by Debra Glass
Her eyes snapped open just in time to see Eric rearing above her, his face contorted into a look of rugged ecstasy. His shoulders tensed and then tensed again before he groaned and collapsed on top of her, breathlessly drawing her into his arms.
Rose relaxed into the haven of his embrace. For the first time in years, she felt safe. Closing her eyes, she relished the warmth and strength of this man’s body. He was her enemy and yet here in her house, in this bed, the outside world disappeared.
His big palm cupped the back of her head and he drew her close to press a kiss to her forehead. The urge to kiss him suddenly overwhelmed her and she lifted her mouth to his. When her tongue sought his, he returned her kiss with bruising force. She’d thought her body—her desire—was sated.
She was wrong.
He rolled onto his back, dragging her with him so that she was suddenly astride his hips.
“I’m still hard,” he told her, his voice rough and blatantly sexual. “Ride me.”
Rose reached between their bodies and guided his cock inside her. With a sigh, she sank onto him, loving the way he filled and stretched her. She’d never before been in this position and the idea that he could so easily see her body and face, both thrilled and terrified her. His gaze roamed down to where they were connected and then back up again. Inhaling, he swept her long hair behind her shoulders and then he admired her breasts.
Rose swallowed.
“You’re beautiful,” he murmured.
Again, his eyes fell to her hips where he brushed the pad of his thumb over the only evidence she had ever carried a child inside her body. Grief and gut-wrenching memories surged. Faraway voices that would be forever burned into her brain. “Why isn’t she crying? What’s wrong?”
Rose sucked in a breath and Eric pulled her body down to his. “Hush, darling,” he cooed in her ear. His hands trailed down her sides and he began to guide her hips.
Only then, did Rose realize tears streamed unchecked down her face. Forcing herself to chase the past away, she buried her face against his shoulder intent on finding release once more.
* * * * *
Rose twitched restlessly in her sleep. A frustrated whimper alerted Eric that she was having a nightmare. He touched her face. “Rose?”
Her forehead furrowed.
“Rose. Wake up,” he said firmly.
Her eyes snapped open. Confused, she stared and then realization relaxed her features.
“You were having a nightmare,” he said, brushing her sweat drenched hair away from her face.
Without leaving his embrace, she turned so that her back was to him. Eric twisted to spoon against her. “It was just a bad dream.”
Her body tensed.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked softly.
She inhaled. “I dreamed about her again.”
Eric pursed his lips. Her could refer to many people but Eric felt he knew Rose had dreamed about the baby she’d carried. Pity for her tightened in his chest along with the sick need to say something comforting. But what?
“I’m sorry,” was all he could muster.
Rose turned her head to search his eyes. After a heavy silence she said, “Thank you, Eric.”
“I…I’m not certain what to say,” he said.
This time, she rolled back over so that she was facing him again. “No one ever does.” Her eyes grew dark and glassy. “It’s the people who tell you they know how you feel that infuriate me. They didn’t carry her for all those months. They didn’t worry about her.”
She cast her gaze downward. “They didn’t…love her…before she came into the world.”
Her eyes filled with such grief, Eric’s insides knotted.
She sought his gaze again and shook her head. “Nobody ever loved her but me,” she managed to squeak out.
At that, he cradled her head to his chest. Rose curled her fists against him. “I keep wondering if it was something I did wrong. I keep thinking that—”
“Hush,” Eric whispered. “I’m sure you didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Everyone I’ve ever loved has been taken away from me,” she sobbed.
Eric could do nothing to comfort her but hold her. He thought of Sally. He’d been heartbroken when he’d discovered that she was a prostitute and spy. He’d lost too. But unlike Rose, the love he’d lost had never been real to begin with.
Although she’d gotten angry at the mention of him, it was doubtless that Rose had loved her brother who’d fought and died for the Union side. And her Confederate husband…
Eric took a deep breath. Mixed emotions that he did not like roiled inside him whenever he thought about her husband. He’d been sent here to find out if she was a spy, not to become infatuated with her.
Already, he was on too slippery a slope. She snuggled closer against him, entwining her legs with his. But as her breathing grew even and she drifted once more to sleep, Eric wondered how he could ferret out her secrets before becoming even more dangerously involved than he already was.
* * * * *
Rose stared at her sleeping lover. She’d heard the clock strike five and she knew it was just before dawn. The fire in the hearth had burned down to smoldering embers and although the room was chilly, Eric slept with the covers skirting his waist.
Rose trailed her fingers across the fine, blond down meandering along his breastbone. Without clothes, he looked every bit like a Viking warrior of old. His hair was a tad longer than was fashionable. His jaw looked as if it were chiseled out of marble rather than flesh and bone. She’d never known another man who appealed to her the way Eric did.
Asleep, he was beautiful. Awake, he was magnificent.
She wondered what he would have been like if she had met him in another time and place. Away from this world. This war.
Could her attraction to him have turned into something deeper? Her stomach tightened. He had been so wonderfully tender with her last night. No one had ever held her while she grieved for her dead baby. She swallowed thickly realizing that last night was the first time she had even mourned the loss.
She hadn’t cried when they’d told her the baby was stillborn. She hadn’t cried when they’d buried the tiny body in the city cemetery. Someone had placed a rock on the grave to mark it and Rose had told herself that it was best the baby was never named and that the rock was the only evidence of her existence on the earth.
She pursed her lips. She hadn’t visited the grave until Rueben had brought Billy’s body home.
Now, she suddenly had the desire to name the child and to have a proper stone erected at the gravesite. “Mary Alice O’Kelley,” she whispered the name aloud.
Eric’s eyes fluttered open and the tiniest of smiles claimed his lips. “What time is it?” he asked, his voice thick with sleep.
“After five.”
He yawned as he rolled toward her. Rose searched his eyes while he brushed stray tendrils of hair away from her face. Her heart twisted. Why couldn’t this be real? Why couldn’t he be looking at her with love in his eyes instead of—
Her heart skipped a beat when his thumb brushed her bottom lip and without thinking, she kissed it. Something shifted in his eyes and then inhaling a deep breath, he dragged her body underneath him. As he moved over her, he guided his cock into her channel. Rose cried out but opened her legs wider, welcoming the invasion.
Closing her eyes, she breathed in the warm fragrance of his body. Her own body softened and countered his slow, tender thrusts. The rough hairs on his chest raked her breasts. One big palm cradled her head and the other scooped her bottom up so he could penetrate her a fraction of an inch deeper.
Rose wrapped her legs around his. What was this wild heaven he touched deep inside her body—her soul?
Without words, he made love to her and Rose lolled in the slow, thunderous roll his movements created in her body until it built and budded and then crashed.
Her fingers tangled in the hair at his nape and she tensed as ecstasy thrumme
d through her veins. While she rode the pleasure, she heard Eric’s moans join hers and felt him pulsing deep in her center.
He stilled and when Rose opened her eyes, she found him gazing at her. What are you thinking? She was dying to know but she didn’t dare utter the question.
And then his mouth was on hers. Soft and sweet and tender. His tongue teased through the opening she left for him and then plundered inside, ever deepening to flood her with fresh desire. She rocked her hips against his and when he withdrew his cock, she moaned a protest into his mouth. Her cunny clenched around its own emptiness but came alive with sensation once more when his fingers delved between them to find her sweet spot.
Still kissing her, he dipped his fingers to coat them with her wetness and then he rubbed in a circular motion until Rose was gasping and writhing in his arms.
Her eyes opened and her heart skittered at the sight of his smile. Why did his smile affect her like that? As if he were her love instead of her lover. A warm blush infused her cheeks. How did he find her so easily? How did he bring her to the edge time after time?
“Good morning, Rose,” he said and he pecked her lips one last time before he crawled out of bed.
She watched him, in all his naked glory, collect his clothes and then boldly stride out of the room.
Chapter Six
Rose wiped her hands on her apron as she stood.
Ford’s Roadhouse, which had been turned into a hospital for wounded soldiers, was full to bursting. She hadn’t thought there was room for one more injured or dying man. In fact, they’d been turning the lesser wounded away and sending them to homes accepting injured soldiers.
But when Euphrates had brought his wounded master, James Martin, all the way back home from Georgia, no one had the heart to turn him away. It wasn’t so much Captain Martin as it was Euphrates. Well over six feet tall, he towered over most men. His shoulders were so broad, and arms so big, the seams of his shirts strained when his Herculean muscles flexed. But when he cried, the whole world cried with him. Euphrates was incapable of concealing his feelings.
Rose glanced through the crack in the curtains into the room the medics were using for an operating room. She swallowed. They were getting the instruments ready. One of them complained about how little morphine they had left. Her gaze drifted out the window above the pallet where Captain Martin lay in fevered delirium.
Euphrates stood, twisting his hat in his hands, blubbering with tears pouring down his weathered black cheeks. Not only was Captain Martin about to lose his leg. After the operation, the Yankees had orders to transfer him to Johnson’s Island prison.
Euphrates’ tears were more unbearable than the misery of the wounded soldiers. He’d moaned that it was all his fault. He’d wanted to bring Mister James home to be with his family in case the worst happened—not to deliver him into the hands of his enemies.
Boots echoed on the wide floor planks. “Give this to Doctor McVay,” a familiar voice said.
The back of Rose’s neck flamed at the sound. Swiping a loose strand of her hair behind her ear, she turned to discover Eric. She swallowed thickly as his gaze found hers across the room.
“We’re ready for him,” one of the medics said behind her.
Reluctantly, Rose turned away from Eric and watched as two orderlies shifted Martin onto a stretcher. The stench of his rotted leg wafted up and she held her breath against the scent. She’d worked as a nurse since the first wounded had been brought here after a skirmish at the livery stable but she still wasn’t accustomed to the horrid smells and the anguish in the men’s faces.
Through the window, Martin’s wife had just arrived. Rose watched her try to comfort Euphrates. He clung to the tiny woman, looking as if he might crush her with grief at any moment.
“A good many men have lost limbs in this war,” Eric said softly behind her.
Rose whirled.
“Is that his wife?” he asked, inclining his head toward the window.
“Yes,” Rose said. “His servant brought him all the way back here from Georgia and now you Yankees are going to send him off to a prison camp. What more good can he do for the Confederacy?”
She hadn’t realized just how angry she was about Martin’s fate until now.
“Do you think you can convince him to take the oath of allegiance?” Eric asked.
Rose snorted. “No. Before the fever took over, he said he’d die in a Yankee prison before he’d betray his country.”
Eric’s gaze slid down her body in such a way that it made her self-conscious. Her stomach twisted into a knot. “Stop that,” she hissed. “Someone will see you.”
“I have influence as to whether he stays or goes,” Eric said, his voice barely above a whisper.
“Tonight, then,” Rose snapped. “Whatever you want.”
One side of Eric’s mouth twisted into a grin. “Right now. Meet me in the shed outside in three minutes.”
“But I—”
“We have an agreement. Three minutes,” he said and spun on his heel to leave.
Rose gaped at his back as he walked away. Three minutes? For what? Surely he didn’t intend to have sex with her in a shed? She’d go and tell him just what he could do with his agreement.
But then, she remembered James Martin and his grief-stricken family—and miserable guilt-ridden Euphrates. She heaved a sigh. The Martins had already lost a son. At this very moment, James was losing one of his legs. What trouble would it be for Rose to do something she’d already done for much less?
“Miss Rose,” a soldier called, shaking her out of her thoughts. “Might I trouble you for a drink of water?”
By the time she’d given water to four wounded soldiers, her three minutes were up. She snatched her shawl and wrapped it around her shoulders as she stole outside and walked around back to the shed where Eric waited for her. She glanced around to make certain no one saw her before she opened the door and went inside.
The carriage shed was dark. The horses had all been turned out but the earthy scent of them mingled with the redolence of weathered leather and damp hay. A shiver rippled up Rose’s spine.
Eric stepped out of the shadows.
“This is too risky,” Rose protested. “Anyone could walk in here and my reputation would be ruined.”
Her eyes dropped to where he was unbuttoning the fly of his trousers. She gasped. “Do you really intend to go through with this?”
“Come here, Rose.” His tone was blatantly sexual and as dark as the shed in which they stood.
Bristling, Rose crossed the hay-strewn dirt floor to where he stood. She looked around the shed. “This is hardly a place for…for this.”
“The sight of you with that lock of hair out of place and your face flushed was too much for me,” he said. “Feel what you do to me.”
He took her hand and pushed it into his open fly. Rose gasped as her fingers curled around his steely cockstand. In spite of everything, her channel clenched in anticipation. She couldn’t deny it. She wanted him, too. But here? Where they could be caught?
“Eric,” she breathed. “Let’s go back to my house. Anywhere but—”
“And risk being discovered by Rueben? He’d put a bullet in my back,” Eric said with a grin. “We’re safe here. If your reputation suffers, I’ll marry you.”
The erotic desire that had been coiling inside her since Eric had ordered her to meet him in the shed suddenly unraveled. “Marry me? What makes you think I would say yes?”
“You’re going to say yes to this,” he said, toying with that errant strand of hair she’d been fighting all day. “Get on your knees.”
Rose stared.
“Get on your knees,” he said again, his face deathly serious. “Take my cock in your mouth.”
She couldn’t move. She couldn’t react. She couldn’t believe what he’d asked of her.
She glanced down to where her fingers curled around his shaft just below the plum-colored head. A bead of his lubricant glistened
in the dim light. She swallowed. Anticipation welled.
“I’ve never—” she began.
He stopped her. “Good. I want to be the first.”
“Eric, I—”
“Do it. Grant me this and I will make certain your Rebel friend goes home to his warm bed and his family. Do it, Rose.” His voice dropped to that palpable sexual whisper once more. “Take my cock in your mouth. Let me feel the heaven of your lips and your tongue.”
She gulped. The lady in her felt it was necessary to protest but the part of her that had become his wanton and willing servant wanted to explore and taste every inch of this man. Furrows deepened in his forehead when she gave his cock a little squeeze.
His thumb brushed across her bottom lip. “Get on your knees, Rose.”
“What about my pleasure?” She arched an eyebrow as a coquettish smile played at the corners of her mouth.
“Give me mine and I will see that you are satisfied. Do me this honor.”
Shaking, Rose slowly sank onto her knees. His fingers trembled as they threaded into her chignon and pulled her head close. Awareness of the power she held over him at this moment flooded her as her lips touched the head of his phallus. He emitted a soft groan.
She lifted her gaze to his. “What if…what if I do it wrong?”
His face shone with expectation. With something else. Lust? Rose couldn’t define it.
“You won’t,” he said and pulled her head impossibly closer as he guided his cock to her lips.
Instinctively, she opened for him. She’d expected to be shocked by her willingness to engage in such an act. Instead, her body hummed with the longing to please him, to be pleased by him. Her tentative tongue tickled the underside of his shaft and the shiver that tore through him encouraged her.
She engulfed him, gripping his cock with one hand and pulling him toward her with the other. He rocked, mimicking the motions he made when he fucked her. “That’s it, Rose. Suck me. Oh God. Yes.”
She no longer cared if they might be discovered. She was no longer concerned with Euphrates’ tears, James Martin, the hospital or the war. Everything else faded away until there was only this moment and her desire—and Eric.