Page 24 of A Lyon’s Lesson

He shook his head. “I’m a crude beast. I should not be using such foul language with my wife.”

“Well, it wouldn’t do in mixed company, but if it’s just between us, I don’t mind,” she confessed.

He laughed. “I was right, you’re a goddess.” He kissed her again, and Cecey felt her heart swell and bubble over with warmth. Tears stung her lids, and she seized his face and kissed him back.

“Thank you.”

“What for?” He looked at her with a quizzical expression. “For giving you pleasure?”

She nodded shyly. It seemed the easiest answer, for how could she explain the mélange of feelings in her chest? She didn’t understand them herself.

Rolling off her body he gathered her close and yawned. “I’m afraid I need some sleep before we do it again.”

He tucked his large frame around hers, cupping her body into his with her back against his front, and an arm across her body. She listened to his breathing even out as he fell into slumber, and she lay curled in his embrace and let soft tears gather in her eyes and roll silently down her cheeks, tears of happiness.

His hands wandering over her body woke her sometime before dawn, and after a passage of kisses and touches, he rolled her under him and filled her with his member again and drove them both to a third blissful climax. This time, in the aftermath, she curled against him, her head on his chest, and fell asleep to the steady stroke of his hand on her hair.

When she woke again, it was daylight, and he was gone. She rolled onto her back and stretched. Her body was sore and sticky, but her limbs felt heavy with satiation, and her heart was light with joy. Rick may not have wanted to marry her, but he clearly wanted her physically. It had been far better and more enjoyable than she could have hoped for. She felt optimistic for the first time about the prospects of this marriage, hopeful that she could find some semblance of affection and perhaps even love.

Her heart thudded with a mix of excitement and trepidation at the notion. She just needed to hold her own and make him earn it. Instinctively, she felt that Rick could too easily take things for granted if she were too accommodating.

Chapter 13

Rick had woken with the dawn and a restless urge to be up and doing. He felt good. So good. He stretched and watched Cecelia sleeping for a moment or two. It was tempting to wake her for a fourth round of lovemaking, but she looked so peaceful that he hadn’t the heart. So he rolled out of bed and stole quietly to his room to wash and dress.

There was no sign of Reynolds, but he didn’t bother to ring for him, simply pulling on shirt, breeches, boots, and jacket. He wanted to explore the property a bit more, now that he had full daylight. He missed his horse, Sovereign, who would be at least another two days away. Pagette was under strict instructions to take it easy and not the tax the beasts. But young Hendrix had mentioned a couple of hacks used for domestic errands. He would borrow one of those.

Thus, he presented himself at the stables and found Tom Hendrix at his work. He couldn’t fault the man for his care of his charges. Instructing him to saddle one of the horses for him, he set off to explore. The beast was a roan gelding, not in his first youth but still serviceable, who answered to the name of Navy for some inscrutable reason.

Beyond the tangled lawn and hedge that bordered it, he found fields belonging presumably to the home farm. He set the horse at a comfortable amble and enjoyed the prospect of the sun rising and filling the day with heat and light. April and May had been unseasonably wet this year and the evidence was to be seen in the deeply rutted road which was drying to crust in the warmth of the sun. Birds raised a racket with their dawn service, and a light mist lay over the fields, dissipating in the rising sun’s rays.

In London, he seldom rose before midday, but that was often because he didn’t go to bed until dawn; but in the country, he found it easier to follow the sun’s diurnal pattern. His thoughts drifted to last night and the pleasure he had found in Cecelia’s bed. He had set himself to bringing her pleasure and been rewarded by an unexpected gift. Few women, in his experience, could orgasm naturally from penetration alone; to discover that his wife was one of them was an unlooked-for treasure. It was every man’s fantasy to bring a woman to her peak with his cock. Cecey was a surprise blessing in this regard; it gave him a surge of warm pride in his chest that made him smile.

The fields were under some kind of crop, but his woeful ignorance of all things bucolic offered no clue as to what it was. He would have to ask this steward that he was supposed to meet today. To his untrained eye, the crop appeared healthy enough and well-tended, so at least that part seemed to be true, which left the mystery of why the house itself was so neglected.

Beyond the fields, he began to see small dwellings that he presumed must be the homes of the tenants. His tenants, he reminded himself. The notion that he was responsible for these people sat ill with him. With the bond of matrimony that tied him to Cecelia, he had assumed the yoke of property management, and it still made him uneasy. A sense of inadequacy threatened his good mood.

Such things had never held any interest for him. Then again, he had never expected to be in this position. As a younger son, under the draconian rules of primogeniture, he was entirely dependent on his eldest brother’s generosity. With no means of supporting himself, a duke’s son didn’t do anything so plebeian as work for a living. He had lived a life of aimless pleasure, constantly on the edge of financial ruin, from which Robert rescued him with monotonous regularity.

To suddenly find himself a wealthy man and possessed of land and all that went with it took some getting used to.

He was jerked from his reverie by a cry from one of the fields. He put up a hand to shield his eyes from the sun and focused on the source of the sound. A pair of yoked bullocks had stopped dead in the middle of the field, the plow behind them in the earth, and a slight figure was bent over the plow trying to dislodge it from whatever had stopped its path.

Urging his mount forward, Rick soon saw that the slender figure was a woman. She was dressed in a brown worsted gown, hitched up to keep the hem out of the mud, and had a broad-brimmed hat upon her head, from which straggles of red hair escaped. Her pale skin was freckled from the sun, and she looked up from her task as he approached, revealing a face younger than he expected. He dismounted, saying, “Can I help?”

“If you would,” she said, removing her hat and wiping sweat from her face with her arm—her hands were caked with mud—before shoving it back on her head. “That would be most kind. I cannot lift the plow around the obstacle, nor dig it out.”

He crouched to examine the problem. A large stone was blocking the path of the plowshare. The woman had attempted to clear the mud away from it, but clearly the large rock was too big for her to dislodge with her hands, and equally, as she said, the plow itself was by far too heavy for her to lift or move sideways around the obstacle.

A stick to provide some leverage would do the trick, but there was no wood anywhere around to use. Nothing loathe to help, Rick worked his fingers into the mud around the rock and eventually found the underside. Getting a good grip either side of the stone, he pulled. It took two goes to pull it free of the sucking mud, but it finally pulled loose, and he was able to rise with it and walk to the end of the row where he set it down out of the way.

“Thank you, sir. I am most obliged,” said the woman with a relieved smile.

“You’re welcome,” said Rick. “It’s heavy work for a woman. You’ve no husband to help you?”

She shook her head, her face becoming somber. “I lost Ned last year to an infection in his leg.” She shook her head as if the shake off the memory. “Can I offer you some water to wash your hands and drink for your effort?”

“I won’t say no, but what of your beasts?”