‘You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen,’ Gray said, his voice low. ‘I thought you lovely before, but I could not have looked hard enough, long enough. I will never be able to look long enough.’

  His palms stroked over the arch of her feet, up her ankles, the fine silk of her stockings snagging slightly against his skin. He untied her garters, one by one, his fingers steady, slow on the ribbons, his big hands gentle as he rolled each stocking down her legs and tossed them aside.

  Gaby gasped as he leaned forward, pressed her knees apart, but she opened for him, bathed in the heat of his gaze. Her arms gave way as he edged up the bed between her legs and she fell back with a little cry as Gray bent his head and she felt his tongue lick up the inside of first one thigh, then the other. He teased the crease between body and leg for a while, then stilled. When she lifted her head to look at him he was kneeling between her knees, his hands curled lightly over her belly.

  ‘There is nothing to see yet.’ His fingers stroked, tender, possessive.

  ‘No. It seems hard to believe and yet I know.’ She put one hand on top of his. ‘Boy or girl, I wonder? Do you have a preference?’

  ‘I want a child of yours. Any child of yours.’ Gray leaned over, kissed her stomach, his tongue tip playing for a moment in her navel until she fell back, laughing at the tickle. Then he slid down, his shoulders wide between her thighs, and began to kiss and lick into the core of her.

  Lightning shafts of delight, teasing, aching strokes of his tongue, his lips, his teeth, sucking and nibbling, dragging every exquisite, tortuous shred of pleasure out of her. She heard herself moan aloud, bit her knuckles, then flung her arms wide, her hands fisting in the sheets as he slid one, two fingers into the heat that was tight with longing for him.

  ‘Gray.’

  He answered her with the thrust of his fingers, the intensity of his kiss and she convulsed against his hand, gasping her love for him as he came up her body and took her mouth. She arched against him and he entered her in one hard stroke and then froze.

  ‘Gabrielle,’ he said against her throat, like a prayer. ‘Gabrielle.’ And now it was a demand, a challenge as he moved again, strong, slow, the rhythm as old as time, as fresh and new and miraculous as the moment.

  ‘Yes.’ She curled her legs around his narrow hips, dug her heels into the small of his back, clung to him and answered every thrust, every demand, gasping out her love and her pleasure as it built, tangling tighter and tighter. She felt him begin to lose his rhythm, heard his breath coming harder, harder against her face and then Gray went rigid above her as the knot of her pleasure unravelled into bliss. There was heat as he spilled inside her, the awareness that the only reality was the two of them, now one, and then she was lost in him.

  * * *

  ‘Papa, why isn’t Thomas a lord? I’m a lord.’ James, Lord Travers, peered down at the face of his new day-old brother, just visible in the swathing shawl. ‘Is it because he’s very small?’

  Gaby watched as Gray bent over his sons, checking that Jamie, seated cross-legged on the end of her bed, was supporting the baby’s head properly.

  ‘It is rather unfair, I agree,’ Gray said. ‘Only the eldest son of an earl gets to be a lord with a courtesy title. Your brother is the Honourable Thomas Laurent Frost Graystone.’

  ‘But Joanna is a lady,’ Jamie persisted. ‘And so is Susanna.’

  They all looked to the other bedpost where Joanna was sitting, her new sister held very carefully. ‘Lady Susanna Maria Frost Graystone,’ she recited.

  ‘That is the rule, I’m afraid,’ Gaby said. ‘There’s no arguing with the College of Heralds. Even if it would be nice to have two matching sets of twins.’

  Constantia, the new nurse, came in. ‘Time for the little ones to sleep,’ she said in her heavily accented English. ‘And for their mama to sleep also.’ She retrieved the babies competently, one in each arm. ‘Come with me, children, and let your mama rest. Your grandmama is waiting for you.’ The look she gave Gray was, Gaby thought, enough to rout most men. He took his son’s place at the foot of the bed and just smiled until Constantia left, the children with her.

  ‘Well, Lady Leybourne?’ he asked, moving so he was sitting next to her, his legs up on the bed, his back against the pillows.

  ‘Very well, Lord Leybourne.’ Gaby rested her head on his shoulder. ‘Tired, but so happy.’ The shutters were half-drawn against the August sun and the filmy white curtains fluttered in the afternoon breeze that brought the scent of herbs and roses with it and, distantly, the sound of the river.

  ‘Was it not clever of me to present you with twins?’ he asked.

  ‘And have me lumbering about like an elephant all through the summer heat?’ She nuzzled her cheek against his shoulder. ‘Yes, very clever. You have given me a ready-made family. Four children and we have only been married eight months.’

  ‘Jamie and Joanna love you, you know.’

  ‘I know. They explained very carefully the other day why they had begun calling me Mama. Their first mother was, obviously, Mother, which meant I was Mama. They are sweet, the pair of them. I just want to smother them in kisses sometimes. You know Jamie brought me a salamander last week?’

  ‘If I bring you a salamander, will I get kisses?’ Gray asked, his voice hopeful.

  ‘You will get kisses whether you bring me salamanders, diamonds or simply yourself. You will get kisses for ever.’

  He slid down the bed and held her carefully against his chest. ‘I’m amazed you can still love me after yesterday. All husbands should be chained to the foot of the bed when their wives give birth, then there would be no nonsense about who is the weaker sex. Sleep now, my love.’

  ‘You sleep, too. And we will wake up and this will be no dream, but the reality of the rest of our lives.’

  Gabrielle drifted off into sleep, Gray’s murmured words mingling with the sound of the river, the sigh of the warm breeze, the beat of their hearts, and knew she would wake to a love that would last a lifetime.

  * * * * *

  If you enjoyed this story

  don’t miss these other great reads by Louise Allen:

  Marrying His Cinderella Countess

  The Earl’s Practical Marriage

  And check out her

  Lords of Disgrace miniseries

  starting with

  His Housekeeper’s Christmas Wish

  Keep reading for an excerpt from Seduced by the Prince’s Kiss by Bronwyn Scott.

  Seduced by the Prince’s Kiss

  by Bronwyn Scott

  Chapter One

  Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex—March 1824

  Spring had come again in all its glory: blustering winds, lashing rains and always the peculiar English dampness that conspired to keep a person indoors far beyond the body’s patience for inactivity—at least his body’s. Stepan Shevchenko braced himself against the sea winds buffeting the bluffs. He peered through the eyepiece of his spyglass, searching the empty horizon.

  Nothing yet.

  He collapsed the spyglass with a frown. Still, it was far better to be out here amongst the elements than inside where he’d been for months. He had little tolerance for the indoors. He craved constant exercise, constant adventure, despite his efforts to tame himself to the more sedate rhythms of an Englishman’s life.

  Two springs now he’d spent in Britain and yet in all that time he’d proved only that one could take the man out of Kuban, but one couldn’t take Kuban out of the man. The wildness of Kuban with its mountains and rivers called to the wildness within him, something he buried deep at his most primal self, something he’d been careful to suppress. It had become a secret identity, known only to him and those who knew him best: Nikolay, Ruslan, Illarion and Dimitri. Certainly, no one in London who did business with Prince Stepan Shevchenko would guess at it. To them, he was all that was proper. A boring word for someone whom many thought a boring man.

  He preferred it that way. Proper was a very good cover. So good, in fact, he could even hide the wildness from himself. Sometimes, he almost believed the façade. But on days like today, when the wind blew through his hair, and the rain soaked his face, he knew better. He was still wild at heart; always running, always raging.

  The horizon shimmered, the emptiness interrupted by the appearance of sails. Stepan smiled and lifted the spyglass again. It must be her—his ship, one of them. Through the eyepiece he sought out the name on the prow; the Lady Frances, a ship well known to be sponsored by Prince Stepan Shevchenko, bringing the latest Kubanian luxuries to London: lacquered trifle boxes with carefully painted scenes of Kubanian life on their lids, delicate birch wood carvings and the ever-entertaining Matryoshka dolls. A sense of tentative gratification rippled through him at the sight of the ship, followed by a clench of anticipation deep in his stomach. He moved his glass to take in the space behind the Lady Frances but the remainder of the horizon was empty.

  Wait for it, he counselled himself. Impatience often bred unnecessary worry. He should not be concerned. Not yet. It was a good sign the Lady Frances was here. There was a satisfactory profit in her cargo once the duties were paid and a satisfaction of another sort, the sort that came from surrounding oneself with reminders of home. If he could not go to Kuban, he could bring Kuban to London. It was a type of cure for an odd homesickness for a place he’d not expected to miss, a place that didn’t hold good memories, but haunted him none the less now that he could never go back. But a man did not get rich, not like he had, on importing knick-knacks to decorate ladies’ parlours. No, the Lady Frances wasn’t the real prize. She was merely the decoy.

  His anticipation growing, Stepan focused on the empty space left in the Lady Frances’s wake. Wait for it...wait for it...five minutes went by. Then ten. There was movement. His adventurer’s heart leapt. The thrill never got old. Slowly, a second ship came into view. It was here! The Razboynik held the true profit—casks of undiluted vodka straight from Ekaterinador and duty-free, thanks to his ingenuity and specially engineered barrels. Without the vodka there was no profit in it otherwise. No adventure, either, and no cause that justified the risk. For him there must be all three. Stepan reached into his pocket, trading his spyglass for a mirror and flashed a brief signal out across the water. That single flash meant: ‘All is safe, come in from the sea.’

  Stepan heard his horse nicker from his picket and felt a presence behind him. He smiled without turning, knowing full well who it would be, his land-crew chief, Joseph Raleigh. ‘I swear, Joe, you can smell a ship a mile out to sea.’ He chuckled as Joseph came up beside him. Stepan passed the young man the spyglass.

  ‘It’s a beaut, milord.’ Joseph grinned, peering through the eyepiece. ‘What I can smell is profit. The boys are rarin’ to go.’

  By ‘boys’, Joseph meant the crew that would gather to unload the Razboynik, all of them adolescents ranging from fourteen to seventeen, all of them orphans figuratively or literally. Growing up, Stepan had been both. Some were from London, gathered up during his visits, others were from the area. There were those in society who, if they knew, might condemn him for employing ‘children’ in illegal work. But these were boys who’d seen hardship, who lived with it every day, boys who’d been reduced to doing far worse than diluting vodka in caves before he’d found them. At their age, these boys needed guidance and help, but they also needed their pride. They wouldn’t take charity.

  He knew, he’d been their age and in their situation before, never mind that he’d been raised in a palace and they’d been raised on the streets. Context didn’t prevent one from being lost and rudderless. Like them, he’d been headed towards a life of shiftlessness before he’d been found, a boy not interested in school, only in running wild in the great outdoors. A balanced life needed both freedom and structure. Stepan would pay forward the favour Dimitri had done him if he could. One didn’t need to be poor to need direction. The pitfalls of being an orphan were no respecters of station.

  As for the smuggling—well, everyone did it. There wasn’t anyone in Shoreham who wasn’t connected to ‘free trading’ in some way, either as merchants or consumers or employees. That made it a fairly safe ‘industry’. Folks were less likely to turn in their friends and their own suppliers of goods they couldn’t afford by other means. There were the politics of it, too—this was a way to stand up to an unfair government that taxed goods beyond legitimacy. It was a way to stand up to greed, to a system sustained by standing on the backs of those who could least afford to support the weight, while the system ignored those in the most need: widows, children, orphans, broken men home from war and farmers who could no longer afford to farm. To Stepan, smuggling was protest. When the system changed, he would change.

  Joseph shut the spyglass and handed it back. ‘Shall we go down, milord?’

  Stepan pulled a pouch of coins from his pocket. ‘Make sure everyone who works tonight gets their share. I’ll see you later.’ He would ride down in a moment to meet the Lady Frances at the docks. While he was respectfully and publicly paying the duties on her cargo, the Razboynik would put in unnoticed to the quiet cove below the bluffs. Joseph Raleigh and the land crew would stow the vodka and small packets of spices in the caves. Then, they would spend the week preparing the vodka for transport from Shoreham to London, where Stepan had managed to make Kubanian food, drink and artefacts the latest rage. The women wanted their knick-knacks, the men wanted their vodka.

  It was a good arrangement, one that had increased his fortune and satisfied his need for adventure. The arrangement was neat, but not too neat. There was, after all, a margin for risk. Multiple aspects of his ‘business’ could be discovered at any time. The caves where he stored his treasure were not his own. They belonged to the estate of Preston Worth, whose wife, Beatrice, was a friend of Dimitri’s wife. Worth and his family were not always in residence. The man’s work took them to London a good part of the year as it did now and, when it did not, Worth was a civil prevention officer intent on ridding the coast of smugglers while one roosted in his very own nest. The irony of it appealed to Stepan nearly as much as the risk.

  Preston wasn’t the only threat. There was always the potential the coastguard would discover his illicit little enterprise. Little or large wouldn’t matter to the King’s men. The penalty for smuggling was still the same: hanging or, if one was lucky, transportation.

  Not that Stepan worried about either overmuch. If anything, the penalty for discovery challenged him to be more creative. A good smuggler these days couldn’t rely on simply outrunning the British as one might have done in the past. In the modern era, a good smuggler had to outsmart the soldiers. Thankfully, Stepan was very smart. His new casks with their secret compartments were proof of that. Even if the Razboynik had been stopped, he doubted the excise men would have found anything of concern.

  Stepan turned from the bluff and strode to where his horse waited. They would ride to the docks and then the hour back to Little Westbury and the hospitality of Dimitri Petrovich. He didn’t mind the long day in the saddle or even the rain. He had plenty to occupy his thoughts. He was already planning his next delivery. That ship was due next month and would require more thought than this one. The Razboynik was a practice run of sorts to try out the decoy and the new casks. The other ship, the Skorost, carried an enormous vodka cargo along with more spices and precious Russian saffron. The stakes were infinitely higher. Planning excursions kept his mind busy. It was better to think about how to land contraband than to think about other, less feasible things, like the unattainable Anna-Maria Petrova, Dimitri’s vivacious sister.

  There was nothing but disappointment and heartbreak down that road. If anything were to come of his fantasies in that direction, transportation and hanging would be the least of his worries. Dimitri would have him drawn and quartered, and that would be after Dimitri had him castrated. He’d always admired Dimitri’s tenacity when it came to protecting his family. Stepan just never wanted that tenacity turned in his direction. He valued Dimitri’s friendship too much, and well, to be frank, he valued certain parts of his anatomy, as well.

  Stepan smiled ruefully and swung astride his horse. He had smuggling to soothe his agitated soul. It gave him purpose and a cause. It kept him out of the house a good part of the day and out of Anna-Maria’s energetic orbit. For the sake of all parties concerned, he’d concluded long ago that Anna-Maria was a passion best indulged at a distance.

  * * *

  She saw him coming the moment he turned down the long drive towards the house. Hmmm. Where had he been this time? Anna-Maria stood carefully to the side of her gauzy white bedroom curtains where no one could see her and pondered her question. She’d made something of a study of Stepan in the long winter months he’d been with them in Little Westbury. It had begun as a way to pass the time until spring, until she could go to London and make her debut. She was nineteen and by rights she should have gone to London last year, but she’d been too new to British shores in her brother’s opinion. This year, she could hardly wait. Finally, her life could begin. Anything would be more exciting than the country.

  But until she could go to London, her brother’s friend made an interesting enough subject. There was an air of mystery to his absences. He left mid-morning and returned late each evening just in time for dinner. Anna had entertained the notion of trying to rise with him in the mornings, but the earlier she rose, the earlier he rose, until he was leaving well before his usual mid-morning departures. She’d experimented with that variable for a week before she gave up trying to pace him.