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huskily as they came back together for the next part of the dance and even a brisk measure with a very disapproving matron hadn’t been enough to restore him to a fit state to inhabit a lady’s ballroom. ‘You couldn’t manage a bit of a stumble, or perhaps even a faint, could you, love? I want to bed you even more urgently than I did this afternoon and I don’t think there’s any way I can conceal the fact from the rest of the world for much longer.’
‘It would take half a dozen footmen to carry me out,’ she said with a wry smile and a huff of laughter as she looked down at the evidence of his rampant need for her. ‘Hmm, I do see what you mean, though,’ she added with a delighted smile that only made it worse.
‘I won’t have you traduce yourself, or me for that matter, my love. You are just as tall as you need to be and I wouldn’t have you even half an inch less and at least if I’m carrying you I can hide behind your skirts, for once.’
‘You couldn’t,’ she gasped a little less certainly as the music finally wound down, and she looked as if she felt ready to melt from the inside out as well.
‘I’m impressive, Polly, my darling, but not even I am too huge not to be able to hide what you do to me behind that delightful but highly unnecessary wisp of silk and nonsense,’ he said with a dismissive glance at the finest gown in a whole wardrobe of them that the Bond Street modiste had rushed through her workroom in time for Lady Mantaigne to make her début in polite society at the advanced age of four and twenty.
‘It is very necessary,’ she argued absent-mindedly as she flitted through scenarios for getting out of this ballroom in double-quick time and without her lord making a scandal of them both mere days into their marriage.
‘Not as far as I’m concerned it’s not,’ he argued as his intensely blue eyes met hers with a wealth of hot promises that made her shiver with anticipation. ‘I want you in it, out of it and any other way I can have you, my lovely witchy Polly. From the first moment I laid eyes on you I’ve been racked with need and I don’t intend either of us to be denied satiating that need again for much longer.’
‘We sated it all afternoon, Tom,’ she protested half-heartedly, but there was as much heat in her grey-green-blue eyes as in his, and her breath was coming so short his fascinated gaze was fixed on her décolletage as her breasts rose magnificently, begging for his attentions as soon as possible under the promise of all he’d taught her to expect these past few days since they married in haste. ‘I suppose I am very hot,’ she managed to say rather breathily.
‘You most certainly are,’ he drawled, with the Tomcat smile that had once made her hackles rise and hot shivers of desire plague her dreams and now made her long to share them with him even more than she had a second ago.
‘I love you, Tom,’ she breathed, and to the devil with anyone who might be listening.
‘And I love you, my darling, but any minute now I might have to beg you to get us out of here, because I can’t seem to string two thoughts together than aren’t of making love to you as soon and as long as I can find an excuse to.’
‘Oh, very well then,’ she said with a tight little sigh that told him more than a hundred words of how much she loved and wanted him back, because she obligingly drooped as if quite overcome by the heat and excitement of her first night amongst the ton and trusted him absolutely to catch her and get them out of here as fast as he could order his host to lend them the nearest carriage and throw guineas at the coachman to get them back to Mantaigne House faster than he could say knife.
* * *
Polly stayed totally limp against him for a long moment, savouring the mighty strength of her lover and revelling in being needed and wanted by the man she wanted and needed so desperately back.
‘I never dreamed I would marry at all, you know?’ she whispered as he held her even closer to shield her from the rocking carriage as it swept across Mayfair.
‘I know it,’ he said rather grimly, considering he had interrupted kissing his way up her throat to do so. ‘I deplore it and yet... Oh, love, I’m so glad you were safe at Dayspring and away from the wolves all the time I was strutting about the ton pretending I didn’t care a damn for anyone. I have no right to be so proud to be your first lover, but I am and fully intend to be your last as well, if God will grant us the time to glory in each other like this for life.’
‘Idiot,’ she muttered on a blissful haze of joy that almost went beyond words. ‘Of course I’m glad it was only ever you and always will be. There’s nothing wrong with being all in all to each other, nothing wrong with being glad we love and live and want each other so immoderately. Do you truly think Toby will be all right with Mr Peters, though?’ she added as remembrance of the rest of her family impinged on the desire he was feeding so shamelessly she wondered if they would make it home and into his splendid marquis’s bed before they fell on each other like ravenous tigers.
‘Why else to you think the man agreed to come with us tonight?’ Tom said and gasped in a huge breath as the brush of her thigh against his mightily aroused manhood made him grip his fists tight in his determination not to make love to his marchioness in a stranger’s carriage. ‘He’s no fool and knew neither we nor Luke and Chloe would be able to keep cool in the company of our lovers. I dare say he would rather have teeth pulled than enter a Mayfair ballroom of his own accord.’
‘Then he’s a good man,’ she said with a nod that said it confirmed her conclusions about her new husband’s lawyer and perhaps friend. ‘I hope your godmother hasn’t bitten off more than she could chew this time, though, for I would dearly like to see your Mr Peters happy.’
‘He’s neither mine nor Mr Peters, love, but I have learnt to have even more faith in Virginia over the past three months than I had before, so I expect he’ll end up wherever it is he thinks he has no right to be. However, my interest in the man is lukewarm at best when I have my Lady Mantaigne available to distract me with her many and varied charms,’ he said as the carriage finally lurched to its destination.
‘No,’ she ordered him brusquely as he jumped out of the carriage and turned to lift her in his arms again. ‘You will just have to carry this,’ she declared, handing him her cloak as a mask for the state they had done nothing to diminish during the drive. ‘I refuse to have you winded and exhausted when we finally manage to get ourselves upstairs,’ she added with a haughty sniff as he eyed her with lordly determination and made a grab for her.
‘She-wolf,’ he accused as she dodged him and reminded him he’d agreed to pay the coachman another two guineas if he got them here before the clock finished chiming midnight.
‘Tomcat,’ she shot back over her shoulder as she gathered up her silken skirts and frothy petticoats in one hand and ran up the steps as if the devil was on her heels.
‘Hand over the keys to the wine-cellar, marry him to your eldest daughter or just pay the man for me, would you?’ Tom asked his butler distractedly before he set off up the steps to his once-stately and echoing mansion without a second thought for his lost reputation as an elegantly bored and sophisticated man about town.
‘Yes, my lord,’ the butler said with a glare for the grinning coachman. ‘Breathe a word of this and I’ll make sure you ain’t up to marrying any man’s daughter, let alone mine,’ he threatened the man as he handed over the extortionate fee his master had promised him.
‘Even the nobs will know by now he can’t keep his hands off her, cocky, so that’s a horse as has already bolted,’ the man said cheerfully and went off to tell his tale to whoever was the most eager to listen to it.
‘And ain’t that just how it ought to be between a man and his wife?’ the butler asked the sparkling June night, lit by stars so bright they even managed to outshine the man-made glitter of Mayfair in full fig.
‘Hurry,’ Tom gritted between clenched teeth as Polly streaked up the stairs ahead of him and he could see enough of her slender legs and the long, sleek lines of her hips and bottom outlined by that wicked provocation of a gown to drive him nigh demented.