His breath drew in with a gasp.
“Send them away,” she whispered.
He made fists at his sides. “William! Again, damn it. Tomorrow could be too late. If we miss her time, there’ll be hell to pay.”
“Help me take off my clothes.”
“Calm her, Rory.” He gave no sign of hearing her speak.
“I’ll just have to undress myself.” She undid her cloak and let it fall. Next she loosened the tapes that secured her bodice and eased it swiftly down, pulling her arms free and wriggling until she was naked to the waist. “Look. I promise you’ll like what you see.”
“Did ye say somethin’, sir?” one of the men called.
His back flexed and he locked his knees. “I said, be careful.”
“Oh, dear,” she told him. “I’ll speak more softly. Things went well tonight. Stonehaven’s agreed to send that insipid little waif of his to Edinburgh. By the time we’ve finished with her, he won’t be interested anymore.”
He shifted closer to the wall and muttered, “Not now.”
“Sir?”
“I said, now!”
She heard the stallion bellow and the mare’s shriek.
“Damn it! Hold that mare, I say.”
“Slipped away from the big, bad stallion again, did she?” Clasping his knees, she pulled herself forward between his parted legs. “I won’t slip away from you, will I? I know what’s good for me.”
“For God’s sake,” he ground out, making to step away, but halting abruptly. “Don’t do that.”
“You like it,” she hissed, keeping her hands where they were, supporting the weight that bulged and grew inside his tight breeches. “Don’t pay me any mind, my love. Instruct your men and I’ll instruct you.”
Wriggling, she turned to sit with her back against the wall and her hips firmly wedged between his feet. “Mmm. Let me see what I can find.”
“If he … if he starts to lose interest, use your … use your hands on him.”
She could hear his harsh breathing. “Use my hands on him?” she murmured, and began undoing his breeches.
He swiped downward, searching for her wrists, but missed.
“I am an obedient creature. I’m going to use my hands.” A few deft, practiced movements and she tugged until he stood, legs parted, manhood springing free—all but naked from waist to knee.
And she did use her hands.
“I think we’ll get her this time,” a voice shouted from below. “Mayhap if ye’d come down and lend a hand, sir?”
“Run down and lend a hand,” she taunted him. “I’ll come with you and help.”
“The three of you can manage. Make haste. Finish it, now.”
“I will,” she whispered. “Give me … Oh, it isn’t going to take very long at all.” Running her palms along his groins, she weighted his ballocks and smiled when his thighs jerked.
“He’s got her!” His voice broke.
“And I have you.” Opening her mouth wide, she drew him in.
Darkness rushed over her, darkness tinged with red behind her closed lids. She felt his body shudder and heard the wild sounds of the mating animals … Using her lips, she sealed him close. Then he spent himself and all but sank on top of her.
For several minutes she rested her head against rough wood and stroked upward over his belly. The man was never less than almost ready, even now.
“Good enough,” he said, his voice a hoarse croak. “Lock them in and go. I’ll stay awhile.”
“Are ye sure, sir?”
“Yes, damn it. Go.”
Languid warmth softened her body and ran in her veins. She sighed, looking up, waiting.
At last the barn door slammed shut.
With his hands on the railing, he leaned away until he could see her. The slightest arch of her back made certain he saw enough to make his juices run hot.
“Damn you,” he said in tones she didn’t like one bit. “I told you to stay away from me.”
“You said you’d be here tonight.”
“And that I’d be busy.”
“You knew I would come to you. I always come to you when I can.”
He clenched his teeth. “I have told you this should not continue.”
“And I’ve told you I’m the one who decides about that.”
“What the hell d’you think you’re doing now?”
“Getting you ready to do a masterful plowing job,” she said innocently. “It’s been too long and I’m a very ready girl tonight.”
“Girl? Hah!”
When he tried to wrench away, she grabbed his shaft in the squeezing fingers of one hand and held him tightly.
“Hell’s teeth!”
“You may have my teeth, if you like. But first let us remember a few things. You and I are lovers. We’ve been lovers for a long and very satisfactory time.”
“It wasn’t my idea.”
“No, it was mine. But you weren’t hard to seduce, my love. I seem to remember that you followed me into that little cupboard at Kirkcaldy quite willingly.”
“I thought you needed something.”
“I did.” With the end of her thumb, she flipped back and forth against the head of his manhood. “I needed you, and you very quickly obliged.”
He panted and covered her hand. “You stripped naked. Right in front of me.”
“And you spread my legs in an instant.”
“That was then.”
“And this is now. Spread my legs again. I want you to remind me of what it is I so admire about you.”
With a rough moan, he took her shoulders and threw her to her back on the straw. Instantly he was upon her, pawing her breasts, sucking her rigid nipples into his mouth.
“That’s right.” She hissed through her teeth. Her skirts were already bunched about her hips. “Put it in me now. Now!”
In a single, mighty thrust he buried himself in her, and she wrapped her legs about his waist. Their coupling was savage. “I’m just like that woman you mentioned to your men,” she panted against his ear. “I can hardly wait to get some more—and some more. The only difference is that I don’t need to be persuaded.”
Spent, he fell on her, breathing heavily, and rolled onto his back. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”
Rage swelled instantly. Her eyes stung, and her throat, but with fury, not tears. “You took a married woman, another man’s wife. Me. I don’t have to tell you what will happen if he learns you’ve cuckolded him.”
“If we stay away from one another, he won’t.”
“If you stay away from me, he will. I’ll tell him and I’ll say you raped me.”
For an instant he was silent, then he reared over her, eyes blazing like a crazed animal. “I never raped you.”
“No,” she said very softly. “I raped you—virtually. But he won’t believe that. No, Hector McFie, you will do as I tell you, and keep on doing it, or I’ll make sure you lose everything you’ve worked for.”
He stared down at her for a long time before scooping her left breast into his big hand and slowly lowering his mouth. “As you say, Theodora. We are bound together, aren’t we? Bound by what we both want most: power over others.” He bit her nipple until she cried out in exquisite pain.
Fascination Chapter 18
“May I join you?”
“Oh!” Startled, Grace jumped and spun to see Mrs. Pincham climbing the last few steps to an alcove in the Eve Tower where a small window gave a view over the moonlit approach to the castle. “How did you find me?”
“Your maid,” Mrs. Pincham said, joining Grace. “I’ve been looking for you ever since dinner.”
“Mairi? She doesn’t know where I am.”
“Evidently the girl’s very devoted to you. She was in the corridor below.” In the subdued light from a sconce, the woman’s eyes were turned blue-black. “Been following you for hours, so she says. Lucky I saw her. I told her I’d look after you and sent her to her bed.”
“That wa
s nice of you.” Grace touched her cheek and felt moisture. “Really, Mrs. Pincham, I don’t need company.”
“I’m wounded. You must not like me at all.”
“Of course I do.”
“Then call me Melony. Only strangers call me Mrs. Pincham, and I’d hoped we were to be friends.”
A friend would be wonderful, especially now when Grace felt so hopeless. “Melony. Yes. I’m sorry, I was preoccupied.”
“Then we are friends?”
“That would please me.” If anything could ever please her again.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” Melony said, her lovely face full of concern. “Why did you cry at dinner?”
“It was nothing.” It was everything.
“Friends confide in one another.”
Grace turned back to the window.
“Please.” Melony put an arm around her. “Let me help you. I feel a great need in you, and I know that if you’ll trust me, I can dispel whatever is making you unhappy.”
Grace closed her eyes, and fresh tears coursed her cheeks. “Thank you, but I shall have to … In time I’ll learn to deal with the things I cannot change.”
“Oh, my dear.” Melony folded Grace against her bosom and rocked her. “You have not spoken of your troubles to your mama?”
Grace jerked away. “No! She is too delicate.”
“Hush. Hush.” Melony pulled her gently back into an embrace. “You are such a sweet thing. Of course you want to shield your Mama. Do not be angry with me, but may I guess that Stonehaven is the cause of your distress?”
Grace said nothing.
“I thought so,” Melony murmured. “Men. They are so necessary and so difficult. Is he cruel to—”
“I cannot speak of this.” Her throat felt raw from holding back sobs.
“Then let me speak. Has he … Has he tried to…”
“Oh.” Grace buried her face in Melony’s sweetly scented shoulder and wept. “I … I’m sorry. It’s just that I know nothing. Almost nothing. About how things are supposed to be between men and women. And I have no one to ask.”
“Ask me,” Melony said soothingly.
How could she ask? How could she explain all that had transpired and try to describe the tumult of feelings she had for Stonehaven?
“Ask me, Grace,” Melony urged.
“I hate him,” Grace said, and began to tremble. “But, on the other hand, it’s entirely possible that I love him.”
“Just so.”
“How can I possibly decide which when I don’t understand what has already …” A great rush of emotion left Grace weak. She had to turn to someone. “A great deal has happened, and I don’t understand any of it—most of it. Stonehaven and I… Well, we … Oh, dear.”
“My darling friend. Will you let me be your best friend?”
Grace looked into Melony’s sympathetic face. “Oh, yes, I would be very glad to.”
Melony smoothed Grace’s hair. “You have made me incredibly happy. We women only have each other to truly trust, and I need you as much as you need me.”
“You do?”
“You’ll never know how much. Come, let’s go to your room, where we can be completely private. You shall tell me everything. Then I’ll make certain things work out for the best.”
Arran folded the music atop his writing table. He slid the sheets into a large envelope he’d already addressed, turned it over, melted some wax, and applied his seal. This piece was very short, a simple air for piano alone. After leaving the red salon, he’d gone to the gallery and worked into the night until the thing seemed complete. He’d returned to Revelation feeling an urgency to be rid of it. Let the chosen beneficiary of his efforts decide if the little offering was ready for performance.
Gallatin Plethero, Esquire.
Young, extraordinarily talented, extraordinarily ambitious. Arran had heard Plethero play for Prinny—before he became George IV—at Brighton Pavilion. The brilliant performance had been the only worthwhile moment in an otherwise grotesquely excessive night of revelry. Since that evening, more than ten years ago, Arran had sent his compositions to Plethero with the firm instruction that no one should ever know who wrote them. They were to be performed—if they pleased the musician—with a brief introduction explaining that the composer was unknown.
The brandy had dulled his anger—and his confusion—for far too short a time. Then the music had rushed in to distract him once more.
Now the music, like the brandy, was a memory, and there was nothing to divert his pondering.
Grace.
“Grace,” he said aloud. “What are you? Who are you? Are you exactly what you appear or are you what I …?” Could she be what he’d vaguely felt her to be when he’d watched her still face, those downcast eyes at the dining table?
Could she be a gentle girl with an artist’s soul inside a body led astray by unruly passion?
He touched the back of his hand where her tears had fallen.
Arran got up from the writing table in his sitting room. The fire had been made up whilst he worked in the gallery. McWallop doubled as his valet and saw to all personal comforts. An unusual arrangement, but one that suited Arran’s need for complete privacy. The fewer intruders into his world, the better. Anyway, McWallop had been with the family for years and he’d learned to anticipate his master’s wishes almost before Arran thought of them himself.
Playing host to the Cuthberts and silly Blanche Wren had exasperated him. If there hadn’t been a need for some public record of his intention to marry Grace, he would never have suffered such nonsense. God, the servants had eyed him as if he were a phantom materialized at his own table by a devil’s spell. Some of them really had never seen him before and must have believed the piffle about his having two heads, or whatever.
A kettle stood ready to be boiled on the hob for the green tea he’d learned to relish on the continent in ‘15. He’d been working behind the scenes, honing his skills as a diplomat for England as she formed an alliance with Austria, Prussia, and Russia. An Austrian princess with a liking for things from the East had introduced him to Japanese tea, drunk very late at night—between athletically strenuous sessions on her embroidered Chinese pillows. The tea, she had huskily informed him, was most restorative. And so it was. The princess had also liked rare eastern oils, sultry, aromatic oils that made her ample white body as slippery as a lithe, snowy seal—but much warmer.
Arran sat the kettle on the hob to boil and took the lid off the dark blue Sevres pot that was his favorite.
Princess Annalisse had been very athletic indeed. He recalled her intriguing ability to sit impaled upon him, her knees spread like a nicely plump frog, whilst she excited his belly with her oiled breasts and reached back to squeeze his ballocks at the same time.
The princess had been his last female adventure before Isabel, who, although not at all athletic, had made up in imagination for what she lacked in muscle.
But that had not been his reason for marrying her.
Straightening, Arran stared down into the leaping flames. He’d thought himself in love with Isabel, and her gift to him in return had been to teach him that love did not exist.
Little Miss Grace Wren was something entirely different again. She was an odd mixture of bone-deep sensuality and … and achingly naive simplicity.
She had the power to move him.
Steam began to rise from the kettle spout. Arran poured water over tea leaves but stopped with the pot only half-filled.
If she had the power to move him, and if he thought for an instant that her innocence was real, then how could he be so certain that she was nothing other than a conniving opportunist?
In the distant and ugly Delilah room she would be lying awake.
How did he know?
He knew.
Should he go to her—simply to talk? He could test her. Only in simple ways, such as to ascertain her fondness for children. And in so doing it might be possible to make a smoother path into t
his sham of a marriage.
Arran wanted to see her.
No. No, he would never allow himself to again become vulnerable to a woman.
What could it hurt to go to her?
He finished making the tea and paced across the room, waiting for the leaves to steep.
There could be more to marriage than passion. His mother had died young, but his father had frequently spoken of her as that which had made his spirit whole.
Had he made it too difficult for Grace to tell him she’d decided to abandon entering into a bogus marriage? Could it be that she did feel something for him?
The answers weren’t really relevant, although if she should carry any kindness toward him, the months ahead would be made the more pleasant.
Pleasant. Hell’s teeth, he didn’t want pleasant. He wanted heirs and he wanted a warm—no, a hot, willing partner in the making of those heirs.
“Damn it to hell!” Grabbing up the evening coat he’d tossed on a couch, he left the room.
Cursing under his breath, Arran made his way from Revelation through the warren of corridors and stairways that eventually took him to the wing he sought. Even if he were seen here, there could not be too much idle chatter since he was merely visiting his fiancée.
“Repeat what you said.” He spoke aloud. “You do remember what you said? About having intended to tell me—when you thought I was Niall—that you would not marry the marquess after all?” Then he would ask the most important question of all: “Why had you decided to tell me that?”
And therein lay the solution to his dilemma. Should he try to trust her, or should he continue to take the safe route and merely use her?
At the corner that would take him to the Delilah room, he paused. He hadn’t been here since the night … not since then. Isabel had insisted she wanted that particular room, even though it was so far distant from his. The arrangement had been devilish difficult, particularly since she had declared that she detested Revelation and could not possibly spend nights there. He’d made more journeys across the castle to this wing than he would ever be able to remember.
He did not wish to remember any of them, especially the last one.
Arran turned the corner and collided with a hurrying figure in violet-striped white muslin.
Fascination -and- Charmed Page 23