She touched the silk fichu at her neck again, and swallowed. Maybe this provocation from a virgin widow had not been so wise.
She was sure Dom made the sounds she heard; in the short time she’d known him, he’d honed her instincts about him. Yet she well remembered the abduction attempt. Stripping off her riding gloves, she stuck them in one of her overladen saddlebags, then fumbled for her pistol and pulled it free.
By urging Sterling to quicken his gait, she arrived at the cottage before Dom. She barely glanced at the building, knowing she would see the small, neat white box of a house, the steps going up to the front door, the shutters over the windows. The messenger hadn’t arrived yet, and that was good. Just as she’d planned.
Dismounting with some difficulty—the tightfitting skirt hindered her—she slid out of the sidesaddle to a jarring meeting with the ground. She tied Sterling to a branch and, pistol in hand, stepped behind the edge of the tall blackberry brambles that rose near the stables. She watched through the overhanging branches as Dom rode into sight.
His gaze noted the gelding, the cottage, the sheltering trees, and as he looked around, she looked at him.
He sat his horse easily even though they had been matched only the day before on her father’s instruction; the black stallion he rode was the finest in the royal stables.
He was a man who could control a horse without reins—indeed, although Oscuro exuded an air of tempestuous savagery, Dom allowed the reins to hang negligently from his fingers.
He was a man who could control a woman, and Laurentia found herself caught between fear and excitement. She wanted this, she’d planned this, yet no woman in her right mind could face the possibility of an angry Dom without wondering about her own sanity.
At this moment, she couldn’t remember why she’d deliberately lost him.
As uncertainty whirled through her mind, he spoke. “You can come out now, Your Highness.” He looked straight at the blackberry bushes.
Chapter Eighteen
Laurentia didn’t allow—wouldn’t allow—her uncertainty to show as she stepped into sight. Keeping Dulcie’s instructions in mind, she smiled enticingly at Dom. “I knew you would find me.”
“Always.” He grinned back at her, but she would never call that stretching of lips over teeth mirthful. “Never think I won’t.”
He was angry. She had known he would be. She had thought she was ready to face him, but her mouth dried and her smile wavered as he swung out of the saddle.
Rather than move toward her, he walked to his mount’s head, his slight limp in evidence, and she hated the relief that swept through her. Calming the tremble in her lips, she acted as if he were an invited guest and she a proper hostess. “There are no servants here. We have to care for our own horses.”
“Of course.” His gaze rested on the pistol still clasped in her hand. “Still not stupid, I see.”
“Never.” She hoped.
Grasping the leading rein, he looked again at the cottage. “Where is here?”
“Here is my personal refuge.” She walked right past Dom, acting as if she were confident he would not grab her. He didn’t, but he watched her, his gaze oppressive with heat and laden with the promise of retribution. “Papa had it built for my mother. After my ... after Beaumont died, he thought I might need a place to go where I could have privacy.” Replacing the pistol in the saddlebag, she untied Sterling and led him toward the stable.
Dom followed. “Why would a princess want privacy?”
She hesitated, but it was too soon to tell him all the truth. She had learned discretion at a hard school. Lightly she said, “Here I can scratch wherever it itches.”
“Ah, yes.” Unwilling amusement shaded his voice. “That evening on the terrace, I seem to remember a fair amount of envy that men could scratch as they pleased.”
“Oh.” Did he have to remind her of how inane she had been two days ago? “I did say that.”
“You said quite a lot for such a reticent princess as you have proved to be.”
His voice sounded close, and she turned to find him moving past her, toward the closed stable. He lifted the bar from its brackets and laid it aside, then swung the doors wide. Musty air rushed out, but immediately Laurentia moved to guide Sterling inside; the shadows in the dim stable would protect her from Dom’s incisive gaze.
As she passed him, he caught her fingers in his, and her gaze flew to his. “Is it only in the darkness you speak your heart?”
“Yes.” Her throat seemed suddenly too small, constricted by alarm, and she cleared it, all the while thinking, He’s holding my hand. And then, as his thumb stoked the remarkably sensitive center of her palm, He’s caressing me. “Yes, it must be the dark.”
Bending from the waist, he placed his lips on the backs of her fingers. Just placed his lips there for one long moment. It wasn’t a kiss; she’d had her hand kissed many times. This was more of a savoring, an appetizer before the first course.
Then his lips moved, opened, tasted her middle finger in gourmet delight. His eyes fanned shut, his lashes shadowed the faint circles beneath. A lock of hair fell over his forehead, and this tableau, played out in a stable doorway on the top of a mountain, should have seemed ridiculous.
Instead the romance of it brought tears to her eyes.
His lips, his tongue, slowly slid toward her fingertip. His mouth wrapped around it. He turned her hand and slowly stood, sipping her flesh as if it were intoxicating brandy.
“Dom,” she said faintly. “I don’t think ...”
And he nipped. One small, stinging bite.
She snatched her hand away. She cradled it in the other, staring at him and wondering if he were a maniac to bite her ... and if she were mad to feel a quiver of excitement.
He smiled at her, all promise and enticement, and, as if nothing untoward had happened, said, “It’s dark in the stable.”
She had no idea what he was talking about. Right now, she could scarcely remember her name.
He returned to Oscuro with a loose-limbed gait that held her gaze. “You can talk to me in there. You can tell me what you like.”
As he led Oscuro around her, the significance of his words broke through her trance. Impetuously she followed him inside. “No.” She wailed just a little, and she hated that.
She hated it more when Dom said, “You forgot your horse.”
Sterling was a sensible beast, and when she turned to get him she found him right on her heels. “I didn’t.” She grasped his reins.
“So I see.” Dom hummed a little as he opened the door to one of the two stalls and led Oscuro inside. “Is there straw?”
“In the loft.” She untied the bow at her chin, pulled her hat off, and hung it on a nail.
“Do you want to go up and pitch it down, or shall I?”
“You do it. My skirt is too tight.” She pushed Sterling into the remaining stall and pulled off all four saddlebags. Grimacing with the effort, she tossed them, one by one, out into the aisle.
“Who usually does it?”
“I do.” She unbuckled the flank cinch on the saddle.
Dom leaned his arms over the wooden wall between the stalls and in a tone of disbelief said, “You really come here by yourself.”
“Yes.”
“And His Majesty doesn’t object?”
She grasped the heavy saddle in both her hands and, with a grunt, lifted it down. “I would never do anything to cause His Majesty undue worry.”
Dom mulled that over. “So he objects, but not enough to coerce you.”
There was more to this retreat than her own selfish desire for solitude, so she said nothing as she dragged the heavy saddle over to the low wooden stand. She hefted the saddle up. The stand teetered on uneven legs; boards and nails were an enigma to her, but she’d built it herself, for herself, and she was proud of her work.
He said nothing. He only watched, his face and form in shadow. What he thought of Bertinierre’s princess grooming her own ho
rse, she couldn’t imagine. She didn’t even know if he believed her, and thought perhaps he scrutinized her to gauge her expertise. But she did know she would rather he question her about the cottage and her activities here than about what she liked.
When the silence had become oppressive, he said, “His Majesty lets you have your head. But with a kidnapper on the loose?”
She clipped off the words. “He trusts me to take care of myself.”
“That little popgun’s not going to do you a lot of good against a gang of kidnappers.”
“I have you.”
She could have bitten out her tongue when he said, “So you do.”
Seeing him still draped over the wall, she asked tartly, “Do you want me to unsaddle your horse, too?”
He laughed appreciatively. “Little witch.” He disappeared back into the stall, and a moment later his riding jacket was tossed over a post.
That meant he was in his shirtsleeves. That meant only fine white cotton covered the shoulders she so admired. Unwillingly she waited motionless, waiting to see if other pieces of clothing were removed and hung over the post. The shirt, or perhaps his trousers.
She closed her eyes. She had to gain authority over her watercolor fantasies. They had dominated her thoughts far too much, and a woman could live on daydreams only so long. Someday the outlines had to be filled in with bold brushstrokes of reality.
Controlling her nomadic thoughts proved impossible when Dom was climbing the upright ladder to the hayloft. Her eyes had adjusted to the dimness only too well, and she observed him with a salivating gratification.
Did he know how his slight state of undress affected her? Of course not. Not even Dom could imagine that the princess of Bertinierre would paint flights of fancy around his muscled thighs and broad shoulders. She wondered about the exact color of the skin on those shoulders, longed to see the muscles of his thighs flex, and whether—she took a hard breath—whether Dulcie had been lying when she’d described the mighty expansion that occurred in the male organ.
Laurentia’s own wickedness amazed her, for as Weltrude had told her many times, good women did not speculate about proper gentlemen in any physical sense. By that, Weltrude unquestionably meant that Laurentia should not imagine Dom in a total state of undress. But Dom was not proper, not a gentleman, and Laurentia, sadly, did not fit Weltrude’s definition of good.
A shower of straw interrupted her reverie, and with gritty determination, she walked to the window on the opposite wall and struggled with the catch on the shutters. When at last she opened them, she stood in the breeze and waited for it to cool her.
Only she couldn’t wait that long. Dom would be down when he finished, and after all she had said she wouldn’t have him think the pampered princess expected him to do all the work. She did do the labor here, no one else, and she would not have him doubt that.
Turning away from the window, she shoveled grain out of a feed bin into the trough. Gathering the grooming brushes and pick, she went to Sterling and spoke to him, removed his bridle, and picked his hooves. Dragging her stool over, she stepped up and with firm strokes of the currycomb began the job of grooming the massive horse.
She heard Dom descending the ladder. He tossed bedding in Sterling’s stall, then in Oscuro’s, and left a mound in the back corner. “For later,” he said.
She glanced at him occasionally, observing his expertise with a pitchfork, wondering if there was anything he didn’t do well, then blushed at her own audacious speculation.
Reality had begun for her. She herself had set it in motion. This intimacy was what she wanted, and nothing could stop her now—not even her own maidenly indecision.
When he finished with the hay, he moved back into Oscuro’s stall and out of her sight, but she listened as he removed the saddle, gathered the spare brushes, and began to groom his horse with the same care he would use—
No. She wouldn’t think of that now.
The circular curry motion, the repetitious brushing, and the companionable silence relaxed her as surely as it did Sterling. She finished Sterling’s head and neck, and moved the stool to work on his back. At last she stepped down on the packed ground and groomed his flanks. In the other stall, Dom performed the same labors. She suspected he would finish first. He had, after all, the advantage of both height and experience.
Apparently the labor gave Dom pleasure, too, for he started to hum, first tunelessly, then a new waltz she had never heard before.
“Who wrote that?” she asked, not realizing what the contentment in her voice revealed.
“Johann Strauss. It was all the rage when we were in Vienna.”
Curiosity and an absurd kind of jealousy sank their twin fangs into her mind. “We?”
“My pack. My mercenaries.”
That surprised her. Dom had mentioned his pack before, but he had such an air of an outcast about him, she had forgotten. “What happened to them?” she asked.
“They’re dead.”
“Oh.” She didn’t think Dom truly felt nothing, only that he refused to reveal himself to her.
She understood. People who had been betrayed too often were cautious. In the end, it would be easier to bare her body to him than to bare her mind.
Yet if all they were to each other was two bodies, she might as well have chosen Francis.
In a cheerful tone that had even Sterling pricking up his ears, she plunged into speech. “I’d love to hear about your mercenary adventures, but first I think you’d like to hear about me, and I don’t object.” Much. “What is it you want to know?”
She waited, half-cringing, for him to ask her what she liked.
Instead he asked, “Are you done?”
After a last few strokes down Sterling’s legs, she tossed her brushes onto the shelf. “I am.” Sterling was dry, clean and contented, and she experienced the gratification she felt when she performed a labor to her own satisfaction.
“Aren’t you warm?”
She paused, half-standing, totally astonished. “What?”
He’d draped his arms over the wall again. They were bare, his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, and she noted the dark hair that covered his muscled forearms and the scars that broke the tanned skin with their irregular patterns of white.
He fixed his gaze on her. “This is hard work, and you’re all trussed up like a mercenary’s pilfered chicken. You have to be warm.”
Gradually she straightened to her full height, which in this instance wasn’t nearly high enough.
While she’d been busy, she hadn’t been aware of the heat, but now that he was looking at her, she was more than warm. She was hot.
She was also the princess, unused to personal comments and unsure how to deal with them. And she was almost sure this comment went beyond personal, and into familiar.
Which was what she sought, she assured herself. Familiarity, and in more than words.
She looked at him, right into his eyes. “I am warm.”
He smiled at her, a practiced smile. “Come here and let me help you.”
She didn’t like that smile, with its smug dimples and suave appeal. He must have used it in hundreds of seductions. But she didn’t think she should complain. Didn’t know how to tell him she wanted him to be sincere, even if he had to pretend. So she walked out of Sterling’s stall and met Dom in the aisle.
The sun stood directly overhead, the whole mountain stilled to receive its blessing. The horses were comfortable, chewing their grain. The shadowed stable was a world of its own; its silence hung heavily in the air as the princess and the mercenary stared at each other.
Laurentia discovered something right away. When they stood this close, it didn’t matter that Dom smiled like a magician performing a card trick; her heart still thumped and her breasts rose and fell in quick little breaths.
“This scarf is very pretty.” He touched the fichu with one large finger. “But you can do without it. Let’s take it off, shall we?”
S
he nodded, giving permission.
This was all right. He was half-undressed, too, with his shirttails pulled from his trousers and his collar gone. He’d loosened the tie at the neck, and in the vee below she could see a thatch of chest hair, dark and dense, but no matter how hard she stared, she couldn’t tell if it descended down his stomach.
And she shouldn’t be staring quite so openly. She jerked her gaze to his face to find him smiling with genuine amusement, but loaded for seduction.
His hands, square, strong, capable, reached for the silk. She kept her gaze on his face as he slowly pulled one end from the neckline of the jacket. His eyes narrowed as the bare skin of her upper breast appeared.
His practiced smile didn’t survive the shock. His cheeks went slack. She saw him swallow. He paused and then, in a flurry, unwrapped the length of silk from around her neck. The jacket was cut almost to her nipples, and the tight cut pushed her bosom up and out. Her chest and her shoulders were bared to his gaze, with only the barest frill of lace showing above her jacket.
Dom didn’t move; his hands stilled. He stared without finesse, without a sign of the skilled debaucher. The breath he took was rough and deep. The fichu fluttered to the floor. “Woman, what do you have under that riding habit?”
She’d rattled him, and she couldn’t keep the triumph out of her voice when she said, “As little as possible.”
Lifting one hand to cup her chin, he looked into her eyes, and said slowly, “You don’t even realize what you’ve done.”
Abruptly his fingers tightened, his free arm snaked around her waist, and he pulled her against him, up onto her toes. He held her face still for his kiss, a kiss without subtlety, without restraint. Yes, the seducer was gone. The man who held her was the mercenary, ferocious and untamed.
He was the man she wanted.
He opened her mouth with his, ravished her with his tongue, moved his hips against her.
She let him, urged him, soaked in the impressions of heat, of passion, of a man beyond control. Dimly she thought Dulcie was right; the organ he pressed against her was much larger than it had been. She’d looked too many times to be deluded. He wanted to put it in her, too. He made that clear when he pressed his hand against her bottom, probing between her legs, restrained by the tightness of her skirt.
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