Fifteen
Hannah assured herself that catching a ship from Edinburgh for Boston would be no effort at all. Asher would take her North, she’d linger long enough to ensure no one could accuse her of carrying his child—Though what would that matter, given the even worse conclusions Polite Society had already drawn?—and she’d leave this godforsaken land with or without Enid’s companionship.
That Asher understood how badly she needed to go home—finally, finally, understood—had to be what explained his capitulation to their mutual attraction. Hannah was too pleased at his belated attack of sense to congratulate him on it.
She regarded the man standing beside her bed, the man whose reputation was now at risk because of her. Of all the times they had sinned, an innocent situation would be what had landed them in trouble.
The thought broke her heart in four different pieces, only one of them for him.
“We can discuss anything you want in the morning, Asher. For now, please kiss me.” More explicit than that, she could not be, not with words.
When he might have subjected her to another spate of his infernal reasoning—wonder of wonders—he unbuttoned his waistcoat. Anticipation and relief started a duet in Hannah’s body in close harmony: a sweet melody and a throbbing rhythm. She shamelessly gawked at him as he hung his waistcoat over a chair then sat to remove his shoes and stockings.
His shirt came next, and because he’d turned back the cuffs, he could undo a few buttons and pull it over his head.
“That’s cheating, Asher.”
He looked up from undoing his trousers. A slow male smile revealed white teeth and impending trouble. “Shall I put the shirt back on, Hannah? Would you like to undo me buttons, then, unwrap your prize button by button?”
Ah, the burr. She adored the burr. “Now you’re stalling.”
A man could shuck out of his trousers and underlinen in nothing flat, and then he could stand there, all shadows and strength not three feet away, while a woman ached to touch him.
“I want you, dear heart, verra much.” His desire was made evident by the erection arrowing up along his belly. A peculiar male endowment Hannah wanted to study—some other time.
“I want you too.” She’d told him she wasn’t a virgin, and she had not lied—not in the medical sense—but her prevarication was making her anxious to get matters under way. “Come to bed, Asher, please.”
She was using please rather a lot. She’d use it more, willingly, if it would get him under the covers with her. What followed now, and possibly in the next several weeks, would be hoarded up against the rest of Hannah’s life, against all the arguments with her stepfather, all the maneuvering with the lawyers. She could endure those battles if she could have these pleasures with this man for herself now.
As he climbed into the bed, dipping the mattress so heavily Hannah rolled to his side, she admitted one serpent to her garden: consummating her dealings with Asher was a two-edged sword. She would have the pleasure and joy of the memory, but she’d have the torment of it too.
“Now, madam”—he slid an arm under her neck and brought her flush against his side—“did you say something about kissing?”
“In a minute.” She wrestled free of his embrace. “You distracted me, flaunting your wares. I have a few wares of my own… what?”
He lay on his back, his arms laced behind his head to reveal dark tufts of hair at his armpits. “Slowly, my love.”
Comprehension dawned. When Hannah would have drawn her nightgown straight over her head, she instead slipped a button at her throat through its buttonhole. “This nightgown has a lot of buttons, my lord.”
“I’m a patient man, though I’ll no’ tolerate any me-lording nor Balfouring when we’re abed, Hannah.”
A patient mon. She hoped he’d speak Gaelic to her when their bodies were joined, hoped he’d say naughty things in any language—and mean every word. More buttons came free, and all the while, Asher watched her. When she would have crossed her arms to lift the nightgown away, he stopped her by using her braid to tug her down to him.
“Kisses, madam?”
The things he knew… How could Hannah have guessed that kissing him with her nightgown half-on, half-falling off her shoulders would be more inflammatory than were she stark naked? Soft, worn cotton took on sensual powers, dragging over Hannah’s chest, back, and arms as Asher levered up to set his mouth to hers.
He held back. She’d kissed him enough to know that this delicate tasting of her lips was intended to part her from her reason, and it was working.
“Stop teasing, sir.”
He shifted, and in a blink, Hannah was on her back, pinned by a grinning Scottish earl apparently in no mood to take direction. “Stop managing. It’s a habit ye’ll give up, Hannah, at least when we’re abed.”
“The day I—”
Now the kissing began in earnest, a wondrous onslaught of male guile intended to convince Hannah she didn’t want to manage him in bed, not ever. She decided instead that she’d learn to tease him, to enjoy the wares she wasn’t quite sure how to flaunt—and to enjoy his wares.
“That’s better, love. We’ll go slowly, and take our time, and all the pleasures—”
She pinched his derriere, not hard, but enough to take pleasure in the resilient abundance of muscle on his backside as her toes stroked along the curve of his calf.
“I’ve never petted a man with my feet before.”
“Blessed saints, I hope not.” The humor in his voice sounded strained. “What other wee tricks would you like to try out on my poor, unsuspecting self?”
“I’ll give you a list—later.” For now, the feel of his erection, warm, smooth, and heavy against her belly, distracted her sorely. She rolled her hips to remind him of the point of the proceedings, though the perverse man raised himself off her and shifted to his side, taking his weight and warmth away.
“Did I do something wrong?”
He kissed her nose. “Between two people sharing a bed like this, Hannah, there’s no right and wrong. There is only what pleases us.” He drew his callused finger slowly down the midline of her face: forehead, nose, lips, chin, throat, and on down.
“Are you going to draw on me or make love to me, Asher?”
“Draw on you”—he nuzzled her breast—“for now.”
He drew on her nipple with the wet warmth of his mouth, and Hannah nearly came off the bed. “That is… that is wicked.”
She gripped his head, fingers fisted in his hair while heat leapt out from where he touched her. “That is wicked, and lovely. I can’t…”
His hand drifted over her chest, tracing the bones of her sternum, covering her other breast, teasing, tormenting… teaching her that whatever she’d envisioned sharing with him, it was going to be much more personal and of much greater impact than she’d imagined.
For a time, they drifted between kisses and caresses. Hannah discovered that her hands pleased him too—on the angles and planes of his face, over the warmth and power of his chest, down the sinewy length of his arms. He sighed, his breathing hitched, he murmured in unintelligible Gaelic, and he made not one peep of protest when Hannah wrapped her fingers around his engorged member.
How long she mapped the feel of him she could not have said. She acquainted herself with downy, masculine hair, the smooth length of his shaft, the curiously silky head of his cock, and all the little twitches and inhalations that went with her touching him.
“You’re braced in some regard, Asher MacGregor. You’re enduring this.”
“I’m wallowing in it. You are very thorough in your explorations, Hannah, and that pleases me. I would not want you to think otherwise.”
He was being honest with her, though still… She trusted her sense that he was waiting for her to look her fill, waiting for her to gather her courage.
“I’ve explored this part enough.” She tugged on his cock gently. “For now.”
He shifted up again while Hannah, as naturally as dancing, subsided onto her back. “I will be the judge of what’s enough, woman, at least this time.”
His kiss was different, more uncivilized. Hannah took that as an invitation to reciprocate, to explore his mouth with her tongue, to breathe through him and undulate up into the hand he traced down her ribs. Something inside her was coming undone—wonderfully, completely undone—and she wanted him undone with her.
This time, he did not linger at her breasts or stop his quest at the soft flesh low on her belly. He brushed his fingers through her curls, gently, gently, a caress as maddening as it was arousing.
“Asher, that’s all very—good gracious.”
She went silent, let her knees fall open, and waited to see what he’d do next. One leisurely pass of his fingers up the crease of her sex, a little pressure on a particular spot, and words deserted her.
“Shall I do that again, love?”
“Mm.” She grabbed him by the back of his head and fused her mouth to his. He chuckled—the dratted beast—and repeated that most interesting caress, this time with a hint more pressure.
Hannah pushed into his touch, and Asher smiled against her mouth. “She likes it. She likes it verra much.”
She liked it so verra much she caught a rhythm as he explored for them both all the folds and creases of a woman’s most intimate parts. She liked it enough to growl into his mouth and to nearly tear his hair from his scalp.
“You’re wet for me, Hannah. I adore that you’re wet for me. Shall I love you now?”
She couldn’t even beg. She tried to scoot under him in answer, to wrestle him over her, and he allowed it, covered her with his heat and strength, braced himself up on his forearms, and went still.
He hitched close, brushed her hair back from her forehead, and spoke right near her ear. “There’s no undoing this, my love. No turning back or forgetting it. This is forever.”
“Please, Asher…” She sought him with her sex, and there he was. Big, blunt, hot, hard, and everything she wanted, forever and in the next instant.
“Please you, I shall.” He eased forward, just that. Hannah’s body gave easily at first, welcomed him into soft, damp heat. The next part had her opening her eyes.
“Aren’t you going to move?”
He sighed and pushed forward a bit more, to the extent that Hannah’s grasp of how intimate they would be underwent a transformation.
“Ye must relax, Hannah. I will linger right where I am until ye do.”
He could do it. He could stay right where he was, kissing her brow, her temple, bumping his nose along hers while she lost her mind on the battleground between anticipation and anxiety.
“Asher MacGregor, you’re killing me.”
“We’ll die together.”
This time, he shifted to brace one hand under her backside while he propped himself on the other forearm. A short, sharp nudge, and Hannah was wonderfully impaled on his fullness.
“That’s better,” she began, ready to reassure him that things were proceeding in an acceptable direction.
“You approve?” He started to withdraw, of which she did not approve in the least.
“Don’t you d—”
“Then this might be to your liking as well.” He glided more deeply into her body, retreated, and eased forward, waltzing his way past her wits and even her ability to think.
“Asher MacGregor, I love”—you—“it.”
His movement picked up intensity without becoming any faster. “I’ll tell ye a secret, Hannah.”
He was telling her secrets. Wonderful secrets about the body she’d inhabited for nearly a quarter century, and secrets about his body too. “Mm?”
“In this, with me, ye can be greedy. Ye can have all ye want and more, as often as ye like, because my desire for ye will have no end.” The blessed man dropped into Gaelic, his tone promising wicked bliss, his body turning the promise into a vow.
Hannah clung to him, moved with him, and when her body shook with the fulfillment of Asher’s vows, she fell and fell and fell with him too.
***
He’d loved her right to sleep.
Hannah’s passion was a wonderful, generous, unstinting thing, a measure of intimacy Asher lay thinking about as he held his prospective bride and matched his breathing to hers.
She’d been matter of fact about the aftermath—“That’s the scent of your seed, isn’t it? The scent of copulation?” and “This is not all neat and tidy. I like that it isn’t tidy.”—which was very different from Monique’s shyness and self-consciousness.
Monique had laughed her way through life’s difficult moments. Only now, holding a lady for whom humor played a different role, could Asher see that Monique’s approach was that of a very young woman, one who’d not strayed from the smile she’d learned to wield early in life, a means of coping she could not put aside in favor of more mature strengths.
Strengths like courage, resilience, honesty, or trust. “I like that it isn’t tidy.”
A universe of joyful marital potential lay in that confession.
Had Hannah been awake, Asher might have said to her, “I was married before. It was sweet and precious, and when it ended, I thought I’d died. I wished I’d died, and I knew I would never love with my whole heart again.” He might have added, very softly, “I was wrong.”
Instead, he caressed Hannah’s hair and kissed her temple, and—because with her sprawled on his chest, the temptation was too great—stroked his hand over the curve of her backside.
Somewhere in the affray, her nightgown had gone missing. This was convenient, because before he left the bed, Asher intended that Hannah’s wits go missing again too—even though he’d finally located his own wits for the first time since leaving Scottish shores years ago.
***
“By what feat of feminine cerebration did you conclude you were unchaste?”
The question was asked with lazy amusement, the same lazy amusement with which the end of Hannah’s braid was brushed across her lips. She rolled to her back to find Asher propped on his elbow beside her.
The birds were singing outside her window, while a faint gray light crept around the edges of her curtains.
She and Asher hadn’t much time, though she found it impossible to dismiss him from her bed.
“I was not a virgin. I lacked the requisite…” She batted sleep away from her brain, batted his braid-wielding hand from her face. “There’s a name for it, for the little scrap of flesh a girl is to guard with her life, and I parted with mine some time ago.”
He kissed her nose. “The name for it is invisible, in most cases. A woman as active as you are is unlikely to be sporting much in the way of a maidenhead so late in her life. Hymen, if you want the medical term.”
“Are you calling me old?”
He kissed her ear and spoke right next to it, which tickled. “I am calling you adult, also mendacious. Untruthful, but not quite a liar. Tell me, Hannah.”
He wrestled her over him, a position in which they’d made love sometime in the night. The memory was luscious and painful. Hannah curled down onto Asher’s chest and wished she could hold back the dawn.
“Hymen. I’d forgotten the word. Your medical knowledge has its uses.”
His hand on her back paused then resumed the slow stroking across her skin, which would have provoked her to purring were she capable of it.
“You were a virgin, dear heart. I would stake my life on this. Were you misleading me in an effort to hasten your ruin?”
He wasn’t going to let this go, but because he was going to let her go—in a few minutes in one sense, in a few weeks in another—she tried to find the right words.
“When I jilted Widmore, he did not deal well with it.”
“Most fellows would take umbrage at being made a laughingstock at the altar. I certainly would.”
Hannah glanced at the window, listened to the caroling of the birds, and kissed her lover’s nose. “He went to my stepfather and stated quite baldly that he’d had carnal knowledge of me. If I refused to marry him, in public with full honors, he threatened to bruit it about that I’d enticed him into anticipating the vows.”
Asher’s languid caresses slid lower. “His name is Adventus Widmore. He resides at 28 East Breitling Place, Boston. He flunked out of Yale and was given work in your stepfather’s offices two years ago as a favor to some business crony. Widmore stands about six feet, is blond, blue-eyed, and has a nick in his left earlobe from where his younger sister aimed a rock at him as a lad. Shall I kill him for you, precious heart?”
“Such endearments. You shame the dawn with your efforts to cheer me.”
“Perhaps you’d prefer to see him gelded? Or—my medical training again—I could have him relieved of one testicle but not the other. It’s messy, there’s a lot of blood involved, and it’s quite painful, but a man can still—”
Hannah kissed him on the mouth. “You wax enthusiastic on a surgical topic, and I have yet to break my fast. I was never intimate with Widmore, though not for lack of trying on his part. I learned not to be where he could catch me alone. And I think he realized that smearing my reputation would not inure to his advantage.”
At some point in Asher’s surgical recitation, Hannah had become aware that in addition to the sun, something else, something equally lovely, was rising right there in the bed.
“So were you lying to me, Hannah? Trying to goad me past propriety?”
His thumb feathered over her nipples. Not a goad, an inspiration. Hannah flexed her hips, caressing his cock with her sex.
“My stepfather had a midwife examine me, but he gave the woman instructions first.”
“I am not going to like this midwife much either, am I?”
He’d probably want to disfigure the poor woman, which was unfair, though endearing. “I like that, the way you tease my nipples. Is there a medical term for the nipple?”
He gasped as she sheathed him in one smooth, sweet slide of her body over his. “For God’s sake, Hannah, hold still.”
Good advice. She was a trifle sore, which was a new sensation, not exactly uncomfortable, and wonderfully intimate. “Am I hurting you?” She snuggled closer. “I’m a bit tender myself.”
“I am very tender.”
He wasn’t joking, though she didn’t think he was referring to his cock—she knew that term—but she couldn’t be sure. “Shall I—?” What was the word for untangling their bodies without consummating their joining? “There’s an entire vocabulary you’re going to have to teach me.”
“There is, but you’re a quick study. The word for nipple is papilla, though the shortened form—pap—can refer to the breast generally.”
He’d regained his balance, the wretch, while she… “Can we simply lie here like this, joined but unmoving?”
“There’s no law against it, and no word for it either that I know of. Tell me about the midwife.”
The birdsong changed, became polyphony instead of an avian plain chant. Whereas one bird had been fluting along, greeting the sun with a silvery solo, now others joined in while Hannah remained joined to the man in her bed.
“She described for me the nature of the examination, and explained that she’d also been instructed to ensure my wedding night proceeded without discomfort.”
Asher’s expression grew more fierce. “She was to destroy the evidence of your virginity, if any she found.”
Hannah brought his hands to her breasts. “I suppose so.”
Male thumbs feathered over her nipples. “And you weren’t to know that’s what she was about.”
“Not at the time. She was honest though, and told me the lack of a maidenhead was likely to be presented to me when I turned up fractious at a later date. That is an interesting… I feel that caress in places you aren’t touching me.”
He nudged up with his cock. “Here.”
Hannah managed a nod, closed her eyes, and let her head fall to his shoulder. “I like it when you do that.”
“Why did you let that woman carry out her instructions? And no, you are not to move, Hannah. You’ll need a soaking bath as it is. A long, hot, soaking bath to start your day.”
Focusing on the question took effort, for pleasure was building in Hannah’s body, even as outside her window the sun was rising. “The midwife assured me she found no evidence of unchaste behavior, and she would swear… swear… if you move any more slowly, Asher MacGregor, I shall bite you.”
He stopped moving entirely. “She would swear to your chastity?”
“She said as much and explained exactly what you said. Nobody could tell, in any case, but I might be more comfortable on my wedding night if I complied with the scheme she’d been put to.”
He started moving again, slow, easy lunges into her body that went wonderfully deep. “While you concluded you’d be conveniently ruined if the need arose. Are ye comfortable, my heart?”
She met his thrust, counterpointed his rhythm. “Not comfortable, exactly. Are you comfortable?”
While the sun crept over the horizon and the birds sang in welcome, Asher levered up, wrapped Hannah close, and laughed.
***
“It’s no use.” Enid’s tone was bitter enough that Augusta exchanged a look with Genie and Julia. “Word has gone out. Nobody will be calling. Hannah has received no bouquets, no cards, nothing. We might as well decamp for Poland. She has quite ruined herself, and all over a little swoon. You will excuse me if I need a tot of my medicinals.”
Enid pushed her chair back with an unladylike scrape, and left the breakfast parlor amid a series of equally indecorous sniffs into her handkerchief.
“Hannah was smart to linger at her bath,” Julia observed, reaching for the teapot.
“None for me,” Genie said. “Lately, I use the necessary enough as it is in the mornings.”
Mary Fran held out her cup. “That passes. I wish that woman would leave for Poland, though Matthew says it’s a beautiful country. I don’t suppose the Poles deserve the imposition, either.”
Augusta shook her head at the proffer of more tea. “I have learned a few things from my Scottish husband.”
Genie’s smile was impish. “We’re all learning things from our Scottish husbands, and our nurseries will soon bear the proof.”
“Not those sorts of things. Well, those things too. I am learning from Ian that anger need not be a corrosive, bitter thing. Anger can be an inspiration.”
“Revenge,” Mary Fran said, smiling hugely. “We could take in Enid’s crinolines until she can neither breathe nor stand up with her Mr. Trucklebed.”
“Trundle,” Augusta said. “We could lace her patent remedies with a laxative. We could see her compromised, though she’d hardly object to it. She is upset that Hannah is ruined because it reflects poorly on her, not because Hannah will suffer for it.”
“Hannah might be married for it,” Julia pointed out. “I’m not sure, given that Asher is the prospective groom, suffering is the appropriate term.”
Augusta drew her fingernail along an embroidered seam of the tablecloth. The figure was a depiction of pretty bluish flowers—lilacs and columbines amid greenery against a soft gold background. “Neither one of them wants to be married, and if they do marry, it shouldn’t be like this.”
Like this—a reference to the things Enid had noted. An absence of bouquets, a lack of calling cards, much less cards with a particular corner bent, indicating the visitor waited, in person, for a few minutes with the ladies of the household.
Polite Society was nothing if not articulate in its silences.
Genie buttered a slice of toast but didn’t eat it. “Con said he, Gil, and Ian asked Asher what he was going to do about Hannah’s situation. Asher didn’t answer them directly.”
“Perhaps he’ll give them an answer on their morning ride,” Julia observed.
A knock on the door interrupted the conversation.
“Enter,” Mary Fran called out.
Two footmen strode in, each obscured by an enormous bouquet. All four ladies sat up.
“Sweet basil is for good wishes,” Julia remarked, breaking off a leaf from the nearer bouquet and bringing it to her nose. “Water lily is for purity of heart. Nobody puts water lilies in bouquets. I forget what arborvitae is for.”
“Unchanging friendship,” Genie said. “The roses are from Spathfoy, white for purity. But this other bouquet, it isn’t gaudy, exactly…”
They regarded the larger arrangement, a pretty assortment of both blooms and greens.
“Jasmine is for grace and elegance,” Mary Fran murmured. “I know that one only because Matthew has sent it to me, the daft man.”
Augusta rose and plucked a single sturdy evergreen stem from the very center of the bouquet. “Juniper is for protection. Who in the world?” She rummaged around among the blossoms, looking for a card. An elegant little note sat near a creamy magnolia blossom. “Magnolia for dignity.”
“There’s a carriage pulling up. Crested,” Julia reported. “I can’t quite… God in heaven. We’re to have a caller after all.”
They went to the window en masse. A liveried footman sprang from the back of an enormous town coach and strode briskly toward the town house door.
“That crest is familiar,” Augusta said. “Somebody make sure Hannah is properly turned out before she comes down. These flowers need to go into the front hallway, and have the footmen fill the card bowl with last week’s cards. Alert the kitchen we’ll need the best service, and send word to the mews when the men come in that Mary Fran will skelp their bums if they set so much as one muddy boot on the back steps while we’re entertaining. And do not breathe a word of our caller to Miss Enid. The woman needs her rest.”
The ladies scurried off in several directions, so that within the five minutes necessary to assure the footman they were at home and happy to receive guests, word had gone upstairs, downstairs, and everywhere in between.
While the kitchen worked furiously to assemble a tea tray fit for royalty and Hannah’s maid put the finishing touches on her coiffure, the Moreland ducal coach disgorged no less than a viscountess, two countesses, two marchionesses, and… one dignified, smiling duchess on the arm of her graciously congenial—if leonine—duke.