Lord of Scoundrels - Loretta Chase [83]
He set her down very carefully upon the bed.
Then he rang for her maid…and left. Without another word, and in rather a hurry.
Jessica sat gazing at the empty doorway, listening to his carpet-muffled footsteps as he strode down the long hallway, until she heard the faint thud of his door closing.
Sighing, she bent to remove the stocking he'd loosened, which had slid down to her ankle.
She had known from the minute she'd agreed to marry him that it wouldn't be easy, she reminded herself. She had known he was in an exceedingly prickly humor this evening— all day, in fact. She could not expect him to behave rationally…and bed her properly…and sleep with her.
Bridget appeared then, and without appearing to notice her mistress's disordered state of dress or distracted state of mind, quietly and efficiently prepared Her Ladyship for bed.
Once tucked in, the maid gone, Jessica decided there was no point in fretting about Dain's failure to deflower her.
What he had done had been very exciting and surprising, especially the last part, when he'd made her have a little earthquake. She knew what that was, because Genevieve had told her. And thanks to her grandmother, Jessica was well aware that those extraordinary sensations did not always occur, especially early in marriage. Not all men took the trouble.
She could not believe Dain had taken the trouble merely to score a point, like proving his power over her. According to Genevieve, it was extremely painful for an aroused male to deny himself release. Unless Dain had an esoteric way of relieving his arousal that Genevieve had failed to mention, he'd surely suffered acute discomfort.
He must have had a compelling reason for doing so.
Jessica could not begin to imagine what it was. He wanted her, beyond a doubt. He had tried to resist, but he couldn't— not after she'd shamelessly bared her breasts and stuck them right under his arrogant Florentine nose…not after she'd hiked up her skirts and sat on his breeding organs.
She flushed, recalling, but the heat she felt wasn't embarrassment. At the time, she'd felt wonderfully free and wicked…and she'd been hotly, deliciously rewarded for her boldness.
Even now, she felt he'd given her a gift. As though it were her birthday, not his. And after gifting his wife with a little earthquake and enduring acute physical discomfort, he had— with no small difficulty, she was sure— contrived to get her up the stairs without waking her.
She found herself wishing he hadn't done so. It would have been easier if he'd roughly wakened her and laughed at her and let her make her own way upstairs, dazed, stumbling…besotted. It would have been easier still if he had simply pushed her down, rammed into her, rolled away, and fallen asleep.
Instead, he'd taken pains. He'd taught her pleasure and taken care of her after. Sweet and chivalrous he'd been, truly.
Her husband was transforming simple animal attraction into something much more complicated.
And soon, if she was not very careful, she might make the fatal error of falling in love with him.
* * *
Midafternoon of the following day, Lady Dain discovered that Athcourt did have ghosts.
She knelt on a threadbare carpet in the upper-most chamber of the North Tower. The room was one of Athcourt's furnishings graveyards. About her were trunks filled with clothing of bygone eras, draperies, and linens, as well as assorted odds and ends of furniture, crates of mismatched dinnerware, and a number of household utensils of enigmatic function. Beside her knelt Mrs. Ingleby, the housekeeper.
They were both gazing at a portrait of a young woman with curling black hair, coal black eyes, and a haughty Florentine nose. Jessica had found it in a dark corner of the room, hidden behind a stack of trunks, and thickly wrapped in velvet bed hangings.
"This can be no one but His Lordship's mother," Jessica said, wondering why her heart hammered as though she were afraid, which she wasn't. "The gown, the coiffure— last decade of the eighteenth century, no question."