Suddenly You(80)

“A year or two?” Amanda repeated, her voice taut with suspicion. “That’s all?”

The wide line of his mouth tightened impatiently. “Five years, dammit.”

She felt suddenly as if she could not breathe properly, her lungs deflating inside her chest. “You’re only five-and-twenty?” she managed in an airless whisper.

“It makes no difference.” His sudden reasonable manner sparked fury amid her distress.

“It makes every difference in the world,” she cried. “For one thing, you lied to me!”

“I didn’t want you to think of me as a younger man.”

“You are a younger man!” She glared at him vehemently. “Five years…oh, God, I can scarcely believe I’ve married someone who is practically a…a boy!”

The word seemed to catch him off guard, and his entire face hardened. “Stop it,” he said quietly. He caught her as she backed away from him, his big hands closing around her.

“I’m no damned boy, Amanda. I take care of my responsibilities, and as you know, I have a hell of a lot of them. I’m not a coward, a gambler, or a cheat. I’m loyal to the people I care about. I know of no other requirements for being a man.”

“Perhaps honesty?” she suggested acidly.

“I shouldn’t have lied to you,” he admitted. “I swear I will never do so again. Please forgive me.”

“This cannot be resolved that easily.” She rubbed her brimming eyes with miserable wrath. “I don’t want to be married to a younger man.”

“Well, you’ve got one,” he said flatly. “And he’s not going anywhere.”

“I could seek an annulment!”

Jack’s sudden chuckle infuriated her. “If you do that, peaches, I’ll be forced to publish exactly how many times and ways I’ve already had you. No magistrate in England would grant you an annulment after that.”

“You wouldn’t dare!”

He smiled and pulled her resisting body against his. “No,” he murmured. “Because you are not going to leave me. You’re going to forgive me, and we’ll put this behind us for good.”

Amanda strove to retain the remnants of her anger. “I don’t want to forgive you,” she said, her voice muffled against his shoulder. She stopped struggling, however, and let herself rest against his chest, sniffling back her remaining tears.

He held her for a long time, cuddling her in the shelter of his body, murmuring apologies and endearments into the curve of her neck and the soft indentation beneath her ear. She began to relax against him, unable to maintain the mortified resentment of discovering that she was the older partner in their marriage. Indeed, there was nothing she could do about it now. They were locked together legally and every other way.

His hands moved to the backs of her hips, pressing her lower body against the tremendous, arching shape of his erection.

“If you think I will go to bed with you after this,” she said against his shirtfront, “you are absolutely mad.”

Jack rubbed her slowly against the bulge of his sex. “Yes. I’m mad over you. I adore you. I lust after you constantly. I love your sharp tongue and your big gray eyes and your voluptuous body. Now come to bed and let me demonstrate what a younger man can do for you.”

Startled to hear the word “love” escape his lips, Amanda inhaled sharply at the feel of him through the veil of her white, ruffled dressing gown. He tugged the shoulders of the garment until her upper half was exposed. “Later,” she said, but the glide of his fingertips over her back left trails of fire in their wake, and the downy hairs on her body prickled in sudden excitement.

“It has to be now,” he insisted, a flick of amusement in his voice. He nudged his burgeoning loins against her. “After all, you can’t allow me to go around like this all day.”

“From what I’ve learned so far, this is your natural condition,” came her pert reply. She felt his mouth touch her neck and wander to the pulse at the base of her throat.

“And I depend exclusively on you to relieve it,” he murmured, tugging at the ribbon tie that closed the front of her gown. The covering of fine white muslin dropped from her body, and he clasped her na**d limbs against his clothed ones.

“You’ll be late for work,” she said.

His bold hand traveled over the full shapes of her bu**ocks, squeezing and kneading the pliant flesh. “I am helping you with your work,” he informed her. “I am giving you new material to use for your next novel.”

A gurgle of reluctant amusement rose in her throat. “I would never put such a vulgar scene in my book.”

“The Sins of Mrs. D,” he mused, lifting her in his arms and carrying her to the unmade bed. “We’ll give Gemma Bradshaw some competition.” He released her to the bed, gazing appreciatively at her abundant pink-and-white flesh, and the cascade of her auburn curls.

“Jack,” she said faintly, torn between excitement and mortification. She reached for a sheet to cover her na**d body.

He joined her among the heap of snowy bed linens, still fully clothed. Snatching the sheet from her grasp, he pulled it far away from her and spread her limbs wide beneath his.

“You can’t solve anything by taking me to bed,” she told him, gasping a little as the silken fabric of his waistcoat brushed over her br**sts.