One Night with the Major

by Bronwyn Scott

  She turned a fast circle, the sword never slipping from her head and Cam made up his mind. Perhaps his mind had already been made up the moment their eyes had met. Her circle stopped. He rose and held out his hand. Good lord, he didn’t even know if she spoke English. This was madness. But he couldn’t leave her here when it was clear she had no idea of how much danger she might be in from men who might not hesitate to strip those veils from her, who might decide to make a plaything of her for their own amusement, who might not ascribe to the idea that a person was a person no matter the colour of their skin. There were too many ‘mights’ for his taste. Too much to leave to chance.

  She dipped him an English curtsy, returned his sword and without a word let him lead her up the stairs. How did this happen to him? How did he find himself in the most unwanted circumstances? This was not an adventure he would have sought for himself. He was probably the only soldier in the British army who didn’t want to be back on English soil. Balaclava had been a bloodbath and he’d been the one to live to tell about it, a prospect so daunting, he couldn’t sleep at night—he still woke up screaming about it. But here he was—back in England and with one more responsibility to carry out when all he wanted was to be back with his troops and a life he understood, a life that pleased him.

  At the top of the stairs, he ushered her into his chamber and shut the heavy oak door behind them. Cam leaned his head against the door frame, closing his eyes for a moment of clarity, savouring the coolness of the wood against his brow. Good lord, he had an exotic dancer in his room. His grandfather would die if he knew. Exotic dancers were not part of his grandfather’s plan for him.

  Aside from the pleasure that came with the thought of niggling at his grandfather’s limited sensibilities, this was not how Cam had expected the evening to go. He’d gone down to the taproom in the hopes of forgetting everything, to put off his duty one more day. He could have easily ridden on to London tonight before dark, but that would have meant facing his grandfather, playing the returning war hero and the doting suitor to Caroline Beaufort, his intended, a young woman selected by his grandfather as worthy of a Lithgow with her exquisite looks and immaculate pedigree, but a woman who engendered nothing more than polite interest from him.

  It was no wonder he loved soldiering. It was full of the adventures he thrived on—new places, new people, new tasks—where there was little time to spend worrying over the delicate concerns of etiquette, while life here in London spread before him like a vast empty wasteland full of useless occupations. Well, maybe it wasn’t quite an empty wasteland just yet. There was still the dancer to deal with. He needed to make it clear to her that she had his protection, that nothing else would occur in this chamber tonight. Despite what his body might have argued, he wasn’t in the mood. His mind was too fixed on the things he’d have to do tomorrow, like telling the Duke of Cowden his son, Cam’s own best friend, Fortis Tresham, wasn’t coming back.

  Cam turned from the door, ready to make his pronouncement, and his mouth went dry. His dancer stood before him beautifully naked, her discarded veils at her feet, a tanned goddess come to life with high, bold breasts and a gentle hand over her shy nether pelt, a delicious contradiction of seduction and innocence. Had he really been about to refuse her? His body’s reaction laughed at the prospect, but his conscience pricked. How dare he think of pleasure when Fortis was dead.

  He strode towards her, purposefully shrugging out of his coat and draping it about her. ‘You needn’t offer yourself to me. You are safe here.’ The coat was big, effectively hiding her, but it did nothing to dampen his response. With her face revealed, she fulfilled the promise of beauty: wide eyes, a full mouth, a delicate jaw that created a heart-shaped face and hinted at English antecedents.

  ‘Do you not want me?’ She sloughed off his coat, naked once more, her hands cupping her breasts, lifting them for his inspection.

  ‘It’s not that.’ Cam was uncharacteristically at a loss for words, he who shouted orders over the chaos of a battlefield. ‘It’s just that you don’t need to feel obliged.’ He’d never taken a woman to bed who felt obligated to be there and he wasn’t going to start now.

  She moved towards him, reaching for the stock about his neck and tugging it free, determined to undress him. ‘And if I don’t feel obliged? Would you want me then?’ She smelled like adventure, all citrus and spice, a fragrance of the Far East, a fragrance of happier times, when he and Fortis had served two years for the Crown in India.

  Cam swallowed hard. He was starting to lose this fight and maybe he should lose it. Maybe bedding her would help in some way with the grief he carried, a first step back towards living. No, that was ludicrous. He was simply justifying things now to please his body. He put his hands atop hers, stopping them where they worked the buttons of his uniform’s waistcoat. ‘I don’t know who you are. I don’t even know your name.’ He knew only that she was Indian and English, and beautiful.

  She pressed a long, slim finger to his lips. ‘No names. It’s best that way, don’t you think?’ He didn’t think. He was starting to not think at all.

  Chapter Two

  ‘Let me help you.’ Her voice was soft, soothing, entirely at odds with the excited turmoil inside her. She’d got him this far, upstairs and into his room. But he’d done nothing to undress himself, so she’d do it for him.

  He forgot to restrain her hands this time when she worked the buttons free. She pressed her advantage, slight as it was. ‘You came to the tavern to forget something tonight. I saw it in your face out there.’ She slid the waistcoat over his shoulders, down his arms and tossed it aside as if she undressed men every night. Pavia pulled his shirttails loose, praying at some point, he would take over. She would soon be in over her head despite whatever theoretical knowledge she had gleaned growing up in her uncle’s zenana, but even that was scarce little. She had not been in India since she was twelve. ‘You are hurting.’ Her hand stopped over his heart. ‘In here. I’ve seen men like you before.’

  She had his shirt off him in moments, her hands pressed against his chest. She appealed to whatever sense of fair play he might possess—a trade. ‘You helped me down there tonight, now I will help you forget whatever it is that’s on your mind.’ She raised up on her tiptoes and took his mouth in a soft kiss. ‘Then, in the morning, we will be even. All debts between us paid.’ Such a bargain should appeal to a military man.

  Under her mouth, he gave a harsh chuckle. ‘I will never be able to wipe my slate clean again.’

  Ah, so she’d been right about the demons. Leave it to her luck to seduce the one man who didn’t have seduction on his mind. She twined her arms about his neck. She’d come too far to give up now. ‘Then erase it just for tonight.’ She whispered the temptation. ‘There is comfort here, free for the taking.’

  She moved against him, kissing him again as if he’d already accepted her offer, her terms, and this time he gave over. His hands settled at her hips, holding her to him, his mouth opened to her, letting the kiss seduce him, draw him in to the fantasy until he became an active participant, kissing her back, with tongue and teeth at her ear, her neck, the caress of his mouth drawing heady sensations from her—sensations she had not expected. This was meant to be a job. She’d assumed it would be joyless. That was not the case.

  The kiss was consuming. Pavia let the world shrink to encompass only this room, only this man, only this time as he took the kiss away from her, making it into his seduction at last, his hand in her hair, gathering it at the nape of her neck, his mouth insistent on hers, and her mouth answering with an insistent hunger of its own. Then they were both falling, to the bed, into the void of the night. Had he taken her down or had she pulled him? She didn’t know, she didn’t care. He was over her, her body warm as it stretched beneath him, all lush curves and slim lines against the hard muscle of him. The dusky peaks of her breasts arched up to brush his chest, teasing themselves into erectness. Her t
highs cradled him, inviting him. This business of lovemaking was easier than she’d imagined, far easier than getting him up the stairs, and she knew she’d been lucky in her choice.

  He was a deliberate lover, his body savouring the slow sheathing of itself in hers, making it clear this was not a fantasy to rush. He did not want to lose himself for just mere minutes, but for a night, for hours at a time. She gave a delicate moan beneath him at his first breaching, her body stirring in discomfort and then in accommodation. She arched against him in an untutored squirm that made him laugh, a warm, intimate chuckle. ‘Easy now, I know what you want. Be patient. I will take you there.’ His mouth hovered above hers, his hand pushing her hair back from her forehead in a gentle gesture as his hips began to move, and his body picked up an ancient rhythm of easement and surge.

  She joined him in the intimate waltz, letting him set the pace, letting him drive them towards ecstasy’s cliffs as she lifted and fell with him. Her hands dug into his shoulders, her legs wrapped tight about him, holding him close, her body desperate for the promised fulfilment that hovered on the horizon they’d created. His exhalations suggested he was nearly there and she sensed that he was somehow with her and beyond her. When the pleasure took him, she was left alone, that same pleasure eluding her. But she could not complain as his chest heaved and his muscled arms trembled with his release. She had got what she’d come for.

  It was done. Completely and most thoroughly. Not that she’d been any judge before, but she was now. Her nameless lover had comported himself well. She could have asked for nothing better. Pavia imagined this would become the measure against which any other lover would be compared. He would be measured against this golden-haired, broad-shouldered god of a man who lay sleeping beside her in post-coital exhaustion. She had chosen well. Maybe too well. Instead of leaping out of bed while he slept and running back to her inn a few streets away, she wanted to stay. She wanted to watch him sleep, wanted to trace the musculature of his chest with her finger, wanted to indulge her imagination in guessing his story. Who was he? What was he doing here? Where was he going? Answering those questions broke her rules. No names, no regrets, no tomorrows.

  It was the novelty of him that tempted her to linger. She’d not thought a man could be so beautiful. She’d not expected to enjoy his body, seeing it, touching it. It was well muscled and smooth, his chest tanned and devoid of coarse hair, perhaps from campaigns spent sleeping out of doors and bathing in foreign rivers. Pavia let her imagination run wild, shamelessly romanticising the life of a soldier. Not just any soldier, an officer of some rank if she read his uniform aright. There’d been plenty of the East India Company men at their home in India, enough for her to know an officer’s uniform when she saw one.

  She’d not been prepared either for the surge of emotion the act had raised. She’d expected a messy, painful interlude of grunts and thrusts until the deed was done. There had been discomfort, but nothing unbearable and nothing that had lasted once the initial shock had receded, replaced by something, if not breathtaking and heart-stopping, certainly pleasant in its own right. It had been different for him, however. For him, it had been breathtaking and heart-stopping. She’d seen it in his face as his release came over him like a wave. A nugget of irrational, womanly pride had formed in realisation that she’d been the cause of it. Whatever had haunted him in the taproom had been temporarily exorcised.

  He stirred beside her, his blue eyes searching for her. Somewhere in the room, a log crackled and split in the fireplace. His arm reached for her, drawing her against his side, her head cushioned on the place where his shoulder met chest. This was one more thing she’d not counted on—this easy intimacy of lying naked with a man. She didn’t want to question it, didn’t want to over think it and become self-conscious.

  ‘I’ve been to India,’ he said in a voice made husky from sleep and waking. ‘It’s a beautiful place, wild, exotic. Not like here.’ His finger traced a slow, idle route over the curve of her hip, raising delicate goose pimples in its wake. ‘Where are you from? What part?’

  ‘Sohra.’ Telling him that much wouldn’t break her self-imposed rules of anonymity. ‘Do you know where that is?’ He probably didn’t. It was a remote principality.

  ‘Hmm. No,’ he replied drowsily. ‘I was stationed in Madras.’

  ‘Sohra is a long way from there. It’s up in the Khasi Hills in the north-east.’ She sighed, her own finger drawing a map of her uncle’s home on his chest. ‘We have green hills, cool breezes and waterfalls.’ She sighed. Just talking about Sohra brought its own kind of peace. ‘We have root bridges and mountains.’

  He chuckled, the sound rumbling his chest beneath her ear. ‘I am jealous. Madras was hot and steamy. A man could sweat through his uniform within minutes of putting it on and the streets smelled horribly.’

  She raised up on an elbow and gave him a teasing scold. ‘You just said India was beautiful. That description doesn’t sound beautiful.’

  ‘Oh, but it was. Once I got out of town, the jungle was splendid. The fruits, the animals, incredible.’ He laughed in his defence, then sobered. ‘It’s different than here. Everything here is so...tame... Do you miss it?’

  ‘Of course.’ She let him draw her back down, but not before the flicker of memory danced in his eyes. She probed it. ‘What are you missing? A place? A person?’ It struck her too late who that person might be. ‘A woman?’ A quick spike of jealousy stabbed at her. She didn’t want to think about this man with another woman. Tonight, she wanted him to belong solely to her. Yet it was another item unreckoned when she’d concocted this plan. It was supposed to have been simple: find a man, bed him and leave.

  He shook his head. ‘No woman. A military man isn’t very good at making or keeping commitments of that nature. His days are not his own. Nor his life. It could end at any time.’ He was warning her to remember what they’d agreed upon. She didn’t need the reminder. She’d been the one to set the rules. But it was more than a warning. He was hinting at something larger, something his soul wanted to share. She waited, letting the silence stretch about them. She sensed he wanted to talk, the desire was in him, if only he could find the words. She gave him time and at last the words came.

  ‘My friend was killed in battle, at a place called Balaclava, near Sevastopol. He was an officer in the cavalry, one of the best. I saw him go down. One moment he was waving his sword, rallying his troops, and the next he was gone.’ Three sentences was all she would get. Perhaps he, too, was caught in limbo between the freedom of whispering secrets to a stranger to whom those secrets would mean nothing and the need to keep those secrets hidden in order to protect himself. The less they knew of each other the better. It was the deal after all.

  ‘I am sorry.’ She said the simple words softly, meaning them.

  ‘Tonight is not for war.’ He reached for her, tasting her—her mouth, her neck, the pulse at its base, the swells of her breasts—with sweet, slow kisses as his mouth, his hands, moved down her body. He laved the indentation of her navel with his tongue, his hands at the span of her waist, and then his mouth was in the curls hiding her core, his breath warm against her dampness. ‘You’ve not had your pleasure yet.’ Sharp blue eyes looked up at her from their intimate position at her thighs, burning with cobalt desire, for her perhaps, or for smothering the past. It didn’t matter to her body which. Her pulse quickened in a way that had nothing to do with her quest tonight, and everything to do with this man staring up at her. ‘Permit me?’ She might have permitted him out of curiosity alone, but Pavia was well beyond that now. Her surrender was imminent. She was not only curious, but intrigued by this man. He’d become more than a means to an end. No one had warned her about that.

  The end was different now than when she’d begun. His wicked tongue licked at the seam of her in proof of that. The end was much more short term; the end was not a blocking of Wenderly’s unwanted suit, but something much more pleas
urable, much more elusive—the goal was now this pleasure her soldier alluded to. He licked her again and she moaned. She wanted what he’d had. She’d seen his face—she wanted that, too, that sense of being swept away, of being beyond the physical realm. For a moment he’d been transported. Was it possible for her, too? His tongue found a hidden nub and she cried out her surprise, her enjoyment, the sensation sharper, stronger than before. ‘It’s all right to let go,’ he murmured against her skin. ‘You’re safe with me. Let the pleasure come,’ he coaxed. Her rational mind had no reason to believe him, but her body did. He’d done nothing but respect her since they’d come upstairs.

  His mouth took her again and she felt the option to choose slipping away. She would give over to pleasure whether she wished it or not. And she did, her hands fisting first in the linen of the bedsheets and then the thickness of his hair, holding him to her for fear he’d leave her before the pleasure was complete. She would not survive it if he did. She arched into him, once, twice more, sensation driving her to the brink of madness and then to breaking. She felt herself shatter against his mouth, her body shuddering its own completion. This was what he’d felt. This was how he’d felt. Now she knew. In the swirling kaleidoscope of completion, she felt omniscient, as if she was in possession of great knowledge, of great power, one of the world’s supreme mysteries made known to her alone.

  Her lover stretched along beside her, his eyes smoky, his face content. The act had given him pleasure as well. Pleasing her had been important to him. Would all lovers be this considerate? She yawned and he smiled. ‘Come and rest.’ Against her better judgement she did, nestling into ‘her’ spot at his shoulder. How quickly she’d become possessive of this stranger’s body. What could it hurt to lay in his arms an hour longer? It wasn’t as if she could sneak downstairs just yet without being noticed.