by Sophia James
‘I want you.’ The words were out before he knew it.
‘I want you, too, to forget,’ she returned, reaching up and he lifted her skirts as she opened her legs. The blood beat through him out of control and frantic. If he wasn’t within her he would die, it was that simple.
Not just want, either, but need, and not just need, but desperation.
When she bit into his shoulder to hurry him on, he moved her thighs over him and sank in, as far as he could go, claiming her as his own.
‘Mine,’ he cried as he felt the giving.
Her breath caught as the barrier of her virginity fell away and he stopped, dead still, giving her the time she might need to accommodate him, both their hearts beating in unison and desire. Her nails dug into his skin, keeping him close.
He rode her with the thought of possession, pressed in tight with the understanding that they could both be saved by it and survive with the oneness and the relief. Almost seven months of grief and loss flowed now into elation and when she shouted out and arched he went with her willingly, the spill of his seed deep in her womb as her muscles clenched and held him still.
Life and lifeless lay on each side of the same coin, happy and sad separated by a thread. This was the little death the French spoke of, the place where nothing else mattered save sensation, the suspension of energy whilst time stopped and each separate beat of two hearts lay perfectly merged, blended and united.
He turned her head and kissed her in the same hard way, deep and rough, and she kissed him back, without reserve or restraint, giving as good as taking.
This was not the time for a fragile tryst or a tentative trust. His body shook with the want of her and he felt himself harden again.
‘I love you. I love you more than life itself and if I lost you...’
She placed a finger on his top lip.
‘There are no ifs, Gabriel. I will never leave you.’
She smiled as she drew him back in, guiding him to the slickness of her centre. This time his ardour was quieter and more tempered, fierceness buffered and held in check. The wrath was gone, but the wonderment still lived on, her warmth and her tightness. The bruising around her neck was already turning black and the cut on her head had begun to bleed. But he could not stop and tend to her just yet, the shake of fear still in him, the fright of loss unquenched. He felt the crescendo before it even came, cutting into him like a hot knife across butter, the relief of it making him shout her name again and again in pure and honest gratitude. The noise of the pines above snatched the sound away.
Afterwards Gabriel took her in his lap and wrapped her with his cloak so that they were enfolded in the darkness and the quiet. The moon had risen, the light of it spilling through the trees and across them both.
Unreal and shadowed.
‘You are no longer impotent?’ There was humour in her whisper and he drew his hands through his hair.
‘Rage has cured me, I think, and fear. When I first saw you I thought you were dead and then I was in you, scrambling for life and love and for ever.’
In the moonlight he saw her smile. ‘I think all those rumours about your prowess might very well be true. But from now your expertise is only for my benefit.’
When he laughed the sound travelled through the glade and then echoed back, the small joy bouncing and reverberating against the trees. Like music.
It was his life now. Complete. Adelaide had brought him that. Acceptance. Resurrection. Absolution.
He looked upwards into the heavens and thanked God for bringing her to him, through the darkness of his life and into the light.
* * *
They arrived back at Ravenshill at midnight to find Daniel Wylde had been put to bed and that the bleeding on his side had stopped hours ago. Amethyst came to meet them at the doorway and when she saw Adelaide she took her into her arms.
‘Thank God you are safe. Thank God we are all safe. Your housekeeper made us take your room, Gabriel, but I can always move Daniel...’
‘No. We will sleep in the cottage at the back.’
‘You are sure? Did you see your neighbour— Alexander Watkins, I think he said was his name? He came looking for you.’
‘Yes. He helped me clean up...things and then went to get the constabulary. That’s why we have been so long.’
A cry from Robert had Amethyst turning.
‘We shall have to talk in the morning.’ She smiled at both of them and then went back into the annex, leaving Gabriel and Adelaide to gather a few things and then make their way outside.
The world seemed softer tonight, more gentle after the terrible day, and Gabriel was glad for it.
Once in the cottage he made certain the lock on the door was secure and then lit a few of the candles he had brought over from the annex. Taking off their clothes, they jumped beneath the heavy eiderdown and settled against the cushioned bedhead.
‘I think George Friar actually loved Henrietta Clements, despite all that she said of him, Gabriel. He repeated over and over that he wanted you to feel the anguish he knew in losing her. He still thought it was you who had killed her despite everything that was decided by the courts. He said you had paid them off.’
‘But she threw herself into the fire after lighting it.’
‘I told him that, too, but...’ She stopped.
‘He did not believe it.’
‘Friar said her husband had never loved her properly, either. But he didn’t kill him. Friar said John Goode had done that himself because of money Randolph Clements had taken, money that was supposed to go to the coffers of France.’
‘A hive of iniquity, then, with no one trusting the other?’
‘These were the sort of people you stopped, weren’t they? The ones who would cause havoc on society out of madness and hate if they were just left? It must have been horrible to be amongst them and to pretend.’
He frowned. ‘I did not always have to pretend, Adelaide.’
‘I know. Tonight... I could tell you had...done that before.’
‘Espionage has the same rules of war. Kill or be killed.’ He took her hand, his fingers threading though her own, holding on. ‘It was not always easy and it wasn’t always right.’
‘Can you stop, then...working for the Service, I mean?’
‘I almost have. I will send the names to Alan Wolfe tomorrow and they will be rounded up and questioned. There is enough proof of foul play to put them in jail, I think, and that will be the end of it.’
‘And then we can live here at Ravenshill and farm and rebuild and...’ She stopped and blushed as his eyes looked closely at her face.
‘Is this sore?’ Her lip was swollen and there was another bruise on her cheek. In the candlelight he could see so much more than he had been able to outside the cottage and his anger against George Friar returned.
‘I hope I did not hurt you when...’
She finished the sentence. ‘When you made love to me as if I was the only woman left in the world.’
‘The only one I love, at least. As you know, I thought you were dead when I saw you in the clearing tied to the tree and I wondered if I could ever live again. It is a rare thing to have your life held in the hand of another and not want it different, I think. To belong to someone, I mean, for ever, and be the happier for it.’
‘My old aunts used to say that independence was the key to a good life and for a long time I believed them. Until you. Until you smiled at me and asked me questions at the Bradford ball with your golden eyes and your quick-witted words. You smelt like woodsmoke and leather and I thought I had never had another conversation like it.’
‘I should have touched you then and there and felt the magic. I should have taken the chance and grabbed your hand and kissed you and carted you off to Gretna Green. Instead, I watched you d
ance a waltz with the Earl of Berrick and he held you much too close.’
‘Close like this?’
She wrapped her arms about his neck and pulled him down into the nest of duck feathers.
* * *
This time she wanted to be the one in control, the one to set the pace and the tone. Her mouth closed over his nipple and she took him hard, like he had taken her against the wall of the abandoned building, unyielding and fierce in the dark.
Biting the skin across the plane of his stomach, she went lower and saw the damage that he had not wanted her to see, the swathe of burned skin across his upper-right thigh and groin.
She knew he waited to see just what she might say for his breath stopped and his fingers clenched the softness of the cotton sheets beneath, the wedding ring he wore catching the candlelight.
With care she traced the ruin with her tongue, along this ridge of damage and then down to the next. Always coming closer to the hard shaft that lay amidst a bush of light-brown hair, only a small burn marking the smoothness.
And then he was inside her, the taste of him salty and masculine, sweet and known. So easy to make him hers, she thought, the rise of him sure and quick now. The power of what he allowed her boiled in her blood, too, a shared joy, a further intimacy that held no words, but only feeling. Then the thickening, as the tempo changed to a reaching, surging ache of trust.
Gabriel. Her angel delivered from Heaven.
‘I love you.’ Whispered on the edge of tears, her voice quiet with feeling. He had killed a man to protect her and then banished her demons with his own body. Only strength in it and an undeniable honesty, because in the gift he gave her she had lost all fear.
He lifted her upwards and took her mouth into his own, other flavours, further discoveries. Abandoned and open she accepted him in and she writhed with the beauty of it and the truth. She was no longer only herself. He was of her, inside, curling around constant loneliness and ancient shame. There were no rules here, no inhibitions, no places the ache of knowledge could not touch as love accompanied the sensual.
‘I love you, Gabriel. Till for ever.’
‘Make a child with me, then. Here and now. Let this be the moment of his conception, in this bed with the moon outside and Ravenshill safe. But this time together and in gentleness. This time only with love.’
‘Yes.’ She felt tears fill her eyes, not of sadness but of joy. She felt his hardness and her own answering push. She felt the starch of cotton beneath them and the cool of the night on their skin. She smelt the wax of a candle and heard the call of an owl, far away in the lines of trees that ran behind the high ground where a house could be rebuilt.
Home. Here. With Gabriel.
And then as he came within her and his fingers found that place that only he could know, she closed her eyes and simply was.
* * ***
Keep reading for an excerpt from TARNISHED, TEMPTED AND TAMED by Mary Brendan.
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Tarnished, Tempted and Tamed
by Mary Brendan
Chapter One
‘So, you are happy to be travelling all alone, then, Miss Chapman?’
‘I am, ma’am,’ the young lady answered through lightly gritted teeth. She had been asked the same question, in the same scandalised tone, about five minutes previously. Even before then two other women, and a gentleman, had made similar enquiries, couched in a slightly different way. Each interrogator had in turn professed a concern for her welfare rather than an interest in her business. In the close confines of the mail coach Fiona Chapman could not escape the ladies’ judgemental eyes or the fact that they were whispering about her behind their gloved fingers. Only the middle-aged farmer had not returned to the subject of her lack of a companion after his initial remark.
A triumphant blast of the driver’s horn proclaimed the rattling contraption to be approaching a watering hole. Miss Chapman’s fellow passengers stirred excitedly at the prospect of stretching their legs and having some refreshment. A few minutes later, from under the brim of her chip-straw bonnet, she watched them all alighting. The farmer, who had introduced himself and his wife as the Jacksons, had sat opposite Fiona, accidentally banging his tweedy knees against hers every time the coach leapt a rut. Now he kindly held out a hand, helping her to alight onto the cobbles of the Fallow Buck public house. Fiona gave him a rather wistful smile because he reminded her of her late papa with his wispy salt-and-pepper hair and rotund girth straining his waistcoat buttons. But Anthony Chapman had been older, Fiona guessed, than this fellow. Her father had died of a heart attack a few years ago at the age of fifty-two and the sad occasion had been the catalyst to Fiona making this journey.
‘Don’t be paying heed to my wife, miss.’ Mr Jackson patted Fiona’s hand before letting it go. ‘She’s a worrier and not only on her own account. We’ve two daughters, you see, so know a bit about what girls get up to.’ He slid Fiona a startled look. ‘Not that I think you’re up to anything, my dear Miss Chapman,’ he burst out. ‘Oh, no... I wasn’t suggesting...or prying...’
‘I understand.’ Fiona gave him a kind smile, taking pity on his blushing confusion. Of course he thought she was up to something...just as the ladies did. And they were right to be suspicious; well-bred young ladies did not as a rule travel unaccompanied on public transport.
‘Our two girls have settled down with their husbands. Good fellows, both of them, and Dora and Louise have each got a brood round their ankles.’ He gave Fiona an expectant smile, perhaps hoping to hear that such a blissful ending might be on the cards for her before it was too late.
Fiona knew that it was clear to all but a blind man that she was not in the first flush of youth and remaining on the shelf was thus a possibility. She’d no claim to beauty, either, and looked what she was: a spinster in her mid-twenties, with a pleasant rather than a pretty face and hair a disappointing shade of muddy blonde. She spoke in an educated way and that together with her neat attire proclaimed her to be not poor, but not rich, either, holding a status somewhere in between the two.
Mr Jackson poked an elbow in Fiona’s direction, offering to escort her into the tavern. While they had been conversing his wife and the Beresford sisters had gone ahead and disappeared inside the open doorway. ‘Mrs Jackson is alarmed in case any harm is done you, you see. And I have to admit I share my good lady’s worries.’
‘I’m sure I shall arrive in Dartmouth in one piece,’ Fiona returned with a smile that concealed the fact she wasn’t as confident as she sounded. She had left London in good spirits despite her mother begging her not to act so rashly. But the further west she journeyed the stronger grew her doubts over the wisdom of her impetuous decision to take up gainful employment in a strange and remote place.
She’d read about Devon and Cornwall in books and studied pictures of wild seas crashing against rugged coastlines. She’d seen images of country folk dressed in plain coarse clothes and shod in clogs. It was all a far cry from the sophistication of the capital city in which she’d been reared. But then Fiona had never really been part of that life, either, preferring to read or paint than attend society parties with her mother and
sister. She’d been sure she was ready for a change, even before change had been forced upon her by her papa’s demise and Cecil Ratcliff’s arrival.
‘You’re an innocent, my dear, not used to country ways, I’ll warrant,’ Peter Jackson broke in on Fiona’s deep thoughts. ‘There are nasty individuals about these parts who’d rob blind a lady...or worse...’ he mumbled. ‘So you be on your guard every minute. Before we go our separate ways we’ll give you our direction just in case you might be in need of assistance. If your business doesn’t go the way you want you might need a friend...’
Fiona knew the man was keen to know what her business was, but she’d no intention of elaborating. She’d been reared to guard her tongue and her privacy in case the ton’s gossips concocted something out of an innocent remark. The fact that her destination was the home of a widower was sure to set tongues wagging; she’d thought carefully about it herself before accepting the post of governess to two motherless children at Herbert Lodge.
‘Thank you for you kind advice, sir, I will remember it,’ Fiona promised, while holding on to her bonnet as a stiff breeze lifted it away from her crown.
Mr Jackson had introduced himself and his wife to Fiona earlier, when they had set out from the staging post in Dawlish. He’d told the assembled company that he and his dear lady were returning home having attended the nuptials of a niece. Miss Beresford and her sister Ruth had also boarded the coach at Dawlish but were due to alight first. Fiona and the Jacksons were travelling further on into Devon.
On entering the tavern Fiona and Mr Jackson found the trio of ladies already ensconced in comfy chairs around the blazing logs and the landlord dancing attendance upon them.
‘Now you must come and sit with us close by the fire, Miss Chapman,’ Mrs Jackson called from her cosy position, waggling her fingers to draw Fiona’s attention.
‘The coffee is very good in here...or I could recommend a hot toddy to warm you up?’ Peter Jackson suggested, solicitously drawing closer an armchair for Fiona to sit in. ‘We stop here quite often, don’t we, Betty, and find the fare very acceptable. I had a beef and oyster pie on the last occasion and very tasty it was, too.’
