A Marriage of Inconvenience (30 page)

Lucy wasn’t sure what response she expected, but it certainly wasn’t the widest grin she had ever seen on her husband’s face. “I
knew
you were a fighter from the day I met you.” At that he sprang to his feet and pulled her into his arms. Then his lips were on hers, and she wound her arms around his neck, awash in joy and relief.

After a few long moments they broke apart and sought out Anna. They saw her off amid tears, embraces and mutual promises to write often.

They spent the remainder of the day basking in each other’s company, talking of everything and nothing. She supposed they could have gone straight to bed the instant Anna had left, but as much as she desired him, she was glad they didn’t—she liked having the reassurance of their mutual forgiveness in words and everyday kindnesses before they sealed it with their bodies.

After nightfall she paced her bedchamber again, eager but also anxious. Would all truly be well between them now? No amount of love and forgiveness could undo the past. Could she and James acknowledge their mistakes, accept how much they could not know or control and live happily?

With a soft rap on the connecting door, James walked in, dressed in a nightshirt and the blue silk banyan that matched his eyes—and carrying a stack of cravats. Lucy flinched and took an involuntary step backward. She did not want to be tied up, not tonight. It was a different kind of trust that needed to be rebuilt between them now.

James stopped just inside the doorway. “No, no,” he said, “these aren’t for you.”

Lucy curled a hand around her bedpost. “No?”

“They’re for me. I…I need to practice accepting the limits of my control.”

She stood speechless for a moment. The idea that James would acknowledge such limits at all, and that the first thing he would ask for upon returning to her was that
she
take control…perhaps love and forgiveness were enough.

“Come here, then,” she heard herself say.

Slowly but without a hint of hesitation, James crossed to her and placed the cravats in her hands.

She kissed him. “Close your eyes.”

When he obeyed, she took the first cravat and wound it around his head, tying it carefully to make sure it didn’t pull his hair, then stood back and considered what to do next. She had relived the night he tied her up countless times already in her imagination, but had never considered what she might do if their positions were reversed.

“Lucy?”

The anxious note in his voice surprised her. “I’m still here.”

“Good.”

“You don’t think I’d walk away and leave you like this?” If she had, it would have been an easy matter for him to push the blindfold away, since she hadn’t bound his hands yet, but Lucy sensed this wasn’t about practicalities.

“You’d be within your rights to humiliate me, after how I treated you.”

“Oh, James.” She caught his hands, squeezed them hard. “I’m not here to punish you. We don’t have to do it this way. You can take the blindfold off.”

He shook his head. “No. But—keep touching me. Don’t let go.”

“I won’t. I promise.” Seeing James so vulnerable, almost afraid, put a lump in her throat. She stepped closer to him, untied the banyan’s sash, then ran her hands up to his shoulders, enjoying the feel of his muscles beneath the heavy, opulent silk. She kissed him as she pushed the banyan off him and let it drop to the floor.

He tried to untie her wrapper, but she pushed his hands away. “I’ll decide when to do that,” she announced, and he grinned.

Lucy’s uncertainty had disappeared, and she pressed herself against him. Whatever fears he had at putting himself in her hands like this hadn’t been enough to keep him from becoming aroused, and she decided she had no desire to take this slowly. She tugged his nightshirt over his head and nudged him against the bed. “Lie down,” she commanded.

He obeyed, a little awkwardly, and she kept touching him as he had requested, guiding him to the center of the bed, then tying his hands to the bedposts.

“Oh, God,” he muttered as she secured the final knot.

His hips jerked, and Lucy smiled. She knew exactly how he felt.

“I’m still here,” she told him when she perforce had to stop touching him long enough to shed her own clothing. “And you are…pleasing to look upon.”

“Good,” he said with a nervous chuckle.

Naked, Lucy climbed onto the bed and sat beside him.
Pleasing
was too weak a word, she decided.
Splendid
would be better. “If I did want to punish you,” she said, “I would go get my sketchbook and draw you, just so, before I touched you again.”

“Then I am exceedingly glad you do not wish to do so.” His hips jerked again.

“Oh, I
wish.
” She curled her hand lightly around his erection, marveling at the smoothness of the skin and how strangely heavy it felt in her hand. “But I won’t.”

In the book from India James kept locked away, there had been pictures of women taking men’s erections into their mouths. Daringly, Lucy followed their example. She didn’t know how—the pictures weren’t
that
detailed—and she didn’t want to hurt him, so she kept her touch as light as she could. A gentle kiss, a careful circling lick.

“Oh,
God,
Lucy!” James’s hips jerked off the bed, and he shuddered all over.

New as she was at this, Lucy realized neither of them could wait much longer. She straddled him and pushed down onto him—so good, she had missed this so—and leaned up to push the blindfold away. She needed to see his eyes, blue and beautiful and driven beyond any possible control.

Afterward, as soon as she’d untied his hands, he took her hand and pressed it against his heart. “I love you,” he said. “I promise. No matter what.”

Lucy’s eyes stung as she nestled into his embrace. Love and forgiveness, she decided, were the strongest forces in the world.

Ten years later

With the morning’s post tucked under his arm, James paused in the doorway to bask for a moment in the sight of his wife and his nine-year-old daughter, Meg, drawing together in the gallery, with his infant son and heir, Josiah, asleep in a basket at Lucy’s feet. Their eldest child had inherited a full measure of her mother’s artistic gifts, and James knew that teaching her was among Lucy’s greatest delights. They had added to the Orchard Park collection over the years. Travelers came from far and wide to admire it, and whenever she was home, Lucy liked to lead the tours herself.

But today was a quiet day, as no one had written to ask permission to view the gallery. After a moment Lucy and Meg sensed his presence and turned to smile at him, two pairs of dark brown eyes glowing with welcome.

“Papa! Mama is letting me copy the Rembrandt.”

He kissed Lucy on the cheek, then leaned over Meg’s shoulder to examine her sketch. He praised it and bent down to stroke his sleeping son’s black curls. At last he smiled up at his wife, who had set down her pencil and was watching him with a tender expression on her face.

“Letters from India?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Your sister or my brother?”

“One of each,” he said, handing her the unopened letter written in her youngest brother’s hand. Rhys, when offered several opportunities for an adventurous profession upon completing his education, had settled upon the East India Company.

“How is Anna?” she asked before breaking the seal.

He grinned. “
Very
well. It’s a boy, and they named him James. I’m quite flattered.”

“A new cousin?” Meg bounced on her chair.

“Shh, dear, you’ll wake Joss,” Lucy cautioned. “Yes, a new cousin. They will keep pace with us, and they’ve two boys to our one.”

“No matter. I wouldn’t trade our girls for a dozen sons.” He ruffled Meg’s hair. “In any case, Anna says that she thinks the name suits the little fellow, as he is easily the most imperious and demanding of her babies thus far. Perhaps I’m not so flattered after all.”

Lucy raised an eyebrow but forbore to comment on the appropriateness of their new nephew’s name. “How are the rest?” she asked mildly.

“The children are all well and thriving, and send their love, and I gather Will is making himself as indispensable as usual.”

Will was Anna’s second husband and the father of her four children. Despite valiant and persistent efforts, Anna had never managed to repair her marriage to Sebastian. But he had died eight years ago, and her next choice, whom she had met and shared adventures with in Spain, had worked out much more happily. James himself rather wished she hadn’t eloped to India. He would far rather
see
his sister than merely exchange voluminous letters with her. There was always that niggling worry that something might have gone terribly wrong in the four months since the letter in his hands had been written. But James was learning to accept and tolerate that which lay beyond his control, and Anna was indubitably as happy in her life as he was in his own.

Lucy began to break the seal on her own letter. “I’m glad they’re happy,” she said. “I’m glad
we’re
happy.”

“The best day of my life was the day I met you.” He spoke lightly, but let his gaze linger to show that he meant it.

But Lucy sniffed and her eyes twinkled. “It was nothing of the sort. You fell off your horse, and that always makes you cross.”

Meg turned from her drawing to regard them, round-eyed. “You’ve never told me that story.”

“How remiss of me,” he said. “Yes, I did fall—but then an angel came to my rescue, and it was the best day of my life.”

Lucy and Meg rather spoiled the romantic effect with their laughter, but as that had been precisely his intent, James didn’t mind.

Susanna Fraser wrote her first novel in fourth grade. It starred a family of talking horses who ruled a magical land. In high school she started, but never finished, a succession of tales of girls who were just like her, only with long, naturally curly and often unusually colored hair, who, perhaps because of the hair, had much greater success with boys than she ever did.

Along the way she read her hometown library’s entire collection of Regency romance, fell in love with the works of Jane Austen and discovered in Patrick O’Brian’s and Bernard Cornwell’s novels another side of the opening decades of the nineteenth century. When she started to write again as an adult, she knew exactly where she wanted to set her books. Her writing has come a long way from her youthful efforts, but she
still
gives her heroines great hair.

Susanna grew up in rural Alabama. After high school she left home for the University of Pennsylvania and has been a city girl ever since. She worked in England for a year after college, using her days off to explore history, from ancient stone circles to Jane Austen’s Bath.

Susanna lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and daughter. When not writing or reading, she goes to baseball games, sings alto in a local choir and watches cooking competition shows. Please stop by and visit her at www.susannafraser.com, get to know her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/authorsusannafraser and follow her on Twitter at @susannafraser.