Tom woke to the delicious felicity of having his wife in his arms, in his bed. Exactly where she belonged. They would never spend a night apart again, he vowed. Tom didn’t make many vows. He’d seen the results of too many foolish ones, but this one he meant to keep.
Helena stirred against him, murmuring his name. Ridiculously pleased that she knew who he was, even in her sleep, he smiled at her and adjusted the covers to a more sensible arrangement. They had lost the sheet somewhere, but they would make do with blankets.
“What time is it?”
Dawn was beginning to seep in, the gap under his bedroom door lighter than it was. Even as a boy, he’d marked the nights that way. He had never slept well, but with Helena in his arms, he found he could slide into the deepest slumber. He felt safe with her, and he had a reason to rest.
The scent of their activities wound around him, faint but persistent. Would she fall pregnant? She had not before, but maybe they had been fortunate. Or not. If she had, he’d have forced the issue. He’d have had to talk to her, despite his agony.
“Time we made love,” he said firmly. Easing her on to her back, he came on top of her, but this time he took care to bear his own weight. Already he was aching to have her again, but this time he wanted to watch her and make sure he pleased her to the utmost of his ability. “I was a coward,” he said, although he had not planned to say anything of the kind. “I stayed away from you because I could not bear to be near you and not know you were mine. If we had talked, we wouldn’t have lost those five years.”
“A lot happened in that time.” She gazed up at him.
There was just enough light for him to see her lovely shape, and her eyes, holding everything he had ever dreamed of.
“Not least that I grew up. I learned that the world did not revolve around me, and I learned that I could be something and be of importance to someone merely by being myself.”
To her brother Julius. He had always assured her that he valued her, where her mother had not. “Do you regret your mother’s actions?”
“You mean yesterday? No. She was not a kind mother. Perhaps she knew my father did not love her, but I suspect that was the least of her concerns. She was determined we should be Vernons first, especially Julius. She took him away from the schoolroom and gave him a tutor of his own, but we contrived to share in many of the lessons. When she discovered that, she punished us all, but Julius the worst.”
“I see.” Tom was beginning to understand many things he had not been aware of before. For one, he’d had a happy childhood. Even though his family had been embroiled in near-treason, his parents, and then his father and grandmother, had taken care to keep the children away from the turmoil. They had never been forcibly separated or made to feel less than they were.
She would never feel that way again. She was his beloved wife and a precious member of his family.
Smiling down at her, he bent his head and kissed her, nudging her lips apart and stroking her body back into awareness. Her nipples, so sensitive, hardened into tiny delicious peaks, and she let her thighs fall open.
Watching her all the while, he slid his shaft down her crease, gathering her juices as he went, and slid into her, the movement as natural as breathing.
This time he took care to bring her to slow and profound ecstasy. Driving into her with firm insistence, watching her, he pressed his forehead against hers. She met his every stroke, arching her back to take her part in their dance, one neither needed to learn the steps for because it came as naturally as breathing.
He marked his slow progression toward his peak and watched her, saw how her eyes dilated and her mouth plumped and reddened. Her nipples pressed into his chest, evidence of her arousal, adding to his pleasure.
Her channel tightened around him in the first of the contractions that heralded her orgasm. Catching her lower lip in her teeth, she let it go with a gasp, and he kissed her, sharing their loving and the emotions he’d never looked for nor expected in his life.
When he came, it was with a profundity beyond speech. Deep inside her, he gave her all himself.
He always would.
* * * *
Although Tom intended to keep Helena in bed all the next day, she would have none of it. When the maid came in with a repast on a tray for them, she shrieked and burrowed against him.
Laughing, he lashed an arm around her. “Surely you have had a maid come into your room before?”
“Not when I have company,” came the muffled reply.
“You don’t. Your husband is a permanent fixture here.” He drew her up, scooping his hands under her arms and hauling her into his arms. The tantalizing scent of fresh coffee and hot toast filtered through to him. His stomach rumbled.
She screwed up her nose. “You’re such a man!”
“You were glad of that in the night. Four times, as I recall.”
Laughing, he delivered a smacking morning kiss to her mouth, threw back the covers, and climbed out. Her small groan of appreciation fed his sense of well-being, and he waggled his backside at her, just to hear her joyful laugh.
After pouring the coffee, he brought the cups back to bed. “I shall be your maid this morning. And later.”
“Can you lace stays?” Sitting up in bed, she plumped the pillows and leaned against them, taking the coffee with a happy sigh. “Is there any tea?”
“Ah, no. I will be sure to have some served tomorrow. Should I send for some now?”
“No. The coffee is fine.”
He glanced at her. She was sitting in his bed, the sheet tucked under her arms, a steaming cup of coffee in her hands. As he watched, she blew on it and took a sip. She brought him to his knees right there. Oh, no, they would not be going far today.
A knock sounded softly on the door. More to assuage his wife than because the intrusion would have concerned him, he plucked his banyan from the daybed, where it had rested undisturbed all night, and thrust his arms through the sleeves. “Come!”
His valet entered. Lamaire did not glance at the bed once, but he bowed to his master. “Lord Winterton is below with a sheaf of papers. I have ventured to order food served to him in the morning parlor. He says he has the settlement, and her ladyship’s luggage will be arriving within the hour.”
Tom groaned. “Then I suppose I must dress and go down.”
“We must,” Helena corrected him.
He did not bother to contradict her, because she was right. Besides, the tedium of arranging the contracts would have much more interest if Helena shared the process with him. She would have to sign the contract, but he knew her too well to suppose for one minute that she would consent to have a pen thrust in her hand with a terse instruction of “Sign here, and here.”
“Send a maid up for her ladyship.” He paused by the tray to pluck a piece of buttered toast from it. “We need to engage someone for her.”
“His lordship informs me that he will send her ladyship’s maid with the luggage. Where shall I tell them to take it?”
“The room next to this one,” he said.
“The duke has declared it too modest for his daughter-in-law,” the man said smoothly.
“We will not be staying long. We have decided to repair to the country.”
An expression of mild alarm widened the valet’s eyes, and Tom suppressed a malicious grin. Lamaire went to the country under protest. When he had ordered the man to get himself engaged by Lord Winterton and keep an eye on him, Lamaire had not realized that Julius was shortly repairing to the countryside to look for one of Maria Rubio’s children. He had berated Tom, in a fashion, by threatening to remain with Winterton. Tom had been duly punished and had promised to give Lamaire notice next time. Well, he just had.
“I do have some business to conduct before we go, and your help would be greatly appreciated.” He needed to find that bastard Everslade, or rather, the impostor, before he left. He would not leave Helena open to such danger, and he wanted to reassure her that she was completely safe from the man who had tried to abduct her.
Lamaire bowed, but said nothing.
Half an hour served to see both Tom and Helena downstairs. He had used his powder room, as he had the night before, listening to the bumps and thumps from next door, accompanied by feminine shouts of “No, not there! In the clothes press!” Other comments had not been as patient. It enlivened Tom’s ablutions remarkably.
He stood on the towel while Lamaire swabbed him down, and while the man went about his duties, he gave terse instructions about Everslade.
“I have been working on the problem,” Lamaire said calmly, handing Tom a fresh pair of drawers. “I assumed you would wish the man ah…dealt with.”
The pause was not for the Frenchman to work out the words. Lamaire had excellent, if heavily accented, English. Lamaire’s delicate suggestion covered a far more sinister solution. Tom was not entirely out of sympathy with the man. A slice across the throat at midnight, followed by a splash as the body was disposed of in the Thames seemed like a suitable end, but he would not order such a thing. Lamaire knew this. He would merely report to Tom that the matter was “at an end.”
Once he’d learned that, Tom had taken more care with his instructions. “I want to speak to him first. And I want him capable of answering questions.”
“Very well, my lord.”
“I want to know who he came from and what his instructions were. Why he wanted to abduct Lady Helena. Was it just because he wanted a rich wife, or was something else involved? And why was he masquerading as Lord Everslade? Most of all, what has happened to the true earl?”
“Yes, my lord.” No expression marred Lamaire’s tone.
Tom sat before the mirror so the man could comb his hair back and secure it. He had grown it on a whim. That, and the scratchy wigs he’d always detested. But washing, combing, and dressing it for balls was mildly tedious sometimes.
He would ask Helena which she preferred and let her guide him.
He startled his reflection by smiling. Tom very rarely smiled in the morning. This time he had a very good reason—the best reason in the world.
* * * *
Downstairs, Lord Winterton waited. The duke and duchess were with him, and Tom’s father had summoned his man of business. The round tilt-table had been brought into the middle of the room, and now its surface was covered in neat piles of paper. Tom helped Helena to sit and greeted Winterton cautiously before he took his own chair. Not that he had any particular reason to treat the earl cautiously, merely that old habits died hard.
The crystal ink well and the matching stand lay in the center of the table, the stand bristling with quills.
Although the room was not particularly small, it seemed crowded with everyone sitting around the table. The sun streamed in, a valiant effort for this time of year, and the fire crackled. This was his grandmother’s favorite room. A workbasket stood by the chair drawn up to the fire, and a shelf of obviously well-read tomes was fastened to the wall by the fireplace. Not to mention the china figures his grandmother loved sprinkled around the place.
Helena smiled. “This is a lovely room.”
Tom had not realized how starkly masculine the rest of the house was until she said that. He could probably expect more rooms like this in his future. He exchanged a glance with Winterton, who gave him a wry grin.
“When you have a house full of females, you learn to take care where you put your hand. You could hit a china shepherdess or worse, a lapdog, if you don’t take care.”
“Helena has a lapdog?” The notion startled him. He could not recall seeing her with one.
“My daughter has one. A pug, to be precise. She got it earlier this year, and she’s inseparable from the beast.”
“She called it Lapin,” Helena said with a chuckle.
“Why would she call a pug Rabbit?” Tom looked to Winterton for an explanation, but he only shrugged.
The duke dragged the nearest pile of paper toward him and dealt his son a glare. “Let’s get on, shall we?”
The business of arranging the contract was not quite as tedious as Tom had imagined. Helena had a generous dowry, and as it turned out, Winterton had quietly had a contract drawn up, in case, he said, Helena took a notion to marry. “I did not wish my mother to become embroiled in long negotiations,” he said.
Ah, yes, the duchess might well do that. Another delaying tactic.
Tom wanted to leave them to it. He hated paperwork. But because the matter concerned his wife and because he wanted her as happy as he could make her, he reined in his impatience and discussed all the details, even to the percentages and yields. He became more interested in the portfolio, because, unexpectedly, Helena had a ship.
The news startled Helena too. “A small vessel,” Winterton explained. “But every member of the family has one in our enterprise. My cousin, the Marquess of Devereaux, is particularly interested in insuring ships, so we had to give him something to keep him busy.”
A way to help the marquess when he’d been struggling, Tom guessed. Devereaux’s father had been a wastrel, leaving his son very little in the way of inheritance. That the marquess was now a wealthy man was entirely due to his own efforts, plus a judicial marriage to a woman who, by all accounts, he adored. His relatives had kept his business afloat—pun intended—and Helena now had a ship.
“I have interests of my own in that direction,” he said. “We should discuss the best way to deploy them. But not now,” he said hastily, as Winterton showed every indication of doing so.
“Not many people are aware of the investment,” Winterton said. “We decided to set up a corporation to amalgamate the ships into a small fleet. It has worked well for us.”
They kept at it and in a remarkably short length of time, when the clock had just chimed mid-day, they had finished. Winterton had done a good job, better than his father, who was adept at financial settlements. But when he wanted to add the annuity he was setting up for Helena, Tom refused.
“I will provide the equivalent.” He met Winterton’s eyes, and the room fell silent. This was the test. For years, Winterton had cared for Helena’s needs, when her family had proved deficient. Now it was his turn. He would care for her as ruthlessly as she needed.
Eventually Winterton nodded. “Then I will put the annuity toward my unborn child. Caroline is already provided for. I will not have the females of my family put under an undue obligation.” That would be because of the way his parents had treated his sister and the way society had treated his first wife, provoking her to further excesses instead of helping her.
Instead of an enemy, a flat figure they could take aim at, Lord Winterton had become a fully rounded person. The transformation had happened so slowly that Tom was not aware where it had started. Perhaps in that fateful year when Winterton had married for the first time. The issue of the Old Pretender’s children had emerged at the same time.
They must move on or atrophy.
The meeting broke up shortly after, and Winterton confessed that he was anxious to get back to his wife. “She says my fussing annoys her and sends me away on errands,” he said in a rare moment of frankness.
The undercurrent remained unsaid. Caroline had died shortly after giving birth. The pregnancy had increased her volatility, affected her moods, and after the birth of her baby, she had plunged into a cycle of abject despair followed by frantic, joyless activity. Tom had seen it but at the time taken little notice of it.
Eve was entirely different, but perhaps her husband was having understandable concerns.
As Tom rose and helped Helena to stand, he had a moment of realization. Nothing would ever be the same now he had acknowledged the marriage. The families would be forced into closer contact, and he would have no windmills to tilt at any longer. His father, idealist and staunch supporter of the Stuarts, was wavering, slowly drawing away his more evident allegiance, driven to it by changing allegiances and the almost criminally stupid behavior of the Prince. He had even allowed that heretofore forbidden word “Pretender” to be voiced in his hearing.
At the moment, none of that mattered because he was with Helena, and they could love again.
A wave of blissful happiness swamped his misgivings.
While his father remained to discuss other business with the lawyer, Tom and Helena saw Winterton out. The butler opened the door and stood rigidly at attention as Winterton smoothed his gloves over his wrists and strapped his sword firmly into place. As a gesture of respect, or trust, he had removed it with his outer clothing, something that had gone unmentioned, but not unnoticed.
Helena laid her hand on her brother’s arm. “She will be fine,” she said.
Julius smiled wryly. “I know. Eve sends her best wishes. I will be taking her to Oxfordshire in a day or two, and then we will be calmer. I will be calmer. Perhaps she will regain her taste for tea, too, which she says is the only cloud in her sky.”
He turned to leave.
A loud retort from outside was followed by an object zinging past him, stinging as it went. A bee?
But bees did not sound like that.
Bullets did.