by Jo Goodman
“Cold? Don’t even think it.”
Rhys’s breath tickled her ear as he spoke the words and a shiver rippled Kenna’s flesh. She realized she was not thinking of anything save the splendid sensations flowing down her spine. Her arms eased around Rhys’s shoulders, smoothing the material at his back but curious to touch what lay beneath it. Her fingers slipped under the lapels of his jacket and tugged.
Rhys sat up, his eyes as dark as coals, and eased out of his jacket. He tossed it to the foot of the bed then removed his shoes and stockings. The entire time he watched Kenna, waiting for her to make some protest. When she remained silent, her face expectant, Rhys knew she would not alter the course she had set. His body rejoiced in the knowledge and quieted the doubts in his mind.
He lay down beside her, propping himself on one elbow. He watched Kenna’s lashes flutter closed as his fingers idly brushed the lacy neckline of her gown. Her breathing stilled when he dipped below it to touch the soft skin beneath. He pulled at the satin ribbon that kept the gown’s modest neckline together and opened the virginal collar to bare Kenna’s throat, touching his lips to the tempting pulse beating there.
He savored the taste of her fair skin, the honeyed warmth of the curve of her shoulder. “You’re lovely,” he said against her flesh. His head lifted and he said it again against her mouth.
Kenna found herself welcoming the return of Rhys’s mouth and she answered his searching kiss with a depth of feeling that surprised her. “Oh my,” she whispered when he broke the kiss.
“Indeed.” He smiled.
“Indeed,” she repeated, framing his face with her hands and bringing his mouth down to hers. She initiated the kiss, recalling what he had already taught her to give and receive pleasure. Her tongue peeped out, touching his lips, tasting them. She kissed the corners of his mouth, the slight dimple in his chin, then brushed her lips against his once more before her mouth pressed greedily on his. The comforter and sheets were pushed aside but their movement made little impact on Kenna’s senses. It was the warmth of his hand through her thin linen gown that got her attention but the shock of it only lasted a moment. It was quickly replaced by another shock: she did not want him to remove his hand from her breast.
The way her flesh swelled to Rhys’s light touch was faintly embarrassing to Kenna but the sensations he aroused when his thumb stroked her nipple were too exquisite to forego. Without thought she arched into the pressure and heat of his hand.
Feeling Kenna’s response, Rhys moved closer to Kenna’s slender frame and slid his mouth quickly over her throat. His tongue flicked over the tip of her breast, wetting her gown until her nipple was revealed provocatively by the clinging damp circle he created. His mouth wandered in fleeting little kisses to her other breast while he tugged at the hem of her gown, pushing it out of the way so he could touch her bare skin.
Kenna’s fingers wound in Rhys’s dark hair as his palms slid underneath her calves and stroked the length of her legs. His hands pressed against the back of her thighs and swept upward, pausing when they reached the curve of her buttocks. He sat up then and pulled Kenna with him.
“I think it is time we dispose of this gown,” he said huskily. “Lift your arms.”
Kenna shied away from Rhys’s implacable eyes and looked past his shoulder, studying the patterned wallpaper as if she had never seen it before. “Must I?”
Rhys touched her chin with one finger and turned her face toward him. “Lift your arms.”
Kenna’s hands twisted in her lap a moment before she raised them overhead. There was not time to reconsider as she felt Rhys take the edge of her gown and draw it from her body in a single motion. Her arms dropped immediately to cover her breasts.
Rhys shook his head. “No. I want to see you,” he said softly, grasping, her wrists and pulling them downward. “You have beautiful breasts.” His eyes lifted, meeting hers. “All of you is lovely, Kenna.” His fingers trailed the gentle slope of her breasts, nudging her pink nipples with the pads of his thumbs “And none of you is cold.”
A wisp of a smile touched Kenna’s mouth. “I don’t feel very warm,” she said, eyeing Rhys from under the thick sweep of her lashes.
Rhys was hard pressed to keep the amusement he felt from showing on his face. Had Kenna but known it, a blush had colored her features the moment she spoke with such innocent temerity. “I will have to do something about that, won’t I?” He gave her a light kiss, pressing her shoulders back to the soft mattress. “Don’t move,” he said, adding a kiss to the tip of her nose, Rhys got off the bed and quickly stripped off his shirt and trousers and tossed them on the nearby chair. Naked, he slipped back in bed and pulled the sheet over them. He kissed her tightly closed lids. “You can open your eyes now.” There was no hiding his amusement now. When she looked at him he said, “You know it would have been quite proper for you to look this time. I would have been flattered by a little maidenly interest on your part.”
“I don’t doubt that you’ve had more flatterers than you can count.” Kenna was surprised by the niggling jealousy she felt and prayed Rhys had not heard it.
“That is not very complimentary to my skill with mathematics.”
“That is not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant and I should be devastated if your lovely brown eyes took on the traditional green of your emotion.”
So he had heard. Well, she wouldn’t admit it. Ever! “You flatter yourself. There is no need for me to do it as well.”
“That’s my Kenna.”
“I’m not your anything,” she said with asperity.
“Aren’t you?” he asked, brushing her cheek with his mouth. “You should be.” He kissed the bridge of her nose. “You will be.” He kissed her deeply and felt her obligatory resistance give way to surrender.
Kenna’s hands slid around Rhys’s waist as his body covered hers. Her palms stroked his tautly muscled back and her fingers trailed over the length of his spine as she welcomed the weight and security of his lean frame flush to her skin. His hands were everywhere, feather-light, curiously reverent, as he caressed her arms, her waist, the sensitive flesh of her inner thighs. His mouth moved over her face, then the gentle suck of it on her breast drew a sigh from deep inside Kenna. The sheet was pushed aside as his lips traveled lower over the flat plane of her stomach and the arc of her hip. His mouth touched her once on the red-gold triangle between her legs but the contact was so brief she forced herself to believe she had imagined it. Surely he had not meant to kiss her there.
Kenna’s fingers explored Rhys’s hard chest when his mouth returned to hers. His flat male nipples hardened beneath her curious hands and she felt his abdomen tauten as her hands slipped lower. Something warned her that she could stop Rhys now and know very well that she was not as Victorine had said, yet she had no desire to heed the warning. She wanted to know everything that happened between a man and a woman; she wanted to be released from her schoolgirl ignorance at last.
When Rhys nudged her thighs with his knee Kenna opened to him. His hand slipped between her legs and the intimacy of his caress was as startling as it was pleasurable. Liquid sparks shot through her as his insistent fingers stroked her, fanning her desire. One hand fell to her side while the other reached down to tug at his wrist, intending to pull him away. Instead it rested there while her eyes sought his, naked save for the wonderment of what he was making her feel.
A gasp rose in her throat as the sensations spiraled and she turned her head into her shoulder to keep from crying out.
“No,” he said, lifting the pressure of his hand slightly. “Look at me. I want to see your face…your eyes.” When she still did not look at him he drew his hand away. “Give me your mouth, Kenna.”
She turned her face to him and though her longing was clear she needed to say it aloud. “Don’t stop,” she said on a thread of sound. “I couldn’t bear it.” She thought she must be shameless.
Rhys did not think so as his mouth ground int
o her with an intensity that left them both breathless. His tongue stroked her in an intimate prelude to the loving he desired. When his hand returned to her thighs he felt Kenna arch her hips against him, searching for release from the web of sensation he had caught her in. Her hands lifted, fingers digging into the flesh of his shoulders as he touched the moist, velvet center of her pleasure. His mouth caught her incoherent murmurs as if they were nectar and his own need grew with hers until he realized he could not put off his own hunger another moment.
“Are you certain, Kenna?” he asked roughly.
She had only a vague sense of what he was asking. He had moved, leaving her mouth, her thighs, and was kneeling between her legs, tilting her hips toward him. Her eyes dropped from his face and his strangely ascetic features outlined in the firelight, to the more shadowy outline of his thrusting manhood poised to enter her.
Certain? she thought, panicking at the sight of him. She wasn’t certain of anything, least of all how her body was going to accept his. It seemed quite impossible that she could accommodate him and she almost blurted her astonishment aloud, but when she found her voice she also found she wanted him. “Yes,” she said simply. “Yes.”
“There will be some pain this first time.”
Since it would be the only time with him Kenna didn’t care and told him so.
The sharp edge of self-denial vanished from Rhys’s features as he eased himself into Kenna’s warmth. He withdrew a little at her first distressed whimper as he encountered her maidenhead then thrust quickly forward, jerking her hips toward him and tearing the barrier to his entry. He was still for a moment, letting her become accustomed to the feel of him inside her and then he moved slowly, acquainting her with the rhythm of his loving.
As Rhys filled her Kenna admitted her imagination had failed her miserably on this occasion. She had never dreamed her body could give her such delight, nor that a man’s body could offer so much pleasure. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to give as she took and she caught the urgency of his motion as his thrusts deepened. Her hands caressed his chest and shoulders when he leaned over her and the sparks he had ignited earlier flickered through her limbs without pause.
Their strained voices mingled as Kenna felt her body being stretched taut like a bow. Her neck arched and her fingers stiffened on Rhys’s arms as a cascade of bright light seemed to wash over her. She felt as if she were sparkling, brilliant with the fiery sensation that enfolded her. Her eyes closed and she bit her lip to hold back the sounds of her pleasure.
“I want to hear you, Kenna.”
Rhys’s voice tipped her over the edge and she cried out his name as his thrusts quickened. Her lashes fluttered open and she saw Rhys’s beautiful face grow rigid and still, as if he had suddenly been cast in bronze, then felt him flood her with his seed.
For a while there was no sound beyond their breathing. Rhys shifted his weight from Kenna but lay close to her, one leg flung over hers to keep her near. He pulled the comforter over them, keeping the chill which seemed to seep into their bodies at bay. They both became aware of the rhythmic ticking of the clock on the mantel at the same time and glanced at it together.
“It’s very late,” Kenna said, not knowing what else to say. Her head was filled with clumsy thoughts that she could not express.
“Yes, it is.”
“The servants will be up soon.”
“Not that soon,” Rhys disagreed. “We have a few hours before I have to go.” He turned her face toward him and searched her dark eyes. “Are you so anxious for me to go?”
She wished she knew the answer to that and her confusion registered clearly on her flushed features. “You must leave. You can’t be found here.”
“Where was that reasoning when you asked me to make love to you?” Rhys asked reasonably though he felt a surge of irritability that she was concerned with proprieties now. It had not taken reality long to set in.
“I didn’t ask you to make—”
“Don’t lie to yourself, Kenna. It does not become you.”
“But I am not lying,” she persisted, edging away from him only to find that some of her hair was trapped beneath his shoulder. It made her unaccountably angry that he was still holding onto her. “Release my hair, please,” she said in frosty accents. “And kindly remove your leg.”
“When you explain yourself,” he answered easily, pressing down upon her legs just to show her he could keep her there all night if he had a mind to.
“Oh, very well. Though why you should need an explanation eludes me. It should be perfectly clear that love had nothing to do with what happened in this bed.”
One of Rhys’s dark brows slanted upward. “Didn’t it?” he asked softly.
“You know it didn’t. It was an experiment, nothing more. I posed a question and you gave me an answer. There is no need to puff the thing up with romantic balderdash.”
“I see. Then what happened in this bed, as you euphemistically put it, was nothing more than the coupling of two animals. Perhaps the stable would have suited your needs better. A stallion and a filly acting purely on their instincts as nature intended.”
Kenna was only now becoming aware of how annoyed Rhys was with her. The gentle, inquiring tone of his voice had made her blind to his heat until he mentioned coupling and the stables. “There is no need for crudity. We are hardly animals.”
“That is precisely what we are, Kenna Dunne, though mayhap I should have likened you to a brood mare.”
She gasped and would have slapped his face if he had not anticipated her action and pinned her wrist to the bed. “What is that supposed to mean?” she said, frustrated in the extreme because she could not move.
“It means you could be enceinte. Have I put that delicately enough for your ears?”
Kenna felt the fight drain out of her and she went limp against him. “A child? It isn’t possible.”
“Of course it is,” he scoffed. “Surely you know how a woman gets with child?” To Rhys’s astonishment he saw all the color leave Kenna’s face. “My God, you didn’t know!”
“Of course I knew,” she snapped. “Or rather I knew it had something to do with…something,” she finished lamely, ignoring Rhys’s hoot of sardonic laughter. “But it cannot happen from this one time. I forbid it!”
Rhys lifted his shoulder and removed his leg from Kenna’s. “Tell that to my son or daughter nine months hence.”
Kenna twisted away from Rhys and sat up, curling against the mahogany headboard. The comforter was pulled tautly across her breasts and her heavy hair tumbled about her face and shoulders. “You are teasing,” she accused. “You wouldn’t dare give me a babe. It would be the grandchild of the man you murdered.”
“Seventy-five minutes,” he said tersely after glancing at the clock.
“What nonsense are you saying now?”
Rhys threw off the covers and slipped off the bed. With uninhibited grace he began gathering his clothes and putting them on. “By my reckoning it’s been seventy-five minutes that we’ve been together and this is the first mention of your father. Who, by the way, happened to be the man I admired, not murdered.”
He was leaving. That’s what she wanted, wasn’t it? Then why did she feel strangely bereft that she had chased him from her bed with her sharp tongue?
“As to a child,” he continued roughly, “we shall have to wait and see, won’t we?” He paused in buttoning his shirt and eyed her narrowly. “You could plan for that eventuality and marry me now.”
“Marry you!” she sputtered, astonished. It was exactly this pass she had hoped to avoid and instead she had fallen neatly into his trap. If she didn’t know better she would think he had planned the thing himself, even to putting the words in her mouth. She could never ask another man to accept Rhys’s child any more than she could bring herself to marry Rhys. “I am not going to marry you.”
“You will if you are carrying my child.”
“Will you lower your voice?�
�� she whispered. “The entire house will be down upon us!”
“That would suit me though I can see you are plainly horrified by the prospect.”
“If Nicky or Victorine…”
Kenna could not finish the sentence but Rhys had no such difficulty. “If they found you cowering in your bed, wearing nothing but your modesty, the banns would be posted on the morrow. Is that what you wanted to say?”
“More or less,” she murmured.
Rhys’s lips curled in derision. “The scenario will be much the same when they notice the thickening of your waist.”
“Stop it! I am not with child. You cannot know. It would ruin everything.”
Rhys sat on the edge of the bed and pulled on his boots, “Ruin everything? What sort of plot have you been hatching?”
“Do not make light of this, Rhys Canning.”
Making light of it was all that kept Rhys from throttling Kenna. He knew the risk he had taken by making love to her, knew that she was unprepared to allow a few moments of pleasure speak to her after years of nurturing animosity. He found no satisfaction in realizing he had anticipated her reaction correctly when he would have given almost anything to have been wrong. He sighed deeply and turned on her. “Tell me truly, Kenna. What was this evening in aid of?”
“I told you.”
“I know what you told me. But why? Where did you get such a notion?”
She would not tell him what she had overheard in Nick’s study. It seemed safer to share other truths. “I am twenty-three years old and no man has ever looked at me with anything but polite interest.”
Rhys wondered if Kenna merely did not consider him a man or if she had been oblivious to his interest. “You don’t know many men,” he said. “You refused your season and shut yourself here at Dunnelly.”
“Nick has friends who have visited,” she persisted. “They scarcely noticed me.”
“That only proves how blind they were, not that you are some sort of faerie snow queen. But why try to prove something to yourself now, Kenna? And why with me?”
“It had to be now. I cannot explain it any better than that. And you? I told you, there is no one else.”