The Blood of Roses

by Marsha Canham

  Satisfied, he lifted aside the curtain and stepped into the muted light cast by the fire. The red wool of his tunic glowed like fresh-spilled blood; his white crossbelts and tall black leather boots reflected the shine of the night lamp, as did the dark, narrowed eyes. Still wary of a misplaced footfall, he moved cautiously to the door leading to the outer hall and, after listening for any sounds from without, coaxed the key around in a full circle until a faint click told him it was locked. Stealthily he removed the key and slotted it into a pocket of his tunic.

  The ease with which his mission had been accomplished put a smile on his face as he made his way back to the foot of the bed. He stood and stared down at Catherine’s sleeping form where she lay nestled against a soft bank of pillows, her blonde hair loose and spread beneath her in a pool of molten gold. The covers had been partially displaced, leaving the pale curve of a slender shoulder bared to his hungry gaze.

  At first glance he had thought her to be naked, and his heart had thudded so loudly in his ears he felt sure the sound would waken her. A second, more devastating scrutiny caught the sheen of silk molded around the breathtaking perfection of a breast, and his mouth went dry; his senses wavered and threatened to abandon him to the urgent needs building in his body.

  His hands trembled noticeably as he unfastened the row of ornate brass buttons that ran down the stiff red wool of his jacket. Slipping his arms free, he shrugged the garment to the floor, where it was joined moments later by his belts and sash, the high-collared scarlet waistcoat, and white powdered periwig. He pulled the tails of his shirt free of the tight-fitting uniform breeches and, unwinding the starched ties from around his neck, lifted it up and over his head in a motion that caused the muscles across his chest and shoulders to flex in the gleam of firelight.

  Catherine stirred and made a soft purring sound deep in her throat as she sought a warmer hollow in the mattress. The covers slipped further and she dreamed of searching fingertips skimming over the taut peak of her nipple, of naked, heated flesh pressing against hers, and of long, skillful fingers stroking deftly into the aching junction of her thighs.

  She knew the dream would not last and a small frown of dismay formed across her brow. All the craven sensations, so long denied, were flooding into her loins and curling upward like a wave of thick, rich cream. There was pressure where she longed most to feel it and she moaned, parting her thighs willingly, melting against the insistent, probing tension until the sheer layer of silk was wet and slippery with her need.

  The pressure was so real … the pleasure so intense, she cried out and pushed herself closer to the new source of warmth, and for as long as it took her to realize it was not a dream, she was not alone in the bed, her body continued to respond, to urge a deeper intimacy. The violet-blue eyes snapped open. The very real presence of muscle and bone and hard male sinew brought a jarring halt to all sensations in her body and a scream of pure terror bubbling to her lips.

  The scream was stifled before it was fully formed. The same hand that bore the faint musk of her arousal was clamped firmly over her mouth, while a naked, muscular leg was thrown overtop her own before she could thrash herself free. Blinded by fear, knowing only that she had to escape, Catherine struck out with her fists, pushing and writhing against the great wall of muscle that threatened to crush her. She managed to land a solid blow to his temple and was gathering steam for another when she heard a softly muttered Gaelic oath.

  Her fist froze in midair and her eyes widened. Certain her mind was playing some dreadful hoax, her body tensed and her heart skipped several beats.

  “A hell of a greeting for a wife to give her husband,” Alex murmured, his hand still in place over her mouth, but easing slightly so that it was almost a caress. Indeed, as she continued to stare up at him in shock, the hand slid around to cradle the side of her neck and the pressure of his lean fingers was replaced by the possessive warmth of his lips.

  “Alex?” She gasped. “Oh, God … Alex?”

  “You were expecting someone else, perhaps?” He leaned back and let the firelight play havoc with the glimmering wash of silk. “Come to think of it, you certainly look as if you were expecting someone.”

  “N-no. No! No, I … I …” Her hands trembled up to his cheeks as if to confirm he was real flesh and blood. “Please … tell me I’m not dreaming.”

  “You are not dreaming,” he assured her, kissing each disbelieving eyelid with a gentleness that caused a sob to catch in her throat. “I’m here. I’m real.”

  “But … how did you get here? I thought … I mean, Damien said it would be too dangerous for you to come here … that I was to wait for a message …”

  Alexander’s hands moved down her body compulsively, as if he could not stop their actions now that she was finally in his arms.

  “When Damien impressed upon me the fragile nature of your patience”—his palm encircled the heavy softness of her breast—“I found my own condition to be rather indelicate as well. Far too indelicate to bother with cloak-and-dagger nonsense.”

  “But the soldiers … the militia …”

  Alex’s gaze followed his hand. His thumb stroked the velvety crown of her nipple, and he watched it grow taut and rigid beneath its veil of silk. Catherine’s eyes were fixed unwaveringly on his face, on the square, rugged jaw-line, the dark slash of eyebrows, the twin crescents of long black lashes. She felt the motion of his thumb and she felt the pressure from each individual finger against her breast. Icy shivers of anticipation raced across the surface of her flesh, growing more and more insistent at each slow circuit of his thumb.

  Suddenly the obsidian eyes were gazing deeply into hers. The muscles in his arms were tense and unyielding, his body seemed strained to the limit of his composure. Was it her imagination, or had the months of rigorous army life added even more strength, developed even more formidable breadth to his shoulders and chest, whittled a lean new hardness to his waist and hips? His hair was as long and unruly as she remembered it, and, responding to an impulse, her fingers released the thin black ribbon binding it and let the glossy waves spill free and curl forward over his shoulders.

  His hands had not been idle. They had roved lower on the smooth, silk-clad outline of her hips and thighs, and returned with the captured hem of the nightdress. He drew it above her waist and left it in a shimmering crumple under her arms while he sent his fingers skimming back down into the soft golden thatch below her belly. Catherine endured the first light, delicious strokes in silence, awed by the sweet, sharp ache of shameless pleasure. But as the incursions became deeper and more determined, she rose against him, arched against the shivering torment with a need she could neither conceal nor deny.

  “Easy, love,” he whispered. “Easy.”

  “I … can’t.” She gasped. “It’s been so long. I—I’ve missed you so badly.”

  “Shhh. I’m here now.”

  “I didn’t know if you were alive or dead. I didn’t know if I would ever see you again, if you would ever come back to me. I began to wonder if I had imagined it all … everything … Achnacarry … everything.”

  A sob of sheer ecstasy was torn from her throat as he lowered his dark head to her breast. His lips claimed the tightly crinkled nipple, drawing the succulent flesh into the heated well of his mouth where it was taunted and tormented with the same skillful thoroughness his fingers were demonstrating elsewhere. When she was a breath away from orgasm, he withdrew his hand and his mouth covered hers, smothering her harsh groan of frustration. His tongue plunged repeatedly over and around hers, the sensations coiling downward and inward until she felt like a molten sheet of flame.

  His mouth blazed a trail of fire from the underside of her chin down past the laboring rise and fall of her breasts. From there his tongue swirled onto her belly and into the seductive little indent of her navel. Restlessly he traveled lower, prompting shocked reverberations that weakened each of her limbs and made her quiver with expectation as he eased them apart. His hands c
urved beneath her hips and held her firm while his lips and tongue explored the tender pink junction, lashing over and over again at the remaining shreds of her composure.

  Reaching down with frantic, disbelieving hands, she clawed her fingers into the thick, raven mane of his hair. Her lips drew back in a soundless cry as hot, shivering spirals of pleasure whorled through her body and, tasting them, delving for them, his tongue set wave upon wave of fiery convolutions rippling inward and outward until she stiffened and shuddered again and again and again.

  With a groan that mocked his own self-restraint, Alex rose above her, his muscles bunched and trembling, his hands shaking where they still cradled her hips. He drew her forward and upward into his first thrust, burying himself so deep there was not a breath or gasp between them, no nerve left unscathed by the joining. She locked her arms around him, locked her legs around him, helpless to forestall the white-hot surge of ecstasy that gripped them both in endless volleys of sharp, blinding pleasure.

  Dazed, they clung together, straining and writhing with the need to savor each prolonged tremor until it shimmered into memory. Only then did pent-up breaths make a startled, rushed release; only then did the shivering, quaking tension drain away to leave the two damp, entwined bodies collapsed and panting softly against one another. From somewhere Alex found the strength to raise his flushed face from her shoulder and kiss her—a kiss as honest and naked in its emotion as the shine betrayed in his eyes.

  “I did not think a man could miss his wife as much as I have missed you,” he admitted shakily. “A mistress,’ aye. As a former rogue, content in my bachelorhood, I could more easily understand the intrigue and fascination there … but a wife?”

  Catherine’s eyes opened slowly, two dark pools of violet swimming with unshed tears of happiness. His lips caressed each lid, the tip of her nose, the luscious pout of her lips, and her arms tightened reflexively, as did her limbs, when she felt him start to ease himself away.

  “Please don’t,” she pleaded softly. “Don’t leave me just yet.”

  “I have no intentions of leaving you. I just thought—”

  “Don’t think. Don’t do anything. Just hold me … as close as you can.”

  Aware of his superior weight, Alex compromised by gently rolling with her onto his side. He wrapped his arms tightly around her and Catherine pressed her face into his shoulder, the inner turbulence of her emotions finally seeking relief through quietly muffled tears.

  “Catherine—” He brushed his lips over her temple and stroked a hand through the tousled length of her hair. “I never meant for this to happen. I never wanted you to worry about me or be afraid. If there had been any other way to ensure your safely, I never would have let you out of my sight, you must know that.”

  “Sometimes”—her voice caught on a sob—“I think I would rather risk any danger on earth than suffer such loneliness as I have these past months.”

  His arms hugged her closer.

  “The rest of the time”—she angled her head upward, her face streaked and shining—“has been spent contemplating divorce, revenge … even murder. Three months, Alex. Three months and you never once wrote to me. Not a note, not a letter, not one single paltry word to let me know you were still alive.”

  “I wrote hundreds of them … thousands. In my head. Every day.”

  She dashed the back of her hand across her cheeks to dry them and glared. “As if anyone could ever read what was in your head.”

  “You can if you try.” He cradled her chin in his hand. “Look again.”

  Catherine did indeed look. And they were all there: The hundreds and thousands of words and feelings he had been unable to commit to paper were gleaming deep within the midnight depths, thrilling her with fresh shivers that prickled all the way to her toes.

  “Oh, Alex, when you are with me, I know you love me,” she cried, burrowing against his shoulder again. “But when you are hundreds of miles away … it just isn’t the same.”

  “I guess it isn’t. Mind you, I didn’t exactly see a flood of mail coming from this direction.”

  Catherine pushed herself upright. She stared into his eyes another long moment before twisting out of his arms and climbing off the bed. With the rucked-up folds of the gossamer gown sliding back down to gild her body, she snatched the lamp from the night table and disappeared inside the dressing room. A loud scrape and bang of a drawer conveyed her anger, and when she returned to the bedside, her arms were full of unposted letters. After dumping them unceremoniously on the bed, she planted her hands on her hips and favored him with a scowl.

  “I did not know where to send them.”

  Alex dragged his gaze away from her face and scanned the impressive pile of letters. Most were several pages thick, folded into wads that required several seals and a string binding to hold together.

  He reached a tentative hand out to select one but, with an angry gesture, Catherine brushed them all to the floor.

  “No. What’s in them doesn’t matter anymore. They were … a way of passing the time.”

  “Catherine, I am sorry. But your husband is supposed to be away in the colonies,” he reminded her gently. “How would you go about explaining letters and notes that arrived regularly from northern England? Or suppose they were intercepted and opened? I doubt if even your quick wit could produce an adequate excuse for being in receipt of letters from a captain in the Jacobite army. Especially if they contained anything half as inflammatory as most thoughts I have about you.”

  “Don’t try to wriggle out of it by being logical and rational.”

  “All right, I won’t.” His arms snaked out and curled around her waist, pulling her back down onto the bed in a flurry of silk. “I’ll make it up to you instead, by being perverse and avaricious.”

  His mouth made good on the threat, and when the kiss ended, she was flushed and laughing as she clung to his broad shoulders. She was also naked, the nightdress flung up and away somewhere in the shadows.

  “How did you get in here tonight? The militiamen have the manor surrounded.”

  “One of them was generous enough to lend me the use of his uniform.”

  She frowned and raised her head, peering at the door. “You just walked into the house and came up the stairs to my room?”

  “I came in the same way any lusty Romeo would think to come—by way of a very obliging trellis that leads straight from the ground up to heaven. Remind me to show you how to keep those doors locked from now on; that latch isn’t worth a damn.”

  “It wasn’t meant to keep out intruders, only drafts.”

  “Nevertheless, I want you to keep it locked tightly when you are in here alone.”

  “And when I’m not? Alone, I mean.”

  The dark sapphire eyes narrowed consideringly. “By all means leave the doors unlatched. But choose your lovers carefully, madam, with an eye toward swiftness and an ability to fly, for if I ever paid a visit unannounced and found some addlebrained Lothario trespassing on territory I have clearly staked as my own …”

  A growl defined the consequences, and Catherine welcomed the roughness of his kiss as well as the lusty stirrings elsewhere in his body. Unfortunately, another fit of muffled laughter brought an unwanted end to both intimacies.

  “You find the prospect of infidelity amusing?” he demanded with a frown.

  “Only the sudden image of my vaunted lord and husband chasing some hapless scoundrel about the room at the tip of his sword.”

  “Your own pretty buttocks would find nothing to smile about, I assure you.”

  “They have nothing to fear,” she said, and pressed a chaste, tender kiss over his lips. “For the situation will never arise. You are lover enough for me in this lifetime … indeed, ten lifetimes.”

  Snorting contentedly, Alex shifted his weight lower on the bed and rested his head between the firm white mounds of her breasts. He kept one arm curled around her waist and a muscular leg hooked over hers so that it was impossible for
her not to be aware of the masculine texture of his body. She traced her fingertips over the hard-surfaced flesh of his shoulders, marveling that she did not suffer the least pangs of immodesty. Six months ago she would have died from shame had anyone glimpsed a bare ankle, and the thought of lying naked with a man—even a husband—would have mortified her to the very core. Yet here she was, very happily naked, cradling a magnificently naked man to her breast and wishing with all her heart his mouth was a scant inch or two more to the right.

  In an effort to exhibit some measure of restraint, she turned her thoughts to safer subjects.

  “Have you had any word from Achnacarry? Is everyone well? Lady Maura, Jeannie, dear Auntie Rose?”

  “The news is erratic, naturally, but the last we heard, everyone was fine. I imagine Maura has her hands full keeping the household running smoothly. Rose had a bout of the ague—it seems to settle in her bones every fall—but she’s coping. And Jeannie … well, Jeannie is Jeannie. She was fit to be tied when both Donald and Archibald forbade her to accompany the army, and I don’t expect she is making anyone’s life a joy as a result.”

  “Jeannie wanted to march to war with you?”

  “Scots women are a strong breed, didn’t you know? Some take up the sword and fight right alongside their men. Others … well, they leave the fighting to the men but contribute their, er, services in other equally vital areas.”