Too Wilde to Wed (The Wildes of Lindow Castle, #2)(93)

“North,” she whispered. “Does this mean that you will make love to me again?” His hand flattened and slid up to her shoulder, then down her back. “I want you,” she said, telling him the truth. “I want you more than a bath.”

He tipped up her chin, and his lips came back to hers. “Just so you know, I am kissing the you whom I know. The woman who hates wigs, wears no lip rouge, and knows nothing of peafowl. Who reeks of ale.”

Her heart was breaking from the sweetness of it. She kissed him, rather than the other way around: licked his lips and welcomed his tongue, and wrapped her arms around his neck.

“You know what I wondered after you kissed me goodbye at the door of my chamber?” she whispered into his ear, a while later.

“What?” His voice had fallen to a growl, a hungry, male growl.

“Whether making love could be . . . Can you do it standing up?”

He made a hoarse sound, and twirled around. He put an arm over her head, leaning against the wall. “The answer is yes.”

“You just said I smelled of ale. I must have a bath first,” Diana decided. “What’s so funny?”

“You,” North said, kissing her nose.

“I’ve just realized something.”

“That you and Godfrey and I will travel to Rome, where we will conceive a little girl covered with freckles?”

“That there is one time in life when it is entirely acceptable to be spontaneous!”

Much later, Diana lay on her back, her head nestled on North’s shoulder. “It was shockingly difficult to be a barmaid.”

“Harder than being a governess?”

“I am not fond of changing nappies,” Diana said, considering it. “But managing whining children is easier than lustful men.”

North rolled on top of her. “What about this lustful man?”

Diana looked up at him. North’s warrior face was tired; he probably hadn’t slept the night before. There were wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and a darkness in him that would lighten, but never leave.

He wasn’t the perfect future duke, the fashionable gentleman in powder and patches, but he was so much more.

“I love you,” she said, wrestling with a swell of emotion that made the words catch in her throat. “I love you enough to become a duchess, or a barmaid, or a governess. I would live with you in a hovel or a castle. There is one thing I do well: love you and Godfrey, so I might as well do that.”

His eyes were dark and rawly possessive. “I won’t let you be crushed by the title,” he said, the words growling from his chest. She wound her arms around his neck. “You’re perfect as you are, and you’re mine,” he whispered. “My wife, my love. I have a present for you.”

North rose and went to a battered traveling bag the innkeeper had put in the chamber earlier that evening. Diana watched as he pulled it open and tossed a few nappies and a change of clothing for Godfrey onto the bed.

“How did you know to bring nappies?” she asked, her heart full. Most fathers wouldn’t think of it.

He looked up at her, astonished. “Is Godfrey still in nappies? I asked Prism to make sure Godfrey had whatever he needed for the night.”

“Only in case of accidents,” Diana said, nodding.

North reached the bottom of the bag and carefully maneuvered out a box wrapped in a length of silvery blue fabric. He brought it back to her, his eyes wary. And hopeful. He put it in her lap.

Diana looked up, loving him so much it hurt. “A present?”

“From myself and Joan.”

Joan? A present from his sixteen-year-old sister was unexpected. She stared down at it, instinctively stroking the lustrous silk “I’ve seen this fabric before,” she whispered.

“I bought it from Mr. Calico,” North said. “I tried to give it to my aunt, but she laughed at me. She knew it was meant for you.”

Diana carefully unwrapped the silk and stared down at the box. At one point it had been a plain wooden box designed for snuff; a slight scent of tobacco still clung to it. But now its lid was covered with arrogant paper aristocrats with slashing paper eyebrows and tall paper wigs.

All of them male.

All of them North, by the looks of it, and cut from the prints that made him notorious.

Diana laughed. At the very center of this array was the most amusing depiction of all: North, rising from a small trunk, his muscular, hard chest lovingly detailed.

“You look like a genie coming forth at a lady’s command,” she said, tracing the depiction of his chest with her finger. “A very nicely shaped genie, I must say.”

“I prefer that idea to being likened to Shakespeare’s rapist,” North said. There was something guarded in his voice, a hint of vulnerability. He was not certain of her, Diana thought. Because she had refused him so many times.

“Is there another present inside?” She looked up, loving the angular shape of his jaw, the darkness of his blue eyes, the way he looked back at her. As if she mattered. As if she was the center of his world.

He nodded.

She opened the lid and saw a nest of blush silk, in the center of which lay a ring. Not the ring he’d offered her the first time: that one had been ostentatious, a duchess’s ring.

This ring was plainer and, to Diana’s mind, more beautiful: one simple ruby surrounded by diamonds. North sank to his knees in front of Diana and picked up the ring. “The color reminds me of your hair.”