The blunt tip of him probed the entrance moistened by his loving, and Norah caught her breath in anticipation.
“You’re mine, Norah. Mine. May I be damned me to hell if I ever let you forget it.” He rasped the words as his hips surged forward. A cry of pain escaped Norah’s lips as he embedded himself deep inside her body, but the pain turned to glittering wonder at the feel of him—hard, hot, proud, gloved by the very essence of her woman’s body.
She expected skilled seduction, the teasing he must have perfected in countless other beds. She expected him to continue whatever game he’d been playing since he’d entered her bedroom an hour before.
But there was no dark amusement in Aidan’s eyes now. No mockery—of himself, nor of the wildfire he’d created between them.
Fury—stark, wild, terrifying in its power—shone in every line in his face. Fury and dizzying passion. Desperation and an unexpected darting of what could have been fear.
As if he could see the reflections of his own emotions in Norah’s passion-flushed face, Aidan’s jaw knotted. He set himself against her with steely determination, thrusting deep, hard, every muscle in his body whipcord taut, as rough-edged sounds of pleasure and of pain escaped between his clenched teeth.
Sweat dampened his skin, fusing them together. She had not expected gentleness from this man, no tender words of But it was as if something had changed, shifted in the moment he drove his sex deep into her body. As if everything had changed.
Carnal mastery disappeared in the wake of feral need, teasing gave way to astonishment. Wariness seeped into that fallen-angel face. It was as if he had suddenly stared into an enchanted mirror and seen something that had shaken him to the last hidden corners of his soul.
Aidan delved deeper, stroked harder, as if by force of will alone he could drive away whatever had so unnerved him. Norah kissed him, touched him, reveling in the stark contrast between feminine silk and male steel. She closed her eyes, dreaming of possessing not only Aidan’s surging passion but his heart. And when the wave of pleasure crashed over her, she cried, her tears dampening Aidan’s shoulder as he thrust into her once, twice, then gave a hoarse groan of surrender as he filled her with his seed.
Norah trembled, listening to the sudden stillness, broken only by the soft rasping of their breath, the shudders of fulfillment that still coursed their bodies. He was still joined to her, buried deep, and Norah wished that she could hold him there forever.
She didn’t know what to say to him, this man who now knew her body so intimately, this man who had shattered every rein she’d held on the unexpected well of sensuality deep inside her and turned her into a maddened, desperate creature of the flesh with his kisses and his caresses.
Instead she kissed him, infusing that caress with all the tenderness, all the wonder, all the love that still vibrated in her soul.
When he pulled away from her, Norah felt as if he’d torn her heart from her breast and carried it with him. His eyes were shuttered, green pools of secrets beneath the dark hair her fingers had tousled; that mouth that had devoured every inch of her with such wild hunger was tight now, curled into a frown. Why? Had she disappointed him somehow? Disgusted him with the magnitude of the response he’d drawn from her? Or was there something else that had so disturbed him?
Norah caught her lips between her teeth and groped for the coverlets to draw over her body, now so ruthlessly exposed to his glare. His eyes grew even darker.
“Aidan?” His name was the softest query. It was all she could manage to squeeze between her kiss-reddened lips. “What—what are you thinking?”
“Thinking?” A brittle smile flashed across his face, one of seething recklessness and danger. Yet it didn’t reach his eyes. “That if all my gambling losses were so… pleasurable, I would be the most fortunate man in Christendom.”
The cool words hurt the fragile places in Norah’s spirit he had just opened.
“Don’t look so downcast, my love. Perhaps this marriage bargain we have reached won’t be so painful after all,” he said, climbing from the bed. He grabbed up his breeches, putting them on with a laziness that sizzled along Norah’s nerves. “In fact, any time you… desire me, you need only tell me you want me, and I shall be happy to accommodate you.”
Mockery? After what they had just shared? It was a subtle sting of cruelty, as if he were attempting to drive her away. Norah reeled from it, her cheeks burning with humiliation. Her eyes stung. But she would not let him see her cry.
Why was it that, despite the insensitivity of his words, her gaze clung to wide masculine shoulders suddenly stiffened as if they had been dealt some kind of blow, a face filled with swirling clouds of some emotion she couldn’t name.
“Why, Aidan? Why are you saying such things to me? Acting this way?”
“What way is that?”
“As if you—you want to hurt me?” She met his gaze levelly.
Something flickered in his gaze for a heartbeat—regret and bitter self-contempt. Then it was gone.
“On the contrary, it was my intention to congratulate you,” he observed, tugging on his rumpled shirt. The fleeting regret shifted, a grim satisfaction clinging to those lips that had kissed her to madness.
“You have a decidedly well-loved look about you, Norah mine. Every kiss, every touch, every cry of pleasure we shared is now captured in your face. Not a person at the ball tomorrow night will doubt that you surrendered everything to me. No, not even your champion, Montgomery.”
The words wounded Norah, piercing that fragile sense of wonder, that delicate wisp of hope his kisses and caresses had brought to life inside her. Philip. This was about Philip. Aidan’s visit to her room, his passion-hazed caresses, his kisses. His voice had been so loud when he’d tormented her, his laughter rumbling out during the card game. Even when he’d entered her bedchamber, he had knocked loud enough to alert every servant in Rathcannon that he had come to bed his new bride.
To possess her. To mark her as his own. Not because he loved her, but because of the unreasonable enmity that had sprung up between her new husband and the man she had once fancied herself in love with.
The certainty was more painful than anything she’d ever known. She raised her chin, casting Aidan a glare filled with outrage and with pain.
“Perhaps you would like me to share this night’s experience with Lord Montgomery? Expound upon your prowess?”
Those broad shoulders stiffened, that rugged face stilled. “What the devil?”
“I’m your bride. You have bedded me. Consummated the marriage. From what you say, it is important that the world be made aware that I am now your… your what, Sir Aidan? Possession?”
“My wife,” he bit out. “You’ll have to forgive me for wanting to make that clear to Montgomery. The man seemed most disbelieving of my claim to you, despite the ring on your finger. But you can be certain I won’t leave any room for further misunderstandings. You are mine, Norah. Now. Forever. There will never be another man in your heart…. Or in your bed.”
With those words the rage flowed out of Norah, leaving only a yawning emptiness where all her dreams had been.
No, she thought with wrenching pain, there would never be another man in her heart. Being wed to Aidan Kane, loving him, when he could never return that love, would be more painful than any trial she had ever known.
Chapter Sixteen
It was ten years since the ballroom at Rathcannon had been alive with the chatter of guests. Ten years since Delia Kane had reigned here like a beautiful sorceress.
Hundreds of candles cast light through crystal, turning the chandeliers into sculptures of fire and ice. The music of a string quartet wafted across Rathcannon’s ballroom, while the scent of rhododendrons banked in beribboned baskets about the floor filled the air.
Thirty-some members of Irish rural society—squires and country gentlemen, landholders and a smattering of nobility—had brought their wives and daughters to be introduced to the new Lady Kane.
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Aidan should have been at Norah’s side, introducing her, drawing her into conversation with the gaggle of gawking fools. He should have danced with her, and told her she looked like a fairy queen garbed in green satin, with a delicate silver netting draped like gossamer wings about her.
But all he could do was stand here, isolated by memories that would give him no peace. He saw himself as he’d been what seemed an eternity ago, watching men surrounding Delia like some kind of unholy aura.
From beneath slitted lids, he had observed this squire and that youth, just up from Trinity College, wondering if they were plotting a tryst with Sir Aidan’s woman, or if they had already lain with her to satiate her greedy desires. He had watched his neighbors dance with her, touching her hand, devouring her carnal beauty with eyes that stripped away the glistening angel-faced woman, until only the harlot remained, eager for the hands of a man on her skin—every man’s hands, any man’s hands—except for those of the husband who had planted his babe in her womb and then been bastard enough to insist that she bear it.
Not because he’d felt any mad desire to become a father, brainless young fool that he’d been. Rather because he’d been unwilling to let his wife fall beneath the filthy knives of some back-street butcher who would likely kill her.
Aidan leaned against a stone pillar where shadows clung, his evening attire impeccable, his eyes as hard and bright and filled with hidden fire as the emerald stickpin that glinted in the snowy folds of his cravat.
He should have been able to dismiss his memories of Delia. He might have succeeded, had it not been for the woman who glided about the ballroom now, her dusky locks caught up in a wreath of gardenias, her eyes dark pools in which a man could lose himself forever.
He knew her, every soft curve and velvety hollow, every pleasure place that made her sigh and moan. When he’d left her last night in that passion-tumbled bed, he had been certain he’d possessed her so thoroughly she would never stray. But it seemed he was cursed to repeat the past with yet a second Kane bride—for as he watched Philip Montgomery hovering about Norah, a thousand long-buried doubts shivered to life inside him.
Doubts fired by the hot, pulsing fever Aidan’s new bride had afflicted him with last night in her bed.
How had it happened? He raged inwardly, cursing the fates that had brought this woman here. How had he lost that devil-may-care attitude with which he’d bedded every woman since Delia barred him from her chambers? He had made it a game—had even teasingly labeled bed games as sexual fencing matches, making certain that the foils were tipped so that they could not pierce the lady in question’s heart, nor his own. It had been an amusement fraught with challenge and pleasure, yet one in which both parties knew the rules, and could walk away after the match was over with laughter on their lips.
But somehow, between the time Aidan had tossed the first card out upon Norah’s bed and the time he had pierced the tender veil of her maidenhead, everything had changed. The practice weapons had shifted into blade-sharp points, and Aidan had felt those terrifying emotions drive deep into his chest, far deeper than even Delia had ever stabbed him.
He had thrust into the soft haven of Norah’s body, felt her very essence melting into his spirit, felt those tightly guarded pieces of his soul Delia had not managed to destroy starting to slip into Norah’s hands.
Felt himself… what? Starting to… love her?
The mere words sent terror racing through Aidan’s vitals, making him feel naked, vulnerable. No. He’d vowed he would never let another woman have that kind of power over him again. He would never allow soft kisses and feminine wiles to deceive him, lure him to believe in happily ever afters, in passions that would endure beyond the realm of time.
A fool’s dream. A poet’s realm of blissful insanity. A draught of nectar-sweet poison served up by the same feminine hands that would one day betray the man foolish enough to drink it.
Aidan shuddered, remembering his desperate craving to be touched by Delia’s hands, to be loved by her, the wild rages of jealousy that had tormented him until he feared he would go mad. And laughter… always Delia’s laughter, mocking him, daring him to be man enough to take what he wanted, until he’d nearly surrendered what remained of his soul to meet that twisted challenge. Sickened himself by coming far too close to forcing her to give what she denied him, what she dangled before him, like tempting sweetmeats before a starving man’s eyes.
That single memory still had the power to make Aidan’s nerves coil with revulsion. He had vowed never to allow another woman to make such a beast of him again, to strip away everything decent inside him, leaving nothing but rage and lust and cravings that could never be satisfied.
But here he stood, watching the bride he had taken to his bed one night before, and the hunger in his spirit was raging more fiercely than it ever had for beautiful, shallow Delia. White-hot jealousy carved every nerve in his body, cleaving away the illusion of self-control he had clung to since the day he had left his faithless wife’s bedchamber for the last time.
He was possessed by the need to stalk across the ballroom, scoop Norah up into his arms, and carry her through the crowd up the broad staircase and into his bedchamber. He was afire with the need to fling her onto his massive bed, strip away the layers of satin from her ivory skin, to kiss and caress and suckle every part of her, until she begged him for release. To tease her to even wilder heights with his mouth, his hands, his tongue, until he was buried so deep inside her she would never forget how desperately she wanted him. Him. Only him.
He wanted to wring cries of hunger from that slender throat, hear her tell him that she loved him. Love—not born of a moment’s passion, fading away when dawn’s light trickled through the bedchamber window. But the love of a lady for her knight of old, transcending death itself.
If only he truly believed such love was possible at all.
He gave a bitter laugh. Considering the way he’d hurt her in those raw minutes before he’d stormed from her chamber, he’d be lucky if his bride didn’t loathe him.
“Papa!”
Cassandra’s voice startled him, and he turned to peer down into his daughter’s face, the mere sight of her tonight inflicting yet another blow to his already battered heart.
Cassandra—his little scrape-kneed princess—had somehow been magically transformed into a beautiful young woman, the living image of the willful girl Aidan himself had fallen in love with in that faraway ballroom in London so many years before.
But the facial likeness was the only thing that whispered of Delia in the daughter they had created together. Instead of eyes that begged a man to come hither, Cassandra’s eyes were bright and eager, her mouth sweet instead of seductive, without a thousand pretty lies at the tip of her tongue. Had Aidan suffered seeing Cass thus transfigured a month ago—her gown that of a lady, her hair a woman’s shining coronet—the mere sight of her would have shattered Aidan’s heart. But tonight, even his cherished daughter could not seem to break the invisible chains that had been forged between him and the woman now gliding across the castle ballroom’s floor in the arms of Philip Montgomery.
“Papa, you are being the biggest blockhead in all Ireland!” Cassandra accused. “Standing here as if you were hiding, when the whole assembly is fairly perishing to talk to you.”
“Don’t you mean pry into the strange broth that is my marriage, Cassandra?” he said with a tinge of bitterness. “Even here they’ve given me no peace, hounding me for any scrap of scandal they can carry back to share with some other gossiping fiend. Perhaps I should stop the orchestra for a moment and make an announcement to the blasted bunch of them. I’m sure you are all most astonished at my precipitous marriage, but you see, my daughter found me a bride and gave her to me for my birthday. And since Miss Linton had no other more attractive prospects for her future, she deigned to wed me,” he mocked. “I can just imagine what a delightful time these old dragons would have with that tidbit of information.”
&n
bsp; Cassandra’s hurt glance made him feel like a bastard, but at that moment he saw Montgomery draw Norah a whisper closer to his body, Aidan’s bride tipping her head, as if eager to capture something his lordship had said.
“Papa, even if you detest everyone else here, you could at least pay some attention to Norah.”
“It seems she’s doing quite fine without me.” Aidan’s jaw clenched, his eyes seething beneath half-closed lids.
Montgomery had whisked Norah to the far edge of the dance floor, and Aidan saw Norah lean close to him, whisper something in Montgomery’s ear. A fist seemed to slam into Aidan’s gut as he watched the Englishman move out of the bevy of dancers and tuck Norah’s hand possessively in the crook of his elbow. With a hasty glance to make certain they were unseen, Philip Montgomery led Aidan’s wife out the doors that led down to Rathcannon’s gardens.
How many times had Aidan watched the same scene unfolding? Delia and her lovers stealing away for thirty minutes, an hour or longer, while Aidan and every other guest in attendance pictured all too clearly the lusty exchange that was going on behind the yew hedge or a bank of roses. Delia not caring if she were discovered—actually delighting in it—then returning, licking those passion-ripe lips like a cat who had sampled forbidden cream.
Yet never, in all his years with Delia, had the pain been this brutal.
“Oh, Papa,” Cassandra said, as if realization had just dawned on her. “You are upset because she has danced with his lordship? If you ask me, you are the one who owes her an apology.”
“Owe her?”
“I don’t see why you should act like the maligned hero of some melodrama since you didn’t offer to dance with her yourself! You could hardly expect her to stand by the wall with the buck-toothed Misses Baldrey, could you?”
“Cassandra, I—” Aidan stopped, grimaced. She was right. He was sulking in the corner with all the finesse of the confused, hurting, betrayed youth he’d been when Delia held his heart. He was acting for all the world like a lovesick fool. The knowledge enraged him, terrified him, spurring him to straighten, to draw away from the pillar upon which he’d been leaning. He had watched his first wife parade countless lovers before his face, but Norah… No, he’d not allow any man—especially a pompous ass like Philip Montgomery—to touch so much as the hem of her gown.
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