“And now it has,” she whispered, resting her palms on the smooth front of his shirt beneath his jacket and waistcoat. “I know Papa—”
“You said I might feel you. May I kiss you, Ella?”
Kiss. She had never been kissed. In her dreams, both waking and sleeping, she had imagined a kiss and it had always been Saber’s.
“May I kiss you and forget that there has been any past— or that there will be a future?”
“Kiss me, Saber.”
His head bowed over hers. His breath crossed her face, soft and warm. His lips met hers lightly.
Ella closed her eyes. She did not breathe. She thought her heart did not beat. She existed only where Saber’s lips rested.
Back and forth his mouth brushed, the softest of brushing while a deep sound came from him. A groan. His lips hardened, sought she knew not what, pressed and parted, parted her lips also. Ella gasped, her breathing flowing into Saber, his breath returning to fill her.
Her eyes flew open. His tongue ran along the seared skin inside her bottom lip, and passed her teeth—and met her tongue. His tasting of her turned blood to water, bones to nothing. Her body and his—one. If he released her, she would fall.
“Mmm,” she murmured.
“Mmm what, Ella?”
“I like this kiss.”
“I like it too. I like kissing you.”
“Then perhaps you should kiss me again.”
He kissed her again, and again and again, and every kiss pressed deeper into her mouth. She clung to his shirt, his neckcloth, whatever she could hold. The heat of him beat through to her, reached her skin and beyond. Strange sensations. Pulsing in places she could not name but where she wanted to feel those sensations more and more—with Saber.
“It is not enough,” he told her.
“No.” What wasn’t enough? He would make it plain.
“Is it all right if …I will not pressure you, Ella. You have already suffered enough in your life.”
“And I have been very fortunate in my life, also.”
“Brave little Ella. Just once—may I feel your loveliness just once?”
“I am not lovely. But whatever I am is yours, Saber.”
He straightened, and she heard the rustle of his jacket as he took it off and tossed it aside. He moved more in the darkness, removed his waistcoat. His shirt shone white in the gloom— until that, too, was gone.
Cautiously, Ella slipped the backs of her fingers over his chest. Soft hair. Smooth, warm, firm skin over bone and muscle. So different in form from her own body.
Gently but firmly, he took her wrists and placed them at her sides. He turned her around and began unfastening her gown. She sucked in a breath, but made no effort to stop him.
Slowly, cool air swept over the skin he bared. Her gown was undone, and her chemise. He slid them slowly from her shoulders and down her arms, pulled the sleeves over her hands and let them fall.
Ella bowed her head and waited. If this was what Saber wanted, then she wanted it too.
She was naked to the waist. Never before had she been naked in front … Ella pressed away the memory that crowded in. It did not count that she had been forced to suffer the scrutiny of men while she’d worn only a transparent scarlet gown. Her mind had fled that moment, just as it had fled the sights that had surrounded her on that terrible night, in that terrible house of evil. And at least, thanks to Papa, she had been saved from the full extent of whatever dreadful fate had been planned for her in that house.
Saber kissed her again, this time on the vulnerable back of her neck. She shivered.
“Cold?”
She shook her head and hunched her shoulders, fighting an urge to cover herself. With Saber this was right, it was as it should be.
He urged her against him. Her back met his chest and she leaned. Then his caressing hands rose over her shoulders and across the tender place at the dip in her throat, and passed lower to stroke over her breasts.
Ella smothered a cry. This was Saber, the man she loved. He covered her breasts, lifted and supported them, and rested the sides of his thumbs on her nipples.
She took little gulps of air. Her breasts ached. Her nipples grew hard beneath the flicking brushes of his thumbs. Hard and searingly aware. Arching against him, she rolled her head, seeking. Seeking? What could feel so? What could pass through a woman’s body like white hot strands, strands of pleasure that demanded to be drawn through her without end?
His next kiss lingered on one shoulder, his breath slipping over her breast.
She did not need to see him to know his face, to know his form, to feel him.
When he took his hands from her breasts she was bereft, but waited patiently for his command. Very quickly he slipped her clothes from her hips until they fell about her feet.
Clad in only her stockings and slippers, she stood in a strange room, in a strange house, with the man she had loved since she scarcely knew what love meant.
Her ribs, her waist, her belly—he explored them all with reverent care. Her thighs received his patient attention.
They had no need of words.
There was no before. There would only be now and forever. He touched her there! “Hush,” he said against her shoulder when she made a sound. “Whatever you have known is in the past. This is what I want you to know now—and to remember. My wish is to give you pleasure.”
The place at her center burned at his probing.
Bewildered, Ella twisted to face him. She tried to hold him but could not. He bent and licked the tip of a nipple.
“Saber!” Her legs jerked, and she gripped his tensed arms. Cupping her breasts, nuzzling between, he captured first one nipple, then the other. He drew her deeply into his mouth, and she was helpless. Nerve and flesh, all wanting—all taking.
He straightened, and claimed her mouth again.
Ella slipped her arms around his waist and pressed her breasts to his chest. His hair teased her nipples, inflamed the hot, white threads again, and this time she knew where they began and where they sought to bury themselves. The curls between her legs hid the source of tormenting desire that did not fulfill or release her.
Saber’s hips met her belly. The part of him she knew was his manhood thrust against her. Huge in its strength, it sought her. Again the dim but awful images hovered in her memory. They had no place here. Those were other bodies, other mindless bodies that providence had kept from harming her.
With greedy fingers, she sought the weight of him, surrounded and held it, heard his broken moan, met the fresh lunge of his hips.
His mouth on hers swallowed her cry as he walked her backward. Her bottom met the edge of something solid.
Saber’s mouth left Ella’s, and she looked up at him. In the darkness his eyes glittered, and his teeth. She knew those eyes. They were the deep green of deep water. Then the light was gone again and once more his lips covered hers—and his fingers delved into the curls where pleasure hovered.
She felt the slick wetness of her own body and blushed. He would feel it too. He used that slickness to slip into her most private place, to slip in and slip out. He used her own womanly elixir to glide over a tiny hardened bud where all ecstasy was centered. The ecstasy hovered, begged for what she could not form in her mind.
Again he found the passage that closed without bidding around his fingers. Again he returned to the swollen bud. This time his mouth fastened to her breast, and while he took her nipple between his careful teeth, he worked the bud ceaselessly.
Tension brought her thighs together, clamped his hand.
White hot. It shattered, frayed, blossomed black and red and consumed her. Ella cried out—a scream she could not swallow. He had rent her, and she welcomed the wound, the beloved wound that needed no healing. Might she never heal from this moment.
“My beautiful Ella,” Saber said against her breast. “I thought I could convince you—convince myself that our lives must never touch. Perhaps I thought I might do that thro
ugh teaching you a lesson, poor fool that I am—teach you that I am a poison, to myself and to you. You must go on. But how shall I ever live now?”
She struggled to understand. While all her body throbbed, she fought to clear her mind. And she reached for Saber, for his strong arms and wide shoulders—for his broad back.
“I should like to touch all of you too,” she said timidly. “Might I do that?”
He held still.
Beneath her right hand, a knot of flesh marred the skin of his shoulder. She pressed her lips together and felt his tension. “This is where you were wounded, my dearest. Let me soothe you. There is more to this thing between us, isn’t there? What you have made me feel tonight. You need me to do for you what you have done for me.”
“What have I done for you?” His tone was no longer gentle.
“Brought me so much joy.”
“No,” he said. “I have tasted joy to which I had no right. And I was weak enough to relish every stolen moment. It is more than I deserve.”
“Never,” she told him. “It will never be enough, not until our lives are over.”
“Mine is over.”
She grew still.
Abruptly, he withdrew from her. There was a flare, and the light within a lamp brightened.
Ella didn’t care that she was naked. He was beautiful. His dark hair fell forward as he adjusted the lamp. The line of his long spine glistened and muscles rippled with the slightest movement. Her eyes went to the scar at his shoulder. White and twisted, it traversed in a curve to the center of his back.
So much pain. Her beloved had suffered so much. Where the knots bunched, the point of a blade must have sunk again, and again.
He might have died!
“Saber. Such terrible wounds. So deep. Let me hold you.”
“Hold me?” He turned and caught her by the upper arms. “Hold me? Are you sure?”
“Saber!” Her heel caught the edge of the carpet and she overbalanced. All the room spun before her, the room and Saber’s face, Saber’s poor, viciously scarred face.
Chapter Six
He disgusted her.
Saber looked into her dark eyes, at the revulsion stamped there—and he knew that he had not suffered utter desolation until this moment.
He bowed his head, allowing his hair to cover what terrified her so. Swiftly, he retrieved her clothes and set them on the heavy, canopied bed at the left of the room.
“Saber?”
She still clung to the side of the chair where she’d all but collapsed at the sight of him.
“Can you dress in the dark, Ella? I would help you.”
“In the dark? Yes. Why—?”
“Because I knew you would be repulsed by me and I couldn’t bear the finality of that. So I stayed away. Go to the bed. I will deal with the lamp.”
“Repulsed? I asked…I wanted to know why you would put out the lamp. Why should I dress in the dark?”
“I’d like to spare you the horror, Ella. I thought I could be strong. I had decided that I could meet you in this room, deny my feelings—sever with you forever and be done with it. But then I heard your voice. I felt your presence. I had to touch you, Ella. Once you were near, I had to know your scent, your tenderness. How wrong I was. How my selfish lack of restraint has wronged you. I should have done as I planned. You were never to see me as I am.”
He approached the lamp.
“Ooh!” Her angry cry battered him. “Stop it! Stop it now, do you hear me?”
Saber paused but did not turn around.
“All men are cabbage-heads! All men decide what women do and do not want or think, without ever bothering to ask. You believe you have the right to pretend to see inside my mind. You have misused me, Saber!”
This angry female was not the Ella he remembered, but then, he had shocked her—and he had taken advantage of her ignorance about his condition. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “It isn’t enough, but I regret my behavior.”
“I regret your behavior too.” Her feet beat a path across the carpet. “I shall certainly require your assistance.”
“Yes. A moment while I deal with the lamp.”
“If you touch that lamp I shall …I shall…Well, I will. So don’t. Now look at me.”
She had always been brave. Only a brave young female would share what she considered to be her most shameful secret—her illegitimacy—with a man who was almost a stranger. Ella had done that, with him, when she’d been less than sixteen and so unsure of her future.
“Saber”—her voice softened—“look at me, please.”
He did as she asked reluctantly. With his fists on his hips, he faced Ella across the elegant room and planted his feet apart.
“You’ve hidden from me because of your wounds, haven’t you? Your scars?”
“I have apologized for my actions tonight. There is no more to be said.”
“Nothing at all has been said. Nothing of honesty.”
He drove a hand into his hair. “I tried to stay away from you. Now I shall do so—completely.”
“You didn’t simply try to stay away, Saber. You did so. You are only here tonight because I finally goaded you into revealing yourself.”
He looked at her then. Not a tall woman, but straight, proud. Her black hair had slipped from its chignon to fall in partially unraveled braids about her shoulders.
Naked. Completely naked before him and watching him with those great, dark, exotic eyes.
Unashamed.
But then, this was not a virginal girl who had never known a man.
But she was shy in her way—he knew that. And he must never forget that whatever she had once been was not of her own making—and her extreme youth might well have made the acts she’d performed unreal to her then. Pain. She must have suffered pain at the hands of the monsters who used her. Pain and fear—and confusion. And now, after she had at least enjoyed a few years of comfort and protection, he had visited more distress upon the blameless creature he could not stop loving.
“Say something, Saber,” she asked, wrapping her arms about her waist. “Am I displeasing to you?”
“Displeasing?” He averted his eyes. “You are the most lovely creature in the world. I have tried not to allow this to happen. As I have confessed, I should not have done so. I managed to keep what I have become hidden from you. To change that was madness. I would never have wished you to remember me as I am.”
“They have hurt your soul,” she told him. “If they had not done so, you would not think a few silly scars could repulse me.”
He gazed upon her fully. “Don’t humor me, Ella. Condescension offends my manhood, and there is nothing amiss with that, I assure you.”
She dropped her arms and raised her jaw. “There is no need to testify to the condition of your manhood to me, my lord.”
He frowned, and could not stop himself from glancing the length of her slender but intoxicating body.
“I felt your manhood, my lord.” Her breasts, round and pointed and pink-tipped, jutted with each angry breath. “It thrust at me. And it filled my hands. And its weight impressed me, as no doubt you were aware.”
He felt himself redden. “I’m so glad you noted my proportions in such detail,” he said, making sure his words bore sufficient sarcasm. A man of eight-and-twenty should not blush like a cub at the mention of his rod. “You speak as a connoisseur.”
The words were no sooner spoken than regretted. Her smooth brow furrowed. She lifted her hair from her shoulders and remained with her elbows raised. “A connoisseur?” Upthrust breasts and a slender waist. Her hips flared gently and her long legs—in their provocative stockings—took his breath away. There was nothing about her that did not render him speechless.
“A connoisseur?” she repeated. “What can you mean, Saber? Why, that word suggests—”
“It suggests nothing,” he told her rapidly. “This entire exchange should not have happened. You must return to the party. By now there will be sear
chers out looking for you.”
“I’m never going back to the party,” she said flatly. “Do you know Pomeroy Wokingham?”
“The Hon. Pom? A lecher. A debauched… Enough said. He is not the type of man whose name should cross your lips. Get dressed.”
“You dress me,” she said calmly. “You undressed me.” Saber lowered his eyes. “Sweet Ella. You are determined to pretend I do not disgust you, aren’t you? In the name of an old friendship, you will try to give me back some of what I’ve lost. Thank you, but I am at peace with my choices.” Liar.
“My lord, you have recently completed a very thorough examination of my person. Do you deny that?”
Her manner with words was quite singular. “One does not voice such things.”
“One might not. I do. Answer me, if you please.”
“Your person suffered that treatment from me, yes.”
“My person did not suffer at all—unless it was from the most marvelous ecstasy any woman’s body has ever known. I adored every instant of it, and shall look forward to many more such explorations—from you.”
Saber stared at her.
“Shocked you, have I, my lord? I suppose I should apologize for my forwardness, but since my newly found boldness has been brought about by your kisses, by your mouth upon my breasts, by your hands all over me—your fingers inside me—”
“Ella!”
“As I was saying. I might apologize for being brazen, but I’m naked because you took off my clothes. And I can scarcely help it if I’ve discovered I’m glad you did. Or that having your mouth on my breasts and your fingers in my body and stroking that place until—”
“Ella!”
“Oh, why must you keep shouting my name like that?” She marched toward him. “My mama believes a young woman should know all about the business of men and women. Men and women together—when they are entirely alone, that is. Alone in their own … well, their own chambers, or whatever.”
Saber found he could not summon a single word of response.
“She wrote a book on the subject, you know. And it was published.”
It was published, all right. It was published and published and published, and all of the Polite World—and the not so polite world—had read the damned thing. They continued to read it. Poor Hunsingore, and Stonehaven—and Saber’s own cousin Calum, Duke of Franchot—had suffered the notoriety of having their names emblazoned in the wretched book. Dear Justine’s innocent study of a subject almost entirely lacking in that virtue had led to a most provocative book intended to be read by young women preparing for marriage. And Justine had dedicated the volume to her husband and his brother, and to her own brother—with her thanks for their help!
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