The Wedding Night (18 page)

It didn't matter that the people of Glad Heath counted Rushford among their saints. And it mattered even less that Mairey herself had seen too much saintliness in the man this past day.

He could pay each of his miners a thousand-pound wage every year; he could build stately town houses for each of their wives; send their sons to Oxford; marry their daughters off to members of the peerage. But he couldn't bring back the mountain or the woodlands, nor could he restore the streams that had once bubbled up from the springs. And he would never, ever have the chance to do to her village what he and his like had done to Glad Heath.

Agile and sure of himself, Jack moved along the tidy, down-sloping passage with its low ceilings and shadows. He stopped at a short tunnel dug into the stone. It had a hole at the end that emptied into blackness.

"Back there is where we broke through into the
Shalecross
. We had to cut another, quicker passage. There wouldn't have been enough clean air to last the other way."

"You did all this today?" All the digging and the timbering, as single-minded as ants.

"It took six of us twelve hours, but we managed." He took the lantern and her hand and led her to the end of the rescue passage.

His palm was torn and rough, and she turned it up to the wavering light. Blisters, broken and bleeding and needing care.

"You helped them dig?"

"When I could. I'm not as young as I used to be, and I'm out of shape."

Hardly. He was huge; had shoulders like a… Of course! No wonder he was so broadly muscled.

"You were a coal miner!"

"Like my father." He hung the lantern on a peg above her head. "I started when I was eight, holding open the ventilation doors. I was big for my age, so I was picking coal by the time I was eleven. I worked Glad Heath until the night my father was killed."

He stood close, so very tall and overwhelming. Her metal cap clunked against the thick post behind her and the brim lifted off her forehead like a halo, leaving her to stare up into his breathlessly devilish grin.

"Where did you go then?"

"I emigrated." He flicked his own cap off his head, and it landed with a ringing racket. He stepped closer, still straddling her legs. "I left the country on the next tide, with the law on my tail."

"Jack, why?" The man was a maze of mysteries. The lantern above them planed his features in orange; the coal took the shadows and deepened them. But his eyes were sparkling like diamonds, and made her heart flip.

"Father's strike was illegal, and so was the riot that followed the murders." He threaded his fingers through her hair with tender care,
then
drew his thumb slowly across her lips, watching all the while, grinning a bit. "I was accused of setting fire to Lord Cahill's offices."

"Did you?"

The corners of his eyes crinkled; his laughter filled up her lungs. "Oh, yes, Mairey. With my father's name on my lips, I did it."

Her eyes pooled again with tears, but she snuffled them away. "Good."

"Yes. Good." They stood hip to hip, her belly to his groin. His erection was a wonder. So grandly different than her dusty old collection: hotly independent, compelling her to squirm, to do something with it.

"Ah, Mairey." He took forever bending to her mouth, touching his fingers to her lips. She rose up on her toes to be nearer, sooner. It wasn't wise to tempt a dragon, especially when one was deep in his den, miles from the sky and the green trees.

"Beautiful, Mairey."

"Jack, I—" Oh, bliss. Oh, gracious. He covered her mouth with his, possessed her absolutely, sweetly, and then with a hungry, diving groan that shot sparks to the ends of her fingers, to the center of her, where his never-
tobe
-conceived children slept. Tears gathered in her throat, unshed and aching. His kiss was deep, his lips softly searing.

"Worth waiting for, Mairey." Her miner's cap clanged to the ground as he caught her up in his arms and gathered her against him.

"Yes, Jack." Her head spinning with stolen gladness, Mairey climbed deeper into his embrace, ground her hips against his hardness, wanting more of him, as much as she dared in this dark fairy tale of theirs. She kissed him rampantly, traced the planes of his midnight-bristled jaw,
brushed
her lips across the soft play of his eyelashes. He tasted of soap and fresh bread and a heart-stopping rescue.

He laughed suddenly, his smile as crooked and mussed as his spiky hair. "I've never in my life kissed a woman in a mine."

She liked that a lot. "You brought me all the way down here just to kiss me?"

"I wanted you alone, Mairey. Need you." Another kiss, slanting, slippery, sliding down the front of her bodice, blowing hot through the linen. He shaped his hands beneath her breasts, grazed his thumbs across her nipples, sending a deliciously feverish clenching to the joining of her thighs. "I want you thoroughly, Mairey. In every way I can imagine."

She didn't know what to say, because she could imagine so very much, all of it ending abruptly in heartbreak. He was trembling like the quaking of the earth when he enfolded her in his arms, a caress far more profound than the flesh that still ached for completion.

How simple it would have been to keep on hating him. But he'd taken that from her. He was a man who was doing his best at the only life he knew.

And he did it so admirably, with such easy grace. She'd survived his horrible mine. He'd kept her safe all the time, just as he'd promised.

What was it that he had said before he'd scooped her up and brought her spiraling down into his netherworld? That he would never send anyone into a mine shaft that wasn't safe enough for his own father…

Or for anyone he loved.

Oh, Jack!

Chapter 13

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M
airey was still breathless long after his kiss, long after he'd sent her back up into the light.

Glad Heath was celebrating, and Jack was their hero, though he stayed below, unmindful of the feasting in his name. The town put the mine to rights in eager shifts, having beaten back the devil this time.

And though Mairey looked for Jack all the rest of the day, she didn't find him again until late afternoon. He was leaning back against the lamppost near the pit, only standing because his legs were spread wide with his knees locked, his arms fallen heavily to his sides. His head was tipped back and his face glistened black in the sunlight.

She approached him quietly, thinking at first that he was asleep on his feet. But he coughed suddenly and so violently that he dropped to his knees and bent over, holding himself up on the flat of his hands.

She ran to him, uncertain what to do, whether he wanted her there or not. She put her hand on his back, soothed his shoulders.

"Ah, Mairey, that feels good," he said, sitting back on his haunches, reeling a little as he cast a sideways, squint-eyed glance at her. "Thank you," he said, with a blink that lasted so long she thought perhaps he'd gone to sleep.

"You're a mess."

"Messy business. But it's done for the moment." He crawled back up the post, planted his feet apart again, and put his hands on his thighs. "I have to be back to
London
tomorrow afternoon. Still need to stop at the
Strathfield
Works this evening."

"Not tonight, Jack. You need rest."

He waggled a finger at her, nearly cross-eyed with the effort. "There's none for the wicked, my dear."

The fool launched himself away from the post, looking drunk as he staggered down the bill.

"Jack! Wait!" Mairey caught him around his waist and nearly went down with him in the next step.

"Sorry, sweet," he said, righting them both, leaving her face-to-face with him as she anchored him with her hands round his waist. "You have a very lovely mouth, Miss Faelyn. Honeyed. I'd like to try it again."

She would like that, too. "Not now, Jack."

He must have read right though her evasion—his teeth showed white against his smile.

"To the train, then." He clamped his arm around her shoulder, as possessively as if he had done it all his life. Mairey finally managed to get him to the train, only to find the private compartment noisy with two of his engineers and a mound of paper.

He roused himself as though he'd come fresh from his morning ablutions, and he became the mining baron once again. Mairey fought sleep, but it came anyway,
druglike
in the rocking motion of the railcar, in the soothing rhythms of Jack's voice beside her.

She was dreaming of labyrinths and confusion, blackness and starlight. A soothing hand against her cheek. Warm, rugged,
a saltiness
against her lips.

"Come, Mairey." The voice was very nice, too. As nice as Jack's. "My beautiful Mairey."

He was shaking her awake, lifting her hair out of her face. "We're stopping here for the night."

"In
Strathfield
?" Mairey
raised
up to look out the window. The sun was gone, leaving only an orange burnish to the slate-roofed buildings. She'd been asleep for hours.

"I've already been there, and finished my business. We're in Dealing, at the junction." His face was cleaner, but she couldn't tell if those were deeply etched shadows or coal dust.

He had already arranged for two rooms in the railway inn, two steaming baths, and two dinners. Separate, alone.

"Sleep well, Mairey." He leaned toward her in the hallway, holding himself off her with his hands above her head.

His lingering, succulent, good-night kiss and nuzzling neck-nibbling turned to snoozing into her ear, his chin propped against her shoulder.

"Dear man."

Mairey kissed him lightly, which roused him enough to herd himself to his room through the adjoining door in hers. But not before he gave an overly detailed demonstration of the lock that could only be opened from
her
side of the door.

"Completely safe, madam," he said, blinking. Then he lifted one of his brows and strode through the doorway into his room, rattling the knob in reminder after he'd closed the door.

It was only after she was sitting in the tub that Mairey realized she hadn't bothered to turn the key on her side, that he could walk in at any moment—and that he wouldn't.

She scrubbed herself clean and washed her hair twice, to remove the
dinge
of coal that had collected in every pore. The water was heavenly, warm and drowsing, and she only left it when she caught herself falling asleep.

She tried to ignore Jack's sounds while she prepared for bed, but he consumed her senses. She heard his firm footfalls and the
thunk
of what could only have been his shoes—first one, and then after a very, very long time, the other. A door opening into the hallway, a stranger's voice and then Jack's, and then a flurry of footfalls and bathwater noises.

She listened to him even as she slipped under the covers, even as sleep tugged at her. She heard the splash of water,
then
he groaned like a tired mill wheel coming to rest.

A wife would have worked the kinks out of his shoulders, would knead his ropy muscles, and kiss him wherever he needed kissing…

Mairey woke with a nearby church bell chiming twelve. The doorframe into Jack's room was still limned in bright lamplight, as it had been when she had fallen asleep three hours before.

Odd. He'd been exhausted, ready to drop.

She padded to the door and put her ear against it, listening for a full minute before deciding to knock quietly.

"Jack?"

Silence. Utter silence. Not even the gentle saw of his snoring.

Perhaps he'd fallen asleep with the light on. Or he might have been dragged back to Glad Heath—his life in danger again! She opened the door a crack and peered in. A cold fireplace, an
unrumpled
four-poster, a writing table with a chair. But no sign of the man, no sign that he'd been there at all.

Her heart pounding in apprehension, Mairey opened the door fully and stepped inside, ready to fetch the proprietor of the inn.

Then she saw him, fast asleep in a long, low bathtub, breathing deeply.

"Oh, Jack."

Her view was straight on and breathtaking. The man's hard-muscled arms were hanging free of the tub, his legs inside, his knees propped against either edge. The soap was unused and sitting on the side table. He'd cradled his head on his shoulder and the back of the tub, the motion of his chest making soft ripples in the crystal clear, belly-deep water.

He was magnificent. Bewitching. He made her pulse hum in her ears.

"I can't very well leave you like this." He might drown, or freeze to death—he'd been in the water for hours. Even if he awoke and promised to bathe himself, she couldn't trust him not to fall asleep again.

She hurried back to her room and donned a robe and a pair of drawers for propriety's sake. Then she went downstairs to the kitchen and ordered two pails of hot water from the matronly cook, who frowned at the lateness of the request until Mairey pleaded monthly cramps and an aching back that was keeping her awake.

Wondering where she'd learned to lie so expertly, Mairey went back upstairs, rolled up her sleeves, then stepped into Jack's room to study the problem.

That problem being that Jackson Rushford was a man.

Dear
God,
was he a man in every way imaginable! Darkly curling hair lay in a fine sheen across his broad chest, and arrowed its way downward to a dark patch. His penis, his ever-so classically endowed penis, was as stunning and heart-stirring at rest as it surely would be fully … engaged.

Was that the word? No. But her thoughts weren't scholarly at the moment. They were tender and burning and made her hands ache to touch him.

Well, then: washing a large, exceedingly male body couldn't be that much different than washing
her own
. That wasn't quite correct. He wasn't at all like her, he was rock hard where she was soft, and she selfishly wanted to learn every inch of him. To be tender without him ever knowing—because Jack seemed to take his tenderness very seriously.

She answered the knock on her door and took the water pails from the sleepy kitchen girl, tipping her a shilling. Mairey waited for the girl's footsteps to pad away from the door before she carried a bucket into Jack's room and poured the hot water slowly into his bath. She watched him for signs of wakefulness, not sure what she'd do if—no, when he woke up.

But he only rubbed at his nose with both fists and then slid an inch deeper into the water, letting his arms come to rest across his hips, just beneath the surface.

Sighing with a shattering longing for her dragon, Mairey added more water until a mist rose off the surface and his skin began to
pinken
beneath the grime.

Where to begin this purloined venture? He would probably wake up bellowing about improprieties the moment she touched him. He'd been impossibly incensed about the phallus display, so she lay a towel across his groin, masking all that beautiful masculinity—as much for her own sake as for his delicate sensibilities. Then she soaped up a cloth and knelt beside him.

His hands. That's where she would start. Tautly
sinewed
, blistered and cracked from his labors, and outlined in coal, they had taken the worst damage today, and had wrought such miracles in his life.

Mairey slid his palm across hers, soapy and warm and so very intimate. She caressed the length of his thumb, and he made one of his rumbling sounds very, very deep in his chest.

She was making a careful study of a ragged scar that ran like an extra heart line across the heel of his hand when she noticed that his breathing had gone from deep and untroubled to utterly still.

Immediately wary of what she might find at the other end of all that stillness, Mairey lifted her gaze up the long length of him, from the now-floating towel and his narrow waist, over the muscled ridges of his chest, to a pair of dark eyes that glittered dangerously from beneath a thunderous brow.

"Jack. You're awake." Hushed with guilt as much as with desire, Mairey tried to rise and back away, but he captured her hand with a fluid motion and didn't seem the least bit interested in letting go.

He crooked her closer with a flex of his arm. Nose to nose.

"No, madam, I couldn't possibly be awake. Else there wouldn't be a beautiful woman lounging at my
bathside
, scrubbing me."

With that, he reached over the side of the tub and hoisted
Mairey's
backside onto the broad flatness of his hand. Then he lifted her up, over, and into the water.

She landed in his lap.

His very naked, very wet lap!

"Jack!—" Mairey finished the blackguard's name and added a curse inside the sopping prison of his palm.

"
Shhhh
, Mairey. Can't have the proprietor breaking down the door in the middle of my dream. It's far too stimulating, and I'm far too aroused to be interrupted."

Interrupted!
"You're not dreaming, blast you!" But her statement sounded more like Burr
nuh
deenie
,
ba
oo
!

He tightened his grip and hauled her backward until her shoulders were pinned against his chest. The hem of her nightgown billowed with air,
then
melted into the warm water.

Mairey tried her best to get away, tried desperately not to laugh, but Jack only clamped his free arm beneath her breasts. He shifted his hips, a great, rolling tide, and arranged her higher on his thighs, groaning like a bear just waking from a long winter's night.

"Another of your folk interviews, my dear?" he whispered beside her ear, taking a bit of the lobe between his lips and sending maddening shivers down her neck. "A highly unorthodox technique. One I hope you don't use on other men, because I wouldn't like that at all. But let me see, perhaps I can help you. Were you going to ask me what the coal miner's word is for arousal? For that's what you feel against your pretty backside.
Me
, Mairey, and my aching need for you. Do you feel it?"

Oh, yes!
She felt him like a rod of fire against her hip. She nodded immodestly beneath his hand, fascinated when she ought to be outraged and flailing.

"That is my phallus, Mairey. Not an ivory carving, not stone, but my hard flesh—which is all your doing."

Mairey nodded and
squirmed
a little, thrilled with the sensation, with Jack's words against her ear.

"So full of your science and your fairy tales. Does it feel as you had imagined?"

Better, better, better!
she
wanted to say, but his hand was still covering her mouth, though he was drawing his middle finger along the vale of her lips like a kiss. And, oh, all the other places she could suddenly imagine that finger.