Sam instantly but too late sat still. Thanks to her innocent movements and his lascivious thoughts, he was now hard enough to cut diamonds. Every nerve ending in his body thrummed and he was finding it increasingly difficult to breathe normally, much less keep his hands to himself. He thought about that and corrected himself. He wasn’t keeping his hands to himself. They were already on her. He had an arm around her back and his hand resting against her hip. His other hand, his left hand, he’d smoothed up under her hair to cup her cheek and neck. So, essentially, he was embracing her.
The only thing separating him from the feel of her bare skin under his touch was the thin fabric of her nightgown. All he had to do to kiss her was raise her chin. God knew he wanted to and had ever since he’d first seen her in this very room only a matter of hours ago. Sam’s mind wandered now, presenting him with images of himself claiming her lips, of his tongue inside the warm moistness of her mouth, of his hand on her breast, his thumb caressing her nipple—
Bloody hell. This simply will not do. Think about something else, man. Taking his own advice, he searched through his many business ventures and concerns for something of sufficient weight to distract his mind from the reality of the sweet-smelling woman atop his thighs. The cattle he’d had shipped from America to strengthen his stock? He shook his head. No coherent thought would form regarding livestock. The fine horses, then? No. The fact that Parliament was sitting without a Treyhorne in attendance? Hardly. His mother’s imminent return from his aunt Jane’s? No. His brother Geoffrey’s sudden illness and death?
Sam shook his head as if to physically dislodge that remembrance. If he dwelled on that, he’d be the one with the nightmares. Or a different one, at least.
Sam gave up. The thought simply did not exist that could render him unaware of the petite, redheaded, green-eyed woman in his arms. She was too potent a presence. Too warm a weight. Sam exhaled and leaned his head back against the bed’s headboard. He closed his eyes. What was he supposed to do, then? Stay like this until the morning? No. He’d already ruled that out.
Well, damn his uncharacteristically kind instinct in coming in here in the first place. Look where a bout of compassion had landed him. Yes, just look where. In the bed of a very desirable woman whose mystery and flashing green eyes excited him beyond belief. But a woman who had no inkling that he was presently in her bed. A woman who would not be amused in the least to find him here. He needed to leave, he knew that, and go back to his own bed. Now. Before he fell asleep. Before the room’s silvery moonlit grayness and absolute quietness seduced him into dropping off. Before the wonderfully comfortable mattress underneath him lured him into its depths.
And before the enticing sleeping woman in his arms had him simply shrugging them both down atop the bed and pulling the covers up around them. Sam blinked and yawned, feeling his muscles relax, feeling the lethargy of sleep slip over him. He started to nod off. He felt his hand drop from Miss Calhoun’s neck to her thigh, where his palm lightly rested against her skin. His other hand fell away from her hip and onto the sheets.
Several peaceful moments slipped by … then Sam started, coming to and shaking his head, trying to clear his mind. He took a deep cleansing breath, blinking rapidly and admonishing himself. Just get up, man. Simply lay her down and leave. You’re not a schoolboy. This isn’t the first woman’s bed you’ve been in. You’ve made getaways before. You can do it this time, too.
Right. He needed to leave. What he had to face, though, was that he didn’t want to leave. He wanted to stay. He wanted to continue to hold her. He liked the way she felt in his arms. He liked the way her hair smelled, the softness of her skin. Sam heard himself and called himself four kinds of a fool. Curse it all, he was making this worse by even entertaining thoughts such as those. But there it was: he liked being here with her. It was as simple as that. Simple or not, he didn’t have her permission to be here. Worse, he had no right to be here, no matter how pure his motives had been at first. Beyond every other consideration—and they all paled when held up to this one—he was a married man. He had taken vows, sworn an oath of fidelity.
While he hadn’t yet broken them, his behavior here tonight proved him to be no kind of gentleman. He might not be polite society’s idea of a gentleman, but he did have his own convictions regarding honor and his own standards of conduct, none of which he was currently upholding. An ironic grin claimed his lips. The only thing he was upholding was a delicious armful of sleeping female—who would, no doubt, scratch his eyes out if she awoke to find him in her bed.
That image did it. Where shame or good sense held no sway, the possibility of being blinded for life prevailed. Renewing his grip on her, as well as his resolve to get himself free and remain unscathed, Sam tensed his muscles and sat forward, scooping his feminine burden up into his arms. Done with efforts at gentleness and doubts, he rocked forward, trying to get his balance so he could twist and lay her down. But he came too far forward and lost his balance, falling heavily onto the mattress—atop her and squashing her under him.
A moment of stunned silence followed. Then, a muffled feminine squawk from somewhere under him, between him and the sheets, told him his worst nightmare was now awake.
Chapter Six
In one split second, deep sleep became a painful and frightening awakening. The only thing Yancey’s shocked mind would register was that she was in a bed and something had fallen atop her, something that lay across her back and was crushing the life out of her. When the weight had hit her, her breath had left her lungs in a muffled whoosh that under other circumstances would have been a shriek. Where was she? She couldn’t remember. What was happening? She had no idea. All she knew was that something warm-blooded and heavily muscled—and deadly—held her pinned down.
That was when, in the next second upon being forced awake, her situation became crystal clear to her. She’d been attacked in her sleep. Terrified, yet determined to die with dignity, she stiffened, preparing to fight back. One thought reigned uppermost in her mind. Get to your gun under your pillow. Yes. If only she could. But, frighteningly, she realized that the weight atop her was so heavy that she couldn’t even draw enough air into her lungs to scream, much less to mount any kind of an effective attack. She was lying on her stomach and couldn’t even turn her head. Nor could she get so much as a hand out from under whoever was atop her.
So this is how it will end, a very calm part of her mind remarked. No. She wouldn’t accept that. Not without a fight. With a surge of determination lancing through her, Yancey struggled in earnest, wriggling about and straining ever upward. That was when she heard the voice—an irritated and pompous one that stopped her cold with disbelief.
“Would you bloody well hold still a moment, Miss Calhoun? We’re tangled together here, and I’m trying to get you free.”
The duke! Anger and outrage combined with fear and flooded through Yancey. When the weight gave some, finally lifting off her neck, she turned her head to the side so she could grit out her words through the tangle of her hair that covered her face. “Get off me, you big overbred ass.”
The mattress under her shifted with the man’s efforts to extricate himself from her. “I assure you that is exactly what I am trying to do … you underbred little guttersnipe.”
Yancey sucked in an insulted breath, or tried to. All she got was a pained attempt. “How dare you?” she bleated into the sheets.
“How dare I? I’ll tell you how I dare. This is my house.”
Suddenly the weight was removed completely from her back. Extreme relief coursed through her as, gasping for each breath, she remained flat on her stomach, her arms out to her sides. Every blink of her eyes revealed tiny stars dancing across her vision. They gradually receded as she shoved her hair away from her face and raised her head. Moonlight—or perhaps the beginnings of sunlight—peeking through the closed drapes across the way revealed that she now mysteriously was lying sideways to the bed and at its foot. She could make nothing of that
as she concentrated on sucking in huge drafts of sweet and wonderful air.
When her breathing became more normal, she pushed herself up and sat cross-legged atop her bed, a hand to her chest as she stared at the duke.
He’d hopped off the bed and was now lighting a threesome of fat candles that sat atop a bedside table. A golden light suddenly suffused the room, pushing the gloom back to the corners. Yancey watched in disbelief, thinking how common and ordinary a task he’d just performed under these most extraordinary of circumstances. What did he think he was about? Then she realized that she was now capable of speech and made her demands known. “What in God’s name were you doing in my bed? And if you expect a ‘Your Grace’ to follow that, then you have a long wait, sir.”
“I expect nothing, I assure you,” the duke said, now standing beside the small round table, his body suffused in the candles’ glow as their combined light danced over his skin.
His skin? Blinking her surprise, but then instantly captivated by him, Yancey raised her chin and looked at him through different eyes. She slowly slid her gaze up and down the duke’s length.
A sensual awareness flooded through her, finally pooling low in her belly and leaving her limbs feeling heavy. The appreciative female part of her brain registered that the duke was a magnificent specimen, just as she had supposed he would be. Perfectly proportioned. Broad across the shoulders and through the chest. Narrow at the hip. Hard-muscled. Breathtaking. And almost completely unclothed. Yancey softly blew out her breath—then realized with a suddenness born of embarrassment that she was ogling her tormentor and thinking very unladylike thoughts of him. And he knew it.
“Are you done?” His voice was low, husky … faintly taunting.
“For now,” Yancey replied boldly, raising her chin. In order to meet his arrogant gaze, though, she had to tear her own away from the sprinkling of crisp curling hair that graced his broad chest. The candles’ insufficient light masked his gray eyes, but she could see that he had arched an eyebrow in a suggestive way that she deserved but didn’t particularly like.
She refused to look down at herself to see what, if anything, she might be exposing to his gaze. “I expect that at any moment now you will tell me what has happened here?”
“Certainly.” He crossed his arms over his chest. His bunched muscles spoke of power and health. “You cried out.”
“Of course I did. I awakened to find you atop me and crushing the life out of me with your bulk. Anyone would cry out.”
“No. I meant before.”
“Before what?”
“Before I came in here to see about you. You cried out.”
“I never.”
“You did. And more than once.”
This was unsettling news. But uppermost in her mind was her growing sense of immodesty in her pose. She subtly pulled at her gown, tugging it down over her legs and holding the gown’s fabric wadded up in her lap. “Say I did cry out in my sleep. I doubt that I called out for you.”
“Not for me. Not for anybody, actually. Just cried out. A moan of terror. You were apparently having a nightmare.”
Sitting there, considering him as much as his words, Yancey decided that she believed him. Certainly the frightening images that had been burned into her memory by repeated nightmares over the years could have assailed her once again. The dreams were always the same: the day her father came home when she was thirteen. Five years of hell had followed that, ended by an afternoon of violence that only she had walked away from. Or run, was more like it.
Yancey felt her throat tighten and her face heat up with remembered emotion. “I see. A nightmare,” she finally commented. “And you thought the best way to wake me from it was to jump atop me and try to smother me?”
His expression hardened as he lowered his chin. With his face partially in shadow, he looked positively sinister. “Had I had been trying to smother you, Miss Calhoun, there would be no need for this conversation because you would already be dead.”
Yancey’s breath caught in her throat. She reminded herself of her gun under her pillow and her own proximity to it. “I’ll strive to remember that,” she replied. “And given that’s the case, please accept my apologies. I never meant to malign your abilities or your motives.”
He ducked his chin regally. “Apology accepted. Now, if you will excuse me, I would like to finish my night’s sleep.”
Again, and just like out in the garden last afternoon, his change in manner was so sudden that Yancey could only watch in disbelieving silence as the duke—acting as if they were fully clothed and stood in broad daylight, as if he’d only just met her on the street and they’d visited amiably—stepped away from the table and skirted the end of her bed.
Yancey crabbed around none too ladylike atop the mattress in order to keep him in her sight. The fear that he would again leap atop her and crush her no longer held sway in her mind, despite her warning to herself only moments ago. Instead, it was the breathtaking sight he made in only his smallclothes. They did nothing to hide his masculine endowments. Yancey’s gaze remained helplessly riveted to his body.
When the darkly sensual duke reached the open door of the dressing room that joined her bedroom to his, he stopped and turned to her. She’d thought he meant to say something, yet he didn’t. Instead, with a hand holding on to the doorjamb, he merely stared her way. Yancey’s heart beat slowly and dully. What now? she could only wonder, still under the spell of his overt sexuality that had her breathing in and out through her flared nostrils.
Then … he did speak, his voice a husky purr. “Good night, Miss Calhoun. Or should I say good morning?” He touched his fingertips to his brow in a mock salute to her. “I hope the remainder of your night, or day, is less eventful.”
“Yours as well … Your Grace. You’ll forgive me if I don’t leave my bed and curtsy this one time, won’t you?”
His chuckle was decadent. “Oh, I think under the present circumstances, we can forgo the formalities. But only if you’ll forgive me for how much I enjoyed holding you while you slept.”
* * *
She’d overslept. And it was no wonder, given her extreme tiredness of the day before and then the unusual but titillating events of the early morning hours. Refusing to dwell on his comment about how wonderful he had found it to hold her in his arms, and following a late breakfast alone in the very formal dining room, Yancey had set about some detecting duties. She didn’t know exactly what she was searching for in each orderly room she invaded. But, to her, it was enough that she was diligently on the job. Something, no doubt, of a suspicious nature would present itself to her trained eye.
But it wasn’t to be because no matter where she’d roamed, or into whatever room she’d slipped, she’d been politely confronted by some servant or another wanting to do her every bidding. It hadn’t taken her long to get full of that and to retreat in irritated self-defense to her own elegant suite of rooms upstairs.
Standing now in front of one of the tall windows in her bedroom, her arms crossed and her features set in lines of vexation, she stared at the landscape spread out before her. Hulking mountain peaks formed a jagged backdrop to the green hills and the thatch-roofed cottages closer by. Cattle and horses dotted the land. And an occasional farm wagon trundled by, headed in the direction of the village in the distance. Though the setting was beautiful, much like a fine pastoral painting, Yancey just couldn’t appreciate it today. Not when she needed instead to be working on a plan to solve the case for which she’d been sent here.
And that case involved the duke. Despite her best efforts not to indulge in fantasies of the man, her mind insisted on reliving the feel of his wonderfully lithe body and sensual presence in her bed only a matter of hours ago. Immediately Yancey responded, tensing with a yearning she found hard to control. She caught her breath and exhaled it slowly in an effort to cool her blood. Hoping to distract herself from what could only be ruinous yearnings, she lowered her gaze from the middle distance of the Eng
lish countryside to focus on the formal gardens right below her window. Any distraction would do at this point.
Below her, the gardeners were revealed to be about their duties. The flower plots were overrun with an army of men who, like so many ants, were busy with potting and pruning and planting. And there was that scrappy little dog, Mr. Marples. Yancey grinned at his canine antics. Tearing about, he seemed to be purposely getting in the workmen’s way, only to be shooed irritably. Undaunted, grinning, his tongue lolling out the side of his mouth, he hurried to the next man and helped with the digging, throwing dirt and chaos everywhere, only to be shooed again.
Yancey then spied the dog’s three shadows … the cats Alice, Mary, and Jane. Taking the sun, the felines were elegant white splotches draped lazily over the various ornamental benches set around the fountain. Comparing her plight to theirs, Yancey called herself the very image of the damsel in distress from ancient times, withering away and locked inside her ivied tower.
And that was when it occurred to her: there was indeed an ivied tower here, one simply begging for exploration, if for no other reason than to see the view from its top. Just then, something pinged against the glass, at a spot only a few inches from Yancey’s nose. Startled, she blinked and pulled back. What in the world…? It happened again. Another sharp, startling ping. Much as if a small stone—
Someone was throwing rocks at the window. She leaned toward the glass pane and peered outside. And there he stood … the duke. A thrill of excitement chased through Yancey’s veins. The barest of smiles slipped onto her lips. Then she caught herself. No. She stiffened her knees and warned herself to adopt an attitude of diffidence toward this man. To do otherwise, to respond warmly or wantonly, could be the death of her, she reminded herself.
But her cautions to herself died a sudden death, and it was the duke’s fault. There he stood, dressed in much the same type of clothes he’d worn yesterday. Black boots, corded breeches, and a white shirt. He had his hands planted at his waist and he was staring up at her. Apparently realizing that he had gained her attention, he grinned and waved at her, signaling for her to come down and join him.
The Marriage Masquerade Page 9