He didn’t even bother to look at her as he spoke, the beast. “I can, and I will. Go to bed, Charlotte. I have work to do here, and you can’t be of any help unless you know how to increase the efficiency of a marine condenser.”
She gritted her teeth against the desire to tell him just what he could do with his inefficient condenser, but she told herself a good wife did not think such thoughts, no matter how much her pigheaded, obstinate, foolish husband might try to goad her into it.
Besides, a sudden vision had come to her, a vision of a book in blue leather with lovely gilt letters and marbled endpapers. Vyvyan La Blue, she was certain, would have a thing or two to say about husbands whose manly instruments erected at will and yet whose masters refused to put them through their paces. Vyvyan always had something to say, and the connubial calisthenics described had always looked so appealing.
“Very well,” she said, her chin high as she skirted the machine. “I shall retire for the evening. Good night.” She stretched up on tiptoe and placed a chaste kiss on his cheek.
He mumbled a good night that turned into a yelp as she boldly placed her hand on his crotch. His instrument twitched in response to her caress. She smiled a very, very smug smile as she turned and left the room without another word.
All would be well. He wanted her, his manly instrument was twitching as it should be, and as for all the rest of his outrageous statements…well, that would sort itself out in time.
Seven
Wearily, Dare climbed the three sets of stairs leading to his bedchamber, his mind filled not as it should be—with a solution to the problem of the obstruction of the free passage of heat from the boiler to the water of the cold cistern—but with thoughts of the warm, vital, utterly enthralling woman who was now legally his. There wasn’t a person in the whole British Empire who would bat an eyelash if he were to march straight into her bedchamber and claim those marital rights due him as her husband. Certainly Charlotte wouldn’t complain, he thought with a tired chuckle as he turned down the hallway toward the bedchambers. She all but stripped him in his workroom, and the way her body melted against his indicated she wasn’t immune to his touch. If she only knew the power she held over him…he shook his head, thankful she had no idea of the effect she had on his heart and soul. He glanced downward and ruefully added body to the list.
Of their own accord, his feet stopped before the door to her bedchamber. He found himself holding his breath, listening for sounds from the room. A powerful wave of desire washed over him as he stood gripped with indecision, wanting nothing so much as to fling open the door and spend the rest of the night making his wife happy. His lips twisted wryly as he eased the tight material of his breeches across the proof of his arousal. Just the thought of her so close, so tantalizingly near left his heart pounding with the effort to keep his needs under control, his whole body straining for release at the image of her awaiting him in bed, warm, welcoming, loving…
He grimaced at the last word. That was the problem, she didn’t love him. Hell, he doubted if she even liked him. She was physically attracted to him, but so were a good many other women, and while he had no complaints with a purely physical relationship based on mutual satisfaction, that was not what he wanted from a wife. A wife was different.
Not that he had wanted a wife, he pointed out to himself as he turned away from her door. But he had one now, and it was up to both of them to make the best of it. He wanted Charlotte to be a friend, a partner, someone who desired to share his life, not just his bed.
Dare hissed an oath as he strode down the hall to his small dressing room, cursing his foolish pride, cursing his need for something more than a lover. Why couldn’t he be like other men and take what was offered without looking to engage her affections? He stripped off his breeches and boots, throwing them heedlessly in a corner before washing the dust and grime off his torso. Towel in hand, he glared down at himself. Despite the cold water he was still hot and hard and in desperate need of relief.
“Traitor,” he growled to his arousal before stalking to the window, looking out at the empty moonlit streets, trying to ignore the demands of his body that swept all else from his mind. Certainly looking at a street would be safe. There was nothing out there to remind him of the warm, supple woman lying in the room next to his. No, there was just a street out there, a common, everyday sight. True, the crescent curve of the street reminded him of the sweet curve of her hips, but that was the merest of coincidences. And that the silvered light glinting off a puddle of water was just as bright as the sunlight striking her golden curls was of no account. Of course, there was the deep indigo of a shadowed doorway that mimicked her eyes as they darkened in passion when he took possession of her sweet, alluring mouth…
“Dammit!” he snarled, dropping the drape and whirling away from the window. His arousal was throbbing now, actually throbbing with want and need and desire. He considered easing himself just so he could sleep, but grimly told himself he wasn’t that desperate.
“Yet,” he muttered with a curse as he blew out the candle and headed for his bedchamber. It was going to be a long night, this wedding night of his, but it would be better spent lying sleeplessly in his dark bed where everything he saw wouldn’t remind him of his bride in the next room.
The bed loomed up, melting into the darkness of the room, the long bed curtains turning it into a yawning black embrace of heaven or hell, he wasn’t sure which. He slid between the covers, ignoring the almost painful touch of cool linen across his heated parts, willing himself to concentrate on something not remotely related to the cries of need from his body. His engine, that’s what he’d think about. Engines were masculine. Engines were hard, not soft and sweetly scented like a woman’s welcoming body. Engines had long, steel shafts that fit tightly into waiting oiled bearings. Engines had pistons, lots of pistons, all of them pumping tirelessly, pumping and pumping, driving the shaft in a long, endless motion, building the pressure higher and higher until it was so great, the blow-cock triggered, releasing a great blast of steam…
“Oh, Christ.” Dare moaned into the arm flung over his face. He truly was going mad if even the thought of his steam engine did nothing but conjure images of Charlotte. God’s carbuncles, his mind was so consumed with her, it even manufactured the sweet scent of her perfumed skin to taunt and torment him.
His entire body stiffened. Slowly he moved his hands, flexing his fingers, then turned his head toward the arm draped across his cheek and brow, the arm that most definitely did not belong to him.
“Charlotte?” he whispered.
“Mmm?” came a muffled, sleepy response from the shadowed side of the bed. The soft arm slid down his face to his chest. Dare cursed fluently in Gaelic as he leaped from the bed and grabbed for the flint.
“What the—Ow! Bloody chair—devil are you doing in my bed?” he roared at the disembodied arm lying in a pool of moonlight as he lit a candle.
“Hmm? Alasdair?” The soft glow of the candlelight revealed Charlotte sitting up, sleepy confusion on her face, her hair a mass of streaming gold that glinted as bright as a polished sovereign. “Oh, good, you’ve come to bed. I must have fallen asleep reading about the Beltane Fire.”
Dare stared at his wife as she pushed the hair out of her eyes and stretched. Even covered with a virginal night rail, she was a goddess, a wanton temptress, Aphrodite and Venus rolled into one enticing package. He clutched the candle tighter and tried manfully to drag his hungering gaze from the soft swell of her breasts. “Beltane Fire?”
“Yes.” She smiled and pushed back the bed linens, scooting over to the side of the bed he had just left. “It’s one of the connubial calisthenics. I thought it looked particularly…dear God in heaven!”
Charlotte froze in mid-scoot, her eyes huge as she stared at Dare. All of him. Every last blessed inch of his hide. Especially the traitorous parts.
“I think the word ‘ere
ction’ does not do your manly instrument justice, Alasdair,” she breathed, her eyes luminous as they feasted on his arousal. “I’m thinking something more descriptive like monument or colossus or tarantula would be in order.”
“Gargantua, not tarantula,” he snapped, dropping the candle as he scrambled to find his dressing gown. He could feel her eyes on him, touching his flesh, sending rivulets of molten desire through his veins until he thought he would go mad. Lord help him, he would never survive the night, let alone the few months he expected it would take before she had grown to care about him. He wrestled his dressing gown over a body that cried out for completion, and relit the extinguished candle.
He took hold of resolve that was slipping away with every rise and fall of her breasts, and set his jaw. He had to be strong. He had to be unflinching even in the face of the most tempting woman on the face of the earth. He had to stand firmly behind what he knew was right.
She leaned forward, the loose neckline of her night rail slipping down over one shoulder, exposing the creamy curve of her breast.
He had to be out of his mind.
“Oh. Why did you put that on? I liked you much better without it. You have nice flesh. It looks very touchable.”
He swore that if he squinted he could see the rosy shadowed peek of her nipple through the thin lawn material…good God, what was he doing? He dragged his gaze up to her face.
The pink tip of her tongue ran lightly across her bottom lip. His eyes followed it. The world as Dare knew it darkened and spun for a moment. He wondered idly if he was about to swoon. He’d never heard of a man swooning outside of the battlefield, but then, no man he knew of was so close to going up in the flames of unrequited desire as he was.
“Alasdair?”
He opened his eyes. She was standing before him, a book clutched to her stomach, her breasts straining against the material pulled tight across them. He hadn’t been imagining it earlier; he really could see the blushing crown of each glorious breast. His mouth watered at the thought of the taste of them, of the silky smoothness of her breasts, of the weight and feel of them in his hands, of the scented paradise her body offered.
“Is something the matter? Is it…” For the first time since he had met her five years before, she looked unsure of herself. She made a whispered choking sound. “…me? Is something wrong with me?”
She bit her lip and blinked rapidly, as if fighting tears. The resolve he held on to so firmly began to melt at the sight of his wife, his bright, effervescent, witty Charlotte standing before him believing herself to be inadequate. God’s knuckles, what was he doing to her? She was all but an innocent, and his honor, his determination to be in control of his life was hurting her. How could he be so cruel to her?
“Dare? Don’t you want to bed me?” The words, almost too soft to be heard, pierced his heart.
“I…I’m sorry, Charlotte.” His voice was as rough as granite. “I tried to explain to you earlier. It doesn’t have anything to do with my desire to bed you. I want something more than just your body.”
She clutched the book tighter, tears trembling on her lashes. “I don’t understand. What do you want if you don’t want me? Is it someone else? Why did you offer for me if you want someone else?”
He shook his head, fisting his hands to keep them from pulling her to him. “I don’t want anyone else. And it should be quite obvious, even to you, that I am not immune to your many charms. But you are my wife. I didn’t want to take a wife because…well, for many reasons, not the least of which is I’m in no financial position to support a woman like you as she deserves, but most importantly because I didn’t want to settle for a convenience, just a body to slake myself on. I expect more from my wife.”
Dare willed her to understand. He couldn’t say the words in his heart to her, not yet, but he hoped she would realize that what he wanted to grow between them was something more profound than just lust.
Her throat worked as if she were swallowing back tears. “You desire me?”
He nodded, unwilling to trust his voice.
“But you want something more from me than just…” She looked toward the bed.
His eyes glittered at her. “Yes. I want something more.”
She bit her lip, an annoying habit in any other woman, but endearingly sweet and innocent in his wife. It melted his resolve even further. That his proud, confident Charlotte was standing before him unsure and insecure…his heart ached with the knowledge that it was his determination to have more, to have all of her that brought her to this, and yet he was unable to condemn them both to the misery that would follow if they settled for anything less.
“What do you want me to be?”
Companion, friend, wife, lover. “It’s not so much what I want you to be, Charlotte. It’s what we both should feel. I haven’t seen you in five years, and we knew little enough about each other then. You put me in a position where I had to marry you, but that doesn’t mean I’m willing to throw away our chance at happiness. I think we can have a happy life together, but only if we are first given the chance to learn about one another, to grow to…to have feelings for each other, something more than just the physical desire that we both feel.”
Her eyes shimmered with tears. Then her gaze dropped to his feet as she made her soft admission. “I can’t help the way you make me feel. My body burns for you. I want to touch you and taste you and have you touch me. My womanly parts tingle at the thought of you, Dare.”
It was his name that did it; it was the soft exultation of his name off her sweet lips that pushed him over the edge. He told himself he was just going to show her pleasure, give her relief from desires that were, after all, entirely natural and wanted in a wife. He told himself he owed it to her to give her something since he couldn’t give himself, but the truth was he just couldn’t keep from touching her.
He scooped her up in his arms, reveling in the weight of her, his senses swimming with her scent and the texture of her silky hair, of the shy kisses she pressed to the column of his throat. Shy? His Charlotte? He would have laughed at the thought, but for her hands on his bare chest, stroking his skin with a touch that set fire to his blood. He moaned his surrender, dipping his head to plunder her sweet mouth.
His tongue moved boldly, teasing her, stroking her, sucking her lips into his mouth as he laid her on his bed, magically whisking away the suddenly unbearable material that separated her flesh from his.
“Magic.” Charlotte sighed in happiness as the hot lure of his mouth returned. She tried to wrap her arms around him to pull his hard body against hers, but he resisted, murmuring instead a promise to please her. Please her? She wanted to tell him that he had far surpassed mere pleasure and was into uncharted realms of ecstasy, but she couldn’t remember how to form words. Maybe later she would, when she wasn’t being driven witless by the feeling of his mouth on hers.
Foolish woman, she thought a few minutes later when his lips had left hers. Foolish woman to think that it was just his tongue twining around hers that stole her wits. No, she knew better now. Her back arched of its own will as he licked and sucked a path down her neck to her collarbone, her legs tensing under his hand as it slid upward on her thigh. The skin on his hand was rough, but it felt wonderful on her sensitive flesh as she obeyed the silent command to part her legs. Her mind felt as if it were fracturing under the twin sensations of his mouth steaming a trail toward her aching breasts and the restless need building in the deepest center of her, directly in the path of his hand.
The cool softness of his hair brushed over her sensitive nipples as he traveled downward, his mouth hot on the underside of her breast, her mind fracturing even more when he took one breast in his hand while the other was laved in tightening circles of kisses, all while his fingers stroked a line up her thigh to the spot she ached for him to touch.
“Dare!” she groaned, her body moving of its own vo
lition now. She felt as if she were floating in a sea of heat, flames licking at her, matched by the inferno he started so deep within her that her body wept tears of passion for him. “Please. Please.”
Dare hovered over her, his head dipping in the valley between her breasts. She clutched his shoulders, wanting him, needing him, desperate to feel his hard body pressing into hers.
“Please what, love? Tell me what you want. Tell me what you like.” His voice rasped along her heated flesh as his mouth closed over the hard, aching nipple at the same time his fingers found her sensitive folds. She heard his words, but they didn’t make sense, nothing made sense, nothing but the feeling of his mouth and hands and the silky heat of his skin under her fingers. She arched beneath him, sobbing with desperation to feel him against her, but he slid down her body, pausing just long enough to suckle her other breast before kissing a hot, wet path down her belly.
“Dare! You can’t stop! You can’t leave me like this!”
His fingers stopped the delightful dance they were doing on her soft, sensitive parts, leaving her bereft, frustrated, wound so tight she was certain she would splinter into a thousand sharp pieces. “Dare!”
His hands were bold on her hips as he nipped her belly and looked up, grinning as he slid his hands down to part her legs wider. “Don’t worry, love. I won’t leave you. Not just yet.”
“But…but…” Her eyes rolled back in her head as his head dipped down to her belly, suckling a trail of heat that led straight to the focus of all her desire. “This has got to be sinful,” she whispered, clutching handfuls of the bed linens as his breath scorched the outer edges of the needful center of her being. “I’m going to go to hell for this, I just know it. But oh, Lord, I don’t care! Don’t stop, please don’t stop!”
His hair was the smoothest silk against her skin as his mouth possessed her in a way she had never dreamed possible. He was fire, he was lightning, he was quicksilver inside her, and she was dying, but oh, what a sweet death. She was no longer in any doubt that his tongue was the very best part of him as it worked magic on her sensitive, swollen flesh, touching her, teasing her, suckling her until she thought she would burn up in a bonfire of sensation. She had no idea she could burn hotter, but the minute his finger slid deep into her heat she blazed in a flame that was surely going to incinerate them both. She heard a voice sobbing his name and knew it was her own, but could think of nothing but the bright, blinding moment of pure rapture as it exploded within her.
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