She smoothed a hand over his hair. “I’d like that. Now get under the covers. You’ll catch your death strutting around in the altogether with your hair damp. Are you trying to flaunt your wares, Tiberius?”
He rolled off of her, lifted the covers over his body, and lay back against the pillows. “Yes, I am. I am flaunting my wares shamelessly. Are you tempted?”
He sounded amused despite himself—if a little exasperated—and this pleased her, to think she could make him smile even if the damned man wouldn’t actually show it. “I am impressed.” She rolled over to her side lest he see her smile. Behind her, she felt Tye shifting on the mattress, and then a voice sounded very near her ear.
“Cunnilingus.”
She drew his arm around her waist and snuggled her backside into the lee of his body. There was no point trying to disguise the laughter that lit her from within, no point hiding her pleasure in the answering humor she felt reverberating through him, either.
How did a man clarify that he’d come to propose marriage when a woman’s mouth was inches from his ill-behaved cock? Tye considered this question as he wrapped himself around his naked, laughing, prospective marchioness.
The answer was simple: he didn’t. He hadn’t, in any case. He’d been too busy resisting the temptation to sink his hand into the golden glory of Hester’s unbound hair and guide her mouth a few inches lower.
“Tell me about your sisters, Tiberius. I see you are a faithful correspondent to them.”
His sisters? Hester was naked in his arms on a commodious, soft bed, and she wanted to talk about his sisters. Very well—sisters were not a topic that far removed from marriage.
“I am blessed with three, all younger. They take after our mother in that they are very sociable.”
“Unlike you.” She turned her head to kiss his biceps where he’d threaded an arm under her neck.
“Unlike—?” He kissed her nape in retaliation. “If I were any more sociable at the present moment, madam, you’d be wearing my ring.”
“Tiberius, did no one ever tease you?”
“Gordie.” The admission was out, a truth, not a comfortable one.
“Tell me about him. All I know is he ruined Mary Fran, and then had to be brought up to scratch by the combined forces of his superior officers and the old Earl of Balfour.”
“Gordie was not happy in the military.” Another admission. “He said the army was changing and no longer a fit place to stash superfluous younger sons and other ne’er-do-wells. He would have done very well as my father’s heir.”
The words hung in the darkness, something between a shame and a regret, though the truth didn’t sound half so awful aloud as Tye had always thought it would.
Hester turned out of his embrace and lay on her other side, so she was facing him. “How can you say such a thing?”
“It’s simply a fact. Gordie liked to tool about the countryside, calling on the neighbors, visiting in the churchyard. He could talk politics with my father all night and knew the names of every yeoman ever to raise a chicken on Flynn property.”
She pushed his hair off his brow, an oddly soothing caress. “And you don’t?”
“I’m not much for visiting.”
This caused her lips to quirk up in that secret, feminine smile Tye was coming to watch for. “I’d say you visit rather well.”
She shifted again—she wasn’t the most restful bed partner—and wrestled Tye into her embrace. He allowed it, though permitting a woman to cuddle him was a novel addition to his intimate repertoire. When he was wrapped in her arms, his cheek pillowed on her breast, his nose full of lavender and lemon verbena, she stroked his hair back off his face.
A slow, pleasurable caress that should have been soothing, though Tye’s reproductive apparatus was not exactly soothed. Before she could return to the topic of his sisters—or, God help him, his parents—Tye decided to advance his artillery on the main objective.
“Do you ever consider marriage, Hester?”
She yawned, which had the effect of raising then lowering the feminine pillow beneath Tye’s cheek. “Not happily.”
“Don’t you want children?” Even his sisters admitted to wanting children, though Joan was adamant her artistic and fashion endeavors had to come first.
“Of course I want children.” Her reply held not a hint of banter. “Every woman is raised to want a family and a home of her own, and I’m no different, except my parents’ union was not happy. My sister is so much more vivacious than I am, so much prettier—she’s tall, you know—I accept that I might have to settle for being a doting aunt.”
“Your sister could not be any more attractive than you are, Hester Daniels.” He hadn’t meant it to sound like a scold, but he’d seen Miss Eugenia Daniels in more than one ballroom. “There’s a difference between pretty and attractive.”
“That is the oddest compliment, but I think you mean it.”
He didn’t exactly kiss her breast, but he opened his mouth against her skin and breathed in the fragrance of her. “Pretty fades in time, and women who rely on their looks alone can all too easily become pathetic, like a man who relies exclusively on his title. You have bottom and sense.”
“Now if only I were seventeen two hands and broke to the bridle, hmm?”
Bottom and sense were to Tye high praise, but it struck him as he nuzzled her breast that Hester Daniels also had a bruised, if not broken, heart. He lifted his head and rolled to his back. “Come here, Hester. If we’re to indulge in the equestrian analogies—which I do not encourage, mind you—then you can mount up.”
She regarded him curiously in the dim light but obliged him, straddling his hips and curling down onto his chest.
He undertook to organize her hair. “Why should you have to settle for being a doting aunt? Why not marry?”
Why not marry me? Except winning the argument in the general case before he put a specific opportunity before her seemed the more sensible course.
She was quiet so long, Tye thought she might have fallen asleep. “I was not… I did not exercise good sense when Jasper proposed to me. I let him conduct a hasty, quiet courtship, allude to an agreement with my father, and impose himself upon me, all without protest on my part. Marriage is designed to make women stupid. We are supposed to be willing to do anything to gain that prize. I see this now.”
For God’s sake, it was exactly the argument his sisters made, frequently and at great volume. They insisted on the right to choose, said the church itself did not countenance women being forced to marry, and flounced off to the next house party completely oblivious to the marquess’s draconian views on the matter.
“But you want children, Hester, and I think you would make a fine mother.”
She cuddled closer and pressed her nose against his throat. “This is a very peculiar discussion to have with you, Tiberius. I did not realize you would excel at prying confidences from me.”
Nor had that been his objective, but another part of him wanted to hear her confidences. “I didn’t discuss Gordie with anybody until I came up here.”
“And then Fee got to you, didn’t she?” Hester shifted on him, letting him have more of her weight. “She no doubt had you maundering on about your late brother, and you all unsuspecting. She’s gotten to me too, and this is the reason why I will eventually waver on the idea of marriage. I love that child. I would die to protect her, and if we discount last summer, I’ve known her only a handful of weeks. She is that dear.”