Midnight Pleasures (32 page)

She pressed even closer, and when Patrick’s hand left her head and started a seductive caress up her leg she made no protest. Her eyes stayed shut and her head fell back as he whispered something down her neck, a tongue like liquid fire pausing at the base of her throat.

And then his hand stopped. Sophie’s eyes flew open. Was he horrified? Somehow she found that without even noticing, she had been moved and was now half lying on Patrick’s desk, crushing a pile of papers under her. Her husband was leaning over her, his white shirt falling open in front—had she undone his collar?—showing muscles almost hidden in a mist of black curling hair. Irresistibly Sophie spread her hand flat on his chest, her fingers delicately rolling over the muscled ridges, curling in the tangles of chest hair.

Patrick looked down at his wife thoughtfully as his hand continued its caress. Where was the small ruffled band under which he normally slipped his fingers?

Sophie tipped back her head again, another small cry erupting from her as he continued his languid dance.

“No drawers?”

Sophie gulped and opened her eyes, staring at him half blinded. How could he sound so calm while he … he … Her body involuntarily twisted under his hand.

“No.” Her voice quavered.

“Why not?” Patrick prided himself on his reasonable tone. Of course he knew why not. Today was Thursday; today was Braddon’s day. Bloody hell, Sophie probably never wore drawers on Thursday. His hand stilled again, and something about the fierce silence which descended on the room made Sophie suddenly alert, like a fawn that hears a strange noise approaching, the unknown but dangerous sound of belling hounds. She gulped.

Patrick stared down at his wife, his beautiful wife. His!
His, his, his:
The word pounded against his ears, a drumbeat in his blood, a fire in his veins. Not
his
.

His wife sat up and wound her arms around his waist, hiding her face as her lips skimmed the hard ridges of his chest.

“When I was still in the nursery, I heard my nurse talking to one of the maids who was about to be married. I wasn’t supposed to be listening, but I was. And my nurse told her that if she wanted to … to enchant her husband, she should sometimes neglect to put on her undergarments.”

Her voice dropped even lower. “So this morning, well, you probably don’t remember it, but in the middle of the night you were caressing me. You were asleep,” she added hastily. “Anyway, this morning I thought I would neglect my drawers, but then of course Simone was dressing me and I
couldn’t
not put them on.”

Patrick was painfully aware of Sophie’s soft lips moving over his chest, punctuating her breathless words with kisses, her breath tickling his hair.

“So I waited until she went downstairs,” Sophie continued, “and then I took my drawers off and I folded them exactly as she does, and I replaced them in the drawer. So that she wouldn’t know,” Sophie added reasonably. “But during luncheon I remembered that Simone almost always undresses me at night, and what would she think if I had somehow lost my drawers?”

Patrick felt a rush of feeling wash down his spine, a glorious relaxation of tension. This was his own silly Sophie. She was French enough to wear drawers in the first place—they were still considered fast by many Englishwomen—but she was English enough to quail at her maid’s reaction if she left them off.

“So,” Sophie’s voice was very breathless now, “so I came in to see what you were doing—”

Her voice broke off as Patrick pulled her sweet bottom up toward him, her legs instinctively going around his hips. He walked in three huge strides to the divan and put her down, going on his knees next to his startled wife. A soundless joy had grasped him, a yearning, delicious longing for possession of
his
wife’s body.

“Patrick!”

Patrick didn’t answer, just looked down at Sophie, his devil-black eyes laughing. Then he swooped down and pressed each eye closed with a kiss, at the same time as his hand pushed her gown up to her waist.

She was swollen, sweetly soft, softer than anything he’d ever felt before, and every touch of his was met by a gasping, pleading breath. Patrick grinned, deliberately taming the raging fire that threatened to take over his body.
His
lady wife waltzed in here without drawers … he’d be damned if he’d let the moment pass too quickly.

He turned the key in the door, and wrenched off his clothing. Then he eased his weight on top of Sophie, but that was all … he teased her, and teased her, enjoying the whimpering cries, and then the moment when her eyes snapped open and she said fiercely, “Patrick!”

He bent his head and ran a lazy tongue over Sophie’s lips, enticing her mouth to open, rubbing himself against her at the same time, carefully avoiding the arching demand of her hips.

But suddenly, with a sharp twist, Sophie slipped out from under him. Small, determined hands pushed him over and down on his back on the wide divan.

His wife’s eyes were shining with a mischievous gleam that matched Patrick’s own. Their eyes found each other’s, each bright with laughter and desire, daring the other to protest. Sophie perched herself on top of Patrick, pressing his shoulders to the velvet surface of the sofa with her palms.

“Now we’ll see how you like it,” she whispered against his mouth, her breath sweetly falling on his lips. She wriggled against him with a movement perhaps more inexperienced than seductive, but it was fire to Patrick. He gasped involuntarily, and Sophie grinned.

She wriggled farther down Patrick’s body, enjoying the feeling of her breasts against his hair-roughed chest. Her lips found his nipples and she imitated what he did to her, blissfully tracking his rough breathing and the feeling of his racing heart under her fingertips.

Then she tipped herself off the couch, her gown falling down over her bare bottom with a silky swish. Every nerve in her body was alive, demanding. Sophie bit her lip, schooling herself to patience. She took him in her hands, giving him a butterfly kiss.

“Sophie!” Patrick’s voice had an agonized roughness that she had never heard before. She grew bolder, ignoring the fact that his hands were straying over her body and had somehow yanked up her dress again, even while she knelt on the floor. Tentatively she flicked him with a small pink tongue, opened her mouth and caressed him.

A ragged moan rewarded her.

So she gave him a little nip, just the sort of small bite he seemed to love when she kissed his nipples. But the response was not a moan, but a yelp.

“Sophie!”

Patrick rolled off the couch so fast that Sophie didn’t know what was happening. In one second she was flat on her back on the thick carpet, her dress swept to her waist and her legs instinctively clenching Patrick’s waist as the lovers came together in a great primal, beating dance. Sophie’s broken cries drifted into the room, punctuated by Patrick’s harsh breathing groans.

“Oh God, Sophie, Sophie,” Patrick shouted. She strained up toward him, catching at bliss as every nerve in her body lit and burst into fire.

The silence which followed was not at all like the silence before Sophie had entered the library, Patrick thought. He rolled over, pulling Sophie onto his chest. She was still breathing in tiny pants, her body shaken by slight tremors.

“Patrick?”

“Hmm?”

“Did you dislike it when I, uh, bit you?”

“Yes,” Patrick said firmly. He settled her more carefully into the crook of his arm. “We’ll practice.” His tone was resonant with anticipation.

“I have something to confess,” Sophie whispered. “I wasn’t entirely honest with you.”

Patrick listened lazily to his wife’s sweet voice, hardly paying attention.

“I didn’t interrupt you only because I realized that I … I had to resolve the problem with my drawers. I wanted to enchant you. It was all I could think about this morning.”

Patrick didn’t answer. His arm pulled her tighter, crushing her small sweetness against his chest. Oh God, what a wonderful thing it was to have a wife, to make love to one’s wife on the loading bills, and on the couch, and on the library floor. To have a wife who
thought
all morning.

It wasn’t until much later that afternoon that a thought of his own strayed into Patrick’s mind. Without even noticing it consciously, he was replaying the moment when he pulled Sophie’s loose dress to her waist. It almost made him groan just to think about the way her breasts overflowed in his hands, their rounded plumpness begging for kisses.

They’ve grown, he thought. Sophie’s breasts have grown. From caresses? Slowly the thought trickled into the rational part of Patrick’s brain. The truth was likely a good deal less romantic.

Patrick’s back suddenly grew rigid. The image of Sophie’s curvaceous body entered his mind. Unconsciously he stood up, and desperately counted in his head. The night he first went to her room—Jesus, when was that? Over three months ago.

He was an idiot, an outrageously stupid idiot. He had protected women from pregnancy hither and yon … women he didn’t give a toss about. And now, when he had found a woman whom he loved—why not admit it? He loved her, loved Sophie, with all his soul and heart. Now he had her, and he was wooing her, and it was working, he knew it was working…. He deliberately, stupidly, had put her in the greatest danger a woman could face.

“Idiot! Idiot!” Patrick didn’t even realize that he was howling, face up to the elaborate whorls of plaster ornamenting the ceiling.

In the back of his mind, Patrick had meant to talk Sophie out of the idea of having a child. She was too small, too petite, the lovely woman he’d taken to wife. In his mind’s eye he could see her slender hips, her waist, so small that he used to be able to span it with both hands. How could he be so witless? All the evidence was there.

She would never survive a birth. Look at his sister-in-law. Charlotte was much taller than Sophie, and she had almost died. Hell, compared to Sophie she was an Amazon. His mother … Even the Indian woman he had seen die in childbirth had been larger than Sophie.

He came bellowing into Sophie’s bedchamber. “Sophie! Sophie!”

She looked up hopefully as her husband thrust open the door. After having lost her Turkish grammar to the waves, Sophie was still adhering to her self-imposed ban on languages. Unfortunately, except for when she visited Madeleine, her days were painfully dull. She talked to the housekeeper or went shopping. Given that the season wasn’t in full swing, many of her friends were still in the country.

At the moment she was reading through the plays of Ben Jonson, in a rather haphazard fashion. She couldn’t make head or tail of the old-fashioned dialogue. In fact, Sophie admitted to herself, I’m no scholar. I have only one skill, for languages.

Patrick crossed the room in one bound and dropped to his haunches next to her chair. “Listen to me, Sophie! I climbed the ladder to your room
three and one half months ago
! Have you—did you—bleed during that time?”

“Has it been that long?” Sophie hadn’t figured out the likely dates.

Patrick’s face softened. “Yes, it has,” he replied. “I’m afraid, Sophie, that unless you are a very irregular sort of female, we are expecting a child.”

“It’s odd, isn’t it?” Sophie said rather dreamily. “It doesn’t seem possible. Why, we haven’t been married nearly long enough.”

“There’s no
enough
,” Patrick said. “One day is enough.”

“That’s not true!” Sophie retorted. “Why, my mama told me …” But then she fell silent, remembering the talk of maids who undoubtedly knew more of the practicalities of conception than did her poor mama.

Patrick misunderstood her silence. “Some women have trouble conceiving. Perhaps your mother is one of those sort, and that is why you are an only child. I’m sure your parents have tried to have another child, given that titles pass only to males.”

He straightened up and walked restlessly to the window, looking out.

Sophie contemplated her parents’ separate—extremely separate—bedrooms in silence. It felt like betrayal to blurt out the truth.

The room fell into stillness. Sophie’s mind was racing. She had delayed telling Patrick about the baby. Their recent happiness seemed so fragile that she hadn’t wanted to disturb it. And yet a corner of her mind blossomed with pure joy every time she thought of the babe. It
was
time that her husband knew he was expecting a child.

A tiny bit of that joy withered when she turned her head and caught a glimpse of her husband’s face.

He looked about as happy as a cat thrown into puddle water. His face was rigid, his eyes angry.

“What’s the matter?” Sophie steadied her voice just before it trembled.

Patrick looked at her almost as if he didn’t see her. When he finally spoke, his voice was cold and distant. “I told you before, Sophie, I’m not the sort of man who howls with joy to hear that he has procreated. I’ve always been damn careful before this point to make sure it didn’t happen!”

“But we’re married!”

“What excuse is that?”

“I thought we agreed to have one child,” Sophie said warily.

“We did,” Patrick snapped. He knew he was behaving like an ass, but he couldn’t stop himself. From the moment the knowledge sank into his mind, he had been paralyzed with fear. Why, why didn’t he control the whole situation better? Why on earth had he blithely deserted the habits of a lifetime and made love in such a feckless and stupid fashion?

“Then why are you so angry?” Sophie was completely baffled.

“I’m angry at myself,” he said, and then added irrationally, “Damme, Sophie, you must be as fertile as a rabbit!”

Sophie turned white. “That’s a cruel thing to say,” she said slowly, her eyes searching his face.

Patrick turned around and stared out the window again. “Let’s just leave it, shall we? I see no reason to discuss the situation further. The die is cast.”

Sophie nodded, but Patrick didn’t see her. She felt as if she were speaking through a sheet of ice. “In that case,” she observed, walking over and pulling the bell rope, “I shall call Simone. It’s time for my bath.”