‘How fast can those horses of yours go, Alaric?’ she asked with a world of hot need opening out in front of her and an urgent desire for everything she had fantasised about him coming true as soon as they could get to a clean house with a clean bed in it.
‘Since I will not have you slammed about and bruised as we tear around corners and bounce over potholes, you are not about to find out.’
‘Then perhaps an inn...?’ She let her voice trail off as the suggestion lit even more fires in his already hot-blue gaze. ‘Your tiger would know what we were about, of course, but I really am beyond caring. I want you so much, Alaric.’
‘And do you really think he is going to tell anyone? The man only speaks to horses with the occasional grunt for me if he is in a particularly good mood.’
‘He does seem taciturn.’
‘He is and, even if he was the best gossip in England, I do not care who knows I love you to the edge of reason and I cannot keep my hands off you for very much longer.’
‘Well, that is very good news as far as I am concerned since I feel the same way about you, but fine words butter no parsnips, my lord. Action is what is needed right now.’
‘I agree,’ he said and they could hardly fumble the ancient great lock on the front door back into place fast enough before they joined hands and ran carefully down the wild grass at the side of the drive because they might be in love and desperate to prove it to one another, but Lord Stratford had spent enough time laid up with damaged limbs and a broken head lately.
Chapter Nineteen
They did manage to contain themselves by maintaining a tight-lipped silence all the way back to Owlet Manor, but by the time they got there they were very glad to hand the curricle and horses over to the uncommunicative little man who had been sitting up behind them for miles frowning over their heads at his precious horses.
‘Hurry,’ Marianne urged Alaric when he would have stopped to say something polite and gentlemanly to Fliss’s new housemaids.
‘Now they will gossip,’ he said as they ran up the familiar stairs to the quaint old bedchamber Marianne had fallen in love with on her first day at Owlet Manor. It seemed fitting that the first place that had felt like home since she left her father’s old vicarage would be the place where she first made love to her future lord and true lover.
‘Let them, I do not care,’ she gasped, tugging him in through the door of the room as she took a quick look around it in the fast fading light and realised Fliss had not changed a thing in here. It did still feel hers and she hoped Fliss would forgive her for this intrusion into her new domain. Marianne rather thought she would once she had explained there were no convenient shepherd’s huts on their way here and this was her first time with the man she loved, so it deserved to be private as well as special from one end to the other.
‘I do not expect you to love your Daniel less because you love me as well, Marianne,’ Alaric managed to tell her huskily despite the frantic need she had sensed him barely holding under control for miles as he drove with almost too much care so he did not take unnecessary risks with her safety.
‘Thank you,’ she said sincerely and put her cold fingers against his even colder face and held them there to warm them both and because she did love him so much she wanted to touch him and warm him and show him how lovable he really was and how very, very strong and manly and kind and—
Just get on with it, Marianne; love the man before you both faint from frustration.
‘But love is generous, my darling, so there is enough of it in my heart for both of you and I shall never love you less because I love him as well.’
‘I am not sure I can give you gentle, though, and you deserve it,’ he told her unsteadily.
‘Do not put curbs on us, Alaric. However much you try to reason it into a corner and control it we want each other quite shamelessly.’
‘That does not mean we cannot have tenderness as well as passion,’ he said stubbornly and covered her hands where they still cupped his face and stared down into her eyes with his loving, lingering touch against her skin. ‘Love,’ he said with wonder still in his eyes.
‘Yes.’
‘I want you so much my eyes are crossing,’ he told her and she stood on tiptoes for a closer look and nodded sagely at him to say so they were and the closer she looked the more hers were as well.
‘Time to stop talking, then,’ she said practically and raised her mouth for his kiss and to get him to give her the use of her hands back, so she could touch and hold and encourage him as he did the same for her. It was the lovely loving connection of it all that made her gasp and her body sing as they fell on one another with a hunger that had been too long building to be slow or carefully seductive now. Fire and fierce passion and that streak of tenderness under it all that he had promised them seemed to draw something wondrous out of them as they fell on each other and reached higher and faster than it felt they had ever been before. She fell back to earth with a sob for the loss of that ecstatic, languorous place they had just claimed as their own for the
