Fear and resentment sharpened her voice. “What does that mean?”
The hesitation, before Sabrina responded to his invitation struck Perce like a blow in the face. She had always been as eager as he, even the previous night when she was terrified and exhausted. But perhaps that was why. Perhaps last night she had not yet absorbed the fact that she was really and truly free now and could have any man she wanted. Had she taken him as a lover only because knew she could trust him? No! Not Brina.
“It was meant as a subtle invitation,” Perce said without inflection, but he could not meet Sabrina’s eyes. If there was refusal, contempt, in them, he could not bear to see it.
“I’m not stupid. I know that,” she replied. “Why suddenly bother with subtle invitations?”
“It wouldn’t have been very tactful to ask you before,” Perce said dryly. “Legally and morally you should have refused me. If I didn’t ask, you didn’t have to consider that. The situation is different now.”
The pressure of his hand on hers lightened infinitesimally. Sabrina knew he was about to lift it. Was he hoping she would refuse so he could escape from the relationship? A sense of loss swept her and she turned her hand and seized his fingers. Muddled bits of thoughts flicked through her mind—that she loved him, that she could be so good a wife he would learn to be glad of the marriage, that if he did not want her, she could not trap him in his own goodness, that the kindness he had offered was more cruel than unkindness would have been. But blanketing over all her thoughts was a rush of desire, a need to have him before she had to renounce him. She would never force Perce to do anything, because his happiness was more important to her than her own.
The thoughts were so swift that they were in and out of Sabrina’s brain even as Perce was returning the pressure of her fingers and leaning forward to murmur, “Please, Brina.”
She made no answer to that except to turn more toward him and put her free arm around his neck. That was answer enough, of course. His lips met hers eagerly. It was eagerly, she assured herself. It was! Nor was there the smallest sign of reluctance or hesitation in the remainder of Perce’s program. True enough, he was in no hurry, although he had pulled off his own clothes very quickly after they broke the kiss. However, when she started to unbutton her blouse, he had told her sharply to stop.
The small chill generated by that rather harsh order had been warmed away quickly, when it became apparent that Perce intended to use the removal of her clothing as a form of foreplay. It was a completely delightful notion, Sabrina came to think as Perce’s lips followed his fingers wherever buttons were loosened and skin revealed. She shivered as what should have tickled and produced giggles—and did—also generated a violent sensuality.
When the blouse was gone and had been followed by breastband and petticoat, Perce caught Sabrina to him, eased her to the ground, and knelt beside her. All the while he proceeded with what he was doing, kissing midriff and breasts as he unbuttoned her pantalettes. He pushed them down, using the suggestive upward thrusts of Sabrina’s hips which lifted her buttocks from the ground. She freed herself of the final impediment, by kicking the garment off her feet while, Perce nuzzled and licked her abdomen.
Sabrina was uttering wordless cries of mingled frustration and excitement, and Perce did not mute her. There was no one to hear, no need to be silent or hurry for fear of discovery. Coherent thought was not really possible in the midst of the powerful sexual arousal, but in some deep recess of Perce’s mind there was the fixed intention of proving himself so desirable a lover that Sabrina would be unable to resist the memory.“
Using one hand to steady her hips, Perce positioned himself with the other. His own craving bade him thrust deep and hard, but he resisted it, merely inserting the head of his shaft teasingly and moving it so that the rod brushed the tenderest and most sensitive spot in her body. Sabrina was beside herself. She tried to heave against him but he held her firm. Her hands fluttered over him, unable to grip because she could not decide where she needed the greater pressure most. The featherlight touch of Perce’s tongue and lips on her breasts heightened excruciatingly the sensation produced by his shaft. Both tickled and titillated until the pleasure was piercingly near agony, and she shrieked in climax, scoring her lover’s back and thighs with her nails.
As the convulsions died away Perce slid himself into her completely and lay still. When Sabrina sighed and put up a hand to brush involuntary tears from her eyes, he began to move slowly. Sabrina moved in rhythm, assuming that he would now satisfy himself. She offered her lips in mute thanks, but Perce accepted them with other intentions, and soon his hands were busy too, stroking and tickling, seeking out areas already sensitized by handling.
After the violence of her preceding orgasm, Sabrina had not thought her body was capable of responding to further stimulation. To her surprise the steady, slow thrusts, the kisses and touches, the suggestive whispers broken by sighs and tremors indicative of Perce’s own pleasure, began to build a second heat in her. As her desire increased Perce slowed his movements, then stopped. Sabrina protested wordlessly, already caught up in the rhythm, but Perce slid a hand under her hips, pushed with his other arm, and lifted her on top of him. Surprise checked Sabrina’s building passion, then Perce thrust upward and she moved in response.
Instinct and desire are excellent teachers. In seconds Sabrina discovered the joys of free movement. She lifted herself on her elbows to free her breasts for Perce’s caresses while her hips plunged and ground. Her eyes opened. Perce was moaning, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God,” over and over, his neck stretched back and his head rolling from side to side. Catching sight of his extremity pitched Sabrina right into a second climax almost as violent as her first, and she collapsed on him, shaking and sobbing.
She was so stunned and exhausted that she hardly realized Perce had turned them again. He was lying quietly, but Sabrina opened her eyes wide at the realization that he was still full and hard inside her. His head was beside hers, his lips mumbling at the lobe of her ear. Sabrina pulled away as far as she could to focus her eyes on him. His were closed, and he was breathing heavily. He licked his lips and then reached blindly to kiss her throat.
“Don’t you dare,” Sabrina whispered shakily, and stretched down to run her fingernails very gently over his genitals and thighs.
Perce jerked. “No, don’t,” he begged.
His assaults on her had been so clever and her response so intense that she had not yet caressed him. “Two can play at that game,” Sabrina murmured, laughing and continuing to tease him.
“Don’t. Don’t,” Perce pleaded, his voice quivering between desperation and the edge of laughter, but his body was moving.
Sabrina thrust her tongue into his ear and drew her legs up around his back, simultaneously twisting so she could tickle the base of his shaft. His protests became incoherent, his thrusting stronger and more regular. She lifted to meet him, one hand toying with him in front, the other behind. His movements became frantic, jarring her with his ferocity before he went rigid, then heaved and cried out in release.
There was a long silence. In fact, when Sabrina opened her eyes again it was pitch black around them and she realized they had both fallen asleep immediately. She was warm enough, since Perce was still lying atop her, but she could feel him shivering in his sleep. She felt around for the cloaks as carefully as she could, but the movement wakened him, and he rolled off her at once, apologizing thickly for crushing her.
“I’m sturdier than you think,” Sabrina replied, and then, after they had found the cloaks which were close behind the blanket, and wrapped themselves, she added, “Perce, what were you trying to do—kill me in a peculiarly improbable way?”
Perce briefly considered telling her the truth, that he had wanted to prove himself a better lover than her husband or any other man she was likely to look at now that she was free.
“I wanted it to last forever,” he said, and that was not a lie either
. “Each time you climaxed I could feel it, and it was like heaven. Even making myself wait was wonderful.”
Jealousy pricked her. Perce always said he was not much of one for women. If that were so, where had he learned so much? Surely not from the casual whores he paid to relieve his body’s need from time to time. William had lied most convincingly. Was Perce a liar, too? On the other hand, the heroic effort he had made could only have been to please her, although he had phrased his answer in terms of his own pleasure. Surely he intended to make her permanently his. Yet he said nothing.
“What are we going to do now?’ Sabrina asked.
Perce chuckled. “You’d be horrified to know what came immediately to my mind. You are a terrible influence on me, Sabrina. If you don’t want to be ‘killed’ again, you’d better stay well away from me.”
Tears flooded into Sabrina’s eyes. Because of what she had been thinking, her question—in her mind—had related to their personal future. She had hoped Perce would say, “Get married as soon as we can.” Logic was not operating in any rational fashion in her, and for the moment Sabrina’s very lively sense of humor was dead. Both distortions of her reasoning combined to twist what Perce meant as teasing flattery into a rejection. Unfortunately Perce could not see her face, and he took the little sniff she made in fighting back her tears as a wordless comment on his humor and his suggestion.
His mind moved on to practical things. “I had no idea how dark it would be in here. You must be starving, and very thirsty, too, Brina, and—oh, God! I didn’t close the food bag or hang it up. It must be crawling with ants.”
Sabrina tried to get a grip on herself. That previous remark had sounded like a warning, but what was it supposed to mean? There was a crudity in such a direct warning off that was not at all like Perce. It was cruel, and he would not be deliberately cruel to her. Or would he? If he realized his kindness had led them both astray, would he believe that a brief, sharp pain of severance would be better than a slow wrenching away? She should ask for a plain, clear explanation, Sabrina knew, but she did not want to hear the answer.
“The apples and oranges should be all right,” she said in response to Perce’s remark about the food bag.
“If they haven’t rolled to kingdom come. Do you remember where the food bag was?”
As they crawled around, feeling for it, getting in each other’s way and finding extraneous things like boots and oddments of clothing, Sabrina realized how silly she had been in the last few minutes. It was ridiculous to think that Perce was going to make lifelong decisions in the middle of a forest where they might be lost. Obviously he was concentrating on immediate concerns, and if she were not an idiot, she would be, too. Eventually they found two apples and an orange.
Sabrina sat back on her heels, munching her apple while Perce tried to make holes in the orange so it could be sucked. “Could we make a fire?”
“I don’t know. This is a carpet of dry pine needles and dead leaves. I’m afraid the forest could catch fire.”
Sabrina reached to the edge of the blanket and dug her fingers into the pine needles, pushing them aside. Not far down she found what seemed to be solid, and damp, earth. “We could scrape away the pine needles,” she suggested, “except for a little pile in the middle. If you could light those, we could see whether the area around them would catch fire, too. If it did, we could put the blanket on it and step on it. That should put the fire out.”
Perce reached over, found her, drew her close, and kissed her. “You’ve more sense in your hair, Brina, than I have in my head,” he said admiringly.
Soon, using the spark from the unloaded pistol and a pinch of powder from the one he had not fired, Perce had a tiny fire going. By its light they cleared the area round it better so they could feed it twigs, more pine needles, and eventually larger dead branches. It was nice to have a fire, comforting, even though they did not need the warmth. If a shadow of doubt about the future remained in either of them, it was buried temporarily. A simple joy in each other’s company and in the success of their joint effort overlaid everything else.
When they had partially dressed, eaten part of what could be salvaged from the ants, and done their best to quench their thirst with another orange and apple each, Sabrina said, “We’ve been through a lot since last night—was it only last night?—but I can still hardly believe you’re here. How did you manage to pop up in Portugal just when I needed you most?”
“You can damn and blast that suspicious son of a cit Canning that I wasn’t here a week or two ago. Then none of this would have happened,” Perce replied bitterly, and told her how Bennigsen had secretly given him copies of the secret clauses in the Treaty of Tilsit and the action being taken to prevent them from hurting Britain. “He arranged to keep me nearly under house arrest until Lord Gambier sailed. Well, it was politer than that, but it amounted to the same thing.”
“But how did you get to Portugal?” Sabrina persisted.
Perce laughed. “That was Roger’s idea. Leave it to Roger to kill ‘seven with one blow’ whenever he can. I suppose Canning realized I was on the edge of telling him where to get off, and he knew he couldn’t really keep me bottled up any longer. He must have asked Roger, and Roger suggested that I be sent to fetch you home. But it was all part of the same ploy—Canning wanting to be rid of me because he thought my tongue would wag.” He paused a moment, then said coldly, “He’s no gentleman.”
So it hadn’t been Perce’s idea to come and get her, Sabrina thought, but hurriedly fixed her mind on what he had said. “No, Canning isn’t a gentleman,” she agreed. But Perce was. He would never fail to do and say what was right, the niceties that made life easy for others, even if it killed him. There must have been something funny in her voice, because he turned his head quickly to look at her. “He makes the most dreadful mistakes because of it,” Sabrina continued hastily. “He’s only clever about books and words and plans. I think he’s stupid about people. He accused William of being pro-Russian and wouldn’t listen at all when William begged that troops be sent to help the Russians. And now look what’s happened.”
Perce looked back at the fire. It seemed to him that Sabrina had been more disturbed by her late husband’s problems with Canning than was reasonable if she hadn’t cared for him. Yet she spoke of him easily, without any catch in her voice. It makes no difference what she felt, Perce told himself. He’s dead. And if it were the diplomatic post she was worried about, I can get into the service easily enough. He felt a temptation to ask outright for a commitment, but subdued it. It wasn’t fair.
“It’s just as well the British troops weren’t sent to Prussia,” Perce said, clinging to the impersonal topic. “They would have been slaughtered. Perhaps Alexander wouldn’t have been as bitter against us, but it’s hard to tell with him. He’s more man of mood than of reason, I’m afraid.”
Sabrina nodded acceptance. She was familiar with Alexander’s personality. “Is there no hope for Portugal?” she asked. “The people are so nice. The court’s dreadful; the queen is mad, the regent can’t make up his mind what day it is, not to mention anything else, and his wife is a religious fanatic. But the—well, we could call them squires—they’re brave. They’d fight if they had a leader or any help.”
Perce sighed. There isn’t any help we can give them just now. That idiot Windham had embarked on all kinds of stupid ventures. I understand we lost eight thousand men in Egypt, and Howick, who should have known better, paid off most of the transports in the interest of ‘economy’. Mulgrave’s doing his best with the navy, but there are still virtually no ships to move troops, and Castlereagh’s got about twelve thousand men available under arms. You know, Brina, this business with Spain and Portugal may be a feint.”
“You mean you think Boney’s planning an invasion of England again? But he can’t. He doesn’t have the ships.”
“Don’t be so sure. Philip says the French never stopped building transport barges, and if Gambi
er doesn’t take the Danish fleet and the Portuguese vessels fall into his hands, then Boney will have about three naval vessels for our two. Admittedly our men are better, but with Nelson dead and some of the senior admirals incompetent, those are bad odds.”
“I don’t think he’ll get the Portuguese fleet,” Sabrina said. “If Boney took it, it would never get out of harbor, but I hope it won’t come to that. William told me that Strangford is trying to convince the prince regent to flee to Brazil and take his entire fleet with him.”
“Flee to Brazil?” Perce echoed. “Leave his people?”
“They’ll be better off without him,” Sabrina said with a shrug. “I think he means well, but that wife of his pulls him one way, shrieking eternal damnation if he deals with the English heretics, and the business interests pull him another, saying Portugal will be ruined if he abandons the British trade, and he’s frightened to death of the French—”
“So am I,” Perce interrupted.
Sabrina smiled at him in the last of the fire’s light. “Not too frightened to fight them.”
Perce laughed shortly. “Too frightened not to fight them. Boney’s a vampire. He talks of unity and friendship, but he drains the blood out of any nation that makes terms with him.”
There was a brief silence while both considered this statement. Then Sabrina asked, “Perce, what will happen to us?” There was a tiny tremor in her voice.
Startled, Perce said, “Nothing, darling. We’ll find our way to the road tomorrow. Don’t worry.”
The Kent Heiress Page 40