Some Like It Wild

by Teresa Medeiros

  She returned his frown with one of her own. “I felt very cross indeed.”

  “Cross?” His grip on her wrist softened, but the ripple of amusement in his voice only made her feel more contrary. “Because you thought she’d given me that locket? Because you believed she was a woman from my past who still had some sort of claim on my heart?”

  She tugged her wrist from his grasp. “Among other things.”

  Her frosty tone only deepened his dimple. “And now that you know she’s my sister,” he asked gently, “just how do you feel?”

  Instead of telling Connor how she felt, Pamela decided to show him. Rising up on her tiptoes, she drove her hands into his hair and tugged his mouth down to hers.

  Chapter 20

  Connor groaned, accepting her unspoken invitation to ravish her mouth by thrusting deep with a velvety stroke of his tongue. Welcoming the hot, hungry press of his mouth against hers, Pamela threaded her fingers through his hair, raking the silky strands free from their velvet restraint as she had longed to do all night.

  He might play the role of gentleman with convincing flair, but she knew in her heart he would always be that same wild boy who had taken to the mountains after his parents were murdered, with a gun in his hand and a dangerous gleam in his eye. She could taste that wildness in his kiss, smell it in the crisp, musky tang of pine and wood smoke that no amount of bayberry soap could ever completely wash away.

  She realized in that moment that she didn’t want to tame him. She wanted to drive him even wilder.

  Judging by the growl that rumbled up from deep in his throat when she pressed the softness of her breasts to his muscled chest, he was more than eager to let her do just that. She ran the tip of her tongue over his teeth, savoring that chipped edge even more now that she knew what it had cost him. As her tongue grew bolder, tenderly mating with his, he slid his hands down her back to cup the lush curves of her bottom in his palms.

  “You’re wet,” he murmured against the corner of her mouth.

  “I can’t help it,” she replied, no longer willing to be shamed by her desire for him. “It happens every time you kiss me.”

  He lifted his head to give her a bemused look. “No, I mean your skirt. It’s wet.” He held her away from him, dismay replacing his bemusement as his gaze traveled down to the bedraggled hem of her gown. It was as if he was truly seeing her for the first time since they’d left the soiree. “What happened to your bonny gown, lass? And your new shoes?”

  Pamela glanced down to discover that her white slippers were no longer white, but caked with mud. One pearl buckle was hanging by a thread and the delicate satin was already pulling apart from the soles. “I don’t really know. I suppose when I was following you down the hill, I must have—”

  “And where’s your shawl?” Connor demanded, briskly rubbing the gooseflesh from her naked arms. “What are you trying to do, you wee fool? Catch your death of a chill?”

  Before Pamela could remind him that he was the one who had dragged her out of the carriage without giving her time to retrieve her shawl or muff, he swept her up in his arms as if she weighed no more than a child and started for the Doric temple.

  She twined her arms around his neck and rested her head on his shoulder, the heat radiating from his big, powerful body making her feel as if she would never be cold again. His arms were the same arms that had cradled his little sister’s trembling body, his hands the same hands that had covered her ears to try to shield them from the brutal thud of fists and the sharp crack of the pistol that had ended their mother’s life. He had done everything within his power to spare her the horror of that night, leaving him to carry its terrible burden all alone.

  Pamela pressed her lips to the fading rope scars that marred the corded column of his throat. This was one night when he would not be alone.

  He carried her up the broad flat steps of the temple. Moonlight filtered through the swaying branches of the surrounding willows, dappling the circular interior with shadows.

  He sank down on one of the broad benches that ringed the overblown gazebo, cradling her on his lap. Thankful that he had already rid himself of his cravat, she lavished the strong line of his jaw with feathery kisses.

  Uttering a soft groan, he reached down to tug off her sodden slippers and tossed them aside. “I’ll buy you more,” he vowed, the possessive glint in his eye making her shiver with anticipation. “A hundred pairs, each more expensive and bonnier than the last.”

  “What kind of thief are you? Why buy them when you could just steal them for me?”

  Driven half mad by the wicked sparkle in Pamela’s eyes, Connor tipped up her chin to reclaim the warm, wet silk of her mouth for his own. In that moment he would have stolen the crown jewels for nothing more than a honeyed sip from her lips.

  But after several minutes of drinking deeply of that pleasure, he knew it would never be enough to satisfy him. He wanted more. He wanted it all.

  She gasped into his mouth as he laid her back on the bench, following her down without once breaking their kiss. He had dared to hope she would open her arms for him, but when her legs fell apart as well, inviting his hard, hungry heat to nestle in the cradle of her thighs, he nearly exploded with want.

  He braced his weight on his hands to gaze down at her, fighting to gain control of both his breathing and his lust. He had thought she was beautiful when she had come floating down the staircase earlier in the evening, but she was even more stunning now with the shimmering coils of her hair tumbling out of its pins, her luminous eyes reflecting the moonlight, her plump lips glistening with the dew of their kiss.

  He rose up on his knees to shrug off his coat and waistcoat only to find her sturdy little hands already there, impatiently tugging away the garments. She tore at his shirt with equal enthusiasm, scattering the pearl studs across the floor of the temple.

  “My tailor will never forgive you for that,” he warned her as his shirt fell open.

  “What about you?” she whispered, gazing at the well-muscled contours of his chest in rapt fascination. He sucked in a sharp breath as her fingertips raked lightly through his chest hair, then ventured lower to caress the taut planes of his abdomen. “Will you forgive me?”

  He caught her hand, pressing it boldly to the rigid shaft straining against the front of his breeches. “I already have.”

  As Pamela shyly traced the width and breadth of him through the clinging doeskin, it was her turn to suck in a shocked breath. When it finally escaped on the wings of a sigh, Connor’s mouth was there to catch it. He covered her again, laving her lips with deep, drugging kisses even as his hand glided beneath her skirt and up her thigh. She moaned as the very tips of his fingers brushed the damp silk between her legs.

  “You told me you weren’t wearing any drawers, you wicked, wee liar,” he whispered, the words an endearment on his lips.

  “Weren’t you the one who warned me there was no honor among thieves?”

  He punished her for her lie by touching her through the silk, using the sleek fabric to create an exquisite friction between his thumb and forefinger and the throbbing little bud beneath. Soon she was sobbing with pleasure, begging for his mercy. In answer to her breathless pleas, he slid his longest, thickest finger through the narrow slit in the silk and into her, ravishing her tenderly but thoroughly. She thought she would perish from disappointment when he stopped touching her altogether, leaving an aching void where his finger had been.

  Ignoring her whimper of protest, he cupped his hands beneath her bottom and rose to his feet. She was so limp with desire she could only wrap her arms and legs around him and hold on. She would have been lying if she had claimed she didn’t feel a primal thrill at how effortlessly he lifted her, how easily he could make her his own. To be such a man’s woman—even for one night—was more than she had ever dared to dream.

  She let out a helpless squeal of surprise as he set her down on the slab of cool, smooth marble that rested on a stone pedestal in the
very center of the temple.

  “It seems the duke has provided a table for dining al fresco.” Connor’s wolfish smile sent a dark shiver dancing down her spine. “Thoughtful of him, wasn’t it?”

  She didn’t realize just how thoughtful until Connor tugged her gown over her head and gently eased her to her back. His hands made short work of the fragile silk of her drawers, leaving her exposed to the cool night air and his heavy-lidded gaze.

  As Connor gazed down at his moonlit goddess, the night breeze drifting through the graceful columns failed to cool the fever coursing through his blood. Both the fever and the blood were pooling in his groin, leaving it hot, heavy, and near to busting the seams of his breeches.

  He couldn’t believe that his dream of having Pamela naked beneath him was finally a reality. Well, except for the blush silk of her stockings and the lace garters hugging her creamy legs just above the knee. A smile slanted his lips. He was a generous man. He could afford to leave her those.

  “My modiste will never forgive you,” she murmured, eyeing the tattered scrap of silk in his hand that had once been her new drawers.

  He tossed the fabric away. “What about you, lass? Will you forgive me?”

  Before she could answer, he parted her thighs, lowered his head and put his mouth on her.

  In that moment, Pamela would have forgiven him anything.

  For Connor the slab of marble became a pagan altar where he could worship Pamela to both his heart’s and his body’s content. She tasted of ambrosia and nectar and all the forbidden delights once denied to mortal man. He savored every creamy, luscious sip, knowing he could never truly drink his fill of her.

  Soon she was arching off the table, panting his name, and clutching at his hair with her tight, little fists. He kept right on adoring her with his lips, his teeth, his tongue—a willing supplicant to her delight.

  Pamela never would have guessed anything could surpass the pleasure Connor’s hands were capable of delivering, but his tender and unholy kiss devastated her every defense. His tongue leisurely swirled over her quivering flesh, bringing her to one shuddering climax after another.

  He did not relent, not even when he had driven her half mad with longing. She should have been satisfied. Should have been utterly satiated by the raw pulses of pleasure still cascading through her. But it wasn’t enough. She wanted more. She wanted him.

  “Please, Connor,” she moaned. “Make me yours.”

  She did not have to ask twice.

  His shadow covered her a heartbeat before his body did, hiding her nakedness from the face of the moon.

  She could feel the back of his hand moving against her in the dark as he unfastened the front placket of his breeches. Then he was there, rubbing his rigid length between her dusky petals, dipping into that aching hollow as if to test the waters.

  As he began to gently but relentlessly push his way inside of her, Pamela moaned deep in her throat. There was no comparing the thickness of his finger to this. No preparing her untried body for such an extraordinary invasion.

  She began to writhe and pant, the cool marble beneath her a stark contrast to the fevered flesh struggling to possess her from above. Bracing his weight on his palms, Connor arched against her, the corded tendons of his throat and the bulging muscles of his forearms betraying the price of his patience, the cost of his control.

  There was a sharp stab of pain, as if she was being torn asunder by a blunt club, then Connor slid the rest of the way home.

  Pamela clung to him, tears spilling down her cheeks. There was no turning back now. He was buried so deep inside of her that nothing would ever be the same. She would never be the same.

  “My Pamela,” he whispered, kissing away those tears one by one. “My brave, bonny angel.”

  His mouth found hers then, giving her a taste of her own surrender flavored with the salt from her tears. Her sense of helpless wonder grew as he began to move within her. The sharp pain soon became a dull ache that only intensified her awareness of how deep she was taking him, how much of himself he was giving her. From that ache, another sensation blossomed—pleasure, dark and carnal and irresistible.

  Connor had feared dealing Pamela a blow that might frighten her off forever. While most women welcomed him because of his size, there had been a few who shied away from him, even going so far as to refuse his coins and foist him off on a more “adventurous” companion.

  So when Pamela wrapped her legs around him and dug her little heels into the small of his back, urging him on, he was only too happy to oblige. He stopped trying to temper his thrusts with gentleness and drove himself into her again and again—deep and hard and fierce—holding nothing back, including his heart.

  Pamela dug her fingernails into Connor’s back, forced to hold on for dear life as he used his body to bludgeon her with waves of pleasure. She knew in that moment that this man would not be the first lover of many, but the only lover she would ever want. She was not her mother. If he walked away from her on the morrow, she would never open her heart—or her legs—for another man. She would spend the rest of her life baking shortbread and collecting cats and remembering the moonlit night when a highwayman named Connor Kincaid had stolen both her innocence and her heart.

  Then there was no more room for thought, no more room for anything but Connor and the driving rhythm of his thrusts. She had yearned to drive him wild, but he was the one driving her half out of her mind by angling his strokes just enough to strike fresh sparks off of that taut little flint nestled in the crux of her curls. At the precise moment that exquisite friction sent rapture burning through her like wildfire, Connor let out a guttural groan. She felt his powerful body shudder and jerk within hers as he spilled his seed at the very mouth of her womb.

  As he collapsed between her splayed thighs, burying his face in her sweat-dampened throat, she gently stroked her hands down his back, welcoming the burden of his weight.

  “Och, lass,” he finally bit off when his ragged breathing had steadied enough to allow him to speak, “you’re so bloody tight.”

  “I’m sorry,” Pamela whispered, frowning in dismay. “I don’t mean to be.”

  Connor lifted his head to give her a disbelieving look. “It wasn’t a complaint. What I should have said was that I’ve never felt anything so fine in all my life.”

  “Oh! Well, I like that much better.” Swamped by relief, she curled her hand around his nape and urged his mouth down to hers.

  Their tongues tangled until she felt him begin to stir and swell deep within her, impaling her anew.

  She broke off their kiss, her eyes widening with shock. “Why, Mr. Kincaid, have you no shame?”

  His mouth curled in a wicked leer. “Haven’t you heard that we Scots are a savage lot cursed with insatiable carnal appetites?”

  She fluttered her lashes at him. “I suppose a timid little English miss could never hope to satisfy a big strapping Scots lad like you.”

  “Probably not,” he said solemnly. “But I don’t think that should stop her from trying, do you? Perhaps if she let him have his way with her at every opportunity, he might even be able to get rid of his sheep.”

  As he began to move within her, Pamela sighed against his mouth. “Why do I feel sorry for the poor sheep?”

  Crispin slipped through the darkened corridors of Warrick Park as silently as a ghost. There was a time when he would have been terrified to leave his bed once the lamps were extinguished. When his mother had first brought him to live here after his father’s death, he had found everything about the immense house foreign and frightening.

  They had only been living there for a few short months when his uncle had taken to his chair and never risen again. To a painfully shy, undersized nine-year-old, that chair had seemed like some sort of living monstrosity. He had been haunted by nightmares where he fled down one shadowy corridor after another, unable to escape the shrill creaking of its wheels. If it had ever caught him, he was convinced it would have gobbled him
down without leaving so much as a bloodstain on the expensive carpet.

  His mother had delivered daily lectures on how he must strive to ingratiate himself to his uncle. She promised him that if he would be a good boy and win the duke’s favor, Warrick Park and all of its treasures would someday be his—a prospect that horrified him more than she would ever know. He was plagued by new nightmares then. Nightmares where he was the one imprisoned in that chair for all eternity.

  Crispin desperately wanted to please his mother but found it impossible to please the duke. No matter how hard he tried, he could never sit up straight enough or eat neatly enough or answer quickly enough to please his uncle. His every attempt—no matter how earnest—was greeted by a mocking rejoinder or a scathing set-down. That was usually followed by a private scolding from his mother or a stinging slap if she felt he had been particularly clumsy or slow-witted that day.

  He had been fourteen when he had finally accepted that he would never win the duke’s favor. From that day forward, he had stopped trying. He would greet the man’s caustic insults with a sarcastic retort, honing the rapier-sharp edge of his own tongue. He surrounded himself with a circle of acquaintances who believed him to be polished and clever and always ready with a sly quip or a witty bon mot. He devoted himself to gambling and drinking and seducing women of easy virtue and any other decadent pleasure that might cast the shadow of scandal over his uncle’s good name.

  Eventually even his mother had been forced to accept that his uncle would never love him. Crispin might be the man’s legal heir, but he would never replace the son he had lost.

  The son who had now returned to whisk that inheritance right out from under Crispin’s nose.

  Crispin’s furtive footsteps paused in front of his cousin’s bedchamber. He pressed his ear to the door, listening for any hint of movement within.

  What he heard instead was a strangled groan, as if someone was in the mortal throes of agony. “Och, Cookie!” a man exclaimed in a Scottish burr so thick it was nearly unintelligible. “It feels like ye’re goin’ to break me spine in two when ye squeeze me that way. But whatever ye do, don’t stop!”