The Passionate One

by Connie Brockway

  Overseas property? The Americas? Australia?

  Ash rose from behind the desk and walked to the window. Ever since Rhiannon’s arrival Carr had grown daily more tense. But in the past few days his irritability had given way to a certain expectancy. It boded ill for someone and that person mustn’t be Rhiannon.

  Lost in contemplation, Ash was only vaguely aware of the door opening behind him. Assuming it was a servant bringing a pot of strong black coffee, Ash gestured toward the desk without turning. “Put it there, please, and don’t bother to stay and tidy up. I’ll be gone from here soon enough.”

  He stared out at the sea. The dim, hushed predawn light soothed his burning eyes. It was like Fair Badden’s pure sweet dawns. He would have liked to have gone for a walk this morning as he had so many mornings there. He would have liked to have stridden through the dew-shimmered grass with that fool hound Stella gamboling behind him and Rhiannon at his side.

  With an exhausted sigh, he rested his forearm on the window above his head and leaned wearily into it. No such pastoral pleasures for him. He had an image to maintain, a reputation at stake.

  “No. No sunlit vagaries for me,” he murmured to himself. “Not when an entire night beckons me with the promise of untold amusements.”

  “Ash Merrick, you’re a liar.”

  He wheeled around. She stood in a soft wash of paling light, a cloud of silky lace pooling about her bared feet, her shoulders rising from the froth of her night garment like an alabaster Venus rising from the waves.

  He swallowed. It was all he could do. He was too tired and she was too beautiful and he’d tried, God knows he’d tried, to keep her safe from Watt and Carr and most especially himself.

  But he hadn’t any reserves left; he’d been wrung out of his last drop of self-restraint and he’d never owned any good intentions anyway. He’d wanted her, lusted after her, desired her, and needed her and she was here, in his bedchamber with cloudy dawn molding itself to her skin and a haze of soft slumber muzzying her soft, rich mouth.

  But he tried. He still tried.

  “If you take another step into this room,” he advised her, “I will not let you leave until I’ve had you on your back.”

  She took a step into the room.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Ash met her before she took another step. He reached her and dipped, sweeping her up in his embrace as easily as if she’d been feather down. Jaw set, he strode across the room and kicked open the door to the adjoining suite, stopping in the door frame.

  Little light came through the long, tall windows facing out over the sea. A storm rushed down from the north, steeping dawn in a clotted blue-gray, making the room twilight. A great canopied bed, counterpane pristine as a sacrificial altar, stood in the center.

  The windows rattled with a sudden gust of wind, breaking Ash’s stillness. He carried Rhiannon to the bed, laid her in its center, and followed her down, imprisoning her between his arms. Trepidation clouded her exquisite gold-green eyes. Too late. He braced himself above her on shuddering arms.

  His gaze devoured her, roving greedily over her shadowed eyes, touching on the mane spread across the counterpane, and moving lower to the deep, lace-edged vee of her sheer nightgown. It exposed the creamy column of her throat, the delicate collarbones spread like wings beneath fragile flesh, and the velvety shadowed valley between her breasts. She’d grown thinner in the last month.

  “Oh, Ash,” she said, reaching up and delicately touching the bruised flesh beneath his injured eye.

  She ruined him. She saved him. He turned his face into her palm, branding it with a hot, fervid kiss.

  He didn’t want to rape her or rut with her … he wanted to make love with her.

  He lowered himself, pressing her body into the thick feather mattress, intent on simply kissing her. He bent forward; his lips touched hers.

  His head spun with light-headed pleasure. Her lips were as cushioned and warm as he remembered, but softer now, slightly, shyly, breathlessly opening for him. He sipped in her breath, tasting the corners of her mouth with his tongue with feigned languor.

  “Kiss me, Rhiannon,” he whispered, hopelessly vulnerable now, wretchedly aware that petitioning her favors guaranteed his rejection. How could she do anything else? She’d been someone else’s bride-to-be and he’d seduced her.

  “A kiss.” He brushed his lips over the velvety shell of her ear, hoarding sensations, pleading with gentleness, begging with restraint. Her fragrance intoxicated him: warm and clouded floral, the sharp tang of sea and pine, the musk of arousal … arousal.

  He angled his head, licking the base of her throat. Her pulse fluttered beneath his tongue.

  Carefully, he slipped one hand beneath her waist, crept his arm up her back between her shoulder blades, and cradled the back of her head in his palm, lifting her body up. The thick satin mass of hair fell down over his arm.

  “Rhiannon.”

  She kissed him. She lifted her head and molded her lips to his. He shivered with the unexpected voluptuousness of it, his body growing hard with burgeoning desire. The tip of her tongue teased just within his mouth, both bold and hesitant, untutored and wise.

  His mind teemed with gratification, overwhelmed by every exquisite detail: her softness, her graceful curves, the beat of her heart. A beautiful female body lay beneath him, vibrant and glowing with slowly awakening appetite. But all this could not explain his total absorption, because he was involved with so much more than the body that yearned beneath his hands and lips.

  Rhiannon. Rhiannon’s heart, flesh, and bone. Rhiannon revealed to him, beneath him, surging up to cling to him. It had been Rhiannon since Beltaine night. He could no longer fight that knowledge.

  She undid him.

  He settled his hips against hers, rocking into her with little irrepressible jerks. Her thighs relaxed, she tilted her hips. He shivered, fighting for control, fearful of crushing her. Mouths still melded, hand still cupping her delicate skull, he shifted away and swept his hand between them, encountering fragile silk and gossamer lace. He no longer thought, he reacted instinctively. The material that kept her from him hissed as it tore.

  Startled, her eyes flew wide. Her hands instinctively flew up to brace against his chest.

  He cursed himself. He’d no graces, no art, nothing but this devastating desire growing each moment, and each moment shredding his tenuous mastery of it.

  He released her mouth, overwhelmed. His heartbeat raced out of control. He closed his eyes, fighting the imperatives of pure want, forcing his breath to a quieter tempo, chaining desire to his will.

  He had not meant to frighten her.

  “I won’t hurt you,” he promised thickly. He bracketed her face between his forearms and, with as much gentleness as he possessed, touched her cheek, her temples, lining one silky-smooth brow and feathering her eyelashes with the back of his forefinger, trying to show her what he could not say.

  Beautiful. Lovely and sweet and impossibly desirable. His gaze roved over all the grace notes of her countenance: the slight dilation of her pupils, the thin white scar on her cheek, the delicate blue tracery of veins on the whiteness of her breasts.

  Slowly, the taut line of her mouth relaxed as he plied her with soothing caresses. He brushed her shoulder in slow, ever-widening circles, moving gradually to her breast. She sighed, a sweet sound of abandonment. He found the tip of one breast and rolled the nub between his thumb and fingers, watching her face intently.

  She inhaled sharply. Her shoulders arched off the bed; her breasts rose in an unvoiced overture. He made no attempt to withstand the offer. His mouth closed on her dark, ripe nipple, sucking gently at first but then more greedily, lifting and kneading the other plump breast.

  It was more than Rhiannon could bear. All the words, the terrible names, the warnings and castigations she had been chanting like a charm against his enchantment could not save her. She did not want to be saved.

  His mouth pulled forbidden sensa
tions from her while his hand fondled her other breast into peaked and ready arousal. The hardness pressed against the vee at the top of her thighs rubbed with intimate promise, swirling into a rush of titillation.

  Unable to resist, she combed her fingers through his long, tangled black hair, stroked his face, and felt the rasp of his unshaven cheeks. He drew harder, deeper. A throaty purr vibrated from deep in her throat.

  The sound caused him to release her. His eyes flashed up to meet hers, black and unreadable. For a timeless moment she stared into their depths and then he lowered her shoulders to the bed. Slowly, like a prowling beast, he moved up over her, his legs on either side of her hips. He braced himself on his arms, suspended above her, his hair falling forward, masking his features. The only sounds she could hear were the pelted spatter of rain on glass and her own harsh breath.

  He suddenly pushed back, knees spread wide, and rested on his heels. His gaze locked on her mouth. He grasped his shirt bottom and pulled it from his breeches and over his head.

  It had been dark on Beltaine night and thus she’d never fully seen what she’d clutched and stroked and petted and strained to join. And when he’d fought he’d been filthy and battered. Now, finally, she did.

  For the first time she saw how beautiful he was, more beautiful than her imagination had allowed. His hips were narrow and his shoulders broad, his body taut and lean. His clear skin sheathed hard muscle and long, clean bone. Her gaze dropped and fled. The evidence of his arousal strained the fabric of his breeches.

  His gaze followed her own. “Yes, boidheach, readied, hard and urgent, for pleasuring you, for pleasuring myself. For passion’s sake.”

  “No other reason?” she whispered, trying to ignore the sliver of uneasiness his words had caused.

  If he heard he gave no indication. His eyes were nearly black with arousal, focused and intense. He stretched out his hand. Purposefully, he ran his knuckles in a long, drawn out caress starting from the base of her throat, moving slowly between her breasts down over her belly to the thicket of soft curls between her thighs. She writhed beneath the gentle contact, trying to remember what she’d asked and why.

  “Need there be another?” he whispered hoarsely.

  She did not answer, for his fingers had found her nether lips and were gently stroking the silky interiors. Moments and hours, he played upon her body, stroking and urging, nibbling and licking, tender kiss and sharp nips ending just the pleasure side of pain. She lost herself in the vortex of sensation, liquid with want, the agitated sounds of constricted pleasure humming from her throat, foretelling her crisis.

  Finally she could take no more, she held up her arms, her eyes wide and unseeing. He fell upon her like a sea eagle on a dove, jerking his strained breeches away, unerringly finding the moist cove he’d so thoroughly prepared. He entered in one long, sense-shattering slide.

  She caught her breath, instinct and need supplying what befuddled memory withheld, and shifted her hips to accommodate the length of him. She would surely die. It felt that good; it promised that much.

  “Rhiannon,” he gasped, grasping her hips in his big callused hands, the scarred wrists shining like a strand of milky pearls in the dim light. “This time it counts.” His gaze held hers until finally she surrendered.

  “Aye. It does.”

  He began moving, his teeth grinding together and his eyes clenched in extremity. Unbearable stimulation, too rich a broth, too heady a brew, her body riding waves of increasing desire, pulling her muscles tight with anticipation, forcing her hips to rise, to accommodate more, to welcome the increasing power of his thrusts. Her back arched, her hips bucked, and her mouth opened on soundless supplication as her hands flew up to seek purchase against the storm of sensation buffeting her from within.

  They found Ash’s rock-hard body. A sound like a growl vibrated from his throat. The muscles of his arms and chest and throat stood out, straining and corded-over with dark veins. He thrust forcefully, caught up in the intensifying rhythm, aggressive, masculine, moving in her, taking her.

  There. And there. All the swirling sensations condensed and telescoped with dizzying speed to a single center.

  Then it exploded.

  Every inch of her skin, every fiber, every bone flooded with rich, boundless pleasure.

  There. There. She panted, riding the tidal wave of feeling, absorbing it, shivering with its aftermath. She clung to him, dimly becoming aware of the runaway thunder of his heartbeat beneath her ear. He flung his head back, lifting her and clamping her to him.

  “Rhiannon. Chan urrainn dhomh ruith tuilleadh.” I cannot run anymore. “For my heart’s sake. It always has been.”

  Words had no meaning here, the only truths were his arms and body, his kisses and his strength. His words barely penetrated her thoughts, sweet verbal caresses when her whole body was being stroked.

  “Rhiannon!” He thrust into her one last time.

  His whole body shuddered. A low cry of triumph surged from his throat. He froze, holding himself deep within her, straining and raw and beautiful in the act of completion.

  Gradually the rigidity melted from his body. His face fell forward into the lee of her throat. His breath sounded harsh in her ear. With a small groan, he set his shoulder to the mattress and rolled, pulling her over onto him. His forearm looped about her waist, keeping her there.

  He was hot and damp and solid and she’d never felt anything so good, so perfect. Lush with completion, she drifted, disjointed and detached from time and memory, his chest her pillow, his body her bed.

  “Sleep, Rhiannon,” he murmured, stroking her hair from her temples. His breath was warm. “The day will wait.”

  She sighed, utterly content, and nuzzled her cheek against the rising plane of his chest and, beyond all expectation, fell asleep.

  Rhiannon woke slowly. The warm skin beneath her cheek rose and fell in measured cadence. Ash. She opened her eyes. It was still early, the room was still dark. A glance at the boiling gray sky outside the window told her why. A storm had taken hold of the coast. It might be days before it blew over.

  She lifted her gaze to Ash, studying him as he slept. She was startled by what she saw.

  She’d always thought of Ash as a man, fully mature and well into his prime years. But now, with slumber erasing the jaded sophistication from his face, and his eyelids hiding his bleak, world-weary soul, she realized that Ash Merrick was a young man, a very young man. Perhaps no more than a few years her senior. Tenderness filled her.

  Being careful not to disturb him, she swung her legs over the edge of the bed and sat up. He sighed in his sleep and flung one long, tapering arm out across the bed, as though even in his sleep he searched for something. She leaned forward, intent on bestowing a kiss on his bluish-cast cheek, but thought better of it.

  She had to leave him, before someone discovered her in his bed and told Lord Carr. She’d no doubt that Ash’s father would use the information in some hurtful way. She did not want to be another flail Carr wielded over his son. She wanted only to love Ash.

  She smiled sadly. She’d been correct in Fair Badden to think she’d been prey to a girlish infatuation. She’d been besotted by Ash’s black and white good looks, by the forbidden danger suggested by his scarred wrists, and by a susceptibility to his glib tongue and urbane manners. She’d been enamored of a mask, a character Ash had created to hide the real man, a man so much more complex, so much more vulnerable, and yet so much stronger than that play actor. A man in need of love.

  Well, Rhiannon thought, he had her love if he wished it and even if he didn’t. She loved Ash Merrick.

  How sad, she thought, that she’d spent so many years amongst loving, gentle people and never learned the simplest truth of that emotion—that the heart does not need reasons to love, only the opportunity.

  She’d never had to earn Richard or Edith Fraiser’s love. She’d never had to be careful in securing Phillip’s affection.

  The thought of Phillip a
mbushed her. How ill she’d used him! How grievously she’d wronged him! She could never begin to make up to him what she owed—but she must. She would never know peace until she tried.

  She stood and gathered her ruined nightgown about her as best she could. With one last, lingering glance at Ash, she slipped from his room and down the dark corridor.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The stable was warm, the dawn was cooled by sheets of rain, and young Andy Payne was as hot and cocky as only a sixteen-year-old male newly initiated into the world of carnal pleasure can be. His darlin’, Cathy? Carly? had left earlier and he’d dozed a bit—this tupping business was most strenuous play—but now he felt quite up to a cup of milk and a bit of beef.

  Whistling happily, Andy clambered down the ladder from the hayloft, leaving the stables and heading for the kitchen building. The smell of baking bread was just beginning to ride the gusting east wind. He followed it down the path between the alehouse and the icehouse, and in doing so ran smack dab into a human mountain.

  Andy staggered back, staring up into a once handsome visage now ravaged by sleeplessness and pain.

  “Mr. Watt!” Andy cried.

  Phillip clamped his hand over the boy’s mouth, hushing him in a low urgent voice before half dragging him into some scrub larch fifty feet away. A half-dozen men materialized from the brush and encircled Andy. Their faces were grim, their clothes hard worn, their boots scuffed with travel.

  Andy counted three he knew besides Phillip Watt: John Fortnum, Ben Hobson, and Edward St. John. The other two men were vaguely familiar but the glint of excitement in their eyes he knew all too well from his years working his Dad’s tavern. Troublemakers, this lot. Up to no good. He’d stake the guinea in his pocket on it.

  “What are you doing here, Mr. Watt?” Andy asked, though he suspected he already knew, and that knowledge lodged in the pit of his stomach and made it ache. “Where’d you come from?”