Suddenly You(89)

“Now I shall have my dessert,” she said, and for a long time there were no words, no thoughts, only the two of them joined in passion.

Afterward, he cuddled her at his side and a sigh of contentment escaped him. Then his chest moved with a rumbling laugh, and Amanda stirred against him. “What is it?” she asked curiously.

“I was thinking of that first night we met…that you were willing to pay me for doing this. And I was trying to calculate how much you owe me after all the times we’ve slept together.”

As weary as she was, Amanda couldn’t prevent a sudden laugh. “Jack Devlin…how can you think of money at a time like this?”

“I want you to be so deeply in my debt that you’ll never be free of me.”

She smiled and pulled his head to hers. “I’m yours,” she whispered against his lips. “Now and forever, Jack. Does that satisfy you?”

“Oh, yes.” And he spent the rest of the night showing her how much it did.

Epilogue

“Papa, you’re supposed to catch me!” the small boy exclaimed, toddling toward his father’s long form stretched on the grass.

Jack smiled lazily at the dark-haired child who stood above him. Named for Amanda’s father, Edward, their son possessed an unending supply of energy and a vocabulary that far outstripped the average three-year-old. Young Edward loved to talk, which was hardly a surprise when one considered his parentage. “Son, I’ve spent the better part of an hour playing chase with you,” Jack said. “Let an old man have a few minutes of rest.”

“But I’m not finished yet!”

With a sudden laugh, Jack seized the boy and pulled him down for a game of roll-and-tickle.

Lifting her gaze from the papers in her lap, Amanda watched the pair play. They were spending the hottest part of the summer at Jack’s inherited estate, a place so exquisitely landscaped that it could have been the subject of a painting by Rubens. All it required were a few angels and billowing clouds overhead, and the illusion would have been complete.

The estate garden led from a semi-circular brick pattern at the back of the seventeenth-century house to a manicured upper garden, a white stone arch, and a vividly hued wilderness garden and oval pond below. The family often had picnics beneath the shade of a majestic old sycamore tree, its trunk clothed in thick swaths of hydrangea. The nearby pond, edged with feathery grass fronds and yellow irises, provided a welcome place to dangle their feet.

Replete from a lavish picnic that had been packed by the cook, Amanda tried to turn her attention back to the work she had brought. After four years under her management, the Coventry Quarterly Review had become the most widely read review magazine in England. Amanda was proud of her accomplishments, particularly in proving that a female editor could be as bold, intellectual, and freethinking as any man. When the public had eventually discovered that a woman was the driving force behind a national magazine, the controversy had only helped to increase sales. As he had promised Jack had been a stalwart defender, sharply denying all suggestions that it must be he, and not his wife, who had done the work on the paper.

“My wife needs no assistance from me in forming her opinions,” he had told critics sardonically. “She is more capable and professional than most men of my acquaintance.” He encouraged Amanda to enjoy her newfound notoriety, which had made her the most sought-after guest at every fashionable London supper-party. Her “clever mind” and “original wit” were universally praised in the highest literary and political circles.

“I am being trotted out like a trick pony,” Amanda had once complained to Jack after a gathering, during which her every utterance had been given scrupulous attention. “Why is it so difficult for people to believe that someone who wears a dress could also have a brain?”

“No one likes a woman to be too clever,” Jack had replied, smiling at her annoyance. “We men like to maintain our appearance of superiority.”

“Then why aren’t you threatened by a woman’s intelligence?” she asked with a little scowl.

“Because I know how to keep you in your place,” he replied with a maddening grin, and reared back, laughing, as she leaped on him to exact revenge.

Smiling at the memory, Amanda listened while Jack spun a tale of dragons and rainbows and magic spells, until Edward finally went to sleep in his lap. Carefully, Jack laid the boy’s slumbering form on the linens that covered the grass.

Amanda pretended not to notice as her husband settled by her side.

“Put that away,” he commanded, nuzzling his face into her loose hair.

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I have a demanding employer who complains when the Review is past its deadline.”

“You know how to make him stop complaining.”

“I don’t have time for that now,” Amanda said primly. “Let me work, if you please.” But she did not protest when she felt his arms slide around her. His mouth pressed against the side of her neck, sending a shot of pleasure down to her toes.

“Do you have any idea how much I desire you?” He curved his fingers over the shape of her stomach, where their second child moved gently inside her. His hand wandered along her leg to her ankle and insinuated beneath her skirts. The sheaf of papers fell from her hands, fluttering to the grass.