Page 68 of The Traitor
Sebastian remained silent, but his eyes, so cold and distant, gradually warmed. “You’ll take a chill.”
“We’ll keep each other warm.” When she’d wrestled her dress off and was wearing only her chemise, Milly started on her husband’s cravat. “We have blankets, and nobody will come looking for us until the storm passes. Let me do your cuffs.”
He allowed her to remove his waistcoat and shirt, their clothing becoming an untidy pile near the edge of the blankets, until Sebastian grabbed her dress and his shirt and wadded them into a pillow. He let her plow her fingers through the dusting of dark hair on his chest, let her feel his hands shaping the contour of her breasts.
“Your touch is warm, Husband.”
And he was becoming aroused. Milly knew this because she sat upon the part of him most honestly able to communicate such a development.
“I am glad you married me, Millicent St. Clair. Glad of it, and I always will be.”
Ah, finally. Milly hadn’t been sure, hadn’t known if she was a blessing or another burden to him, hadn’t dared hope his sentiments matched her own.
“I’m glad too. You will please now exert yourself to make me even more glad.”
She added that last because already she had learned that her husband responded to a tone of command, even if the words were half-whispered and full of wonder.
Twelve
“Mercia, you must celebrate with me!”
Christian folded down his newspaper to regard former Captain Lord Prentice “Pretentious” Anderson grinning at him with a sense of bonhomie usually reserved for a much later hour.
And for much closer acquaintances. “Anderson.”
Anderson stuck a pale hand in Christian’s face. “I’m to be a papa, again. Her ladyship told me at breakfast, said kippers would not be on the menu for some while. Sure a sign as ever there was. She can’t abide kippers when she’s on the nest.”
Christian rose from his reading chair, his irritation with the captain and with the day fading marginally. “That is splendid news. This will be your third?”
Anderson gave a ponderous wink. “Third time’s the charm, not that I don’t adore m’ girls, but a fellow has a duty, dontcha know.”
Christian, being a duke without extant male progeny, did know, though he wouldn’t trade his daughter for all the trees in Surrey. Anderson was beaming at the books encircling the club’s reading room as if the entire burden of gestation and childbirth was one he’d personally undertaken in service to the succession.
“You’re having champagne?”
“Told the steward to bring up the best,” Anderson said. “The fellows are in the dining room, but somebody recalled you were hibernating in here.”
Hibernating. Christian was serving out a sentence handed down by his duchess, to get out and enjoy the day. Her Grace was likely stealing a nap, rest being of paramount interest to a woman in anticipation of a blessed event.
“One drink, then. A man deserves to celebrate such good fortune.” And as Anderson’s former commanding officer, however briefly, Christian was obligated to celebrate it with him.
“Say what you will about the damned Frenchies,” Anderson observed as they quit the sanctuary of the reading room, “they brew fine drink. Suppose that’s why we let some of them live, what?”
Christian remained silent, because precious few men, precious few young men, had survived France’s bid for glory. The ones who’d survived had been lucky, and damned brave.
The crowd in the dining room had clearly been alerted to Anderson’s happy news. Glasses were full, the noise level rising with one bawdy toast after another.
“Mercia! It’s an occasion indeed when you deign to join us.” Lord Hector Pierpont’s voice held the grating good cheer of a man masking self-consciousness with lubricious manners. “Steward, another bottle for His Grace!”
Christian accepted a drink—he’d said he would.
“Give us a toast, Your Grace. Like old times, eh?” somebody called.
Wellington believed in reassembling his staff periodically at Apsley House for social dinners. He trotted out the full Portuguese service and the best wines, an occasion for men who’d shared a war to take a step in the direction of sharing peace.
Christian had dodged every invitation thus far, and intended to keep dodging them indefinitely.
He held up his glass and waited for order to assert itself. “To our ladies. May they weather their challenges as safely as we have weathered ours.”
