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It was a pleasant surprise to discover that he was after all a man of tender conscience. Perhaps more than usually so. He had pitted his conscience against the whole of his world five years ago. "I will marry you if you still wish to marry," she said. "But only /if/.
You must not now feel that you are obliged to wed me only because you made me an offer which I have accepted. /If/ you wish to marry, then I will marry you. I will take a chance on the future." He had opened his eyes though he had not moved his head. He was looking steadily back into her own eyes. His looked very black. His face looked very severe and angular in the darkness. A few days ago she might have been frightened. "I wish to marry you," he said. "I would ask only one thing," she said, "and this I beg of you as a great favor. Allow me to tell my family what you have told me tonight – Stephen, Vanessa and Elliott, Katherine and Jasper. I would stake my life on their honor and discretion, on the fact that not one of them will say a word to anyone else without your express permission. But I really ca
Oh, she liked kisses without ferocity, she thought – just as he raised his head. "You wish to marry me, then, Maggie?" he asked. "And by the same token bed with me nightly?" He was, she realized, waiting for an answer. It was a good thing he could not see the color of her cheeks. "Yes," she said. And an aching weakness between her thighs assured her that she was not lying. Yes, she wanted to bed with him. Nightly. She did not love him any more than he loved her, but … Oh, but she wanted to be /married/ to him. She found him strangely attractive. She wanted to go to bed with him.
She verbalized the admission in her mind and felt breathlessly wicked.
But it was not wicked. She was going to be his wife. "Kiss me, then," he said. "I just /was/ kissing you," she protested. "No, you were not," he said. "You were holding your mouth relaxed for my pleasure, just as you did yesterday afternoon in the park. I do not want a passive, submissive woman. There are too many of those in the world, forced to it by the demands of their menfolk. /My/ wife will not be one of them. If you wish to marry me, if you wish to bed with me on our wedding night and every night thereafter when we are both in the mood for sex, then kiss me now as if you mean it." And the thing was that he was neither joking nor teasing. His face and his voice both attested to that fact.
Just as he had not been joking or teasing at the Tindell ball when he had offered her marriage within a minute or two of colliding with her.
He was not someone, then, who took kisses as if it were his right to do so. "Kiss me," he said softly. "We are on the /street/," she reminded him. "And everyone in the neighborhood is either asleep or still out carousing," he said. "There is not a single light in a single window.
And if there is a Peeping Tom behind one of the darkened ones, he is having lean pickings tonight. We must be almost totally invisible beneath this tree. Maggie, you are either a coward or you do not wish to kiss me. And if it is the latter, then you do not wish to bed with me either and therefore do not wish to marry me." She laughed. "Which is it?" he asked.
She gripped his upper arms, leaned forward, and set her lips firmly to his. She was instantly more fully aware of the hardness of his thighs against her own, of his broad chest pressed to her bosom, of the wine flavor of his mouth and the warmth of his breath.
His lips remained still and passive against hers, and after a few moments she was at a loss. She drew back her head. "Oh, dear," she said, "I suppose you are demonstrating the way /I/ was kissing /you/. I am so sorry. It is just, you see – " His mouth covered hers again, and she leaned deliberately into him and burrowed the fingers of one hand into the back of his hair beneath his tall silk hat, angling her head slightly as she did so and parting her lips, moving them over his, touching his lips with her tongue and then venturing within them until his arms tightened about her and he sucked her tongue into his mouth while his hands slid downward to spread over her buttocks and half lift her against him.
He was ready for her. Oh, dear God, he was … She drew firmly away from him. "Frightened?" he murmured. "Yes," she said. "And also aware that we are on the street even if we /are/ invisible to Peeping Toms." "The voice of reason," he said, brushing his hands over his clothes and stepping away from the tree trunk. "But you need not be afraid, Maggie.
We may be marrying for all the wrong reasons – though I am no longer sure what /right/ reasons there can be for matrimony – but we can still expect pleasure from our union. It is obvious that pleasure is within our grasp." "Yes," she said, and she saw the flash of his teeth in the darkness. "Are we going to remain here forever? Soon we will be sending down roots to join the trees." He offered his arm, and they resumed their walk home to Berkeley Square. "Tomorrow," he said, "I shall take you to meet my grandfather, if I may.
It may be rather like ushering Daniel into the lions' den, I am afraid, though he will have no reason to turn his wrath upon /you/. The day after I will have an a
And so she was betrothed, Margaret thought as she stepped inside the house and made her way toward the staircase with a firm stride quite at variance with her feelings. To a man for whom conscience and personal honor meant more than reputation or law or church or peace of mind.