The Rascal

by Lisa Plumley

  As though she could feel any freer than this.

  Laughing, weeping, Grace nodded. “It feels it. It feels like a celebration. Oh, Jack…”

  “We were foolish.” He tucked his hand over her hammering heart, palming her with reverence. His expression fraught with wonder, he gazed at all he’d revealed. Her bare skin, her bosom—pushed to their limits by her corset—her helpless need. “We were foolish to wait,” he said.

  “To deny.” Willing, thrilled and far too inexpert for her own liking, Grace dared to grab Jack’s clothes, too. She bit her lip and wrested with his shirt buttons. She caught his surprised look and widened her eyes. “What is good for you to do is just as good for me to do.” She gestured to his top few buttons, already freed. “Given my inexperience, I would say I am very skilled at this. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Very, very skilled,” Jack agreed. With his eyes shining in clear approval, he cupped her chin in his hand and kissed her again. “Don’t stop or I’ll begin to doubt your sincerity.”

  “Never.” Grace set to her undertaking again, only to find herself tipped backward a moment later. She fell, shrieking.

  They landed together atop her crowded cot, its blankets askew and its pillows fluffing around them. Sprawled ignobly beneath Jack, Grace squirmed. “Now I can’t reach your buttons.”

  “I’ll take care of everything,” he promised. “Even you.”

  For once, Grace didn’t disagree. Jack’s care and concern were too obvious to argue with—as was his sincerity, when he thumbed away a few more buttons and spread apart her dress. For a long moment, he was silent as he looked his fill.

  “You are beautiful, Grace,” he said. “Beautiful.”

  And just then, Grace believed him.

  She wanted to blush beneath his admiration. Strangely, she did not possess that much modesty—probably because she rapidly became engrossed in her own discoveries. Holding Jack’s shirt wide, Grace admired the broad span of hair-sprinkled chest she’d uncovered. He looked even better than she’d imagined, fit and strong and sun browned. With a helpless sound of appreciation, she flattened her palms against Jack’s bare skin.

  “I might have known you would be bold in this, too.” He clasped his hand over hers, his fingers stroking. “Oh, Grace. My Grace. You are wondrous.”

  Grace smiled at his praise. She was bold, but whether because of her nature or her feelings for him, she couldn’t say. Beneath her hand, Jack felt hot and hard and wonderful—so different from her, but so right.

  Closing his eyes, swallowing hard, Jack tautened above her as she touched him. He liked this, she realized. He did. The knowledge gratified her beyond all expectation. Fondly, Grace squeezed his shoulders with both hands, exploring further.

  “You are spectacular also,” she observed seriously. “I find you most handsome, Jack. And extremely perfect otherwise.”

  He opened his eyes to see her smile.

  “There is no one like you, Grace.”

  His tender touch roused her all over. Quickly, it turned passionate, too. Again and again he stroked her, leaving Grace breathless and wanton and eager to shove the bunting from the cot, the forgotten paintbrushes from beneath their shoulders, the whole world aside for this magical night.

  In the lamplight, Jack lowered himself over her, kissing her in ways more pleasurable than she’d ever dreamed. She clutched him to her as though she would never let him go. His hand slid from her knee upward, claiming parts of her no man ever had, and Grace welcomed him eagerly. Her skirts bunched. Her whole body arched upward, wanting to be closer still.

  “Even dress-reform clothes aren’t sufficient for this,” she complained breathlessly, wriggling to be free. She shoved at her skirts. “Whoever devised such items should be—”

  “Don’t worry,” Jack said, just as breathless as she. His smile warmed her through. “We can do it together.”

  In a heartbeat, Grace was naked. Jack dropped her corsetry and chemise to the floor beside her dress and the oversize brogan shoes she’d kicked off, leaving Grace to marvel at him.

  “You are excellent at that!” she said. “I had no idea.”

  He gave a modest shrug. “I am inspired by you.”

  They came together again, Jack with his shirt hanging from his shoulders, Grace with her whole self revealed to him. The sheeting lay soft beneath them. Outside, the stars shone down, making the night as miraculous as any she’d ever imagined.

  “But this is not fair,” Grace said, twisting a few moments later to gaze into Jack’s face. He looked handsome enough to make her want to sigh…rascally enough to make her want to kiss him all the more. “I am wearing nothing, while you—”

  He bolted upright. In a trice, his clothes were shed.

  Grace sat up, insatiably and unabashedly curious. In the flickering lamplight, Jack’s body was splendid, his torso lean but ridged with muscle, his arms as strong as ever. His hips were fascinating and his legs powerful, covered with more muscle and manly dark hairs. In between all that…

  “You are larger than I thought,” she observed. “More finely shaped, too.” Candidly, she peered nearer. “Yes, I approve.”

  His smile delighted her. His embrace, when next he joined her atop their skewed blankets and rickety cot, made her heart feel overflowing with tenderness. Jack spread himself beside her. Gently, he leaned closer to kiss her, his hand on her hip.

  “That’s a good thing,” he said, his brogue deep and beloved. “For I feel every kind of naked in front of you.”

  She gazed into his eyes, seeing the truth there.

  “Then we are equal,” she told him, and kissed him again.

  With Jack there was no hiding. No feeling peculiar or lacking or unwanted. There was only love…love and needing.

  On a moan, Jack kissed her more deeply, his hand delving into her hair to loosen its pins. They pinged to the mattress beneath them, as liberated as Grace herself felt, scattering all around. For once, she didn’t care about the disarray.

  There was something momentous in this night—something special in the way Jack had come to her aid, leaving his saloon to Harry’s supervision without hesitation. Jack cared for her, Grace realized, just as she did him. As she gazed at him in wonder, memorizing the angles of his face and the tenor of his whispered words, she knew she would never forget whatever happened between them next. Nor ever regret it.

  Feeling on the brink of something new…something marvelous and extraordinary and necessary, Grace drew in a deep breath. Her chest expanded to meet Jack’s, causing a riot of pleasurable sensations. Instantly, his hands closed on her breasts. His mouth came next, leaving her writhing beneath his gentle kisses, his sweet words, his promises of what was to come.

  “All that?” she managed, tingling all over with expectation and newness. She could scarcely believe she found herself here, now, needing and wanting and… Grace hesitated. “Jack, I’m not entirely sure I’ll be satisfactory in this. I haven’t any expertise at all. I’m generally quite adept at things, but… I would not want you to be disappointed.”

  Worriedly, she studied him, taking in his strong nose, his disheveled hair, his kind eyes. A man like Jack was rare indeed.

  He tipped up her chin and kissed her. “All I want is to be with you. If you would rather stop—”

  “Oh, no! I find myself quite eager to continue. It’s only—”

  His grin broadened. “Listen to this. Listen carefully and believe me when I say you have nothing to worry about. Here.”

  As though in demonstration, Jack drew his hand from her hip to her breast. He cupped her there, sweetly, offering her to his mouth for another kiss, making Grace gasp and twist and clutch his arm. With a heartfelt glance to her face, Jack slid his fingers further with maddening surety, with impossible slowness, along a matching path to her other side.

  “Do you hear that?” he asked, his expression intent.

  Grace squirmed. “You didn’t say anything,” she pointed out.

  “Mmm.
” His eyebrows rose. “Listen more closely then.”

  Keeping his gaze locked with hers, Jack trailed his hand down the middle of her chest, barely brushing her breasts. His expression reverent and his breath held, he slipped his fingers lower, past her rib cage, over her belly, lower still…

  A tremor shook her. Wild with it, Grace felt her eyes widen, even as she held Jack’s gaze. She grasped his shoulder, helpless to do more than breathe and feel and listen.

  “With every touch,” he said earnestly, not stopping—never stopping, “I’m telling you I love you.”

  “Oh, Jack! I—” Grace quivered, yearning to believe him.

  “I love you, Grace.” He swallowed her cries with a lingering kiss, keeping her safe and whole while the world turned dizzying around her. “I’ll tell you again and again.”

  And for all the rest of that night, Jack did. He held her and showed her, and tutored her in his love in ways Grace had never envisioned…but cherished all the more.

  There was more to Jack than manliness and clever drawings and whiskey, she learned. There was gentle surety and unbelievable strength, and as Grace trembled beneath him again and again, devoutly giving as much to him as he did her, she learned that there was more to her than she’d believed, as well.

  There was vulnerability in her. And laughter. And love. So much more love than she’d known lay inside her, just waiting for Jack’s kiss, Jack’s jokes, Jack’s love to awaken it. Holding him close, lying drowsily in his arms, Grace knew she was forever changed by that night. She could not be anything but glad.

  She’d left her old self behind, she realized, with her eyes newly opened to all the possibilities of love and loving and needing. And giving, too. Nothing in her life had prepared her for it, but that made it all the more special.

  “Thank you, Jack.” Snuggled up beside him, wrapped in their blankets—and possibly the leftover bunting but not caring a whit—Grace laid her head on his chest. She sighed contentedly. “Thank you.”

  He gave a rumbling sigh of his own, then tightened his arm around her shoulders. Being with him this way felt perfect. It felt right and good and utterly indispensable. Grace felt her whole heart open, ready to embrace whatever came next.

  “Thank you?” Jack nuzzled her enticingly. “For what?”

  Grace gazed up at his profile, knowing she would remember it forever. “For giving me the rest of myself.”

  “Ah.” She would never have thought to see a man so rugged as Jack seem quite so moved. He looked at her for a long moment, his face a study in caring…in protectiveness.

  “Then we are even,” he said, and his smile lit the night.

  Jack awakened slowly, lulled by the distant jangle of wagon fittings, the clip-clop of horse traffic and the faint murmuring of faraway voices. Morrow Creek had risen before him, he realized—an event fairly unprecedented since he’d come to town. Usually, Jack was up with the sun, doing whatever he could to maintain or build or grow his saloon.

  And his new life besides.

  But today everything was different. Blinking at the rafters overhead, Jack smiled broadly. His body felt sorely used, his left arm completely benumbed. His toes hung over the mattress, which was miserably cramped and lumpy besides. A powerful thirst bedeviled him, and he felt fairly certain he would benefit from a particularly hearty breakfast to regain his vigor. But all those things paled beside the woman who slept alongside him.

  Grace. Foolishly enamored by her, Jack turned his head. Her slumbering profile met him, partly obscured by her pillow and a wayward scrap of suffrage flag trimmings. She looked beautiful. Her cheeks were pink, her brow smooth, her mouth tempting. Her hair tumbled over his chest, brown and lustrous.

  He’d never seen it loose before last night. Now he never wanted to see it any other way. With her hair unbound and her eyes passion-filled, Grace had seemed all the more herself—freed of every scrap of convention and open to him in a way she’d never been before. The things they’d shared humbled him. To be a part of such feelings…Jack had never experienced its like.

  Awash in remembrance, he ignored his squashed arm and gazed at her all the longer. Tenderness suffused him. Her freckled nose? Perfection. Her stubborn chin, her wayward arms, her teardrop breasts? Ideal. The way she crowded him on their narrow mattress, uninhibitedly draping one lithe leg over his thigh? Everything he wanted. Satisfied, Jack thumbed a strand of hair from her face, lingering over her soft skin.

  If this was rabble-rousing, he wanted more every day.

  But only if he had Grace for company.

  With a mighty groan, Jack stretched himself out. Grace roused only a little, snuffling closer to him. Doubtless she would drool on his chest, cramp his hips still further, leave his arm asleep till it dropped clean off. But Jack couldn’t seem to muster the will to care. He grinned and slipped his free hand to her shoulder, then swept his fingers along the curve of her back. He would wake her in the most pleasurable way possible.

  Soon, surely. But first another besotted look. While Grace slept and could not object nor claim he was being foolish.

  Jack lost track of how long he watched her…how long he stroked her, enjoying the smooth warmth of her skin and the luscious curve of her hip. Her bare buttocks fit his palm exactly, offering further proof of their rightness for one another. Grace had glimpsed almost all of the real him, Jack realized, and she loved him. She loved him. Beyond everything else, that meant more than he could say—him, a man of words.

  If the real him were known, at least.

  Grace’s eyes fluttered open. Groggily, she blinked. She stretched. Her lips puckered and smacked as though seeking another kiss. Jack obliged, his lack of peppermint tooth powder be damned. He wove his fingers into her hair, holding her carefully to him.

  Grace moaned. Sweetly, she kissed him, her arms moving unerringly to pull him closer. Her fingers spread over his back, clinging tight, assuring him of the rightness of their being together…the completeness of the tender feelings Jack felt.

  When he ended their kiss, she smiled. She looked lovely.

  “You are a rowdy awakener,” Grace said. “I approve.”

  “I’m glad.” Naked, Jack rolled nearer, feeling wholly united and not the least bit sated—not now that Grace had cast him that seductive look. Their bodies pressed closer, sharing warmth and love. “For I’ve no intention of letting you leave.”

  They kissed again, heedless of the sunshine outside the window, the passersby on the street below, the day meandering past without them. All of that felt decidedly remote. For once, Jack decided, his saloon could open very, very late. Being with Grace felt more intoxicating than any liquor could anyway.

  “Anyone would think you’re at home here.” Looking equally blissful, Grace gestured to the cluttered space around them. “Surrounded by suffrage accoutrements and paint and the like.”

  “I want to be wherever you are.”

  She issued a fond sound, bringing her palm to his cheek. “And I want to be with you.” Grace hesitated, but only for an instant. “Do you think we dare be together? Truly? The whole of Morrow Creek will likely believe we’ve gone mad.”

  “I don’t care,” Jack said. “I—”

  A strange sound reached him, making him pause. He angled his head sideways, listening. Shuffling came from the street outside, calling to mind—curiously enough—dozens of stamping feet. There was a rumbling, too—distinguishable as voices, but he couldn’t make out the words. If he hadn’t known better, Jack would have sworn that the surprised citizenry of Morrow Creek had gathered outside Grace’s window already.

  The notion made him grin.

  “They will applaud our charitable ways toward one another,” he predicted, shoving the blankets lower to reveal the curve of Grace’s hip. His attention caught, he stroked her there. “We have certainly found a compromise between us.”

  Despite his best attempts at diversion, Grace cocked her head, too. “Do you hear that?”

  Her body tensed
beneath his fingertips. Reluctantly, Jack listened again. Now it sounded as though a hundred people turned the pages of a book, creating a peculiar ruffling. There were more footsteps. Another clanging wagon. He glanced to the window and glimpsed a sheet of paper, rising on a puff of dust and drifting all the way to Grace’s second-floor meeting rooms.

  Grace kicked aside the sheets. “I’d better go see—”

  “No, I will.” Offering her his most promise-laden wink, Jack disentangled himself. Carelessly nude, he strode to the window. The shutters were still flung wide, the glass the only barrier between him and the outside. “Then I’ll—”

  At the sight that greeted him, Jack stared in disbelief.

  A whole crowd of people truly had gathered outside, downstairs at the steps to his saloon. Women of all shapes and sizes and ages chattered avidly to one another, their heads craning to see if the place had opened.

  At the edges of the group, a few men loitered, their grins wide as they examined something. More papers, Jack discerned, like the one that had wafted upward on the breeze. They seemed to be printed pages, torn from somewhere and then brandished like the most hilarious of jokes. Frowning, Jack squinted.

  Grace joined him at the window, wrapped in the blanket with her hair tumbled. At the sight outside, her smile faltered.

  “I wonder what’s happening.” She peered. “There are nearly as many people down there now as gathered at the train station when that circus passed through town last year.”

  Jack nodded. The merest hint of an unusual event was enough to draw a crowd in Morrow Creek, so hungry were the residents for gossip and entertainment. It wasn’t often anything lively enough happened to cause such a stir.

  “What are those papers?” Grace asked. “They look—”

  She ended on a gasp. Wordlessly she pointed, even as the ruckus outside grew louder. More people joined the group, several striding from the direction of the Lorndorff hotel.