Except that Alex woke up again, some two hours later. Charlotte was deep in the sleep of the utterly exhausted next to him. He swore to himself that he wouldn’t wake her, but then he irresistibly drew off the blanket and looked at the elegant lines of her body. She was his, all his. And when Charlotte awoke, languorously returning to the world, she first shrieked in disbelief, and then in utter, abandoned pleasure. Alex’s dark head was between her thighs and his tongue forced streaks of mindless bliss to rocket through her body.

So the night was long, but it was not, as wise men say, without its rewards. Morning light first slanted below the velvet curtains around six in the morning. In time the lines of warm sunlight crept closer to the end of the bed. They found the Earl, and the Countess, of Sheffield and Downes sleeping the sleep of the just, the exhausted, the newly married, and the thoroughly sated.

Chapter 16

Chapter 16

The next two months were long remembered in the history of Dunston Castle, Scotland, the seat of four successive Earls of Sheffield and Downes. In fact, the castle’s butler, Mr. McDougal, confided to his wife that there’d been nothing like it since the third earl, the present earl’s father, he punctiliously explained, brought a young woman up to stay for a week. She was no better than she should be, obviously, and the antics they had to put up with!

There was the time they found the dining room door locked, for example, just as McDougal was about to bring in a flaming tart, himself being just a footman at the time. The tart was ordered special, McDougal recalled, the cook not being used to fancy continental dishes that had to be set on fire. And wasn’t she in a tizzy when the whole thing was brought back to the kitchen, blackened and frizzled?

And there was a young second housemaid who learned entirely too much when she innocently went to dust the music room—and what did she find? His wife nodded knowingly as McDougal waggled his eyebrows.

“I was just a young one then,” he said. “But I well remember the hysterics she had in the kitchen. Such an uproar! The cook finally had to give her a good shot of the cooking brandy, since the butler-that-was, old Grimthorple, was rather tight with the key to the spirits cabinet. Ah, well.”

“I don’t rightly think that this earl should be compared to his father,” said his wife comfortably. She ran the laundry, linens, and weaving section of the castle operations, and what she didn’t know about castle occupants wasn’t worth knowing. “These two are sweet on each other and newly married. And the countess is no slip of a girl. Even if one does see them kissing now and again, she is always respectful and courteous to me.