Midnight Pleasures (22 page)

It wasn’t until long after the
Lark
was dark and quiet, with no one awake but the first mate at the wheel, that Patrick and Sophie slipped out of the cabin and made their way to the kitchen.

They found asparagus soup waiting in its tureen; even better, they found champagne floating in a pool of melted ice. The dinner buns had gone hard, but that was all right. They sat side by side on the kitchen table (it was too bothersome to remove the chairs from their nighttime position strapped to the wall). They drank the soup and dunked the hard dinner rolls into champagne.

They sat so close that their legs pressed together and Sophie’s hair, falling in unruly waves down her back, brushed Patrick’s shoulder.

It was a feast fit for the gods.

Chapter 15

I
won’t do it, Braddon. I won’t do it.” Back in London, the Earl of Slaslow was employed in the task that had obsessed him since the
Lark
left its moorings, two weeks previously. He was pleading with Madeleine.

“What on earth will it hurt to try, sweetheart?”

Madeleine didn’t even look up from where she was sweeping a curry brush over Gracie’s round, hard sides. “It’s not proper. You are asking me to lie.” Her mouth was set in as firm and stubborn a line as Braddon’s family had ever seen on his face.

He rolled his eyes, not for the first time. “Don’t you see that it’s a small lie in service of the greater good?”

“The greater what?” Madeleine’s French accent became more marked when she couldn’t understand something.

“The greater good,” he repeated lamely. “It’s a phrase that means … well, that it’s all right to do a small wrong in order to obtain a larger right.”

“That’s not what French philosophers say,” she snapped. “Monsieur Rousseau says that
les bons sauvages
, those who are truly innocent, do only good.”

Braddon dismissed the alarming signs of learning that Madeleine liked to throw at his head in moments of tension. He dared to reach out and stroke her cheek. Lately she had been like a tyrant and wouldn’t even let him kiss her. At the moment, for instance, she had edged around the stall so that Gracie’s bulk stood between them.

“Please, Maddie. Please. I want you to be my countess,” Braddon whispered. “I want you to have my children. I don’t want to leave your house at night and return to mine. I want you to live in my house. Don’t you see, I want you to be my wife, not my mistress!”

“You can’t have everything you want,” Madeleine muttered, but her face was softening. Braddon could see it. And her hand wasn’t moving as briskly over Gracie’s side.

He looked at the neck of Madeleine’s starched white fichu and gulped. He longed to plunder the sweet flesh that flirted modestly behind her lace scarf.

“Only for three weeks, Maddie. In three weeks I can meet you at a ball, be swept off my feet, and we can marry by special license, the way Sophie and Patrick did. After we’re married, no one will think twice about your past. You will be the Countess of Slaslow, and no one questions a countess.”

For the first time, Madeleine looked torn, rather than adamantly set against the idea.

“I wouldn’t be able to do it,” she muttered, leaning her forehead against Gracie’s warm belly. “I am not an aristocrat, Braddon. I’m only a simple horse trainer’s daughter.”

He scoffed. He could smell victory. “Since when do simple horse trainers quote Rousseau and Diderot? Your father owns more books than he does saddles!”

Madeleine raised her head and looked straight into his eyes. “I am educated, Braddon; I can read. But that doesn’t make me a lady. What do I know about dancing and, and all those other things ladies can do? I know how to splint a foreleg, but I don’t even know how to embroider!”

Braddon scowled fiercely, ducking under Gracie’s neck and forcing his large body into the space at the back of the stall, next to Madeleine. “Don’t talk about yourself that way, Madeleine! You are more of a lady than most women I know. That embroidery business is all poppycock. My sisters couldn’t do it worth a fig. My mother wailed about it endlessly. None of ‘em learned to play the spinet or the harp, and Lord knows they’re terrible singers. That’s not what makes you a lady.”

Madeleine looked at him imploringly. “You simply don’t understand, Braddon. What about my clothing? I don’t have the right gowns, and Lady Sophie is so elegant.” She had read about Sophie in
The Morning Post
, which always carefully detailed where she had been, with whom, and, sometimes, what she was wearing. The very idea of meeting her was terrifying, let alone the idea of Lady Sophie teaching
her
how to be a lady.

“Sophie will take care of all that,” Braddon said carelessly. “I’ll give her some blunt so she can pick up a few dresses for you.” He was deeply enjoying the fact that Gracie’s huge bulk was pressing his body against Madeleine’s.

“Oh, this is impossible!” Madeleine cried in a passion, pounding her fists against Gracie’s back. Gracie snorted in surprise and turned her head to see what was happening. Then she backstepped a bit to get away from the annoying sensation. Braddon almost groaned as Gracie pushed his body even more firmly against Madeleine’s.

“What are you doing?”

She sounds really furious now, Braddon thought muzzily.

“Get away from me! I can feel you … you … you reprobate!”

In response, Braddon wound his arms around her. “I love you, Maddie,” he said, his voice husky. “I love you. I want you. Please, darling, do this for me so that we can be married.”

“No,” she said stubbornly, edging her hips away. Braddon was pressed against her in an utterly inappropriate fashion.

“Then I’ll marry you anyway,” he said with quiet determination. “It doesn’t matter to me, Maddie. I’ll marry you and we’ll go live in Scotland—or in America. I don’t care, as long as I’m with you.”

Madeleine gasped. “You can’t mean it. You’re an earl. You would be cast out.”

He tightened his arms around her. “I mean it,” he said. He rubbed his cheek against her sweet-smelling hair. “I won’t marry anyone but you, and if you don’t wish to pretend to be a French aristocrat, then I shall marry you as you are.”

“Your family will never speak to you again!” Madeleine was horrified.

“I never liked my family much,” he said without hesitation.

“Your mother!”

Braddon sounded happy now. “I won’t miss her.”

“No, no, no,” Madeleine cried, her French accent thickening. “I cannot allow you to make such a sacrifice.”

“No sacrifice,” he muttered. She seemed to not have noticed that he was holding her so tightly that he could feel every curve of her body. “Nothing to worry about, Maddie. Our son will still inherit the title.”

“But … but he’ll be an outcast!”

Braddon shrugged. “Perhaps by then the
ton
will have forgotten. Anyway, who cares? There’s aeons of time between then and now.”

Madeleine frowned. Her practical French soul was incapable of dismissing the future the way Braddon could. Go live in America? Was he crazed? Everyone knew that America was a vast wilderness, inhabited only by criminals and savage Indians. Rousseau was all very well in the pages of a book, but she doubted that American
sauvages
innocently longed to do nothing but good.

“No,” she said. “If there is a chance that our son could be born with the approval of society, then we must try to do that. Even if it involves lies, and learning how to be a lady.”

Braddon responded by capturing her mouth and muttering love words against her lips. But just when he was sinking mindlessly into the kiss, Madeleine erupted into speech again.

“Oh no! We forgot my papa! He will never agree to your wild scheme.”

“Perhaps you’re right.” Braddon rubbed his hands up and down her back in a comforting manner, hoping that Madeleine wouldn’t notice how his hands trailed over the delicious rise of her bottom. “Let’s get married tonight, Madeleine. The scheme will never work. We’ll go to the border.”

Madeleine twitched herself away from his straying hands and frowned, an adorable line appearing between her brows. “You
are
a reprobate,” she snapped. “Lord only knows why I want to marry you.”

Braddon snatched her up the minute the words left her mouth. “You do? You will? You want to marry me? Oh Maddie …” He bent his head and ravaged her mouth.

Madeleine shivered as a wave of heat rose from her knees to her breast. He might not be the brightest in the world, her Braddon, but there was something about his kisses that turned her into a puddle of jelly.

As the
Lark
headed to its first port of call on the Welsh coast, Sophie and Patrick were sitting on the deck, enjoying a bout of unusually temperate afternoon sunshine. Sophie was soundly beating her husband at backgammon.

“It’s not fair,” Patrick said moodily. “You’ve no strategy at all, other than throwing those bloody doubles every other turn.”

Sophie smiled as she gleefully scooped up two of his pieces, sending them back to the beginning.

“My grandfather used to say it was my only skill at board games.”

Patrick cast her an unwilling look of admiration. “I wouldn’t say you’re a peagoose at the chessboard, m’dear.”

“Pooh! You’ve beaten me two out of three times.”

“Yes, but normally I can’t be beat
at all
,” Patrick pointed out. “And never before by a female,” he added, with just a trifle of an edge in his voice.

“Dear Patrick. It quite wrings my heart to see how much you are suffering.”

Patrick bared his teeth at her. “You’re a witch, wife. A witchy wife.”

Sophie delicately licked her lips. “Hmm … I wonder what spell I might cast on you?”

Despite himself Patrick leaned forward, a finger tracing the dainty outline of Sophie’s lips. “You have the most kissable lips in the world, witch.”

Her eyes glinting, Sophie touched his finger with her tongue and then drew the finger into the warm recesses of her mouth. “Perhaps you have cast a spell on me,” she whispered.

Patrick was just rising from his chair when an awkward cough sounded at his left ear.

“Excuse me, sir.” Captain Hibbert was standing, cap in hand, looking a bit worried. “I wonder if you’d cast your eye to the east and let me know what you think. Begging your pardon, madam.”

Sophie smiled at him. She liked the tongue-shy captain, with his clumsy manners and bashful looks.

“Please, Captain Hibbert, don’t let me interrupt your discussion,” she said, rising from her chair. “I was about to retire to my cabin.”

As Captain Hibbert bobbed an inept bow and turned back to his barometer, she cast Patrick a glance under her lashes. But Patrick was frowning off toward the east, where the sky had turned a streaky blue-green color.

“Is it a storm coming?”

“We call it a mackerel sky,” Patrick said, throwing an arm around Sophie’s shoulders and drawing her snug against his body. “See that dappling effect off to the right?”

“The rows of little clouds?”

“That’s it. Hibbert was right to interrupt us before we retired down to the cabin.” Patrick laughed as he saw Sophie’s cheeks gain a slight flush. “My wife might not have let me out of bed for hours,” he whispered.

Sophie didn’t say anything, just leaned her head against Patrick’s shoulder.

He gave her a reassuring squeeze. “There’s no need to worry. This boat can outsail any storm. Hibbert and I have outrun hurricanes, on occasion.” His blood raced with anticipation of the moment when the boat strained at every sinew, boards groaning and screaming, ropes flapping, the wind howling as they raced across the ocean. Fleeing in front of a gale was the only way to test a boat’s mettle. No boat went faster than when it was in the arms of a storm wind.

Suddenly he looked down at the soft curls nestled against his shoulder and rethought the idea.

“Not that we’re going to do anything of that nature today.”

Sophie looked up, startled. “Why not?”

He bent down and kissed her, lingeringly, on the lips. “Because you’re onboard.” His deep voice allowed no argument.

Sophie stared after her husband as he followed Captain Hibbert. Then she turned and wandered off to the main cabin.

She realized more and more why gentlemen left their wives at home when they went about their activities. Patrick had been throwing his boat before a gale, while she prided herself on the remarkable freedom of being allowed to learn Turkish.

With a sigh, Sophie pushed the thought away. Her nurse had always said that there was no point in getting vexed to death over things that couldn’t be changed.

Within an hour the
Lark
was nosing along the western coast of Wales, looking for a good place to draw in for the night.

“Aye, cap’n!” came a call from the lookout.

Patrick and Hibbert looked up from where they stood on the aft deck.