“Not just money.” He clamped her tighter against him. When she gasped for breath he quickly pushed her hands over her head and trapped them against the wood shavings. Aggie inhaled gratefully with her arms no longer crunched atop her breasts. The only problem was, more of her bare torso was now intimately scrubbing against his chest.
“It’s hard to be furious when we’re this close,” he said, watching her face. “Isn’t it? Yes, Agnes, admit it. You aren’t entirely convinced that I’m a monster.”
She cursed, jackknifed under his leg, and tried to throw him off. But she only rammed her thighs against the hairy, unmovable weight of his leg. “Is this your idea of how to change my mind?” she asked grimly.
“At least this makes you remember how well we fit together.”
“You didn’t have to hold me down to keep me from leaving. That’s what I remember. Not like now. That’s the difference.”
“The difference between my idea of romance and what you think I enjoy? You’re wrong if you think I don’t care whether you hate me. It tortures me to hold you like this, knowing that not one ounce of your body wants to be under me. It’s torture to feel your nipples against me and know that I can’t kiss them, or feel those dangerous legs of yours struggling to get free and kick the hell out of me. I’d rather you part your thighs oh-so-sweetly and ask me to put my hand between them, then ask me to put a much more interesting part of my body in my hand’s place.”
“Stop it!”
He smiled thinly. “When I think of how you felt about me this time yesterday, I want to beat my head against a wall. Remember? Before you left for work at the pub, you insisted that I make love to you in the shower. And then again in bed. And you were crying with pleasure before we finished. Only about twenty-four hours ago, Agnes. Can I be such a different, undesirable man today?”
His provocative words made her quiver. Her voice breaking, she said, “Did I make it easy for you? Was I so desperate that you thought I was funny?”
“Agnes, no. Don’t you see? Everything that happened between us was real, and beautiful. I tried not to lie to you about who I was. I tried very hard to be vague when you asked questions, but you were so damned determined to see a hero instead of a man.”
“I saw both,” she replied through clenched teeth.
“Because you thought I was wealthy and aristocratic.”
“Because you were loving and decent!”
“And wealthy and aristocratic.”
Aggie made a guttural sound of frustration and tried to pull her arms out of his restraining grip. But he only clamped his hands onto hers and wound his fingers through hers. “That’s cozier,” he said with a hint of sarcasm.
Aggie jerked on his hands but stopped when she realized how much her movements made her breasts jiggle against his chest. “Why couldn’t you have told me the truth about your background?” she demanded. “Even if you didn’t tell me you were here to get your ancestor’s books back!”
“You’d have turned me out in a second if I’d said I was ex-Scotland Yard and had spent time in prison.”
Aggie stared at him with grim dismay. “I’m not a snob! Do you think I go around judging people that way? Me? With the kind of background I have? I’m the last person in the world who’d condemn you for having a bad reputation.”
“So you’re willing to believe that I’m innocent of the bribery charge?”
“I don’t know.” Hope and anger were written on his face in harsh lines. His dark eyes were narrowed as if he’d built a shield around himself and left only that pair of vulnerable spots to let pain in and out.
“You judged me hard, Agnes,” he said in a low voice. “As soon as you heard the basics about me from Detective Herberts, you made up your mind, and you don’t want to change it. So how can you say you wouldn’t have judged me wrongly from the first?”
“But you didn’t tell me the truth about yourself. I had to hear it from a stranger.”
“Does that make such a terrible difference?”
“Yes!”
“No.” His hands tightened on hers. A sinew flexed in his throat as he swallowed harshly. Aggie felt as if he and she shared every emotion, even the hidden ones neither wanted to reveal. Their straining bodies and the night’s warm, pungent air made a primitive scent.
To Aggie it was a reminder of the potent sexual mood between her and John during the past week. How could she have been wrong about a man who was so lusty and yet incredibly unselfish in bed?
“You didn’t want an ordinary man,” he insisted, leaning over her. Even more of his body pressed against her, and every inch of him was asking her to accept his explanation.
Aggie searched his eyes. “I never considered you ordinary!”
“Because you loved the lies I told you about myself.”
“I loved the way you treated me! What woman doesn’t love hearing that she’s special? I believed you meant it! That’s what hurts the most—that you lied about your feelings for me.”
“I wasn’t lying.”
She exploded with rage, twisting violently under him. “You can have the books! But don’t try to make a fool of me anymore!”
“Is this a lie?” He kissed her gently and quickly, brushing his lips over hers.
Aggie cried out in anger and surprise, turning her face away. Tension hummed inside her for a new reason. His kiss made her madder, but not afraid or disgusted. He still had the power to make her want him.
She shut her eyes and cursed bitterly. Aggie sensed him watching her, his face so close she felt the warmth from it and heard the harsh rhythm of his breath, matching hers.
“If you insist, keep believing I misled you about my past,” he whispered. His hands sank deeper into hers, and his thumbs stroked the tender skin along the sides of her palms. “But don’t you dare think I didn’t want you more than I’ve ever wanted a woman before in my life. I told you from the beginning how fantastic you were, and I meant it. I still do.”
“No.” She shook her head fiercely, and new tears drowned her eyes. She blinked rapidly and swallowed the embarrassing sobs that rose in her throat. “I heard what I wanted to hear and thought you had no reason to make any of it up. But you had plenty of reasons.”
He brushed another devastatingly soft kiss across her forehead. “If you think I’m known for chasing and seducing women with my quotes from Greek philosophy, you’re very wrong. In fact, women have always chased me, so all I usually have to do is wait.”
He touched his lips to her wet cheeks. “I’m not used to charming a determined loner like you. You see? I couldn’t plan a devious attack on you with my skills as an upper-class Casanova. I had to rely on the truth. I told you how I really felt about you. And I showed you, something I’m much more skilled at.”
As if to prove his point, he sank his mouth onto hers. Aggie inhaled sharply and murmured a word onto his parted lips. But the word was garbled, even in her own mind, and it came out more as a sound of confusion than a denial.
She refused to move her lips in response to his, but he continued kissing her anyway, lightly tugging at her mouth and angling his head to tantalize her from new directions. Each time he pulled back a little then came down on her mouth with a different mood—tender, angry, seductive, sweet.
“Here’s the truth,” he said gruffly. Her hands had relaxed; he kept his hands on top of them but loosened his grip and slid his fingers down to her palms. He stroked lightly with his fingertips while he never stopped kissing her. In a distracted part of her mind Aggie realized that her hands had uncurled and were enjoying his caress.
“I’m not a criminal,” he whispered, the words feathering her mouth. “And you can trust me as much now as before. Completely.” He held Aggie’s attention with the hypnotic sincerity in his eyes. “When we made love, you saw a very real and very vulnerable man, not a man who was planning every word and action.”
He rose on his elbows and drew his hands down her arms, trailing his fingers on the sof
t undersides, which lay exposed to him the same as her emotions were. He framed her face, and his thumbs smoothed tears from the tender skin under her swollen eyes.
Aggie looked up at him in a daze. This was the John Bartholomew who’d won her love, the man whose voice and touch made her drunk with desire, the man who was capable of the most uninhibited passions but also heart-melting tenderness.
Could he be the kind of man who’d have done everything to deceive her into telling him about the medieval books?
She didn’t know. Her thoughts were jumbled. But one thing was disturbingly clear: The man was proving that he could trap her the way she’d trapped him—but he didn’t need a chain.
A chill ran through her. If she didn’t stop indulging these crazy fantasies, she’d lose the rest of her dignity to John’s smooth seduction. She formed a cold smile and stared hard into his eyes. “I don’t want you. I want the man I met two weeks ago. There’s no comparison. So why don’t you let me go and we’ll get this over with?”
At first he looked stunned. Then a hard, carefully concealing expression came over his face. “That man was as much a ghost as your beloved Sir Miles. But it wasn’t a ghost who made you happy. It wasn’t a ghost you were begging for more every night.”
Suddenly he straddled her, planting his knees on either side of her. Aggie’s heart raced as she stared at the overwhelmingly, potently masculine image he made. The chain draped from his neck to one shoulder and then curled gracefully down one side of his chest, as if it were part of some barbaric warrior’s insignia.
He stroked a hand down her body. “I’m a warm, eager, flesh-and-blood man, Agnes. That’s what you needed. A man who loved making you smile, in bed and out. A man who still wants to make you smile.”
“A man who even asked me to marry him,” she replied in an icy tone. “How far would you have gone to get the books?”
“You laughed at the proposal. You were terrified. You’d never have said yes.”
“Terrified?” she echoed. “What makes you think that?”
“It threatened you. Too much reality.” His gaze moved down her body. “You’d rather give yourself to me in ways that seemed much safer to you.”
Aggie resisted an urge to cover her breasts. She felt sad and vulnerable, and needing him upset her. She casually rose to her elbows and tried to ignore her nakedness. When she glanced down she saw the pattern of his chest hair on her right breast, where he’d lain against her so tightly.
“I don’t have any trouble making commitments,” she told John. Small shivers of misery and undeniable sexual tension made her ache inside. “I’m the one who was married once, not you.”
“You weren’t married,” he argued bluntly. “You were playing at it, playing a game you couldn’t win, because you didn’t know what kind of man you really needed.”
He leaned forward and planted a hand on either side of her hips. Abruptly she was confronted by his nearness again. His brutally handsome face and fierce mood were posed a breathless fraction from her face. She had to tilt her head all the way back to look directly at him. Her throat felt exposed, and as his gaze rested on it she thought, with an internal quiver of arousal, that he could easily bend his head and sink his teeth into her. Her awkward position made her breasts thrust upward, as if offering themselves to him against her will.
“I don’t need you,” she said. But the tautness of her neck compressed her voice and made it sound hoarse, even seductive.
His eyes glittered. “I dare you to prove that.” He scooped both arms around her waist and pulled her up to him. She hung in his embrace, her hands reaching automatically for a grip on his shoulders. He coupled her to him with his mouth, possessive and demanding this time, making her moan deep in her throat, a sound of defeat.
She moved her lips against his, then caught his lower lip between her teeth and bit him hard. He jerked away but immediately kissed her again, coaxing her with sensual shoving motions of his jaw until her lips parted and he slipped his tongue inside.
She trembled with anger, grief, and excitement. No other man in the world could have caught her in this spell. She wanted to fight him at the same time she wanted everything to be perfect again. It never could be, she thought wretchedly. Why was she torturing herself this way?
John bent farther over her as she kissed him. He closed his arms tighter around her, then raised one hand to the back of her head. He sank his fingers into her tangled hair and pulled her head back. With his eyes burning into hers he said gruffly, “I’m not that fantasy you wanted, but I’ll never deliberately hurt or disappoint you. I think you know it.”
“The books,” she said numbly. “You only want the books.”
“I want you and the books.”
“What are you going to do with them?”
“Sell them, the same as you would have done.”
“No!” Aggie returned to earth with a jolt. Her grip on his shoulders became a hard shoving motion as she tried to push herself away. “Let me go!”
His expression became grim but he released her. She scooted back from him, trying to draw her legs from between his. But he wasn’t about to let her get away completely. He grabbed her bound ankles and sat back on the bedding. Lifting her feet into his lap, he wound a fist into the leather belt and held firmly.
“You were going to sell those books eventually,” he insisted, but he looked at her with a puzzled frown.
“No, I want to protect them, the same way my grandfather did!”
“Dammit, Agnes, why don’t you admit he was going to sell them? The only reason he didn’t was because he got nervous when the broker in London backed out.”
“He could have sold those books years ago, if the money was all he cared about! In the letter he left to me he explained why he never tried. Your grandparents trusted him to take care of the books. After the war he couldn’t find them, then when he learned they’d died, he tried to find their daughter. But it was impossible to track down an orphan in a country where there were so many orphans and so few records of what happened to them.”
“Maybe what you’re saying is true. Maybe he didn’t steal the books. But right before he died he was planning to sell them.”
“He wanted me to have plenty of money for this ranch. He only wanted to sell the books for my sake. In his letter he told me to sell them if I had to, but to read his translation of the diary, first.”
She shook her head. “I saw why he felt so protective of what Sir Miles had written. The diary may be valuable to collectors because it’s rare and ancient, but it’s valuable to me because it shows that there really are people who never stop loving each other and never let the world take away their dignity.” She was crying now. “That’s why I don’t think I could have made myself sell it.”
“I’ll tell you what helps a person keep the dignity you love so much,” John said softly, his voice strained. “Having the money to tell the rest of the world to take a flying leap.”
Aggie braced her hands behind her and gritted her teeth. With her feet trapped in his lap she once again felt like a rabbit caught in a snare. All she could do was sit there, naked except for her panties, and glare at John in helpless rage, while tears slid down her face. “You’re going to sell the diary and prayer book,” she said flatly. “I can see it on your face. You’re not even going to read the diary’s translation. You’re just going to hand the books over to some rare-books dealer and rake in your money.”
He nodded curtly. “Do you have any idea how much the books are worth?”
“No.”
“Probably a million pounds, to a private collector. That’s over a million-and-a-half American dollars, Agnes. Is sentiment worth ignoring that much money?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think, or what I want. They’re your books. I won’t fight you for them. My dignity is worth too much to me. It’s about all I have left, and I’m going to hang on to it.”
“We’ll see how you feel about my decision when I’m r
ich. Think of it, Agnes. I’ll be that wealthy man you wanted me to be.”
“You’ll never understand what I wanted you to be. But it didn’t have anything to do with money.”
His eyes were black with frustration. He started to say something, but the dogs began to bark outside the barn. Within seconds Aggie heard a car’s tires on the driveway’s crushed shell and gravel. She gasped.
“Expecting a visitor?” John asked calmly.
“No, but whoever it is might come in here looking for me!”
He clamped his hands tighter around her ankles. “If I can’t leave this stall, you can’t leave.”
“For godsakes, John, I didn’t bring the padlock key in here with me!” Let me go, and I’ll get it, I swear!”
He chuckled darkly. “An oath easily made is easily broken. No, if I have to sit here chained to the wall, you can damn well stay with me.”
She heard the car come to a stop in the yard. Aggie looked down at her nakedness frantically. John tugged on her feet. “I’m such a gentleman that I’ll allow you to crawl over and get your sundress.” But he didn’t turn her feet loose. “Go ahead,” he urged, as she scowled at him. “You can wiggle.”
She cursed under her breath, rolled over onto her stomach, and squirmed to within arm’s reach of the dress, which he’d tossed across the stall. Grabbing it, she sat up and slipped it over her head. Wood shavings itched on her skin and clung maddeningly to her hair, and the dress’s torn back gaped open, but at least she was covered.
John slid back into his corner and pulled her across the soft bedding. “Come along, my little red-haired hamster,” he said with a calm smile.
“Let me go!”
“I let you get your dress. That’s as far as my nobility will stretch. Now come here and do what I say, if you want to salvage your precious dignity.”
They heard the car door open and shut. Aggie gave in and scooted over to him. He leaned against the stall’s back wall, draped the chain out of sight down his back, then he took her arm and pulled her to his side. She tucked her belted feet under the dress’s skirt.
Stranger in Camelot Page 15