This Side of Heaven

by Karen Robards

  So far she had watched him in silence, though her eyes, peeping at him over the edge of the blanket, had grown bigger with each garment that he stripped away. Now he felt vaguely self-conscious, but determined too to show her all there was of him to see, and so shucked his breeches down his legs, shoved them aside with his foot, and stood before her in all his naked glory.

  Her eyes were fastened on his member, huge and stiff as it stuck straight out from its bed of wiry black hair. As he looked at her looking at him, for one of the few times in his entire adult life Matt felt himself start to blush.

  She seemed very young and very virginal, all big-eyed and pale as she gaped at him, her masses of black hair tumbling loose on either side of her face making her appear scarcely more than a child. Did the sight of him horrify her? Disgust her? Frighten her?

  If she was truly too distressed from seeing him so to proceed, would he be able to force himself to leave her alone?

  Yes, Matt told himself firmly, he would. If it killed him, he would give her time to get used to this new knowledge of men before he took the lesson any further.

  Though from the way he was feeling at present, kill him it just might.

  He waited in trepidation as she swallowed and lifted huge shadowy eyes to his face.

  “Is that all there is to it?” she asked as if marveling at a long-feared object’s innocuousness.

  For a moment Matt couldn’t believe his ears. Then he gaped at her like a wantwit. Finally he let loose with a shout of laughter. He was still chuckling as he crawled beneath the blanket and gathered her into his arms.

  40

  “ ’T is not funny! What are you laughing at?”

  Indignant that he should be so consumed with hilarity at such a time, Caroline punched him on the shoulder. He winced, caught her fist in his hand, and pressed his lips to her clenched knuckles. But his chest still heaved with laughter he could not quite suppress as he held her close against him.

  “I take it you were expecting something different?” The question was polite. Too polite. Caroline knew that he was still vastly amused, though she could not quite figure out why.

  “From the feel of the thing, I thought it was huge,” she said, a shade resentful because of his laughter at her expense that she could not share and could not understand why that sent him into guffaws again. He laughed until he choked, his arms holding her tight all the while as if he were scared that she would take umbrage and leave—which she might well have done if she hadn’t been as naked as a babe, and shy with it.

  When at last he had done laughing, he lay spent against the plush fur beneath them, his head pillowed on a saddlebag, his eyes alight.

  “I’m afraid there’s no more than that.” His tone was apologetic, but Caroline knew when she was being made sport of. Still, he looked so handsome, so happy and at ease with his eyes a sparkling bright blue and his mouth stretched into a wide grin that made him look dazzlingly young and carefree, that she could not work herself up to a true anger, though she still did not understand what had provoked him to such paroxysms of mirth.

  “If you’re going to laugh at me, then I’m going to sleep,” she said, flouncing onto her side and presenting her back to him just to see what he would do. Immediately he leaned over her, his body close against hers beneath the coverings that were piled atop them both. She could feel the whole hard length of him from his wide chest with its thick wedge of hair, to the powerful muscles of his legs and thighs, to the throbbing heat of that part of him that had been the subject of their conversation as it pressed against the roundness of her buttocks.

  “Oh, no, you’re not. Not just yet.”

  His arm slid around her waist, his hand seeking and finding a naked breast. Caroline felt a quiver of pleasure, stunning in its very unexpectedness, shoot clear to her toes as his fingers rubbed across her nipple. His hand splayed over the soft mound, squeezing and caressing, causing her breast to swell into his molding palm. She had not guessed that any part of the physical act between a man and a woman could feel good, but this felt unbelievably so. Then his hand strayed to her other breast, treated it as he had the first, and the resulting bedazzlement disrupted her breathing. Arching her neck so that he could more thoroughly address himself to the side of it, Caroline felt languid heat begin to coil in her belly, and she trembled.

  “I love to touch your skin. I wondered for a long time if it could possibly feel as soft as it looks. It does.”

  The thickened quality of his voice was wildly seductive. Caroline quaked under the combined assault of words, kisses, and roving hands as, brushing the heavy curtain of her hair aside, Matt pressed quick burning kisses on her sensitive nape, then trailed his warm mouth along her shoulder and back again to rest, nibbling, in the delicate hollow below her ear. His beard, so masculine in its harsh abrasion that it made her bones melt, scraped across her tender skin. With one hand he continued to stroke and fondle her breasts while his other hand, sliding around her waist from beneath her, moved over her belly to explore her navel with a questing finger. Then his hand flattened and slid lower, covering that part of her to which she had never affixed a name. Instinctively she wriggled a protest, trying to shift his hold to some less intimate place, but he would not be dislodged.

  “Trust me, poppet,” he whispered in her ear. Caroline was briefly reminded of Eve and the serpent, who must once have murmured something very similar. But then his long fingers were moving lower yet, sliding down between her legs to touch her there so gently that the fire that ignited inside her as a result was almost shameful, and she no longer entertained any rational thoughts at all. Because surely that undemanding pressure should not in itself be enough to create such an inner burning! It was like liquid fire, a most pleasurable liquid fire that made her breathing quicken until she was almost panting and her body writhe against the hand that caressed her and the hard male body pressed close against her back.

  Her eyes were closed, but she was aware of him with every pore. His breathing grew increasingly hoarse as he slid his mouth and unshaven jaw along the sensitive chord on the side of her neck. His arms enfolded her, the fronts of his hair-roughened thighs pressed against the backs of her silky ones, his broad shoulders dwarfed her own. He held her close against him so that she could feel the enormity of his maleness jutting against the nakedness of her rounded buttocks—funny how the thing felt so much more menacing than it looked! He caressed her breasts and explored the secret place between her thighs until she was shaken with involuntary tremors, in thrall to a burning sweetness that had her moaning and twisting in his hold.

  Then he slid his fingers inside her, truly inside in the wet secret passage where she had never dreamed that they would go, and began to move them in and out in gentler approximation of the way he took her with his body.

  Caroline’s eyes fluttered open as she found herself on the brink of being consumed by an aching, swirling need the likes of which she had never dreamed she could feel. She gasped, tried weakly to hold it back, to squirm away, but found herself caught between his hand in front and his body behind. With a sound that was a cross between a moan and a sob she felt again the inexorable motion of those shocking fingers—and finally surrendered with closing lids and a shameful little cry to the wonderful quivering rapture that he had built within her like a carefully stoked fire.

  When it was over, when she had returned to herself again, Caroline dared not open her eyes for the embarrassment of it. Matt still lay against her, holding her close, his hands possessive as they splayed over her breasts and the dark triangle at the apex of her thighs. His fingers were no longer inside her, for which small mercy she was thankful, but they still rested between her legs, and now that she was of sound mind again she found the extreme intimacy of his touch mortifying.

  But not distasteful, or disgusting. Realizing that gave Caroline the impetus to open her eyes.

  “Well, now, and what did you think of that?” He sounded both self-satisfied and curiously tense a
s he muttered the question into her ear, but it was the note of complacency underlying the question that brought her squirming around so that she could glare at him.

  “I think you’re conceited, and base, and …” she began wrathfully when she lay flat on her back on the soft fur looking up into his smirking, black-stubbled face. But despite the half grin at, she thought, her expense, what she saw in his eyes left her bereft of words. There was tenderness for her in the cobalt depths, and perhaps the faintest suspicion of triumph, but overshadowing all was hunger, feverish bright. He gazed at her as a starving man might look at meat, and Caroline let the smirk pass and the question die unanswered as she realized that he needed to be fed.

  “I love you, Ephraim Mathieson,” she whispered, the words drawn out of her of their own volition. Her hand lifted to caress his sandpaper cheek.

  He trapped her fingers, pressed them close so that the heat of his skin seared her palm, his gaze never leaving hers. His eyes were suddenly vulnerable, defenseless as a child’s, and his vincibility touched her as nothing in her life ever had. Shaken to the core by the force of what she felt, she raised herself on one elbow to press a kiss to the scar that was his badge of honor.

  “God in heaven!” he muttered as her lips brushed the whitened ridge and were withdrawn. The grin disappeared entirely in favor of a grimace as his eyes flared and turned dark. Then he was pushing her back down and lowering himself atop her, kissing her as if he would steal her very soul, his hands everywhere, caressing and arousing and possessing, lifting her legs to encircle his waist even as his body staked the most primitive claim of all.

  This time, as he made her his, Caroline was able to appreciate just how men could come to crave this physical act so, because the burst of response he’d engendered in her just moments before was nothing compared to the explosion of ecstasy that overtook her as he thrust for a final time deep inside her, crying out her name as he spilled his seed.

  In the aftermath, they lay entwined, Matt on his back with Caroline sprawled across his chest, listening contently to the gradually slowing beat of his heart.

  “Tell me something,” she said idly after a long silence, tracing circles with a fingertip in the fascinating wedge of his chest hair. His nipples were flat and dark brown, like hers and yet most emphatically unlike, and she had rubbed and flicked them until, with a groan, he had caught her hands and requested her to desist. So she curled his chest hair around her fingers instead, various random thoughts occupying her mind. This one, for which she had wished an explanation for some time, had intruded out of the blue, faintly nettling her. “Just what did you mean when you told me that Hannah Forrester and I are very different kettles of fish?”

  Matt lifted his head to look at her even as she tilted her chin so that she could meet his eyes.

  “So that bothered you, did it?” Now that his passion was slaked, humor surfaced again. Too lazy to take umbrage at being laughed at—besides, as she thought about it, she decided that she was pleased that she could make him laugh—she merely put out her tongue at him.

  “About as much as Daniel’s kissing me at the husking bee bothered you,” she responded sweetly, and tweaked a crisp chest curl.

  “That much, huh?” Some of the amusement faded from his face and was replaced by a darkling gleam. He stilled her fingers, pressing them against him to keep them from doing him further hurt, and slid an arm, elbow bent, beneath his head to act as a pillow.

  “Well?” She wanted an answer.

  His mouth quirked into a half smile. “Why, that you, my poppet, are the most tempting sight I could ever hope to feast my eyes on this side of heaven—and she is not.”

  “And it had best stay that way.” Pleased at his answer, she nevertheless fixed him with a severe stare. “Because you have given yourself to me, sir, and I warn you that I do not share!”

  “Are you making me a declaration, Caroline?” The smile in his eyes as he repeated the question he had asked her once before was belied by the husky undertone to his voice.

  “And if I am?” Her response was husky too.

  “Then I would tell you that it’s my turn.”

  “Your turn?”

  “To make you one. But consider well before you answer. ’Tis a crew you’ll be taking on, and a permanent one. If you would have me, you must also take Davey and John, and James and Dan and Rob and Thom and even the deuced dog. There’ll be more babies, because I won’t be able to keep my hands off you for more than a few hours at a time and babies are the necessary result of that, and all the work that they bring on top of everything else. Even a bond servant is freed when the term of indenture ends. You, on the other hand, would be giving yourself to me forever.”

  Caroline’s eyes widened, and she pushed herself up on her elbows from her supine position on his chest to blink at him.

  “Are you by any chance attempting to make me a proposal of marriage?”

  “I suppose I must be.”

  “ ’Tis a most negative one. May I be permitted to ask what prompted it?”

  His brows shot up. His hands moved explicitly down the naked length of her back to linger on the curve of her buttocks. Caroline ignored the delicate tremors that shot along her nerve endings in the wake of his hands and frowned at him.

  “You want me in your bed.” If there was an ominous note to that, she couldn’t help it.

  “Aye, I do.” His fingers tightened, pressing her against him so that she could feel his renewed arousal.

  “That is the most insulting thing I’ve ever heard!” Barely managing to control the urge to hit him, she started to scramble to her feet, only to be forestalled by his arms wrapping around her.

  “Whoa, now, Madam Spitfire, control that hasty temper of yours! Would you have me deny the obvious? I’ve wanted you in my bed since I first laid eyes on you, hightailing it across my field with that red cloak flapping behind you and Jacob on your heels. A woman who can run like that, I said to myself, is a woman far and away above the ordinary herd of females.”

  He was teasing her, she knew he was, but her feelings, so newly tender and sensitive to hurt, rendered her in no mood for it.

  “Let me up, you randy oaf!”

  She shoved against his shoulders. Matt must have seen the true pain in her eyes, floating just beneath the surface of her temper, because the smile in his died. Without warning he turned with her, holding her captive until she was pinned beneath him, not struggling but glaring at him with fierce hurt.

  “Nay, I didn’t mean it,” he said quietly. “Or, rather, I did, but there is more to it than that, as you should know. I would wed you because I love you, Caroline, more than I have ever loved anyone or anything before in my life. I love you so much that the thought of losing you fills me with dread. I love you so much that, if you refuse me, I’m liable to spend the rest of my life howling at the moon like a wolf who’s gone weak in the head.”

  The smile accompanying this was a mere flicker that did not reach his eyes and was quickly gone. Looking searchingly up into his face, Caroline realized that he meant what he said: he loved her. But like herself, he had been wounded by life, and so he sought to protect himself from his tenderest emotions with humor or whatever other means he could seize.

  At that realization her pique died, and she lifted her arms to link them behind his head.

  “I’ll be proud and honored to be your wife,” she said, and she smiled at him with all the love she’d kept inside for so long shining from her eyes and her voice.

  Matt stared down at her for just a moment, his own eyes darkening. “No, my poppet, ’tis I who am honored,” he muttered, and bent his head to lay his lips against hers in a long but achingly gentle kiss.

  41

  On that night the snow falling outside the shelter could have turned into a medley of cherubim singing in celestial chorus, and neither Caroline nor Matt would have noticed. They loved, and whispered, and laughed, and loved some more, and if the bliss they found together spoke mo
re of earth than of heaven, it was still paradise enough for them.

  Though the night was largely sleepless for both of them, when the dawn came Caroline awoke at the first creeping tendril of light. The interior of the shelter was amazingly bright because of the reflective properties of the snow outside. The fire was still burning steadily—Matt had fed it regularly, and though he had tossed limbs on the blaze from a careful distance, she had been pleased that he could bring himself to do so—but it barely took the chill off the air. Snugly wrapped in their cocoon of fur and covers, however, Caroline was toasty warm.

  It helped, of course, to have a very large, muscular, hairy man sharing body heat with her.

  His arm was around her waist with a hand resting just beneath her breast, and his leg was flung possessively over her thighs. She was curled, back to his front, as close to him as an apple to its skin, and it required some effort on her part to turn over enough so that she could see him properly.

  Asleep, he had the look of a dark angel fallen to earth, his black hair tumbling in a riot of curls over his brow and around his ears, his thick, stubby lashes lying like sable crescents against bronzed cheeks, his features as finely delineated as if they’d been chiseled by a master sculptor.

  On the mortal side, that unshaven stubble threatened to develop into a full beard, and her love slept with his mouth open.

  In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, he snored.

  Not loudly, but the rasping sounds issuing from between those classically carved lips were definitely not heavenly in origin.

  Her eyes lighting with tender amusement as a particularly loud snore disturbed the pristine peace of the morning, Caroline thanked God, or Providence, or whoever was responsible, that Matt, for all his masculine beauty and staid Puritan ways, was no angel.

  Because she loved him just as he was, snores, scars, beard, and all.