Page 32 of The Dravenhearst Brides

My sweet Babs,

I’ve dreamt of you for months on end. Today, the dream becomes reality.

I wonder, do you remember the night we first met? You spoke of horses with such passion, and I took the liberty of cheek. “Why ride a horse when you can ride a bourbon maker?” Oh, the way you laughed—that’s the moment I knew you were mine.

—Excerpt, a letter from Richard Dravenhearst to his wife on their wedding day

Morning sickness set in quickly, and that was how Margot knew for certain. The words of a ghost could not be taken seriously, but her own body…quite another matter.

Quite an astounding matter, really.

The first time it happened, Margot was by the pasture at sunrise, watching Merrick ride.

Her husband had cleverly extracted the promise shortly after bedding her—quite spectacularly—the night before.

There had been a lot of that over the last two weeks, in every spare moment, in seemingly every room, on every free surface of the manor. A few more times in the rickhouses too.

The nausea crept up on her, an insidious knot in her gut as Merrick kicked his horse into a gallop. A twisting coil swelling into a wave and rising to her chest, then throat. Unable to be squelched.

When he noticed her distress, Merrick dismounted and held her hair back as she purged bile into the grass. He apologized profusely for pushing her, said if she wasn’t ready…

“I’m ready. I’m fine.” She was pathological, lying between heaves, waving away his concern, even as her eyes watered and her throat burned.

She wasn’t fine. She hated the sight of him astride Fox.

Couldn’t help but imagine him being bucked, thrown…

that she would lose her husband to the same terrible fate as her brother.

But even with those terrible thoughts rattling through her brain, she knew they weren’t the cause of the vomiting.

She was pregnant. She knew it with a degree of omniscient certainty that sent shivers down her spine.

The man holding back her hair was not only her husband, he was the father of her child.

She was no longer just herself, just Margot. She was going to be a mother.

The sky overhead would never be the same again. Nor the grass under her feet or the hands tangled in her hair. Nothing was ever going to be the same again, because she, herself, was inherently different. The reason her heart beat and her lungs breathed…no longer for her alone.

It was as terrifying a revelation as it was awe-inspiring.

Ruth, who’d been training Omaha nearby, strolled over as Margot’s nausea subsided. The expression on her face made it clear she, at least, was not there to hold back Margot’s hair. She clucked her tongue, then pursed her lips.

Margot gave the smallest of nods. An admission a woman would always understand before a man. Merrick, bless his heart, released her hair and rubbed her back, oblivious.

As she wanted him to be. For now.

Margot sought out Ruth the next afternoon at her cottage. The two women settled on the porch swing, a faint scent of hellebore on the air. Ruth passed her a cup of tea, and Margot peered into its depths.

“No gin rickeys today?” she asked, her voice soft.

“I figured this particular conversation was better suited to tea.”

Margot took a deep breath. “I think I’m…I might be…” She couldn’t bring herself to say it aloud just yet, to speak the thought into reality. “I’ve met Eleanor.”

Met her, seen her, been endlessly haunted by her for two weeks…same difference, really.

Ruth’s teacup rattled when she placed it in its saucer. “Well, that’s it then.”

“What is?”

“You’re expecting. I assume it’s physiologically possible now?” She arched an eyebrow.

“Yes.” Margot smiled softly, recalling last night’s particularly adventurous romp. How Merrick had bent her over the dining room table. How her cries filled the room, giving voice to the wailing centaurs trapped in the coffered ceiling…

“Hmph.” Ruth snorted. “That didn’t take him long, now did it?”

Margot’s daydream shattered. “He’s not made me do anything I haven’t wanted.”

“Of course he hasn’t, dear. He just doesn’t understand the repercussions. Men never do.” Ruth’s gaze drifted toward the stables with a faraway look.

Margot didn’t know what to say. She settled for the same as Ruth, watching Julian with faint disinterest as he led two colts to a water trough.

From this distance, if she squinted her eyes just so, she could almost imagine he was Merrick, with his dark hair and sharp jawline.

But Julian was a decade younger and lean, not carrying an ounce of extra body fat or muscle, the better to fly atop Omaha during training.

Merrick was solidly built from his work at the distillery, with back muscles that rippled beneath her clawing fingers and abdominals that clenched deliciously when he moved above her.

She closed her eyes, imagining the feel of his rough, calloused palm gliding up her thigh.

The sandpaper brush of his stubble scraping between her legs…

“Children change everything, Margot,” Ruth said, still looking at Julian and the horses. “And it starts well before they’re born.”

“I’m sure.”

“Miscarrying her first changed Babette,” Ruth continued.

“Changed her in ways I didn’t altogether understand at the time.

She became a mother, but one without a baby.

It pushed her closer to Eleanor and away from me.

Then came the second pregnancy. Babette fought tooth and nail to bring Merrick into this world.

She was already a mother the second time around, you see.

Mothers will stop at nothing for the well-being of their children.

” Her gaze finally moved from Julian and the horses, latching onto Margot instead.

“If you want this baby, you’ll keep your distance from Eleanor.

From Babette too. The Dravenhearst women have complicated histories with pregnancy, and misery loves company. ”

Margot shifted in her seat. She wasn’t sure how she could possibly keep her distance from the Dravenhearst brides. Not when they burrowed like termites into her subconscious, welcome or not.

What she’d seen so far of the first Dravenhearst bride was a troublesome mystery.

Eleanor could go from giggling one moment to weeping the next.

And always, beneath everything, a compulsive need for closeness and reassurance.

She attached herself like a barnacle, clinging to Margot with such fervor, it was sometimes difficult to rouse herself from dreaming.

When she did, she often awoke with fingernail marks embedded in her forearms.

“Eleanor lost six children to miscarriage, you said?”

“Yes.”

“And Babette just the first?”

Ruth bit her lip. “Well…”

“Well, what?”

“There was a third pregnancy,” Ruth admitted. “Unplanned, mind you. Babette didn’t enjoy motherhood in practice as much as in theory. She went to great lengths to prevent additional pregnancies, but about a decade into their marriage, there was a bit of a mishap.”

“Again? Did she miscarry?”

“In a manner of speaking.” Ruth crossed her legs, uncrossed them. She plucked at a gold button on her blazer. “The day Babette told me she was expecting was the day she died. She confided in me in the morning, and she hung herself in Rickhouse One that very night.”

Margot gasped.

“I don’t think she could face it.” Ruth blinked furiously.

“The house, Eleanor, even Richard—they’d all turned on her during her first two pregnancies.

She wouldn’t subject herself to that again.

I don’t know if she’d told Richard yet, but if she did…

if she told him the same thing she told me that morning—that she wanted to leave…

well, that could’ve done it as well, I suppose.

That declaration would have made him rabid. ”

Margot was horrified. Struck speechless.

“Not to worry.” Ruth patted the top of Margot’s hand. A bit patronizingly. “Nothing like that will happen to you. Just steer clear of Eleanor and Babette. History does have a funny way of repeating itself here at Dravenhearst Manor.” She chuckled weakly.

Margot didn’t laugh. She didn’t think she’d ever found anything less funny in her entire life.

The headboard slammed into the wall, keeping steady pace like a metronome. Tangible, auditory proof of her husband’s feverish desire for her.

“Merrick, please,” Margot gasped, arching her back, lifting her hips. Even when he was fully inside her, she wanted more of him. Always more. “I’m so close.”

His fingers slipped between her legs, putting pressure right where she wanted it, needed it.

“Fuck,” she cried, her vision blacking out.

Her legs turned to jelly, her head lolling back on the pillow as she came apart.

Merrick grabbed her right thigh, moving her leg over his shoulder to pull her slackened body closer.

To angle deeper. Unfathomably deep. Three more strikes before he, too, found his release, crying out and collapsing forward.

“Fuck,” she repeated, blowing out the word with a long exhale. She lifted her arm, heavy as lead, and dropped it over him, pressing his cheek to her breast and running her fingers through his dark hair.

“Such a foul mouth on you, Mrs. Dravenhearst,” he teased.

“My husband is a terrible influence, I’m afraid. Positively uncouth.”

Merrick rumbled with laughter before rolling onto his back.

Margot snuggled into his chest. She sighed contentedly, long and slow as her eyes grew heavy with sleep.

Was there a better way to drift off at the end of the day?

She didn’t think so. She wondered how she’d managed to sleep at all before Merrick.

Ah, that’s right, she recalled faintly. Laudanum.

The bottle was still on her nightstand but gathering dust. Everything was different now. Sleep came easily, a natural extension of her consciousness. Naught but a crossing, easily made when she was so very warm and safe, slackened by satiation.