“and if you are willing to take on the challenge, I believe we can cast William Chastain into permanent disgrace.”
“That sounds dire—also lovely.”
Ash kissed her nose. “Disgrace sufficient that he won’t bother either of us ever again. Do you know what I’d like at this moment?”
“To leave the house party?”
“No, actually. I would like to nap with my wife and have everybody at the luncheon table remark our absence and be jealous of us.”
“I’d like that too.” Della didn’t have a chance to get to her feet, because Ash shifted her so she was cradled in his arms.
He carried her out of the maze without a single wrong turn, past a dozen smiling guests, and straight up to their room, where they did indeed nap.
Eventually.
Ash regarded his recumbent wife and envied his brother Oak the ability to draw. Della lay curled on the mattress, the covers thrown back. She was clad in only her white crocheted shawl, the weave loose enough to hint at the pale glory of her haunch, the tassels lying against her thigh.
If Ash yielded to the temptation to brush aside those tassels, he’d be in this bed for another hour, and what a pleasant hour it would be. His arousal had been more of the slow-burn variety, gaining momentum gradually as he and Della had talked, cuddled, and talked some more. That stealthy approach to lovemaking was new for him and had yielded surprisingly intense pleasure.
Or perhaps, a man who could not rely on his body to rise to the occasion was more likely to savor the instances of pleasure that came his way.
Della had poured out the burden of managing an imagination given to wild flights. Her earliest memories were of adults telling her how sickly and fragile she was, even though she didn’t feel sickly or fragile. Then her mother had fallen ill, her oldest siblings had been abruptly sent off to school or worse, and—she recounted the stories so calmly—there was that business about her family occasionally losing her, followed by the revelation that her father was not her father.
Laid end to end, the litany was enough to make anybody distrustful of life.
“You are looking at me,” she said, rolling over to her back. “I love waking up next to you, and I love the look in your eyes right now.”
Love. She had seized on that word and fired it at him now with the accuracy of a sharpshooter. Well, nothing for it, then. Such courage merited a reciprocal display of valor.
“I love you. I love that you entrust your worries to me. I dearly love that you are my wife.”
He also loved how the tassels draped themselves over the thatch of curls between her legs. The image was all Della and arousing as hell. Why did his damned mind focus on clouds instead of memories of Della and her tassels? When next he was compelled to stare out of windows, he’d put that question to himself.
“I am not very steady, Ash,” Della said. “Chastain could make little trouble for you if I were less prone to the collywobbles in my mental pandenoodles.”
Ash could not reassure Della out of a lifetime’s habit of worrying any more than she could tease him out of chronic and profound blue devils. But he could and did love her, and maybe over time, that might make her worrying—and his blue devils—less devilish.
“Chastain has threatened you, Della, but unless I miss my guess, he will soon threaten the Coventry as well. He will intimate that our tables are crooked, our wine drugged, our staff little better than pickpockets. He will offer to shut his mouth in exchange for an endless procession of cash and bother, and I am not inclined to accommodate him.”
Ash reclined against the bed’s headboard. Della snuggled up to his thigh and rested her knee against his leg.
“Chastain did threaten the club,” she said. “My choices were to partner him at cards for the rest of the week, or leave you here among these Philistines with only Sycamore to take up for you.”
Ash brushed Della’s braid back over her shoulder. “Chastain did not offer you the option of a turn in the gazebo?”
Della drew her shawl up over her face and bundled closer. “I hate him, Ash. I hate him so much it frightens me. He’s everybody who ever mocked me for being upset and unequal to life. He’s a canker on the arse of society, the well-born dandy who refuses to toss the starving