Stealing Heaven

by Madeline Hunter

  She obeyed, but it left her spread and exposed. He moved the other leg, making the exciting vulnerability worse.

  She reached for him again. This time he came to her, not fully against her, but braced on his arms so that a small span of air and space still separated their bodies.

  “How do you like it, Nesta?” He spoke lowly as his mouth and teeth did wonderful things to her ear.

  “If I said slow and careful, and full of pretty words, would it make a difference?”

  He turned his attention to her breast. “I think not.” His tongue swirled on her nipple and her body stretched toward the titillating thrill. “I do not know many pretty words, and with the way that I have wanted you, I expect that it can only be hot and furious.”

  She caressed down his back to his hips. “Then let it be so.” She slid her hands around his loins and closed her fingers on him.

  He looked down between their bodies at what she was doing. When he turned his gaze back to her, his eyes blazed.

  She took his head in her hands and brought his face to hers. She kissed him, taking control this time, using her tongue and teeth to let him know her own impatience.

  The frayed cord snapped. She felt it in the body she caressed and knew it from the devouring kisses he pressed on her mouth and neck and breasts. He eased down on her, his hips nestled between her thighs. His body sealed itself to hers while their savage embrace and kisses both vented the desire and stoked it.

  With her body she entreated him to come to her. She raised her hips as he entered her, and they impatiently slammed together in a desperate quest for union.

  There was the briefest pause while she absorbed the delicious fullness, the permeating contentment, and the heady intimacy of his strength in her arms and body.

  Rising up on his arms, he moved in her. Despite his warning, it was slow and careful and beautiful. She laid her hands on his chest as a blissful contentment soaked her. Every rejoining became a luxurious ecstasy to be savored. In the fire’s light his face showed all of his hard beauty, but there was no harshness in the tight lines. His gaze took her as deliberately as his body did.

  It was good. Too good. She had known pleasure before, but in Scotland love-play had been a game between friends that sated physical needs. This was different in ways that left her spirit and heart as naked as her body. Their connection was tinged with an invasive and poignant intimacy. He might have been claiming her soul as well as her body.

  He stopped, joined to her, completing her in more ways than she could name. He came down, into her arms, so that his skin lined her deliciously and the connection grew closer.

  He kissed her. It started gently and sweetly, but deepened quickly as their mutual desire swept in like a wind. Male power poured off him as if a dam had broken. His passion turned as hot and furious as he had warned it would be.

  Her craving met his and then spun out of control. They fought a battle where they both strove for the same victory. A new delicious shivering began where he stretched her and she rocked into his hard thrusts, demanding more until the quivering filled all of her and grew unbearable. Relinquishing her hold on everything except him, she let him drive her to a crazed climax that had her clawing at his back and screaming into the silence.

  Sanity returned just as his own end came. Holding her right leg over his hip he drove deeper with hard, claiming thrusts that prolonged the pleasure drenching her.

  He spoke lowly in her ear, but not pretty words. He only said her name, once. But the way he said it, gently despite his violence, quietly despite the hot fury of his release, touched her so profoundly that it might have been the sweetest poetry.

  Chapter 10

  As she lay with him she felt bound by a peace and warmth as soulful as a nostalgic memory. She savored the mood, and the hard body in her arms, and the heart beating in rhythm to her own. She could not fight the saturating intimacy, did not want to, but she recognized that danger lurked within the bliss.

  Pleasure had become a physical thing that she took or gave on her own terms. That she controlled. This had been very different. The power of what had happened, of just how weak it might make her, both intrigued and frightened her.

  She should have been the one to run away, instead of Genith.

  He rose on his forearms and looked down at her. Beneath the warm contentment in those dark, intense eyes she read the deeper reflections of his mind. He was contemplating the same thing as she was.

  Two clever people were concluding that they had just done something most unwise.

  He shifted to her side, breaking the physical bond. The other one would be harder to sever.

  Lying beside him in front of the fire, stretched out to his thoughtful gaze, she felt more naked than she had ever been in her life. She subtly dragged the edge of the fur over her hips.

  Smiling as if he knew what she was about, he brushed the covering away again as he caressed down her length. His hand paused on her stomach.

  “You have never carried a child.”

  “Nay.”

  “The King hoped you would not, didn’t he? I think Edward chose that old knight hoping that you would remain untouched.”

  “I suspect he was assured of it. That part of the bargain was quickly forgotten, however. As to a child, Duncan and I both did what we could to avoid that, but perhaps fortune just smiled on me. A child would bind me there forever, even after he died. It was not my home, and never would be, and I did not want such ties.”

  “That convent was not your home, either. Were you so unhappy that a nunnery was better?” His expression was too thoughtful as he watched his hand smooth over her body. She could see his mind working at something.

  “It is no woman’s first home. No one is a stranger if everyone is.”

  “But your father was still alive when your husband died. Why didn’t you go to him, or join Genith?”

  “The choice was not mine. I was sent to Scotland for a reason, and that did not change with my husband’s death.”

  “An old husband, and then a convent.” His fingers splayed over her hips and thighs, as if he drew his mental wanderings on her body.

  She knew where his thoughts were going. “Aren’t you going to ask me what happened with Edward? Don’t you wonder if there were others besides him and my husband, and just how much a whore I have been?”

  “Sleeping with your husband was not whoring.”

  “It is not my husband that distracts you now.”

  “You are so sure of what distracts me, Nesta?”

  “You are a man. I expect that you are wondering how often I have surrendered my virtue as easily as I did this night.”

  “In this I am not like most men. I know that a woman’s heart is rarely as simple as the words ‘virtue’ and ‘whore’ imply. When I was a youth I lived among real whores, and some of them were the most honest women I have ever known.” His gaze turned inward, as if he no longer saw either her body or his caress. “Actually, I am only alive today because a good woman sold herself.”

  A stillness fell over him after he said it. His tone had been distracted, as if he gave voice to a truth he rarely put into words.

  He glanced in her eyes, and then returned his attention to his wandering hand. “Do you know the history of Anglesmore? How Roger Mortimer, when he usurped the young King’s power, sent a man to disseize my father?”

  “I know what happened. It is still evident in your household, and the youth of the men.”

  “The knights have come from elsewhere, but the boys are the sons of men who died when the castle fell. With their fathers gone, their families have no way to provide for them. They petition me, and I take them for service or training, even though there are already too many.”

  “That is generous of you.”

  “I never have thought of it as generosity. I even tell myself no more, but then another one comes and I see there is no other way, so I take him too.” He smiled charmingly, and appeared quite boyish himself. “T
here are complaints about their mischief and noise. The cooks swear that they steal food, and the priest is aghast at their sins.” He seemed to find the priest’s dismay the most amusing part.

  The lightness left his mood as quickly as it had come. He looked in her eyes again, and this time did not turn his attention away. “Do you not find it curious that I did not die that day? I was only twelve, but others my age fell.”

  She would have liked to lie, but he watched with eyes that would see through that. “I have wondered about it.”

  “I was supposed to. The massacre was an act of blood lust, but the deaths of my father and me were ordained. However, the man who took the keep grew besotted with my sister on seeing her. The price of my life was that she go to him.” His mouth formed a bitter, hard line. “I did not realize it at first. Like a fool I thought God had spared me. Then one morning I went to her chamber early to speak with her, and saw them together. I knew everything then. I should have fallen on a sword to spare her more of it. Instead I feigned ignorance and kept silent so the bargain could continue and I could live.”

  The revelation astonished her. Not that it had happened, but rather the flat, calm way he faced the cost both to his sister and his own conscience.

  “Thus did my sister whore, Nesta. After she and I escaped, the women who slaved in the London tile yard where we lived also worked on their backs at night. They did it to feed their families, not for pleasure and certainly not for love.” Again he gave her that direct look. His hand gently brushed strands of hair away from her face. Combing her locks out onto the fur occupied him for a spell.

  “Is that how it was with you, Nesta?”

  The sudden turn in the conversation stunned her. She was touched that he confided in her, but had not expected him to want the same of her.

  “You want to know what happened with Edward, and if I was under some obligation?”

  “You misunderstand. I have decided that I do not want to know which of the songs is true. I have not been thinking of your past. I find myself contemplating the present, and whether you did this with me for another reason. I can hardly damn you if you did, but I still wonder.”

  His frankness alarmed her. He insinuated that he could think of many reasons for her to have done this.

  “It was only for my pleasure, I assure you.”

  His gaze snapped to her face, and she knew then that he had been contemplating more than her motivations. He too had felt the power of what had passed, and been surprised by it, and knew in his heart that they had shared more than pleasure.

  She expected him to challenge her, so intensely did he examine her. He let it pass, however, as if he agreed it would be better not to speak of that when there was no future for it.

  His gaze warmed, and his hand left her hair. He caressed her body more purposefully. “If it is only for your pleasure, I should be sure that you are well pleased. Besides, I always said, if a thief is going to hang, it might as well be for a horse and not an apple.”

  “When did you always say that?”

  He smiled slyly. “When I was a thief.”

  “So now I am a horse?”

  He shook his head. “You are the stairway to the stars. It is heaven that I am stealing here.”

  He cupped her breast and brushed the tip with his thumb. Her nipple immediately hardened and an arrow of intense sensation streaked down her body, reigniting the hot torture.

  “What would be your pleasure, Nesta?”

  She smiled. “If I said slow and careful, would it make a difference?”

  “This time it would. I think that I will make it so slow and careful that you are begging for me.”

  “I do not beg.”

  “I think that you will.”

  He indeed made it slow and careful. So slow that the pleasure almost unhinged her. Flicks of his tongue aroused one breast and the slow grazing of his fingers teased the other.

  It felt so good that she never wanted it to stop, but soon the torment grew so intense that her body begged even if her voice did not. He made no move to answer the pleas implied by her rocking hips, but continued teasing her, letting the delirium build. She wantonly arched so her breasts rose to the delicious torture.

  It became too much. She throbbed where he had filled her, and she wanted that completion again. The pleasure he gave her both increased the ache and denied it. She grew frantic with a building hunger.

  She reached to caress his phallus, to return the pleasure and also encourage him to need her too. To her shock he took her hand, and the other one, and pinned them in a gentle grip above her head.

  “You will do nothing to hasten this. I want you as mad with desire as you will ever be, and more desperate for me inside you than you thought possible.”

  “I already am.”

  “Not enough.”

  He caressed down her body and she anxiously moved her leg. Just the anticipation of his touch excited her more. His first slow stroke left her moaning with relief, but soon she only craved more and more. Ecstasy beckoned, just out of reach, torturing her so exquisitely that she heard herself sighing her approval to every incredible touch. He insisted on bringing her to the edge slowly, and soon nothing existed but the pleasure spilling through her, body and soul, and the single-minded thought that they be joined.

  Suddenly he was gone. His hand left her body and he slipped from her embrace. Confused and dazed, she opened her eyes just as he lifted her toward him.

  He sat and settled her on his legs, facing him, taking care with her sore ankle as he wrapped her legs around his hips. He pressed the tip of his phallus to her passage and her essence cried with joy. He went no further, however, but stopped with them barely connected.

  She could not believe that he was capable of such annoying restraint. Soon she also could not believe what that small connection was doing to her.

  Draping her arms around his neck, she narrowed her eyes on him. “If my ankle was not sore, and I could move, I would make short work of this.”

  His fingers began a devastating arousal of her breasts. It made her come alive where they were partially joined. “You can still make short work of it.”

  Her mind began splitting. Awareness of the lodge retreated again, leaving her conscious of only the fire and him and the tremoring pleasure that itched to find fulfillment.

  “You mean I can beg. That is unkind. You want me humbled.”

  He took her face in his hands, and held her head close to his as he looked in her eyes. “I want you to admit that you want me as much as I want you. And no matter what happens in the days ahead, I want you to remember this night, and me.”

  With ruthless determination he made sure that she did. He used his hands and mouth to bring her to delirium again. She could not move, and so her arousal just built and built. Between her cries she showered kisses on him, tasting his skin, inhaling his scent, filling her memories.

  Finally the last shred of control left her, and she whispered the desperate request he sought. She did not have to plead or beg, she merely asked for what she wanted. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to do.

  He lifted her hips and brought her closer. As he filled her he claimed her with a kiss that smothered their mutual groans. Wrapping her in a binding embrace, he led her toward the heaven that waited.

  Day came too soon. Its bright light poked through the tiny gaps between the timbers, heralding a clear day. Marcus woke and cursed the evidence of fair weather. No excuse to stay here, then. He had hoped to hold off the reckoning, and the decisions this woman in his arms would inevitably make.

  Nesta slept on. The fire was down to embers, but they were cozy beneath the fur mantle, their entwined bodies making enough heat. Saturated with a contentment he had rarely known in his life, he watched her peaceful expression, so lovely in the leaking light of dawn, and counted the dark lashes brushing her skin.

  With Genith gone, she would petition to leave Anglesmore. He already knew the arguments that she woul
d make. She would even use this night, and the danger from the King, as a reason, even though the biggest danger in what had happened here had nothing to do with Edward. It was that other risk that would really compel her to leave. She would want to flee the bond discovered in this lodge.

  He could not let her go, of course. Not only because of the pleasure, and the chance to know it again. Not just because of the intimacy.

  She had indeed been captured by the enemy, and there was much she could tell him that he would want to know. She was up to some mischief, he was sure of it. It involved Genith and Carwyn and those rebels hiding in the hills, and his best chance to discover her plan before she destroyed herself was to keep her nearby.

  She turned in her sleep and nestled closer until her face pressed his chest. She appeared so small and feminine that it was tempting to forget the sharp mind that worked inside that pretty head.

  The movement stirred her and she slowly emerged from her dreams. Awareness came to her slowly, and she frowned a little before she remembered where she was. She favored him with a sleepy smile he would never forget. Then full alertness hit her. She absorbed the new light of day streaking through the darkened lodge, and her face fell.

  They lay in their embrace, closer in some ways than they had been in their passion. Marcus could almost hear the silent debate taking place inside her head.

  “When I left Anglesmore, it was assumed I would be gone many days,” he said.

  She exhaled a deep breath that said more than any words. It was the sigh of a woman who understands the world too well. “Day always comes, Marcus. An hour in a moonlit garden or a night in a firelit lodge does not change what the sun illuminates.”

  “Very little sun enters these walls.”

  “Enough to show us both who we are.”

  He sought to win the argument the only way he could. He kissed her. She accepted it, and held his head to her as she made it long and sweet. When he moved to caress her, however, she turned her head away. “Do not. It will be too sad.”