The Stanhope Challenge - Regency Quartet - Four Regency Romances (8 page)

“Hurry,” she told him. “We must talk about how I’m to leave here without letting half of London know I spent the night. We don’t want any more rumors about us.”

“Right you are.”

As he turned on his heel, she tucked into a generous helping of coddled eggs, toast with marmalade, bacon and a Scottish banger. Stuffed, she poured herself a third cup of tea then rose to look out the window. Wondering why Ulmsly might have come calling on Adam, she realized with a start that this was Friday morning. And on each Friday, the
TellTale
was published.

She closed her eyes and counted backwards. Yes. The story that featured a man similar to Adam had appeared today in its fourth instalment.

She winced. In this one, her Lord S. took a mistress again, after living for weeks alone without his new wife. This was untrue of Adam of course, believing as she did his statement that he’d broken off his arrangement with his paramour. But her tormentor had demanded she give Lord S. loose morals. Clearly, Felice needed to end this story. End the series. Fulfill the hideous terms of her agreement with Adam’s foe. Seven installments. All meant to ruin him politically. She’d agreed initially because she’d needed to pay off her mortgage on the cottage in Kent, a debt that Wallace had incurred at dice. But weeks later, married to Adam, she had not required her little house any longer. She had offered it for sale. How could she have known things could turn so quickly in her favor?

Not in your favor if you don’t stop these stories!

She could not have predicted this reunion and definitely not this bliss with Adam. She must not ruin it. But how to end the series without causing more trouble? Howell promised to print a story about her indebtedness and claim they were her gambling debts. Not Wallace’s. The honorable member for Parliament from Bayton, Mr. Stanhope, was trying so hard to be reputable that he would not welcome any intimation that his new wife was a gambler. That was a piece of fiction through and through.

She clutched her stomach.
What if Ulmsly knows that I am Miss Proper? If he tells Adam, I am doomed.

The breakfast room door creaked open.

She spun.

The butler, a cool man of imperial bearing, did not look at her ball gown, thank god, but at some place beyond her left ear. “May I have Cook prepare more bacon and toast for you, Ma’am?”

“No, thank you. Excuse me, what is your name?”

“Roberts, Ma’am.”

“Thank you, Roberts. I am quite pleased with breakfast. Do give my compliments to the cook.”

He took the opportunity to look into her eyes. Whatever he saw, he did not register in his expression. “Will that be all, my lady?”

She was returning, wasn’t she? As Adam’s wife. With full privileges and duties here to run this household. “Yes, Roberts. Good morning,” she bid him, authority in her tone.

As he left, Adam returned. His face was somber, the lines around his mouth etched with concern.

“Did you finish?” he asked her, his gloom dissolving as he came to put his arm around her and hug her close. “Sorry, darling. Couldn’t be helped. Ulsmly demands his prerogatives.”

“I’m certain.”

“Come sit with me and talk while I finish my breakfast.” He took her hand and led her to her chair. A light came to his dark eyes. “Did you replenish your energy?”

“I think I did,” she said, believing it to be true. “Enormous amounts of it, too.”

He took a bit of toast into his mouth. “Mmm.
Chi
.”

“What?”

“Energy you need. What anyone needs. The Mandarin word for it is
chi.
One must have tons of it to enjoy good sex.”

Her cheeks flamed.

He gave her a lopsided grin. “After all we’ve done, you blush so red you match your gown?”

“Pray, good man. Give a woman an opportunity to become accustomed to such conversation,” she justified herself with a gay taunt.

He used his napkin, reached over and pulled her to his lap. “Don’t be shy.”

She flicked a button on his waist coast. “I’m not. It is just the light of day, you realize. And we are in the breakfast room.”

His fingers etched swirls on her thighs. “Anywhere you are is where I wish to have you.”

She met the challenge in his gaze. “Here?”

With one arm, he swept the breakfast dishes, cloth and all, toward the center of the long table. “Here.”

He nodded toward the edge. “Sit there.”

She hooted. “You cannot mean to do it now?”

He raised her chin. “Anytime. Do you doubt we can do it at this angle?”

She threw back her head to laugh. “I do not doubt you can do it backwards!”

“Mmm.” He nodded. “That I will show you this evening.” He helped her slide back on the polished wood.

“You are a satyr.”

At that, he paused for a moment, definitely unhappy with the pronouncement. But then he leaned forward to thumb her nipples and reach inside her bodice to bring forth one breast then the other.

She looked down at herself. A total wanton. Scandalous Miss Proper.

A smile played about his mouth while he gathered up her hem and lifted it above her thighs.

“I want to see you prepare yourself for me. As I taught you last night.”

She was drawn, mesmerized, thrilled to obey him. She touched her nipples, stroked them, pinched them. She sent them over the wrinkled froth of her gown and down to the pouf of her pussy. Her pussy. Adam’s term for her nether hair, decadent, delicious. She combed her fingers through it. Stroked it. Tugged it. The friction made her moan in need and cry out for him.

“More,” he told her in a guttural sound. He opened the placket of his breeches, grasping his rigid cock and caressing it, thumbing moisture from his hard red tip. “Show me that you are eager for me, pet.”

“I am,” she cried, as she parted her folds.

“A flowing fountain.” He smiled into her eyes, his own dark with wicked lust. “See how well we fit together here.” He inserted his shaft inside her, halted then pulled out.

She objected.

He ground his teeth. “I know, my sweet. But anticipation is so good for you.”

“You will drive me to Bedlam.”

He kissed her like a madman. “I intend to go with you.” He entered her again and held, forging a rhythm that had him enter, hold and retreat. Enter, hold. Retreat. Enter, hold. Retreat. “This is Two Seagulls Soaring.”

Two lovers dancing, meeting, fucking. “I understand,” she said with difficulty as he continued, seemingly disciplined as a monk, save for the perspiration on his brow.

“We will go to my aunt’s,” he said on
hold.

“No,” she objected on
retreat
.

“We return here,” he said and held.

“Why?” she asked in retreat.

He smiled. “To move your belongings into the bedroom suite adjacent to mine.”

“Oh,” she gasped on
retreat
.

“Fear not,” he told her when he
entered
. “You sleep with me.”

“Not separately,” she demanded on
hold
.

“Never,” he said on
retreat
. “I have more to teach you.”

She was incredulous. Her gaze danced over his features. “You know
more
positions?”

“A multitude,” he exaggerated with wide-eyed lechery.

She giggled. “I am yours. But you must go faster.”

“I cannot,” he confessed on a stunning
enter
.

“You’d better,” she threatened. “Or I’m…um…what do you call it…rejoicing without you!”

“Well, then, if you must do it now?” He rocked her in a faster tempo that shifted the table and made them both laugh.

“I believe I really, really…
must
!”

Afterward, they pondered what the servants must think of the master of the house who had just brought his new wife home more than five months past their wedding and had claimed her in the dining room for more than an hour. What’s more, they had set the china clattering and the table legs groaning to their uproarious shouts and ribald laughter at eleven in the morning.

Each day, Felice discovered new satisfactions to being Adam’s wife.

His servants accepted her as their mistress without incident or comment.

His Aunt Amaryllis was the first to call on Felice a week after she’d moved into his townhouse. Days later, the grand old lady brought two of her best friends, dowagers of the first water whose acceptance was needed for any woman in society to make a place for herself.

Other scions of the town soon followed. Lady Ulmsly, featherbrained but forthright, presented her card. Clarice, Adam’s half–sister, came praising two new male staff secured for her by her late husband. Two of Clarice’s friends, fashionable women who admired Felice’s short hair and
au courant
style, arrived to coo over Felice’s newly married state.

Adam brought his son, Georgie, down from the family estate in Gloucester. The little boy was a tow–haired giggling child of two who, nonetheless, did not run to Felice’s arms immediately. She did not balk at that. Still she hoped to show him affection and have it returned. She read fairytales to him at night, played blocks with him in the nursery and, thus, gave him time to discover that she was as devoted to him as she was to his enthralling father.

Her days with Adam were a blur of political discussions, luncheons for him and his colleagues and social obligations that often took him out without her. Increasingly disturbed by the
TellTale’s
assertions of his infidelity to her and to his party, Adam complained how his colleagues now questioned his motives and his objectives. His speeches to the floor were met with catcalls and demands he sit and be quiet. Not all came from the opposition.

“Shall we host a dinner party?” she asked him one morning at breakfast. “We will invite your colleagues.”

Adam remained reluctant. “The conversation might turn to taking me to Tyburn Hill to hang me.”

“What better way to cool their heads than to show that you are not averse to private discussions,” she persuaded him.

Seeking a remedy for his ills, Felice castigated herself for Adam’s troubles. Miss Proper continued to tear his reputation to shreds. This was not because Felice wrote such hideous things, but because whatever she presented to Howell, he edited to make more damning. He would even do it in front of her. Torturing her, he would greet her in the office that had once been her father’s. Howell would read her words—and change the type as it was set, transforming Adam into a lecherous, debased gambler and womanizer. Then he would criticize his politics in scurrilous asides.

Felice objected to Howell’s actions vociferously but had no power to make his employee, the kindly old typesetter, remove the defamatory words. Though the man who had once been her father’s right arm gazed at her sympathetically, Bill Bundy would not argue with his current employer. “A man has to eat, don’t he, sweet Fee?”

Determined to save what she could of Adam’s reputation, she had gone to the Fleet Street offices yesterday in high dudgeon. Bundy looked on as she faced Howell.

“Only two more.” She held her chin high, summoning the actress in her and coupling it with her anger. “Then we are done.”

She had vowed she would forever after cut him cold. Ruin him somehow as he was ruining Adam. Never would she forgive him for how he had abused her and her husband. Taking the premise of a private loan and making a wife betray her husband. For what? To ruin a man’s political ambitions? To win a political point or two?

But at the root of this problem was her own disloyalty to Adam. And she had not the courage to reveal it. From their wedding day, he had emphasized truth in their relationship—and she had violated it. Though she had discounted the Stanhope family curse as a hoax, she had only contributed to the possibility that her own happy marriage was headed for disaster.

****

“Shall I help you with that?” she asked Adam the night of their party. “You are all thumbs with this cravat.”

“Style!” he complained and let her fiddle with the damned thing. His gaze travelled her chemise and stockings, a twinkle bringing a smile to her lips. “Do you have a new gown for this evening?”

“I do. I wanted to feel very special for my first dinner party as the wife of the MP from Bayton.”

He drew her close. His lips brushed the shell of her ear, causing her a delicious shiver. “You are special to me. More so each day.”

She cupped his cheek and he dropped a kiss into the center of her palm. “The feeling is mutual.”

“Georgie comes ‘round, too.” He winked at her. “You charm him as you do me.”

She grinned, gratified the boy had begun to accept her. “He’s a sweet child, easy to love. We’ll do well together, darling. You wait and see.”

“Wes liked you. Said so before he returned to Spain. And Jack tells me he admires you immensely. Always did.”

“Ha! Really? Lift your chin. There. So, ‘Difficult’ can accept me as a Stanhope wife,” she joked about his oldest brother. “Extraordinary!”

“He especially likes your figure!” Adam ogled her décolleté. “If only he could see you now!”

She rolled her eyes at him. “You both are scandalous men to discuss my form.”

“I like your voluptuous curves!” Adam took a fast hard kiss. “Hurry with this tie, madam, or I fear our guests will find us unforgivably late!”

“A tempting idea.” She eyed him, a naughty idea in her mind. “For later! Let’s get your coat.”

As she presented it for him, he turned his back. “About tonight, do me a favor?”

“Anything.”

No discussion tonight of salt and flour supplies for the troops in the Peninsula. Help me steer them from that, will you?”

“Of course. What seems to be the issue?”

“On the floor yesterday, Howell accused me of miscalculating what we need.”

Howell. The scoundrel. “Too little?”

“Too soon,” he told her.

“Do any of our guests tonight feel the same?”

“I am not certain yet. I want to listen and learn.” Adam pulled at his coat cuffs and brushed away a speck of lint. “I worry about the increasing virulence of my opponents.”