“Look at me, Sarah.” His voice was husky.
Shivering, Sarah fought the impulse to close her eyes in a childlike hope that when she opened them again she would be back safe in her own bed and this would all have been a fantastic nightmare. But it was real, she knew, and she also knew that she had no choice but to do as he told her. He had the means to compel her without compelling her at all. . . . She looked at him. His eyes were moving down her body, touching on her small, high breasts with their rosy tips hardening now against her will, her slim waist, the delicate curve of her hips. His eyes slid down the length of her legs, making no effort to hide the desire in their depths. Then, suddenly, they met hers.
“Come here, Sarah,” The words were a hoarse whisper. Sarah stared at him, her eyes unconsciously pleading. His expression was implacable.
“Sarah.”
Jerkily she moved forward, until she was so close she could feel the heat of his body. She was shivering, her teeth tightly clenched, wanting to flee and never stop but knowing that he would catch her if she did.
“Put your arms around my neck.”
Slowly, reluctantly, Sarah did as she was told. His skin was burning hot against the smoothness of her arms. Her hands, locking behind his neck, could not help but be aware of the strength of him, under control now but soon to be unleashed. The already sensitized tips of her breasts brushed the curling mat on his chest. An electric tingle ran through her body. Mortified, her eyes flew to his to find that he was looking down at her, his eyes darkened to a midnight blue as impenetrable as the night sky. She was sore afraid that he knew what she was feeling, what she could not help but feel.
“Close your eyes, Sarah.”
His head was bending, his beautiful mouth descending toward hers. Sarah could not stop herself from remembering his kisses. They had set her on fire. . . . She shut her eyes and waited, trembling, for the touch of his lips. In her heart of hearts, she knew that she wanted him to kiss her, to hold her, caress her, love her—and she could hardly bear the knowledge. She shivered with shame and fear and desire combined as his arms slid around her, under her shoulders and hips. He was lifting her, carrying her. . . .
Sarah’s head was flung back against his shoulder, her thick hair acting as a cushion between his hard muscles and her skull before cascading over his arm toward the ground. Her eyes were shut, her mouth soft and trembling, waiting. Her body was supine in his arms. It was useless to struggle, she told herself, rationalizing her quivery acquiescence. He was carrying her away with him, to lay her down in the prickly grass as he had once before and take his pleasure of her body. And she could not stop him. Did not want to stop him.
Sarah heard a faint splash of water. She frowned, trying to place the sound. She couldn’t. Her eyes opened, first to touch on his face—an odd smile flickered around his mouth—and then to look down. He was wading into the creek; the water was already up to his knees. Feeling befuddled, Sarah looked down at the moon’s reflection in the dark, sluggishly moving surface of the water. Why was he crossing the creek? She looked back to his face. He was watching her, his eyes narrowed.
“What are you doing?” Her voice was faint, almost breathless. She felt as if she had been a long, long way away and was struggling to come back.
His mouth tilted up at one corner. Sarah could clearly see the white gleam of his teeth through his parted lips.
“Giving you a bath, Miss Sarah,” he said, grinning openly now. Before she could do more than gape at him, his arms were dropping away from her body and she was falling. . . . Sarah hit the water with a splash and sank like a stone. It couldn’t have been more than an instant before her behind made bruising contact with the pebbled creek bottom. She surfaced, spluttering and coughing as her lungs tried to rid themselves of the water she had inadvertently swallowed.
“Why, you . . . you . . . !” She clawed at the wet mass of her hair, trying to pull it away from her eyes so that she could see him. At last she succeeded, to find that he was standing over her, unabashedly naked, his head thrown back as he laughed uproariously.
XVI
“You filthy, no-good swine!” Sarah choked, spluttering.
Dominic thought that if looks could kill he would drop dead on the spot. Her great golden eyes, their thick tawny lashes darkened into spiky clumps by the water that beaded them and ran down her face, were fixed on his with a feral stare. Her mouth—that soft mouth that he had had to fight the desire to kiss—was working furiously. With that thick mane of gold-shot hair tumbling wetly over her shoulders and her small nostrils flared with rage, she looked like a lioness that had received a dunking and didn’t like it—and was getting ready to let everybody know her displeasure. Words like swine and beast fell from her mouth, intended, he was sure, to hurt him. Dominic couldn’t help it—he started laughing again. The image of the prim, proper Miss Sarah, naked, soaking wet, and furious but not knowing the right words to express her outrage, tickled him.
“Remind me to teach you some swear words,” he said, chuckling, as he sat down in the creek; when his long legs were stretched out along the rocky bottom, the water came halfway up his chest.
“Of course you would know them all!” she spat in reply. He was perhaps three feet away from her. Her eyes, with their savage brilliance, never left his face. “You just wait until I get home again! I’ll have them chase you down like a dog! I . . .”
“Unwise to threaten a man when you’re in his power,” Dominic observed mildly, scooping up a handful of sand from the bottom of the creek and proceeding to scrub lazily at his chest.
“I’ll threaten you anytime I like! And carry through on it, too, you . . . !” Sarah yelled.
Dominic watched her, delighted at the reaction he had provoked. Prim, proper Miss Sarah had vanished again with a vengeance, to be replaced this time by a shrill-voiced virago who intrigued him as much as did her predecessors. To think that each personality—the convention-bound spinster, the courageous young lady, the charming dancer, the passionate lover, and now the shrew—was a different aspect of the same woman was fascinating. Dominic knew just what it was that was making her so mad—she had thought he would make love to her again, and, while she had professed not to want it, she was now, in the irrational way of women, furious that he had not—and he could not resist teasing her a little more. Sarah enraged was delicious.
“What are you so mad about?” he questioned, lifting a bewildered eyebrow at her. In response, she scooped up a handful of water and threw it at him, looking as if she wished it were something with a good deal more heft.
“You deliberately humiliated me, you beast!” she hissed, lips drawn back from her teeth in a way that made her look ferocious. At her choice of insults, Dominic snorted with hilarity. Seeing Miss Sarah turn into a proper spitfire—though one with very ladylike language even when she was beside herself with rage—was enormously entertaining. “Scumbag! Don’t you dare to laugh at me!”
“Sc-scumbag?” Dominic repeated unsteadily, collapsing back in the water with the force of his laughter. “My God, Sarah, where did you ever hear a word like that?”
Her only reply was a howl of rage. Then she launched herself at him, her fingers curved into claws that went for his eyes, her pearly little teeth snapping at his throat, her knees aiming for his groin. Dominic, caught by surprise, barely managed to fend her off. His hands closed around her wrists before her nails could make contact with his face, but, hampered by the water, his legs were slower to react. Her knee missed its primary target—thank the Lord—but got close enough to cause him considerable pain.
“Stop that!” he said, annoyed, wrapping one leg around hers to still them and holding her, hands pinioned by one of his, tight against his chest so that she could barely move.
“Let me go, you . . .” She seemed to have run out of words, so Dominic helpfully supplied one. A very filthy one. Her eyes snapped up to his. She stared at him, shocked and—momentarily at least—silenced.
“That’s
disgusting,” she said.
“But effective,” he replied.
Dominic was growing all too aware of the warmth and softness and curves of her woman’s body pressed so close against him. Despite himself, he could not control the rising evidence of the effect she was having on him. He rolled so that he was sitting up with her half-lying across one thigh, still safely imprisoned against him but out of the way, he hoped, of that physical sign that he could not for the life of him control. She shifted against him, her silky thigh brushing his much harder one. The sudden passion that shot through his groin made him grit his teeth to keep from groaning.
“You would know words like that,” she said, scathing, the force of her fury apparently having been cooled by the filthy word that he had picked up in the stables of the big house where he had grown up. She wriggled, trying to pull away. “Let me go.”
Dominic could feel the firmness of her small breasts brushing against his chest and the resilient roundness of her bottom rubbing against his thigh. Another fierce stab of desire pierced him. He was conscious of a sudden, almost irresistible urge to kiss her, make love to her, possess her body here, in the stream. . . . She would make only token protests, he knew. But to do so would make things too easy for her. She could hate him if he took her body that way, and her hatred would wipe out any remorse she might feel for having betrayed him before. If he ever made love to her again—and he was honest enough to admit that that “if” was more window dressing than reality—it would be only when she had finally admitted that she wanted it as much as he did, when she begged him; the next time there would be no question that she did not know exactly what she was doing. He would rub her nose in her desire before he gave her what she wanted. And sooner or later she would admit to wanting him—he meant to see to that.
“Let me go,” she said again, squirming. Dominic held her a little away from him. But he thought he could feel the soft thatch of hair between her legs brush against his hip.
“ ‘Please, Dominic,’ ” he instructed. His hand tightened around her wrists; he knew that he had to let her go, but he wanted to make sure first that she understood just who was in charge and how he expected to be treated. She was a bossy little witch most of the time, and if he didn’t seize and keep the upper hand, no doubt she would soon be trying to tell him what to do. But he could not hold her much longer without doing something that would ruin his plan almost before it had begun.
“Please, Dominic,” she said, to his relief, and he obligingly let her go.
She swam a short distance away, then turned back to look at him with an expression he could not read. Sitting again on the creek bottom, she moved her arms slowly back and forth in front of her as she sought to keep herself in place against the force of the current. Her long hair floated around her like twining strands of seaweed. Moonlight picked up gold threads in her water-dark hair and gleamed off the smoke-ringed sulfur of her eyes. Beads of water trickled down the satiny-pale skin from her high, sculpted cheekbones to her small, pointed chin. Her tawny eyebrows winged upward, and her nostrils flared like a cat’s. Her wide lips were softly parted, and he saw just a glimpse of her tongue as it flicked over her dewy lips. Her slender neck and fragile shoulders were just visible above the dark surface of the water. She looked to him like an illusive enchantress, born of the moon and the water and the warm night air. As mercurial and changeable as the moon itself . . .
“Bathe,” he said tersely, turning a shoulder toward her and scooping up another handful of sand.
“The water’s dirty,” she objected. Dominic didn’t look at her; instead, he concentrated on scrubbing himself clean.
“Not as dirty as you are,” he said. Out of the corner of his eye he could see her making a face at him, but then she followed his example, washing first her face and then her body with the sand. Dominic finished his bath, dunking down beneath the water to rinse away the sand, and surfaced to find that she was wringing out her hair, twisting the thick mass in a long coil like a rope as the water streamed from it.
“Come on.” He stood up, indicating that their bath was finished. She looked hastily away from him, and if there had been more light Dominic was positive that he would have seen a blush color her cheeks. “Time to get out.”
“You go ahead. I—uh—I’m not quite done.” He was walking toward her through the knee-deep water. Still seated, she continued to wring out her hair; nervous, she kept her eyes carefully averted. Reaching her side, Dominic bent to catch her elbow and hauled her to her feet.
“Let go!” She tried to pull away from him, but he refused to release her. At last her eyes met his, as she leaned away from him in an effort to break free, and the moonlight silvered her body. . . .
In his effort to enforce his authority, Dominic realized that he had made a tactical error. The sight of her gleaming wet body, naked and endlessly alluring, set his pulses to pounding. He wanted her; God, he wanted her. . . . He knew he should let her go, should turn away from her now, before he could no longer control his surging need to possess. . . . But to turn away might reveal to her his weakness. And she would hone in on any weakness like a spider on a fly.
“Out,” he said gruffly, propelling her toward shore. If he could just control himself for a moment longer, she would never know. . . .
Then she stumbled. Instinctively Dominic reached out to catch her, to save her before she fell. Then automatically he pulled her tight against his body. She had twisted, trying to save herself as she fell. The soft warmth of her naked breasts met the hardness of his chest with the impact of a searing brand.
His arms were around her slim waist; he should release her, he knew, but his arms refused to obey the dictates of his mind. Instead, they tightened. . . . She looked up at him, her hair slicked back against her head revealing the beauty of her bone structure, her eyes wide with alarm and, yes, he wasn’t mistaken, a reluctant wanting that was yet as insistent as his own, those soft pink lips parted. . . .
Dominic couldn’t help himself. He bent his head and kissed her.
XVII
Sarah felt his mouth close on hers like a bolt of fire that jolted her clear down to her toes. His lips were warm and firm, soft at first and then hardening. . . . She pushed at his shoulders, her hands slipping on his wet skin. He didn’t budge. His arms were tight around her waist, hugging her so close that she could feel every hair and sinew. She felt the hot, throbbing maleness of him against her belly, and pushed harder, frantic to get free before her traitorous body could surrender to the clamorous urge to respond.
He didn’t release her. His arms tightened, his hands sliding up her back, leaving little frissons of heat in their wake. Then his hands slid down, caressing the small of her back, running over the curve of her bottom to cup each buttock in a callused palm. He pulled her up on her toes, pressing her hard against him, letting her feel him, feeling her body against his. . . . His kiss changed, grew suddenly fiercer. Sarah gasped. The flutter of her lips under his allowed his tongue to enter her mouth. The hot wet strength of it sliding past her teeth to touch her tongue made her shudder. Seemingly of their own volition, her hands stopped shoving at his shoulders; instead they crept up around his neck, clinging. Her eyes closed. She allowed him to pull her body closer as she kissed him back, her mouth open and hot with desire. . . .
Before, when she had been innocent of the demands a man could make on a woman’s body, she had been surprised, almost shocked by the things his mouth did to hers. Now she reveled in it, reveled in the devouring force of his lips, the slick exploration of his tongue. And she responded, her nails digging into the back of his neck as she ran her tongue with mindless hunger around the chiseled perfection of his mouth, caught his lower lip between her teeth and bit down until he groaned and twisted her so that her head was forced back against his shoulder, and he was again taking control of the kiss, dominating it—and her.
Sarah was trembling from head to toe. She felt as if she were aflame, burning up with a passion that s
he had never wanted to feel again, the same helpless burning passion as he had engendered in her mindless body before; she couldn’t seem to focus on the shame of it, the degradation. Now her body was in control, weak and wanton as it stifled the screaming protests of her mind. . . .
She wanted him, God help her. Wanted him with a fierce passion that was utterly foreign to her nature. Wanted him despite the muddy water that lapped around their legs and beaded their skin. Wanted him without regard for morality or pride or even the humiliation he had made her suffer just moments earlier. She wanted him—and this time she knew that it had nothing to do with the moonlight, the soft scent of fruit trees in the warm air, or the seductive lilt of music. She wanted him—Dominic Gallagher, convict, thief, abductor, man. She wanted him with a passion that she had thought only men could feel, or whores. . . .
Against her breasts she felt the pounding of his heart. The hardness of him was pressing urgently into her belly. He was leaning over her, his arms holding her close to the heat and strength of his body as the thick mat of hair on his chest abraded her nipples, and the steely muscles of one hair-roughened thigh parted her legs. “Sweet Jesus, Sarah,” he muttered thickly into her mouth. Just that one husky whisper sent her senses reeling. She kissed him frantically, as fiercely as he was kissing her, their tongues alternately warring then soothing each other with soft caresses.
One hand was no longer cupping her buttock. She felt it sliding over her damp skin, his fingers trailing fire in the valley separating the soft hills. Then that roaming hand insinuated itself intimately between her parted thighs.
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