“What other?” she scoffed. “I am an impoverished widow without family connection and past the first blush of youth. My highest aspiration is to live on the charity of a distant connection. There is no other, Kit, nor is there like to be.”
She pulled free of his clasp and lightly touched his face, the gesture oddly prim, a formal request, a petition and a plea. “There is only you. One night to hold against all the nights to come.”
“Is this some diabolical test?” His throat corded with veins. “If it is, how can I possibly succeed?” he demanded, his face stark in the leaping shadows. He grabbed her upper arms with sudden, implacable violence and dragged her up against him. “Listen to me, Kate. Nothing else but harm can come of my taking you here. Now. And I swore I would cause you no harm.”
“You also swore you would do anything I ask.” Her voice shook with her audacity.
He stared down at her, the light catching in the jade of his eyes, pearlizing the scar on his chin. His arms trembled, and his body tightened.
“As you will, ma’am,” he finally whispered. Then he was lowering her to her back on a pile of ruined satin and lace, silk and velvet. “What’s another mark to bear?”
He sat back on his heels and, with an easy fluid movement, unstrapped his claymore and stripped his shirt from his torso. His beauty was entirely masculine, rough and virile. Smooth, fine-grained flesh veiled heavy planes of muscle and bone. He tossed the shirt aside, and the biceps bunched in his arms, the sinew in his forearm flexing. He leaned over her, prowling up her body like a cat over a kill; the muscles in his flat belly jumped into relief.
For a long moment, he held her gaze before turning, deliberately exposing the welts on his back and something else. A thick, raised scar in the rough shape of a rose rode below his right shoulder blade.
“They branded us in France. At LeMons. The warden thought it amusing.”
Dear God, the pain he must have endured.
“I wanted you to see this. To drive home what I have been trying to tell you. No man who comes to your bed should be branded, Kate. Or wear scars from a whip. Only a commoner or a criminal would. I am as common as any man on God’s earth,” he said stonily. “I am unfit for your society, your company, or your bed, and that by any, any man’s, reckoning.”
The certainty in his eyes decided her. He expected her to cringe away. She saw it in his expression, the resignation that lay beneath his calm words.
She wrapped her arms around his neck. “By any man’s reckoning, Kit MacNeill, there is nothing common about you.” He was warm to the touch, his naked flesh smooth against hers.
His beautiful eyes blazed with sudden triumph. “I will find tenderness. I will give you pleasure, Kate, or I will die in trying.”
He grinned then and was suddenly, overwhelmingly, a creature of masculine sexuality. All traces of conflict vanished from his expression. His eyes had gone velvety with intent. In one bold movement, he swept the chemise from her shoulder, baring her breasts.
“Kit—”
Before another word could escape her lips, he covered her mouth.
Desire rode him hard, driving him with brutal spurs. But he would not act. He would not, though her breasts weighed soft in his hands and her nipples puckered, a trap set to annihilate his best intentions. She’d asked for tenderness, and he’d promised to do whatever she asked, and if in keeping that promise he singed himself on the blast furnace of tamped desire, so be it.
He swept her up into his arms and rose, his jaw tightening at the way she shrank, praying for restraint, all the while fully aware he had none. The bed was a step away, and he lowered her to the mattress, looking down at her. Yet not for an instant did he mistake what she wanted for what he wanted to give. That would never be his place. For one night he would be her lover, if not her beloved.
He lowered his head, telling himself to be gentle, to be easy.
She did not react at once to his kiss. He did not need her response. Indeed, her active participation might well have destroyed his self-imposed restraint. He rained light kisses upon her cheeks and eyelids and her temples. His head swam with bliss and lust. He could taste her, not just on his tongue, but in the very air, musky and womanly.
He lowered himself, hissing with pleasure as her soft breasts yielded beneath his chest. And when he felt her clasp his shoulders, her long fingers digging into the muscles and her neck arching back, his body quaked. He plunged his hands into the waves of dark hair, damp and cool in the night air, and feasted on her mouth. Silk, satin, velvet? They were not comparisons he could make. He knew little of silk, less of satin, and naught at all of velvet, but surely nothing on earth could be sleeker than her hair, nothing smoother than her flesh, nothing softer than her lips.
Her mouth opened fully and her tongue met his, playing havoc with his self-control. He rolled, carrying her atop him, her thighs spread across his hips, his arousal thrust into the lee of her legs.
Kate gasped with pleasure at the foreign-familiar sensation. She wanted this. Wanted him inside her. A throbbing had begun where he lodged against her, one that needed him inside her to assuage it.
She grew shameless in her quest. She sprawled over his body, rubbing against him, her invitation clear. She wanted him. She needed him. She could not make her need any clearer, and yet he seemed content to play at open-mouthed kisses and slow, languid petting, his hand stroking her idly.
“Please,” she panted, frustrated.
“No. Not yet,” Kit breathed heavily. The tip of his finger traced a circle around her nipple. She flinched at the delicate touch, overly sensitized and overwhelmed, and felt his erection prod her thigh in response. She rocked against him, and he clasped her hips, pulling her hard against him, stilling her movements, his eyes as dark and violent as his lips were tender and soft.
“Stay,” he growled. “I am only human, and if you do that again, then all your hopes for a gentle union will be for naught and all my best intentions destroyed. I am holding on, ma’am. But only just.”
Rather than daunting her, his words stimulated her. That he would harness his desire at her request filled her with a sense of power as elemental as it was feminine. But within seconds, her moment of ascendancy evaporated beneath a new onslaught of sensation.
He lifted her by the shoulder and lowered her upper body above his head, hungrily drawing her nipple into his mouth. He suckled her. She gasped, arching more fully, and he squeezed her breast gently between strong fingers, his tongue swirling against the tip of her breast, turning the muscles in her thighs liquid and stealing the breath from her lungs. She nearly swooned, but he caught her, holding her suspended a few inches above him so he could more easily do what he wanted, play and fondle and suckle and nip, and Heaven help her, she could do nothing but revel in his mastery and give herself to his passionate use.
Between her legs, she’d grown wet and sleek with readiness. A rhythm called that her body answered. She moved on him, once again, the feeling between her thighs expanding and contracting at the same time. He tried to stop her, his hand rough in his attempt to hold her still, but she did not care what she risked; anything was worth the price. She rocked against him, each movement settling her more fully on him, the thick ridge beneath her petticoat pulsing with exquisite reaction.
With a low, desperate sound, he caught her up and dumped her flat on her back, his lower body pressing her down into the mattress, stilling her. “Not yet.”
“Yes.”
“Kiss me.” He commanded her, and like a trollop she complied, hungrily pulling his head down. Their kiss was rough, passionate, his nascent beard abrading her tender lips, bruising her mouth. For long minutes she fed the passion he’d incited, wanting him, wanting an end, a release, one brief night to release her from the last four years of her life.
“Kate!” She had found the limits of his self-restraint. Her mons pumped urgently against him. He growled. “Continue this, and I will have you in ways no lady could want.”
His green eyes narrowed between the banks of gilt lashes. “I will have you on your back and I will have you against the wall and I will take you on your knees. I will hear you sob and plead for my touch, and then you will plead again, and I will have you again.”
Fearlessly, she gazed up at him, her hair spread like a mantle of night across the pale linen.
“Is that what you want, Kate? Because, by God, I can give you that. It’s what I am. But Kate, I would… Let me make love to you.” His voice shook with the force of his emotions, and Kate’s eyes darkened with understanding.
He had no idea. But then, until now, neither had she. Amazement filled her, and she reached up, stroking his cheek. He turned his head into the caress, closing his eyes and pressing a hot kiss in the center of her palm.
“I want you as you are, Kit. As we are.” She stroked him, beginning at one big, scarred shoulder, down the velvety ladder of his ribs, to his hip, and from there burrowed between them, delving beneath the front placket of his trousers and curling her fingers around his erection. He whispered what might have been a curse or a prayer. “This is making love, Kit.”
The hot flesh moved like a satin sheath over the hard core of him, exciting and wicked and exquisitely male. He sank forward over her, his forehead coming to rest against hers for a short, intense instant. Then he rolled her to her side, the movement pulling him out of her hand.
He wrenched her petticoat up, revealing the dark curls at the apex of her thighs. His breathing had grown heavy, his lean face stark as he cupped her mound without haste but without delicacy, a gesture of masculine possession. She reacted with a gasp of pleasure, and a smile illuminated his dark, tense features.
He caressed her, and she should have burned with mortification at the familiarity, the certainty with which he fondled and explored her, but she burned for another reason altogether. Her eyelids drifted shut. Her breath grew shallow and quick. Again and again he stroked her, and with each caress her hips rose, pleasure mingling seamlessly with arousal.
She twisted on the sheets, her petticoat rucked up under her waist, her body hot and needy. Helplessly, she opened her eyes and found him watching her.
She did not want to be alone. She held out her arms. “Kit. Please.”
“Kate. I am trying—”
“Please!”
With an inarticulate sound, he wrenched the front of his trousers open. She had a glimpse of a stiff and swollen erection rising from a dark thicket, and then he was rolling her beneath him, spreading her thighs with his knees, his head fallen into the vee of her neck. His mouth opened on her throat as he lifted her hips and then, there! He drove into her, trying to hold back, trying not to seat himself too deeply with this first thrust, but her hips rose to meet his entry and he took her, filling her.
She cried out, and he cursed, stopping. “I swear I could not—”
“No!” she panted. “No. It is just that …You feel …so…”
“I cannot be…” he said helplessly, misunderstanding. “This is my body. It… I cannot be less.”
“I would not want you to be,” she breathed, and at his startled look she half laughed, half sobbed, need rippling through her. He’d begun to withdraw, but now he stopped. She moaned softly.
He was a big man in all ways. She wanted that. She lusted for it. She lifted her hips and clung to his shoulders and squeezed her eyes shut and bucked to meet his next thrust. Another. And another. He plunged deeper now, the cadence taking hold of him, but he never lost his awareness of her.
He knew with each thrust the body receiving him was Kate’s, the mouth he plundered was Kate’s. He felt the impression of each finger clasping his shoulders, heard each little shivering gasp. He cupped her soft buttocks and rolled over so that she sat straddling him, her knees bent either side of his hips. Her eyes widened, startled by the feeling of him still deep within her.
“This is better,” he managed. “I’m too heavy and— Ah!”
She’d lowered herself more fully upon him. Her back arched and her hair fell down her back and trailed across his thighs, silky and fine as kitten fur. He would surely die of pleasure. He cupped her soft, pale breasts, kneading them as she rose and settled, riding him with increasing neediness. Her face grew tense with yearning.
“Use me, Kate,” he whispered in a hot, wicked voice. “Use me. I would pleasure you, Kate, I would service you and have you pleasure yourself with me, on me.”
The words were a litany of passion and desire, a carnal recitation of want and need, and she heard and heeded, her body tightening, the aching narrowing to a shuddering throb, a point of ever-concentrated passion. She sobbed and he stroked her, she bucked and gasped and… and then… The world trembled, spiraled, and exploded outward. Pleasure suffused her, liquid and molten, and she cried out with the exquisite culmination.
For a long moment she was suspended there, the world both vortex and vacuum. And when she had finished, she collapsed against Kit’s sweat-sheened chest.
But after the last tremors subsided, she heard the thick pounding of his heart, a rhythm at such variance with the tender caress of his hand that she rose once more to her knees. Her hands splayed across his chest, and she dug her nails lightly into his flesh. She looked into his heated gaze.
“I didn’t beg,” she challenged him.
He laughed, rolled her beneath him, and captured her hands, holding them above her head as he drove deep and smoothly into her.
“Not yet,” he agreed.
SEVENTEEN
DEALING WITH ERRORS IN JUDGMENT
“MRS. BLACKBURN!” MEG CALLED through the chamber door.
“What is it, Meg?” Kate came awake knowing she was alone.
“There’s a carriage from the castle standing in the yard come to fetch you.”
Kate looked around the room. Kit was gone. Her dresses were gone, too. Only debris littered the floor. The trunk still lay on its side.
Meg tapped on the door. “What should I tell the driver?”
She stood up. She should be assuring Meg of her imminent departure, bounding from the bed to pack what she could salvage of Grace’s belongings. But she stayed, wrapping the thin blanket around her, woefully aware that she felt no pleasure in the fact that the marquis had sent his carriage for her.
She was a fool.
“This night is mine,” Kit had whispered at one point. They’d both known no future awaited them beyond this chamber’s door. He’d left before she’d awakened, and she should be grateful, she told herself.
In the heated darkness she might pretend, but morning brought familiar desperation: she wanted those things she’d once had—security and safety. She wanted to breathe freely, laugh heedlessly, and close her eyes without the next day looming like an enemy. She wanted the life she’d once had back.
Even if he’d asked her to stay with him—which he hadn’t—and even if she would have been tempted to say yes—which she wouldn’t—what prospects did they have, a penniless soldier and an impoverished widow? Within a year or two, she would be exactly where she stood now, at the threshold of regret, yearning for the past and fearful of the future.
She might be a coward, but she was a sensible coward.
“Ma’am?” Meg called again. “Are you feeling quite yourself?”
How was she to feel herself when she was no longer clear on whom that was? Abruptly, she dropped the blanket. Enough. Nothing had changed. She would put last night from her, stow it away like a maid’s tender dreams. Forget it.
If only her body didn’t remember what she was trying so hard to forget.
If only Kit MacNeill seemed more like what he was and less like what she wanted him to be.
“I heard someone come in and wrecked yer things, but I swear I had no to do wid it.” Meg called plaintively, alarmed by her continued silence. “Ma’am!”
“Yes! I’ll be there at once.” Viciously, Kate pinched her ch
eeks and bit down on her lips. The marquis had sent his carriage. It was an auspicious beginning, one she had to avail herself of. But garbed in what manner? She spied something white wedged between the bed and wall. Her chemise. She snatched it up. It was Kit’s shirt.
Her eyes squeezed painfully shut. Her hands fisted in the thin material, his imagined warmth seeping into her palms, the masculine musk subtle and evocative.
“Please, ma’am. Yer frightenin’ me. Open the door,” Meg implored. “I have the dresses tha cap give me to fix,” she called hopefully.
Forcing herself to the door, Kate pulled it open. Meg waited without, Kate’s gowns draped over her arm. On her other arm swung a small sewing basket, the cushioned top sprouting pins and needles threaded with silk.
Meg’s mouth gaped when she saw the room. “Ach! Look what they done to yer things.”
“They aren’t mine. They belonged to my cousin Grace and her husband,” Kate answered tonelessly. “She sent them to me before she died. I was returning them to the marquis.”
“Must have been someone lookin’ fer money, and when they dinna find any they took it out on these things. Filthy buggers,” Meg said, setting the dresses on the bed.
Meg righted the trunk and pulled the ripped lining back into place before pinning it there. “A few stitches, and this will be right as rain.” She didn’t wait for Kate’s approval but sank to her knees by the trunk and, with a few neat movements, tacked the lining back into place.
Kate moved among the litter, listlessly collecting a few of the books and stacking them on the bottom of the trunk. So much ruined. So much lost.
“There now, ma’am, you needn’t look so glum,” Meg said, standing up. “Here. Look what I managed, and ye’ll feel a sight better.” She shook out the blue gown and held it up for Kate’s inspection. “There was a nasty bit near the hem, but I used the ribbons to cover it up, see?
“And I cut the stained panel out of the purple one and stitched it back up again. Won’t make no difference, seein’ how slender you are, ma’am.”
My Seduction Page 17