She shot him a cross glance, although he looked so beguiling, lounging around like a lascivious pasha, that really she just wanted to haul him straight back to bed. They weren’t long up, although it was getting on for noon. To a countrywoman like her, that seemed disgustingly late.
Here she was sitting at the table, still in her peignoir, with her hair flowing about her. She’d soon recognized that her hair exerted a strange power over Hugh, and it was easier to leave it unbound if they were at home. Which they mostly were. He’d offered to take her to Astley’s Circus, and the Tower of London,and the British Museum, but so far all they’d managed was a stroll in Hyde Park that had quickly turned into a torrid kissing session in a secluded glade. She hadn’t yet seen the sights he’d promised to show her. Not that she minded. She basked in Hugh’s insatiable appetite for her. The woman who had once shrunk from physical pleasure was becoming a dedicated voluptuary.
To a point where she resented any time she spent away from him. Susan had called yesterday and badgered Jane into visiting hermodiste, when all she’d wanted was to remain in the enchanted world she and Hugh created together.
“I told you society gives newlyweds some privacy,” he said with a careless gesture.
“It’s all very well to say that, but we’ll have to emerge some time, and I need help to get through all this as a credit to you.” She watched as Mathers, the butler, cleared away the breakfast dishes.
“If you want to be a good wife, come and sit on my lap,” Hugh purred.
When she caught Mathers’ swiftly hidden smile, she blushed. She’d noted that Hugh’s staff at Half Moon Street held him in great affection. An affection they seemed willing to extend to the new Lady Garson.
Once Mathers had gone, she stood and leveled a disapproving stare at her indolent husband. “You’re scandalizing the servants.”
He still looked at her as if he’d happily snap her up between his straight white teeth and swallow her in one bite. Her heart began to dance a wild tarantella. She knew what that look meant. By heaven, she should. After that extraordinary night when she’d abandoned her fears, they hadn’t left their room at the inn for three days. An eventful trip to London had followed, andsince then, they’d enjoyed three heady days cloistered inside this lovely house.
“They’re delighted to see me happy again,” he said, echoing her thoughts.
“Well, you’re scandalizing me,” she retorted, although once she’d locked the door, she crossed the room to curl up on his lap as he’d asked. She slid one arm around his neck and rested her cheek on his chest. Her fingers tangled in the crisp curls at his nape.
“Do I make you happy, Jane?” he asked softly.
She glanced up at him. “You know you do.”
That was true, as long as she didn’t spend too much time pondering the emotions underlying her delight. Right now, large parts of her life were marked “Here be dragons.”
He smiled and swooped in to capture a kiss. Since the wedding, she’d become a connoisseur of Hugh’s kisses. There were light kisses, over in a second, as if he marked his place in a book he intended to return to later. There were the kisses that conveyed his current satisfaction with the world and his place in it. There were the slow, seductive kisses, where he coaxed her into some reckless act that once would have shocked her into next week. Then when he joined his body to hers, there were the long, open-mouthed, passionate kisses. While he was inside her, nothing else in the world existed, except him and her and the heat melding them together.
This latest kiss expressed his pleasure in her, with a touch of “If you’re interested, we could go back to bed.” She was interested—he turned her into a shameless baggage. But she and Hugh weren’t long upright, and she wanted to talk to him about his plans.
Then they could go back to bed.
“I never knew I could feel like this,” she murmured.
“Let me check just how you feel.”
“Hugh…” she said in confusion, then laughed with relief, as his hands began to explore her body.
“Hmmm. Soft.” He squeezed her breast, unconstrained under the silky nightdress. Before they’d left Salisbury, he’d sent Mary to the best haberdasher in town to buy some undergarments and nightdresses suitable for a bride. Jane hadn’t set eyes on her white flannel in days. She had a suspicion Hugh might have thrown it away.
“Hugh,” she said in a completely different tone, when his long fingers teased her nipple.
“Would I say that’s hard?”
“I don’t know. Would you?” she asked drily and sneaked a hand down to where he rose boldly against her hip. “If it’s not, I know something that is.”
“Hussy,” he said unsteadily, as she curled her fingers around him. His hand left her breast and tangled in the fall of her hair. “That paragon Jane Norris wouldn’t approve of such lechery.”
“Jane Norris, alas, is no more,” she said in mock sorrow. “Jane Rutherford has taken her place, and I fear that she has no morals at all.”
