The Ravencliff Bride (42 page)

“The bullet didn’t kill him,” the doctor flashed. “It was the blow to the head that did it. That’s why he took so long to die. He hemorrhaged to death. Look at the body.” He threw off the counterpane. “The pistol ball is lodged in his hip, hardly a mortal wound. That’s twice my lady’s saved your life, my lord. I think it’s safe to say you owe her that life now . . . and all her heart’s desires.”

Nicholas folded Sara closer in his arms and she met the promise in his hooded gaze with breath suspended.

“Forever,” he murmured, sealing the vow with a lingering kiss, soulful and deep.

Sara’s heart quickened. Something was different, and she surrendered to the silken fire it ignited at her very core. It was a provocative foretaste of what was to come.

Spring came soft with rain again along the coast. Sara lay cocooned in her husband’s strong arms, listening to the ebb and flow of the sea on the strand below in the darkness before dawn. It was hard to believe nearly a year had passed since the post chaise carried her up the treacherous incline to Ravencliff. So much had happened since.

She no longer occupied the tapestry suite. Now, her rooms were situated on the newly renovated third floor, nearby the master suite, in apartments once occupied by Nicholas’s mother. Adjoining was a bright and cheerful chamber that had served as Nicholas’s nursery. Another baby occupied it now. Theodore Arthur Michael Pembroke Walraven, such a daunting name for a child only two months old. Sara smiled each time she thought of it. They called him Ted, a beautiful boy, with hair as black as a raven’s wing and eyes the color of blue seawater.

Nicholas reached for her breast. His lips were warm on hers. It was a brief, tantalizing kiss that promised so much more. He pulled her closer still, nuzzling against the hollow of her throat.

“You have given me happiness beyond belief,” he murmured. “Beyond imagining.”

“Not without a struggle,” she murmured, through a playful chuckle, and a hug to match.

“We still don’t know,” Nicholas said, clouding up. “And we won’t until he reaches puberty. . . .”

Sara laid a finger over his lips. “If needs must, we will deal with it together . . . and so will he, just as you have done, my love,” she said. “But there is one thing . . .”

“Yes?”

“Isn’t it time you introduced our son to Nero?” she said. “Either way, he needs to get to know him, don’t you think? And I miss him so.”

Nicholas laughed. “I still think you love that scruffy old wolf more than you love me,” he complained.

Sara smiled. “I think I did love him first . . . because of your stubbornness,” she said. “But you should be flattered that I fell in love with a part of you that all else shunned. I want our son to fall in love with that part also.”

“And so he shall,” said Nicholas. “But not tonight. There is so little left of it.” He reached for her breast again, and the lips that took hers now were hungry, searching, drawing her closer to the promise of ecstasy.

Sara opened to him happily. Then she took him deep inside her, riding the white-hot surges that sparked and flared and flamed between them . . . and that always would.