Almost Heaven Read online

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

  He tipped his chin down so that he could better see her and brushed a stray lock of golden hair off her cheek. “I was thinking how wise I must be to have known within minutes of meeting you that you were wonderful.”

  She chuckled, thinking his words were teasing flattery. “How soon did my qualities become apparent?”

  “I’d say,” he thoughtfully replied, “I knew it when you took sympathy on Galileo.”

  She’d expected him to say something about her looks, not her conversation or her mind. “Truly?” she asked with unhidden pleasure.

  He nodded, but he was studying her reaction with curiosity. “What did you think I was going to say?”

  Her slim shoulders lifted in an embarrassed shrug. “I thought you would say it was my face you noticed first. People have the most extraordinary reaction to my face,” she explained with a disgusted sigh.

  “I can’t imagine why,” he said, grinning down at what was, in his opinion—in anyone’s opinion—a heartbreakingly beautiful face belonging to a young woman who was sprawled across his chest looking like an innocent golden goddess.

  “I think it’s my eyes. They’re an odd color.”

  “I see that now,” he teased, then he said more solemnly, “but as it happens it was not your face which I found so beguiling when we met in the garden, because,” he added when she looked unconvinced, “I couldn’t see it.”

  “Of course you could. I could see yours well enough, even though night had fallen.”

  “Yes, but I was standing near a torch lamp, while you perversely remained in the shadows. I could tell that yours was a very nice face, with the requisite features in the right places, and I could also tell that your other—feminine assets—were definitely in all the right places, but that was all I could see. And then later that night I looked up and saw you walking down the staircase. I was so surprised, it took a considerable amount of will to keep from dropping the glass I was holding.”

  Her happy laughter drifted around the room and reminded him of music. “Elizabeth,” he said dryly, “I am not such a fool that I would have let a beautiful face alone drive me to madness, or to asking you to marry me, or even to extremes of sexual desire.”

  She saw that he was perfectly serious, and she sobered. “Thank you,” she said quietly. “That is the nicest compliment you could have paid me, my lord.”

  “Don’t call me ‘my lord,’ ” he told her with a mixture of gentleness and gravity, “unless you mean it. I dislike having you address me that way if it’s merely a reference to my title.”

  Elizabeth snuggled her cheek against his hard chest and quietly replied, “As you wish. My lord.”

  Ian couldn’t help it. He rolled her onto her back and devoured her with his mouth, claimed her with his hands and then his body.

  * * *

  “Haven’t I tired you out yet, darting?” Ian whispered several hours later.

  “Yes,” she said with an exhausted laugh, her cheek nestled against his shoulder, her hand drifting over his chest in a sleepy caress. “But I’m too happy to sleep for a while yet”

  So was Ian, but he felt compelled to at least suggest that she try. “You’ll regret it in the morning when we have to appear for breakfast,” he said with a grin, cuddling her closer to his side.

  To his surprise, the remark made her smooth forehead furrow in a frown. She tipped her face up to his, opened her mouth as if to ask him a question, then she changed her mind and hastily looked away.

  “What is it?” he asked, taking her chin between his thumb and forefinger and lifting her face up to his.

  “Tomorrow morning,” she said with a funny, bemused expression on her face. “When we go downstairs . . . will everyone know what we have done tonight?”

  She expected him to try to evade the question.

  “Yes,” he said.

  She nodded, accepting that, and turned into his arms. “Thank you for telling me the truth,” she said with a sigh of contentment and gratitude.

  “I’ll always tell you the truth,” he promised quietly, and she believed him.

  It occurred to Elizabeth that she could ask him now, when he’d given that promise, if he’d had anything to do with Robert’s disappearance. And as quickly as the thought crossed her mind, she pushed it angrily away. She would not defame their marriage bed by voicing ugly, unfounded suspicions carried to her by a man who obviously had a grudge against all Scots.

  This morning, she had made a conscious decision to trust him and marry him; now, she was bound by her vows to honor him, and she had absolutely no intention of going back on her own decision or on the vow she made to him in church.

  “Elizabeth?”

  “Mmmm?”

  “While we’re on the subject of truth, I have a confession to make.”

  Her heart slammed into her ribs, and she went rigid. “What is it?” she asked tautly.

  “The chamber next door is meant to be used as your dressing room and withdrawing room. I do not approve of the English custom of husband and wife sleeping in separate beds.” She looked so pleased that Ian grinned. “I’m happy to see,” he chuckled, kissing her forehead, “we agree on that.”

  31

  In the weeks that followed, Elizabeth discovered to her pleasure that she could ask Ian any question about any subject and that he would answer her as fully as she wished. Not once did he ever patronize her when he replied, or fend her off by pointing out that, as a woman, the matter was truly none of her concern—or worse—that the answer would be beyond any female’s ability to understand. Elizabeth found his respect for her intelligence enormously flattering—particularly after two astounding discoveries she made about him:

  The first occurred three days after their wedding, when they both decided to spend the evening at home, reading.

  That night after supper, Ian brought a book he wanted to read from their library—a heavy tome with an incomprehensible title—to the drawing room. Elizabeth brought Pride and Prejudice, which she’d been longing to read since first hearing of the uproar it was causing among the conservative members of the ton. After pressing a kiss on her forehead, Ian sat down in the high-backed chair beside hers. Reaching across the small table between them for her hand, lie linked their fingers together, and opened his book. Elizabeth thought it was incredibly cozy to sit, curled up in a ;hair beside him, her hand held in his, with a book in her lap, and she didn’t mind the small inconvenience of turning the pages with one hand.

  Soon, she was so engrossed in her book that it was a full half-hour before she noticed how swiftly Ian turned the pages of his. From the corner of her eye, Elizabeth watched in puzzled fascination as his gaze seemed to slide swiftly down one page, then the facing page, and he turned to the next. Teasingly, she asked, “Are you reading that book, my lord, or only pretending for my benefit?”

  He glanced up sharply, and Elizabeth saw a strange, hesitant expression flicker across his tanned face. As if carefully phrasing his reply, he said slowly, “I have an—odd ability—to read very quickly.”

  “Oh,” Elizabeth replied, “how lucky you are. I never heard of a talent like that”

  A lazy glamorous smile swept across his face, and he squeezed her hand. “It’s not nearly as uncommon as your eyes,” he said.

  Elizabeth thought it must be a great deal more uncommon, but she wasn’t completely certain and she let it pass. The following day, that discovery was completely eclipsed by another one. At Ian’s insistence, she’d spread the books from Havenhurst across his desk in order to go over the quarter’s accounts, and as the morning wore on, the long columns of figures she’d been adding and multiplying began to blur together and transpose themselves in her mind—due in part, she thought with a weary smile, to the fact that her husband had kept her awake half the night making love to her. For the third time, she added the same long columns of expenditures, and for the third time, she came up with a different sum. So