The thumping noise startled him once again, and it was followed by a scraping noise that sounded as if someone was trying to dig through to this room.
Jack gained his feet, took care to step over Red, and started for the door that adjoined the room to the dressing room. He put his hand on the door handle and yanked it open.
On the other side of the door, Lizzie cried out with shock and dropped a box she was holding. The contents—yellowed papers, some coins, and a bit of jewelry—scattered across the floor.
“You gave me a fright!” she said breathlessly as she knelt down to retrieve her things. “You might have knocked!”
“I am no’ the one stumbling about in the dark, Lizzie.”
“It is no’ dark—I have a candle,” she said, pointing to it. She began to scrape up the things that had spilled.
“What is this?” Jack asked, squatting down to help her.
“Nothing. I only just remembered it,” she said, peering at one paper. “These were my mother’s things. I found the box after she died and put it away in the bureau.” She smiled wryly. “I remembered there were some papers….” Her voice trailed off. She looked at the things she’d gathered up.
Jack silently watched her examining the things one by one. She opened a brittle piece of foolscap and frowned lightly. “I thought perhaps there was something she’d left behind, something that might be of use to us now, or perhaps something of value,” she added, holding a bauble in the palm of her hand. “But there is no value here. Only sentiment.” Lizzie dropped the bauble and looked up at Jack, her blue eyes full of helplessness. “I am drowning and grasping at straws, for there is nothing that can help me now.”
“Lizzie…”
“I know it is hopeless, Jack. I know it very well! I am destined to be a prisoner of my uncle’s and Charlotte and I will rot here in a rotting house with rotting food and rotting animals—”
He caught her face in his hand. “Stop.”
“The stench of two spinsters in the glen will waft—”
Jack stopped her by pulling her into a protective embrace. She pressed her face to the lapel of his coat, her body shaking from her failed effort to keep her tears from falling. But only a moment, for Lizzie Beal was not one to cry in her porridge. She abruptly lifted her head and her wet eyes glittered with impotent fury.
“I hate him. He would keep Charlotte and me from ever knowing the happiness of looking into our children’s faces, or the comfort of passing a winter’s night in the warmth of our husband’s bed. We’ll be alone and beholden, and there is nothing worse!”
“It will no’ be so,” Jack tried to soothe her.
“I am no’ blind!” she cried. “Who will no’ require a dowry? Even Mr. Gordon, as dear as he is to us, will no’ marry without a dowry—his family would never allow it, aye? So who will come along to love me, Jack? Who will take my sister as she is? Who will make me feel,” she said on a gulp, pressing her fist to her breast, “as you have made me feel?”
Jack’s heart leapt. “How have you felt?”
She responded by lifting up on her knees and kissing him. It was an incongruently shy kiss, but the kiss of an innocent full of untapped passion, and it detonated within Jack. He raked his hands through her curls, cupped her face. His kiss was full of a man’s constant thirst for a woman’s mouth, for a woman’s body, for Lizzie’s legs to be wrapped around his waist.
He began to caress her, his hand gliding over the swell of her breast, to her ribs and the curve of her waist. He fell back against the wall, pulling Lizzie with him, and she lay across him, her shyness evaporating, her kiss deepening in response to him. With his hands he stroked every curve, sought every bit of warm flesh. He buried his face in her neck and ran his tongue inside her ear as he inhaled her scent.
Lizzie was transformed; her hands and lips moved feverishly as she untied the knot of his neckcloth, pulling at the ends of it, seeking his flesh.
Jack could not say how his clothing fell away, article by article, until his chest was bared. He could not say when her breasts had been freed from the bodice of her gown, but only that there had been a mutually blind, mutually furious need to hold each other. His mouth filled with succulent flesh, and his heart filled his chest.
Lizzie seemed lost in her own desire, caressing him, her mouth warm and wet. He guided her to straddle his lap; her dark curls spilled around her bare shoulders, and her eyes glittered with anticipation. She slowly moved down his body. Jack caught a breath in his throat when her tongue flicked across a nipple and her hands fumbled with his trousers to free his arousal.
He was mad to have her. Her hand surrounded his rigid erection and she pressed her open mouth to the hollow of his belly, sending a violent shiver through him. Jack had been with courtesans and experienced women, but none had ever seduced him so utterly as this. Raw emotions chafed beneath the surface of his skin, making him entirely vulnerable to her.
He couldn’t think clearly. His body, his heart, stormed to be inside her, and when he shifted her, moving her above the erection she had stroked, her lips landed softly on his, and she thrust her tongue into his mouth.
He understood her. He knew she wanted him as badly as he wanted her. There were shallow, distant thoughts of impropriety, of consequences, but Jack’s hunger for Lizzie was so voracious he shoved those thoughts aside. He fought her skirts until they were hiked above her hips, then slipped his hand between her legs. Lizzie gasped against his lips and he breathed a silent moan of ecstasy into her body at finding her so wet with desire for him. His fingers slipped inside her; his thumb stroked her mindlessly until she made a little cry and began to move against him, sliding and wiggling on his lap, making restraint unbearable for him.
With his hands on her hips and himself, Jack guided her onto his cock, slipping slowly inside her, using one hand to stroke her and open her to him. But when he reached her barrier, she tensed.
“I’ll stop,” he whispered, surprised by how quickly those words had come, how earnestly he meant it. “Give me but one word, and I will stop,” he added breathlessly.
But Lizzie, her lips swollen from their passionate kissing, shook her head. Rich, auburn curls danced around her face, and she seemed like an angel to Jack in that moment. “Mi Diah, forgive me, but I…I want it to be you, Jack. Please.”
Those words held an almost preternatural power over Jack; he lifted up, caught her mouth with his at the same moment he slid completely in. There was a moment in which she shuddered and her whole body stilled, but then he felt the release of her breath, the relaxing of her thighs. He eased in deeper still, and began to move slowly and carefully inside her.
Lizzie understood the rhythm and began to move with him. The more she moved, the more Jack was aroused. He was quickly lost in the heart-binding sensation of it all, the warmth of her body and her breath and new, unknown emotions swirling inside him. “You’ve driven me to a madness I’ve never known, lass,” he said roughly. “I canna resist you.”
“Donna say more, Jack. Donna say what you can no’ mean,” she begged him.
“Lizzie…leannan…” He buried his face in the valley of her breasts, taking them into his mouth as her body took him in. Over and over again he slid into her, stroking her with his hand, and restraining the beast within him as he sought to help her find her release. “I want you to feel what I am feeling, aye?” With every stroke he came closer, and when he felt her tighten around him, he was unable to contain the powerful need to release himself into her.
Lizzie dropped her head back at the moment of fulfillment, digging her fingers into his shoulder and stifling the cry on her tongue by biting her lip. But her body reverberated, contracting tightly around him, and with a strangled sob of his own, unfathomable ecstasy, Jack let go with a powerful thrust.
She collapsed against him, her body heavy after her passion had been spent, her moist face in the crook of his neck, her breath hot and ragged.
Jack wrapped his arms around her and
slowly eased back. He was drained. He believed his heart had erupted along with his body; he felt extraordinarily tender toward her. For a man who generally took nothing from a woman but pleasure, that was almost inconceivable to him.
Her breathing began to slow and soften; Jack curled one corkscrew lock of hair around his finger.
“What have we done?” Lizzie whispered.
He had no acceptable answer for that, other than that it had been stunning.
She suddenly propped her chin on his chest and looked up at him with eyes still warm with the glow of lovemaking. “I think I’ve lost my fool mind, aye?”
“If you have, it has gone the way of mine,” he said, stroking her cheek.
“What are we to do now? Go on as if nothing has happened between us?”
“Go on,” he said, aware of how incredibly alive he was feeling, how impossibly tender his heart. “But without forgetting this moment.” He really had no idea what he was saying. He could not look in her blue eyes and recall them in the throes of passion and imagine walking away from them.
No, no, he could not think of that now. He could not play a boyish game of imagining it could be any other way, because he knew it could not. In reality, they were on two different ships and there was an entire ocean between them.
Jack turned his head slightly, so that he wasn’t looking into her eyes, and stroked her back. He could not think of more than the immediate future, an incredible, startlingly clear thought in and of itself. Making love had taken the fog from his brain and Jack realized what he must have known all along: he would speak to the king on Lizzie’s behalf. Only he could do it, and there was no other answer.
It hardly mattered that he was sacrificing himself to do it. Incredible though it seemed, for the first time in his adult life, he had come to care about someone else’s happiness more than his own. He had…he had fallen in love.
It was a remarkable moment of awareness, one that shook him to his core.
Jack suddenly maneuvered to his knees.
When he did, Lizzie slid from his lap and onto her back. She still felt as if she were dreaming as he bent over her. He was frowning down at her, his gray eyes shining with a deep and distant light, his brow wrinkled in thought. His fingers trailed down her abdomen like a whisper of a summer breeze on her skin. The sensation made her feel drowsy and confused; she shifted slightly, but he put both hands to her rib cage and murmured, “Lizzie…listen to me, lass.”
“Mmm,” she said softly.
“I know how to put your predicament to rights. I will put this all to rights,” he said low as he traced a line down her belly.
Her heart fluttered wildly with the promise in that statement. She caught his hand as the other drifted to her thigh. “How?” It was the only word she could manage; her body was drifting down another sensual path.
“It will require that we go to London,” he murmured as his gaze slipped to her breasts and his hand methodically moved from her thigh to her ankle and slowly up again.
“I canna go to London,” she said with a seductive smile. “You are mad as an old hen even to suggest it.”
His hand brushed over the spring of curls, to the hollow of her abdomen. “I am mad, there is not doubt of it. We are to London,” he said, and paused to kiss the peak of her breast.
“Who is ‘we’?” she asked breathlessly.
He smiled a little and kissed the peak of her other breast. “You. Me,” he said, pausing once more to kiss the plane of her abdomen, “and bloody Gordon.” He moved his mouth over the juncture of her thighs again.
“That’s ridiculous,” Lizzie sighed while he slipped his hand between her legs, heating flesh that was still inflamed. “The three of us will up and hie ourselves to London, then? As if we are merry friends?”
A slow, lazy smile curved his mouth, and Jack easily straddled her. He pressed his hand to her cheek and neck and shook his head. “I donna tease you, Lizzie. I am quite earnest in this. We will go to London and I will speak to the king on your behalf.”
She blinked. Then laughed. “What, and see yourself hang?”
But instead of laughing as she expected, Jack dropped his gaze so that she could not see the truth in his eyes. He tilted her head back and kissed the hollow of her throat.
“Jack,” she said as his hands began to move on her again, slowly caressing and gliding and moving her to feel the burn of wanting him all over again. “Jack,” she tried again, but it was no use. She was lost the moment his mouth claimed hers.
He made love to her with great deliberation, touching every part of her with his hands and mouth, stroking and tasting her skin, his lips and tongue everywhere, in places and ways that she was certain would sentence her directly to hell, but Lizzie didn’t care. It was madness, but it was divine.
When he entered her again, and began to move her toward ethereal fulfillment once more, he whispered her name over and over as he found his.
It wasn’t until later—much later—when she heard the deep and steady breath of his sleep that she forced herself to return to earth, to the reality of her life. She’d only added to her troubles tonight. She’d only confused her thinking even more, and in giving herself to him so completely, she would be marked forever by a man she could not have. But no matter what, she would have this night to remember and cling to all her days.
Nevertheless, she would not go to London and Jack would not hang.
Chapter Thirty-two
The morning after that extraordinary night, Lizzie found she was not able to think clearly. Charlotte asked her where Fingal and Tavish had gone off to, and Lizzie thought of those frantic moments in Jack’s arms. Mrs. Kincade said they were low on flour, and she fought the despair and disappointment that she could not be with him always.
Later, Mr. Kincade found her milking a cow that had already been milked and told her Charlotte had summoned her to the drawing room. When Lizzie entered, still wearing her milking apron, her eyes saw only Jack.
He was standing tall and handsome and his eyes—his eyes, eyes that had hovered over her, watching her, going so dark with desire when she’d found her release—avoided her gaze as he calmly set forth his plan.
They—Mr. Gordon, Lizzie, and Jack—would travel to London, where Jack would seek the king’s audience and ask His Majesty to set aside the handfasting and bless the engagement of Lizzie and Mr. Gordon. Once he had that, Jack would request that the king confirm the decree that left Thorntree and its slate to Lizzie and Charlotte.
It all seemed so simple when he said it, and Charlotte had almost levitated from her chair with joy. “There, you see, Lizzie? He’s proved himself quite useful after all!”
“Has he?” Lizzie demanded crossly. “And how will we go with bounty hunters on every road?”
“We’ll go north,” Mr. Gordon said. “Over the hills. I know how to do it.”
“Then do you agree, milord,” she said, her eyes on Jack, “to hang?”
“Lizzie!” Charlotte cried.
“That is precisely what he proposes, Charlotte! He will hand himself to the king on our behalf, and he will hang!”
“I will no’ hang,” Jack said dismissively.
“What makes you so certain of it?” Lizzie cried.
Jack looked directly at her. There was a smile on his lips but a dangerously dark look in his eye. “Why, Miss Lizzie Beal,” he said with a mocking bow, “you’ll have me believe you esteem me after all.” And he laughed in that damnably insouciant, supercilious, charming way he had.
“Donna flatter yourself,” she’d said, her anger rising—at what, precisely, she wasn’t certain, “but I’ll no’ have your neck on my conscience.” And with that, she whirled about, striding from the room.
She did not see Mr. Gordon’s sharp gaze. She didn’t see it until he came looking for her. He found her in the kitchen hacking carrots to bits. He sent Mrs. Kincade on a fool’s errand, turned around, then stared at Lizzie until she put her knife down.
“What is the matter with you, then?” he demanded. “He offers us a plausible path out of this debacle, and you flatly refuse it and insult him as well?”
Lizzie had hardly spared him a glance as she gathered her carrots and put them in a bowl. “Honestly, Mr. Gordon, you canna expect me to…to pick up and be off to London!” she insisted, waving her hand in the direction of London.
Mr. Gordon surprised her by suddenly advancing on her. Lizzie let out a sound of surprise and moved back, butting up against the table. He caught her by the shoulders and said, “Gavin. Say my name, Lizzie.”
“Pardon?” she asked, confused.
“Gavin,” he said again. “Say Gavin, Lizzie, no’ Mr. Gordon. You call him Jack, yet you rarely speak my name at all and refer to me as Mr. Gordon. Why is that?”
His sudden interest in what she called him flustered her. “What do you mean? It is out of respect.” She could see he did not accept that explanation. “Gavin, then,” she said, and tried to move away, but he held her tight.
“No, no mere Gavin, then. No, Lizzie. Donna pretend there is no cause for my concern.”
Lizzie’s heart began to pound guiltily.
“I’ve been quite honest, have I no’?” he demanded. “I want to marry you, but frankly, I am no’ certain you want to marry me.”
“That is no’ true. You know I do,” she said warily, even though a voice inside her shouted no, no, no. She’d betrayed him horribly, she’d betrayed her own heart. What was she to do now? Try and fill her heart with a love she did not have?
“Then say it. Say aye, Gavin, I want you above all others.”
“Aye, Gavin,” she said. “I want to marry you above all others.” Her lips were moving, but Lizzie’s heart was breaking. How could she be so wretchedly confused?
“Do you, indeed? Because we canna marry until this business with your bloody handfasting is done, aye?”
“Aye, aye,” she said disagreeably, wanting to be anywhere but here now. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t think. She stared at the carrots over Gavin’s shoulder.
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