by Eloisa James
“There you make an assumption.”
He was grinning at her. What could he mean? Annabel opened her mouth to ask him a question, but they’d said no questions.
“No questions at all?” she queried.
“Perhaps I can guess what you’d like to know,” he said, eyes dancing.
“Quite likely,” she returned.
“There aren’t many likely candidates for my affections in the wilds of Clashindarroch Forest,” he said, using his eyes shamelessly. “When I was a lad, I did practice my skills for a short while with a willing young lady from the village. But then my Uncle Pearce pulled me to the side and said some strong things about the nature of responsibility and what would happen if a woman came with child. I’m their earl, you see.”
She nodded.
“I was tutored at home, and in the normal way of things I would have found myself at a university and there would have met many a young woman who might be able to train me in the ways of women. But unfortunately, before I could do such a thing Rosy was sent to me, under the terms of my father’s agreement with her father. Rosy would have stayed with us for a few years before we consummated the marriage, while I was off at university. She was only thirteen, you see.”
“Thirteen!” Annabel gasped, forgetting her languorous pose and sitting up. “That’s awful. Poor, poor Rosy!”
His mouth was a tight, straight line. “I couldn’t leave her, especially when we discovered she was with child.”
“Did she even know what was happening?”
“Not really. And the night she gave birth…” his eyes had an anguished look. “By then she was able to tolerate my presence. She liked me, even. But when the pains came, she decided somewhere in her tangled-up little brain that they must be my fault. And even though I took myself away, she kept breaking free of the chamber where they had her and looking for me. Finally Nana—my grandmother—decided it was better for her to be able to express herself. So I came to the birthing room.”
Annabel pushed the picnic things to the side and sat down next to Ewan’s reclining body. She wound her fingers into his thick, beautiful hair, and said, “Tell me.”
“As long as she could stand up, she beat at my chest with her fists,” he said expressionlessly. “Then, when she could no longer stand up, she cried. And bit my hand.”
“Bit your hand?” Annabel repeated, stunned.
He rolled onto his back and held up his right hand. There was a deep scar below his thumb.
“Poor you! And poor girl…that’s awful. Did she have any idea what was going on?”
“Not that we could see. Clearly she thought I was inflicting that pain on her.”
Annabel swallowed. “The baby?”
“Was quite healthy. I can’t say it was a very pleasant experience being there at his birth, but Gregory was a fine bouncing boy who screamed himself purple. And that’s how I lost my chance to take university courses in the art of seducing women.”
Annabel had lost track of his reason for telling the story in the pain of its details. “Rosy was only thirteen when Gregory was born?” she asked.
“She was fourteen by his birth. She’s never been a mother to him, but she did play with him a great deal when he was younger. I’m hoping that she’ll never develop the fear of him that she has of other men.”
“Does he know that she’s his mother?”
“Well, he knows and doesn’t, if you see what I mean. He’s fond of her, I’m sure of that. He’s a good-hearted boy, and generally kind. But he doesn’t see her as a mother, no.”
“You are a good man,” Annabel said to him. He was lying on his back next to her. All that thick russet-colored hair had fallen into a patch of sunshine, and he was manifestly beautiful. “It was truly good of you to keep Rosy with you.”
“Don’t go thinking that I took care of her myself,” he said, reaching up and tugging on one of her curls. “She couldn’t bear the sight of me for a good while after the birth, for one thing. ’Tis my grandmother and the monks who’ve done the most for her.”
“But you didn’t leave,” she said. “You let her bite you.” She picked up his hand and kissed it, running her lips along the white scar.
“I’ve scars in other places,” he said, his eyes crinkling with wicked laughter. “Perhaps you’d like to kiss all of them?”
Suddenly temptation was running in her veins like the flowered wine, making her feel brave and curious. “You owe me a forfeit,” she said. “Anything I care to ask.”
“True.” The whole sunlit meadow seemed to be holding its breath, waiting for her to say something. Even the lazy hum of bees had faded away.
And yet she hadn’t lost her senses. The sweetness of this lazy afternoon was undercut by a sharp current of desire, strung between them as tight as wire. “Then I’d like you to remove your jacket,” she said, throwing caution to the winds. “And your shirt as well.”
His lazy eyes swept over her with a blatant invitation. “And if I’m unclothed—here—in the outdoors, what of you?”
“What of me?” she asked. “ ’Tis I who am owed a boon. By you,” she added, in case he’d forgotten.
With a mock sigh, he sat up and pulled off his coat. It was finely made, to wrap close to the body, and Annabel almost leaned forward to help him, but the gesture felt too intimate. She stayed where she was.
He undid his cravat, watching her the whole time, and threw it to the side.
“You’ll have to tell your valet it was uncomfortable,” she chattered, feeling slightly dizzied by—by something.
He smiled at her but said nothing, undoing the buttons at his neck. Then slowly he stood up and pulled his shirt over his head. It billowed for a moment, like the sails of a great ship, and fell to the side.
“And what do you think, Miss Annabel Essex?” he inquired. Amusement and desire entwined in his voice in a wine more spicy than that in their glasses.
He stood above her, dappled with the shadow of saffron oak leaves. And she had remembered correctly: his chest was thick with muscle, beautiful, covered with skin that looked like rough satin kissed by the sun.
In one smooth motion he came to his knees by her side. “When you look at me like that,” he said, “I truly feel that I am one of God’s creatures.”
Annabel couldn’t see what God had to do with it, but never mind. Close up, his stomach had no extra flesh, just rippled muscles that made her long to touch him.
“Put on this earth for no other reason than to adore you,” he said. “Do you know the lines we use in the Scottish marriage service: With my body, I thee worship?”
A smile uncurled on Annabel’s lips. “Isn’t that rather pagan for one as Christian as you?”
“Never. By worshiping you, I worship God. You are one of His most beautiful creatures, after all.”
Annabel liked the compliment, if it was a bit overmixed with theology for her taste. He could call it what he wanted: she saw hunger in his gaze. Hunger for her.
Ewan saw that little self-satisfied smile on his future wife’s face and it made him feel reckless and drunk, naked in the afternoon. She was the pagan, his wife, a glorious, deliriously beautiful pagan. He reached out without even realizing what he was about to do.
His fingers were deft, quick as lightning. Annabel’s traveling dress buttoned up the front, to make it easier for the traveler to unclothe herself in the absence of a maid. Those buttons flew apart at the touch of his fingers and Annabel—Annabel quivered like a newborn fawn, but she didn’t stop his hand. He told himself that if she said no, he would stop. But she made no sound other than the sound of a shaky breath…and that was so entrancing that he unbuttoned even faster.
One second, two seconds later, he eased the dress back over her shoulders. Of course, she was wearing more layers.
“Doesn’t that—” His voice caught in his throat. For she was smiling at him, the mysterious, timeless smile of a woman, and unlacing her corset.
Still without say
ing a word, he pulled her chemise up. Her cheeks took on a wild-rose color, but she said nothing, allowed him to tug the chemise over her hair…and there she was.
Sitting with her legs curled to the side, her dress still modestly clinging to her hips, but bare from the waist up.
And she was lovely. “Ach, lass,” he whispered, “you are the finest of God’s creations.” He wanted to kiss every inch of her skin, make her ache inside as he was doing. Her body was ripe in the sunlight, curved and shadowed with such delicious skill that his hands trembled to touch her.
“I daren’t come near you,” he said, his voice strangled in his throat.
Something about that seemed to give her cheer, and she grinned at him with a flash of her usual impudence. “I shan’t touch you either.” And then: “Do you really mean to say that you haven’t seen a woman since you were a lad?”
“I was older than a boy. But you were worth waiting for.” There was a note in his voice that she heard as the deep bell of truth.
He picked up one of her bluebells, its little bonnets hanging heavy, and drew it slowly over the delicate curve of her shoulder, blazing a path where his tongue could follow when they got to his lands.
She shivered and looked down. They watched together as dusky blue blossoms trailed over the generous curve of her breast, over her rosy nipple—
“Stop,” she breathed.
But he was entranced, watching her shiver under the flower’s caress, dazzled by the flash of creamy skin against deep blue.
She reached for her chemise and pulled it over her head so quickly that the flower flew to the side and landed in his glass of wine.
Ewan sighed. She was right, of course. As it was, his breeches were strained in an agonizing fashion.
“That did not happen,” Annabel said. By the time she dared look at Ewan, he was tying his cravat. His fingers looked perfectly steady. “We will not discuss it, ever.”
“There’s no need to discuss it,” he told her, his voice sending a quiver of pleasure down her legs. Or perhaps it was that look in his eyes. “I’ll never forget it.”
Annabel threw back her head and looked up. By evening, the sky might—just might—echo the beauty of the bluebells. But there was nothing in nature that came close to the beauty of Ewan’s green-gold eyes. Nothing.
Seventeen
Annabel woke at dawn. There was something nagging at the back of her mind, an elusive thought. Ewan was breathing next to her, long slow breaths. He slept like a cat: as quiet and contained as he was while awake.
Light was stealing through curtains of their bedchamber. For a while Annabel watched sleepily as the rays crept across the polished mahogany of their bedchamber in the Queen’s Arms…the very best bedchamber. Ewan had laughed last night when he discovered that the chamber pot was made of bronze, decorated by delicate satyrs chasing about the rim. Annabel had blushed and looked away; there were some aspects to the intimacy of marriage that she wasn’t prepared for, such as Ewan even mentioning such an object in her presence.
The chamber pot was bronze. The desk was mahogany. These sheets were linen; well, they were Ewan’s own sheets, put on the bed fresh every night.
Her mouth fell open.
The truth was blindingly clear.
Ewan was rich.
Very rich. He had to be. Her husband rode in a coach with twelve outriders. He was no improvident, penniless Scot along the lines of her father. Everything she knew about Ewan told her that he would not waste his substance on luxuries, unless he had so much that such luxuries were insignificant.
For a moment she just blinked at the pearly morning light. Of course Ewan was a wealthy man. It spoke in every movement he made, in the gleam of his boots, in the casual way in which he trusted Mac to handle everything, in the beauty of his carriages. She’d been blinded by her own fear.
A surge of pure joy washed over her, followed immediately by shame. But she shook the shame away. Just because she married a man who believed in God didn’t mean that she had to start worrying about her soul right and left. It was perfectly sensible to wish to marry a rich man. She’d never thought it greedy while in England, and she wasn’t going to turn into a Puritan just because she married one.
At that moment, Ewan woke up, in the same silent, contained way in which he did everything, moving straight from sleep to wakefulness.
“Tell me about your home,” she demanded.
“And good morning to you,” he said, giving her his lazy smile.
“Your home?” she asked again, batting away a hand that stretched over the bolster and seemed to have improper ideas in mind.
He gave up and rolled over, stretching. “It’s an old pile of stones that’s been the family seat for ages. Luckily for all of us, my great-grandfather was a bad-tempered fellow who stayed put when Prince Charles summoned the clans. Apparently he said that he didn’t give a damn who was on the throne, and a Hanoverian would be as witless as a Stuart.”
“It’s a castle, isn’t it?” Annabel said, knowing the truth.
“Of course,” Ewan said, yawning. “If you wish to make some changes, I’d be happy. No one’s touched the furniture since my mother died, and that’s over twenty years ago now. My grandmother’s not a very domestic type of woman.”
Annabel couldn’t think of a word to say. She was marrying a man who lived in a castle. She couldn’t help it. There was a grin on her face that had nothing to do with virtue, and everything to do with castles.
“Nana likes to be out and about,” Ewan was saying. “She’s not the type to sit around the castle and think about upholstery. She spends most of her day visiting the cottages.”
“The cottages,” Annabel repeated, congratulating herself on remaining so calm.
“Quite a few people live and work on my land. They’re the cottagers and crofters, or so we call them. And Nana runs about interfering with their lives and generally making herself a nuisance, but I believe they like her, for all that. She’s very good at birthing babies.”
Annabel tried to focus her attention on a sweet-faced Scottish grandmother, bringing everyone jars of homemade jelly and strengthening broth. “She sounds like a lovely person,” she said. “You were fortunate to have her when your parents died.”
“I was lucky,” Ewan agreed. “Although I’m not quite certain most people would describe her as lovely. She’s—well. She’s just Nana.”
He swung out of bed. “I’ll go downstairs to bathe and then meet you for breakfast, shall I?” he asked. Ewan was a very clean person: every morning he bathed at the sluice, and in the evening he had a full bath. Annabel liked that. She liked the way his shoulders tapered as he pulled on a clean shirt. And then there was the castle. She was a little afraid of just how happy she was feeling.
So she sat on the edge of the bed, watching as he moved around the room. Quite unusually for a man, he was swiftly putting everything into order, rather than waiting for the servants to do so.
Apparently her fears about this marriage weren’t true. She wasn’t marrying an improvident Scotsman who would gamble away their breakfast. There was—there was nothing to be afraid of when she was with Ewan. It made her feel as if she were light as air, almost as if she couldn’t breathe.
“You look very serious,” he said, pulling on his breeches.
“What are you most afraid of in the world?” she asked.
He turned about with a wry grin. “A serious question…Are you trolling for kisses, so early in the morning?”
She made a face at him.
Now there wasn’t an object out of its place in the room; the only unkempt thing in it was Annabel herself. So she picked up a brush from her side table.
“I’ll do that,” Ewan said, taking it from her. He sat down on the bed and began drawing the brush through her long hair.
“I’m most afraid of losing my soul,” he said a moment later. “ ’Tis easily said, and, I hope, easily prevented. And the fear of it certainly doesn’t keep me up at
night.”
“What could cause you to lose your soul?” she asked, frowning at the wall. She was starting to think that perhaps a more thorough education in the church might be helpful in making her way through this marriage.
“Only a terrible fault,” he said, turning her face so he could drop a kiss on her lips. “I shouldn’t lose it for lust, for example.” His eyes lingered on her, and Annabel knew suddenly that it didn’t matter whether she was wearing a high-necked cotton nightgown or even a burlap sack. Ewan always wanted her. He lusted for her.
“Then?” she prompted.
“Oh, something terrible,” he said lightly. “I’m telling you, lass, I don’t worry about it. Perhaps adultery. So the marvelous thing is that by marrying you, I’m saving my immortal soul. I could never sleep with another woman after you.”
“Who’s to say that?” Annabel said, pulling back. “I’ve always thought that adultery was something that gentlemen practiced with some ease. And other types of men as well,” she added.
“Not all gentlemen.” He paused. “Did you think to practice adultery? And that’s a question, Annabel.”
“I thought to marry for practical reasons,” she told him, and only then did she realize that she was going to tell him the truth. “For comfort and ease. I thought to marry a man who desired me, and trade his desire for my security. And then, after I had fulfilled the obligations of marriage, I thought that he would likely turn to others and I might, someday, find pleasure for itself.”
“You actually planned to be adulterous,” he said, seemingly fascinated.
“It wasn’t like that,” she said crossly. “ ’Twas only a practical look at the way people truly behave. Imogen could afford to be romantic, but I never could.”
“Poor love,” he said, and gathered her into his arms. Her arms slipped around his waist as if they had always belonged there. She leaned her head against his chest and listened to the strong thump of his heart. “Obviously you haven’t been spending your time worrying about things as ephemeral as souls. What’s your greatest fear, then?”
“The kisses are piling up,” she murmured.