Seven Nights in a Rogue's Bed (10 page)

She’d imagined that like most people, he’d look vulnerable in sleep.

He didn’t.

The angular bones remained rough-hewn. Nobody who saw those determined features would judge the man who owned them anything but a brigand. Dark morning beard on his jaw and cheeks heightened the piratical impression.

And his scars.

This quiet morning, they struck a discordant note.
Relics of an evil Sidonie barely comprehended. It hurt to look at those marks of suffering. She’d feel for any injured creature, but with Merrick, her reaction was more personal than compassion, stronger than outrage. Gossip was silent on where the attack had happened. From what he’d said yesterday, she guessed that he’d spent his youth traveling with his scholarly father. Perhaps he’d received his injuries in some back alley in Naples or Cadiz, or in a skirmish in a wild corner of the Balkans.

In wordless comfort, she rested a hand on his chest. Under her palm, his chest was hard, rising and falling with each slow breath. Lying like this created a heady intimacy. An intimacy that sapped defenses already under siege. Unwillingly, her gaze wandered to his mouth. Relaxed, it conveyed profound sensuality. That was no surprise. From her first sight of him, lounging like a great cat against his massive chair and sipping red wine, she’d recognized a man who appreciated physical pleasure. Unfamiliar weight settled in her belly as she imagined him focusing that appreciation on her when the time came.

If
the time came…

Dear God, did she already concede victory? When everything she knew insisted she couldn’t give in to him. There wasn’t just the danger of losing her virginity, although she couldn’t welcome the chance of having her sins exposed to the world or bearing a child out of wedlock. More powerful was the unreasoning conviction that if she surrendered, he’d sap the strength that had maintained her through recent, difficult years and that would steer her into a self-sufficient, productive future.

Merrick’s eyelashes fanned against his cheeks. Black like the hair tumbling across his high forehead. Sidonie
resisted the urge to brush those soft strands back from his face. When he was awake, she was too busy fighting him to betray such tenderness. Now, in this peaceful dawn, she ached to show him life offered more than cruelty.

Her longing to give him respite made her pause. He worked toward her ruin. He’d plotted to trap Roberta into scandal and disgrace.

He was…

He was the most fascinating man she’d ever met. He listened to her with an attention that fed her soul. He offered glimpses of a world she’d dreamed of discovering. He made her laugh. He kissed her as if he’d die before he stopped.

This weakening against her opponent was more frightening than waking up in his arms. She shut her eyes and whispered a silent prayer against the softening of her heart.

When next she looked, Merrick’s eyes slitted open and he regarded her with an intensity that made her tremble. In the strengthening light, his expression was unguarded as she’d never seen it. Fleetingly she read yearning to match hers in his eyes, misty gray as he surfaced to the day. Asleep he hadn’t looked younger, but he looked years younger now. His mouth curved into a welcoming smile that pierced her heart.

Then in a flash everything changed.

The softness evaporated as if it had never existed. She read unequivocal rejection of whatever he saw in her face. She must gawk at him like an adoring puppy. What price denials now? Leaden shame crushed her.

She shrank back. His arm tightened before she escaped. At the same time, he swiftly slid sideways so the bed hangings shadowed the face he turned away. The dawn light
no longer illuminated his scars. His sudden movement was violent enough to shake the bed.

Lord above…

Her confusion dissipated. Usually Merrick flaunted his scars, daring the world to pity his disfigurement. This morning he hadn’t had time to don his usual armor against curiosity or disgust. With a sickening twist of her stomach, she realized that for all his defiance, he hated his scars. Hated them to the depths of his being.

He’d despise pity so she lowered her eyes. Still tears prickled. Stupid, stupid girl. She couldn’t stifle the longing to take him in her arms and comfort him against a lifetime of grief. An insane, dangerous longing.

“I must be losing my touch. If I polluted the purity of your bed, I was sure you’d howl your lungs out,” he said with familiar derision, at last looking at her directly. But after that revealing moment when he’d withdrawn so abruptly, she knew his careless manner was a defense mechanism.

The beautiful waking smile developed a mocking edge. She was a thousand times a fool, but she couldn’t help mourning the change even as she went rigid against him. “You’ll never make me scream,” she said repressively, although her heart wasn’t in it.

His face lit with amusement she didn’t understand. “Don’t be too sure,
bella
.”

He talked wickedness again. At least his jibes reminded her of what she hazarded in this bed. When she’d agreed to save Roberta, she’d imagined a hundred perils. Violence. Ravishment. Cruelty. She’d never imagined that the riskiest element of her ordeal would be the wounded soul of Castle Craven’s master.

“What are you doing here?” She fought to keep her voice steady.

“Not enough, obviously.”

With those three words, the sweet morning turned dark and threatening. This time she made a more convincing attempt to withdraw, but Merrick pushed her onto her back with insulting ease.

“Let me go,” she said through frozen lips. Her heart beat a wayward tarantella of panic and anger, largely with herself. Why hadn’t she left before he stirred?

Keeping one arm firmly around her waist, he rose and slid his free hand behind her head to restrain her for a relentless survey. “Not in this lifetime.”

Curse him. How she wished he wouldn’t say harebrained things like that. If she’d been one whit less self-aware, she might take him seriously. Then where would she be? Fear wedged in her throat. It would be the outside of enough to leave Castle Craven not only disgraced, but burdened with a broken heart. Except she intended to leave heart-whole and scandal-free, she reminded herself stalwartly. And despairingly wished she believed that.

“This wasn’t part of our bargain.” She wished she could summon will to tell him to release her in a way he’d believe. If she insisted, he’d let her be. She should be fuming at these games—she was, blast him—but still that damnable, reluctant tenderness lingered. Nothing erased the memory of his appalled reaction when he woke to find her studying him. She suspected that he tormented her now to prevent her dwelling on that stark instant.

His masculine scent assailing her, he leaned closer. She prayed for control, for common sense, for, God help the impossible wish, rescue. “There must be another bedroom.”

He smiled in a way that made her wonder if he guessed how she struggled against her weaker self. “This is the only one fit for habitation. I wasn’t preparing to host a house party,
tesoro
. I planned to entertain a mistress to a week of carnal bliss. Or rather I planned for that mistress to entertain me.”

She stiffened as his hand slid languidly through her hair and fell to massage her nape. Sensation spread like circles on a pond. “You slept somewhere else the first night.”

“The cot in the dressing room isn’t designed for a man over six feet tall. I’ll be damned before I let you exile me there again.”

“Perhaps I could sleep there,” she said with false sweetness.

To her surprise, his lips twitched. “Why do you challenge me, when you know I can’t resist a challenge?”

“I hardly know you at all,” she said, to remind herself as much as to put him in his place. She stifled the reckless urge to lean into his caresses.

“So why do I feel that you count every beat of my heart?”

She couldn’t tell whether he was serious. If only she was so awake to his every thought as he accused. What she knew frightened as much as fascinated. What she didn’t know left her floundering in an ocean of reluctant desire. “Stop playing with me, Merrick.”

“You no longer want to extend the preliminaries?” He leaned over her, his big body pressing her into the mattress.

She wriggled without shifting him. “I want you to let me go.”

“No, you don’t,” he whispered.

The problem was she didn’t, not at her deepest level,
but she wasn’t so lost to enchantment that she forgot what was at stake. She raised one hand to his chest to prevent him coming nearer. “Stop it, Merrick.”

“Jonas.”

She struggled to maintain her grip on reality. “Wicked, lying, licentious, scheming, manipulative, underhanded, wanton scoundrel.”

“Say it as though you mean it.” He leaned into her hand and slanted his mouth across hers. This time, surprise didn’t paralyze her. Nor was she the innocent he’d kissed to daunt into incoherence. She knew the pleasure his merest touch sparked.

His hand relaxed to cradle her skull. The arm around her waist embraced rather than constrained. For one forbidden moment, she folded against him like a flower drifting across his breast. Then she broke the kiss and squirmed away until one foot touched the floor.

He caught her arm. “Don’t go, Sidonie. You’re safe enough. I only want to kiss you.”

She cast him a skeptical look as she stood, shivering in the early morning cold. “Why don’t I believe you?”

“Because you’re sadly untrusting.” He paused. “And because you’re a clever woman.”

He caressed the sensitive skin of her wrist. The leisurely stroking made her belly clench with longing, even as she recognized he sought to manipulate her back into his arms. “If I was clever, I’d have fled as soon as I saw you’d weaseled between the sheets.”

He sat up, his shirt sagging to reveal the curve of one powerful shoulder. The sight of smooth tanned skin dried every drop of moisture from her mouth. Such a contrast to his marred face. She hadn’t considered him handsome
at first, even disregarding the scars. With every hour, his physical allure grew. Right now, she’d scorn a handsome man as banal. Idiot that she was, she’d discovered a taste for dark and dangerous and damaged.

Troubled, stirred beyond experience—and he’d hardly touched her—she wondered what had happened to the determined woman who’d arrived at Castle Craven to confront a monster. Only two days later and that woman hovered out of reach.

“Just one kiss, Sidonie. That’s the price of freedom.” He sounded sincere, not like the flirtatious devil whose bright silver eyes dared her.

Shock paralyzed her. It seemed too good to be true. She could depart with Roberta’s vowels, almost as innocent as she’d arrived. Except that along with astonishment and relief, she experienced a twinge of invidious, unacceptable, undeniable disappointment. “You’ll let me go back to Barstowe Hall?”

He scowled as he released her hand. “Are you mad? That wasn’t our bargain.”

“Oh, the bargain,” she repeated soundlessly.

“No skimping, mind. Genuine enthusiasm.”

One kiss seemed small price for escaping this room that bristled with promises of intimacy. “How do we measure your satisfaction?”

The seductive glint returned to his eyes and he reclined against the tumbled sheets with an irritating confidence. “
Bella
, I don’t expect satisfaction,” he purred. “Just a good morning kiss. Nothing to scar you for life.”

He used ‘scar’ to flaunt his disfigurement. But she’d long moved past the stage where his scars struck her as anything other than tragic misfortune.

“Speak for yourself,” she muttered, even as she gingerly kneeled on the bed. The mattress sagged, overbalancing her until she placed one hand on his chest. Heat sizzled from the contact, made her heart pound like a drum. His eyebrows rose in silent mockery as she snatched her hand away.

She trembled as he ran one hand down her plait. His fingers lingered tantalizingly on her breast before he withdrew. Her nipples tightened to tingling hardness.

“Good morning, Sidonie,” he said with a tenderness she mistrusted.

Tenderness was the invincible enemy. The wave of feeling this morning demonstrated that inescapable truth. She could deny seduction. She couldn’t deny his vulnerability. Except she couldn’t deny seduction either, she admitted reluctantly, noting the slumberous light in his eyes.

He released her hair and folded his hands behind his head, tightening the lean muscles of his arms and chest. He looked like a sleepy pasha contemplating his nightly selection from the harem. For an electric moment, they stared at each other. Suspense coiled through her. He seemed content to let minutes dwindle like the bubbles in yesterday’s champagne. She read expectation but nothing deeper in his eyes. He’d raised the drawbridge against incursions into his soul. The day’s clear light proved less revealing than the shadows when he’d woken.

“Well?” She could no longer bear sitting like a mouse in a hollow, waiting for the hawk to swoop.

His eyes flared with unholy amusement. “Well, what?”

She clenched her teeth. “I’d like breakfast before it turns into lunch. Aren’t you going to kiss me?”

Humor lines deepened around his brilliant eyes. “No.”

Shock made her rock back on her upturned heels. “No?”

“You really pay no attention when you make a contract, do you,
bella
? That could get you into trouble.”

At his superior expression, her hands clenched at her sides. She was in such turmoil, she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to clout him or kiss him or run screaming from the room. “It’s got me into trouble already. If I kiss you, can we dress and go downstairs?”

“A kiss in exchange for breakfast? How prosaic you are under that extravagant exterior,
tesoro
. Disappointing.”

She ignored the compliment. She wasn’t extravagant. She was perfectly ordinary. “Disappointed enough to send me away?”

“One would think you wanted to return to your humdrum life.”

She frowned, again wishing she hadn’t been quite so confiding in his sultan’s bower. “I was safe there.”

“Not if your sister’s folly lands you in such straits. And with a man less… accommodating than myself.”