The huge old bed was only ten feet away. When he lay her on the Aubusson carpet that was so threadbare she felt pricks of cold air touching her shoulder blades, he forced himself to stop, just for a moment, and said, his voice thick and deep and guttural, “I want this to be hard and fast, Meggie.”
Meggie couldn’t think of a single word, she was thrumming, mewling like her racing cats she was so excited, she felt so very urgent, it was beyond anything she could begin to understand. She grabbed him around his neck and pulled him down to her. “Please, now, Thomas. Now.”
He was a wild man, all over her, not a touch of gentleness, and Meggie hummed with power and urgency. She also hummed with something else, but she didn’t know what it was.
Meggie would swear that the gloomy room lightened, that the air itself lifted and fluttered when she yelled to those beams in the darkened ceiling. But he wasn’t through, bless him, and within a very short time, she was breathing hard again, beside herself, her hands all over him, pulling and caressing and hitting, and her cries heaved out of her mouth against his shoulder.
“I’m going to die now,” she said, “a happy woman,” and she didn’t move a single muscle.
He grunted beside her.
“I felled you.”
He grunted again, and she would swear she felt a smile on his mouth before he kissed her hair and collapsed again.
“Will you give me another chance, Thomas?”
“Your timing is excellent,” he said, and was asleep, sprawled naked on the Aubusson carpet, a smile on his face.
Meggie’s brain began to function again only when she realized she was shivering from cold. She came up on her elbow over her husband, looked down into his hard face, not so hard now in sleep, and said, “Thomas, how am I going to get you into bed?”
He grunted, then opened a dark eye and looked up into her shadowed face. “If I really concentrate on this, I can move.”
“What will I do,” she said, lightly caressing his shoulder, kissing his face, light nipping, sweet kisses, “when you are an old man and we end up on the carpet?”
“You will just roll me up in the carpet and leave me be.”
She laughed even as he scooped her into his arms and carried her into the White Room. She kissed his shoulder, whispered against his neck, “Are you willing to let me perhaps kiss your belly the way you kiss mine?”
His breath whooshed out and he ran through the adjoining door, nearly knocked Meggie in the head when he ran too close to the wall. He was laughing until her hair cascaded over his belly and she touched him with her mouth. He nearly heaved himself off the bed. Nothing could be better than this, he thought, and nearly expired. Dear God, her mouth.
His last thought before he fell into a blessedly numb sleep was that his wife, the vicar’s daughter, would come to love him. He was smart and he was persistent. He was also determined.
The following morning, however, Thomas wasn’t smiling.
* * *
Chapter 30
YOU DAMNED IDIOT, you’ve been home only a fortnignt and you’ve already done this?”
William didn’t feel well, he really didn’t, and here was his too-sober half-brother, his voice black as the misery William was feeling, each word staccato, colder than an Irish winter morning, slamming right into his ear. He wanted to bolt behind the wainscoting. He wanted to seal up his ears until he knew his head wouldn’t explode.
Thomas said, “Teddy MacGraff was here, fists at the ready, his face so red I was afraid he would fall over with apoplexy, that or come up here to your bedchamber and wring your damned neck.”
“Let him,” William said. “I want to die.”
“Damn you, you’re a man, get up and face this!”
Thomas jerked his half-brother from his bed and dragged him across his bedchamber to his dressing table, where there sat a pitcher filled of water, waiting for soap and his razor.
Thomas poured the water over William’s head. William howled, flopped about, but it didn’t matter.