“For applauding him, no. But that,” Pierce gestured toward the journal, “is not acclaim, it’s preoccupation.”
Daphne looked torn between annoyance and laughter. “This conversation is ridiculous.”
“Why? Because it troubles me that my wife keeps an ever growing testimonial to another man?”
“Another man? My only link to the bandit is through these articles, Pierce. I would hardly describe that as a scandalous relationship. Why, I’ve scarcely even spoken to—” She broke off, blushing furiously.
“You’ve scarcely even spoken to him?” Pierce jumped on her words. “So you’ve met this incomparable bandit.”
“Only once.” Daphne averted her head. “The night he robbed Tragmore. I awakened during the theft. We exchanged a few words, nothing more.”
“And where did you come upon him? The library? The sitting room?”
“No.” Her voice was barely audible. “My bedchamber.”
“Your bedchamber,” Pierce repeated.
“Yes. He came to take my jewelry. I arose and assisted him.” With a deep breath, Daphne raised her head, her chin set proudly. “I asked that he give the night’s booty to the House of Perpetual Hope. He agreed. I then placed his jewel and tin cup on my father’s pillow, thus allowing him to make his escape.”
A muscle worked in Pierce’s jaw. “Have you any idea what your father would have done to you if he’d discovered your actions?”
“Of course. It didn’t dissuade me then. It wouldn’t now. I’d do the same thing all over again, given the chance. And so would you.”
Pierce couldn’t dispute that logic. Neither, however, could he dispel his aching sense of betrayal, ludicrous or not. “Tell me about him.”
“The bandit? There’s nothing to tell. As I said, we scarcely spoke. If it’s his appearance you’re curious about, I could make out very little. He was swathed in black, from boots to hood. Completely concealed. As was his voice, which he kept to a rasp.” Daphne shrugged. “That’s the entirety of it.”
“Did he touch you?” Pierce was appalled to hear himself blurt.
“Touch me?” The color was back on her cheeks. “I believe he touched my hair.”
“You believe?”
“All right, yes, he touched my hair. It was clearly an expression of appreciation. He made no improper advances, if that’s what you’re attempting to discern.”
“Would you recognize it if he had?”
Her eyes widened. “Pardon me?”
“You were so bloody innocent. How would you know if a man were making an advance?”
Daphne’s lips twitched. “I recall identifying your advances, despite my lack of experience.” She wrapped her arms about Pierce’s waist. “You’re behaving irrationally, you know.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” he bit out, enfolding her against him, tangling his fingers in her hair. “I’ve been wild ever since I discovered that journal, smoldering while I waited for you to awaken and explain it away. And, yes, I hear every senseless word I’m raving. I sound like a crazed lunatic, and yet I can’t seem to stop myself. I, the consummate gambler, the unruffleable, level-headed essence of reason. I’m jealous of a bloody phantom? A marauder of the night who exists more in people’s minds than in fact? Damn it!” He shook his head in self-deprecating amazement, struck by the full irony of the situation. What would his wife say if she knew that the man he resented was none other than himself? “I must be losing my mind.”
“No,” Daphne whispered, rubbing her cheek against Pierce’s shirt, “Your heart, perhaps, but not your mind. As for sounding like a crazed lunatic, I disagree. What you sound is possessive and perhaps a bit vulnerable. Given the circumstances, both are understandable.” She lay her hand over his heart. “The vulnerability will subside once you accept the truth: that the risk you fear is unfounded and nonexistent.”
“Daphne.” Pierce’s gaze bore into hers, her name an agonized rumble from deep within his chest.
“I love you,” she breathed back, a healing balm to his tortured senses. “Only you. Always you.”
The inescapable prison he carried inside him shattered, capitulating at last beneath his wife’s gentle attempts to breach its unyielding walls. The senseless envy that had dominated his heart until moments ago receded beneath the intensity of something far more powerful, and the knowledge that, once he gave voice to the words, the circle would be complete and no one, bandit or otherwise, could sever the bond that forged between them.
Pierce brought Daphne’s palms to his lips, determined, now more than ever, to say aloud what he knew to be true, thus relinquishing the emotional isolation that had defined his past. “I want to give you the words,” he began.
Daphne silenced him with a gentle forefinger to his lips. “You already have. It isn’t necessary for you to speak them.”
“Yes, it is. Moreover, I want to speak them.” Pierce kissed the delicate veins at her wrists, the scented skin of her forearms, her shoulders. Slowly, his fingers traced the lacy edge of her chemise where it dipped down at her breasts. “But I want to speak them my way.”
Daphne’s gaze was fixed on his roving hand, her breath already unsteady. “Your way?”
“Um hum.” Pierce watched as soft color suffused her skin, his own body quickening in response. “I’ve waited thirty years to say these words, precious words I never expected to feel, much less say. So forgive me for being a bit selfish about the circumstances under which they are said.”
“How do you wish—”
Daphne’s question caught in her throat as Pierce reached down, catching the hem of her chemise and tugging it up and over her head, “In bed,” he answered, drinking in her flawless nudity with a hotly intimate look that made her tremble. “When I’m deep inside you. When I can watch your face, your every expression, when I can see, taste, savor your reaction as I tell you, show you, how I feel. Is that all right?”
Dazedly, Daphne nodded, her husband’s vows shivering through her. “Can it be now?” she asked in a hushed, heated whisper. “I don’t think I can wait.”
“And I’ve waited too long already.” Pierce yanked his clothes from his body, flinging them haphazardly about the room, pressing Daphne back into the bedcovers and following her down. “No barriers, my beautiful wife,” he murmured, taking her mouth under his. “Nothing but us—and this.”
Daphne whimpered, opening instantly to the demand of Pierce’s lips. Passion exploded at the first glide of his tongue against hers, their kisses turning frantic, hungry, filled with poignant discovery and aching wonder.
Casting all past demons aside, Pierce gave himself to his wife as he never had before, showing her, not only that she belonged to him, but that he belonged to her as well.
“Touch me,” he commanded, capturing her hand and bringing it to his chest. “Touch me everywhere, and feel what you do to me, how much I need you.”
Daphne instantly understood what her husband’s request implied; eagerly embraced the gift she was being offered. Without hesitation, her fingers glided through the soft mat of hair that curled on his chest, the hard muscles that defined the powerful width of his shoulders and arms. Lovingly, she caressed his back, tracing a line to its base, absorbing Pierce’s shudder as she stroked his buttocks, the solid columns of his thighs. With a breathy sigh, she moved around to his abdomen, and Pierce gritted his teeth as her fingers drifted lower, lower still.
He was totally unprepared for the impact of her touch. When Daphne’s feather-light fingers brushed his rigid shaft, then curled around to explore its pulsing length, a hoarse groan erupted from his chest and he squeezed his eyes shut, struggling to curtail the hot release already clamoring at his loins.
Instantly, Daphne paused. “Am I hurting you?” she whispered.
Despite the nearly unbearable passion surging through him, Pierce smiled. “Not hurting me. Killing me. Christ.” He moved against her hand, another groan shuddering from his chest.
“Sha
ll I stop?”
“Never. Never, Snow flame.”
“But—”
Pierce opened his eyes, forcing himself under control at least long enough to erase the concern from Daphne’s face. “When you cry out my name, beg me to stop, do you really want me to?”
A spark of understanding lit her hazel gaze. “No.”
“Then don’t even consider ending your torture. It’s heaven—and hell.”
Tentatively, Daphne caressed him again, lingering at the velvety tip when Pierce growled harshly, caught her wrist in a vise grip. “Is that good?”
He couldn’t speak.
She repeated the caress, fascinated by the warm droplets of fluid that greeted her touch, awed by the very essence that was Pierce.
“Men and women are more alike than I realized,” she murmured, more to herself than to him. “I wonder—what pleases me, would it please you as well?”
He might have nodded. He didn’t know, or care. For at that moment Daphne bent her head, her silky hair sweeping across his thighs as she took him into her mouth, learning his taste as he had hers.
And the world ceased to exist.
Pierce unraveled at her first exquisite contact, the first brush of her tongue against his throbbing flesh. He heard his irrepressible shout, felt his body and his mind reel out of control. Nothing existed but Daphne’s touch, the unendurable ecstasy of being possessed by her hands, her mouth, her breath as it rippled over his painfully sensitive shaft. He tangled his hands in her hair, urging her closer, begging her to take more and more of him, a dark haze dominating his senses as every fiber of his being screamed for release.
In an instant it would be too late.
Abruptly, he shook his head, pushing her away with his last remaining shred of sanity. “No,” he gasped. “Not this time. Not this way.” He rolled her beneath him before she could finish her initial protest. “Daphne.” Every muscle in his body was taut to breaking as he fought back his raging climax.
She responded to the urgency of his tone, her lashes lifting to meet the smoldering frenzy of his gaze.
“Do you feel it?” he demanded, dragging air into his lungs in great gulps. “Do you, Snow flame?”
“Yes,” she whispered, opening herself to him as she caressed his trembling forearms. “Oh, yes.”
Pierce captured her hands in his, lifting both arms over her head and interlacing their fingers, all the while refusing to relinquish her stare. “I love you.” His words coincided with his body’s initial penetration. Parting the delicate folds of her skin, he pressed into her welcome wetness, tightening his grasp on her fingers as he battled for a final vestige of control. “I love you,” he repeated hoarsely, pushing forward until they were one.
Two tears slid down Daphne’s cheeks.
Instantly, Pierce stilled. “Am I hurting you?”
Daphne smiled through her tears, reiterating the very words he had used mere moments ago. “Not hurting me. Killing me. But don’t even consider ending your torture.”
Pierce laughed, a husky, primitive sound of pure male satisfaction. “Never, my beautiful wife. Never.” His words ended on an agonized groan as Daphne raised her hips, drew him deeper inside her. And everything inside him snapped.
Throwing his head back, Pierce began to move in hard, frantic strokes. “I can’t.” Sweat drenched his back. “Daphne, I can’t wait.”
From far away he heard her high, feverish cry. Dimly, he felt her legs clamp around his waist, her fingers tighten in his as she met his wildness, thrust for thrust. Already delayed beyond endurance, his climax erupted in a heartbeat, tearing through his loins, setting fire to his every nerve ending as it exploded from his body into Daphne’s in an endless, scalding torrent. He shouted her name, unable to still the driving motion of his hips, lunging forward again and again as he poured his being into hers.
He felt Daphne tense, her body arching like a bowstring as the fire ignited, spread as wildly through his wife as it had through him. She cried out, once, twice, then tossed her head on the pillow as the spiraling began, spasms of completion that escalated higher and harder than ever before.
Pierce shuddered, dropped his head into the curve of her shoulder as he reveled in her climax, surrendered himself to the hard contractions that gripped his shaft, made him shudder anew. Amazingly, another wrenching spasm was torn from his loins, liquid heat merging with his wife’s final, glorious tremors.
Weak, utterly spent, they collapsed in each other’s arms, both loathe to move, unable to speak.
Pierce felt his wife’s tears, the gentle quaking of her body as she wept.
“Don’t cry, Snow flame,” he murmured into her disheveled cloud of hair. “Please, don’t cry.”
“I never knew such joy existed,” Daphne whispered. “Thank you, Pierce. You’ve just given me the most wondrous gift.”
A hard lump formed in Pierce’s throat, a constriction too vast to overcome with words, even those he’d just uttered for the first time. Daphne believed his love to be a gift, and so it was. But it was she, not he, who had bestowed it, offering him unconditional love and faith and, the greatest miracle of all, teaching him to do the same.
Reflexively, Pierce’s arms tightened around his wife, overwhelmed by the miracle that was his. More fervently than ever he reiterated his silent vow that nothing, no one, would ever hurt Daphne again.
Not her father’s hatred.
Nor the exploits of the Tin Cup Bandit.
“Does Pierce seem well to you?” Daphne asked the vicar anxiously. Her friend blinked in surprise, glancing across the schoolroom to where Pierce stood amid the squealing children, watching Russet chase his tail in wide, vigorous circles.
“Why, yes, he seems fine. The children are enthralled, your reticent little fox cub has unconditionally befriended him. Why, even our difficult-to-please Miss Redmund is smiling. I’d say your new husband’s coming out has been an unequivocal success.” The clergyman studied Daphne’s furrowed brow. “What is disturbing you, Snowdrop?”
Daphne gave a tentative shrug. “I’m not certain. Pierce has been so preoccupied lately, as if something is troubling him, something he chooses not to discuss.”
“I noticed no sign of that when I visited Markham last week.”
“It’s worsened since then.”
“Have you questioned him?”
“Of course. He never quite answers. Nor does he deny being troubled. He only changes the subject as rapidly as possible.” She inclined her head quizzically. “Would you speak with him, Vicar?”
“What exactly is it you’d like me to say?”
“Convince him that he needn’t keep his emotional quandaries to himself. Remind him that love involves more than tenderness and passion. It involves friendship and trust. He respects you, Vicar. If anyone can convince him to share himself, that someone is you.”
A flash of insight flickered in the vicar’s eyes. “You know precisely what’s bothering your husband, don’t you?”
“I have my suspicions, yes. But that matters not. In this case it is Pierce who must come to me, not I, to him. Please, will you talk to him?”
“Very well, Snowdrop. As it happens, I have another matter I must discuss with Pierce today. I’ll bring your concerns up immediately thereafter.”
“Thank you.” Daphne squeezed his arm. “I feel better already.”
“Daphne?” Pierce called. “Would you like to tell the children of our proposed group project?”
She smiled, walking over to join her husband, pausing to scoop her exhausted pet from the floor. “I’d be delighted to.”
“What project?” Timmy demanded.
“How would you all like to help us put a new roof on the school?”
“Us?” William’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head. “But we don’t know nothin’ about buildin’.”
“Nor do we.” Daphne grinned. “But we’ve hired workmen who do. Tolerant, accommodating workmen who won’t mind having us underfoot as the
y hammer and nail.”
“Wow!”
“And that’s not all.” Daphne inclined her head proudly at her husband. “It appears we’ve amassed enough funds to arrange for a whole new schoolhouse to be built this spring. Isn’t that wonderful, Miss Redmund?”
“Hmm?” The schoolmistress was gazing at Pierce with a foolish expression on her face. “Yes, lovely.”
“Did ye ’ear what Daphne said, Miss Redmund?” Timmy demanded, staring at his teacher. “We’re gonna ’ave a new school soon. We ’ave lots of money.”
Miss Redmund blinked, her attention finally captured. “A new school? How on earth…?”
“I bet the duke is payin’ for it,” William guessed shrewdly.
“Are you really a duke?” one of the older boys asked.
A corner of Pierce’s mouth lifted. “It would seem so, yes.”
“ ’ey, Daphne. That makes ye a duchess,” Timmy informed her.
“So it does,” she agreed.
“Can we pat Russet now?” Evidently, Timmy’s awe over Daphne’s newly acquired title paled in comparison to his excitement over her pet.
“Only if you do so one at a time and only if I hold him. Russet is a bit wary around strangers. But the fact that he was showing off his tail-chasing skills is a good sign.” She stroked the cub’s silky head, murmuring softly to him until his ears flattened and he rubbed his chin and nose affectionately against Daphne’s hair. “I think he’s feeling receptive now,” she announced. “Timmy, would you like to be first since it was your idea?”
The children were all enjoying their visit with Russet when the vicar approached Pierce. “May we talk privately for a few moments?” he murmured.
Nodding, Pierce detached himself from the group, confident that the children were too engrossed to notice his absence. “What’s on your mind, Vicar?”
“As I’m sure your guards have advised you, I visited Rutland the day after I dined with you and Daphne.”
“You spoke with Elizabeth?”
“I did.” The vicar sighed. “She was quite shocked at first, and more than a little dubious that a Parliamentary divorce was possible. But I explained everything you said, and she’s willing to place her future in your hands, Pierce.” The clergyman’s expression softened, a reminiscent light dawning in his eyes. “Evidently, Elizabeth has managed to retain the peppery spark I recall from her youth. I thank God for that.”