“You have a deal, Mr. Dolan.” She shook, she kissed the man’s cheek, and she looked like she’d hug the sorry bastard while Greymoor cracked a smile and the sound of applause filled Deene’s ears.
Eve’s family stood around them, Their Graces, her brothers, her sisters, their spouses, all beaming like idiots. The race, it appeared, had been decided.
Westhaven leaned in. “You will not, I hope, choose this moment to indulge in any ninnyhammer behavior, Deene. Shake the man’s hand, and get my sister the hell home before she faints again.”
Deene shook Dolan’s hand, endured the moment when Greymoor declared victory for King William, then got Eve the hell home. While she did not faint “again,” she did fall asleep in Deene’s arms, such that he had to carry her over the threshold and up to their chambers thereafter.
Eve awoke deep in the night to find her husband blanketing her. In one instant, she went from a sweet, sleepy awareness of his body draped over hers, to a focused yearning for intimacy with him.
“I wasn’t sure you’d awaken.” His voice held a note of humor in the darkness, also concern.
She wrapped her arms and legs around him, got one hand anchored on his muscular buttocks and the other in his hair. “I’m awake.”
The day had been long, with her family celebrating at great and noisy length, until Valentine had started singing, Westhaven had joined in, then Sophie with her lovely voice, and Her Grace had all but wept to see her brood engaged in such a display of good spirits.
They’d fallen into telling stories next, with every other tale seeming to center around “Remember the time Evie went steeplechasing on Meteor,” or “Recall that it was Evie who wanted to see if the beasts really did speak on Christmas Eve…”
And Deene had waited patiently through it all, occasionally toasting his marchioness, but mostly keeping her by his side while the Windham family recovered from having one of its members in seven years of self-imposed exile.
When Deene had bundled Eve into the coach, she’d fallen asleep on his shoulder, then later had fallen asleep at her bath, literally, and needed her husband’s assistance to get from the tub to the bed.
He hadn’t bothered to put her in a nightgown, a decision she had to approve of as he kissed his way across her collarbones.
“These bones could have been broken at that bloody oxer.”
“They weren’t. My husband had faith in me.”
He shifted up, to rest his chin on her crown. “I have never been so goddamned scared in my life, Evie. I have faith in you, and you rode one hell of a race, but please—I beg you—develop no aspirations involving a career as a jockey. There aren’t enough prayers in me or in all of Christendom for that.”
“I won’t.”
He sighed a big, husbandly sigh, proof positive he’d truly been concerned about this. And if she’d started spouting plans to work Goblin into better condition, no doubt he would have learned to pray harder and faster.
“Lucas?”
“Beloved?”
“Can we talk later?”
“We will talk later.”
He settled in then to love her. She already knew this about him after only a few months of marriage, knew when he was teasing and testing, knew when he was serious. He was very serious.
He was usually careful to insinuate himself into her body in easy, almost-pleasant stages, but this time, he seated himself at her opening, took her mouth in a voracious kiss, and drove home in one hot, sweet thrust that inspired her body into fisting around him in abrupt, clutching spasms of pleasure.
Eve gathered, as she lay panting beneath him, that her husband was making some sort of point. He waited a few minutes before resuming his diatribe, this time using slow, measured thrusts with a relentless quality to them that made Eve dig her nails into his backside and moan against his throat.
The third time he started up, she realized he was riding some sort of race of his own, an obstacle course of pleasure and persistence, in which she had no choice—in which she had no wish—except to submit and be amazed. When he finally allowed himself to cross his own finish line, she held him tightly, for long, long moments, until she understood what her next obstacle was going to be.
It was time to talk.
She smoothed her hand down the elegant length of Deene’s spine, down to the lovely contour of his buttocks. He sighed and lifted half an inch away.
“I have imposed on you,” he said, biting her earlobe. “You must scold me, Eve.”
“I am too well pleasured to scold anybody for anything. Shall I fetch a cloth?”
“Somebody ought to.”
He would have heaved himself away, except Eve clutched him a little tighter for a moment—for courage. Deene waited, then climbed out of the bed and crossed the room to the washbasin. Eve watched while he rinsed off by the glowing embers of the fire, then accepted the cool cloth from him and felt his gaze on her while she did likewise.
“Being married to you is very intimate, Lucas.”
He accepted the cloth from her and tossed it in the general direction of the hearth. “Are you complaining?”
A guarded note in his voice betrayed the sincerity of his question.
“I am rejoicing. Also a trifle chilled, so please get under these covers and stay awake for a bit longer.”
She caught one corner of his mouth tipping up slightly before he scooted under the covers and moved to spoon himself around her.
“Not like that.” Eve wrestled him about, so he was over her. “What are we to do about Anthony?”
“Anthony has taken ship for Boston, his consort and children with him. I expect he also has at least a small fortune in coin packed among his bags, which I will choose to regard as compensation for his years of service.”
“He stole from you, Lucas.”
“Not as much as you’d think. He skimmed liberally, but as best I can reason, he liked more the sense of being the one who held the power and the purse strings. He didn’t want me discovering his schemes, but more to the point, he didn’t want me to figure out that he was merely a well-paid cipher, not the linchpin of some convoluted, ailing financial empire.”
“A lying, well-paid cipher.”
Deene nuzzled her ear, which tickled. “We ought to be grateful all Anthony’s talk of rumors was mostly exaggeration of his own efforts to slander me, and that nobody has been paying the least mind to us or to my misspent youth.”
Misspent youth. The term reminded Eve of the topic she had yet to broach. “I have something difficult to say to you, Husband.”
“I do hope that white marriage business isn’t going to come up, Eve Denning.”
He snuggled his body in closer, as if to admit that the white marriage business had been lurking somewhere in his male brain, creating havoc these weeks past, and to further clarify that he’d have no part of it.
“God love you, Husband, a white marriage is the last thing I could contemplate with you. I would be devastated…”
He left off nuzzling her neck. “Go on.”
This wasn’t at all the tack she wanted to take. She wanted to be brisk, informative, and unsentimental. To pass along a few minor facts in the interests of easing her conscience and showing the same faith in him he’d shown in her.
A marriage needed to be based on mutual respect, after all.
“There are things I’ve needed to tell you, Lucas, but haven’t found quite the right moment. Things that want privacy.”
“I’m listening, and this is as much privacy as we’re likely to get anywhere.”
His reply was not at all helpful, but he stroked a hand over her hair then repeated the caress, and that… It reminded Eve of the way he’d patted her shoulder before the race. The way he’d stayed near her all day, the way
