Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [118]
“We’re just back from a day’s hunting,” she said, passing a cup and offering a silver dish of hot buttered crumpets. “Do you hunt, Mr. Harrison?”
“Not yet, but I’m sure willing to learn.”
She threw back her head and laughed heartily. “Then you’d better get in a little practice. Tomorrow we’ll fix you up with a mount and I’ll take you out myself so you can get the feel of the land.”
She bit into a crumpet, wiping the crumbs daintily from her mouth with long, graceful fingers. Harry couldn’t take his eyes off her. Her long, copper-colored hair hung loose to her shoulders and curled in soft tendrils around her face, and she had that wonderful clear-eyed, fresh country-complexioned English look. She was still wearing her riding britches and he thought they clung to her perfect small rump as though they belonged, and her high black leather boots and masculine white silkshirt looked sexy as hell.
At dinnerthat night she was transformed, in trailing green velvet with gardenia in her upswept hair. “From our hothouses,” she explained when Harry commented on its scent.
Lord and Lady Tilmarsh were rundown aristocrats and very English, but they made Harry welcome and encouraged his interest in Louisa. And when, after a week, he knew he must be polite and leave or overstay his welcome, he could hardly bear to tear himself away.
“It’s incredible,” he told Buck back in New York again. “I’ve never even kissed her and she’s the sexiest woman I’ve ever met.”
He couldn’t stay away. He forgot about Princeton and he crisscrossed the Atlantic so often that all the stewards on every liner knew him. Louisa was elusive, keeping him at arm’s length, something he wasn’t used to. On his twenty-first birthday she looked so divinely sexy in her britches and boots and jaunty black bowler with her copper hair tucked into a net, that he finally grabbed her and kissed her. She smelled deliciously of Mitsuko and he was overcome with passion, but he knew there was no chance of an affair, so he asked her to marry him.
The Tilmarsh-Harri son wedding was the event of the 1912 London season. The ceremony was held at St. Margaret’s Westminster and was attended by a princess, two dukes, and dozens of lords, as well as three hundred other guests. Louisa looked magnificent in simple white satin from Worth, and the guard of honor outside the church wore hunting pink, forming a triumphal arch for the bridal pair with their riding crops. There was a reception at the Ritz afterward, with a thirty-piece orchestra, a towering five-tier wedding cake, and enough champagne to deplete Krug’s reserves for several years to come—all paid for by Harry because it seemed the Tilmarsh’s had been rather short of money for a couple of generations.
“Whatever we have we put into horseflesh,” Louisa told him proudly. “Our horses are the best Irish bloodstock.”
The first night of the honeymoon was spent at the Ritz, and Louisa bathed and changed into a simple white lawn nightdress. She flung herself into bed next to the waiting Harry. “I’m as tired as the dogs after a day’s hunt.” She yawned, snuggling her head into the pillow and falling instantly to sleep.
Harry stared at her angrily. How could she sleep, tonight of all nights, when he couldn’t wait to get his hands on her? He got up again and dressed angrily. He took one last hopeful look at her before he closed the door on his way out, but Louisa was snoring gently and he stomped out of the room and down the elevator, making for London’s Soho and some willing woman to assuage his needs.
At noon the next day they sailed down the Thames on his yacht and that evening before dinner he gave her a present. A sable coat with emerald buttons.
“It’s wonderful, darling,” she said, putting it around her shoulders and holding the soft fur against her cheek. “Heavenly.”
Harry didn’t usually give away sables with emerald buttons until he had had his pleasure and more, but tonight he had it made. Louisa was his. He paced the chilly decks, giving her plenty of time to undress and make herself ready,