“I – can’t – breathe,” she gasped.
“You’re a vexing woman,” Owen growled as he lifted his head. “I hope you know that.”
“So I have been told.”
“You need to get into some dry clothes before you catch a chill.” Lifting her effortlessly off the ground, he held her cradled against his chest as he carried her back up the hill to the house. When they reached the front door Felicity was there to greet them, having watched their approach from the front window in the parlor.
“What happened?” she gasped as her gaze flitted from Owen to Scarlett. “You – you are soaking wet!”
“Isn’t it o-obvious?” Despite the warm air Scarlett’s teeth began to chatter. “I f-fell in the p-p-pond.”
“Someone tried to kill her,” Owen said flatly. Tightening his grip around her shivering body, he stepped past Felicity and headed straight up the stairs.
“Her bedchamber is the last door on the right,” Felicity directed as she hurried after them. “I will have the maids start readying a hot bath. Is there anything else I can do? Should I call for a doctor?”
“I’ll take care of her,” Owen snapped.
“But–”
“It is all right, Felicity.” Looking up, Scarlett felt a slow warmth begin to spread through her limbs as she saw the unspoken concern in Owen’s clenched jaw and the fear that was still radiating from his hard gaze. Despite everything that had happened between them – her betrayal, his accusation, the hateful things they’d both said to one another – there was a part of him that still loved her. There had to be.
Of course I saved you. I will always save you.
“Owen will take care of me.”
“Very well.” There were a plethora of questions in Felicity’s soft violet gaze, but she kept them contained. “I will be in the library with Darcy and the children if you–”
With a kick of his heel Owen closed the door in Felicity’s face.
“That was rude,” Scarlett chided.
“You need to rest.” Walking through the dressing room and into her bedchamber he closed that door as well, effectively sealing them off from the rest of the household. “Can you stand?” When she nodded he set her carefully down on her feet but remained behind her with his arms spread, ready to catch her at a moment’s notice. Tucking a wet tendril of hair behind her ear, Scarlett turned to face him.
“You saved my life.” She lifted her hand to his chest and felt his heartbeat. It was slow and steady, but when she flattened her palm against his cold skin it gave a sudden jump. “Thank you.”
Owen’s scowl returned. “What was I supposed to do? Leave you to drown?”
“You could have.” Through the damp fabric of his shirt she could see his dusky nipples, their points hard and erect. Her own breasts tingled in response as lust unfurled inside of her belly, filling her with a fiery heat. Her hand crept upwards, fingers sliding up the taut line of his throat to where his pulse throbbed. “I do not think anyone would have blamed you.”
“As a Runner I am honor bound to save those in distress.” He inhaled sharply when she leaned up on her toes and pressed her lips to the side of his neck. “What are you doing, Scarlett?”
The pond may have washed away his scent, but he still tasted like her Owen.
“Warming myself up,” she murmured in a throaty purr. “Don’t you want to get warm with me?”
He captured her slender wrist in his hand, gently pulling her hand away even as naked desire darkened his gaze. “We shouldn’t.”
She tilted her head back. “Since when has that ever stopped us before?”
“You nearly drowned. You’re not thinking clearly.”
“My mind has never been clearer. I want you, Owen. In my bed,” she whispered silkily, her mouth brushing against his ear as she rubbed herself shamelessly against him. “And in my body.”
“Lettie…” His expression tortured, he released her wrist but kept his arms at his sides.
“Don’t think.” She began to undo his wet shirt. For every button that her nimble fingers slid free she kissed his bare chest, slowly working her way down towards his navel. “Just feel.”
Owen’s held breath exploded in a long, loud hiss when her tongue flicked beneath the waistband of his trousers. He pulled her roughly to her feet. For a moment she feared he was going to push her away, but with a groan of surrender he fisted his hands in her hair and yanked her against him, devouring her mouth in one fell swoop.
Their tongues met, heat sliding into heat. Scarlett heard the unmistakable sound of tearing fabric. Dimly she registered it was her own dress being ripped from her body, but she didn’t care. Anything to get closer to Owen. To feel his skin against her skin. To feel his heart pounding against her heart. To feel the shudder rack through his body when she slid her hand inside of his trousers and wrapped her hand around the hardest, hottest part of him.
He brought his hands beneath her thighs and scooped her up. She locked her long legs around his waist as he carried her across the room and dropped her onto the mattress. Leaning up on her elbow she watched him as he undressed, marveling at the hard lines and ridges of his body.
There were scars on his skin that she’d never seen before, evidence left behind from the war he’d fought and the life he’d lived. Scarlett’s breath caught when she saw a long, jagged scar that ran the length of his ribcage. The pain he must have felt… was it any wonder the man he’d become was harder than the boy she’d known? While she’d been off flitting from ballroom to ballroom he had been fighting on some distant battlefield, shedding blood for a king and a country that had never given a damn about him.
“From a bayonet,” he said gruffly, following her gaze down.
“Does it still hurt?” she whispered as she reached out and traced the puckered flesh.
“No.”
Running her fingertip along his hipbone and down across his sleek flank, she beckoned him onto the bed. “Then come here.”
Owen needed no other invitation. He lowered himself onto the mattress with a panther’s grace, muscles coiling and bunching as he held his body poised over hers. Filtered sunlight caught in his hair, turning the tousled strands from dark mahogany to burnished amber. Capturing her lips in another drugging kiss that left her head spinning, he bit her plump bottom lip before following the curve of her collarbone with his tongue.
When she felt his mouth at her breast she gasped and arched her spine, head falling back amidst the pillows as he licked one nipple, then the other. While Rodger had always thoughtlessly hurried in his eagerness to find his own pleasure, Owen lingered, treating Scarlett’s body as if it were a canvas and he a painter with all the time in the world.
He brought color to her body with broad strokes and light, teasing nibbles. Soon she was writhing beneath him, her breath coming in short little pants, her eyes glazed with lust and desire. When he dipped a broad finger into the honeyed depths of her womanhood her hips shot off the mattress.
“Do you like that?” His husky laugh brushed against her navel as his head descended between her silken thighs.
“Yes,” she moaned when she felt his tongue part her blonde curls. “Oh yes.”
Owen toyed with her for what felt like hours. He brought her to the brink again and again, but always pulling her back at the last possible second. Only when she felt half mad with passion did he lift himself above her and slowly, so slowly she nearly screamed, slide his pulsing length inside of her in one smooth, easy thrust until he was sheathed to the hilt.
Her nails dug furrows in his back as he withdrew and then plunged forward again. Sweat glazed both of their bodies as they moved in tandem with one another, straining towards the same blissful peak of oblivion.
Scarlett reached it first. With Owen’s name on her lips she tumbled over the edge, her entire body convulsing in one long wave of pleasure. Throwing his head back he followed her with a deafening roar that echoed through the bedchamber.
When it wa
s finished – when both of them were too sated and too weak to even lift their heads – they laid together side by side with their limbs entwined and their hearts beating to the same steady rhythm.
This, Scarlett thought as she languidly drifted in that warm, cozy space between sleep and awake, this is what true happiness feels like.
Chapter Twenty
“We shouldn’t have–”
“If you say we shouldn’t have done that,” Scarlett murmured sleepily, “I am going to pick up a pillow and bludgeon you over the head with it.”
Swinging his legs over the edge of the bed, Owen sat up. Twisting, he looked back at her over his shoulder and lifted one wry brow. “Something tells me you’re not in any condition to lift a single finger, let alone a pillow.”
Grinning, Scarlett stretched like a cat, sending the white sheet she’d thrown haphazardly over herself slithering down to the floor. When Owen’s eyes heated her grin widened and she reached across the mattress to playfully pinch the top of his left buttock. “Keep looking at me like that and I will somehow summon the strength. Although I do not think I shall waste it on throwing pillows.” Her eyebrows wiggled suggestively and with a half groan/half laugh Owen stood up.
Leaning back on her elbows Scarlett watched him unabashedly as he collected his clothes. His dark hair was delightfully disheveled. His eyes still a bit glazed. And was that a bite mark on his shoulder? She bit her lip. Why yes, yes she believed it was.
Another long, languid stretch and she joined him in sorting out their attire.
“Everything is still damp.” Pulling her chemise out from beneath a chair she gave the wrinkled undergarment a little shake, then wrinkled her nose. “And it smells like the pond. I’ll have fresh clothes brought for you after we clean ourselves up.”
Owen stilled. “I am not wearing anything that belonged to your husband.”
“Nor would I ever ask you too.” Taking note of the sudden tension in his expression, Scarlett sighed. She had known their passionate tryst wouldn’t miraculously fix everything, but she’d hoped their unspoken truce might have lasted for a little bit longer. Yanking the rumpled coverlet off the end of the bed, she walked across the room and handed it to Owen. “We are going to talk,” she said when he looked down at the coverlet in confusion, “but I will not be able to concentrate if you are naked.”
He wrapped the coverlet around his waist and she did the same with a sheet. Tugging it up until it covered her breasts, she perched on the edge of the mattress and hugged her legs against her chest. Owen remained standing. They stared at one another for a long moment, and when they finally spoke they did so at the same time.
“I want to apologize for the way–”
“I need to tell you how sorry I am–”
The corners of Scarlett’s lips twitched. “Should we both acknowledge that we have treated one another poorly and move on from there?”
“No.”
“Owen, I do not want to fight. Can we please just–”
“No,” he repeated, cutting her off. “We cannot move on until I have said what I came here to say. Or did you think it was merely a coincidence that I happened to be at the pond?”
“Come to think of it, why were you there? Not that I can find any fault in your timing. Unless you were the one who pushed me in.” She grinned, having spoken in jest, but by the way Owen’s jaw hardened it appeared he did not seem to find her very amusing.
“You must know I would never harm you, Scarlett.”
She arched a brow. “Oh really? I cannot imagine any greater harm than having one’s neck stretched. I’ve never seen a hanging, but I have heard stories. It sounds very harmful.”
“What the devil are you talking about?” he scowled. “No one is going to hang you.”
“And what do you think happens when a woman is found guilty of murdering her husband? The Magistrate gives her a tap on the wrist and tells her not to do it again?” she said incredulously. The sheet slid down when she threw her hands out wide, exposing the creamy tops of her breasts. It was to Owen’s credit that he glanced down only once. “You have to know I did not kill Rodger.”
“I know.”
“Because if you insist on pursuing you’re ridiculous… what did you say?”
“I said I know. That you did not kill Lord Sherwood,” he elaborated when Scarlett looked at him blankly. “That is what I came to tell you. And to apologize for the way I acted at the inn.”
“I... I do not know what to say.”
Now it was Owen’s lips that twitched. “I think I like you like this, scantily dressed and speechless. You should try it more often.”
“You really do not think I killed Rodger?” she whispered.
“I know you did not,” he said confidence.
“Then why did you ever accuse me to begin with?” She punctuated her shriek by picking up a pillow and throwing it with all of her might at his head.
Owen ducked.
The pillow went sailing past him and hit the wall in an explosion of goose feathers.
“Let me explain–” he began, holding up his hand, but Scarlett was having none of it.
“Do you know what people would have said if they’d had even an inkling that I might have murdered my husband?” she demanded furiously. “I would have been ruined! I never would have been able to show my face in polite society again!”
Owen’s eyes turned cold. “And we couldn’t have that, could we? Rest assured you can continue playing the poor, grieving widow while I look for Lord Sherwood’s killer. Polite society need never be the wiser. In fact, with all of the sympathy you’ll be receiving I imagine you will not be wanting for offers of marriage. Should I call you ‘Your Grace’ now or wait until after the wedding?”
“Owen.” Scarlett took a deep breath. She had been meeting his anger with more anger of her own, but the hurt she saw in his eyes… it cut her down to the bone. He still had so much pain inside of him. Like a wolf with its paw caught in a trap he was lashing out at anyone who came too close, and she’d come the closest of all. But she of all people knew what it was like to ache so much inside that it made you bitter and angry, which was why she was not going to let her temper get the better of her. Instead of yelling at the wolf, she was going to remain calm. She was going to finally say what was in her heart. And she was going to get that damn paw out of the trap once and for all.
“What?” Owen snapped, shifting restlessly from side to side.
Sliding down off the mattress, Scarlett held her sheet up with one hand and tucked a thick curl behind her ear with the other. “Do you know what I was thinking about when I was in the pond? When I thought – no, when I knew – I was going to drown?”
His mouth twisted into a sneer. “All of the dinner parties you were going to miss?”
“No,” she said simply. “I was thinking about you. The same way I have thought about you every day since I made the largest mistake of my–”
“There is no need to revisit the past,” he interrupted. “We were both there. We know what happened.”
“But don’t you see? There is every need.” She padded across her bedroom, toes sinking silently into the wool carpet. “You can cut a weed down again and again, but if you do not pull out the root it will keep coming back. Our root started growing seven years ago, Owen. It is finally time we pulled it out. Please,” she said imploringly. “Just listen to me.”
“Lettie–”
“Please.”
His expression softened. “I never could deny you anything, could I? Not when you looked at me with those gray eyes as big as the sky.”
“No.” Her lips brushed across his cheek. “You never could.”
Slowly, brick by brick, the wall Owen had built around his heart began to crumble. Scarlett felt it shudder when he put his arms around her. And she watched it finally fall when he said in a voice hoarse with emotion, “How could you do it? How could you choose him over me? I loved you, Lettie. I bloody well loved you more t
han anything.”
“I know you did.” She tilted her head back. When she saw his eyes were as damp as her own she raised her thumb and caught a single tear before it had the chance the roll down his cheek. “I loved you as well. But I was a naïve, selfish girl and I did a naïve, selfish thing. I chose Rodger because he was safe, and because he was what I thought I wanted. I chose him because I was afraid of losing everything that I believed was important but in the end it cost me the most important thing of all. You. And for that I am so sorry, Owen.” Her voice broke. “I am so t-terribly sorry.”
When she began to cry in earnest his grip tightened. “You never lost me, Lettie. I never forgot about you. I never stopped thinking about you. You were with me on the battlefields of France. You were with me with I returned home. You were with me when I stood over the graves of my parents. You have been there, Lettie, every single day, for seven long years.”
Had he ripped Scarlett’s heart out of her chest he could not have destroyed her more completely.
“I wanted to hate you,” Owen continued. “God knows I did a bloody good job of pretending that I did. But no matter how hard I tried, I never could. Not really. Deep down I knew you did not have anything to do with Rodger’s death. It was a convenient way to be close to you. To see your beautiful face. To hear your laugh. To see your smile.” His brow furrowed. “Not that there has been very much to smile about. The way I treated you–”
“Was no less than I deserved for what I did.” She would not let him punish himself on her behalf. In their own way, they had each suffered enough pain and regret to last a hundred lifetimes. Now that they’d come face to face with their past it was time, at long last, to look to the future. “I love you, Owen. I always have and I always will.”
He crooked a finger under her chin and tilted it up. “I love you Lettie.”
Her eyes closed. To hear those words again…
They were worth more to her than any jewel or any title ever could be.
“What should we do now?” She looked up at him beneath a thick sweep of pale golden lashes. “I know you will have to return to London soon but I should remain here, at least until Felicity has found a safe place to land for her and the children. Then I can join you.”
A Dangerous Seduction Page 18