The Rake of Hollowhurst Castle (15 page)

‘Nor me,' she acknowledged unsteadily and blessed Charles's sure touch as he shook Mereson's hand while the butler wished them both very happy on behalf of all the castle staff, inside and out.

‘Now let's all get in out of the cold and get on with making merry, shall we?' Charles asked as he shocked and delighted Roxanne by lifting her into his arms and carrying her over the threshold to the cheers of the staff, and the guests beginning to arrive from the church in their wake.

‘Put me down, Charles,' she urged him, not quite sure her legs had the strength to carry her as he did so very slowly when they reached the great hall, and he gave her a decidedly wolfish smile. ‘You're a very bad man,' she chided.

‘Believe me, sweetheart, I could be a whole lot worse,' he replied with a wicked grin that dissipated some of her awe at the solemnity of what they'd just done and made her long to laugh out loud with sheer joy, after all.

‘But not just yet, perhaps?' she replied with a siren smile.

‘Not unless we want to be lynched by our staff and our guests, but later I'll have my revenge for every wickedly alluring glance and taunting smile, Lady Afforde,' he promised, and there was no mistaking the seriousness of his intent, despite the easy smile he turned on Maria and Henry Balsover as her sister insisted on entering the room first in deference to her rank.

‘Happy?' Tom Varleigh asked when he stepped forwards to offer formal congratulations on a marriage he evidently approved of.

‘Deeply,' she agreed, unable to care if Charles heard her admit it.

She
was
happy, after all, ecstatically so at the thought of what was to come tonight, although it was a little diluted by apprehension at the unknown. She knew with bone-deep certainty she'd never have been half as happy with any other man, however much he might have loved her. So, yes, she could admit to being happy, but luckily nobody had the temerity to come out and ask her if she also loved.

If they had, she must either lie and deny it, or tell the truth and cause Charles's eyes to cloud and his smile to waver as he faced the inequality at the heart of their marriage. Blinking tears away, she reminded herself how much she wanted this marriage and did it so well that by the time Charles removed her third glass of champagne from her hand with a shake of his head and a quizzical look she would have argued, if he hadn't whispered he wanted her in possession of all her senses later, so he could drive her out of them with something better than champagne!

 

After the wedding breakfast there was dancing and the Great Hall rang with music and laughter for the first time in years. Roxanne remembered a long-ago ball held here, when all she could do was observe from the minstrel's gallery as her bridegroom spun girl after girl about the ancient floor with laughing abandon. How she'd hated every one of them, including her sisters, that night. Yet now Charles Afforde was her husband, just as
she'd sworn to herself he would be one day, when she was grown up and beautiful and he was loaded with honours and more handsome than ever.

‘Our waltz, my lovely,' her handsome captain murmured in her ear with such intimate heat in his eyes while he watched for her blush that she wondered fleetingly if she might want to slap him if she didn't love him so much. ‘And maybe we can escape this brouhaha once they're all fairly launched into the dancing,' he added, and was it any wonder she hadn't breath enough left to say yea or nay? He laughed at her confounded state and wrapped his arm about her as he urged her on to the dance floor. ‘And pray don't leave me with a floundering bride in my arms as you did the night you finally agreed to all this,' he urged with a lordly wave of his arm at the assembled company, eagerly watching as the bride and her groom took the floor for their dance, their confirmation that this was their day, the start of their joint future.

‘You can be very infuriating indeed, Sir Charles,' she informed him sternly. He nodded. ‘And very high-handed.' Again that nod of wicked acknowledgement, but very little repentance. ‘And as of today you are also
very
married,' she finished ominously, her dark eyes promising retribution. ‘I
know,
' he replied with every appearance of triumph and how could she not be flattered and flustered as he held her even closer and their steps matched in a most disgracefully intimate dance the patronesses at Almack's would surely not have approved when they finally gave in and permitted the waltz to be performed in their hallowed halls.

Respect for their guests made them stay far longer
than they wanted to, accepting increasingly sentimental or raucous congratulations and dancing duty dances with the one or two who believed precedence triumphed over the sheer joy of a wedding. The early darkness of December had fallen long since, and the huge tree trunks burning in the vast fireplaces at each end of the hall had overcome the chill of the vast room. Even their indefatigable guests were succumbing to heat, champagne and happy exhaustion, when Charles seized his bride from a quiet coze with her eldest sister and Stella and whispered for her ear alone, ‘I don't feel married enough yet, my lady, and it's time we did something about it.'

Heart racing, speechless with curiosity and desire, and a nagging jag of apprehension, Roxanne licked her lips nervously as she nestled into his embrace and watched his fascinated gaze linger on that action as if it was driving him demented, so naturally she did it again. He groaned and she felt the triumph of a woman who knew she was wanted above all others by a man she desired exclusively in return; thinking any deeper was banned tonight, and perhaps tomorrow and the next day as well.

‘If you don't stop provoking me, I'll probably publicly embarrass you,' he grated out in a husky voice she hadn't heard before.

‘How?' she asked interestedly, and he growled.

He really, really just growled at her like a hungry wolf, and she eyed him warily as she wondered, with a skitter of her heart that wasn't altogether fearful, if she really had provoked him beyond safe limits.

‘Come,' he demanded savagely, but she excused him that when she saw what looked very like desperation in
his eyes, and she let him draw her inexorably towards the door and the more shadowed part of the house, because she'd be a fool to do otherwise when she was finally at the end of an even longer thread of waiting and hoping than he was.

They heard a hue and cry behind them as the rowdier elements spotted their escape, but Charles's compelling arm about her waist urged her on and they sped along the corridor and darted through the door leading to the servants' stairs, just as the young men tore into the hall and demanded of Mereson where his master and mistress had gone.

‘I really have no idea, gentlemen,' he insisted blandly, and Roxanne stifled a chuckle as she allowed Charles to tow her up the narrow stairs and out into the corridor that led to the master suite and safety.

‘Remind me to double his wages,' Charles muttered as he scurried her along the splendidly carpeted hallway and, much to her astonishment, Roxanne found time to admire the many improvements he'd put in place since buying the castle.

‘Hurry, my lady,' Tabby urged from the open door of her lady's bedchamber, and Roxanne finally felt the weight of her new position as she surveyed the comfort and elegance Charles had created within.

‘It's so beautiful!' she gasped, awed by the transformation from dark and rather dingy chamber into a delightfully feminine bower.

‘You can thank me later,' Charles said with a return of impudence and eloquence as he sent her a wicked smile and went to engage the locks of his chamber as well as hers, before anyone could run them to earth. Putting his head round the communicating door, he
grinned at her, and she felt herself beginning to melt from the inside outwards all over again. ‘Not much later, though,' he promised and left her to Tabby's starry-eyed ministrations.

S
peechless for once, Roxanne sat and let Tabby remove her finery with relief, despite the fact she loved every stitch of it and would cherish her wedding dress until her dying day. The rhythmic stroke of the brush as her hair was released to cascade about her shoulders almost calmed her, but then she licked her lips and met her own eyes in the mirror and knew it was just an illusion.

She looked different, did young Lady Afforde. Like a woman awaiting something very significant and special indeed and not sure if she ought to embrace it. Yes, she told herself fiercely, this is what I always wanted, and she squashed the little voice that argued ‘not quite', even as Charles strode into the room with a splendid dressing robe open to reveal he'd shed his coat and waistcoat and neckcloth and looked incredibly handsome in his ivory breeches and stockings and shirtsleeves. Tabby finished hastily and scampered out of the room with a
cheeky grin that Roxanne promised herself revenge for, tomorrow.

‘I've had enough,' her husband ground out concisely, tugging Roxanne into his powerful arms at last, as if he'd found the day as trying, and at the same time as joyful, as she had.

‘Enough what, Sir Charles?' she asked with a provocative look into his stormy blue eyes.

‘Fine clothes, champagne, relatives and friends, and most especially enough of your teasing, Lady Afforde,' he informed her in a driven voice as he lowered his head in a kiss that allowed nothing for maidenly modesty, but a great deal for the raw, undisguised passion that flamed into immediate life between them.

Luckily Roxanne was as impatient as he was and met his hot kiss with unguarded enthusiasm. Open mouthed, they clashed, took and drove each other mutually crazy. Best not to think that on her side she was crazy with love as well as desire, but Roxanne let her hands explore his strongly muscled shoulders and neck without the annoying restrictions of fashion and convention and ignored the inequality.

This, she decided as she breathed in the scent and sensation of bare, heated, satin-and-steel masculine skin, this was what she'd longed for all those long, frustrated, barren years while he'd been away. His tongue plunged into her mouth and she felt surrounded by heat and need, his and hers, and tipped her head further back to give him even more encouragement.

Unnecessary encouragement, as it happened, for his hands ran heat down her scantily clad back and neat
derrière,
as if he could hardly bear even the gossamer silk of her nightgown coming between the sheer luxury of
skin on skin. It seemed that he already knew how badly she wanted him, she remembered, with a very small regret that she'd held nothing back that day when he taught her the breadth and depth and peril of truly adult passion in the castle gardens below their bedchamber windows.

And he'd taught her very well, she reminded herself as she carried out an exploration of her own and felt his tactile muscles tense and shift under her flexing, stroking, approving fingers. And it was mighty, the steely strength under his satin supple skin. He was a mature, dominant male, and how would her younger self ever have coped with so potent a lover? She would have improvised, Roxanne decided with a cat-like smile against the base of his throat. Now, how had her mouth got there? she wondered as she appreciated his unique charms with it, now it was somewhere so intimate, now this place was to be forbidden all other women. Fair enough, she decided, with hazy logic when his hands were wandering ever lower and driving her out of her senses with this dragging sensual curiosity and an almost painful need for the intimacy of his body where she suddenly knew she wanted him mercilessly, for she could never want another man after this.

‘Don't wait,' she ordered between lips that felt stiff and swollen with needs beyond any words she had left.

‘You're not ready for me yet,' he cautioned in a gravelly voice that made her feel even more urgent for whatever was to come.

‘Damn it, Charles, if I were any more ready I'd burst into flames!'

‘I like the sound of that,' he teased with some of his
old familiar lazy appreciation, belied as it was by the fierce burn of colour across his high cheekbones and the feral glitter in his burning blue gaze as he parted her now unbuttoned nightgown and pushed it down over her shoulders. ‘How
risqué,
' he managed a little unsteadily as he paused to undo the beribboned bows among the frothy lace at each of her wrists; finally the insubstantial thing fell about her feet.

‘I thought you'd like it,' she parried, resisting the urge to bring her hands up to protect her most feminine places from his very male gaze and watching it rove over her with lazy, unmistakable appreciation instead.

‘I do, sweetheart, I most definitely do,' he replied and surprised her by stripping himself as openly as he had done her.

All the time he went about the task with fingers she thought enviably steady, he seemed to encourage her to feast her eyes on him just as he was feasting on her. It was so sensual, so open, so unexpectedly equal that her eyes grew heavy lidded and her tongue came out to lick suddenly dry lips and, instead of shying away with fear as she finally took in how powerfully aroused he actually was, she hoped she was making it as difficult to resist her allure as he was his emphatic masculinity. His manhood rose from his strongly muscled thighs in explicit demand and she found it oddly beautiful, the realisation coming over her in a moment of intense appreciation and arousal.

Maybe the gleam of feminine appreciation was obvious in her dark eyes, for he gave her a quick grin that reminded her of arrogant Captain Afforde, before his searingly hot blue eyes set that rake apart from her new husband. There was nothing carelessly guarded about
this Charles Afforde, nothing deliberately held back and cynical, and she couldn't help but hold out her hands and smooth the satin-smooth skin, roughened by curls of dark gold hair on his powerfully muscled chest, with wonder.

‘Charles,' she murmured as she stroked over his warm, very human skin with hands that wandered lower and yet lower, down over the hard packed muscles of his lean abdomen and even lower, until she held her breath and marvelled as he let her smooth the velvet hardness of his now even more awesomely aroused shaft, and she found it as wondrous under her questing fingers as she had under her voracious eyes.

‘Roxanne,' he replied huskily, the rigid control he was forcing on himself beginning to show in the tension of iron-hard muscles as she let her other hand rove to explore his neat masculine buttocks and the mighty tension in his back, forcing himself to let her explore when she suspected he wanted to be inside her, possibly even more than she wanted him there. Only she didn't actually know the force and feel of a man inside her—no, not just any man, this man and only this man—yet could his need be any greater than hers? Probably not, but fairness made her acknowledge how awesome his control was, and how very far it outstripped her own.

‘Yes,' she answered his demand with a whisper that seemed to fill the hushed room, blotting out the faint bubble of spitting sap burning from the fireplace as the seasoned applewood let out its steady heat, the whisper of a December wind outside the heavily curtained and shuttered windows and any noise the revellers might make below that was not held at bay by the mighty oak door of my lady's chamber.

‘My Roxanne,' he asserted rather unsteadily, the very hint of a question in his gruff voice robbing it of the arrogance that once infuriated her so much.

‘Yes,' she repeated unoriginally, but with a flush of fiery colour on her cheeks now and a challenge in her velvet-dark eyes that should inform him she wasn't going to suddenly shriek and run away in terror. ‘Yes, yours; yes, your wife as of today; yes, I'm ready, and yes, I'll possibly expire of too much waiting if you don't hurry.'

Which seemed to do the trick, she decided in dazed appreciation as he launched himself at her, but even then he touched her heart by testing her earlier words and feeling for himself the moist, shameless heat between her legs, rendering them quite useless for their primary purpose of keeping her upright in the process. If she'd thought she was hot for his touch before, suddenly a raging need was roaring there, and she moaned and shifted to tell him even the intimate teasing of his long, strong fingers on her most secret feminine heart was not enough to slake this driving compulsion for more.

‘Hurry!' she panted as she resisted his moves to walk her backwards to the bed and a more conventional coupling. ‘No, I can't wait for that,' she ordered impatiently as she fought his restraining hands, prepared to climb up his heaving torso and drive them both demented with her inexperience rather than wait a second longer.

‘It'll be too rough for a virgin,' he argued distractedly, but he must have been at the end of his self-control, too, for he shifted her so she came down on to his manhood, and at last she felt the smooth, hard heat of him enter her and gave a great purring moan of satisfaction.

‘Oh, oh, Charles, oooh!' she praised and triumphed
all at the same time as she felt his mighty body tense and change to accommodate itself to her and to discipline himself enough so he could cradle her striving buttocks and restrain her as he felt her maidenhead beat against this hasty coupling.

Unwilling to wait while he played the perfect, gentlemanly lover, she confounded him by letting her legs fall just enough to breach that last, annoying barrier between them. Swallowing a cry at the sharp discomfort that was the end of her long wait for this night, she grinned into his eyes and experimentally flexed a set of muscles she hadn't known she had. Yes, she felt mightily stretched and just a little sore, but the hurt was fading already and it was all part of this glorious night, and there was no way she was going to let him treat her like spun glass just because he'd been annoyingly chivalrous and insisted they wait until their wedding night to do this at last.

‘Oh, ooh, Roxanne!' he echoed, smiling impudently in reply as he thrust mightily within her to show her he was only allowing her to dictate anything about their first loving because he was a gentleman.

Her heart seeming to quiver in echo of her body as fire caught mercilessly once more. She leaned her forehead down to rest against his and watched his pupils flare and contract as she moved demandingly once more, suggestively wriggling her hips as if to remind him he was supposed to be the experienced one here. So he asserted himself by walking to the bed and manoeuvring her on to the high mattress under the splendid silk bedcover without yielding an iota of their intimate joining.

‘Lie back,' he ordered, unclasping her clinging arms
from about his neck and spreading her very willing body against the velvet bedcover until she was lying with her arms over her head and her feminine core at the mercy of his full and dominant penetration, waiting on the explicit fire in his heated gaze.

Not that he showed her much mercy, she decided in a haze of sensual pleasure as he rubbed his palms appreciatively up her slenderly curved torso and spread them over her high and suddenly full and very aroused breasts and flexed them until she screamed with pleasure.

So next he bent to take one of her tightly budded nipples in his mouth, and the feel of it, the absolute pleasure of him inside her as he did so made her head thrash from side to side and soft little gasps urged him to rock that mighty body so they could climb even higher up this astonishing ascent to something, something beckoning and wonderful beyond words, she suddenly realised, as he abandoned her breast and took her begging, pouting mouth in an explicit, raw kiss and increased the pace of their striving bodies. Suddenly it didn't matter that she was splayed out under him, begging frantically in whatever ways she could for his absolute possession like a harem slave, this was all there was in life that really mattered, and whatever it was leading to, they were going there together. Abandoning any hint of subjection, she raised her knees and wrapped her long, limber legs about his waist, drawing him deeper, closer and faster into the now frantic rhythm driving them.

‘Please, oh, please, Charles, I want everything now!' She wrenched her mouth from his to gasp a plea for him to tip her into this unknown glory that was suddenly so close she felt as if she could almost touch it. To end and yet never end this hot, stormy madness inside her as she
strove with his driving, fabulous, oh-so-masculine body centred on hers toward a mystery she was desperate to solve.

‘Soon, lover, very soon,' he promised before he took her mouth back to silence her, and his kiss was fire and a relentless, heavy beat of even deeper arousal as he thrust faster and deeper and she bucked under him, sensing that something glorious was coming, coming so close she could taste it. For a moment he rode her frantically, and she wondered if she'd ever achieve this beckoning wonder she'd somehow been promised, felt him convulse and hated him for not taking her with him, then at last there it was.

Or there she wasn't, rather. She was elsewhere, with him. She was him and he was her and they were more than themselves, outside here and now and at the very beat of life itself all at the same time. Great convulsions of glory and unutterable joy spasmed through her as he gasped and bowed and thrust into her, into them, again and again, and she felt his hot release even as her inner muscles worked round his shaft as if to hold them within this golden moment for ever, and him with it. Panting with exertion and feeling like singing or shouting with delight, she felt his weight rest full on her outstretched torso for glorious moments, and her arms came up in a loving reflex to hold on to the ecstasy they'd just given each other, even as he raised himself on his elbows and smiled down at her while he shook his head regretfully.

‘I'm too heavy, my rosy Roxanne,' he murmured teasingly, even as his index finger outlined her chin and then her brow and down her nose to outline her lips, as if he
couldn't get enough of her, the sight of her, or her scent or the touch of her soft skin under his questing finger.