Regency Surrender: Passion And Rebellion. Louise Allen

at a decent hour...’

      ‘Hang dinner,’ he said, catching her round the waist just as she was about to leave the bed and pulling her back. ‘And hang decency. We’ll eat whenever what you make is ready.’

      ‘But Gilbey will expect—’

      ‘And hang Gilbey, too. He’ll eat when we do.’

      ‘But—’

      He stopped her mouth with a kiss. And smiled against her lips when, with a sigh, she wrapped her arms round his neck and kissed him back.

      * * *

      It was the happiest Christmas she’d ever known. And it wasn’t just because, at last, she had a secure home, plenty of food to eat and no need to worry about how to pay for it.

      It was because of Lord Havelock.

      He made Christmas Day pass in a whirl of merriment and lovemaking. Which he topped off by declaring it had been the best Christmas of his own life, too.

      ‘Don’t look as though you don’t believe me,’ he said, a touch belligerently, when she gaped at him in surprise. ‘You may as well know, right now, that I never lie. Have never seen the point,’ he finished loftily.

      ‘I didn’t mean to imply you would,’ she said, going to the oven and kneeling down to rake embers into the warming pan. ‘It is just, well, it was all so... I mean, you must have had far more grand food and all sorts of entertainments, other years.’

      ‘Oh. Yes, I see what you mean. And in a way, you’re right. I’ve definitely been to a great many Christmas house parties where no expense was spared. But you see,’ he said, gently taking the warming pan from her as she turned and got to her feet, ‘when I was a grubby schoolboy, I always felt I was there on sufferance, wherever I was. And then, when I got older, the same girls who’d been turning their noses up at me all their lives suddenly realised I was a catch and began trying to trap me. Don’t care for being hunted down like a...coursed hare,’ he finished bitterly.

      ‘I see.’ She picked up the lantern, glanced at the kitchen table and smothered a giggle. He’d surprised her, right after dinner, by sweeping the dishes aside, bending her over the table and lifting her skirts. What followed had been wild and wonderful, if a little shocking. ‘It has been the best Christmas Day I’ve ever had, too.’ It had been just as well the table was so sturdy. They’d have shattered a less robust piece of furniture.

      And probably carried right on, in its splintered ruins, until they’d finished what he’d started.

      ‘I meant what I said, you know,’ he said with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes as he followed the direction of her gaze.

      ‘What about?’ She’d lost the thread of the discussion while she’d been reliving the way his hands had taken command of her body, while his lips pressed hot kisses into the nape of her neck.

      ‘About wanting to make love to you in every room in this house.’ As if to prove his point, when they reached the door of the room they’d slept in the night before, he kept on walking.

      ‘There must be a dozen bedrooms along this corridor alone.’

      ‘They...they won’t be very comfortable, though,’ she pointed out, hanging back.

      He turned and looked at her keenly.

      ‘It isn’t fair to expect you to put up with another night on a hearthrug, is it? Very well,’ he said with an exaggerated sigh. ‘Let’s be practical.’ He turned back and entered what she’d come to think of as their bedroom.

      ‘For now,’ he said firmly, shutting the door behind them. ‘But I give you fair warning that once the Brownlows get here, I shall have them make up every bed, in every room, so that we can try out whichever takes ours fancy, whenever,’ he said, thrusting the warming pan under the quilt, ‘it takes our fancy.’

      Whenever? Oh, yes. She liked the sound of that. Funny, but she’d never thought of herself as a spontaneous sort of person. But then she’d never had the chance to find out who she really was, or what she really liked. She’d been too busy just surviving.

      But from the moment she’d married Lord Havelock—or at least, the moment he first started to get undressed, she’d decided she liked being able to make love whenever the fancy took them.

      ‘But for tonight,’ he said, taking her in his arms, ‘I shall make up for the fact we have to stay in here, by showing you...something new.’

      ‘Something new?’

      What more could there be? He’d started by teaching her that people could make love in broad daylight. And gone on to demonstrate that they didn’t even need to lie down.

      Her stomach flipped over in anticipation as he took her hand and led her to the bed. The look in his eyes made her legs tremble.

      ‘What,’ she whispered, ‘do you intend to do to me?’

      ‘Drive you wild,’ he whispered back.

       Chapter Eleven

      On the morning of the twenty-eighth, while they were still eating breakfast in the kitchen, the back door flew open and a middle-aged couple burst in, bringing with them the inevitable gust of rain-laden wind.

      ‘My lord, I’m that sorry,’ the woman began to apologise. ‘Had we any idea you was coming, we’d not have gone away. To think of you having to make do, at Christmas of all times.’

      ‘My Lady Havelock,’ drawled Lord Havelock icily, ‘allow me to present, finally, Mr and Mrs Brownlow. The caretakers of Mayfield.’

      She managed, but only just, to follow her husband’s lead and not get to her feet and welcome the couple into the home as though they were guests. But she felt most uncomfortable when the one bowed while the other curtsied to her.

      ‘You look as though you’ve done very well, considering,’ said Mrs Brownlow, her eyes darting about the kitchen before coming to rest on Mary, who suddenly became very aware of the shabbiness of her gown and the fact that she’d not bothered taking off her apron when she’d sat down to breakfast. It felt as though Mrs Brownlow was sizing her up for the position of cook, rather than lady of the house. And that, given the choice, Mrs Brownlow wouldn’t have granted her either position.

      ‘But now we’re back, you won’t need to bother yourselves with all this sort of thing any longer,’ she added with a sniff, before going to the stove, opening the doors, rattling the poker about inside, then shutting them with more noise than was anywhere near necessary.

      ‘I notice you’ve decided to make use of the green-silk room,’ said the woman, taking the tea caddy from the shelf where Mary had left it and restoring it to the higher one where she’d first found it, but which was so awkward to reach. ‘Saw the smoke from the chimneys as we was coming up the drive,’ she added, which explained how she’d worked out where they’d slept, without anyone telling her.

      But then Mrs Brownlow stilled, catching the full force of Lord Havelock’s scowl.

      ‘We was that relieved,’ she said, veering from her display of competence to ingratiating sweetness, ‘you hadn’t tried to take over the rooms what used to be his late lordship’s and his wife’s. None of the rooms in that wing have been touched since I don’t know when. Need a real good spring clean before they will be fit for use.’

      Mary could have told her, had she paused to draw breath, that she could tell exactly how competent she was, from the state of the larder, the kitchen and the wing that had been let out to raise revenue. And that she didn’t have anything to worry about. Lord Havelock might have a ferocious scowl, but he wasn’t the kind of man who’d turn someone off for not somehow sensing he was about to marry and descend on his ancestral home.

      ‘And we’ll need to get the