She worried her lower lip between her teeth. The front of her dress was stained dark, spattered with water, and his eyes trailed the irregular edges. And suddenly, as he considered how and where she had gotten so wet, he realized what else she had done.
She had struck her cousin. Or she had tried to. Violently. With a water pitcher. And she had done it for him.
His breath whooshed out of him. He stood blinking stupidly at her. What a spectacular match the two of them made. People everywhere should duck for cover.
He took two steps toward her. He was close enough to reach out an arm and touch her now. She had seen the worst in him, and was still here. He could scarcely imagine why.
“I have decided to trust in us.” The honesty felt good falling from his lips. “My life, my work, has always been measured by evidence weighed against evidence. You are right there is very little physical evidence here, one way or the other. I have nothing but instinct. My instinct tells me we belong together.”
Her mouth opened in surprise. “You cannot be sure of instinct. Your instincts told you I was a thief, not eight hours ago.”
“It is a risk,” he told her with a wry smile. “But it is one I will take gladly.”
She sucked in a soundless breath, her eyes going wide.
And then she was in his arms. The corset dropped from her fingers and hit the floor with a satisfying thud. He remembered a very similar sound from last night, when she had slowly unlaced it, one agonizing ribbon at a time, and then tossed it away.
She was wearing far too many clothes tonight. His instincts told him that too. He cupped her face in his palms, smoothed his thumbs over her cheeks. His fingers felt the warm moisture of tears there. He feathered a kiss over one salt-stung eye, then the other, his tongue brushing against her long, pale eyelashes. “What do you want, Georgette?”
“I want you,” she told him without hesitation.
He kissed along her jawline and she tilted her head back to meet him with a happy sigh. “You have to be sure,” he growled into her. Citrus and ginger teased his senses, lying somewhere upon her pale skin. “It is your choice to make, not mine.”
Another piece of honesty. It had never been his choice, not where she was concerned. He would have given his life just for her smile. And he would give her this chance to refuse him, though his ready body and her willing response told him he could easily have her, choice be damned.
She took a step backward, just far enough to have her eyes search his. “What are you saying? I thought . . . I thought when you asked for your ring back, you meant you did not want this.”
James shook his head. Her interpretation of events was so far from the truth he almost chuckled. “You did not read that right, love. If we leap without thinking, your chance for an easy way out is over. You’ll be tied to me for life. I want you to be sure of your decision.”
He waited, his mind and body squirming at her hesitant response. She had made her wishes clear on so many occasions. His hope that she would want him beyond something carnal seemed a childish dream at this moment.
She reached up and flicked open the top button of her bodice. And suddenly, carnal did not seem such a poor idea.
“Mr. MacKenzie,” she told him, her voice as rough as shattered glass. “You make me want to reconsider my position on husbands.”
She opened another button, and then another, parting the fabric with sure fingers. Her chemise glowed white, cut daringly low. The shadow between her breasts was a promise and a taunt. He wanted her to keep going, without question.
But first he wanted her to kiss him. Not only to quiet the noise in his head, but also as proof this was her willing choice. Although, if he stopped to inspect it, kissing might not mean as much as he hoped. She’d kissed him before. Three times today, and countless times last night. And here he was, his craving unfulfilled, his body strung so tight he could have shattered from merely her touch.
No, kissing didn’t mean much in the way of things.
Unless it led to more.
Chapter 32
SHE DIDN’T KNOW what to expect. Or worse, what to do.
Oh, she had an idea of the mechanics of it. She had lived through the tedious side of coupling for two years. But she had never felt like this, her insides tingling from want, her fingers desperate to tangle up in him.
She finished unbuttoning her bodice. Lifted first one shoulder, then the other. She shifted the fabric down her arms. It hung there a moment, a question gathering courage, before falling to the floor in a graceful rush. She stood shivering in her skirts and chemise, though it was not cold. Her hand splayed uncertainly against her abdomen. His eyes settled on that hand, and admiration played over his clean-shaven face.
She could scarcely believe what she was doing, had no idea if she was doing it correctly. Her long-standing aversion to nudity had never permitted her to strip before a man, to measure her progress by each taut, indrawn breath taken by her partner. James’s reaction told her that nudity could be a very good thing, if only she was brave enough to finish it.
Her breasts, normally caged up tight in whalebone, reacted strongly to their uncharacteristic freedom and his none-too-innocent gaze. Her nipples brushed against her cotton chemise with exquisite sensitivity, as if they had been warmed by a fire and then pulled away to be left wanting more.
She closed the distance between them in a rush of skirts and need. He caught her up in his arms but did not kiss her. Instead, he drew her up carefully against the linen of his shirt. She felt sure fingers lift her hair and trail down her neck, and the tiny hairs there prickled in awareness. There was a tug at her waist, and then another, and then her skirts followed the way of her bodice, heaped on the floor. She locked her knees to keep from following them to such an ignoble resting place.
Halfway there, then. This nudity bit was a drawn-out business.
He knelt before her. A singular experience, looking down onto the top of James MacKenzie’s head. She did not doubt she might be the only person in Moraig to realize his hair was as thick on the top as it was at the sides. She could see every stitch upon his head, the tanned part along one side where his hair refused to lie flat. His fingers seemed to have their own interests. He unhooked her hose and her garters and pushed them down, pausing over the task of unlacing her boots.
Ah. Now, at last, she understood a new reason why women wore slippers. How much kinder it would have been to the fire building inside her to not have to pause for laces.
She finally stood before him, clad in nothing but thin cotton. He regained his feet and took a half step back, merely looking. Shouldn’t he be kissing her?
She was discovering that the things she had once thought she hated could be enjoyed under certain circumstances. Things like husbands. And nudity. But waiting . . . now, that she hated. Waiting moved right to the top of her list of things best avoided.
And so she kissed him first.
He groaned his approval, a noise that moved through her body like blood in her veins, pushed farther and deeper by each beat of her heart. Heat streaked through her, melting her limbs and binding her to him. She pressed against him, felt his arousal jutting against the smooth hem of her chemise. Gasped at the intrusion of it.
Cried out from the loss of it.
He had pulled away and was standing a hairbreadth away, breathing hard. He began to shrug out of his jacket, but the motion caught on a low moan as he eased it off his injured shoulder. “I’ll need a minute,” he told her, his eyes clouded with pain as much as passion.
“Oh. You are hurt.” Georgette cringed at the obviousness of it. The wound on his face was no longer bleeding, but now that his jacket was removed, she could see the angry scrape beneath the hole in his shirt, just near his left chest.
She looked around for the washbasin and a cloth. The least she could do for the man who had defended her so gallantly was was
h and tend his injuries. But the pitcher lay broken on the floor, the water tossed carelessly away.
“I’ll send down for fresh water,” she said. “And clean towels.”
He tilted his head to one side. His gaze seemed to travel straight through her chemise. The skin beneath prickled with heat and awareness. “You are not dressed for visitors.”
Her cheeks flashed hot. “I can put my clothes back on.”
He reached a hand out and cupped one breast through the thin cotton that still, lamentably, covered her. “That would be a wasted effort, love, as I would want nothing more than to undress you again.” One thumb rolled over her nipple, a languorous statement of his want. Her body clenched in a reflexive response. “Unless you’d rather call for a bottle of brandy.” His smile was pure mischief, starting small and spreading like a fire licking along kindling and paper. “As you did last night.”
“I . . . I don’t drink brandy.” A drum’s beat of a pulse started in her belly, fierce and wild.
“Oh, we did not drink it.” He ran a finger down one aching, cotton-clad slope of her breast and then inched it, feather-light, up the other side. “Not in the way you imagine. We tasted it.” He pointed to her nipple. “I held a bit in my mouth and kissed you here.”
Wicked, those words. But not nearly as wicked as the eyes that were feasting on her. He ran his finger lower, reaching under her chemise and brushing against the moist curls between her legs. “And here.”
She gasped, as drugged by the shocking portrait he painted with his words as by the touch of his fingers, deftly finding her core and sliding inside her. She sagged against him, almost naked skin against fully clothed male. He chuckled and took her hand, guiding it to the front of his trousers. She felt the hard ridge of his erection, pulsing beneath the flat of her palm. Instinct more than good sense sent her fingers wrapping around the wool-covered length of him.
“And then it was your turn,” he whispered. “You tasted it here. On me.”
Heat flashed inside her, a lightning-quick moment of embarrassment that was immediately shoved aside by fervent curiosity. He was telling her she had put her mouth on him. That she had placed her lips on the most intimate part of his body imaginable.
She could envision herself doing no such thing last night.
But she could envision wanting to.
She pulled her hand away from his erection. Placed her hands on her chemise. Drew it up over her head in a single, fumbling move. She no longer cared if she was doing it correctly.
She only knew she wanted to do it.
His inhaled breath echoed in the small room. He stared, his appreciative eyes roaming every bare, square inch of her. She let him. A month ago, she would have been diving for the security of coverlet and darkness.
But tonight, she stood bathed in candlelight and let him gaze upon her nudity.
“Beautiful,” he murmured. He seemed in no hurry. Then again, he was injured in about ten dozen places. Moving quickly might be beyond him.
“I’m too pale,” she told him, strangely unperturbed by the admission.
He shook his head. “Beautiful,” he repeated again. “You hurt my eyes with it.”
“Perhaps you should shut them, then. I don’t think you ought to risk another injury.” Laughter bubbled in her chest.
“I’ll be the judge of my injuries,” he told her, offering her a lascivious grin. He began to work the buttons of his shirt, but she batted his hands away and put herself to a better use than staring. He let her undress him. Let her ease the shirt off his shoulders, let her even unbutton his trousers and push them down, only to get tangled in his boots. She almost giggled at the sight. She had James MacKenzie, the man every female in Moraig dreamed of, stripped and trussed like a clothing-bound penguin.
A very erect, clothing-bound penguin.
“The bed,” she pointed.
He obligingly hopped that way and then sat down while she knelt to pull off first one boot, then the other.
“Not very experienced with the mechanics of undressing the average male, are you?” His eyes glowed hot down at her.
She lifted her chin. “I wasn’t aware I needed to be. You are anything but.”
He let her pull his trousers the rest of the way off. Sat still even as she peeled smallclothes and socks off his body. And all the while, he grinned at her, the sort of grin that hinted at affection underlying the lust. But his smile vanished as she leaned in close to the flesh rising up between his legs. He hissed through his teeth as her lips made contact. “You really don’t do anything by halves, do you?”
“Do you really want only half of me?” She flashed him her own wicked grin.
The slant of his jaw mirrored the hardness of the flesh she had just kissed. “I want all of you, Georgette. The prim miss. The daring seductress. The fierce protector.” His lips quirked upward again. “You’ve mastered the first two well, but I have a few lessons for you if you are thinking to continue your quest to disable the dishonest men of the world with china.”
She stared up at him from her vulnerable position between his legs, so surprised by the first part of what he had said she barely heard the rest. He wanted the prim part of her too? It quite defied logic, especially as she wasn’t feeling very proper this instant.
No, in this moment, she felt more the daring seductress. She licked her lips. Watched his eyes follow the line of her tongue. She had no idea what she had done with him last night, had only snippets of insight from everyone with an opinion on the matter.
But her feminine instincts had some ideas. She knew exactly what she wanted to do to him right now.
She kissed him again. Ran her tongue up the length of him and over the smooth surface of the tip. Memorized the scent of him, stronger here than in other places, but no less familiar.
He reached down, hands beneath her shoulders, and lifted her up onto the mattress. “I did not last long with such attentions last night, and I would prefer to make this evening’s festivities last awhile longer.”
Her body trembled in agreement. He loomed over her, his body close but not quite touching her. He trailed warm fingers across her skin, dipped them beneath her breasts and lifted, swirled and teased the ends. She leaned back onto the bed, guided by his deft touch. The feel of the fine cotton coverlet was like the roughest wool beneath her back, so sensitive did every inch of her feel.
He was busy. Very busy. But her eyes and her fingers were free to roam. She put them to work, cataloging the hurts and injuries he had accumulated today. She feathered her fingers over his face, marveling at the smooth skin she found there. The scrape along his jaw was going to leave a scar, of that she had no doubt. She lifted her hands to his hair, tangling up in the brown locks. The injury along his scalp, the one he had sustained at her hands, would probably heal well. She moved lower. The wound on his chest was shallow, little more than a scratch. Nothing, really, compared to the vicious-looking bruise blooming along one knee. Her gaze hovered there, wondering how he had sustained it.
“Like what you see?” His voice floated down to her, warm and drenched with suggestion.
She looked up, flushing. She had not even realized he was aware of her indecent perusal. “No,” she told him. “You have a frightful number of injuries.”
“There are places on me that hurt more.”
She craned her neck. “Where?”
He shrugged, a thing of beauty in a man without a shirt. The gesture sent hard muscles rippling beneath his skin. “Neglect can be quite painful.”
“I don’t want to hurt you.” She wanted to devour him. Had wanted to do so, she supposed, since spying him in this very bed this morning. But he had been intact and uninjured then. Things were different now. His wounds stared at her accusingly. How he could talk without groaning was a mystery.
“ ’Tis fine,” he soothed, running one hand along her
shoulder. “Except for the neglect part. I’ve a mind to ease that hurt in the best way possible.”
Georgette released a tremulous sigh. “I am at your disposal, sir.” Who was she to tell him what he was or wasn’t capable of? He had surprised her, shifting her intentions at every turn today. She was looking forward to her newest change of mind.
His hands came around her face then, easy and undemanding. His fingers cradled her head, pulled her to him. His mouth met hers, warm and urgent, the hard press of his flesh against her abdomen chasing away any concerns about his condition.
He was very much alive, and very much aroused.
She arched up to meet him, having no idea how her body knew to issue such an invitation. Her breasts made exquisite contact with his hair-roughened chest, and she gasped into his mouth at the sensation. Her legs had their own ideas about how to conduct this business, and stole around his waist, pulling him close.
And then he was pushing inside her, his body shuddering as he found her core.
There was no fumbling. No attempt to force the issue. She was ready and open for him, in a way she had never been before. Everything about this was different, from the scent of his skin to the way his flesh filled her inside. She tipped her head back and held on as he began to move above her.
The feeling should have been awkward. Should have been something to bear silently, praying for speed.
Instead, every inch of her was strung with feeling. Each slide of his body out was a threat to her building emotions, and each slide in an affirmation of his intent. She was coiling there, in that place where they joined, a curling of need and want into something better defined. He was shaping her uncoordinated feelings into a concise geometry, using nothing more than the strength of his body and his hard, labored breathing against her shoulder.
What Happens in Scotland Page 29
