With This Kiss Read Online Free PDF Page B

again, Grace. And I’ll be damned if I take my wife on these bloody carriage seats one more time.”
    “I’m not your wife yet!”
    “You will be tomorrow morning.” He hauled her onto his lap and tucked her against his chest. “We’re stopping in the next village, and in the morning we’ll be married by the vicar.”
    “Colin!” Grace said, laughing, and trying to ward him off. It wasn’t fair that he merely looked at her, and a melting heat swept down her body.
    “Grace.”
    His eyes were dark with fierce passion, and she couldn’t resist him. Any more than she could later that night, when they were ensconced in the bedchamber at the Rose and Thorn in the village of Piddlepenny, and Colin took out the blindfold again, and she found herself face down over his lap while he…
    And then she found herself doing things that would make an experienced courtesan blush.
    They both loved it when she begged him for more, her voice husky, imploring him with broken whimpers and throaty moans.
    But toward the end he pulled off her blindfold, so he could look into her eyes while he stroked into her. Colin had never felt more grateful for his recovered vision than when he met Grace’s eyes and saw the trust and abiding love that would be his for all the days of his life.
    “I love you.” His words came out in a husky whisper. “I love you so much that I wouldn’t want to live if you leave me, or die before me, Grace. The earth would be dark without you. You are everything to me. Everything.”
    She cupped his face in her small hands and kissed him so sensually—and so lovingly—that he finally understood that he had been given the greatest gift that any man could possibly receive.
    Yes, he’d lost years to warships and battle…
    But none of that mattered because Grace was his.
    H enry Dobson, vicar of St. James Church in Piddlepenny, raised an eyebrow at the two people who had just handed him a special license, signed by no lesser personage than the Archbishop of Canterbury.
    Piddlepenny might be a small town, but Reverend Dobson did not consider that the size of his flock meant that the archbishop should infringe upon his ecclesiastical authority. He did not approve of hasty marriages.
    “This is most irregular,” he stated. He was suffering from a bad cold and wanted nothing to do with something that looked very much like an elopement.
    In fact, he was growing a bit cynical about weddings in general, having seen too many in the last years that were (in his opinion) entered into for the wrong reasons. So he ushered the couple into his study with the firm intention to turn them down, archbishop or no archbishop.
    Clearly, they were gently born, and of comfortable means. They could travel down the road to someone else’s parish. He was not the man to put together couples who married without the approval of their family or without due attention to the gravity of the ceremony.
    “Lady Grace,” he said now, repeating it. He’d never met the daughter of a duke before, but he was pleasantly surprised. She didn’t seem terribly high in the instep. In fact, she was holding hands with her beau, quite as if they were the butcher and his beloved.
    “My father is the Duke of Ashbrook,” she said, nodding.
    “And Mr. Barry,” he said, turning to her fiancé.
    “Yes.” No title. That was interesting.
    “Lady Grace, is your family aware of your intention to marry?”
    She smiled at him, her eyes clear. “Yes, they are, Reverend. My mother obtained the special license you have before you.”
    Against his better judgment, he actually believed her. He would have thought a daughter of the Duke of Ashbrook would be married by a bishop, rather than by special license. But what did he know of polite society?
    Very little.
    “Mr. Barry, do you have the means to support a wife in the manner to which she is accustomed by birth?”
    Barry met his eyes straight on. “I am unworthy of Lady Grace in every way possible. My birth is