Pale Moon Rider

by Marsha Canham

  “I h—have to go,” she stammered.

  She started to turn out the door but his arm came up, blocking her way.

  “Please, m’sieur. I should not have come. Finn will be very angry if he looks in my room and I am not there.”

  “Actually … while I was standing outside your door a short while ago, I could hear him snoring to wake the dead.”

  She risked a sidelong glance. “You were outside my door?”

  “I may be a thief and a scoundrel, but I am not ungrateful. I know the risks you have taken—that all of you have taken—and I thought I might have sounded a tad ungracious earlier this evening.”

  “You do not have to thank me, m’sieur.”

  “You save men’s lives every day, do you?”

  “It was just as much Finn and Antoine—”

  “It was you, mam’selle,” he murmured. “You saved my life, and I wish to express my gratitude.” His hand slipped up from her shoulder to her chin, turning it so that when he bent his head, her mouth was there to meet his. The warm, heady taste of him caused her to part her lips around a faint breath, but he did not take advantage of the invitation, and when she would have taken the initiative herself, he pulled away. Not without great reluctance. And not without a hardness in his jaw that belied the casual gesture he made as he tucked a few strands of blond hair behind her ear.

  “You had, indeed, better go,” he said quietly. “You had better get the hell out of here while I am still feeling noble enough to let you leave.”

  Her hands, clenched up to now in fists by her side, crept up to his chest, spreading flat when she passed the strips of bandaging and encountered the heat and texture of his skin. Her fingers combed through the soft dark hairs and she ran them higher, making no effort to pretend she had any claims left to modesty or pride as she slipped them beneath the open edges of his shirt. His skin was warm and smooth. The dark hairs tickled her palms and teased her fingertips as she ran them up his breastbone to his collar, then around to the back of his neck where she broke contact long enough to unfasten the frayed strip of linen that bound his hair. With a look that was still half pleading, half frightened of being rejected, she threaded her fingers up into the thick black waves, combing them forward so that the silk was on his cheeks, touching hers as she rose up on tiptoes and pressed her lips to his.

  Tyrone stiffened slightly in resistance, knowing that of the two of them, he should be the one strong enough to stop it before it went any further. The trouble, of course, was that he did not want to stop her. He very much wanted the staggering pleasure of holding her in his arms again, of hearing her cry out his name until there was no strength left to give it sound or substance. Before Renée d’Anton, he had taken his pleasure with casual, careless thanks, even wild recklessness when his blood was hot and singeing with tension. But he had never felt this excruciating level of urgency before, never this unrelenting restlessness that built all day and night and had him searching for scraps of toweling she had touched, snuffling into it like a bloodhound as if he could detect the scent of her lingering on it. Nor had he ever wasted a scrap of conscience standing outside a woman’s bedroom door debating the consequences of going inside.

  Her lips were soft and supple and he opened his mouth, responding to her entreaty with a ferocity that drew the breath from both their bodies. He returned her kiss with bruising force, damning the jolt of pain in his side that reminded him he was neither as mobile nor as flexible as he would have liked to be. Finn had bound the ribs tightly that afternoon and the only real difficulty came when he tried to bend over or lift anything above the level of his shoulder. But his legs had not given out yet and his breeches were growing tight enough to suggest he was fully recovered elsewhere. Fully, dangerously, incautiously recovered.

  Renée welcomed his hunger, matching it with her own. The mindless drumming in her blood compelled her to run her hands down the heat of his body again and with each stroke she melted deeper into his embrace. She was not unaware of the growing bulge at his groin and leaned into it, using her hands to circle his waist and pull herself even closer.

  “Wait,” he grabbed her wrists. “Wait, for God’s sake.”

  He saw the instant blush of shame rise in her cheeks and shook his head. “You don’t understand,” he explained with a groan. “Much as I want to oblige you—” He stopped again and gazed into her eyes, the centers wide and black and shining up at him with a volatile mixture of desire and desperation. He stared at her mouth and his thumb moved of its own accord to brush away the faint glistening of moisture.

  “I am not the man you want, Renée,” he said hoarsely. “I am not the man you deserve.”

  “I know that. Believe me, m’sieur, I know that.”

  His eyes narrowed and his blood roared through his temples and he could feel her hands skimming across his flesh again, smoothing over his chest, exploring the shapes and contours of muscle.

  “Renée, dammit … I am trying to be noble here, but I swear to God if you touch me—”

  “Here?” she asked in a whisper, putting her lips to his breast.

  When her tongue swirled around his nipple he closed his eyes and groaned. He bowed his head, burying his lips in the silken mass of her hair, cursing softly as he did so for her hands were prowling lower, plucking the buttons free one by one until his breeches were gaping and his flesh was springing hard and urgent into her welcoming grasp.

  “You will be the death of me, you know,” he gasped. Her fingers were cool, her breath warm, her voice husky against his throat. “Does this mean it is all right to touch you now?”

  He groaned again and tilted her mouth up to his for another hard, lashing kiss. She continued to cradle his flesh, to stroke it until he had to break away again and grab her wrists in order to avoid the ignominy of exploding against her belly. He kept her hands tight in his and led her to the bed. Once there, he let her take command again, the lust rising hotter and faster in his blood as she helped him out of his shirt and breeches and cast the crumpled garments away in the shadows. Her gaze went briefly to his bandages, but there was no sign of pink leaking through. She looked lower, at the thick spear of hard flesh rearing against his belly, and he had to steady her as she wavered and swayed weakly forward into his arms.

  His hands went to her shoulders and peeled off the robe. Beneath it she wore a shapeless cloud of linen, primly fastened to the neck by a row of thin pink ribbons. He freed them one at a time until he was accorded the same privilege of being able to slip his hands beneath the fabric and cradle the lush ripeness of her breasts. Her nipples were already taut enough to draw a moan from the lovers’ throats, and the night rail quickly joined the robe in a puddle around her ankles.

  Gloriously naked she stood before him, her skin pale as cream in the candlelight, her hair spilling around her shoulders in a waterfall of tarnished gold. Her eyes were still dark with desire, innocently trusting, and Tyrone realized, suddenly and shockingly, that this lustrous wisp of a beauty was capable of destroying every iron clad rule he had made himself obey for the past twenty-eight years.

  And Renée, who thought he was hesitating for other reasons, bowed her head and captured her lower lip between her teeth. “If this is not possible … I will understand. I do not want you to hurt yourself, m’sieur …”

  He offered up a ragged laugh. “As you so eloquently pointed out, it would have been possible the first day if you had not been so quick with the laudanum. It only requires a minor adjustment—”

  “—in technique,” she finished for him.

  With their mouths joined, he eased himself back onto the bed and guided her down over him, parting her thighs and positioning her legs on either side of his hips so that she straddled him. Obeying the firm command of his hands, she slid forward and settled slowly, blissfully, back over the rampant thrust of his erection. A fierce streak of pleasure shuddered through her belly at the first touch of hot, sliding flesh, and as the solid heat of him continued to
furrow high and hard and deep within her, she felt herself tighten eagerly around him.

  “Easy, mon innocent” he gasped, his teeth clenched against his own impatience. “We’re almost there.”

  Renée shuddered again and shook her head in awed disbelief, for there were still inches to go and no possible place to fit them. But he only smiled and stroked her hips, and eased her gently forward and back until they were bound snugly together.

  When she could, she drew a slow, steady breath and held it. Her eyes were closed and her head hung forward between her outstretched arms and, lying still as stone beneath her, Tyrone watched every flicker and shiver that passed across her face, waiting until she had become accustomed to his inflexible length and unyielding angle of penetration. Her body was taut, trembling with anticipation, thudding with excitement yet immutable and determined to prolong each sensation as long as possible. He was none too stable himself feeling each subtle adjustment she made, each warm throb of lubricant her body squeezed around him. But he dared not move, dared not allow her to move until he was well and sure he could weather the impending storm.

  She wriggled against the restraint of his hands and shivered through a threatening volley of spasms. “Je crois que je meurs” she cried softly.

  “You are not dying,” he assured her. “You are just discovering how to come alive.”

  She looked helplessly at him through the silvered fall of her hair, and he smiled again then slid his hands up from where they were clamped around her waist. He cupped her breasts in his palms and rolled the calloused pads of his thumbs across the tightly peaked tips, and while the cry was still in her throat, he drew her forward, closing his mouth around a nipple, suckling it with hard, sharp motions of his lips and tongue that perfectly matched the harder, sharper streaks of pleasure that began to tear through her body. Of her own accord she began to move over his flesh, stretching forward and pushing back, forward and back, in increasingly longer, bolder strokes that soon drove him to abandon her nipples, abandon her breasts, and hold on fast to the frantic motion of her hips.

  As shocking as it was for Renée to open her eyes and see how feverishly she moved over him, it was twice as astonishing to see Tyrone staring defenselessly back up at her as his body strained and arched into her rhythm. She could feel the powerful muscles beneath her, inside her contracting and expanding. She experienced the thrill of absolute ecstasy when his head pressed back into the ticking and his body surged upward, rigid and shaking in the throes of a release that she had only fractions of a second to appreciate before the brilliant flare of her own stunning climax swept through her. Through unrelenting, undiminished waves of rapture, she clung to him and shivered his name and her body moved in a desperate blur until one by one, all the myriad fluttering spasms were spent and she collapsed, utterly nerveless and replete, in his arms.

  After several minutes, when the wildness of his own pulsebeat calmed, Tyrone raked up the handfuls of hair that were smothering his face under a golden cloud and twisted them into a thick coil at the nape of her neck. He heard a hushed and resentful little moan and smiled.

  “May I assume you are still among the living?”

  A long, warm breath bathed his neck before Renée lifted her head off his shoulder. Careful to avoid acknowledging the gentle mockery in his eyes or his smile, and despite his earlier assurances, she inspected his bandages again.

  “Did I hurt you?”

  “If you did, I was too distracted to notice.”

  Her shoulders slumped a little in exasperation. “Must you make a joke of everything?”

  “I was not joking. The bed could have caught fire and I would not have noticed. Roth and his dragoons could have burst into the room with bayonets drawn and I would not have noticed. And in case you did not notice, ma petite, you did most of the work. Like the true rogue I am, I only had to lay back and reap the benefits. I still am,” he added in an appreciative murmur as he studied her body.

  Renée followed his gaze. The muted yellow light from the single, flickering candle suddenly seemed as bright as a roomful of sunshine, and her cheeks warmed despite the glaring lack of any and all modesty over the past several minutes. She had never been naked in front of anyone other than a maid before, and because their previous encounter had been mostly in darkness and shadow, she had not felt particularly exposed. Certainly not to the degree she was now. There were mottled pink flush marks on her hips where his hands had gripped her and a similar blush on the insides of her thighs where the skin had been chafed by the coarser hairs on his legs.

  She was, she realized with appalling chagrin, straddling him like a peasant would a plow horse: without a shred of shame or contrition. She glanced up quickly, but any fear she might have had concerning the impression she was leaving in Tyrone’s mind was banished the moment she saw the pleasure in his eyes. Far from looking at her as if she had behaved like a hellion in heat, they were telling her how lovely she was, how exquisitely perfect the shape of her breasts, the line of her throat, the slope of her shoulders.

  “You are,” he murmured, “as beautiful as moonlight.”

  It was such an unexpected compliment, her body responded with another silky throb.

  The pale eyes flicked up immediately.

  “Do not try to tell me no one has ever said that to you before.”

  “I have been told,” she admitted with a shrug. “Many times.”

  “But you don’t believe it?”

  Responding to the astonishment in his voice, she gave a little sigh. “I believe it. But I have lived with this face all of my life and wish, at times, that I looked more like Miss Beaker.”

  “Who?”

  “Miss Entwistle,” she said, blushing. “Good God, whatever for?”

  “Because then, perhaps, I would not just be a pretty decoration on someone’s arm. People might actually seek intelligent conversation and not assume my knowledge or interests were limited to ribbons and furbelows, or how best to set a feather in the hair.”

  Tyrone ran his hands thoughtfully up her arms and brought them to rest on either side of her neck. “While it never occurred to me you might be an expert on feathers, it also never once entered my mind that you would ever be anyone’s pretty decoration. Furthermore, if it would set your mind at ease any to know, you are not entirely without flaws. Your nose, for one thing, is crooked.”

  “My nose?”

  “Indeed. It tilts the tiniest bit to the left side. You also have a habit of chewing on your lip if you are nervous or frightened or angry—I warrant you bit your nails when you were younger—and you have a scar on your temple, just at the hairline.”

  She raised a hand self-consciously, touching a fingertip to the place where she had tumbled into a rosebush and cut herself on a thorn. It had happened when she was barely three years old—she could not even recall the incident—and the scar was all but invisible; she needed bright daylight herself to find it.

  “Too high,” he said, guiding her hand lower, pressing her fingers over the faint tracing. The fact he had noticed it left her somewhat short of breath and speech, and when he laced his fingers through hers and brought them back down, pressing them against his mouth, she felt the effect of his tender, nibbling caress all the way to her toes.

  “I … should go back now,” she said haltingly.

  “Whereas I was thinking … you should stay right where you are.”

  She looked down again in surprise, for she could feel him stirring inside her, a distinct and vigorous hardening where there had been only luxuriant softness a moment ago. To ward off any further thought of protest, he skimmed his hands lightly down her thighs then up again, bringing them to rest at the golden juncture. With his thumbs, he parted the dewy curls and spread the slick folds of flesh, probing and stroking until he found the tiny pink bud he sought.

  Renée had nowhere to look but into his eyes. Even they could not hold her too long as his thumbs continued to tease, and she arched back, bracing herself o
n outstretched arms while he brought her to the gentlest of peaks. When it passed, he started again, using long, deft strokes of his fingers this time to supplement the pressure building inside and out. As she drifted with the pleasure, the haphazard twist of her hair uncoiled and dragged across the tops of his thighs.

  “Oh! M’sieur … !”

  Tyrone groaned and pulled his hands away. He caught her wrists, then her upper arms, bringing her forward until her face was an inch from his and there was nothing to see but the sparks blazing from his eyes.

  “Not ten minutes ago you were all but screaming my name. If you do not want me to turn you out of the bed this instant, you will stop calling me ’m’sieur’ or ’capitaine.’ You will call me Tyrone. It is a fine Irish name and I rather like the sound of it said with a French accent.”

  She expelled a gust of air, her body still molten and rife with sensation. “So you are Irish? Finn guessed as much.”

  “My mother was. I was named after the county where she was born.”

  “And your father?” She wriggled her hips, seeking friction and pressure where she needed it most.

  He scowled. “You are trying to distract me.”

  She considered the charge and the threat that preceded it for as long as it took to contemplate the fine dark lashes, the strong straight nose, the full sensuous lips that were more intoxicating than the purest French cognac.

  “And if I am?”

  “It will not work.”

  She refrained from calling him a liar, for he was thick and full and straining with impatience inside her, and he would no more toss her out of his bed at that moment than she would let him leave this place without taking some indelible memory of her with him.

  She leaned forward, swamping him with her hair as she kissed him. “Tyrone,” she murmured, kissing his chin, the underside of his throat. He gave a little grunt of satisfaction and she licked a path down to the hollow at the base of his neck, punctuating each caress with muffled whispers. “Tyrone, Tyrone, Tyrone.”