“Oh! I’ll hurt you!” Remembering his wound almost immediately, she opened her eyes in alarm, pulled her mouth from his, and sat up straight again so that her arms looped only loosely around his shoulders. For the briefest of moments she took it all in, his lean, handsome face scant inches from hers, the bright fire of her hair spilling over the powerful biceps of his upper arms, the gray wool of her blanket just brushing his broad chest, the pale silkiness of her slender arms draped across his wide bronzed shoulders. The bandage hugging his right side served as a stern reinforcement of her impulse to call a halt. But despite her best intentions, her lids felt surprisingly heavy, her lips seemed to tingle, and a rhythmic quickening deep in the very center of her being made her feel shivery all over. She was breathless and quivering with all the unbelievable things his kiss was making her feel, and some of that must have been obvious to him because his eyes were suddenly hot.
“You won’t hurt me.” His eyes blazed at her as he leaned toward her again. “Believe me, at the moment I’m suffering no pain at all.”
This time, when he kissed her, he wrapped his arms around her and turned her so that her head fell back against his uninjured shoulder. Her neck arched in longing and her toes curled as he once again took full possession of her mouth. Tightening her arms around his neck, she kissed him back with a newfound hunger that would have amazed her had she been in any state to consider it. But she was not. When she kissed him, her head swam. Her bones turned to water and her body to fire. Her insides melted like butter. Her breasts tightened and swelled. In that deep-inside place that she had never before had any real cause to think about, her body throbbed and ached.
It was only when she heard the rattle of metal on stone and felt herself being tipped back that she surfaced a little. The rattle, she realized, was him clearing his pistols out of the way with a sweep of his arm. The tilting sensation was the result of him laying her down. Her back settled onto the shelf; her blanket served to cushion the hard stone. She realized that he had shifted positions, easing her down as they kissed so that she now lay on the shelf with her legs draped over his lap and him looming possessively above her. Still she kissed him with a passionate abandon that until now she would have said was as foreign to her nature as placid obedience. She was almost senseless with the taste of him, the feel of him, the wonder of her own response. But in the tiny part of her mind that was still marginally functional, she registered the coolness of the open air on her legs that she just in that instant remembered were completely bare. Then the warm slide of his hand down her throat and over the fine lawn covering her upper chest set off alarm bells in her mind.
“I can’t.”
The merest breath, her protest was uttered as she turned her head aside to pull her lips from his. It coincided almost precisely with the feel of his hand finding and caressing her breast.
Hard warmth, delicious pressure, a jolt of instinctive pleasure: the sensation was electrifying. It was also galvanizing.
“Oh!”
Her eyes popped open. She was breathing hard, and her heart pounded so fiercely she could hear its drumbeat in her ears. The first thing she saw was that the blanket had fallen away, to trail down the side of the shelf. She was looking at her own very feminine shape, inadequately veiled by the thin shirt, which was high-necked and long-sleeved but so nearly sheer that the round globe and jutting nipple of the breast he wasn’t favoring with his attention were mortifyingly visible, as were the outlines of her delicate rib cage and flat abdomen. Even—and she shuddered to see it—the shadow of the triangle of curls that was the hallmark of her sex could almost be discerned. There any scant protection afforded by the cloth stopped. Although the shirt, when she had put it on, had reached almost to her knees, it was now rucked up clear to the tops of her thighs. Which was no wonder, as her bare legs were bent at the knee and curved over his. His hand, unmoving now, covered her breast. The sight was stirring: her legs, slender and pale, draped over his muscular, black-clad thighs; his hand, long-fingered and swarthy-skinned, resting on the white shirt that was all that lay between his palm and her breast.
As a study of the contrast between the masculine and the feminine, the sight was all that could have been desired. Unfortunately, Beth did not find it the least bit edifying. Rather, she looked on it with growing horror. Worse still, she could feel the firm heat of that hand burning through to her skin. Her nipple, foolish, unknowing thing, butted eagerly up into his palm, as if it wanted his caress.
“You’re beautiful.” There was a husky quality to his voice that made her shiver and look up at him. His eyes were pure obsidian now. His lips were slightly parted. His breath came just a little too fast. “There’s a great deal I could teach you about lovemaking.”
“No.” From somewhere Beth drew the strength to make herself heard. Her body might be weak, and most unaccountably melt and tremble at his touch, but her mind knew better. Memories of her father’s profligate treatment of her mother, of his lecherous friends always trying to force themselves on her and her sisters, of Claire’s hideous first marriage, crowded to the fore as they always did, along with her firm conviction that for men, the conquest of a female’s body was just that, a conquest, with a victor and a vanquished. Suddenly she felt as if she were suffocating. Taking a deep, unsteady breath, she caught his wrist and shoved his hand from her breast as if it were a loathsome thing.
“Let me up. At once.”
“Certainly, if you wish it.”
As he sat up, she scrambled pell-mell off the shelf, pulling the blanket with her and wrapping it around herself as if it were an enveloping shield. Her knees felt weak, and her stomach churned. Her first instinct was to flee, but pride stopped her. Holding herself rigidly erect, she turned to face him. She could barely bring herself to look at him, but not to look would be to let him know how truly shaken she was.
His face was still dark with passion and his eyes were bright with it, but there was another expression in them, too: a kind of comprehension that made her feel more naked than if he had stripped away all her clothes.
“You’re afraid, aren’t you? Of sex.”
Her breath caught. “Just because I am not so depraved as to offer up my virtue to a brigand does not mean that I am afraid of”—she couldn’t say the word—“that.” She was proud of how cool her voice sounded. Unfortunately, she could do little about the color that flooded her cheeks.
“But you are afraid, nevertheless. I saw it in your face when I put my hand on your breast. Why, is what I would know.”
Her face flamed hotter at such plain speaking. “I’m going back to the others now. Good night.”
“Beth.”
He caught a fold of her blanket as she turned away. Frowning, she looked back at him.
“It was only a kiss,” he said softly.
“Let go.”
Jerking the blanket from his hold, she stalked—there was no other word for it—toward the barricade. She was angry at him, furiously angry, although she was still fumbling through her emotions to figure out why. Certainly she could not blame him for the kisses, or even the hand on her breast. At least, not precisely. In any case, she hadn’t told him not to kiss her, or touch her, and as soon as she had protested he had let her go. A few steps short of her goal, she remembered that the others would be waiting, probably breathlessly, for what they were surely hoping would be a blow-by-blow account of everything that had passed between her and Neil, and stopped short. Fobbing them off would not be a problem—except for her telltale cheeks. And the angry sparks that were doubtless shooting from her eyes. And her clenched fists. And gritted teeth.
Taking a deep breath, she deliberately relaxed her jaw and unclenched her fists. Pressing her fingers to her cheeks, she tried to summon cheerful memories, and latched onto an image of the grand ball the Duke of Clarence had given last Season for a cherished niece, and herself in a favorite silver-spangled ball gown twirling about the floor. She’d been in quite her best looks, if she had
to say so herself, and the crowded ballroom had been a veritable fairy land of blazing chandeliers and massed flowers and the ton’s crème de la crème in their most splendid finery. A lovely night—but as she thought on it further, the arms she’d been dancing in had belonged to Lord Kirkby, and just a fortnight later she had accepted his very flattering proposal.
Which had unfortunately ended in . . .
“Very wise,” an all-too-familiar voice murmured behind her, making her jump. “Had you returned to your flock of fluttering hens with your face ablaze, they would have been agog with curiosity.”
Whether she found having herself and the other females compared to a flock of chickens or his reference to her flaming cheeks more annoying, it would have been hard to say. In any case, she had no time to sort out the answer, because he walked on past her. With a single surprised glance she registered that, clad in breeches and boots and her bandage only, he was still as indecent as when she had left him, and most unwillingly admitted that thus attired he was magnificent. Even as she acknowledged that, he reached the barricade. For a moment she thought he meant to continue on and join the women, shirtless as he was. Instead, he stopped and, plucking his greatcoat from the duty to which it had been put, shrugged into it. Having hung it up between the stalagmites herself, Beth recalled that it had been barely damp, and guessed that it was probably, by now, quite dry.
“We need be on our way in no more than six hours, and the trail ahead of us is rough. I suggest you cease your chatter and get some rest.” Raising his voice, he addressed the others, whom Beth still could not see, although without his greatcoat to serve as a barrier there was only the stretched-out domino to block her view of the rest of the shadowy cavern. His tone was one of command, and the answers he received sounded abjectly obedient to Beth’s jaundiced ears. Then he turned and came back toward her.
Their eyes met. She regarded him with chilling hauteur, while, with every bit of willpower she possessed, she tried to keep the heat from rising to her cheeks.
Most unexpectedly he paused, smiled, and chucked her under the chin, in a fashion that was most maddeningly avuncular.
“Sleep well, Madame Roux,” he said softly, and moved on past.
Milady Redhead. As she translated that, Beth’s anger, like her cheeks, flamed anew, and she was forced to exercise considerable self-control to keep from blistering him with a few well-chosen words by way of reply. Instead, holding her head high, placing her whole dependence on the hope that Neil’s unexpected appearance would have provided the others with enough to talk about so that she would not be pounced on the moment she appeared, she walked with a truly admirable degree of dignity to rejoin the rest of the women for what remained of the night.
Chapter Eighteen
DESPITE THE DAMNABLE STIFFNESS in his shoulder, an increasing degree of hunger, a slight but noticeable bodily weakness, and the irritation of having been put in the position of bear-leading a gaggle of bothersome females toward a destination he had no wish to revisit, Neil found that he was almost enjoying himself as he waited at the foot of a nearly perpendicular granite wall that rose some thirty feet to the trail’s next level. Like amusement, enjoyment had been a rare commodity in his life for more years than he cared to think about, and he discovered to his own surprise that he had missed it. He did not have to look far to find the cause: Beth. Since they had arisen, eaten their execrable meal of water and hard tack from a tin in the trunks, and begun their trek some six hours before, she had been short to the point of curtness the few times she had been forced to reply to something he’d said. The looks that had accompanied those replies had been frigid, leaving him in no doubt that she was mortified by what had passed between them the previous night and, in the way of women everywhere, angry at him as a result. Still obviously intent on giving him the cold shoulder, she showed him her profile now as she stood beside him watching one of the wenches—the lachrymose one; Jane, he thought her name was—make her careful ascent. Madame Roux made quite a pretty picture with her delicate nose firmly in the air, her eminently kissable lips primmed into a forbidding line, and her big blue eyes taking care to look at everything but him. The flickering light of the torch he held brought the fire of her hair, which she had bundled into a loose knot at her nape, to vibrant life. Dressed once again in her yellow gown, which had to be sadly damp around the hem although she had answered with a brief “’Tis fine” when he had inquired as to its state, she looked like a flame herself.
A most beautiful, feminine flame.
Who was sadly out of charity with him and taking care to let him know it.
It had been a long time since a woman had been in a snit with him. People in general tended to be frightened of him, and as soon as they had a chance to take his measure usually gave him a wide berth. Women typically fell into one of two categories: attractive, round-heeled, eager wenches who fawned over his looks and fell into his bed at the snap of his fingers, and the rest of them, whom he barely noticed.
Madame Roux was something new.
“I—I can go no higher,” Jane gasped. Glancing up, he saw that she had stopped dead some three-quarters of the way to the top. Flattened against the wall, her toes wedged in a barely visible crack and her arms stretched above her as she hung on to a craggy outcropping, she looked for all the world like a large, bedraggled bat—complaining of the cold, she had been offered the domino and was wearing it at that moment—that had lit on the cliff face and clung. Shadows leaped across the walls and shrouded the soaring ceiling, throwing elongated images against the stone and making her position look far more precarious than he was almost sure it actually was. With his burning torch and the one in the passage above as the only sources of light in an encroaching darkness as absolute as the tomb, it was hard to tell if she was in imminent danger or not. Much had changed in the caves since he had last passed through them. So far they had encountered ample evidence of flooding and rock slides, and in places water seeped through the walls, making them damp to the touch, and dripped from the ceiling. But even if the rock crumbled and she fell, the distance was not all that great. And he would, of course, do his possible to catch her.
“Don’t look down,” Beth warned, as Jane’s frightened face tilted their way.
“Ye great looby, ye can’t stop there. Not unless ye means to ’ang on to that rock till Judgment Day.” Mary-the-mosquito, on her hands and knees inside the upper passage, looked down on Jane with a frown. Clustered behind her, the other women peered over the edge, their faces studies in concern. “Ye must either come up, or fall down. There be no other way.”
Jane whimpered. Her eyes sought Neil’s. “You’ll catch me, sir, if I slip?”
Although he had climbed the cliff first, demonstrating how easy it was in the teeth of their collective skepticism, showing them each handhold and foothold, promising to catch them if they fell had been the only way to induce the majority of them to make the attempt. If he had not made such a promise, they would be standing at the base of it arguing still.
“You won’t slip. Lift your right foot out of that crack and move it about ten inches up and a little to the side. There’s a ledge, and once you are standing on it you’ll find the going much easier,” he instructed her. His patience was being sorely tried, as a trek that would have taken him at most three hours alone had now stretched to twice that, with another hour or more at the rate they were progressing to go, and his hope of arriving at their destination in the early hours of the day, when few if any people would be about, quite ruined. But he had discovered already that his unwanted charges were best handled like skittish horses, with a calm voice and steady demeanor, and the occasional firm hand on the bridle.
“Sure, and if the rest of us can get up here you can,” the Irish farm girl—Peg—encouraged her as Jane, visibly shaking, lifted her foot the required distance. A shower of pebbles accompanied the movement, and as she gained the safety of the ledge a paper-thin layer of shale dislodged beneath her and slid down towa
rd the bottom in a slithering rush. Gasping, Jane flattened again. The gasp, and the rattle of the pebbles and subsequent crash as the shale reached the bottom and shattered, echoed hollowly off the walls.
“Keep going,” Neil said. To his relief, after a frozen moment in which the issue hung in the balance, she did. A moment later her hands touched the lip of the passage, and the others, with much chatter and many exclamations, pulled her up amongst them to safety.
“Thank goodness,” Beth said. The remark wasn’t addressed to him, precisely, but he was pleased to take it as conversation and reply.
“She would have had no trouble at all if she hadn’t stopped.”
The look she shot him in return told him clearly that he was still in her black books and conversation wasn’t on the agenda.
“Miss, when you come up, have a care when you put your foot in that crack. It felt like it wanted to give way,” Jane called down to Beth. They’d all taken to calling her “miss,” just as they called him “sir.” Except for Mary, who most ironically persisted in addressing him as “yer worship,” as though he were a bishop or some such.
“I’ll watch out,” Beth called back.
“If you’re afraid . . . ” Neil began in a lowered voice, because she could be forgiven if that sliding layer of shale had given her cause for concern. Then he remembered the last time he’d suggested the possibility that she might be afraid of something, and smiled.
“I’m not,” she answered curtly. From the look she gave him, she was remembering, too, and, unlike himself, not fondly.
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