The Raider’s Bride

by Kimberly Cates

  "The sunshine will do you good," he insisted, helping her to her feet and drawing her hand through his arm.

  Surrendering, Emily set aside the petticoat she'd been stitching. "We won't be very long, Lucy. If you need anything, just call."

  She fell into step beside Ian, and he was aware of each brush of her skirts against his thigh as he guided her among the tall hedges of yew. He heard the subtle swishing sound of satin against doeskin and was enchanted by the contrast of her small white hand resting lightly on his hard-muscled forearm.

  They walked down the winding path in silence, going deeper and deeper into the flower-spangled reaches of the garden. And Ian found himself savoring her presence far too much to bother with conversation.

  "The flowers are so beautiful," she said at last. "It's astonishing they weren't more bruised by the storm." She lowered her face, shielding it with the brim of the bonnet. "I trust you have... have weathered the storm as well. That you haven't developed a cough after your soaking last night?"

  Ian recalled the night he'd spent tossing in bed, thinking of her, dreaming of her and of the storm they could create together.

  He looked away, not wanting her to suspect what he was thinking, certain it would frighten her if she knew. "The truth is that after last night I have decided to pray for rain and to ride in it with great regularity. The aftermath was so pleasant. You warmed me so quickly and so thoroughly that I am still... affected by your ministrations."

  "I—I would rather not discuss... I mean, last night was..."

  "Was what, Emily Rose?"

  "It was a curiosity to me. I don't usually allow myself to become so overwrought." She brushed her fingertips across a tiny blossom, her voice hushed. "You must have thought me quite mad."

  "I thought you were quite the most beautiful angel of mercy I have ever known," he said honestly. "You have wondrously healing hands, Emily Rose."

  She reacted by attempting to tug her hand away from him. Ian trapped it with his other fingers. "Look what you've done, not only for me but for Lucy as well," he insisted. "If someone had told me a child could be so changed in just one day, I would have called him a fool."

  "It's far too early to hand out congratulations," she warned. "I hope I have helped her, but the hurt runs so deep."

  "And you would know all about such pain, wouldn't you? You'd know about such grief?"

  He could feel her muscles tense just a whisper where he touched her. "I should have said nothing about my past," she said. "It wasn't a fitting conversation to have with... with..."

  "With Virginia's most infamous rakehell?"

  "With any man," she corrected hastily. "I am not comfortable revealing such personal matters."

  Ian couldn't suppress the teasing note that entered his voice. "Considering what I was exposing at the time, madam, I would say we are even."

  He heard her catch her breath, her gaze sweeping unwillingly across his chest. He knew she was remembering how he had looked, half naked in the candlelight. Maybe she was remembering how he'd felt. Had his body pleased her? Tempted her? In spite of her pain, had she wanted him even half as much as he had desired her? The possibility was the headiest aphrodisiac Ian had ever known.

  "Mr. Blackheath, I hardly think it was appropriate for me to be in your bedchamber to begin with. It's even less so for us to discuss it now. Please, let us speak of Lucy or of—of the beauty all around us here in the garden."

  "Beauty? Yes, there is beauty here," Ian murmured, glancing at the scenery around him, the hedges and copses that shielded them from view, the flowers lifting their bright faces to the sun, filling the air with their drugging perfume. "But that beauty has nothing to do with roses and foxglove," Ian breathed. "Nothing to do with the sunshine or the scent of the blossoms in the air."

  He couldn't resist reaching up to trail his finger down the blush-heated curve of her cheek.

  "Please," she pleaded, turning her face away from him. "Don't."

  Ian's gaze skimmed over the brim of Emily d'Autrecourt's bonnet. The yellow straw now obscured her features from his view, and he felt a compelling need to see the heart-shaped perfection of her face, the sweetness that clung about her lips, the emotions that darted like quicksilver in her eyes.

  "You told me to speak of beauty, Emily Rose," he said in a devastatingly reasonable voice, thrumming with desire. "I am only granting you your wish."

  "You are trying to... entice me. With your words. Words that mean nothing. I'm not a complete innocent. Alexander's friends attempted it often enough. It seemed to amuse them, to try to seduce a vicar's daughter."

  "Is that what I'm trying to do? Seduce you?"

  Her shoulders stiffened. "Yes."

  "Then you are making it infernally difficult, with your face turned toward the flower beds."

  Unable to stop himself he took the brim of her bonnet between his fingers, those silken dark curls sliding against his knuckles as he eased the hat down until it dangled by its crisp ribbon ties down her back.

  She lifted her chin, and he was struck again by how much she resembled an angel, all sweetness and innocence, courage and a very real fire that burned in those exquisite eyes.

  "If I gave you the wrong idea last night when I came to your room, I am sorry," she said. "But I—"

  "I know," Ian interrupted. "You are not accustomed to exposing your pain to a man like me. What would you say, Emily Rose, if I told you that this man is not... accustomed to what happened last night, either? I am not much given to having a beautiful woman in my bedchamber, having her touch me, run her fingertips over my skin, and then... letting her escape without so much as tasting her lips."

  "You kissed me when I first came here." Those lips were trembling now, berry sweet, inviting. "You tried very hard to make me think you were wicked. But after watching you with Lucy, I don't believe it."

  Ian's breath snagged in his throat. "That could be a fatal error in judgment," he said in a husky voice. "You are a very lovely woman, Emily. An angel who should be far beyond the touch of a sinner like me." The rough-edged tones softened, dropped to a whisper. "Why is it, then, that I cannot seem to keep myself from this."

  It was madness, but Ian couldn't stop himself from cupping her cheeks in his palms and lowering his mouth until it was a breath away from hers. "This is a mistake, Emily," he murmured. "But then, I've made mistakes before."

  "No!" she protested. "Lucy—"

  "Lucy can't see us now. No one can. What are you afraid of? Are you afraid of me, Emily Rose? Or are you afraid of what I make you feel? What I make you dream of? Are you afraid of what I make you see inside yourself?"

  He could see the alarm in her eyes, but before she could pull away, he surrendered to impulse and let his lips melt against the mind-numbing sweetness of hers. He felt her gasp of surprise and drank in the soft sound of denial and of pleasure.

  He'd learned to kiss a woman with the same skill he used to wield a sword, and with as devastating an effect. His mouth could be ruthless, demanding responses a lady like Emily could not even imagine. It could plunge a woman into rivers of passion so swift and overwhelming she would forever hunger for its power.

  But as his mouth moved over Emily's now there were no demands, only a slow immersion in enchantment. His lips brushed over the full, moist curves, the warmth of her kiss insinuating itself deep into the core of him.

  His hands slid down the swanlike curve of her neck to cup the bare flesh of her shoulders, his thumbs testing the soft hollow at the base of her throat. Her pulse beat against him there, a frantic racing, as if a trapped dove were trying to battle its way to freedom. A freedom Ian knew he could give to her, if he could only lay her down among the blossoms and do with her the things his body was clamoring to do, show her the things his body was hungering to show her.

  Her head fell back as he trailed kisses down her throat, down to the swell of her breasts, and he could feel her shudder with the pleasure she was trying to suppress.

  Now he
was the one who groaned as he breathed in the faint scent of gardenias on her skin and felt the hot satin of that fragile forbidden place against the beard-stubbled roughness of his jaw.

  He let his lips part, tasting the valley where her breasts began. It was flavored with desire and the erratic beat of her heart.

  "Ian..." It was only his name, whispered in a passion-hazed voice that was laced with surprise and a very real dread.

  He gathered her into his arms, and this time his mouth found hers with a hunger he didn't bother to conceal, a raging desire he could no longer temper.

  But this was not the familiar hunger of his body. Rather it was a hunger of the soul he'd thought dead long ago.

  It stirred to life, agonizingly raw, terrifying.

  And in that moment he didn't want her to be afraid of him, didn't want her to see him for what he was—the wicked rakehell, the hardened cynic. Ian Blackheath, Satan's son.

  He didn't want her to taste in him the obsession, the bitterness, the legacy that had borne fruit in Pendragon.

  Pendragon...

  Awareness slammed into Ian with the force of a mace.

  He tore himself away from her, feeling shattered as he stared into those misty amethyst eyes, those lips red with his kisses, her throat, still blushed from the brush of his jaw and the hunger in his mouth.

  What had he almost done?

  Desperate, he groped for harsh words, brutal words, any words that would crush the light that shone in her eyes, the light that awakened in him a yearning that was past bearing.

  It took every bit of will he possessed to speak in the arrogant, detached voice that had become such a part of him.

  "If all governesses are such a temptation, I understand why they lure so many men down the path to perdition. You make me consider paying off my current mistress and taking you in her place."

  She blanched as if he had struck her, but he gritted his teeth and went on.

  "Come, now, Emily Rose. Let us make a game of it, shall we? I shall douse myself with water, and you may strip my clothes away."

  She looked so stricken. Ian's gut clenched.

  "You are a bastard," she said quietly, so quietly.

  "Yes, I am. But you cannot say I didn't warn you from the first. Now, I've amused myself quite enough here in the garden. I do believe it's getting chill."

  With that he turned and strode down the path, hating himself for the hurt in her eyes.

  Chapter 10

  Emily pressed shaking palms to her mouth, feeling sickened by the fever that Ian Blackheath had spread to her with his kiss. A fever of dark, swirling needs, needs she had never acknowledged. A soul-searing weakness that had made her want to thread her fingers through the dark strands of his hair, to draw his mouth tighter, deeper against hers, to taste the enigma that lay beyond that bedeviling smile.

  Hadn't she learned anything in the years she had spent fending off the advances of Alexander's supposed friends? Had she truly been so foolish as to... as to what? Be enchanted by the sight of Ian Blackheath allowing Lucy to teach him to sew? Had she been so foolish as to forget the danger that lurked in Blackheath's insatiable appetites, the shallow selfishness she had witnessed in men like him so many times before?

  Lord, yes, they could be charming. They could fairly reek with understanding and compassion while they were trying to get beneath the lacings of a woman's bodice. Any woman's bodice. But most especially that of a woman who dared to challenge them with her virtue.

  Hadn't she seen a hundred times that the only woman a man like Ian Blackheath wanted in his bed was the woman he had not yet sampled? Hadn't she watched starry-eyed brides in Alexander's circle succumb to a pair of soulful eyes and skintight breeches and fall into a torrid affair, only to find that the moment they had surrendered to their own feminine passions, the man who had pursued them so relentlessly raced off to lay siege to an even more unattainable beauty?

  Hadn't she seen the devastation and the crushing scandal that followed in the affair's wake?

  Let us make a game of it, he had said. I shall douse myself with water, and you may strip my clothes away.

  A game.

  That was what such affairs were to men of that kind. A game that was rigged so there could be only one possible winner. The man and his selfish lust.

  And it was evident from Ian Blackheath's words, and from the fever of desire in those sinfully skillful lips, that he had chosen her hands and body and mouth as the prizes he wanted at present. The diversion of the moment, to be plucked and savored. The conquest to be boasted of over Madeira with all of his fine rakehell friends.

  She had suspected from the beginning the kind of man that Ian Blackheath was. And he had taken an almost unholy satisfaction in confirming her suspicions at every opportunity. But never had she suspected the traitorous feelings that were buried in her own breast. She hadn't realized that beneath the heart of the proper vicar's daughter and Lord Alexander d'Autrecourt's child bride there was a woman hungry for the fire in Ian Blackheath's hands and the unquenchable thirst that had been in his lips when he kissed her.

  Never had she suspected that she would want him.

  She shivered, agonizingly aware of her own response to the beauty of that virile masculine body she had stripped the clothes from the night before.

  Despite her own inner pain, she could still remember the hard musculature beneath her hands, could feel his skin slipping like hot satin beneath her palms. She could see in her mind's eye the curve and ripple of sun-darkened flesh that spanned his chest, the flat plane of his stomach, the fine-spun web of dark golden hair that had accented the magnificence of his seminude body.

  Her cheeks flamed at the memory of how her hands had flown from the knee buckles of his breeches to the flap of doeskin shielding his final mysteries from her gaze.

  He had smiled that dazzling smile, full of suppressed pleasure, amusement, and a beguiling touch of what was almost embarrassment as he had hinted at the evidence his body was already revealing. She had moved him. Stirred him. Made him want her.

  What was it he had said on that first night? That he was not used to self-denial?

  Emily had had much more practice in that virtue. She had denied herself so many things, so many feelings, so many dreams, that it was little wonder the attentions of a charming rogue with sea-blue eyes had been able to lead her into this foolishness here in a sunlit garden.

  But there must be no more missteps in this dangerous dance she was trapped in. There must be no more moments of weakness, when the sensual adventures that beckoned her from Blackheath's eyes lured her away from her own well-developed sense of caution.

  This is a mistake, Blackheath had murmured, every sinew of his body straining toward her, heating her blood until it raced through her veins.

  Emily caught her lower lip between her teeth, remembering his brief hesitation, the wariness that had stolen across features that were as strong and compelling as those of a warring king.

  A mistake...

  Merciful God, hadn't she made enough of those already? And endured the consequences of her folly? Was she foolish enough to have her head turned by a handsome man who flustered her with his attentiveness, unnerved her with the secrets hidden in the exquisite blue of his eyes?

  His eyes...

  Emily wrapped her arms about her ribs as if to shield herself from the memory of those incredible eyes. So blue she could drown in them, so filled with sensual promise she could feel it to the feminine center of her that still throbbed with wanting him.

  But the thing that disturbed her most was the other, more fleeting emotions she had seen in his gaze... a kind of bewilderment where there should have been only diamond-hard cynicism. A hesitation, as if he were teetering upon the brink of something he didn't understand. And a kind of quiet longing that had softened the arrogant planes of his face, leaving him even more beautiful than before.

  The night before, during the storm, Ian had gotten her to reveal things she'd rare
ly spoken of, and never to a man who was a virtual stranger.

  Her memories of Jenny had been treasures far too precious to share with anyone. Her memories of Alexander were laced with guilt and shame and regret.

  But Ian had revealed nothing of himself. He had given her no hint of what lay beyond his rapier-sharp wit and his debauched ways. Only rarely in the past two days had she caught glimpses beyond that hardened shell of his and seen genuine warmth in his smile as he looked at Lucy. Only rarely had Emily sensed his delight in the little girl's blunt manner, sensing that he felt a certain kinship of spirit with Lucy when the child was most unruly and most intrepid.

  And last night, when Emily left his bedchamber, Ian had called her back, his voice tender, aching.

  What was your little girl's name? he had asked.

  Oh, God, that he should want to know Jenny's name.

  She closed her eyes, remembering the look on his face. Haunted. Compassionate. As if he understood...

  Emily crossed shakily to a statue of Cupid and Psyche and leaned against the exquisite carving.

  Who was he, this man who had barreled into her life in Lucy Dubbonet's wake? This man who could at once seem so reckless, so wild, and yet so... lonely?

  Lonely in spite of his rakehell friends, his wealth, his power.

  Lonely in spite of the sensual response he seemed able to coax out of any woman with the wave of one long-fingered hand.

  Who was he?

  No. She didn't want to know. More than that, she didn't want to understand.

  She only wanted to find what she had come for. The doll. The hidden message.

  Then she wanted to leave this house with its lovely gardens and its huge empty rooms. She wanted to leave this man with his empty heart, and the little girl with her too wise eyes and her wary smiles.

  In the short time she'd been at Blackheath Hall, Emily had learned only one thing for certain.

  Ian Blackheath was not what he seemed.

  Secrets were hidden beneath that mocking grin. Loyalties warred inside that broad chest. She could sense them, feel them.