The Seduction of Elliot McBride hp-5

by Jennifer Ashley

  He’d brought her in here, stripped off her clothes and his, laid her on the bed, and made love to her for two hours.

  Now he stretched out on his side, his half erection heavy against her thigh. Elliot’s gray eyes were soft in the light, but he looked nowhere near tired.

  Juliana said softly, “When I was told what happened in the marriage bed, my stepmother mentioned none of this.”

  Elliot lifted the weight of her breast, caressing the tightness of her nipple. “None of what?” His head was on her pillow, the covers long ago kicked off.

  “None of what we’ve done today. I was told to lie quietly on my back and let you adjust me as necessary, and then you would come in on top of me.” She smiled at her questions—What will I do in the time between that and when he spills his seed? The whole discussion seemed long ago and innocent now. “You would derive pleasure in the act, but I probably wouldn’t. I was to hold and comfort you when you released, because at that moment, a man was, for the only time in his life, weaker than a woman.”

  Elliot laughed, a deep-voiced, masculine laugh. “Was this in a book?”

  “I expect so.” Come to think of it, she couldn’t picture Gemma lying back so tamely, and Ainsley had said, with a twinkle in her eye, that the marriage bed could be a fine place. “But no one mentioned dining room tables, or what you did outdoors today, or me wanting to hold you in so many different ways.”

  “Mmm. What sort of different ways?”

  Juliana ran her hand over his shoulder. “I never thought I’d need to touch my husband at all. But you are so very touchable.” Juliana glided her fingertips across his knotted shoulders, tracing the scars that lined them. “I don’t like that they hurt you.”

  “It doesn’t hurt anymore.”

  But it had hurt him. Very much indeed. “You’re safe now,” Juliana said. “Here in this house, with me, you’re safe.”

  “I know that.”

  “But this morning, you thought you were back in the prison.”

  Elliot twined his hand through hers, stilling her touch. “It happens.”

  “Quite often?”

  Elliot’s eyes lost their warmth while he kissed her fingers then let them go. “Not as much now.”

  Juliana skimmed her touch across the tattoo around his bicep then moved to his flat nipples, his wiry hair catching the last of the sunlight. “I want you to be well.”

  “I’m well when I’m with you, Juliana.”

  “I want you to be well even when you’re not with me.”

  Elliot closed his hand around her wrist and gave her a heart-stopping smile. “Then you’ll have to stay with me always.”

  “Well, of course. I did marry you. But seriously, Elliot, you know that some days I will have to leave you alone, and you, me.”

  He caressed her wrist, but didn’t let go. “I don’t know if I will ever heal as much you want me to.”

  “Perhaps if you talk about it…”

  “No.” His voice grew hard. “I don’t want to remember, or talk it over, or dwell on it. I want to be in the here and now. They never knew about you. They could never take you away from me.”

  Juliana wasn’t quite sure what he meant by this last, but it made sense to her that he would want to push aside bad memories to enjoy the safety and calm of being home. But she also knew that the distance she felt between herself and Elliot wouldn’t lessen until she understood what had happened to him.

  Or perhaps she expected too much. Many a husband and wife had distance between them that they never closed. The man stayed at his business or in his club; the wife made her calls and planned her social engagements. They came together when they hosted a gathering or attended one together, but only briefly. Juliana had friends who barely communicated with their husbands at all. They’d conceived children with these men but barely knew them.

  Elliot said he wanted more children. Juliana had seen hunger in his eyes when he’d announced that desire.

  She let her hand slide from Elliot’s chest to his tight abdomen, touching the indentation of his navel. Elliot released her wrist as she traced below his abdomen to the organ that was again as hard as when he’d made love to her not a quarter of an hour ago.

  Elliot laced his hands behind his head and rolled over onto his back, giving her full access to his body.

  “So you find you want to touch me, do you?” he asked, sinful heat in his eyes.

  Juliana had felt him wonderfully inside her, had seen his hardness dark and beautiful, but she’d not touched it until now. She daringly dipped her hand to his warm balls, which became tight against her palm.

  Elliot lay rigidly, as though he forced himself to remain still, his hands tucked firmly behind his head. He made a noise of pleasure as Juliana drew her fingers up either side of his shaft, liking the satin smoothness of his skin. In the dying light, he was dark with wanting, heavy in her hand.

  She closed her fingers around him and squeezed, and a louder groan escaped Elliot’s lips. The tip reddened as she drew her hand to it. The head was different from the shaft, she found as she traced it, more giving, but at the same time stiff and warm.

  Juliana wondered what he tasted like. Her thoughts shot back to Elliot licking and drinking her on the path in the woods. She’d never felt anything like that in her life. The heat of his mouth, the friction of his tongue…she squirmed to remember.

  She leaned down and licked his tip.

  “God, Juliana, you’ll kill me.” The words were soft, tight.

  Juliana brushed her tongue over him again, liking the warm salt taste of his skin. She enjoyed the various textures of him too, the slight sponginess of the tip, the edge of the head, the straight sides of the shaft. The coarse hair at the base tickled her tongue, his balls like warm velvet.

  Elliot’s abdomen rose and fell with his breath, and she couldn’t resist moving upward to lick his navel. Her hair fell forward, pooling around him.

  His breath went out in a grating sigh. One hand found her hair, bunching it in his fist. “No, they couldn’t take you away from me.”

  The words were so soft Juliana wasn’t certain she heard them. She circled his navel with her tongue then traced down the line of hair that led back to his staff.

  She began tasting him again, moving her tongue up and down the sides of his shaft, dropping little kisses all the way up to the tip. Then she raised her head and smiled at him, thinking he’d laugh at how silly she was.

  The look on Elliot’s face made her stop. His eyes held pure carnality, raw need. He was a beautiful man, naked on his back, his tanned body spread for her on the sheets.

  She had time for only one delicious glance before Elliot seized her under her arms and dragged her up his body. His mouth opened over hers, and his hands parted her legs.

  Elliot lifted her hips a little, then sank her down onto him, his hardness entering her and rising high inside her. Juliana gasped, the position opening her, her body arching as more of him went into her.

  Elliot’s hips were moving then, his hands strong on her waist. Juliana felt joy build within her, the tight spiraling where nothing was real but Elliot inside her and the feelings in her heart.

  As cries escaped her lips, Elliot rolled her over, the mattress crackling, and drove down into her. His eyes were fixed with a determined, almost mad light as their bodies came together.

  Juliana remembered crying out, then Elliot shouting, then both of them collapsing onto cool sheets.

  Elliot landed next to her, pulling her back into his embrace. Lassitude and peace struck her, and Juliana fell into a pit of sleep.

  Elliot jumped awake.

  Nothing had moved. Nothing had changed. And yet…

  Moonlight mixed with lingering twilight outside the window, keeping darkness at bay. The half-light made Juliana’s already pale skin white as marble.

  Her quiet breathing hadn’t woken him. Nor had any shout in the corridor—not McGregor and Komal in one of their English-Punjabi arguments, no
t Hamish bellowing something down the hall. The house was silent, the frogs, crickets, and night birds outside filling the dusk with soothing music.

  A clock in the hall, which Juliana had insisted be cleaned, wound, and set, chimed twelve times. Midnight. An enchanted hour.

  Elliot rose noiselessly from the bed. He could move like a ghost, skills learned as a tracker and hunter settling on him without him having to think about it.

  Juliana slept on, undisturbed. Elliot pulled on his shirt, wrapped his kilt around his waist, grabbed his boots, and went into the hall.

  He donned his boots at the bottom of the stairs then walked quietly along the flagstones to the kitchen. He found the shotgun Mahindar had hidden in the butler’s pantry, and shells in a drawer high in a kitchen cupboard.

  Mahindar was nowhere in sight, the family taking a well-deserved sleep. The likeliest person Elliot would encounter was McGregor, who sometimes wandered the house at night, but even he remained upstairs and quiet.

  A cool breeze met Elliot when he stepped out the back door, but he didn’t bother fetching a coat. He could wrap up in his kilt if need be.

  A fox called in the distance, followed by the noise of small animals scurrying for cover. At the end of the garden, just outside the gate, Elliot stopped and loaded the gun, tucking spare shells into his sporran, along with the tin of biscuits he’d found in the cupboard next to the shells. He kept the gun open, slung over his arm.

  He started along the path that would take him to the footbridge that led over the river to Rossmoran land. He and Juliana had used this route to return to the house that evening.

  As Elliot walked, he relived the tactile sensations of being with Juliana—he inside her, she squeezing down without knowing she did it, the cushion of her breasts against his chest. He also remembered the delicious feeling of her tongue on his cock. Her hesitant little licks and kisses, growing bolder by the second, had him nearly crazed with need.

  She was too innocent yet for the things he wanted to do with her. Her well-meaning stepmother had taught her that a man bedded his wife using one position, did his business quickly, and disappeared back to his club and his mistresses. Elliot would have to teach her that this was not necessarily so. Besides, he had no intention of spending days at a stifling club with hidebound men, nor did he intend taking a mistress. What idiot would, when he had Juliana?

  Elliot reached the footbridge and the path that led to the steep hill where he and Juliana had climbed from the tunnels. He picked his way along, the moonlight giving him no need for a lantern.

  The hill curved around into the fold of the valley, another hill rising beyond it. Elliot knew there must be more entrances to the tunnels—the McGregors of old would not have allowed themselves to be bottled inside if their enemies found and blocked one. He walked to the next hill, where trees began to rise around him again.

  The woods went quiet, the watcher back.

  Elliot snapped the shotgun closed and cocked it. “Come on out and face me,” he said, voice loud in the still air. “If I like what you say, I might not shoot you.”

  Chapter 15

  Silence. An owl hooted far, far away.

  Only one man in Elliot’s experience could track him in this way. But he was dead, gone, buried, forgotten by the world. Unfair that he was forgotten, because he’d been amazingly good at what he did, but the world was like that.

  Stacy had to be dead. When Mahindar had told Elliot about the man’s death, Elliot had accepted the story as plausible, because Stacy had been volatile and tended to provoke people.

  Equally plausible was that Stacy had provoked Elliot, and Elliot had throttled him. Mahindar could have invented the story of Stacy dying in Lahore to spare Elliot—Mahindar was forever trying to spare Elliot.

  The fact that Elliot had no memory of murdering Stacy meant nothing. He had no memory of many things, and Elliot had learned so well to be an expert at killing.

  The watcher displayed skills very familiar to Elliot—he’d taught Stacy most of them.

  Elliot was being stalked by a dead man. Or a man who was supposed to be dead and was not. Elliot still lived some of his days sunk in confusion, but his instincts, honed by months of animal-like existence, told him truths that his reason could not grasp.

  “If I’m right,” Elliot said to the night, “then tell your friends I didn’t kill you. Keep them the hell away from me and my wife.”

  Wind sighed in the trees, last year’s leaves scuttling in the dirt. It was dry now, no rain for days.

  Elliot spoke again, keeping his voice level, no shouting. “If you’re trying to take the child, I’m not letting her go to you. Priti is mine, and she’s staying with me.”

  Silence. The watcher apparently did not intend to speak.

  Elliot walked closer to the spot where he thought the next opening to the tunnels lay and set the tin of biscuits on a rock. “If you try to live off the land, someone will report you to the constable as a poacher. I’ll have my lad bring you some food.”

  Still, nothing. The wind sighed again, and in the next instant, Elliot knew the watcher was gone.

  He’d heard no branch moving, no twig breaking. Stacy was almost as good a tracker as Elliot. That had been the basis of the men’s friendship at first.

  Elliot waited for a long time after that. The noises of the woods returned to normal again, but not until the moon had moved well behind the hills in the west did Elliot snap open the gun and tramp back the way he’d come.

  The next morning, Juliana emerged from bathing and dressing in the bedchamber to find the lower hall filled with men wanting work.

  Hamish had spread the word with a vengeance. Men of all ages, shapes, and sizes had come from Highforth village and the outlying farms, from sturdy lads who should have been in school all the way to a stooped elderly man who’d come to give his decided opinions on everything. They’d arrived to put McGregor’s house right.

  Mahindar was a bit nonplussed about how he would feed them all, but Juliana had Hamish run to the village and see what he could find. Not only that, the farmers and crofters brought things with them—chickens, eggs, a nanny goat, cheese, bread, ale—gifts for the new laird and his lady.

  Priti liked the goat, even though it immediately found and ate one of Channan’s pretty silk scarves. The animal looked quite innocent when the discovery was made, despite the bit of indigo silk sticking out the side of its mouth.

  McGregor sat down outside with the elderly man to chat and smoke a pipe with him, while Mahindar and Channan ran about the kitchen, Nandita tried to hide from all the strange men, and Priti played with her new friend the goat.

  The day before, Juliana had begun lists of what needed to be done, but her round of calls, followed by climbing through the tunnels with Elliot and making love all evening, had kept her from finishing them. Mahindar’s voice sounded down the passage as he tried to keep order, and Komal busied herself following people about and giving commands no one understood.

  As Juliana tried to decide what they should do first, Elliot calmly walked in and took over.

  He set men to repairing the roof, some to repairing windows, some to finding the wires and pulleys of the bell system, and some simply to cleaning. He gave orders clearly and without fuss, asking which would be the best men to do each job.

  By midmorning, Castle McGregor buzzed like a hive, workers crawling all over it—raising dust, hammering, breaking away old things and putting up new. The kitchen overflowed with food, Mahindar, Channan, Nandita, Hamish, and Mrs. Rossmoran’s granddaughter Fiona cooking up a storm and watching Priti at the same time. The nanny goat eyed Mahindar nervously as he approached her, but Mahindar only wanted a bit of milk.

  Juliana commandeered a section of the dining room table, where she wrote letters, made her lists, and summoned Hamish from time to time with a handbell, which she’d found rolling in a drawer in the sideboard.

  One of the smaller rooms on the ground floor, whose windows overlooked t
he land sloping down to the sea, would be sunny in the mornings, perfect as her writing room. The room next to it, large and airy, would be the breakfast room. She looked forward to mornings there with Elliot—he reading his newspapers, she reading and answering her correspondence.

  Cozy, domestic, warm.

  When the house was whole, she told herself, Elliot would no longer have his bad dreams and waking visions of the past. He was a natural leader—the way he handled the men working on the house told her that. He’d be himself again. They’d have summer fêtes and the shooting in August, Christmas and New Year’s, and then return to Edinburgh or London—wherever her family and his decided to go—for the social rounds of the Season.

  Mahindar fed them all lunch, mostly bread, meat, and cheese—probably Fiona Rossmoran’s suggestion, though Mahindar brought Juliana a lentil and chicken stew with goat’s milk that was seasoned to perfection.

  The men worked throughout the afternoon, their banging and shouting somehow comforting. The old house had been quiet too long. Now it teemed with life.

  Even McGregor was excited. He’d longed to repair the place, he’d said, for years, but he’d had no money, and he wasn’t the sort of laird who’d force his tenants to work for no pay.

  As the workday waned and the men went home with their families, Mahindar came to Juliana’s dining room corner and cleared his throat. Juliana looked up from her list of supplies to find him curling and uncurling his large hands in nervousness.

  “What is it, Mahindar?” she asked in alarm. “Is Mr. McBrideunwell again?”

  “No, no, the sahib is fine,” Mahindar said quickly. “No, the thing I do not want to have to tell you is that we have a thief.”

  “A thief?” Juliana glanced at the jumble of furniture piled into the dining room, put there so the men could tear apart the other rooms. “How can you tell anything is missing? Or even what there was to be missing in the first place?”