Another pulse of that unwelcome wish that his wife wasn’t quite so experienced, that she didn’t know to leave off her undergarments when greeting a man. He pushed it down, away.
“I had no idea,” he promised her, “and neither did the viscount. Believe me, I was looking.” Phoebe’s breasts were voluptuous and plump, overflowing his hands like a gift from the gods. He ran a hand down the curve of her hips, the length of her legs. She lay before him, naked, flawless, a sweet expanse of perfect skin and sultry curves waiting to be caressed.
“You’re perfect, Poppy,” he breathed. And then heard what he had just said.
She scowled. “My name is not Poppy. I know you’ve been with other women, but you have to remember my name.”
“I’ll never be with another woman again,” he said, cupping her face in his hands and bringing his nose close enough to touch hers. “I’m going to spend the rest of my life in this bed.”
“No Poppies?”
“Never. Could I call you Poppy sometimes?”
“No?”
“Not even when I want to make those beautiful eyes stormy?”
“No.” She was an uncompromising woman. He made a mental note to call her Poppy on regular occasions. Obviously, it was his role in life to make certain that his wife laughed.
“No going to sea?”
“Never again without you. I’d like to show you Paris sometime.” Tired of talking, he took her mouth, one hand curving under her bottom, pulling her hard against his crotch.
They kissed until he realized that he was in danger of losing control, pinning his wife down and having his way with her.
“You’re bad for me,” he murmured, leaving her mouth and kissing his way down her throat.
She had to clear her throat to answer. “Why?”
“First you made me impotent. Now you’re threatening to turn me into a six-second miracle.”
“A what?”
“A misfiring pistol,” he said, a laugh rumbling in his throat. For all he was ravaged by lust at the mere sight of her, he actually had an iron grip over himself. He would not lose control until he had wiped out the memory of Colin’s father, so that his wife never thought of the man—whoever he was—again.
He’d reached her breast, so he licked and nuzzled and suckled until she was begging him wordlessly, her arms trying to pull him closer, her legs clenching together. “Please,” she kept begging. And then commanding, “Now, Griffin!”
There was no reason to obey her, not this time, so he kept on going, down past the curve of her stomach. He glanced up to see a horrified expression on his wife’s face.
That just made him grin. Apparently, there was something he could teach her in the bedroom. He was skilled . . . she was a woman . . . the outcome was inevitable. And she was wildly responsive, after she got over her initial qualms.
In fact, it was a mere moment before she screamed, her body twisting up before she fell into a surprised, limp heap. He didn’t stop. He was reveling in the pure carnality of her lusciousness, in her sleek, wet beauty. So he bent his head and started over with a wantonly sensual kiss, one that broke every rule and demanded utter surrender.
Phoebe surrendered, oh so sweetly. He let the pirate side of him enjoy holding her down, pleasuring her even as she tried to pull him up.
He kept going until her breath was coming in little sobs, her body bucking against his, her eyes glazed.
Then he brought his hand into play, and with just a rough caress and a twist of his fingers, her whole sweet little body tightened around his fingers and she screamed again, falling apart.
It was time.
He came up and over her, pausing for a moment to enjoy the sweet triumph of knowing every luscious inch of her was suffused in pleasure. Her skin stretched like the finest silk over her bones, sweet and creamy, without even a freckle.
Or, more to the point, the faintest stretch mark.
He frowned.
His wife’s skin was unmarked, except a trail caused by kisses that must have been rougher than he thought. “Phoebe!” he growled.
She opened those beautiful blue eyes.
Perhaps they would always be able to read each other’s thoughts. A little smile instantly curled his wife’s lips. “There’s something I keep meaning to tell you,” she whispered, her voice a husky, sensual invitation. No virgin could . . .
“Damnation!”
FIFTEEN
Phoebe could have laughed at the astonishment on Griffin’s face, but her heart was too full. “It’s good news, isn’t it?” she asked. “From your point of view, that is?”
“Good,” he repeated. He looked as if she’d struck him over the head with a big rock.
She nodded.
He spread his hands across her stomach. She instinctively tensed her muscles to try to draw it flat. She had a curve there. The truth was that she had curves everywhere.
“You didn’t sleep with another man.” His voice was raw with an emotion she couldn’t quite recognize. Relief? “You aren’t accustomed to eating dinner without underclothes.”
“What? No!”
“You never wore that blue gown for lover?”
“Absolutely not!” She felt a little indignant at the very idea. “You think I have a wardrobe just to satisfy my illicit desires? My maid took off its underskirt because she wanted to make sure you found me desirous.”
“Absurd.”
She scowled at him.
“As if any red-blooded man in the world could resist you. Now I wish I hadn’t ripped the gown.” There was laughter in his voice again, but relief, too. Relief and joy and a bedrock strain of desire. “Or rather, I wish I’d jumped off that boat and swum back to shore and tried again. Or that I’d remembered I was married and been faithful to you.”
She snorted. “Under English law we aren’t yet married, you know. Not until the marriage is consummated. My father told me, the moment I confessed that you were gone.”
“You lied?”
“I lied.”
He cupped her face in his hands and dropped a kiss on her lips. “Thank you.” And: “I don’t deserve you.”
“No, you don’t,” she whispered back. “Remember that.”
“The children?”
“My cousin died when Alastair was born. Her husband asked me to care for them. He left for the Bermudas and died of a fever only two months later.”
“Worthless sod,” Griffin growled, picturing Colin’s father under his foot. “He should have stayed with his children.”
But Phoebe was smiling at him, and the thought slipped out of his head. “They call me Mama. Still, I tell them about their mother, and we visit her grave now and then.”
Despite all the emotion, his body was urgently making its demands known. He’d had a cock-stand for hours, and he couldn’t wait much longer.
“You’ll be a wonderful father for them,” she said.
The three little ones had already stepped into his heart, that scrappy bravery they showed ten times as dear now he knew they were orphans. “We’ll adopt them.”
“We already did.” Phoebe had the lazy smile of a well-satisfied woman playing around her lips, but he was still in the grip of a ravening hunger.
Strands of hair fell over her voluptuous curves, playing hide-and-seek with a pink nibble. He clasped her breasts with a possessive joy that he had never felt before. “Phoebe,” he murmured, bending to lap that nipple. “Could we discuss the children later?”
A tiny gasp, and then: “Yes.”
It was a long night. Griffin worked his way down his wife’s body again, making certain that she understood that every splendid inch of her was his, had been kissed and claimed. In turn, he threw himself on his back and let her touch him everywhere.
“Virgin curiosity,” he grumbled, his muscles sha
king as he fought to keep control as her fingers glazed his most sensitive parts.
“Exactly,” she said. But the gleam in her eye seemed more suited to a pirate queen than a virgin, even as she decided that touch needed to be supplemented by taste. His self-control was on the frailest of threads . . .
Still, she was a virgin.
Finally he rolled over, plundered her mouth as he braced himself above her. Her eyes weren’t glazed any longer: they were clear, desirous, and passionate. “Yes,” she sobbed, “please.”
“I love you,” he said, looking down at the strong, funny, utterly adorable woman whom fate had given him fourteen years ago.
“What?” she asked, sounding dazed.
“I love you,” he said, feeling the rightness of it through his chest, and his heart.
“Oh, good,” she said. Then she bent her knees and arched up toward him. “Let’s discuss it later.” There was naked longing in her voice.
Griffin knew at that moment that he would never experience anything so wonderful again in his life. “This might hurt.”
“I know,” she said, “just do it. Please!” Her fingers were clenched on his forearms.
He thrust into the sweetest, tightest, heaven-sent . . .
There were no words.
By some miracle, he managed to hang on to his control enough to pause. “Phoebe,” he growled, “are you all right?”
“No,” she whispered.
“Pain?” He dropped a tender kiss on her mouth.
She wiggled and he sucked in a breath. “No.”
“No pain?”
She wiggled again. “It’s just that I want . . .”
He withdrew in one smooth movement.
“More,” she said, her voice husky, craving. “More. I want more of that.”
He gave her more. At some point he realized that he had been wrong: he hadn’t had the best experience of his life already, because surely that came later that night, when Phoebe woke from a nap.
She crawled on top of him and he woke to find a delectable, fragrant woman sinking onto his very willing self.
At which point his very own pirate queen leaned over and whispered, “I love you too, Sir Griffin Barry. My husband.”
Surely that was the best moment . . . but then there was the next morning in the courtyard, when Phoebe described herself as insatiable, beckoned to him like a “crazed widow” (her term), and pushed him up against the wall. They barely made it into the dairy, and all the time he was pounding into her, smothering her cries with his kisses, he could hear Nanny McGillycuddy calling.
SIXTEEN
The story thus far has taken but a single day . . . but this final chapter happens later, after days had blurred together like shining beads on a string: luminous, joyful, slipping from pleasure to pleasure, into a memory of the best summer of their lives.
Even in all that joy, one night stood out. It was in the dog days of summer, when September was still breathing sluggish, summer dreams, and snow seemed like an old wives’ tale. The lake water was warm even in the morning, and the lawn of Arbor House was burned by the sun and disheartened by the pounding of little slippers up and down its slope all day long.
Far from keeping the children out of the lake, Griffin encouraged amphibian habits. This particular day, court had been in session only in the morning, and he had the children in and out of the lake all afternoon. By now they had all learned to swim, though none as well as Colin, who was a veritable fish. Shark had tied a wooden seat to a willow tree; it swung out over the lake and they took turns dropping, screaming, into the water. They raced little wooden boats back and forth and quarreled over a dead fish that Alastair discovered floating belly up.
By six o’clock, when Phoebe and Griffin came around to give goodnight kisses, all three children were already dreaming, brown as berries, exhausted and happy. Colin, Margaret, and Alastair had changed since June. When Griffin first met them, they had been scrappy but vulnerable, with the wariness of children who aren’t entirely sure that the world is a safe place.
Now they swam and ran and played with a blithe sense of invulnerability. They were the pirate kings and queen of their world. They had Papa to protect them against everyone, including and most especially pirates, and Mama to cuddle them (when Papa wasn’t), and Nanny to scold them, and Lyddie to ignore them, so they could get into mischief now and then.
To their minds, their parents had no greater ambitions than to wrestle and play and soothe them.
But, of course, their parents sometimes waited impatiently for bedtime, played chess with an eye on the clock, stole kisses that no one saw, and counted the minutes until twilight fell.
This evening Griffin kept Phoebe and Viscount Moncrieff in stitches with tales of the idiot prosecutor for the Crown, one Barnardine Hubble.
“So Hubble looks down at Margery Bindle and he says, with all the pompous clearing of his throat and twitching of his wig that you can imagine, ‘Miss Bindle, can you confirm that you believe your baby was conceived on the evening of August eighteen, when the defendant came through Bath in company with his theater troupe?’ ”
“Poor woman,” Phoebe said. “Caught by a player. Some of them are wickedly handsome.”
The sideways glance her husband gave her, which said without words that she was not to ogle good-looking actors, was quite satisfying.
“So,” Griffin continued, “Margery agrees that the baby was conceived on the evening of August eighteen, and Hubble demands, ‘What were you doing at that time?’ ”
Phoebe broke into giggles, and even the viscount smiled. “The chamber went into an uproar,” Griffin admitted. “I couldn’t stop laughing myself, and afterward Hubble huffed around the back rooms complaining about a lack of dignity in the courtroom.”
“He’s right. There is no dignity in your court,” Phoebe said, putting down her fork. If she didn’t stop eating, she’d be as round as a church steeple in a few months. “Tell your father what happened last week with the doctor.”
Griffin and his father were becoming fast friends, though naturally they never said such a thing aloud. They were too used to considering each other enemies, when to Phoebe’s mind they were more alike than different.
“Dr. Inkwell is fascinated by dissection,” Griffin said, waving a paring knife as if to illustrate the doctor’s technique. “Alas, a Mrs. Crosby claimed that he dissected her husband while still alive, even though the man’s death was attested to by two doctors.”
“Poor woman,” his father observed. He was peeling an apple in one neat spiral.
“Only Hubble would be fool enough to prosecute the case. He began by cross-examining the good doctor. ‘Before you began the dissection, did you check for a pulse?’ The doctor said no. ‘Did you check for breathing?’ The doctor said no.”
“Shouldn’t he have checked something of that nature?” the viscount asked.
“Hubble asked if it’s possible that the patient was still alive,” Griffin continued, “and Dr. Inkwell said no, because his brain was sitting in a jar on his desk.”
A slow smile curled the viscount’s lips, the same smile that Phoebe saw countless times a day on her own husband’s face.
“And then Hubble asked, without skipping a beat, ‘But could the patient have still been alive?’ ”
“This is the part I love,” Phoebe put in.
“ ‘Absolutely,’ snaps Dr. Inkwell. ‘Mr. Crosby is undoubtedly alive and practicing the law.’ ”
They frightened a sleeping sparrow with their laughter. She started from her nest and flew in a circle around the courtyard before settling in the old oak.
They had been dining early so the viscount could take himself back to his own house and spend the next day working on the most important bill that the House of Lords would see that quarter.
“Tomorrow,” Phoebe ca
lled, blowing her father-in-law a kiss as he took his leave.
There were no lonely corners of Griffin’s heart anymore, but had there been, his father’s grin as he left would have soothed them.
Griffin had a family now. Hand in hand, he and Phoebe wandered down the lawn to the water, and from there climbed into the flat-bottom rowboat, and from there ended up in mid-lake. They began with a twilight swim and ended up naked in the boat.
It was that sort of evening.
He was lying flat on his back, enjoying the slosh of warmish water that was playing around his back. Phoebe was on her knees, perched over him, and he knew that any moment now the queen of the pirates would make him happy.
But probably not until he begged.
Which he was going to do, as soon as he’d had enough of stroking those luscious breasts, and then down the slope of her stomach, and . . .
The slope of her stomach.
“Phoebe?” he asked. “Is there something you forgot to tell me?”
She looked down at him, tossed her hair over her shoulder in a way that made her breasts plump in his hands. “Sir Griffin, have you noticed that I like to choose the right moment to make important announcements?”
“I have.”
“I have no time for that now.”
His hands slid down, into the hottest, wettest place on the whole boat. His wife gasped and dipped to kiss him.
He kissed her hard, saying without words what was in his heart.
Then she straightened and let him guide her with strong hands, let him drop her at just the right angle, let her cry echo across the rippling water and into the quiet night.
“You are my heart,” he said, thrusting into her, fierce, out of control as always, beside himself.
She smiled down at him, hair wet and finger-combed, looking like Venus perched on a clamshell rather than atop a battered pirate. She looked like a boy’s wet dream. She looked like his wife.
“I love you,” she gasped as he thrust up, at just the angle that he knew she liked the best. “And, Griffin?”