When the Duke Returns(112)

“You’re not going to drown. Ever.”

She put her head against his chest and listened to the strong beat of his heart. They were safe. Tears slid slowly down her cheeks.

He said something she couldn’t hear.

“What?”

“Don’t you see how lucky we are, Isidore?”

“Yes,” she said, a little damply. Her heart was still pounding with fear, even now she was in the warm circle of his arms.

He pulled back and cupped her face in his hands. “We’re like your parents, sweetheart. If one of us is going to be lost, both of us will go. I would never, ever stop searching for you if our boat overturned.”

Then he was kissing her, the kind of possessive, loving kiss that she’d seen her father give her mother a hundred times. Tears welled out of her eyes, and Isidore wound her arms around Simeon’s neck and held on as tightly as she could, even as her tears made him a little wetter than he already was.

It sounded as if the cheers grew even louder when he lowered his head to hers again…but maybe that was just her imagination.

Two minutes later, Simeon picked her up again and carried her through the crowd, regardless of her wet, heavy dress trailing behind them. Isidore hadn’t paid much attention to what was happening around her, but when the groomsmen closed the carriage door behind them and Simeon deposited her on a seat, she looked about. She was placed in the most luxurious carriage she had ever ridden in, upholstered in red velvet with gold coronets sprinkled everywhere. The horses started and she could hardly feel the motion, so sweetly was the coach designed and calibrated.

“Where are we?” she asked, half laughing.

Simeon was wrestling off his wet shirt and didn’t look up. “The Duke of Buckingham’s carriage.”

“A royal carriage,” she said, watching him under her eyelashes. Her breath felt hot in her chest. Surely he couldn’t mean to…

He did mean precisely that.

Because a second later Simeon was tenderly peeling her drenched bodice down to her waist. There were red marks on her skin left by the diamonds as she struck the surface of the water. He kissed every little bruise, moving down her body like a man who knew exactly where those kisses were most needed.

And though Isidore had never imagined such a thing was possible—making love in a carriage, let alone a prince’s carriage!—she found herself laying back on red velvet upholstery as her husband deftly woke her body into the same trembling, vibrating state she had experienced on the yacht.

“We shouldn’t,” she whispered at some point, and lost her train of thought when a wave of pleasure swept her into a place where words were impossible.

And when he thrust into her, she plummeted into a state where she could do nothing but sob for the pure pleasure of it.

Simeon’s body begged him to follow her, but instead he chose to make love to Isidore slowly. It was only by kissing her, by stroking her, by stroking in her, that he could tell her in a way that scorched the truth into both their hearts.

Finally, he couldn’t keep to his slow rhythm. He began pumping hard and fast, keeping his eyes open so he could see the way she strained to meet him, the way she gasped and cried out, the sheer beauty of her eyes and mouth.

The carriage rocked as it rounded a corner, and the sensation just increased their pleasure. “Simeon,” Isidore gasped, “we must be nearly home.”

“I told them not to open the door,” he said, but he could feel his control slipping away.

“Simeon!” Isidore cried, pulling his body even deeper inside her own, forcing him to throw away the remnants of his control and surrender to something wilder and more beautiful. Something that left Isidore crying ( just a little), and Simeon’s eyes misty ( just a little).

In the moments that followed, broken only by their whispered endearments, he realized something his heart already knew. They were partners. She would always make impulsive decisions and he would make slow, reasoned ones. He would always be a little terrified that she would look at him with the scorn he saw in his mother’s eyes. And she would always be a little terrified that he would look at her and not love her enough.

In short, they were made for each other.

He thought of eloquent things he should say, all the tenderness and passion and hope in his chest, and distilled it to one sentence. “I love you.”

She kissed him. And kissed him.

“Whither thou goest,” he said to her, in a voice so quiet that she could hardly hear it over the clattering wheels. “There will I go too.”





Chapter Forty-two




St. James’s Palace

London

April 10, 1784

It wasn’t until two weeks afterward that Isidore understood the whole of what happened. She hadn’t realized that most of London saw their daring escape, and Simeon’s rescue of her. Nor that the King himself watched Simeon carry her from the water and kiss her afterwards, and then swore that he would never listen to another solicitor bleating on about one of his noblemen being mad, let alone annul a marriage on those grounds.