The Chase

by Sara Portman

  This time when he pressed his lips to hers, he felt the kiss everywhere that their bare skin touched. He loved the feel of her soft breasts pressed to him, and the round of her backside, now free to his touch. He wanted to roll her onto her back and bury himself inside her, but that was not the promise he’d made.

  It was not his pleasure he sought, but hers.

  He gentled the insistence of his kiss and smoothed her hair from her face. Lifting away from their touch he gazed at her wide, green eyes—watching and waiting for him to fulfill his promise. He kissed the tip of her nose and rose again from the bed. He sat on the edge to remove his trousers, not trusting his leg to support the task standing. When he was as bare as she, he slid between the covers and stretched out again beside her.

  She lay on her back, very still.

  “Are you sure?” he asked, willing his hands not to roam again until she’d given her answer.

  Her eyes held his in the dim firelight that reached their shadowed corner. “Yes,” she whispered. “I am sure. Only I,”—pink stained her cheeks, “—I don’t know what to do.”

  His passion leapt in anticipation of how he might show her, but he willed himself to be unhurried. “I’m going to kiss you and touch you and you may do whatever that inspires you to do in return.” To give truth to his words, he reached for her running his hand over her breasts, closing briefly over each one as he grazed them. “You may find,” he continued, “that you would like nothing but to lie back and feel. You can tell me what feels best to you,” he said, splaying his hand across her smooth stomach, “and I shall endeavor to exceed it.”

  He slid his hand over her waist to her back, drawing her against him and she came eagerly, anticipating his kiss and meeting it. He drank her in, deeply and thoroughly, letting the heat between them build until he ached with it. If he had awakened half as much desire in her as she’d aroused in him, they would consume each other. And still he kissed and clutched at her, and she at him. He was determined that she would be drunk with her need before he answered it, so long as he could keep hold of his own. She squirmed in his embrace, pressed herself against him, and he knew she was near to the point he wanted her to reach. He cupped her backside and pressed her heat against him. She released a pleading whimper into his kiss. He slid his hand between them then, rolling her gently from her side to her back as his touch moved lower, grazing down the outer curve of her hip, across her knee, drawing slowly back upward along the inside of her leg. She shivered has his fingers neared the apex of her thighs.

  He cupped her there and then began to tease her, drawing from her a sharp intake of breath. He watched her a moment, drinking in her reaction to his touch, then lowered his head to take the tip of one breast in his mouth. “So beautiful,” he whispered against her. She may not have heard his voice, but her skin reacted to his breath as it skimmed across her.

  He continued to touch and kiss her, drawing out mewling sounds and breathy moans that each felt like a prize for his efforts, until she clutched at the bed linens and he knew she was close to the edge. Then he slid lower on the bed and teased her with his mouth the way he had with his hand, drawing her sighs and moans with his caresses until she called out and her hips lifted from the bed.

  He stroked his hands up and down the length of her smooth, pale thighs as she slowly recovered herself. She opened her eyes and looked at him. He thought that look—the passion-sated gaze of longing, gratitude and wonderment—was the most arousing expression he’d ever seen, and he’d found her arousing from the moment he’d looked at her.

  Confusion mingled with her expression. “That’s not...” She was still breathless. “We haven’t…”

  “No,” he said softly. “We don’t have to. Your pleasure doesn’t require it.”

  “But what of yours?” she asked, concern drawing the tiniest line between her brows. “I thought we would do what couples do.”

  “We don’t need to,” he said, though his body defined need quite differently than this mind.

  “But I would like to,” she said. Her eyes were pleading. God, how could he deny her when she asked for his pleasure?

  “It may not be comfortable for you,” he warned.

  “How shall we know unless we try?”

  He could not fault such sound logic. He rose over her then used one hand to guide himself slowly inside her, in small increments so as to ease any possible discomfort. He knew the point at which she was no longer comfortable, for he felt her twitch. “Are you all right? I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “It doesn’t hurt,” she said. “Not exactly. It’s only…tight.”

  Michael held himself there, torturous as it was, until he felt her begin to relax around him. Her hips squirmed, drawing him deeper and he continued, slowly, until he was fully inside her. He waited, running one hand along the curve of her hip and touching kisses along her neck until she again relaxed around him. Slowly, he withdrew then ever more carefully advanced.

  She closed her eyes, but this time from pleasure. He withdrew and entered her again, more quickly, and she gasped her surprise. The sound was followed by a smile and he knew the pain had passed. He pulled back and advanced again, more quickly each time, letting his need and hers build with his quickening pace. He clutched her and continued until he had no sense of pace or control at all, but was himself swept into a sea of feeling and sensation. When he made the final thrust, he had just enough presence of mind to fully withdraw, spilling himself onto her smooth stomach, instead of inside her where all of her plans and his could be incurably altered.

  He collapsed at her side and lay there a moment, sated and weak, before he pushed himself up on his hand and then left the bed to retrieve a cloth to wipe away the results of their act. She watched, curious, as he wiped her stomach, but did not ask why. She must have understood why he had done it.

  When he was finished with the task, he stretched out alongside her again and pulled her against his length, loving the feel of it—loving the freedom he had to do it, for this night at least.

  “Are you comfortable?” he asked.

  She nodded against his chest. “Does this mean I may call you Michael now?” She asked it with a smile.

  “I suppose I shall allow it,” he said, very much liking the way her voice made his name somehow better, more important. He rubbed his hand along her back, in part because he wanted it to be soothing for her, but also because he found it soothing himself. Her soft, smooth skin was a treat to touch. “Tell me something more about you, Juliana,” he whispered. “Take something else that you’re hiding and share it with me.”

  “I don’t think there is anything else,” she said.

  “That can’t be true, when I know so little,” he coaxed.

  “There is very little about me to know,” she said. Her hand traced up and down his arm as they lay and he wondered if she had the same need to be touching him the way he wanted to be simply touching her. “I have experienced more with you in the past days that I have in the first twenty-five years of my life. Beyond living with my father and imagining my mother, my life was simple and, I suppose, rather empty.”

  “What did you imagine,” he asked, “about your mother?”

  She sighed in that wistful way that was not a laugh because the thing she was talking about wasn’t humorous, but rather she wished it could be merely a funny memory. He wanted to take the sorrow away from her. “I recall at one point hearing my mother speak French,” she said. “I don’t know how much or how little French she knew, but a common daydream as a child was that she was an agent of the crown and had been sent to France to spy for England.”

  “That seems particularly imaginative for a young child. How did you even know such spies existed?”

  She smiled and shook her head. “I don’t know. I also imagined she had been mistaken for another and taken away for a crime she had never committed. I daydreamed
fantasies of finding and rescuing her.” She pulled herself more tightly against him. “And sometimes I dreamt that she had only meant to go away for a visit, not forever, but something had gone wrong, or she had gotten lost and she was trying to find her way back to me.”

  “They seem like comforting dreams,” he whispered, noting each one explained why the mother was unable to return to her child.

  “They were, for a time. Once I began to gradually understand the letter I had seen about my small inheritance, I think I realized that she must be truly gone—not just away for a time, but truly gone for good. Why else would her family leave funds for me, instead of her?”

  “Do you think she is alive?” he asked, not certain what Juliana had meant ‘gone’ to include.

  “I don’t know. I suppose she could be. She would not be so old. But she is gone because she chose to be. Once I accepted that my mother was not a spy and left of her own accord, there were no explanations left as to why she chose not to take me.”

  Except, of course, Michael thought, that she was a selfish, horrible woman who left her defenseless daughter in a situation that she herself found intolerable enough to flee.

  “It doesn’t matter where my mother is, or what she has done. I am grateful that her family has remembered my existence and provided a means for my independence.”

  Provided she could keep it from her father, Michael appended silently. “Do you know them? Do they visit you?”

  “No. I have never met them,” she said. “Perhaps they choose not to know me. Or perhaps my father would never allow it. I will likely never know which it was.”

  Michael regretted that he would not meet her father. He would have relished the opportunity to give the man what he deserved. He understood now the desperation that led her to lie to him. Given the harm her father was willing to cause her, he could imagine the sort of father he was when she was in his clutches. He was only glad for her sake that she’d happened upon him rather than someone who might have been less able to protect her, or taken advantage of her innocence.

  Of course, isn’t that what he’d done after all? They were shut up here in this cottage, and he’d done precisely what they should not be doing. He was so tempted by her. He could still recall the vision of her as they walked out of the forest together—she was quiet and mystical, like Joan of Arc, battered but triumphant, with Gelert at her side.

  “Are you really going to marry a woman you’ve never met?” she asked and he stiffened. The question struck him as odd at first, but perhaps it was not so strange that her thoughts might linger on the fact that he would soon be married.

  “I will meet my intended bride first,” he said, deliberately misinterpreting her question. “I imagine there will be some time for arrangements before there is a wedding.”

  “All for your Rose Hall.” She lifted herself on her elbow to regard him curiously.

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  He lifted a brow.

  “It is just that…well, it must be very important if you are willing to marry a stranger to have it.”

  “It is very important,” he assured her quietly.

  She leaned her chin on her hand and waited to hear more, so he tried to explain. “To my father, Rose Hall was just some property too far north for him to bother about. When I returned from the war, I suppose that made it an ideal place to send the bastard son he no longer wished to bother about.”

  “Yet you want it to be yours.”

  “It is already mine, except legally,” he told her. It was the way that seemed least significant each day while he was running the estate on his own, but the most critical when he considered his future. “When I arrived, the place was neglected. The manor needed repairs, the tenant farms were failing, the village was poor.”

  “What did you do?” she asked.

  “For a while, I moped around the place as though I and my injured leg were a match for our pathetic surroundings. But eventually, I became bored and my leg became mostly better. Then I needed something to do.”

  “You made improvements.”

  “I built a brewery.”

  She laughed her surprise. “You built what?”

  He rolled onto his back, pulled her to his shoulder and decided he was quite comfortable with her there, fingers tracing over his chest. It had been painfully arousing before, but was soothing now. “The estate needed more than just improvements,” he told her. “It was slowly dying. A few repairs here and there were not going to change anything. Something had to happen that was vastly different, that had a chance of bringing real prosperity.”

  “How did you decide on a brewery?” she asked, her hands still moving. He liked knowing that she continued to want to touch him this way now, even if they couldn’t after this night.

  “War is not all marching and battles,” he said. “There is a lot of waiting in between—long hours spent passing the time doing anything but contemplating the last battle or the next one. There was a soldier in my regiment who was a brewer. We spoke at length about it.”

  “And your brewery, it was a success?”

  “It is, I am happy to say, though I had a few missteps in the process.” He did not tell her of the long hours that he labored away alongside the first handful of tenant farmers who had agreed to plant hops, the repairs he’d made himself because there were no funds to hire additional laborers, nor how he’d had to negotiate with his father’s steward for the additional funds to complete the brewhouse when it cost more than he’d anticipated. “I don’t want to be away too long, though. I am anxious to return.”

  She lifted her head again and, sadly, stopped the soothing movement of her hand. “If the property is not part of the entail and your father doesn’t care about it anyway, why doesn’t he simply give it to you? Or if not now, will it to you? Even if you are not legitimate, you are his acknowledged son.”

  Michael sighed. “I am acknowledged, yes. I have been well fed, well educated—provided for in every respect, but that does not make me a son. I am not family. I am merely a matter to be dealt with.”

  “Has he said as much to you?”

  “Not in words, but consider—my father has countless properties throughout England. Don’t you imagine there is a reason why I am tucked away in Yorkshire, as far as possible from London?” He didn’t intend for her to answer the question. Instead he continued. “He will not simply gift Rose Hall to me, but as he wants something only I can provide, I intend to barter for it.”

  She watched him closely, likely finding the traces of bitterness in his carefully guarded expression. She reached her hand out to lay on his and spoke softly. “I am sorry. I know what it is to be unwanted, except when I prove useful. I have been housekeeper, cook and general servant to my father for all of my life. It would have been different, serving those roles if we were a family in any sense, but we were not. He hates the very sight of me. I remind him of my mother.”

  “Your father is an ass and an idiot.” Michael declared. “I should ride to Peckingham and sic Gelert on him right now.”

  “I am not from Peckingham,” she told him softly. “I am from Beadwell. I took the mail coach to the first stop. I couldn’t very well wait for you where my father might simply walk down to collect me.”

  Wait for you. She said it as though they now knew it was supposed to have been him. He looked at her. He could become dangerously accustomed to this sort of comfort and understanding. Michael had friends—a few in whom he’d even confided now and then—and there had been lovers. But the two categories in his life had never intersected, until now. He didn’t just want this woman, he wanted her to know everything about him and he about her. He wanted to offer comforting words to her as she did to him. Every instinct in him wanted to tell her that she never had to worry about her father again, but how could he make that promise when less than a
day remained before they would part ways and not see each other again?

  Chapter Thirteen

  Juliana awoke to the foreign sensation of sleeping next to another person. A very large, warm, solid person. She wanted to roll toward him and appease her curiosity, but she did not know if he slept still and did not want to be caught staring at him.

  She gave in to temptation just enough to turn her head slowly. The blanket crossed low over his abdomen and his chest was uncovered. She wanted to reach out and touch it. She had touched it the night before, but that had been…then. She didn’t know what to expect now, or what he expected.

  And if she touched him, she would surely wake him.

  She considered the light filtering in through thin, ineffective curtains and wondered at the time. They would be back on the road to London very soon. Juliana knew she should feel more relief and excitement at the prospect than she did. She would collect her funds and be on her way—away from her father.

  Away from Michael.

  It was a silly thought. Of course she would part ways with Michael. They were only travelers on the same road. Beyond that, their lives held no connection.

  Except that she had asked him to make love to her and he had obliged her request—most devastatingly. Her cheeks heated at the thought of all that they had done—and the realization that she was stretched alongside him, still as bare as she’d been the night before. She clutched the covers to her chin and scooted away from the sleeping stranger who’d seen more of her than anyone else ever had—or ever would.

  “Good morning.”

  She started and turned her head to look at him. He was smiling at her, unburdened by the same uncertainty. He pressed a kiss to her forehead before rolling to his side and rising from the bed, pausing briefly before standing to test the weight on his leg. She looked her fill of him as he crossed the small room, unabashed in his nakedness.