Free The American Duchess by Joan Wolf Page B

feet were bare. She baited her hook with professional detachment and looked at him expectantly.
    His blue eyes glinted at her. “Go ahead,” he said. “I’ll move off onto the rocks over there.”
    She nodded and expertly cast her line into the water. He did not move immediately but stood regarding her. He was, as his aunt had often remarked, a very fastidious man, and the sight of his wife barefoot and dressed in a plain cotton dress with the sleeves rolled up ought not to have appealed to him. But it did.
    For one thing, Tracy didn’t look even remotely disheveled. She could have spent hours rolling her sleeves in just that way, arranging her collar in just that fashion, so perfect did they look on her. She had a way with clothes, he reflected, that was more French than English. Whatever she wore, it looked marvelous. It was the way she wore it—as if, under the circumstances, it was impossible for anyone to wear anything else. She began to pull in her line and he moved over to the rocks he had pointed out and began to fish himself.
    They had quite a successful afternoon, and the Duke’s bucket was respectably full when he decided to call a halt. Tracy had stopped fishing about fifteen minutes before and was lying back on the grass, sleepy from the sun, her eyes closed, her hands behind her head. He put the fishing gear into the phaeton and sat down beside her. Her lashes, a darker brown than her hair, lay on her cheeks. Her skin was honey colored, not the white-white of an Englishwoman’s. Damp brown-blonde curls clustered at her temples. There was a faint beading of moisture on her upper lip. The outline of her breasts against the thin cotton of her dress was beautiful.
    She felt him looking at her and the knowledge of his gaze awoke a memory of the feelings he had stirred in her the other night. She felt his finger on the inside of her bare arm, gently rubbing. “Are you awake?” he said and she opened her eyes.
    All during the drive home, and all during dinner, she felt as if she were waiting. They took a walk together in the garden after dinner and watched the light die away from the sky. Then he sent her upstairs. She put on a thin silk nightdress and told Emma she would not need her any more that night. Her husband, coming into her room, found her in bed this time. When his lips came down on hers and his beautiful, narrow hand touched her breast, she knew that this was what she had been waiting for. “Adrian,” she whispered in wonder, “Adrian.”
    He didn’t go back to his own bed that night, or any other night of their stay at Thorn Manor. In loving Tracy he had discovered a heady combination of tenderness and eroticism that he had never known before. Her innocence, her total trust, called forth from him feelings of protectiveness and care. He wanted to cherish her.  But, at the same time, he felt he could not get enough of her, of her beautiful body, which she put totally at the service of his desire, of the small cries of astonished pleasure she gave when he thrust deep within her, of the feeling he had of absolute possession.
    This was his wife. There was a feeling of permanency about his lovemaking with her that he had never felt before. He thought not only of the present, but of the future. He thought of filling her with children—sons who would have her brightness and who would bear his name and carry on his line. Six centuries worth of dynastic and possessive instincts had been bred into the Duke; in his relationship with his wife, all of those instincts had come strongly into play.
    Tracy felt herself plunged into a world she hadn’t known existed. She was bound to her husband by an intimacy of intense passion that left her with awareness of little else. She felt totally, absorbingly, married. Adrian’s least movement, his smallest glance, engrossed her. She was like wax in his hands. He could do what he would with her. For five magic days, the outside world, as far as she was concerned,