by Danice Allen
He was immersed in water up to his neck, his knees seeming to float like smooth brown-beached islands in the foamy water. His eyes were shut, the ebony lashes a slash of kohl against his cheeks. But he’d apparently detected the soft scuff of her slippers on the polished wood floor and felt the slight stirring of air as she shut the door noiselessly behind her, because, though his eyes remained shut, a fissure of irritation marred his tranquil expression.
“Lad, I said I’d enough water and was quite capable of bathing myself. I don’t need mollycoddling. Thank you for your assiduous care, but please leave me alone.”
He sounded authoritative and more than a little exasperated. Perhaps his nerves were just as raw and his emotions just as tumbled and needful as Beth’s. She hoped that meant he’d be as happy to see her as she was to see him. Even his voice produced tremors of electric awareness through her, sending her blood pulsing through her veins.
“Dudley, is that you? Well, speak up! Damnation, I’ve had just about enough of this.”
Alex peeked grudgingly through half-closed eyes. No doubt he had intended to look daggers at the chucklehead who insisted on disturbing his bath, but he didn’t know quite how to react to finding Beth in his bedchamber. Sliding one bare, wet arm over the lip of the tub for support, he pulled himself up. As his upper torso rose out of the water, soapsuds slipped down the beautifully sculpted contours of his chest, sliding around the dark wine-colored nipples, catching in shiny knots of bubbles where the water-slicked black hair was the thickest.
Beth stood with her back to the door, her hands clasped behind her. The bodice of her willow-green muslin stretched taut across her breasts as she breathed deep and fast. When his eyes locked with hers, she felt a jolt of pure, undiluted pleasure surge through her.
“God, Beth, what are you doing here?” His reaction appeared to match the intensity of her own. His expression was equal portions of shock and elation.
She was entranced with looking at him, but she wanted to see more. More than that, she wanted to touch him. She took a step closer and said in a rush, “Nobody’s home, Alex. Zach is gone. Dudley and Sadie are gone. Even Stibbs is napping in the cellar between the wine racks.” She clapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh, dear, I wasn’t supposed to tell anybody that.”
Alex laughed, then stopped and looked disconcerted, as if he hadn’t expected to laugh, or thought it inappropriate given the circumstances. “What are you talking about, my Beth? Old hatchet face is lying between the wine racks? Foxed, I suppose. But Lord, Beth, what are you doing in here?”
Beth took another step forward, hands clasped demurely behind her, but with anything but demure thoughts possessing her mind and motivating her behavior. “I told you, Alex. Nobody’s here. The maid saw Zach leave and then told me where everybody else is. We’re … we’re quite alone, you see, except for a few sleepy servants.” She took another step.
“Zach’s gone?” Alex’s brows dipped in a frown. “I suppose he’s gone to—” He stopped abruptly and shifted his eyes about the room, resting here, there, then back to Beth. “I suppose he’s gone to town. I was going to tell him about us after dinner.”
“Perhaps he plans to return for dinner,” Beth suggested with an uninterested shrug of her shoulders, all the while looking at Alex in a most interested fashion. “But there are several hours before dinner, you know.”
Alex laughed again, but this time there was an underlying tension that was palpable, that hung, teasing and tempting, in the still, damp air between them. Beth liked the smell of his soap. It made her think of ferny dales and musky herb gardens, with a tang of spice. She liked the way his hair curled above his forehead, the dark coils plumped and shiny with water.
Alex let loose a hissing breath. “Beth, I don’t think this is particularly wise. We might be found out. And, worse even than that, this is Zach’s house. I’d feel like an absolute scoundrel making love to you under Zach’s very roof.”
Beth felt the genesis of anger and hurt pushing its way through the haze of passion. “Alex, are you ashamed of us?” she demanded to know. “If we love each other and are committed to each other, there’s no shame in it. Would you feel better about this, more noble, if I married Zach? Then there’d be no guilt to deal with, just a few decades of loneliness and wretched remorse—at least for me.”
“Ah, Beth, for me, too!” Alex assured her, his eyes darkening with swiftly building emotion. He braced his hands on the sides of the tub and seemed about to stand up, then stopped abruptly, looking almost sheepish.
Beth tried to cloak the eager look she was sure was evident in her eyes by dropping her gaze to the floor, but she couldn’t help the small smile that tilted her lips. “If you’re feeling a tad modest, Alex, I won’t look. I know it was dark before.”
“Which time are you talking about, my Beth?” he retorted softly. “The sun was shining full and bright that day at Dozmary Cove when first you saw me naked.”
Beth’s eyes flitted upward to meet his highly amused expression. “You knew I was there? You’ve known all along that I saw you that day? Why didn’t you say something?”
“Indeed, Beth, what could I say? ‘Oh, Miss Tavistock, I chanced to see you yesterday at Dozmary Cove. So rude of me not to greet you with a bow, but I felt a trifle too informal in my state of dishabille. I hope you will forgive me. By the by, did you like what you saw?’”
Beth giggled, her cheeks exploding with heat, and she reached up to hide the increased color that she knew had blossomed there. “I’d have died if you’d spoken so to me. I felt so guilty about watching you, especially since I did like what I saw ever so much!”
Alex settled back into the water. He drew his knees up and leaned his folded arms atop them. Over this quickly constructed plateau of beautiful crisscrossed male arms, he looked at her. His teasing smile was gone. He was dead serious. “Why are you so honest, Beth? You devastate me with your honesty. You humble me with your honesty. Lord, you seduce me with it!”
Beth rolled a shoulder. “I can’t seem to be anything but honest with you, Alex. Lying to you would be like lying to myself, which I don’t like above half, I can tell you. I’d been lying to myself ever since you came to Pencarrow, telling myself I didn’t want you. I’ve never felt so truly myself, so liberated, as I did that night by the creek. Since then it’s been hard …” She took another step forward.
He watched her intently. “Would you like me to tell you something—honestly—about that day at the cove?”
She nodded, her throat dry, every nerve vibrant with expectation.
“I knew you were watching me and I liked it. I liked it excessively.” His lips twisted ruefully. “I wanted to strut before you like a puffed-up peacock with all my colorful plumes spread for inspection.”
She returned his smile. “Why didn’t you? As I recall, you jumped into the ocean, disturbing Shadow from his slumber. I was compelled to leave.”
“I was compelled to hide my arousal from your fascinated virginal gaze. I did not wish to surprise and alarm you with the … er … changes that come about when a man is aroused.”
He was alarming her now. Oh, how he was alarming her, and oh, how she enjoyed being thus alarmed. “You did not frighten me by the creek. Since we made love, I’ve come to appreciate the importance of … arousal. I don’t think I shall ever again dislike being … alarmed.”
Alex’s grin slackened and disappeared. His eyes were piercing, as black as Judas’s soul. “Beth, you take my breath away with your words, as if Gentleman Jackson himself had plowed a huge fist into my belly. You must have been born a seductress, an enchantress like the sirens who mesmerize sailors and dash their ships against rocky shores. I wonder you do not leave in your wake a similar spoil of male bodies.”
“I was no seductress till I met you, Alex,” she replied. “’Tis only you I wish to mesmerize, as you’ve mesmerized me.”
For a long moment they simply stared at each other, hearts beating wildly, breathing alloca
ted to a secondary necessity of life, next to their need for each other.
Alex broke the charged silence. “There’s a key on the chest by the wardrobe.”
Beth walked unhesitatingly to the chest, found the key, and locked the door. She turned and looked at Alex, as if waiting for further instruction. In the school of love she was happy to be a most biddable student.
“Now, Beth, take off all your clothes, and do it slowly. You’ve seen me in the bright light of day, yet I’ve enjoyed your delectable little body only by moonlight.” He rested his chin on his folded arms, a bemused smile on his lips, as if he anticipated a leisurely tryst with pleasure.
“Are you complaining, my lord?” Beth quipped, licking her upper lip nervously. She hoped he’d like what he saw by sunlight.
“Are you stalling, my Beth?” he shot back.
She wrinkled her nose in reply and proceeded, with shaky fingers, to untie her gown at the back. The gown was simply made, overlapping and fastened with only two lengths of ribbon. This swiftly accomplished, she nudged down the short puffed sleeves till her arms were free. The bodice fell in billows about her waist. She hooked her thumbs in the soft material and eased the dress down past her hips and to the floor. She stepped out of the gown and stood in her white cambric shift. She was thrilled and reassured to know that her inexperience in such matters was not off-putting to Alex; the ardent, soft-hard look in his eyes had intensified.
Alex was glad to be immersed in a cloudy camouflage of tepid water. His body had quickened the moment he set eyes on Beth, but now his loins were achingly engorged with desire. Sensuality incarnate, an innocent temptress, was his Beth. Circles of perspiration had collected on her shift, beneath her arms, in the valley between her breasts, at the dip of her navel. Even where it wasn’t wet, the shift gave a collective impression of molded liquid, clinging loverlike to every swell and hollow of her body. He watched as a trickle of sweat rolled down her chest from the base of her throat, sliding into the dark, moist cleavage.
His eyes returned to bore into hers. “Well then, Beth?” he rasped, deploring his own eagerness. This was too exquisite an experience to hurry.
She smiled crookedly, the dimple in her right cheek showing like a crescent moon against a dusky pink sky. “You said to go slowly.”
“Not so slowly that you drive me insane. Or is that your intention, Delilah?”
“A mad lord with a lascivious smile on his lips as they trundle him off to Bedlam would be satisfying scandal-broth for the ton to sip,” she suggested playfully.
“Beth!”
She pushed down one small capped sleeve of her shift, then the other, baring both smooth, rounded shoulders. Then she did a sort of wiggle and thrust, wiggle and thrust, till the cambric fabric clung with teasing precariousness to both erect nipples before dropping at last to catch on the womanly swell of her hips. She seemed to be about to shake her hips and dislodge the undergarment, allowing it to fall about her feet, when Alex stopped her.
“Not yet, Beth,” he said, his voice husky and low. “Let me look at you.”
Aphrodite could not possibly have been more alluring, he thought. Beth’s breasts were milky mounds, firm and upright, the nipples as richly tinted as damask roses. Her waist curved perfectly into a flat stomach. The shift still clung to her slim hips, but just barely.
“Now?” she asked, the eagerness in her eyes a reflection of his own impatience. He nodded. She rotated her hips, and the shift fell to the floor.
The sight of legs as long as a lazy summer day increased Alex’s internal temperature to match the simmering heat outside. The rounded thighs and calves and trim ankles looked satin-smooth. Ah, yes, how well he remembered. They’d felt like a skein of exotic silk slipping between his own hair-dusted legs, twining round his waist….
“Now it’s your turn,” Beth informed him with a tilt to her chin, a wicked look in her aqua-blue eyes.
“I’m already undressed,” he retorted. “Or hadn’t you noticed?”
“Yes, you appear to be unclothed,” she conceded, “but unless you stand up, I won’t know for sure, will I?”
Alex chuckled nervously. “You minx! You shameless baggage! Join me. Come! The water’s refreshing.”
“I’ll come only if you stand up and make room for me. The tub is small, and you are quite large, my lord.”
Alex knew not how to respond to Beth’s assertiveness. It had been dark when they’d made love. And earlier, when she saw him on the beach, he was not aroused. He felt a trifle reluctant to show himself now, since he knew himself to be hard and swollen to the point where he might indeed alarm her, despite her brave and brazen words. The extent to which he wanted her made him feel vulnerable, too.
“Come, Alex,” she coaxed. “Here is your opportunity to strut like a peacock. I believe I would exceedingly enjoy such a sight.”
With a slight moue of reserved uncertainty, Alex finally complied. Beth watched as he straightened himself, braced his hands on the sides of the tub and slowly stood.
He was like Neptune rising from the foamy sea, but even that mythological ideal could not surpass the beauty of Alex’s naked body. His wide chest narrowed to a spare waist and hips, a flat stomach, and long—ever so long—legs. All of him glistened like a merman, water-sheened, sensually slippery. And that part of him, which he referred to with modesty as his arousal, was proud, erect, the epitome of manhood.
“Beth?”
Alex’s voice was a little uncertain, as if he was afraid he’d frightened her. But when his gaze searched hers, his concern disappeared under the blatant, unflinching admiration reflected there. “Well, come, then,” he said gruffly, his arms extended in invitation.
Beth went. Later she could not recall those few seconds as she crossed the floor to step into the tub. Perhaps the journey was lost in the confusion while her brain busily registered all of the delicious, delirious sensations being transmitted from every nerve as their bodies made contact.
Beth was immersed to the knees in lukewarm water. Alex has placed his large hands at the indentation of her waist and pulled her against his water-slicked body, at the same moment capturing her mouth in a hard, urgent kiss. Teeth and tongues, satin-moist corners, were rediscovered. So many sensations, so many aching points of connection. Tender nipples against wet, hair-textured chest. Belly against belly, his rigid arousal pressed between them, carnally enticing.
Beth’s hands roamed over his shoulders and down his muscled back. She broke the kiss and dipped her head to nibble his shoulder, her tongue pleasuring itself in the moistness of his warm skin. Then her hands slid down to cup and knead his firm buttocks, as she bent her head to find his nipple, which she took between her lips and suckled greedily.
A growl of pleasure rumbled from Alex; his hand on her shoulders bit almost painfully into her flesh. “Let go, you water nymph, or I’ll take you—now!—in the tub. The resulting tidal wave will leak through the floorboards and alert the household. Come.” He pulled her upright with his hands tucked under her arms, his thumbs grazing the outsides of her breasts.
In accord, they stepped out of the tub and moved to the bed, heedless of the water dripping on the floor. They stepped on the dais and sank onto the crimson counterpane, instantly enfolded in each other’s embrace, arms and legs already entwined in a body poem of beautiful physical prose.
Beth lay on her back with the cool silk beneath her and Alex above her, her nerves aquiver with a calliope of sensations—wet and dry fillips of roughness, sleek caresses, fire and ice.
He touched her; he worshiped every inch of her body with his hands and his mouth—a clever mouth so adept at making her murmur and softly exclaim with unexpected pleasure. When she was near crazed with need, she wrapped her legs around his waist and pushed her pelvis hard against his. She took his face in her hands and looked at him beseechingly. “Alex, love me.”
Mingled perspiration and scented water beaded dewlike on Alex’s face, his chest and arms. He held between hi
s teeth the inside corner edge of his bottom lip, and his eyelids drooped, giving the incongruous image of an ardent grimace. He, too, had only a tenuous hold on his urge to consummate their lovemaking immediately.
“No,” he rasped. “If I must go to the devil for my sins or be posted off to Bedlam in a restraining gown because you—witch!—have driven me mad, I will prolong the damning process as long as possible.” Then, with one fluid movement, he rolled over on his back and pulled Beth atop him.
Beth trembled and thrilled at Alex’s provocative threat. Her breasts were flush against his chest, her arms supporting her on either side. Her legs were parted, slightly straddling him, though she still reclined. She looked at him, wide-eyed. “What should I do now, Alex?”
Alex laughed, his black Gypsy eyes glimmering. He raised his arms above his head and linked his hands under his neck. “There are no ‘shoulds’ or ‘shouldn’ts’ in lovemaking, gosling. Do with me as you feel inclined. I assure you, it’s all been done before, yet has never lost its allure over the centuries.”
Beth believed him. She couldn’t imagine ever tiring of bedding with Alex. Then she did as he bade her to do—she followed her instincts.
Beth pushed herself up till she was fully astride him, her knees on either side of his hips, the smooth, hot tip of his manhood nudging the insides of her thighs. She feathered her fingers along his shoulders, his chest, his stomach, while her eyes lovingly followed each caress. Her woman’s pride rejoiced when she noticed his responding quiver or flush or cluster of gooseflesh. She looked up and saw that his eyes were closed, as if in an ecstatic dream.
