Free The Stanhope Challenge - Regency Quartet - Four Regency Romances by Cerise DeLand

save for the perspiration on his brow.
    “We will go to my aunt’s,” he said on hold.
    “No,” she objected on retreat .
    “We return here,” he said and held.
    “Why?” she asked in retreat.
    He smiled. “To move your belongings into the bedroom suite adjacent to mine.”
    “Oh,” she gasped on retreat .
    “Fear not,” he told her when he entered . “You sleep with me.”
    “Not separately,” she demanded on hold .
    “Never,” he said on retreat . “I have more to teach you.”
    She was incredulous. Her gaze danced over his features. “You know more positions?”
    “A multitude,” he exaggerated with wide-eyed lechery.
    She giggled. “I am yours. But you must go faster.”
    “I cannot,” he confessed on a stunning enter .
    “You’d better,” she threatened. “Or I’m…um…what do you call it…rejoicing without you!”
    “Well, then, if you must do it now?” He rocked her in a faster tempo that shifted the table and made them both laugh.
    “I believe I really, really… must !”
    Afterward, they pondered what the servants must think of the master of the house who had just brought his new wife home more than five months past their wedding and had claimed her in the dining room for more than an hour. What’s more, they had set the china clattering and the table legs groaning to their uproarious shouts and ribald laughter at eleven in the morning.

Chapter Eight
    Each day, Felice discovered new satisfactions to being Adam’s wife.
    His servants accepted her as their mistress without incident or comment.
    His Aunt Amaryllis was the first to call on Felice a week after she’d moved into his townhouse. Days later, the grand old lady brought two of her best friends, dowagers of the first water whose acceptance was needed for any woman in society to make a place for herself.
    Other scions of the town soon followed. Lady Ulmsly, featherbrained but forthright, presented her card. Clarice, Adam’s half–sister, came praising two new male staff secured for her by her late husband. Two of Clarice’s friends, fashionable women who admired Felice’s short hair and au courant style, arrived to coo over Felice’s newly married state.
    Adam brought his son, Georgie, down from the family estate in Gloucester. The little boy was a tow–haired giggling child of two who, nonetheless, did not run to Felice’s arms immediately. She did not balk at that. Still she hoped to show him affection and have it returned. She read fairytales to him at night, played blocks with him in the nursery and, thus, gave him time to discover that she was as devoted to him as she was to his enthralling father.
    Her days with Adam were a blur of political discussions, luncheons for him and his colleagues and social obligations that often took him out without her. Increasingly disturbed by the TellTale’s assertions of his infidelity to her and to his party, Adam complained how his colleagues now questioned his motives and his objectives. His speeches to the floor were met with catcalls and demands he sit and be quiet. Not all came from the opposition.
    “Shall we host a dinner party?” she asked him one morning at breakfast. “We will invite your colleagues.”
    Adam remained reluctant. “The conversation might turn to taking me to Tyburn Hill to hang me.”
    “What better way to cool their heads than to show that you are not averse to private discussions,” she persuaded him.
    Seeking a remedy for his ills, Felice castigated herself for Adam’s troubles. Miss Proper continued to tear his reputation to shreds. This was not because Felice wrote such hideous things, but because whatever she presented to Howell, he edited to make more damning. He would even do it in front of her. Torturing her, he would greet her in the office that had once been her father’s. Howell would read her words—and change the type as it was set, transforming Adam into a lecherous, debased gambler and womanizer. Then he would criticize his