His tongue pushed against her lips, and she opened them, welcoming its invasion. He held nothing back, his mouth demanding, his hands on her upper arms, holding her on tiptoe as his mouth ravaged.
Almost in wonder, she finally understood that this was not a man fighting the ghost of another man's possession. This was a man claiming that for which he had hungered.
His mouth released hers to trace across her cheek and then along her neck, trailing heated moisture in its wake. Her head fell back as her eyes closed, savoring his touch.
His hand flattened against her back, urging her body into closer contact with his. She put her arms around his neck as his tongue found the slight depression of her collarbone, sending a frisson of sensation spiraling through her body.
Her head tilted to give him greater access to her throat and at the same time, she felt his fingers working deftly at the closure of her gown. They slipped inside its high neckline, their masculine roughness moving abrasively against her skin, and she shivered again, this time in anticipation.
His hand stilled, and for a moment she didn't understand why he had stopped. She turned her head, her mouth moving against the fragrant softness of his hair.
She put her hand over the fingers that had halted, their movement frozen. Her mouth breathed the word she had once only dreamed about saying to him. And now, finally, she could.
"Yes," she whispered.
Instead of returning to that caress, however, his hand slipped beneath her knees, and he bent, lifting her into his arms. Looking down into her eyes, he carried her across the room to the bed where he had slept alone. And where tonight...
He would never again sleep alone, she pledged, although the words were only in her head. Neither of them would ever again be alone in the darkness, not as long as they lived.
***
Despite what she had told him, she had thought at some point she might be afraid. Surely there would be some residual anxiety, if not in her brain, which welcomed his touch, then in her skin and muscles, branded with the memory of that other pain. And now, with thanksgiving, she knew there was not.
She wondered if the slow, sensual glide of his hands had been deliberate. Or was this the way he would have made love to her, even if what had happened in that inn in Scotland had not been between them?
His movements seemed completely unstudied. He touched her as if he enjoyed touching her, whether his palm was sliding over the slight convexity of her stomach or trailing slowly down the outside of her thigh. He had explored her body with a skill that left her breathless and shaken.
And she had denied him nothing. Because at last she had understood what he had feared and because she had told him the truth. The depth of the love she felt for him was itself more than enough to see them through this night. More than enough.
He had touched her a long time before his lips and his tongue had joined the sensual worship of his hands. And she had known then that what he had said was truth as well. He did not find her sullied or stained. If he had, he could not caress with his lips the trembling flesh that had once been torn and bloodied by another man's brutal lust.
Even in her innocence, she knew this was not lust, despite its power. That, too, she had needed to learn. There was daylight and there was night. There was what had happened before. And there was this.
This wonder, for which she had no words. No guides. No rules. Only that she was his, to do with as he wished. And what he wished...
And what he wished, she had discovered, was nothing that she, too, did not crave. The quickly spiraling desire had come as a surprise to her. She had been prepared to endure.
What he had given her first was a shimmering anticipation, created by the slow secret movements of skin against skin. Heat to heat. Moisture to moisture.
His lips brushed the sweat-dampened hair at her temple and then he raised his chest, propping above her on his elbows. He smiled at her, his eyes tracing over her face.
She knew he had watched her. And she knew why, of course. Now, however, his eyes on her face were simply a part of what was happening between them. No more and no less.
He found joy in watching her. And she had found it in letting him. Joy. He had given her joy. Or rather he had given her back the sheer joy in being alive that had always been an integral part of who she was.
"Why?" she asked, expecting denial or avoidance.
His thumb touched her cheek, following the line of bone up to the temple he had touched with his lips.
"Why?" he asked, his voice completely relaxed.
As much as she hated to destroy that tranquillity, she needed to understand this, the last of all the things that had stood between them. Understand and then destroy, as they had tonight destroyed the rest.
"When I came to you and told you I loved you—" she said, and watched his eyes change. "You said that Dare had been wrong. And now... Forgive my arrogance," she said, smiling at him, "but it is obvious, even to me, that you lied about what you feel. I need to understand why."
"Because I'm a fool," he said, answering the smile.
"Whatever else you are, my love, you are not a fool. Was it the money? Because you were afraid of what people would say?"
"I didn't know about the money. It had nothing to do with that. And nothing to do with you."
"Then..." Nothing to do with you. "It must have had something to do with you."
As the silence stretched too long without his answer, her smile faded, as did the tranquillity.
"Ian?"
"I wanted your life to be only joy," he said.
She shook her head, still watching his eyes. "No one's life is 'only joy.'"
"I wanted yours to be," he said.
"And you thought it would be without you? You thought that by denying you loved me—" She stopped because there was no logic in that. "I don't understand."
His lips tightened, and then he took her hand, guiding her fingers over a ridge on his chest. She had seen the scars, and known again her father's guilt, but this...
"What is it?" she asked, her fingers exploring the shape and size of whatever lay beneath the skin.
She felt the depth of the breath he took before he said, "Something I brought back from Portugal. Something they tell me may...move. Become dislodged and shift its position."
"What would make it shift?" she whispered, trying to make sense of what he had said. "Why after all this time..."
"Physical exertion. At least that's what McKinley has warned me about."
"Exertion? Such as in fighting off a highwayman?" she asked. "Or a mob?" Her voice rose on the last, remembering those things with a sense of horror she had not felt then because she had had no idea what had really been at stake. "You did those things, knowing that it was possible—"
"Nothing happened," he said, his thumb again moving over her temple, his voice soothing. Reassuring. "Nothing at all."
It hadn't, she realized. He had survived both of those battles. And being shot by Travener. He had even survived that terrible fever in Scotland, an illness brought on by that injury and his reckless drive to rescue her.
Survived. Even Travener had recognized the tenacity with which Ian Sinclair clung to life. Which must mean...
She put her fingers against his cheek, thinking about how long he had lived under the shadow of this death sentence. A sentence which, given all that had happened to him since she had known him, she found she could not believe.
"McKinley could be wrong. He must be. If that were ever going to happen, it would have by now."
His eyes held on hers. Wanting to believe.
"I refuse to allow it," she added softly, smiling at him. "I refuse to believe whatever they told you. I refuse to allow you to believe it."
"You were made for joy," he said again.
"I was made for this," she said sharply. "However long it lasts. No one has guarantees. Not of anything."
That was another illusion. That there would be years to savor. Sometimes there were
. And sometimes there were not.
The only thing sure was this moment. This second. This heartbeat. And she knew she wanted all of them, as many as were left, against hers. That was the reality of loving someone. That inevitable and terrible price.
"I want this joy," she said. "I want your sons. And most of all, I want you."
Far more than enough... And however long or short it was, she knew that it would be.
GAYLE WILSON
Four-time RITA finalist and RITA Award winner Gayle Wilson has written twenty-five novels for Harlequin. A former high school English and world history teacher to gifted students, she writes historical fiction set in the English Regency period and contemporary romantic suspense. She has won numerous awards, including both the 1998 and the 1999 Kiss of Death Awards for Outstanding Romantic Suspense, the Texas Gold Award in 1999, the Laurel Wreath Award for Excellence in 1998 and 1999, and the 1999 Dorothy Parker Award for Category Romance, given by Reviewers International Organization. Gayle was a RITA finalist in the category of Best First Book in 1995 for her first historical, The Heart's Desire, and a RITA finalist in Romantic Suspense in 1999 for Ransom My Heart. In the 2000 RITA competition, she was a finalist in both the Short Historical category for Lady Sarah's Son and in Romantic Suspense for The Bride's Protector, for which she won the RITA.
Gayle still lives in Alabama, where she was born, with her husband of thirty-two years and an ever-growing menagerie of beloved pets. She has one son, who is also a teacher of gifted students. Gayle loves to hear from readers. Write to her at P.O. Box 3277, Hueytown, AL 35023.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Wilson, Gayle Page 25