SIXTEEN
TEMPTATIONS, ENTICEMENTS, AND LURES AWAITING THE UNWARY LADY
KIT TIGHTENED HIS HOLD, and Lamont’s heels drummed against the floorboards. The innkeeper, witness to God knows how many acts of violence, discreetly disappeared. At the last moment, Kit released his grip and dropped the gasping man like a pox-plagued rat.
With a sound of disgust, Kit stepped over his onetime savior. Kit MacNeill always paid his debts: it was the only reason the bastard still drew breath. But if he ever threatened Kate again—by implication, word, or act—he was dead.
He gazed dispassionately down at the unconscious man, studying his features. He hadn’t recognized him. None of them had been shaven; all of them had been encrusted with fleas and sores and filth. But the rapier should have struck a chord. Whoever used a rapier but Ram and his pupil? Kit scowled. Could Ram have sent him up here?
A female’s cry of distress abruptly canceled Kit’s half-formed thought.
He took the stairs two at a time, pulling the clay more from its scabbard on his back in a smooth, lethal motion. Kate’s door stood open, and inside she lay huddled on the floor, her face buried in her hands. Her indigo cape had fallen off one naked shoulder. His heart thundered thickly in his chest. If anyone had touched her—
He shut the door and glided past her, his gaze sweeping the room. There was no place to hide; they were alone. He turned back to her.
“Look at me, lass,” he demanded tautly. “Are you injured?”
“No.”
“Did he touch you?”
“No.” She shook her head and her inky tresses streamed out, catching and releasing glints of candlelight. “Why did someone have to do this?”
Do this…? He looked around and so for the first time noted the condition of the room. Around them lay pieces of porcelain and glass, splintered wood and torn papers. Someone had destroyed most of the contents of her trunk.
But she hadn’t been harmed.
“Are you sure you are not hurt?”
“I didn’t even see anyone.” She lifted her face. Tears streamed down her pale cheeks.
He relaxed, allowing the readiness to ease back a notch, and slipped the claymore back into its scabbard. Now that he knew she was unhurt, relief flooded him, and with it a dawning awareness of her state. He fervently wished it hadn’t. It had been possible to ignore her body when she’d been bundled in her indigo cape and the monk’s sturdy wool gown. But her movement had caused the cape to slip off her shoulders, and the thin chemise she wore beneath did nothing to conceal her body. Lace flirted with the top of her bosom, and a white satin ribbon trailed provocatively down the shadowed valley between her breasts. Beneath the thin white material, her areolas gleamed like late buds beneath first snowfall. His mouth went dry with longing.
“Why are you crying then?” He sounded rough and accusatory when, in fact, his accusation was solely for himself. What sort of animal was he to go from fear to lust so quickly?
Her hand fell on the dress piled beside her, her fingers plucking weakly at it. “They’re ruined. All ruined.”
The gown? he thought incredulously. All her tears were over a bloody
gown
?
“It’s just a dress.”
“No.” She shook her head in violent denial. “No, it’s not. It was my way out.”
Her way out. She had no idea of the depth of the cut she dealt him with those few words.
“Is it so intolerable, not having wealth?” He could not hide his sneer. “Not having pretty dresses?”
She looked up at him, her eyes brilliant with tears.
“Yes!” she cried. “It is.
Intolerable
. Do you find that superficial?” she demanded. “Well, I am sick unto death of apologizing for not wanting to be poor—as if that desire is somehow cowardly and iniquitous and the endurance of poverty is noble and virtuous.
“There’s nothing noble in poverty, MacNeill. Poverty is cold and desperate and anxious—always anxious. It stands by and watches men get sliced open and doesn’t dare interfere. Then it chokes you with guilt for surviving.”
He frowned, uncertain where her rage came from but knowing without doubt that it was not because of a ruined dress. He reached down to help her up, but she snatched herself back, glaring up at him.
“I want back what I once had. I don’t want to be afraid anymore. I don’t want to watch a man get killed and do nothing to stop it—” She broke off. “And I
would
. Because I know how afraid she was!”
She? Who had Kate been talking to? “Kate, I am sorry you—”
“No! Do not dare comfort me!”
She’d pressed her hands flat against the floor on either side of her. “I won’t graciously accept living the rest of my life like this, as if I had somehow conspired at my state and was paying a penance for some sin.”
She pushed herself to her feet, standing toe to toe with him, her dark eyes filled with angry challenge. Her cape billowed and fell, drifting to the floor.“He died, not me!”
Her father? He stood above her, finally understanding.
“I wasn’t prepared. I wasn’t supposed to be a widow and an orphan.” Her voice cracked, anguish abruptly replacing her rage. “And I know there are others who have endured far grimmer fates than I, and that I should be grateful things aren’t worse.But I can’t. I’m not. I’m not noble enough to welcome crumbs.” Her voice broke. “I’m so tired of being afraid, of fearing what challenge the next day will bring. Of fearing that I might not be able to meet it. “
“I understand.”
“Do you?” she whispered.
She gazed somberly up at him, and he would surely drown in her eyes, get so lost he would never find his way back. He cupped her face between his palms. He had no right to kiss her. He’d promised her and himself he wouldn’t.
He’d lied.
It had been nearly four years since Kate had quickened to a man’s touch or she’d arched with instinctive welcome beneath a man’s body. Nearly four years since she had wanted and been wanted in return.
It all came rushing back so swiftly that she grew light-headed, sensation igniting long-dormant instincts like lightning to a deadfall. Her knees buckled, and Kit caught her, lowering them both to their knees and looping his arm tightly about her waist, binding her to the hard masculine wall of his chest.
His lips never left hers.
With his free hand he clasped her chin, tipping her face up and holding it as if afraid she would turn away. He needn’t have. She kissed him back, her mouth opening to taste him with tongue as well as lips: tangy male, salty and rich.
He pulled back, spreading his hand across the base of her spine just above the flare of her buttocks and slowly pressing her against him, molding her against the hard male ridge. His eyes were no longer light and chill, but dark and reckless.
“I shouldn’t do this,” he said. But he did not let her go. “I shouldn’t have kissed you again. I swore I wouldn’t.”
“I want you to kiss me,” she answered, desire destroying modesty.
“No.” He shook his head, stumbling to his feet. Without his support, she sank down atop her ruined gowns.
“Not two days ago I swore that I would not touch you again.”
She reached up and placed her palm flat against his belly. A tremor rippled through him. He stared down at her hand, struck still at her touch. When he lifted his head, his eyes were terrible with conflict, damning her, pleading with her. Wanting her.
“I do not remember my husband’s embrace.” She had to make him understand things she barely understood herself. “I was married for six months, and we enjoyed tenderness and affection, and we made love, but I do not remember it. Except in dreams. And of late, I dream of you.”
A strangled sound rose from Kit’s throat. “Jesus, Kate.”
“You kissed me, and I have been burning ever since. Your kiss burned away everything.” She held his gaze. “Everything but you.”
He looked stricken, trapped. “I’m sorry. I took that kiss. I shouldn’t have.”
“I do not accept your apology.”
“What else can I do?”
She lowered her eyes, afraid to meet his gaze. “Make love to me,” she whispered breathlessly, stunned by her own boldness. “Make me forget. Make something for me to remember.”
He raked his hair back from his face with trembling fingers, pacing as he spoke. “You don’t mean this. You’re scared, and you’re feeling vulnerable. You want comfort. Not a lover.”
She did not say a word, only tracked him with dark, enigmatic eyes.
“You should have a gentleman lover to kiss your fingertips and write love letters and whisper poetry.”
Still, she did not speak.
“I’m not that man, Kate. I’m not a gentleman, Kate, I’m a
soldier
. All I have, all I am, is ferocity.” The words grated out, vehement and apologetic. “It is all I know.”
He moved past her, heading for the door, but she snagged his wrist, stopping him, forcing him to look at her. She pulled at him until he sank again to his knees, conflict playing over his stark features: darkness and light, honor and disgrace, hope and despair.
“I don’t believe that.” Her fingers curled around the neck of his shirt, the weight of her hand dragging it open over his chest. The dark hairs covering his chest sprang crisply under her knuckles. His body was hard and supple, muscular and sleekly toned.
“God. Please.” He closed his eyes, pulling her hand away from him, struggling for words. ’Tisn’t my place. That will someday belong to another.”
“What other?” she scoffed. “I am an impoverished widow without family connection and past the first blush of youth. My highest aspiration is to live on the charity of a distant connection. There is no other, Kit, nor is there like to be.”
She pulled free of his clasp and lightly touched his face, the gesture oddly prim, a formal request, a petition and a plea. “There is only you. One night to hold against all the nights to come.”
“Is this some diabolical test?” His throat corded with veins. “If it is, how can I possibly succeed?” he demanded, his face stark in the leaping shadows. He grabbed her upper arms with sudden, implacable violence and dragged her up against him. “Listen to me, Kate. Nothing else but harm can come of my taking you here. Now. And I swore I would cause you no harm .”
“You also swore you would do anything I ask.” Her voice shook with her audacity.
He stared down at her, the light catching in the jade of his eyes, pearlizing the scar on his chin. His arms trembled, and his body tightened.
“As you will, ma’am,” he finally whispered. Then he was lowering her to her back on a pile of ruined satin and lace, silk and velvet. “What’s another mark to bear?”
He sat back on his heels and, with an easy fluid movement, unstrapped his claymore and stripped his shirt from his torso. His beauty was entirely masculine, rough and virile. Smooth, fine-grained flesh veiled heavy planes of muscle and bone. He tossed the shirt aside, and the biceps bunched in his arms, the sinew in his forearm flexing. He leaned over her, prowling up her body like a cat over a kill; the muscles in his flat belly jumped into relief.
For a long moment, he held her gaze before turning, deliberately exposing the welts on his back and something else. A thick, raised scar in the rough shape of a rose rode below his right shoulder blade.
“They branded us in France. At Le Mons. The warden thought it amusing.”
Dear God, the pain he must have endured.
“I wanted you to see this. To drive home what I have been trying to tell you. No man who comes to your bed should be branded, Kate. Or wear scars from a whip. Only a commoner or a criminal would. I am as common as any man on God’s earth,” he said stonily. “I am unfit for your society, your company, or your bed, and that by any, any man’s, reckoning.”
The certainty in his eyes decided her. He expected her to cringe away. She saw it in his expression, the resignation that lay beneath his calm words.
She wrapped her arms around his neck. “By any man’s reckoning, Kit MacNeill, there is nothing common about you.” He was warm to the touch, his naked flesh smooth against hers.
His beautiful eyes blazed with sudden triumph. “I will find tenderness. I will give you pleasure, Kate, or I will die in trying.”
He grinned then and was suddenly, overwhelmingly, a creature of masculine sexuality. All traces of conflict vanished from his expression. His eyes had gone velvety with intent. In one bold movement, he swept the chemise from her shoulder, baring her breasts.
“Kit—”
Before another word could escape her lips, he covered her mouth.
Desire rode him hard, driving him with brutal spurs. But he would not act. He would not, though her breasts weighed soft in his hands and her nipples puckered, a trap set to annihilate his best intentions. She’d asked for tenderness, and he’d promised to do whatever she asked, and if in keeping that promise he singed himself on the blast furnace of tamped desire, so be it.
He swept her up into his arms and rose, his jaw tightening at the way she shrank, praying for restraint, all the while fully aware he had none. The bed was a step away, and he lowered her to the mattress, looking down at her. Yet not for an instant did he mistake what she wanted for what he wanted to give. That would never be his place. For one night he would be her lover, if not her beloved.
He lowered his head, telling himself to be gentle, to be easy.
She did not react at once to his kiss. He did not need her response. Indeed, her active participation might well have destroyed his self-imposed restraint. He rained light kisses upon her cheeks and eyelids and her temples. His head swam with bliss and lust. He could taste her, not just on his tongue, but in the very air, musky and womanly.
He lowered himself, hissing with pleasure as her soft breasts yielded beneath his chest. And when he felt her clasp his shoulders, her long fingers digging into the muscles and her neck arching back, his body quaked. He plunged his hands into the waves of dark hair, damp and cool in the night air, and feasted on her mouth. Silk, satin, velvet? They were not comparisons he could make. He knew little of silk, less of satin, and naught at all of velvet, but surely nothing on earth could be sleeker than her hair, nothing smoother than her flesh, nothing softer than her lips.
Her mouth opened fully and her tongue met his, playing havoc with his self-control. He rolled, carrying her atop him, her thighs spread across his hips, his arousal thrust into the lee of her legs.
Kate gasped with pleasure at the foreign-familiar sensation. She wanted this. Wanted him inside her. A throbbing had begun where he lodged against her, one that needed him inside her to assuage it.
She grew shameless in her quest. She sprawled over his body, rubbing against him, her invitation clear. She wanted him. She needed him. She could not make her need any clearer, and yet he seemed content to play at open-mouthed kisses and slow, languid petting, his hand stroking her idly.
“Please,” she panted, frustrated.
“No. Not yet,” Kit breathed heavily. The tip of his finger traced a circle around her nipple. She flinched at the delicate touch, overly sensitized and overwhelmed, and felt his erection prod her thigh in response. She rocked against him, and he clasped her hips, pulling her hard against him, stilling her movements, his eyes as dark and violent as his lips were tender and soft.
“Stay,” he growled. “I am only human, and if you do that again, then all your hopes for a gentle union will be for naught and all my best intentions destroyed. I am holding on, ma’am. But only just.”
Rather than daunting her, his words stimulated her. That he would harness his desire at her request filled her with a sense of power as elemental as it was feminine. But within seconds, her moment of ascendancy evaporated beneath a new onslaught of sensation.
He lifted her by the shoulder and lowered her upper body above his head, hungrily drawing her nipple into his mouth. He suckled her. She gasped, arching more fully, and he squeezed her breast gently between strong fingers, his tongue swirling against the tip of her breast, turning the muscles in her thighs liquid and stealing the breath from her lungs. She nearly swooned, but he caught her, holding her suspended a few inches above him so he could more easily do what he wanted, play and fondle and suckle and nip, and Heaven help her, she could do nothing but revel in his mastery and give herself to his passionate use.
Between her legs, she’d grown wet and sleek with readiness. A rhythm called that her body answered. She moved on him, once again, the feeling between her thighs expanding and contracting at the same time. He tried to stop her, his hand rough in his attempt to hold her still, but she did not care what she risked; anything was worth the price. She rocked against him, each movement settling her more fully on him, the thick ridge beneath her petticoat pulsing with exquisite reaction.
With a low, desperate sound, he caught her up and dumped her flat on her back, his lower body pressing her down into the mattress, stilling her. “Not yet.”
“Yes.”
“Kiss me.” He commanded her, and like a trollop she complied, hungrily pulling his head down. Their kiss was rough, passionate, his nascent beard abrading her tender lips, bruising her mouth. For long minutes she fed the passion he’d incited, wanting him, wanting an end, a release, one brief night to release her from the last four years of her life.
“Kate!” She had found the limits of his self-restraint. Her mons pumped urgently against him. He growled. “Continue this, and I will have you in ways no lady could want.”
“What ways?” she asked, shameless and brazen.
His green eyes narrowed between the banks of gilt lashes. “I will have you on your back and I will have you against the wall and I will take you on your knees. I will hear you sob and plead for my touch, and then you will plead again, and I will have you again.”
Fearlessly, she gazed up at him, her hair spread like a mantle of night across the pale linen.
“Is that what you want, Kate? Because, by God, I can give you that. It’s what I am. But Kate, I would… Let me make love to you.” His voice shook with the force of his emotions, and Kate’s eyes darkened with understanding.
He had no idea. But then, until now, neither had she. Amazement filled her, and she reached up, stroking his cheek. He turned his head into the caress, closing his eyes and pressing a hot kiss in the center of her palm.
“I want you as you are, Kit. As we are.” She stroked him, beginning at one big, scarred shoulder, down the velvety ladder of his ribs, to his hip, and from there burrowed between them, delving beneath the front placket of his trousers and curling her fingers around his erection. He whispered what might have been a curse or a prayer. “This is making love, Kit.”
The hot flesh moved like a satin sheath over the hard core of him, exciting and wicked and exquisitely male. He sank forward over her, his forehead coming to rest against hers for a short, intense instant. Then he rolled her to her side, the movement pulling him out of her hand.
He wrenched her petticoat up, revealing the dark curls at the apex of her thighs. His breathing had grown heavy, his lean face stark as he cupped her mound without haste but without delicacy, a gesture of masculine possession. She reacted with a gasp of pleasure, and a smile illuminated his dark, tense features.
He caressed her, and she should have burned with mortification at the familiarity, the certainty with which he fondled and explored her, but she burned for another reason altogether. Her eyelids drifted shut. Her breath grew shallow and quick. Again and again he stroked her, and with each caress her hips rose, pleasure mingling seamlessly with arousal.
She twisted on the sheets, her petticoat rucked up under her waist, her body hot and needy. Helplessly, she opened her eyes and found him watching her.
She did not want to be alone. She held out her arms. “Kit. Please.”
“Kate. I am trying—”
“Please!”
With an inarticulate sound, he wrenched the front of his trousers open. She had a glimpse of a stiff and swollen erection rising from a dark thicket, and then he was rolling her beneath him, spreading her thighs with his knees, his head fallen into the vee of her neck. His mouth opened on her throat as he lifted her hips and then, there! He drove into her, trying to hold back, trying not to seat himself too deeply with this first thrust, but her hips rose to meet his entry and he took her, filling her.