they’d parted. And of the sweet contentment of rolling along in a coach with Della tucked against his side. She was a desirable woman, but more significantly, she was dear. Fierce, outspoken, vigorous of mind, and energetic of body. Her company was a tonic, and Ash would miss her more than ever when he quit Town.
“What about that discussion has merited your consideration?” Ask asked, setting his empty plate aside.
“Have you decided not to marry because you think no woman would have you, or because you simply aren’t interested in having a wife on hand, with all the loss of privacy and tedium that entails?”
“Not interested?” Tedium? She thought wedded bliss would be tedium?
Della rose and faced the fire, meaning Ash was free to admire the graceful lines of her back and the way her hair curled over one shoulder.
“My brothers are faithful to their wives,” Della said. “Once they marry, they don’t stray. Before they marry, they are free with their favors, but when they find the right person… I suspect your brother Sycamore is the same sort. He will cut a very wide swath until he gives his heart. Then he will be a pattern card of domestic devotion.”
Ash rose, collected Della’s shawl from the back of her chair, and joined her at the hearth. “Are you asking if I’m cutting a wide swath, Della? If I’m wallowing in London’s many vices between my bouts of low spirits and simply enjoying myself too much to consider taking a wife?”
The firelight found all manner of highlights in her hair, even as it cast her features half in shadow. He draped her shawl over her shoulders, stealing a caress across her nape as he did.
“Something like that,” she said. “Because if your hesitation to marry is because of the other reason, you’re wrong.”
“What other reason?”
“If you think no woman would have you, you are much mistaken, Ash Dorning.”
He did not know what to think, because it appeared, unless his ears deceived him and his heart was equally misguided, that Lady Della Haddonfield was considering proposing to him.
He turned her by the shoulders. “If I were to marry anybody, any lady in the whole of God’s creation, I would account myself most fortunate and blessed to find myself married to you. But I cannot in good conscience ask that of you.”
“What if I am asking it of you?” She slipped her arms around his waist and leaned against him. “What if I am inviting you to try a life with me, Ash Dorning? If we don’t suit, you can set me aside, and we’ll live apart, enjoying cordial relations on necessary occasions. Many couples don’t remain together for most of the year.”
She was willing to be misplaced again, for his sake, and that broke his heart.
“You deserve better,” he said, never more certain of anything in his life. “You deserve to speak your vows with a man who can offer the whole bit, Della, until death, not until he’s overcome once again by the mulligrubs.”
She peered up at him. “And what do you deserve?”
Before he could answer her, she kissed him. This was no friendly peck on the lips. This was every forbidden kiss Ash had ever dreamed of, every sweet, slow taking of his mouth, every plundering of his wits and testing of his self-control.
His self-control quit the field at a dead gallop as Della opened her mouth and pressed close. While she was petite, she was also womanly, and she knew what she was about. Her palm glanced over Ash’s falls, and—he was the King of Idiots—he grabbed her fingers and repeated the gesture, pressing her hand firmly to his privities.
The problem was not that he’d gone too long without sharing intimacies—though he’d gone months—the problem was that he was mad for Della Haddonfield and had been for ages.
And by the heavenly powers, she knew how to handle a man, how to proclaim without saying a word that he was desperately desired and wearing too many clothes. The unabashed press of her breasts to his chest confirmed the same happy news, as did the enthusiasm with which she welcomed his tongue into her mouth.
Ash’s body woke up, woke up from a hibernation he hadn’t realized he’d been enduring. He had formed the thought that the sofa would accommodate a couple comfortably, followed by the notion that Della might like to have her breasts freed from her décolletage, when a soft click had Della going still in his arms.
A click,