William kicked the snow off his boots and stepped through the front door. A sudden early-March bluster had brought winter back to Bath with a tantrum of wind and snow. But the cottage was snug and warm, and smelled of a hearty meal being prepared. Nora sat in an armchair by the fire, her legs folded onto the seat, tucked into her skirt. She was too captivated by her book to have acknowledged his return, and he took a moment and enjoyed the homey view. These past two months, living with her like this, had been idyllic in many ways, despite the turmoil and trauma that had brought them here, and followed them as well.
The scandal of her story had howled across England for a full week, but by the end of the second week, it had settled to a grumble, and the past day or so had been quiet, without mention of Lady Nora Tate in the London papers, and no visits from strangers to their cottage.
He smiled as he shed his coat and scarf and handed them to the maid. “Thank you, Nell. It smells delicious in here.”
“Thank you, Mr. William. It’ll be brisket and potatoes tonight. And a custard tart for pudding.”
“Wonderful.”
“May I pour you a cuppa, sir? There’s a fresh pot.”
“No, thank you. I’ll get myself something stronger.” Nell took his coat and scarf to the coat tree and returned to the kitchen. William went to the parlor.
Nora set her book on her lap and tipped up her head for a kiss. “Your nose is like ice. Is it very cold?”
“For this California boy, it’s unpleasant. The snow’s slowed down, though. Just a few inches.” He kissed her hearth-warmed lips. “You look cozy. What are you reading?”
She showed him the spine, and he chuckled. “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman? Don’t you have that memorized by now?” In town for one of her therapeutic visits to the Roman baths, they’d stopped at a booksellers, and Nora had bought an armload of books, one of which was Mary Wollstonecraft’s manifesto. Nora had read it at least three times through in two weeks.
“Don’t be snide. You know, Wollstonecraft wrote this in 1792. A hundred years before I was born. She makes the same arguments we’re making now. And yet here we still are, crying out for simple human rights.” She sighed and set the book aside. “Was there anything interesting in the post?”
He took the armchair facing hers at the other side of the fireplace. “Yes. I have another letter from Chris.”
She rolled her eyes, and in that gesture seemed young and immature. “Anything interesting?”
“Nora, listen, please. He writes that your father wants to see you.”
She paled and turned away, and William wondered whether he’d been too direct with the news. The last time she’d had any contact with Lord Tarrin, she’d been in her room at Tarrindale Hall. In November, four months ago.
She contemplated the fire and finally answered, “The father who locked me away like Mrs. Rochester and then abandoned me entirely? I think not.”
“All right. I just wanted you to know he’s asking.”
She scoffed quietly and said nothing more.
“There’s also a letter from your aunt. It’s quite thick.”
Her attention returned to him. “Did you read it?”
“It’s addressed to you.” He handed her the sealed envelope.
She took it and broke the seal. The thickness was another envelope inside the first, accompanying a single-page letter. William watched as Nora read the page, then studied the second envelope.
She looked up, and her eyes showed shock and trepidation as they met his. “This is a letter from Mrs. Pankhurst.” The still-sealed envelope shook in her hand.
“Emmeline Pankhurst?”
“The very one.” Nora set her book and her aunt’s letter aside and opened Mrs. Pankhurst’s envelope. Again, William studied her, watching her eyes track back and forth across the page, wondering at the furrow of her brow. When she was done, her hands sank to her lap, and she stared at the fire again.
“Nora?”
Unfurling her legs, she stood and brought the letter to him. As he took it, she walked on and out of the room.
William let her go and read the letter.
My dear Lady Nora,
I hope you’ll forgive my familiarity, but over this week of news I feel I’ve come to know you. It could not have been easy to tell your story, and your strength in persevering through your trials and their telling is admirable. You are a sister among us now. I write to invite you to talk with me about your experiences and our fight, and also to stand with me and speak to the public, to our sisters in suffrage, and to those who must be persuaded of the righteousness of our cause. I think your story and the grace with which you tell it could help our cause tremendously. Please send your answer to your aunt, Lady Collington, at your earliest convenience.
Sincerely,
Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, WSPU
William read the letter twice, then went in search of Nora. He found her in the library, staring out the window at their little garden, with its low, snow-topped stone wall, and the lane beyond.
He stood behind her and set his hands on her hips. She rested back against his chest. “What are you thinking?”
“That I’m a coward. Mrs. Pankhurst honors me. She’s in hiding, you know. To make that invitation is to extend her trust. But all I can feel is horror at the idea.”
William was horrified at the idea himself. Emmeline Pankhurst was a fugitive and considered an enemy of the Crown. When she presented herself publicly, despite her security and protections against arrest, the police response was greater and more avid, and the women around her at greater risk. He never wanted Nora anywhere near another protest or suffrage speech. Not in England. In America, the fight for suffrage was still a debate—often heated, and the opposition’s rhetoric insulting, but the retributions were, at least, non-violent, as were the protests themselves. Mrs. Pankhurst’s ideas about civil disobedience hadn’t made it across the Atlantic. He knew of no arrests, and American suffragists weren’t throwing rocks and carrying clubs, or setting fires to mailboxes.
But this wasn’t his decision to make, so he clenched his jaw against all his strong arguments and said simply, “You’re not a coward, Nora. You never have been.” He swept his arms around her waist and pulled her closer. “Talk it out with me.”
“I don’t know … I’m not ashamed of my story, and I understand that it should be told. But … I don’t know.” Her shoulders lifted and fell with a sigh. “I don’t know.”
Knowing by now very well how her mind sorted through her thoughts, William kissed her head and waited, looking out the window with her. An early spring bird, small and softly brown, landed on the stone pilaster at the gate. Her little feet shifted irritably through the snow.
At last, Nora spoke again. “I can’t face it, the thought of it all happening again. I just can’t.” A sobbed hitched up and broke the last word. “I can’t. William, I can’t.”
He turned her in his arms, and she wrapped herself around him, crying softly. “You don’t have to, darling. You owe no one anything.”
“I do!” she exclaimed into his shirt. “I owe Kate, and Maude, and all the women who fight and fight and fight again. How can I leave them to fight alone?”
“You’re not, and you won’t.” He leaned back and lifted her chin so she would meet his eyes. God, hers were so beautiful, even more so now, sparkling with earnest tears. “Nora, there are other ways to fight. Your aunt fights.”
“She doesn’t. She writes checks.”
It was a point Nora made often, contemptuously—and also, in William’s mind, fallaciously. “Which do you think has the greater chance of getting Maude her children back—a hunger strike, or the excellent solicitor Martha has paid for?”
Without a rebuttal, she simply stared up at him. When she blinked, she dislodged a tear from her lashes. William caught it on a fingertip.
“There are many ways to fight. And money is crucial. Talk is crucial, too—not only rousing speeches at rallies, from balconies, but quiet talks in parlors and drawing rooms, or meetings in hotels. Editorials and articles printed in the right papers and journals. I’ve been with my mother for years while she’s fought, and she’s done it with her voice, her pen, and her purse—and the purses of other wealthy people. What Kate and Maude, and you, have done with your bodies is crucial. It’s the front lines. But that fight is supported and given weight by people like my mother and your aunt. And you, if you need to step back.”
“I don’t have any money.”
“You have mine. And you have a voice, and a pen. You have a story. You can tell it from a distance, and it will carry as far as you wish. The choice is yours, Nora. I’ll support whatever decision you make. But make it for yourself, not for what you think others expect. Isn’t that what you’ve been fighting against?”
She turned out of his arms, back to the window. The little brown bird was gone, and the landscape was quiet and nearly colorless. “I don’t want to be a martyr. Or a mascot. But I don’t want to give up, either. I don’t know what to do.”
He’d tried to show her that she didn’t have to give up, but she wasn’t yet ready to see her aunt’s fight, or his mother’s, as efforts as valiant as Kate’s or Maude’s, or Mrs. Pankhurst’s. “May I make a suggestion?”
“Please.” Reaching back, Nora grabbed his hand and pulled him close. He wrapped his arms around her waist again.
“Let’s do what we planned before you got this letter. We’ll go to Scotland for a few weeks, get married, and then go to America. I want to introduce you to my family. We can decide what our future could be from there. If you want to come back and live in England, we will. Or we’ll make our home in California. But you can fight from either place.”
She looked over her shoulder at him, her eyes round with surprise. “You’d live here? What about your father, the business?”
“My father has a vision for a global business. How better to find our way in than to be based across the ocean?”
“You don’t like England.”
No, he did not. “I love you, and I can do that anywhere.” He picked up her left hand and kissed the diamond ring she now wore. “Marry me, Nora, and I’ll be home wherever we are.”
“Oh, how I love you,” she whispered and wound herself into his embrace.
By the time they’d settled up their affairs in Bath and given up the cottage, traveled to Gretna Green, and whiled away the three weeks’ residency Scotland required before a marriage could take place, March had become April, and spring had found its footing. William and Nora were married by a blacksmith on a bright, warm, flowery day.
Gretna Green, just across the border from England, had been famous for centuries as a place particularly welcoming of eloping couples, and in the three weeks of their stay, they managed to put together a wedding they could remember fondly for more than the act it accomplished. As part of a fairly extensive wardrobe Nora happily collected, and William happily purchased, during their three weeks of leisure in Scotland, she had an elegant white suit made at one of the many competing boutiques in town, and bought a fetching, broad-brimmed, veiled hat at another. He wore a new bespoke suit. Their vows were spoken before strangers, with nary a guest in sight, but that was as they preferred it. There was no one with whom Nora wished to share the day, and those William would have shared it with were thousands of miles away.
William’s mother had probably come over with a case of the vapors when she got word that her one and only child intended to finally marry, at the age of thirty-four, without a guest list of hundreds or a celebration of any kind, but he expected she’d survive the shock. He also expected that there would be a celebration, when they made their way back to California. If there was anything his mother did better than fight for justice, it was throw a party.
After their vows were spoken, the documents signed, and a stiff photograph taken, William and Nora celebrated with a quiet dinner in the hotel dining room. They shared a bottle of champagne, from which William drank most. Nora had never had champagne, and a single glass coursing through her small frame had her cheeks rosy. After a dessert of strawberry tart, William led her up to their suite, fully expecting that it was the end of their wedding night.
He knew what had happened to her, the things she’d been subjected to, and she knew he knew. But they’d never spoken of it in any kind of detail. For all the things she’d needed to sort out in her mind about her ordeal, all the talks they’d had, everything she’d told him, those details, she’d kept to herself. The force-feedings, the beatings, the ‘treatments’—she knew he knew and let that stand for all she’d say.
He could only imagine how those things had shaped her. He could hold her through a nightmare and calm her, and he could wonder, but he couldn’t know.
For three months, they’d slept together, Nora wrapped in his arms throughout each night. For three months, he’d fought the urges, the needs, of his body while hers pressed innocently to his, while her scent and warmth and delicate softness surrounded him. He had every intention of spending the next three years likewise. The next three decades. Until she was ready. But he’d be lying if he said it was easy.
So when her arms snaked around his waist as he stood before the armoire and opened his shirt, as her hands pressed flat on his belly and her head rested on his back, William closed his eyes and took a deep breath to steel his will.
“I love you, husband,” she murmured behind him.
He smiled and patted her hands. “I love you, wife. Are you happy?”
“Ever so. I feel like everything will be right. Like it already is, because you’re mine at last, and no one can take you from me.”
“No one,” he agreed. “Would you like to read before we turn out the lights?”
“No. I don’t want to read.” Her hands pushed beneath his undershirt, and her palms were on his skin, smoothing over his belly. “I don’t want to read at all.”
Her hands went for his waistband, and he grabbed them. “Nora.” He turned and cupped her face in his hands. Her hair had grown so that pretty, soft golden curls edged her face and looped around his fingers. “We don’t have to do anything just because it’s our wedding night. We can wait until you’re ready.”
“I am ready. I’ve been waiting. For this. To know you’re mine and no one can separate us. Not my father, not Christopher, no one. Even by the rule of our archaic laws, now I’m yours. My father has no claim. No one does but you.” Her arms eased around his waist and her hands slid up his back, on his skin. “I’m yours, William Frazier, my handsome unicorn. I’m yours forever, and I’m ready.”
He nearly asked if she was sure, if it wasn’t the champagne talking—but he knew the look she’d give him, full of fire and challenge. She’d told him what she wanted. Who was he to question what she knew of her own mind?
“Darling,” he sighed and put his mouth on hers.
She moaned, the sound so sweet he could taste it on his tongue, and her hands slid up his back and hooked over his shoulders as her body swayed into his. God. They’d kissed, deeply, and held each other, tightly, during these months since he’d found her; they’d expressed their love daily in touch and in words. But there had always been a reserve, a holding back. They’d both known it would go no farther than a kiss, than closeness. They had been waiting.
For this moment. She was his wife.
Dear God, she was his wife.
Let no man put asunder.
She must have felt the same explosive emotion that surged through his veins, because she tore her mouth from his just then and gasped. William dived in and fixed his mouth to her throat, taking her pulse on his tongue, and closed her up in his arms, leaning over her so that she arched over his arm and all that held her up was his strength. She dragged at his shirt, as if she meant to pull it off while she clung to him.
Panting, nearly dizzy with need, he stood and released her—not far, not even a step away, keeping so close to her that their bodies still touched. He dropped his suspenders off his shoulders, shrugged out of his shirt and tossed it away, then stripped off his undershirt and sent it to follow.
“Wait!” Nora cried, when he moved to unbutton the pretty jacket of her wedding suit, and thwarted desire snapped so hard inside him that he flinched. But she wasn’t trying to stop. She set her hands on his chest and brushed her fingers through the hair, then pushed up to his shoulders. Down his arms. Back up to his shoulders, and again to his chest. She lingered over every ridge, every swell, every dip, her eyes on fire with greedy interest.
William, who hadn’t had a woman since he’d last had Nora, nearly eighteen months past, clenched his hands into fists and withstood the exquisite torture of her gentle exploration.
“I forgot how beautiful you are,” she whispered. “How could I have forgotten this, when I’ve relived it so often in my mind?”
Though he wore nightclothes to bed, for his sake as much as hers, she’d seen his bare chest during these months. She’d touched him, innocently—or mostly so. And yet he understood her meaning. “You’ve never seen me like this.”
She smiled up at him, and he smiled back, diving into those beautiful blue eyes with their gemstone rays of green. “No, I suppose not. I’ve never looked on my husband before.” Her hands slid up, over his shoulders, to the back of his neck, and her fingers coiled in his hair. “Well, he’s glorious.”
“So is my wife. I’d love to see more of her.”
“Will you help me undress?”
Still swimming in the limpid depths of her eyes, William opened the dainty, silk-covered button that closed her jacket at her throat. Her chest swelled with each deep, sultry breath.
He pushed the jacket from her shoulders and let it fall at her feet. Beneath it, the matching lace and light silk gown buttoned at the back, from high on her neck to below her waist. He’d helped her finish off those shell buttons that morning, when she’d been unable to reach the ones between her shoulder blades. She hadn’t had a lady’s maid in Bath, and she’d turned down the hotel’s offer to send one up for her. What she couldn’t do herself, William helped her with.
He turned her around and began at her neck, easing each button open. When he exposed the little moles he loved so much, he paused and kissed them, circling his arms around her waist, holding her body tightly to his. “My love,” he murmured, his lips brushing her satiny skin. He felt her pulse fluttering, smelled the subtle flowers of her scent, heard the soft sigh of each breath.
He pushed the dress off her shoulders and helped it float down to a pool around her ankles. She wore a corset beneath it, but it wasn’t punishingly tight; he’d been the one to tie it, and he’d made sure. He undid her garters, letting her stockings slide down her legs, and unlaced the corset. Nora raised her arms above her head, and he lifted the rigid garment away and tossed it across the room.
Now she stood in her underthings, in a silken mound of discarded clothes. He crouched low and slid her shoes off, one at a time, helping her step out of each one, then eased the stockings from her pretty feet. Standing again, he helped her out of her vest and drawers. When she was nude, he turned her to face him again, took her hands and guided her out of the puffy pile of clothes.
She stood there, tiny and still so very thin. He remembered her body, as it had been before. She’d been slight then, but now, after her ordeal, even after three months of recovery, she seemed as delicate as a bird. Maybe it was simply that he remembered, too, how very frail she’d been when he’d picked her up from that iron bed, how insubstantial her body had felt cradled in his arms. Maybe that image would never leave him, and he’d never see her again without remembering how she’d been lost.
But she’d been found, and now she was his.
He dropped to his knees before her and wrapped her snugly in his arms, pressing his cheek against the soft scoop of belly. He felt her hands on his head, her fingers combing through his hair.
“My God, I love you.”
“William.” Her voice was soft with wonder. “Please.”
Standing and sweeping her into his arms, he carried her to the bed and laid her among the soft, silky linens. As he stood back to shed the rest of his clothes, Nora stretched languidly and skimmed her hands up her belly, over her breasts. Those tiny pink points hardened at her own touch, and William’s mouth went dry.
“Have you touched yourself, Nora? The way I showed you?”
She bit her bottom lip. “Sometimes … before …”
Damn, he’d lost his head and hadn’t thought before he’d spoken. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t’ve—”
“No, it’s all right. That … what happened … it’s different. Nothing like what we did. It’s not tangled in my head. Not anymore. I haven’t since because I wanted to wait to be with you.”
Meanwhile, he’d taken matters into his own hand almost daily, trying to curb his appetite for her.
Her eyes lowered and took in his erection, and her tongue came out hungrily and wet her lips. “Please, William.”
He slid onto the bed, stretching out at her side. Wanting to be sure of her readiness without asking a question he knew she’d cast aside, he loomed over her, brought his mouth to hers, and whispered, “Touch yourself for me now.”
The whimpering, sensual sigh that left her lips spoke of her desire, and gave no suggestion that she was anxious. She truly was ready.
Her graceful hand slid between them, grazing his belly and hers as she found her core. She moaned when her fingers stroked through her folds. William’s own need thudded in his chest and made him groan as he dipped and took the tight knot of a nipple into his mouth and sucked gently.
She gasped noisily and arched up, and her fingers sped up between them. William sucked harder, swirling his tongue around her bunched areola, drawing her nipple between his teeth. Each of her moans drew an answer from him. Each flutter of her huffing breath in his hair sent sparks from his scalp to his gut. He clasped her in his arms and suckled her, his hips rocking in time with her spasming hand, his strained breaths keeping tempo with hers.
No—it wasn’t enough, not with her willing and ready. He needed to taste her, to feed on her. Frantic with his own need, he knocked her hand away and sank between her legs, putting his mouth on her, lapping through her folds as if he were starved.
“William!” she cried and tensed as he sucked her into his mouth. She tried to sit up, then crashed back to the pillows, and still he fed on her, flicking his tongue, lapping, plunging deep, taking all he could get of her. He held her thighs open and he fed.
She grabbed hold of his hair, and, at first, she pulled hard. Before he could react to that, before he could even quite make sense of it, she held him close instead and began to grunt, and then to cry out. Her climax came in a wash over his tongue, his mouth, his face, and he lapped it all up until she lay quaking and loose-limbed beneath him.
When he pressed a gentle kiss to the inside of each thigh and then to her belly, and eased up to hover over her on his hands, Nora stared up at him in a daze. “What was that?”
“Did you like it?”
“Is it normal?”
“It can be, if you like it.”
She nodded. “I did. Oh, so much.” Her hand came up and brushed over his mouth, his beard. “I didn’t know that was possible.”
His cock wept for the need of the pleasure that was only inches away. So long since he’d felt her around him. But what he wanted more than anything else was her undiluted, unreserved pleasure and comfort. “That and more, my love. There’s a lot we can do.”
“Not right now. Right now I just want you.”
“And I just want you.” He hooked her thigh over his hip and prepared to give them both what they wanted.
“Wait.” Nora reached between them again, and this time, she wrapped her hand around him. William was so shocked at the act, and at the powerful bolt of sensation that blasted through him, that he almost finished right then.
He clenched through it as she added, “I don’t want a baby.”
Ever? All the things they’d spoken of in these months, they’d never talked about children. It hadn’t occurred to him they’d need to. Marriage meant children, unless Fate prevented it.
His surprise served to calm his body down enough that he could ask, “Ever?” He pulled her hand from him and set her leg back on the bed.
“Someday. But not yet. I want to experience a life that’s only you and me. I don’t want to be a mother yet. I want to be a woman first, and know what it is to be me. I haven’t had a chance to be who I am. And I want to be your wife and have you all to myself. Is that terrible?”
“It’s wonderful. I’m in no rush. We have plenty of time. I’d like to have you all to myself, too.” He leaned down and kissed her. “Until we’re ready, I’ll pull out. And from now on, I’ll be more careful where I come.”
She blushed. “You don’t have to be. I … I liked that. Feeling you on me, and you washing me after. I’ve thought of it often.”
Sweet lord. “You are a treasure, Nora Frazier.”
“Nora Frazier. That’s who I am.”
William pushed in and claimed his wife, groaning at the deep bliss of her enveloping heat, and the sweet sound of her happiness.