She had come to him.
Slowly, she straightened, and he saw how the moonlight turned her tall, slight body to a tender, shapely silhouette inside some garment of wispy white.
She did not know he watched her.
She did not know, because she watched him…part of him. His shaft, already erect, leaped beneath her intent scrutiny. When she touched it, lightly, with a single fingertip, he clamped his jaw closed and felt sweat bead on his brow.
Then he heard her sigh—a sigh that was not at all unhappy. Her fingertip passed along the length of him, from stretched tip, over distended veins, to the dense hair at the base.
And then she retraced her path.
Calum held his breath and prayed for guidance.
Another small sigh reached him. Pippa surrounded and stroked him downward until she met hair again, and this time she extended her explorations further, weighing and testing every male contour as if memorizing him for some future purpose.
He shut his eyes, tried and failed to contain a grimace that was pure, ecstatic excitement, and forced himself not to reach for her.
The next sensation he felt brought his eyes wide open. Pippa’s silken hair spread across his belly, slithered over his thighs, and she drew his shaft between her lips and deep into her mouth.
Calum groaned aloud.
Such things did not happen—except in the maddened minds of men about to die of frustration on their wedding nights. Wedding nights when they were denied the presence of their brides.
He was dreaming.
Her cool hands grasped his hips. She withdrew her mouth—and within only a moment buried him once more in the moist magic beyond her marvelous lips.
Not a dream.
“Pippa,” he groaned. “In God’s name, woman, what are you trying to do to me?”
He pushed himself to his elbows and she lifted her head. Her face was all shadows, but her eyes caught the moonlight. “You are the head of this household,” she said breathlessly. “And it is my duty to ensure that your needs are met.”
“But how,” he scarcely dared ask, “how do you know these things? The things you do?” Surely there was only one way.
“You find this unpleasant?” Her anxiousness might have made him laugh—at some other time.
“I find it most pleasant.”
“Oh, good. I could only guess you might.”
He could no longer stop himself from touching her hair, from stroking her face, her neck—from dropping his hand to cup her breast. She gasped and he smiled a little. “You are such a puzzle, my lady. Why would you be guessing at such a thing?”
“I was blessed with so much time alone at Dowanhill,” she said. “That is how I was fortunate enough to find the books. I didn’t realize then just how fortunate, but I do now.”
“Books?”
“In my father’s library. Not intended for me, of course, but perhaps fate did plan that I should see them, since I had no other source of instruction in such things.”
“No.” If she continued to fondle him, he would surely disgrace himself.
“Unfortunately, the book with the most useful drawings was written in a language with which I am not familiar. But the drawings were very well done. I am doing this correctly, am I not?”
“So very correctly.” He could well imagine the kind of texts her young eyes had happened upon.
“Good. You are most beautifully made. But that is what I had surmised from my studies of you.” Promptly, she began to take him into her mouth once more.
“Studies of me?” His voice broke.
Pippa couldn’t answer him.
“Stop!” With one fluid motion, he sat up, caught her beneath the arms and lifted her to the bed. Depositing her against the pillows beside him, he stared down into her face. “What made you come to me tonight?”
“Someone had to help you through your attack of nervous sickness.”
He shook his head in quiet disbelief. “My nervous sickness?”
“Bridegrooms invariably suffer the condition. Probably because they are so anxious about their brides having the fortitude to accept their seed often enough to bear fruit in a timely fashion. I assure you I am stronger than I appear. I shall accept and accept. I shall swallow all night if necessary. And then I expect we should wait and pray.”
Calum dropped flat onto his back and covered his face. His rod ached, and his gut. His thighs strained. His brain struggled with the wonder of the woman who waited beside him.
At last he trusted himself to turn back to her, to draw her into his arms and kiss her with a tenderness that cost him dearly in restraint before her pure sweetness tempered his lust.
He caressed her hair, stroked her long, straight spine past the curve of her waist to the firm roundness of her hips. “Pippa,” he murmured, “forgive me for being the fool.”
She framed his face with hands that trembled. “We are blessed that we have been given to each other. And I am grateful my early instruction will help us so.”
Calum smiled against her neck. “You are indeed well informed on some things, dearest. On others I fear you are hopelessly ignorant. However, because I love you to distraction, I shall spend the rest of this night, and tomorrow and possibly the next night and the next day—and who knows how many more—attending to your education.”
I love you, I love you, I love you. “I love you,” she told him.
“I know. And I thank you.”
He stripped away her robe and her gown, and she felt no shame. He touched her in all the ways he had touched her before, and in so many more—and she felt awe.
And then there was That. It was absolutely as magical as she’d expected. Calum could even use it to make her feel the white-hot throbbing, the slipping away, that he’d created with his fingers and with his mouth.
So much to learn.
“Now,” he whispered, his lips on her neck, “we shall see to the planting of the seed, my dearest love.”
When she made to find his shaft with her mouth, he eased her down upon the bed once more and rose over her. “No, sweetest. Not that way. This way.”
He pressed himself against the hidden place that led into her body. He pressed and entered and stretched her. “Aah,” she moaned, could not help moaning. There was a sheer, scalding shock of sensation, and a small pain, as if something within her had torn.
Calum grew still. “Can you bear it, sweet?”
“I cannot bear for it to stop,” she told him.
He moved again, slowly, driving deep within her and pulling all but entirely away again, only to return, harder and harder each time.
Pippa arched her back, arched her breasts to Calum’s hair-rough chest and dug her fingers into the iron muscles of his neck.
A wave of sensation broke. It broke and broke and rolled, rippling over her skin and through her flesh with a force that bore her along to a place where she was formless and one with the man above her.
He knelt beside her on the bed and soaked a soft linen cloth in warm water that had been discreetly left in his sitting room at some time during the night and day they had spent together here.
Many bowls of water had been left and removed. And tempting food and drink. Yet never had Pippa or Calum seen those who waited upon them.
“It’s growing dark again,” Pippa said drowsily.
Calum slowly bathed her face, her neck, and smoothed the cloth between her breasts. “We have not discussed our honeymoon,” he said, smiling when her back arched beneath his ministrations. He did not kiss her breasts. That way led in one inevitable direction, and he would make himself wait just a little longer this time. “Honeymoon?” he said, settling a thumb on her lips.
“They usually last several months, don’t they?” she said, whipping the linen from him before he could resist.
“Certainly,” Calum said, gasping when the cooled cloth met his shoulder. “Yes, certainly several months would not be unreasonable.”
“Oh, good. I’ve alwa
ys thought a honeymoon should be memorable. Several months spent alone with you in this room should be entirely memorable, thank you.”
“Pippa, I am serious.”
“And so am I. You will need your time here to become accustomed to the very great demands your new life will place upon you.”
He allowed her to sit up, rinse the linen and proceed to gently wash his body. “I shall be very capable of dealing with the matters of this estate, madam wife,” he told her. “True, I have not been solely responsible for anything as extensive as is now my lot, but I’m considerably experienced.”
“It was not the estate I had in mind, Your Grace. Mine are the demands you may find most taxing.”
When Calum laughed, her whole world smiled. “I’m glad I amuse you so thoroughly,” she said. “I am also glad you are to take your rightful place. But I confess I should not have cared at all what manner of life destiny gave us as long as we were allowed to share it.”
He only smiled and smiled, and contrived to plant small, nipping kisses on every spot he could reach without tumbling them both from the bed.
“What is this thing?” She set the cloth aside and lifted the square of worn leather he wore on a thong about his neck.
“Something I was given to wear as a child. Our nurse at Kirkcaldy said it was a scapula that would keep me holy.”
“Hah!” Pippa turned it over and looked closer. “Clearly it has not worked.”
“You are disrespectful to me, wife.”
She reached for the lamp and brought it near to see the faint inscription on the leather. “You must have replaced the thong many times.”
“Boys grow into men. Many times.”
“But the scapula is the one from your childhood?”
“I have already told you so.”
“Calum, I think Justine’s locket bears the same inscription. A bird, perhaps, with spread wings.”
He grew still. “I had not studied Justine’s locket.” Slipping the leather from his neck, he put it into Pippa’s hands. “It was tooled in gold once, I think. That faded long ago.”
She turned it over and examined the fine stitching that, joined back to front. It was Calum who took a small knife from a tray bearing fruit and carefully slit the talisman in two.
Into his palm fell a small, pale thing, dried to papery whiteness. When Pippa touched it, she found the folds soft. “What is it?” she asked, and when she looked at his face, she knew he fought to speak.
“It is a caul,” he said. “I was born inside this. All the time I wore the proof of who I am.”
He glanced into her eyes. “I will explain, but it will take a long time. For now, we will call it a gift from my mother, given to make certain I should one day come home.”
Calum took her hand and pressed it to his breast. “What do you feel?”
“The beating of your heart,” she whispered.
He rested his brow on hers. “Do you hear it? Do you hear what I hear, Pippa?”
With her eyes closed, she listened. “Yes.” Her breathing speeded. “Yes. A soft voice, like the sea?”
“Like the sea. My mother’s voice.”
With their arms entwined, they listened.
“I will bear you home!”
The End
Keep reading for a special excerpt from the
novels His Magic Touch and Only By Your Touch by Stella Cameron
Excerpt from His Magic Touch
Chapter 1
“Sin, my friend, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.” James St. Giles, Earl of Eagleton, looked not at his companion but at the raucous, glittering crowd that jammed Covent Garden’s Theater Royal for the evening’s presentation of Romeo and Juliet.
As always, the big, swarthy man who was rarely far from James’s shoulder took his time to answer, and when he did, his soft voice held its customary hint of menace. “No doubt you’ll tell me the author of your wisdom?” Won Tel stood in the shadow of the box’s red velvet curtains, the lines of his broad, high-cheekboned face gleaming faintly in the dim light of a nearby lamp.
James tapped his lower lip with a long finger. “I was told this wisdom by the man whose opinion I trust most. Myself.”
Won Tel’s hoarse laugh would have chilled most who heard it. He tugged at his luxuriant black beard. “If that is true, and I’ll not doubt it is, then the world’s as sorry a place as I thought and I am saddened.”
“You, my friend, are a liar.” James spared his servant a thin smile. “You thrive on sin. And this”—he flipped a hand to indicate the restless audience that crammed the five tiers of boxes and galleries—“this should feed your conviction that English society is essentially contemptible. Perhaps more so under the influence of our precious Regent. I, for one, regard myself fortunate to have managed to remain at a distance—a great distance—for so long.”
The audience seemed barely aware of the impassioned performance on stage. Rather, they gawked about and gestured among themselves, each apparently determined to outdo the other in outrageous antics or fabulous dress. James pretended not to notice that his own person was attracting considerable fluttering of fans, female giggling, and distinctly dangerous leaning from flanking boxes.
“We could always abandon this scheme of yours and return to Paipan, my lord,” Won Tel said.
“Not until I get what I came to London for!” Swiveling, James turned the full force of his gray-eyed stare on the other man. “This scheme of mine, as you call it, is all I will live for until it is finished—until they are finished! And remember that unless I tell you otherwise, I am simply James Eagleton, shipping magnate. My Uncle Augustus is finally persuaded to accept that I will acknowledge the title, but only when I’m convinced it will be useful. Remember, I have taken great pains to assure no word of my father’s death, or my relationship to him, becomes known in England. It would be a pity if some chance remark of yours warned my enemies of my presence. Forget the name of St. Giles and forget the earldom—until I decide to use it like an axe on the necks of Darius and Mary Godwin.”
Won Tel’s expression didn’t change. He bowed, presenting the top of a dark blue skullcap of the same heavy silk fabric as the unadorned, high-collared tunic he wore over full black pantaloons gathered into tall, glistening boots without heels. The boots were specially designed to allow their wearer to move swiftly and silently…a fact known only to James and his enemies. Unfortunately for the latter, the discovery invariably accompanied punishment that robbed the victim of either the will or the means to comment.
The man straightened and said tonelessly, “My duty is done, then. Before your father died I promised him I would always remind you that there is never only one choice in dealing with dangerous matters.”
James made fists on his thighs. His muscles felt coiled, had felt so in the months since the death of Francis St. Giles from injuries suffered beneath carriage wheels. “Here there is only one choice. The Godwins will be reduced to nothing. And I will have what is mine—what was rightfully my father’s before me.” He shifted restlessly on the foolish little blue velvet and gilt chair clearly not intended for so tall a man. “I will have my retribution.” That his dying father’s last wish had been for James to wreak vengeance in both their names would remain a secret pact between the one living and the one dead.
“Very well. The third box from the left is the one you seek, Mr. Eagleton. On this level. It is immediately opposite.”
Narrowing his eyes, James swung back toward the theater and snatched up his opera glass. “You should have told me the instant you knew.”
“I did, Mr. Eagleton,” Won Tel said in his still voice.
James knew better than to ask how the signal had been received. “I don’t…Third from the left? This tier?”
“Correct.”
“There are only two females in the box. Where is Godwin?”
Won Tel raised an opera glass to his own eyes. “The girl must be the daughter. The woman—”
“
The woman is of no concern to me. She is obviously some sort of companion.” James trained his sight on the girl. “That cannot be the Godwin daughter. And the other is too young to be her mother. Damnation! Your informant has failed you…and me.”
“Mr. Eagleton—”
James waved Won Tel to silence. “I had counted on this opportunity to make contact. This business will be quickly accomplished. The Godwins have cost me more—cost my family more than their two miserable lives are worth.”
“Yet you intend to leave them that much.”
“Oh, yes,” James said softly. “I intend to leave them their lives, not that they are likely to be particularly grateful, I think. Leave me and find out what’s amiss. I have no reason to remain at this circus if Darius and Mary Godwin are not here.”
Wordlessly, Won Tell slipped through the drapes at the back of the box.
James spared a moment’s notice for the hapless players on the stage, then busied himself sweeping his opera glass past the opposite boxes again, trying to match faces with the descriptions his father had given him.
Pointless. Francis St. Giles had been remembering the Godwins as they had been twenty years ago, not as they would look today.
Through the glass, James stared again at the two women who were useless to him. They were both notable in that they concentrated intently on the production. The older, dark-haired female might be thirty or a little more; a slender, serious-faced creature some might find appealing. Her austere black gown, of exceedingly simple cut, marked her as some sort of elevated servant to the other.
And the other…
“We are confounded, Mr. Eagleton.” Won Tel glided back behind James. “The Godwins are not yet in London.”
“What?”
“The Godwins are—”
“I heard you, dammit. What in God’s name are you talking about? Our information stated that they would be in Town by the beginning of April. It is now the tenth.”
“They changed their minds. But take heart. Word has it that they may arrive any day. And the girl is Celine Godwin, the daughter.”
Very slowly, James raised the glass once more.
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