“Let me go,” she said through frozen lips. Her heart beat a wayward tarantella of panic and anger, largely with herself. Why hadn’t she left before he stirred?
Keeping one arm firmly around her waist, he rose and slid his free hand behind her head to restrain her for a relentless survey. “Not in this lifetime.”
Curse him. How she wished he wouldn’t say harebrained things like that. If she’d been one whit less self-aware, she might take him seriously. Then where would she be? Fear wedged in her throat. It would be the outside of enough to leave Castle Craven not only disgraced, but burdened with a broken heart. Except she intended to leave heart-whole and scandal-free, she reminded herself stalwartly. And despairingly wished she believed that.
“This wasn’t part of our bargain.” She wished she could summon the will to tell him to release her in a way he’d believe. If she insisted, he’d let her be. She should be fuming at these games—she was, blast him—but still that damnable, reluctant tenderness lingered. Nothing erased the memory of his appalled reaction when he woke to find her studying him. She suspected that he tormented her now to prevent her dwelling on that stark instant.
His masculine scent assailing her, he leaned closer. She prayed for control, for common sense, for, God help the impossible wish, rescue. “There must be another bedroom.”
He smiled in a way that made her wonder if he guessed how she struggled against her weaker self. “This is the only one fit for habitation. I wasn’t preparing to host a house party, tesoro. I planned to entertain a mistress to a week of carnal bliss. Or rather I planned for that mistress to entertain me.”
She stiffened as his hand slid languidly through her hair and fell to massage her nape. Sensation spread like circles on a pond. “You slept somewhere else the first night.”
“The cot in the dressing room isn’t designed for a man over six feet tall. I’ll be damned before I let you exile me there again.”
“Perhaps I could sleep there,” she said with false sweetness.
To her surprise, his lips twitched. “Why do you challenge me, when you know I can’t resist a challenge?”
“I hardly know you at all,” she said, to remind herself as much as to put him in his place. She stifled the reckless urge to lean into his caresses.
“So why do I feel that you count every beat of my heart?”
She couldn’t tell whether he was serious. If only she was so awake to his every thought as he accused. What she knew frightened as much as fascinated. What she didn’t know left her floundering in an ocean of reluctant desire. “Stop playing with me, Merrick.”
“You no longer want to extend the preliminaries?” He leaned over her, his big body pressing her into the mattress.
She wriggled without shifting him. “I want you to let me go.”
“No, you don’t,” he whispered.
The problem was she didn’t, not at her deepest level, but she wasn’t so lost to enchantment that she forgot what was at stake. She raised one hand to his chest to prevent him coming nearer. “Stop it, Merrick.”
“Jonas.”
She struggled to maintain her grip on reality. “Wicked, lying, licentious, scheming, manipulative, underhanded, wanton scoundrel.”
“Say it as though you mean it.” He leaned into her hand and slanted his mouth across hers. This time, surprise didn’t paralyze her. Nor was she the innocent he’d kissed to daunt into incoherence. She knew the pleasure his merest touch sparked.
His hand relaxed to cradle her skull. The arm around her waist embraced rather than constrained. For one forbidden moment, she folded against him like a flower drifting across his breast. Then she broke the kiss and squirmed away until one foot touched the floor.
He caught her arm. “Don’t go, Sidonie. You’re safe enough. I only want to kiss you.”
She cast him a skeptical look as she stood, shivering in the early morning cold. “Why don’t I believe you?”
“Because you’re sadly untrusting.” He paused. “And because you’re a clever woman.”
He caressed the sensitive skin of her wrist. The leisurely stroking made her belly clench with longing, even as she recognized he sought to manipulate her back into his arms. “If I was clever, I’d have fled as soon as I saw you’d weaseled between the sheets.”
He sat up, his shirt sagging to reveal the curve of one powerful shoulder. The sight of smooth tanned skin dried every drop of moisture from her mouth. Such a contrast to his marred face. She hadn’t considered him handsome at first, even disregarding the scars. With every hour, his physical allure grew. Right now, she’d scorn a handsome man as banal. Idiot that she was, she’d discovered a taste for dark and dangerous and damaged.
Troubled, stirred beyond experience—and he’d hardly touched her—she wondered what had happened to the determined woman who’d arrived at Castle Craven to confront a monster. Only two days later and that woman hovered out of reach.
“Just one kiss, Sidonie. That’s the price of freedom.” He sounded sincere, not like the flirtatious devil whose bright silver eyes dared her.
Shock paralyzed her. It seemed too good to be true. She could depart with Roberta’s vowels, almost as innocent as she’d arrived. Except that along with astonishment and relief, she experienced a twinge of invidious, unacceptable, undeniable disappointment. “You’ll let me go back to Barstowe Hall?”
He scowled as he released her hand. “Are you mad? That wasn’t our bargain.”
“Oh, the bargain,” she repeated soundlessly.
“No skimping, mind. Genuine enthusiasm.”
One kiss seemed small price for escaping this room that bristled with promises of intimacy. “How do we measure your satisfaction?”
The seductive glint returned to his eyes and he reclined against the tumbled sheets with an irritating confidence. “Bella, I don’t expect satisfaction,” he purred. “Just a good-morning kiss. Nothing to scar you for life.”
He used “scar” to flaunt his disfigurement. But she’d long moved past the stage where his scars struck her as anything other than tragic misfortune.
“Speak for yourself,” she muttered, even as she gingerly kneeled on the bed. The mattress sagged, overbalancing her until she placed one hand on his chest. Heat sizzled from the contact, made her heart pound like a drum. His eyebrows rose in silent mockery as she snatched her hand away.
She trembled as he ran one hand down her plait. His fingers lingered tantalizingly on her breast before he withdrew. Her nipples tightened to tingling hardness.
“Good morning, Sidonie,” he said with a tenderness she mistrusted.
Tenderness was the invincible enemy. The wave of feeling this morning demonstrated that inescapable truth. She could deny seduction. She couldn’t deny his vulnerability. Except she couldn’t deny seduction either, she admitted reluctantly, noting the slumberous light in his eyes.
He released her hair and folded his hands behind his head, tightening the lean muscles of his arms and chest. He looked like a sleepy pasha contemplating his nightly selection from the harem. For an electric moment, they stared at each other. Suspense coiled through her. He seemed content to let minutes dwindle like the bubbles in yesterday’s champagne. She read expectation but nothing deeper in his eyes. He’d raised the drawbridge against incursions into his soul. The day’s clear light proved less revealing than the shadows when he’d woken.
“Well?” She could no longer bear sitting like a mouse in a hollow, waiting for the hawk to swoop.
His eyes flared with unholy amusement. “Well, what?”
She clenched her teeth. “I’d like breakfast before it turns into lunch. Aren’t you going to kiss me?”
Humor lines deepened around his brilliant eyes. “No.”
Shock made her rock back on her upturned heels. “No?”
“You really pay no attention when you make a contract, do you, bella? That could get you into trouble.”
At his superior expression, her hands clenched at her si
des. She was in such turmoil, she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to clout him or kiss him or run screaming from the room. “It’s got me into trouble already. If I kiss you, can we dress and go downstairs?”
“A kiss in exchange for breakfast? How prosaic you are under that extravagant exterior, tesoro. Disappointing.”
She ignored the compliment. She wasn’t extravagant. She was perfectly ordinary. “Disappointed enough to send me away?”
“One would think you wanted to return to your humdrum life.”
She frowned, again wishing she hadn’t been quite so confiding in his sultan’s bower. “I was safe there.”
“Not if your sister’s folly lands you in such straits. And with a man less… accommodating than myself.”
“This is the first time she’s done anything like this.” Sidonie had long come to terms with her anger at Roberta. She merely needed to remember the way her sister concealed her bruises with a shame that wasn’t her shame at all. She remembered William’s unchecked rages. She remembered Roberta’s two young sons. Sidonie had no choice about offering herself in exchange for Roberta. But Merrick was right; she was lucky. If he’d been the villain her sister described, the torments would be intolerable.
He smiled at her as though she were precious. Lying, lying smile. “You said it yourself—if you kiss me. Note the wording.”
Nervousness made her stammer. “I won’t. I can’t. I… I don’t know how.”
More of that dangerous tenderness before a downward sweep of long black lashes veiled his expression. “You had several thorough lessons yesterday. I can’t imagine the girl who sent me to the devil quailing at a little kiss.”
She’d survived his kisses before. Scoffing laughter echoed in the recesses of her mind. Survived? Yesterday she’d positively thrived on his kisses. Meeting his gleaming silvery eyes, she shifted close enough for her leg to brush his flank. “All right.”
It was just a kiss.
Chapter Eight
It was just a kiss…
Jonas struggled to maintain his careless air while his heart performed a Highland fling. However much he ached to grab Sidonie, he kept his hands by his sides as he stretched before her. If she guessed the pitch of his hunger, she’d flee the room. Hell, he wouldn’t catch her before she reached Sidmouth. Deliberately he avoided dwelling upon that deplorable moment when she stared with unabashed curiosity at his nightmare of a face.
Her expression turned assessing. What the devil would she do? When she shifted again, he caught her haunting scent. She reached out and smoothed her palm down his arm. Under her tentative exploration, his muscles tightened to rock.
“You’re so warm,” she murmured, as if speaking to herself. “Like a furnace.”
He tried to summon a reply but when she ran her hand under his shirt and glanced across a nipple, words jammed in his throat.
“How interesting a man’s body is.” She combed her fingers through the hair on his chest. The friction spurred his heart to a wild gallop. “You’re not at all like pictures I’ve seen of statues.”
In spite of his extremity, a strangled laugh escaped. “Not at all.”
She cast him a disapproving glance. “Pictures don’t convey the size and power.”
He restrained the urge to tell her about the size and power of one particular part of him. His hands clawed the sheets beneath him. “Damn you, Sidonie, put me out of my misery.”
She studied him as if he presented a mathematical problem. Obscurely her calmness annoyed him. Blast her, she should be flustered. She should be all a-flutter to kiss him. “I think you should sit up,” she said thoughtfully.
“At your command, my lady.” He rose, piling pillows behind him.
After an infinitesimal hesitation, she pressed her hands to his cheeks. Automatically he flinched. He loathed anyone touching his scars. Hell, for her, he wished he wasn’t scarred. He wished he was young and pure, gallant and worthy. When he was none of that.
She lurched forward and he drowned in womanly scent, warm and sweet with early morning. Then soft arms encircled his neck, velvet-covered breasts nudged his chest, breath drifted across his face.
Her lips met his.
Sidonie’s brief confidence shriveled. Merrick’s arms lay at his sides and the mouth beneath hers remained sealed. She waited for him to seize control and sweep her into fiery heaven.
Nothing.
Trembling uncertainty built. Long enough for her to notice the smoothness of his lips. The soft hiss of his breathing. The heat of his body against her thigh. Tentatively she moved her lips, then started away at the tingling rush of pleasure. His mouth twitched at her skittishness.
“Don’t you dare laugh at me,” she said grimly.
“Never.”
His morning beard rasped beneath her palms. She had access to a secret Merrick that the world never saw. More unwelcome intimacy. Somewhere since accepting his challenge, she’d abandoned all pretense that she did this for any reason other than the desire to kiss him.
Wicked, wicked girl.
“Blushing, Miss Forysthe?”
She refused to answer. Instead she studied his mouth. That mouth betrayed so much. Passion. Humor. A vulnerability he’d go to the gallows before admitting. She licked her lips as she remembered that mouth claiming hers yesterday.
Ah…
“You look like the cat that got the cream.”
She delighted in his wary tone. “Do I?”
Without lingering on the scars, she caressed his face, then kissed each corner of his lips. He released a muffled groan. At last she seemed to be getting somewhere. Taking a lesson from him, she bit gently on his lower lip and sucked it into her mouth.
He tasted wonderful. Salty. Hot. Desperate. She traced his lips with her tongue, then lifted away to meet his silver gaze. “Damn you, Merrick, stop fighting me.”
“You’re not trying hard enough.” He struggled for nonchalance, but his husky voice betrayed how her clumsy wooing stirred him.
“I’m just starting,” she said softly.
Jonas braced for more tantalizing kisses. Containing himself when she tasted his lower lip had required every ounce of control. Blast and confound it, he’d promised to take the kiss no further. He needed to have his head examined.
She nibbled an excruciatingly pleasurable line down his neck.
“I think you’re avoiding the business.” Not even threat of damnation could stop his voice shaking.
She kissed his jaw. “Just preparing the ground.”
This time when her mouth met his, he was incapable of denial. His lips parted and her tongue darted in to taste him. He groaned low in his throat. She tensed and withdrew. As if seeking assurance that he was a better man than she thought, she stared at him. Tragically he could offer no such confirmation. Even more tragically he wanted her so badly, he almost promised to change, to prove himself worthy.
This had started as a morning’s game. Now all urge to tease vanished. And still the wordless conversation continued.
I want you.
You can’t have me.
I need you.
You’re not worthy of me.
That’s true. Still you desire me.
Yes, still I desire you.
He heard her sharply indrawn breath. Then, slowly, oh, so slowly, she leaned in to place her mouth on his, soft as the brush of air across an angel’s wing.
Jonas wasn’t by nature a gentle man. Since violence had shattered his childhood, tenderness was unknown. Building his business empire had only fortified his ruthlessness. Since his father’s death, he hadn’t cared for anyone. He’d believed the carapace around his kinder emotions so thick, he never would. Sidonie’s kiss stabbed straight to the heart he’d considered impregnable.
She flicked her tongue along his lips and this time, he let her in. On a sigh, she kissed him with unfettered pleasure. Sidonie was a quick learner. Damn him if she wasn’t. Groaning, he yielded. His arms wound around her, dragging her down
to sprawl across him. Until now, for all his seductive maneuvering, he’d been careful about scaring her. But she’d pushed him beyond restraint. She moaned and met his passion. He rolled her under him and hauled the covers off with a shaking hand. He couldn’t remember the last time a woman had made him shake. Sidonie made him shake.
Smoothly he slid between her legs, the robe rucking up. Ruthlessly he shoved the silk nightgown aside until his hand met her thigh. He wasn’t the only one shaking. In his embrace, she trembled like a leaf in a gale.
Very slowly so he didn’t alarm her, he trailed his hand upward. The prospect of touching her center made him burn. His fingers curved over her mound and tangled in damp curls. He slid his hand into slippery heat, bathing his fingers in her desire. She gasped with shock and wrenched away, panting.
Damn it, too fast, too hard, too much.
“No… wait.” Her voice was broken as he’d never heard it. She placed one hand against his chest. Under her palm, his heart flipped like a landed trout.
He placed his hand over hers. His voice was rough. “Are you content to stop there?”
She raised a troubled gaze to his face. Whatever she saw offered no consolation, he immediately recognized. His arm still encircled her. He’d need mere seconds to bring her against him. “Sidonie, give me your consent,” he prompted when she stared at him as though he constituted her greatest fear—and greatest desire.
The uncertainty in her eyes intensified. “I can’t.”
“You want to.”
A faint line appeared between her brows. “You’re the voice of temptation.”
He looked into her beautiful face, the heavy-lidded dark eyes, the flushed cheeks, the reddened lips he’d tasted so thoroughly. A plea surged up from his soul. “Relent, tesoro. Relent. And save us both from insanity.”
She stiffened against his attempt to draw her closer and her stare was uncompromising. “You gave me your word the decision was mine.”
He cupped her jaw. Those unwavering eyes continued to study him. Oh, hell and damnation. He surrendered with a sigh. “If you leave this house untouched, amore mio, we’ll both be sorry.”
Seven Nights in a Rogue's Bed Page 8