Chemistry of Magic: Unexpected Magic Book Five (Unexpected Magic #5)(16)
“I’ll not take you for the first time in a coach,” he murmured. “But there are so many other pleasant ways to pass the time.”
Unable quite yet to pull her hand away from his chest, she stroked just a little lower, only a little, until she felt a wrongness. Did consumption also attack lower than the lungs? She hastily yanked her fingers away before the prickles started, and she forgot to be cautious.
He caught her misbehaving hand and pressed a kiss to the back of it. “I know seduction wasn’t part of our agreement, but you do not seem to object. Am I correct? Or are you simply being polite by not slapping me out the window?”
She could hardly catch her breath much less consider a proper answer. She yanked her hand away and folded it in her lap. “Men generally do not show interest in me, so I did not give seduction any thought,” she said honestly. “I’m anxious to start on the laboratory and to check on my grandfather’s herb garden, and there was so much to do with the wedding and packing and. . . I just did not think.”
“And you considered me too ill to make demands,” he finished for her with a deprecating laugh. “I may be in a few months, when winter closes in. But in the meantime, if there’s any chance that you might wish to be a wife in truth. . .”
Now, now, tell him now. But she couldn’t, not any more than she could deny a dying man his wish or deny her own curiosity. If he had only a few months, why let her lack of knowledge stand between them? She had always feared that physical intimacy would cause the same dangerous connection as healing, but if she wasn’t falling into the vortex of her gift now. . .
She swallowed hard and looked up to meet the shadows in his lovely gray-green eyes. She saw the sadness and the heat and the hope. . .
“You are hoping for an heir, are you not?” she answered, understanding more than he would say.
Looking disgruntled, he rumpled his hair and sat back. “It’s not likely,” he pointed out. “And if you do not wish to be left alone with a child, there are ways to prevent conception. My first thought was simply of how much I want you.”
He said that as if he honestly meant it. She’d heard the rumors. Her husband was accustomed to having women in his bed. That he’d been deprived these last months of illness and living with his mother meant he would seek any woman handy. And she was convenient. There was the reason he was abandoning the city and its pursuits for rural boredom and took an interest in a bean pole like her.
She could feel his longing deep in her center, but rather than act on the pooling heat, she contemplated his statement with interest. “You really mean that, don’t you? But now that I have mentioned an heir?” A child. . . She had really never given one a thought. Hers wasn’t a maternal nature.
His disgruntlement slowly melted into a grin, then spread to dance in his eyes in a manner that made her heart go pitter-patter. He was a handsome, conniving male animal and almost nearly irresistible when he smiled like that.
“I would want to come back as a ghost to see Cousin Peter’s face if you delivered a boy. He is planning the wallpaper for the townhouse already. He’s told me he plans to install his childless wife in the rotting hunting box that we laughingly call my estate, and install his mistress and children in my mother’s Mayfair home. He wants to bring his bastards up like ladies and gentlemen.”
“The children aren’t at fault for the iniquities of their parents, but he cannot be a very sympathetic man if he’s telling you his plans for your death!”
“Exactly so,” he murmured, sliding his fingers a little further beneath her bodice.
Her new husband had the devil’s way about him, of a certainty. But miraculously, he still wasn’t causing her any of the pain she feared. She held her breath and waited to see what he would do next.
Chapter 5
Dare had seduced his fair share of women over the years, but he felt like a green youth when it came to his own bride. His prick rose to the occasion with no more provocation than a scent of lavender and a hint of soft skin as she leaned into him. They were in a carriage, deuce take it!
But it had been such a damned long time. . . Closing his eyes and indulging in sensation, he nibbled on the shell of her ear and felt her quiver delightfully. Still, she did not turn toward him. What would it take to stir white-hot passion in his bluestocking wife? Her corset offered no hindrance—
The hunt was on. He undid the tidy corset bow beneath her bodice, and his lady inhaled sharply.
Just that slight inhalation heightened his lust to feverish. Either that, or he was actually fevered. He was a sad, pathetic excuse for a man, but her newly-aroused excitement intensified his enjoyment of the experiment. With satisfaction, he knew he could now determine just how much bosom his bride possessed.
He ran kisses down her cheek and throat while he maneuvered his hand beneath her bodice and corset chemise, cupping a sweet peach of a breast. The nipple was already at full peak, and her moan as he tweaked it nearly crippled him. He needed to yank all that fabric out of the way and taste. . .
The driver shouted at the team and the carriage slowed.
Mentally cursing, Dare rested his forehead against the silk of her hair, regretfully stroked a furled nipple, and removed his hand. “I know waiting enhances the anticipation, but I fear I may collapse in a swamp of need before this journey ends.”