So Enchanting

by Connie Brockway

  Not tonight. He cupped her buttocks and lifted her, settling her against his upward thrust, lifting her, settling her again, teaching her the rhythm, the counterpoint of male and female in this exquisite dance. Her hands clenched and unclenched on his shoulders, the black satin hair sweeping down her back and brushing his thighs. Her lips parted in a sob. He pumped quicker now, a little harder. His jaw flexed with the effort of self-control.

  Then, beautifully, richly, sweetly, she came. She cried out, her nails digging into his skin. And when she gasped, riding the last crest of passion, he pulled her down into his embrace and held her tightly, absorbing the tremors left over from her climax.

  Grey stared at the night outside the bedroom window. In the indigo sky outside, a legion of bats whirled like dark confetti against the full moon. A chorus of owls, their haunting cry deep and bone-vibrating, echoed from the mountain and valleys.

  He did not see them. He did not hear them.

  His world had telescoped down to this one perfect moment, this one imperfectly perfect woman.

  And then she started to cry. She wrapped her arms around his neck, holding on to him as though he were her last hope of salvation, and sobbed like a baby.

  “Oh, God. I swear I was trying not to… Fanny? Please. Did I hurt you?”

  She started to laugh at the same time she sobbed, and neither reaction seemed to want to end. “Yes, yes. I’m fine. I…I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It was just… It was so beautiful! I’m… It… It has made me…emotional. I’m sorry!” she wailed.

  Beautiful? She was crying because their lovemaking was beautiful? Dear God. He had never felt so humbled. Never heard such honesty. Never felt such an answering accord.

  For a long moment he was silent, absorbing her tears and gently stroking her back. Gradually her tears subsided, and then, out of the blue, she tumbled off of his chest and scuttled away, clutching up handfuls of the bed linens to cover herself.

  “What?” he asked, desperate to understand what he’d done.

  She began trying to wrap the sheet around her, but he was lying on part of it, and her nightgown was in shreds.

  “You…you didn’t…finish.” Her cheeks scalded with a blush. “You are still…tumescent.”

  He had no idea what to say to that, so he answered, weakly, “Yes.”

  “Don’t patronize me.”

  “Patronize…?” he echoed numbly. “What the bloody hell are you talking about, Fan?”

  “You feel sorry for me. Don’t deny it.”

  “Dear God, Fanny,” he said, anger rising in his voice. “You’re a widow and you’ve never experienced a climax before. Only a sadist wouldn’t feel sorry for you.”

  “Ah!”

  She scooted off the bed and would have run, but he was too quick. He caught her arm and yanked, toppling her effortlessly flat on her back on the bed. She twisted, trying to roll off the other side, but he caught her wrists and dragged them up on either side of her head, pinning her.

  “Let me go!” she said.

  He shook his head, the dark locks tumbling over his forehead, his blue-green eyes ablaze. “Not until you see reason. You have no cause to lambaste me for feeling sorry for you.”

  “No?” she shot back, panting. “That’s rich, coming from you. You, who would rather have hot tar poured down your nostril than have a word of sympathy directed at you.”

  His expression hardened with guilty frustration.

  She saw it. “Ha!”

  “It’s not the same thing.”

  “It is. You would have the same reaction if I were to…” God, she could barely bring herself to say it. “If I were to treat you to such charity.”

  Charity? She thought what they had just done had been charity on his part? She’d shaken the foundation of his world and she thought she’d been the recipient of his charity?

  He began laughing at the absurdity of it, and her head snapped back around and his gaze slipped down over her face, her throat, to her breasts, rising and falling with agitation, and his laughter stilled.

  “Here I was congratulating myself on my sensitivity, and you took as disinterest what was, madam, nothing short of a Herculean display of self-restraint.” He chuckled again, releasing one of her hands and sliding his arm beneath her body. “Well, I certainly don’t want to leave you in any mystery as to my interest.”

  He dipped his head and his teeth closed on the point of her shoulder, nipping her as he pressed her deep into the mattress. She had no artifice in her. Without a trace of resistance, she wrapped her arms around his neck.

  He kissed her from the point of her chin down her throat to her breasts, sending delicious, wanton pinpricks of pain shooting through her body. Abruptly, he shoved his hands beneath her buttocks, lifting her hips up, roughly kneeing her legs apart and settling himself between them.

  She squirmed in a rapture of longing. Still, he didn’t enter her. Roughly, he kneaded her buttocks, bruised her mouth with the ardency of his kiss. Breathing harshly, he pulled at the wrist he still held down, forcing her hand between them.

  “Touch me,” he said. “Then tell me I’m not interested.”

  He wrapped his hand about hers, closing her fist around him. He hissed as her hand slid over him, jerking back reflexively. “If I were any more interested, madam, I’d be spilling myself in your hand.”

  Then, gripping her knees wide, he thrust himself deep inside of her. His head fell to the lee between her neck and shoulder as he breathed raggedly in her ear. She clung to him, her knees wrapped tightly around his rock-hard flanks.

  “Please,” he whispered.

  “Yes. Anything. More.”

  He rocked into her, urgent and feverish, his heart galloping against hers. She arched and he lifted his head, staring down into her eyes, watching her, licking the moisture from her temple, skating his teeth along her jaw, his expression intense and focused.

  Pleasure danced like a mad dream through his veins, tearing apart his thoughts, pulsing, swelling, building toward a dizzying peak.

  She closed her eyes and he called her back. “Look at me. See what you do to me. You utterly destroy me.”

  She stared up into his eyes, her own as deep and pure and inimitable as a drowning man’s dream. His gaze never left hers, even when his body quaked and the air hissed through his clenched teeth. Even when she arched back and found her release again. Even when he pulled her against his hips, holding her tight to take one last, hard thrust deep. Even as the veins stood out on his neck and he found his own piece of eternity.

  And when it was over and he rolled her to his side, he nibbled soft kisses along her shoulder and upper arm.

  “You’re a fool, Fanny Walcott,” he murmured. “How could you not have seen it? Even the old witch knows.”

  “Knows what?” she asked breathlessly.

  “Why, that you have only to bend your finger to have me on my knees.”

  At the same time Grey was confessing Fanny’s power over him, Violet was on her way out of Quod Lamia, heading to the terrace for her biweekly lurk. She was not hopeful. In fact, she’d pretty much given up on ever surprising Amelie Chase in the middle of doing some sort of magic. The lass was peculiarly cautious, which, while getting Violet’s grudging respect, also deflated her hopes of winning Grammy Beadle’s gratitude. But Violet was a persevering lass, if nothing else, and a duty was a duty, and this was her night to lurk about on the terrace, so lurk she would.

  She rounded the house and stopped dead in her tracks.

  There in front of her, lining the flagstones where the terrace met the meadow, were hundreds of eyes gleaming like effervescent fire in the darkness, fixed on Quod Lamia’s second floor. Shadow cats, dozens of them, and other creatures, too, judging by the size and shape of the unblinking eyes: mice and weasels, fox, rabbits and hedgehogs, all crouching motionless on the terrace edge within a handbreadth of one another, staring at the house.

  The breath caught in Violet’s throat. Natural ene
mies lying quiescent in the shadows cast by a blue moon.

  What could it mean? As she stood watching she realized something else: The night was filled with a low humming sound, rough and beautiful and hypnotic.

  Violet’s mouth dropped open as she realized what she was hearing: The animals, leastways all those that could, were purring.

  She drew her breath in on a low whistle. A smile broke over her narrow, dirty little face.

  Wait’ll Grammy hears about this.

  Chapter 31

  Well, this was awkward.

  The next morning, Fanny walked along the edge of the road leading into town, swinging her golf club as she went, using it as a sort of scythe, thoughtlessly beheading the heather sprouting from the verge. She barely remembered picking it up, and must have been so distracted she’d forgotten to put it down before she’d fled the house just before lunch, certain Grey would be feeling well enough to come down to eat. Last night had proved he wasn’t in the least incapacitated. Not in the least.

  She knew fleeing said little for her character, but she was not so much a coward that she wouldn’t admit to the act. She’d fled, run away because it was awkward. Last night she’d felt so sure of herself. Of Grey. So certain that she understood him and that he understood her. But with daylight had come doubt. Neither of them had spoken of their feelings. This in itself was not unusual. They were both prickly and self-contained, wary of emotions.

  She wanted to believe Grey loved her as she loved him, but was that simply wishful thinking? He hadn’t said as much, but there were other ways to speak aside from words. But again, always there was his suspicion of her, the well-founded suspicion that she was keeping something from him, which she was and would continue to do.

  It was all very awkward and confusing. She needed to think.

  She sighed, her golf club’s arc slowing until the club rested in the dust at her feet. She looked around, startled to realize that she was at the end of Bernard’s drive. Now she saw that the iron gate had been closed and a chain latched around it.

  Bernard would have locked Caesar and Brutus in the house to guard his stamps. Grammy would be by later to heave a haunch of beef in through the front door. Grammy was the only person the poor brutes tolerated.

  Except for Fanny.

  She looked around. This was as good a place as any to think. The boulders guarding the bottom of Bernard’s drive were flat-topped and sun-warmed. She clambered atop one and sat, swinging her golf club disconsolately at a thistle head below.

  Should she return to Quod Lamia and tell Grey her feelings? Would he insist once more that she was keeping a secret from him, was planning something or concealing something? Yes. He would. It was his nature to abhor lies and demand truth. He had already demonstrated that he knew she concealed something. As long as they were in proximity to each other, he would not stop until he had revealed what she hid. Which meant, quite simply, that she shouldn’t be near him. But…

  She hesitated, frowning, for the first time in six years considering the unthinkable: What if she did tell him?

  All her self-preservation instincts recoiled at the thought. Telling him could not end well.

  He would think she was lying for some dark purpose or perhaps—marginally better—he would think she was crazy; or worst of all, he might believe her. Worst because then how would he see her? The answer was simple: just as everyone else she’d ever loved and confided in had seen her, as an oddity, a peculiarity, someone to be watched carefully. Even her loving parents hadn’t been proof against that innate cautiousness that came when one was confronted with something abnormal.

  Maybe she could write a letter. Damn, she wished she’d more experience with this sort of thing, but all she had to guide her was four years with a lying, conniving, dishonest fraud. Hardly good proving ground for future relationships with the opposite sex.

  At the sound of a train’s whistle, she lifted her head toward Little Firkin. Bernard’s house was elevated above the town spread out below her a mile away, its twisted streets wending out from the center like an unraveling bit of lace. On the near side of town, the spur line had begun slowing as it approached the loading dock.

  A single figure waited on the platform beside a pile of trunks. Ah, yes. Bernard. She was not the only one fleeing, she thought. She watched as the train pulled to a stop and a conductor jumped out, dragging out a short stack of steps leading into the single railway car. He then scurried forward to hoist Bernard’s trunk to his shoulder, motioning for McGowan to precede him into the car.

  At the back of the train, another worker hauled out a pallet and made quick work of unloading a few wooden crates before disappearing back inside. The whistle blew, and with a squeal of wheels, the train pulled away from the dock. And that was it. That was how easy it was to leave Little Firkin.

  A savage outburst of barking coming from McGowan’s house sent Fanny turning around again. Grey Sheffield was striding up the road from the direction of Little Firkin, bareheaded and without a collar, his sleeves rolled up over his dark forearms and his jacket slung over his shoulder.

  He looked up at the sound of the dogs barking and caught sight of her. At once, he skidded to halt. For a long, awkward moment—she’d just known it would be awkward—they stared at each other, the dogs barking wildly in the background.

  He didn’t look like someone who’d been knocked unconscious and drugged a mere twenty hours ago. His hair had been carelessly raked back from his face, and his trousers were dusty. He looked entirely too virile.

  A wave of yearning seized her, so strong that she had to clench handfuls of moss to keep from sliding off the boulder and flinging herself into his arms. Instead, she demanded, “What are you doing walking about?”

  Her voice freed him from whatever paralysis held him. He started toward her, scowling. She didn’t fear his scowls. Not anymore. They were simply his fallback expression, to be donned when he feared anything less would show vulnerability.

  “I was in town,” he said, stopping in front of the bolder where she perched. “Asking questions. Wasn’t that what you wanted?”

  “You should be back at Quod Lamia, lying in bed.” As soon as she said the words, her face lit with heat.

  She expected him to make some sort of rude comment. Instead, he answered by turning just as ruddy beneath his tanned skin. Oh, yes. This was all going to be excruciatingly awkward.

  Too bad it didn’t keep her from noting the curl of dark hair peeking from the vee of his open collar, or the dark down covering his forearm, or how that same forearm was sculpted of long, sharply defined sinew and muscle, and how strong his wrists were, and how elegant his long fingers—

  No. No. No. She was not going to do this to herself. She looked up, determined not to spend a second longer rhapsodizing about Grey Sheffield’s forearms. Doing so, she walked straight into the trap that was his eyes. Dazzling aquamarine eyes ringed by thick, sooty lashes, ensnaring her with their beauty, the heat in his gaze feeding the fire in her veins. She heard the golf club clatter to the ground as she felt herself falling forward, drawn by an irresistible force.

  And then his arms were around her and he was snatching her from the boulder top, dragging her hard against him, his lips opening over hers. He plundered her mouth with hot, wet kisses, his tongue making salacious sweeps along the silken interior of her cheeks, his hands roving feverishly down her body to grip her buttocks and hoist her up against his body.

  He moved forward to ease her against the boulder, his mouth never leaving hers as he whispered hot, ardent words against her lips. She dug her fingers into his cool, thick hair, tugging at him, wanting more, wanting to melt into him, dissolve into his body. Her reason evaporated under the sensual ferocity. She panted, wriggling against him helplessly, not knowing how to tell him without words what she wanted, needed, could not imagine never having again: him inside her.

  With a low oath, he grasped her knee, urging her leg up around his hip. She struggled to wrap it
around him, cursing her skirts…

  The sound of ripping cloth rent the air like a lightning strike, and with just as devastating an effect; Grey stopped kissing her.

  He froze, his lips still tight against hers, one arm supporting her derriere, the other hand at his pants opening. Slowly, he withdrew his lips from her mouth and for a brief second rested his forehead against hers. His chest labored like a stevedore’s. His eyes were clenched shut. Then he let her slip slowly to the ground.

  Her sense of place, time, of how easily they could have been seen fell in on her with avalanche force. Yet still…still…a part of her wanted to say, The hell with “could-be’s,” and climb once more onto Grey’s solid, heavily muscled, perfectly masculine body. She didn’t, of course. Instead, she stumbled back a step and touched her hair and fiddled with her collar. When she looked up, she saw Grey engaged in a similar activity, loosening a nonexistent collar and clearing his throat. He caught her eyes.

  At the same time they both blurted out, “I’m sorry.”

  He smiled, and her embarrassment melted under the rare, gentle look. “I shouldn’t have done that,” he said.

  She laughed, blushing like a schoolgirl. “And here I was under the impression that I’d been the one who’d ‘done that.’”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I do.”

  “Are we going to fight about it, do you suppose?’ he asked. The idea didn’t seem to upset him. His eyes glittered.

  “Do you want to?” She fluttered her eyelashes.

  Good heavens, they were flirting with each other, she realized incredulously. What was she doing? She had just finished outlining for her poor, senseless heart that any relationship between them did not stand a chance. Yet here they were, involved in some sort of bizarre mating ritual, the sort reserved for hedgehogs and porcupines and other equally prickly species. The thought made her smile, albeit sadly. Grey reacted by taking a sharp, involuntary step forward. He stopped himself.