Once Upon a Tartan

beyond the call of reason.”

“Do I really?” What a lovely notion. “You tempt me too, Tiberius.”

He pitched the rag away and stood scowling down at her. “A man’s sense of self-possession is important to him, or it ought to be.”

Hester hiked up on her elbows and regarded him as he tried to be stern and proper, his hair sticking up, not a stitch on him. With a flash of insight, she realized he wasn’t afraid, nor was he anything approaching embarrassed, but he was uncertain. The idea that he, of all men, would suffer such insecurity was untenable.

She pushed up to a sitting position, which put her at eye level with a part of his anatomy that was curiously unassuming in its present state, and just plain curious by any lights.

“Tiberius?” Hester caught him by one wrist and tugged him a step closer. “My self-possession is important to me too.” She leaned forward enough to rest her cheek over his soft, damp genitals. Two could play at the business of being shocking, though it wasn’t her aim to disconcert him.

She wanted to reassure him, in fact, and to regain that sense of closeness with him she’d enjoyed before he went haring off in search of a damp cloth and his dignity. His hand gathered her hair and draped it over her shoulder.

“Is it? Then you will accept my apology for taking the kind of liberties a man does not appropriate with marriageable women. It was not my intent to offend you.”

She was tempted to take him in her mouth. To taste him and learn what pleased him. But the dratted man wanted words now, words and coherent sentences and maybe just a touch of reassurance.

Of appreciation.

“I am not offended.” She kissed him low on his belly, the hair at his groin tickling her chin. “If marriageable women are denied the kind of pleasure you just gifted me with, then I pity them as a race.”

“Hester?” Her name on his lips had a controlled quality.

She sighed against his skin, wondering why pleasure made her drowsy while it made him loquacious. “Hmm?”

“Nothing.” He scooped her up against his chest, her nightgown and wrapper floating to the floor. “You are a remarkable woman.”

“I’m a tired woman. You have worn me out, Tiberius.”

He settled her onto the bed and stood back, his expression hard to read in the waning firelight.

“For pity’s sake, Tye, come to bed. It’s time for my vocabulary lesson.”

To her relief, he put one knee on the mattress. He’d needed to be invited to share her bed, which was interesting.

“Would you rather go back to your own bed?” She held the covers up for him to scoot in next to her. “I hardly know how to go on in this situation. I rely on you to establish the rules.”

He fluffed the pillows and got off the bed, which Hester took for a delaying tactic. When he returned, he carried her nightclothes and his robe, all of which he laid across the foot of the bed. “There are no rules, Hester, other than the ones we establish. I think one rule ought to be you don’t ask me to teach you naughty language.”

“I’ll ask Aunt Ariadne, then.” Except then Aunt would retaliate with questions of her own.

“You’ll do no such thing.” In an instant, he’d gone from tidily laying out their nightclothes to blanketing her with his naked frame. “If you’re to be acquiring a command of indecent terms, you’ll acquire it exclusively from me.”

She smoothed a hand over his hair. “I’d like that. Now get under the covers. You’ll catch your death strutting around in the altogether with your hair damp. Are you trying to flaunt your wares, Tiberius?”

He rolled off of her, lifted the covers over his body, and lay back against the pillows. “Yes, I am. I am flaunting my wares shamelessly. Are you tempted?”

He sounded amused despite himself—if a little exasperated—and this pleased her, to think she could make him smile even if the damned man wouldn’t actually show it. “I am impressed.” She rolled over to her side lest he see her smile. Behind her, she felt Tye shifting on the mattress, and then a voice sounded very near her ear.

“Cunnilingus.”

She drew his arm around her waist and snuggled her backside into the lee of his body. There was no point trying to disguise the laughter that lit her from within, no point hiding her pleasure in the answering humor she felt reverberating through him, either.

* * *

How did a man clarify that he’d come to propose marriage when a woman’s mouth was inches from his ill- behaved cock? Tye considered this question as he wrapped himself around his naked, laughing, prospective marchioness.

The answer was simple: he didn’t. He hadn’t, in any case. He’d been too busy resisting the temptation to sink his hand into the golden glory of Hester’s unbound hair and guide her mouth a few inches lower.

“Tell me about your sisters, Tiberius. I see you are a faithful correspondent to them.”

His sisters? Hester was naked in his arms on a commodious, soft bed, and she wanted to talk about his sisters. Very well—sisters were not a topic that far removed from marriage.

“I am blessed with three, all younger. They take after our mother in that they are very sociable.”

“Unlike you.” She turned her head to kiss his biceps where he’d threaded an arm under her neck.

“Unlike—?” He kissed her nape in retaliation. “If I were any more sociable at the present moment, madam, you’d be wearing my ring.”

“Tiberius, did no one ever tease you?”

“Gordie.” The admission was out, a truth, not a comfortable one.

“Tell me about him. All I know is he ruined Mary Fran, and then had to be brought up to scratch by the combined forces of his superior officers and the old Earl of Balfour.”

“Gordie was not happy in the military.” Another admission. “He said the army was changing and no longer a fit place to stash superfluous younger sons and other ne’er-do-wells. He would have done very well as my father’s heir.”

The words hung in the darkness, something between a shame and a regret, though the truth didn’t sound half so awful aloud as Tye had always thought it would.

Hester turned out of his embrace and lay on her other side, so she was facing him. “How can you say such a thing?”

“It’s simply a fact. Gordie liked to tool about the countryside, calling on the neighbors, visiting in the churchyard. He could talk politics with my father all night and knew the names of every yeoman ever to raise a chicken on Flynn property.”

She pushed his hair off his brow, an oddly soothing caress. “And you don’t?”

“I’m not much for visiting.”

This caused her lips to quirk up in that secret, feminine smile Tye was coming to watch for. “I’d say you visit rather well.”

She shifted again—she wasn’t the most restful bed partner—and wrestled Tye into her embrace. He allowed it, though permitting a woman to cuddle him was a novel addition to his intimate repertoire. When he was wrapped in her arms, his cheek pillowed on her breast, his nose full of lavender and lemon verbena, she stroked his hair back off his face.

A slow, pleasurable caress that should have been soothing, though Tye’s reproductive apparatus was not exactly soothed. Before she could return to the topic of his sisters—or, God help him, his parents—Tye decided to advance his artillery on the main objective.

“Do you ever consider marriage, Hester?”

She yawned, which had the effect of raising then lowering the feminine pillow beneath Tye’s cheek. “Not happily.”

“Don’t you want children?” Even his sisters admitted to wanting children, though Joan was adamant her artistic and fashion endeavors had to come first.