Once Upon a Tower

by Eloisa James

  But angry or frightened, he still loved her.

  She could think about that later, though, because his eyes had now dropped below her face. His mouth tightened as he reached her ribs, but then they drifted lower, to the tuft of golden hair between her legs, her curved thighs, and, finally, her delicate slippers.

  When he looked back up, his eyes had gone ravenous again. “I do like your slippers. And you have the most beautiful ankles I’ve ever seen.” She saw his throat move as he swallowed. “May I kiss you, Edie?”

  She shook her head no, quite enjoying herself.

  “Your legs?” His voice sounded a little desperate.

  “Absolutely not,” she said.

  And she pointed at the bed again. And then she did the ogling, because her heart quickened when she looked at his muscled rump. And those long legs.

  Gowan lay on the bed like a man accustomed to offering himself to women. It steadied her to remember that for all he liked to claim possession, he was also hers and hers alone. He’d never touched another woman. No woman had ever touched him.

  She clambered onto the bed and knelt beside him, kissing his brow, his cheeks, his nose, his lips. She investigated the prickle of his beard with the tip of her tongue, returned to his mouth, wandered to his cheekbone.

  Then she pulled back and began to run her fingers over all the areas she was curious about: the strong column of his neck, his broad shoulders, his arms. She dropped kisses all over her battered, bruised warrior’s chest. She ran her fingers from his wrists to his shoulders and then down to his stomach, exploring the smooth skin that sheathed rippling strength, the way he gasped, the way he started to shake.

  Still, he didn’t move. He let her explore him like a new instrument, caressing, inspecting, finally tasting . . .

  Words broke from his throat then, unintelligible noises, finally, oaths. Edie ducked her head so that he couldn’t see her grin. It was the most arousing thing she’d ever experienced to see a gorgeous, huge man panting with lust, yet never reaching for her. Not even when she ran her lips along the hair-roughed skin of his thighs.

  His hands came from behind his head and dug into the sheets, but he still didn’t touch her. Every groan, every oath sent a pulse through her that ended up between her legs. And every one of her touches, her kisses, and even—once she dared to be bold—her licks and nibbles sent heat through her body until her heart was beating as fast as his, and her breath was caught in her throat.

  She wrapped her hand around him and experimented with that velvet hardness.

  “I dreamed of this,” Gowan said hoarsely.

  Edie looked up. She was thinking that she could kiss him the way he kissed her. And he would like it.

  “You did?”

  She gripped him a bit tighter, and his hips arched into the air. “Bloody hell,” he gasped. “That feels so good.”

  He had dreamed about her. Edie was starting to feel as if the mere sight of him was a sensual assault. She felt restless and greedy, as if her body was pulsing to a rhythm she barely understood.

  “Even though I can’t touch you, you can touch yourself, Edie.” His voice was hypnotic.

  Edie frowned at him. He was trying to turn the tables. Before he could open his mouth again, she bent her head, wrapped her lips around that part of him, and took back control.

  A shout broke from his lips. She would have smiled, but she was too busy running her tongue over him. All the time her hands were moving over his legs, caressing his thighs. She discovered that she could make him roar, and his roars made her feel wet and empty and even more restless.

  “You must stop,” he gasped a moment later, his voice strained with need. “Edie.”

  She raised her head. She could feel that her lips were a little swollen so she pouted at him, watching his eyes grow even darker.

  “I cannot do this anymore,” he said with great difficulty. Every muscle in his arms and chest was rigid.

  She smiled at how beautiful he was, and then she crawled up and said, “I love knowing that I can reduce you to begging. Are you begging?”

  “Yes. I have to touch you,” he said, not smiling, the words exploding from his mouth. “This is not the way it’s supposed to go. Please, Edie, please.”

  She wanted his touch so much that her mind was fuzzy and she could no longer remember what she had demanded. Her hand was trailing over his stomach muscles, but maybe . . .

  “Edie!”

  She was starting to feel as if she’d drunk a whole bottle of champagne. She lowered her head and licked his nipple. “Mmm.”

  “Please, Edie.” He was begging her, this man whom she loved more than anyone in the world.

  Of course, she would always give him what he wanted. “As you wish,” she said, giving his nipple a little tiny bite, just because she remembered that he—

  He flipped her over so fast that her hair swirled around her shoulders and came down in a cloud. “You’re so damned beautiful, Edie,” he muttered. One hand ran over her breasts, over her ripe nipple, down her flat belly and then dove between her legs. Edie opened her eyes and her mouth fell open.

  When he ran a finger between her legs, they both felt how drenched she was, how swollen and tight.

  He groaned. She didn’t say a word, because a shiver burned through her whole body at the mere touch of his fingers, rippled through her, and again. He moved his fingers and it came again, wave after wave until she was shaking all over. She cradled him with her knees and whimpered, asking without words for more, more of him, more of that.

  “I meant to learn about what makes women come,” he whispered against her mouth. “Up there in the Highlands.”

  Edie’s entire self was concentrated on what he was doing with his hand. She felt as if . . . She hid her face against his shoulder. It felt out of control, as if her face might contort, or she might make some . . . some squeal or do something . . .

  “Edie!” Gowan’s hand stilled and after a second, she looked at him.

  “Hmmm?”

  “I went to a pub, the Devil’s Punchbowl.”

  She looked at him. His face was so beautiful that she leaned up so that she could capture his mouth.

  But Gowan was nothing if not stubborn. “I have to tell you this. I went to the pub to find a barmaid who could teach me about a woman’s body, about what makes a woman happy in bed.”

  It took a moment, but that filtered in. And although Edie was not the type of person who ever shouted, she shouted now. “What?”

  “A barmaid took me upstairs.”

  Edie was off the bed in one second. “You didn’t!”

  “I did.” Gowan didn’t look particularly apologetic. He rolled off the bed and stood up just in front of her. Edie was breathing fast, her fists clenched, trying to make sense of it.

  “You were trying to solve the problem,” she said, her chest hurting with the truth, even as she understood: Gowan was a problem solver by nature.

  He nodded, and then slid his arms around her. They stood together, naked, his cheek on her hair. “I couldn’t do it. I never meant to bed her, but I thought I would ask her about what she liked . . . maybe even ask her to—to demonstrate.”

  An involuntary shiver of disgust went up and down Edie’s body, but she said nothing.

  “I couldn’t,” he whispered, pulling her even more tightly against him. “After about a moment in that room, I realized that I didn’t give a damn what aroused her. I certainly didn’t want her to demonstrate anything. Before I could stop her, she pulled open her bodice.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I looked away.”

  Edie felt as if she’d moved into a warm room after standing in an icy rain. Heat slid over her skin. “Was the young lady was surprised?”

  “She decided that I was only attracted to men,” Gowan said, sounding rather pained. “She gave me a lecture about how there was nothing she could do for me. I offered her some money but she said she was too sorry for me to accept it.”


  Edie slid her arms around his waist, and tried for a moment to control her laughter, but to no avail.

  “What I’m saying is that I’m a dunce, Edie, but I’m your dunce. I still don’t know where I went wrong. But I’m begging you to give me another chance. You—” He stopped for a moment, and then continued. “You are the only one for me, Edie, and you always will be. I don’t want to think or hear about another woman’s pleasure, only yours. If you’ll allow me, I will spend my whole life trying to make you happy.”

  It was amazing how fast tears could replace laughter. “Oh,” Edie whispered. “Oh, Gowan, I love you so much.”

  His big hands slipped down her back. “Even though I’m an idiot?”

  She pulled back just enough to look at him. “We’re both idiots,” she said firmly. “When you were angry—justly angry—because I deceived you, I crumpled. I need to have more backbone. I should have been honest with you from the beginning, but my impulse, my habit, is simply to smooth everything over. It was stupid.”

  He cupped her face in his, and gave her a sweet, sweet kiss. “I have a sense of how tempestuous your father’s marriage is.”

  “I don’t manage anger well,” Edie admitted, coming up on tiptoes to kiss him back. “I don’t think I ever will.”

  His eyes holding hers, Gowan went down on one knee, just as he had in the drawing room at Fensmore. He held her palms to his lips. “I promise never to shout at you again. I vow it.”

  The joy in Edie’s body was more potent than canary wine, more heated than the sun. She sank to her knees. “I promise never to lie to you. That’s my vow. And I will never love anyone the way I love you. I think we are both marked by our childhoods.”

  Gowan made an inarticulate sound.

  Edie leaned forward. “I love you, Gowan. Just as you are: problem-solving, brilliant, domineering, beautiful, poetic. You’re a poet when you’re not bossing bailiffs around.”

  “And I love you, lass.” Gowan’s accent turned to a proper burr. “You’re my heart, Edie. My everything.”

  Tears were sliding down her face, and he was kissing them away, and then somehow they were back on the bed. “I don’t deserve you,” he said hoarsely, “being as you love me even though I’m a proper—”

  Edie stopped him with a kiss. “You survived,” she told him. “I love you the way you are because you not only survived, but you triumphed. All these people depend on you, Gowan. You could have been like your father, and turned your back, but you didn’t. And you never will.”

  Gowan wasn’t listening to her, but she meant to tell him that two or three hundred times in the next fifty or sixty years, and someday he would understand.

  “May I touch you, Edie?” he asked, his eyes fierce with desire.

  Her heart was so open and wide that she didn’t hesitate. “Both of us,” she said, reaching for him.

  They were kindling to a bonfire. He kissed his way down her body, put his mouth on her most delicate spots, and licked until her blood throbbed. Until she was whimpering, and crying. Until his fingers and his mouth ravished her so that she shrieked, her body arching from the bed.

  Still, he didn’t even stop, not until they discovered that Edie could come again and again . . . but by then she was maddened with desire, and her begging went to Gowan’s head.

  “Shall we?” he asked, husky and low, when he was so overcome by a desire to be with her in the most profound way possible that he couldn’t stop himself.

  Edie sobbed without words, pulling at him. Gowan nudged her legs apart, braced himself, and slid in.

  It didn’t hurt. Not even the tiniest amount. There was just an intoxicating feeling of fullness . . . and it was Gowan inside her.

  But he didn’t move, waiting. “Is it painful?” he asked. In that moment Edie knew that if she felt the merest twinge, he would back away. The thought—his concern, his control—made flames lick at her.

  She shook her head, clutched his arms, and opened her mouth, but just then he withdrew and pulsed into her again. He kissed her so hard that her scream was silenced. Then all of a sudden those feelings—that wild explosion of heat and emotion—ripped through her body again.

  Gowan tore his mouth away and looked down at his wife in amazement. Edie was arched against him, her body shaking, eyes squeezed shut. Her hair was darkened with sweat, like corn silk in the rain.

  He felt a joy through his body that would never go away. So he drew back and began thrusting into her over and over and over. Her eyes flew open and she gasped, “Can you feel it if I do this?”

  “Hell,” he rasped, because he could feel exactly what she was doing. “If you do that, Edie—don’t do that! I’m going to lose control.”

  She laughed and didn’t obey. With every pump of his hips, she rose to meet him, her thighs clamped around his body. She was clutching him inside, over and over. He couldn’t stop going harder, pounding, hurtling closer toward something that was almost frightening in its intensity.

  Then Edie opened her eyes again, her lovely green eyes, and gasped, “Gowan.”

  Her voice was desperate, and hunger blazed down his backbone.

  “Will you—”

  He braced his arms, leaning down to brush a kiss on her lips. “Tell me,” he managed.

  Her hands slid down his back to his arse and pulled him even closer. He threw his head back. He dimly heard her gasp his name, and then she was clenching on him again, but it was tighter and sweeter than he could have imagined. Her whole body shook under him and she cried out . . .

  Something in Gowan broke free. His whole body flamed up as he thrust into her.

  She’s all states, and all princes, I. Nothing else is.

  Edie sobbed beneath him. Gowan threw back his head, roared, and spent himself, giving her everything he had.

  She gave it back, and gave it back again.

  Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere.

  This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.

  Forty-one

  Edie woke, confused, to the sound of rushing water. And then she realized that she wasn’t alone. She was lying on her side, facing away from the man whose arm was curved around her waist. And she knew instinctively that if she moved, she would wake him.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Gowan’s sleepy voice growled, and sure enough his arm shifted and a hand slipped around one of her breasts. “Mmmm. I believe this is my favorite part of your body.”

  She laughed.

  His hand slid downward. “Of course, I like this, too.” He cupped her between the legs, his hand warm and affectionate. “This is my favorite way to wake up.”

  “Lords and ladies in polite society do not sleep together,” she pointed out, a gurgle of laughter in her voice. “That is for peasants, who must keep each other warm.”

  His hand was back at her breast. “I love your body heat.” Then, uncannily, as if he had read her thoughts, he said, “I don’t think I’ll ever want to sleep without you, Edie. Those endless hours when I was riding from the Highlands in the rain, when I landed in the ditch, when I found another horse—”

  “When you climbed the tower in the dark and the rain!” she said, rolling over to face him. She felt a pang of fear at the memory. “I almost lost you.” She dropped another kiss on his biggest bruise, the one that spread right across his shoulder.

  “I thought I had lost you,” he said, pulling her closer. “I was so terrified. As frightened as if the moon fell from the sky, or the sun never rose.”

  She slipped a leg between his, loving the way his breathing roughened at her slightest touch. “No more climbing towers.”

  He grinned, and her heart thrilled to the flash of wild humor in his eyes, the laughing Gowan whom almost no one glimpsed but her. “Do you know the Clan MacAulay motto? It’s dulce periculum; danger is sweet. Go ahead and lock yourself in another tower, Edie. Danger is sweet, but you are sweeter.” He leaned forward and kissed her.

  She drew away sometime la
ter, her fingers trembling. “I love you,” she whispered.

  He kissed her again.

  “You will have to get used to sleeping alone,” she said a while later, teasing him, but a little serious as well. “I can’t constantly travel with you from estate to estate, Gowan.”

  He shrugged. “So I won’t travel anymore.”

  “But I thought you had to move from one to the other!”

  “I thought through all that while I was away. There are a few decisions that only I can make. But the world is full of intelligent men. I have Bardolph to manage them. I have you to manage me.”

  Edie began to smile, slowly. “Your Grace, are you, by any chance, saying that you intend to work less? That you might make a place on your schedule for a wife, aside from dinnertime?”

  “I want to be with you,” he said, dropping a tender kiss on the end of her nose. “I want to watch you play your cello. I want you to perform for me naked.”

  She laughed aloud. “I couldn’t!”

  He disagreed, and she ended up on her back, kissing him fiercely. After a while, Gowan rolled over, bringing her to a sitting position on top of him, because it was time to try all the things he’d dreamed of, and since he had a wife who was as confident in her sensuality as she was in her love for him . . .

  Later, Edie wandered over to the window, followed by Gowan. He pushed her hair to the side and licked her neck. “Essence of Edie,” he murmured. “And sweat.”

  She made a face at that—and then, “Gowan!”

  “Mmmm?”

  “The river,” she gasped.

  Overnight, the Glaschorrie had swollen to a torrent, burst its banks, and now surrounded them. The river was split in two by the tower, flowing around it and coming together on the other side, continuing its dash to the ocean.

  But the rain had stopped, for the moment at least. “Imagine,” Gowan said, pushing the window open wider. The sun had broken through the clouds, and the water below glinted as if thousands of gold sovereigns were hidden just below the surface. “We won’t be able to leave the tower for at least a day.”