Nobody's Angel

by Karen Robards

  It was perhaps one o'clock in the morning. All the world seemed to sleep under the mantle of darkness. Only the singing of crickets and the occasional hoarse cry of a lonesome bullfrog marred the quiet. Susannah, wanting to hurry along home, clucked to Darcy as he slowed a bit, pricking up his ears at something along the roadside that she could not see. Probably a raccoon, or even a bit of blowing bush, though Darcy was not ordinarily skittish. Still, just being out and about in the dark seemed to spook horses as well as humans. As often as she was out alone in the middle of the night, she never quite got used to the isolation of it. She was a grown woman, and one moreover who prided herself on being as practical and level-headed as they came. Certainly she didn't believe in haunts or piskies or evil spirits that arose to flit about the world by moonlight. But still, with the moon floating like a pale ghost high overhead and the tips of the pines that lined the road swaying in homage to the wind that blew gray wisps of clouds across the sky, it was easy to imagine any number of things. For example, that she was not alone. . . .

  A bullfrog erupted with its characteristic bellowing "jug o' rum!" nearly under Darcy's hooves. The horse, who ordinarily would have ignored such a familiar disturbance, danced a little. Susannah, her own nerves tightening, pulled steadyingly on the reins.

  "What the devil was that sound?"

  The gravelly voice, coming as it did seemingly out of nowhere, startled Susannah so much that she screamed and nearly lost her hold on the reins.

  18

  Darcy, upset at the commotion, nickered and broke into a canter. Fortunately Susannah recovered both her wits and her reins in time to pull him in before he got completely out of control. As the horse dropped back down to a trot and she got her breathing under control, Susannah slanted a furious glance into the back seat at Ian. She had recognized his voice almost at once, though the sheer unexpectedness of hearing it under such circumstances had thrown her off for a vital, scary instant.

  "You scared the living daylights out of me! What do you think you're doing, hiding away in the back of my buggy in the middle of the night? How did you get there, anyway?"

  "I wasn't hiding. I stretched out on the back seat while I was waiting for you, and I must have fallen asleep. As to how I got here, I heard you set out from the barn and followed you. On foot, I might add. 'Twas a goodly walk, and I don't appreciate having to make it. I told you this morning that I'd be driving you wherever you needed to g°"

  "That's ridiculous!"

  "You've got no business driving around by yourself, particularly at night. I can't believe nothing's happened to you yet."

  Susannah snorted. "What in the world do you suppose could happen to me around here? The worst would be if Darcy threw a shoe and I had to walk home."

  "The worst would be if some piece of slime like Jed Likens decided to catch you alone and teach you a lesson. Or any man, coming upon a woman out by herself in the middle of the night, might decide to take advantage of the opportunity. You're setting yourself up to be raped, if not murdered."

  "Jed Likens is all talk. He's not going to hurt me! He wouldn't dare, for one thing. Nobody around here would do something like that. Why, I've been driving around by myself for years and never had a bit of trouble."

  "You've been lucky, is all. As long as I'm around, I'll drive you. Particularly at night. There's no use even arguing about it, because I mean what I say."

  Hampered by having to conduct the conversation over her shoulder while she drove, she found it difficult to express the true degree of her indignation at his highhandedness. Susannah pulled Darcy up, tied the reins, and slewed around to glare at him. The moonlight washed over the front seat, illuminating her as clearly as if it had been day. But the buggy's leather top blocked most of the light from reaching the back seat. Ian's face was in deep shadow, though she had no trouble making out the sheer bulk of the man or the gleam of his eyes.

  "You forget yourself, Connelly." She called him that quite deliberately and with just a shade of unnecessary emphasis. "I am the mistress here. You are the servant. You do as I say, not the other way around."

  There was a brief, pregnant silence. He folded both arms along the top of her seat and leaned toward her. The action was almost menacing, and it was all Susannah could do to stop herself from drawing instinctively away. She stayed where she was through sheer force of will, chin up, eyes defiant, though it meant that his face was only a few inches from hers when he spoke at last.

  "I'm tired because it's real late and I haven't been to bed yet. My feet hurt from following you for miles over a damned bad road in shoes that I haven't had a chance to break in. My knees hurt too, from kneeling in your church most of the day. I'm hungry, and I'm not feeling any too cheerful as a result of all that. So if you mean to argue with me tonight, be warned that you do it at your peril."

  "I am not arguing with you," she said coldly, turning her back on him and reaching to untie the reins. "I am stating a fact. One that you would do well to remember. Now, if you will kindly sit back and close your mouth, I'll take us home."

  "Susannah," he said, "I'll drive."

  "No," she said, "I will. And it's Miss Susannah, as you know very well."

  He said nothing but stepped down from the buggy. Obviously he meant to settle the discussion by physically taking possession of the reins. He looked very tall and leanly muscular, standing beside her in the road with one hand on the curved frontispiece, ready to haul himself back aboard, only this time in her seat. His black felt hat was pushed to the back of his head, and his coat had apparently been left at home. The dull gold of his waistcoat shimmered in the moonlight. So did the icy gray of his eyes in that devilishly handsome face.

  He put one foot on the step and started to heave himself up. Susannah, reins in hand, snapped them smartly against the horse's back.

  Unaccustomed to such treatment, Darcy shot forward. The buggy jolted, Susannah's head snapped back, and Ian fell from the buggy to land with an audible thud on his rump in the road.

  Served him right! Gloating, Susannah glanced back at him, grinned, and waved, then kept Darcy at a smart pace as she headed for home.

  As soon as she reached the barn, she roused Ben from the loft to put Darcy and the buggy away. She headed for the house as fast as her feet would take her. Her one fear was that Ian would reach home before she was safely inside. He would be in a rage, she knew, and, brave as she was feeling, she still wasn't quite foolish enough to want to face him until he had had a few hours to cool down.

  But of course, from where he had exited the buggy it was quite a long walk home.

  Grinning at the thought of him trudging along on his supposedly tender feet, proud of herself for having gotten the better of him and no longer very sleepy at all, Susannah went up to bed.

  Half an hour later, just as her lids were beginning to droop, a scraping noise and then a soft thump roused her to full consciousness. Startled, she sat bolt upright in her bed. A series of small stealthy creaks set her heart pounding. Something, or someone, was moving across the roof of the rear porch toward her window.

  Her window was open, as it always was in hot weather. The simple muslin curtains billowed on the breeze. The inky sky beyond the window was bright with stars, alive with scuttling clouds—and then, so abruptly that she had to blink to make sure she wasn't imagining things, a tall, dark shadow blocked her view of the night.

  The porch roof, only one story high, ran beneath her window. Someone was using it to gain access to her bedchamber.

  Ian! Susannah knew who it was even before he threw one long leg over the sill and slid inside.

  "What are you doing in here? Get out of my room!" she whispered fiercely, clutching the bedcoverings around her neck and glaring at him as he stalked toward her.

  "Oh, no," he said, his voice vibrating with fury for all its menacing hush. "Not just yet."

  He reached down, yanked the bedclothes out of her grasp, and threw them aside. Though it was dark in the room, it was
not so dark as to hide her deshabille from his gaze. Pale moonlight mottled the bed, lending Susannah's prim white nightgown a translucence she was sure it had not possessed earlier. Glancing down at herself in horror as his eyes ran assessingly over her from her high, frilled neckline to the tips of her small bare toes, Susannah felt as exposed as if she had been naked. With a soft cry of mingled anger and protest, she scrambled to draw her legs beneath her. Crouching in the center of the feather mattress, her arms clamped over her breasts, she turned her face up to his. The long rope of her hair, braided for sleeping, spilled down over one shoulder. Tawny, curling tendrils formed a halo around her face. Her wide mouth was clamped into a straight, angry line. Her eyes blazed a bright green-gold.

  "If you dare . . ." she began furiously.

  "Oh, I dare," he said, reaching out to catch her by the elbows and haul her up and over until she was kneeling on the edge of the mattress and he was looming threateningly above her, his face just inches from her own. "Make no mistake about that, Susannah. I dare."

  "Take your hands off me!" Her whisper was shrill with outrage. "And it's Miss Susannah!"

  He laughed. The sound was soft, unpleasant. "I don't like being knocked on my ass in the dirt, Miss Susannah. I don't like being left in the middle of the night to walk three miles home over a pitiful excuse for a road. And I especially don't like having a prim little minister's daughter look down her nose at me every time I turn around. That I don't like at all."

  "If you don't leave my room this instant, I'll scream." The depth of his fury should have frightened her. But Susannah was angry herself, and when she got angry, as her family liked to say, Susannah didn't fear the devil himself.

  "Scream, then. Go ahead."

  He had her there. She wouldn't scream, and he knew it. The very idea of having her family discover him in her bedroom, with all the explanations that would entail, was enough to make her cringe.

  "No?" His voice was soft, taunting. "I didn't think so."

  His hands tightened around her arms, and lie pulled her up against him. Her breasts pressed against his chest. Her belly brushed his abdomen. Her thighs lay against his. Heat engorged her body, flushing her skin, setting her blood to boiling. The sheer shock of it saved her. She jerked back from him as convulsively as if he'd been a poisonous snake,

  "Let me go! Connelly, I'm warning you!" It was a furious whisper.

  She had managed to put some six inches between their bodies, though she remained all too blindingly conscious of the hard, warm length of him so near. Her head was thrown back so that she might meet his gaze head on. His hands remained tight about her arms.

  "I'm getting bloody tired of you calling me Connelly in that haughty little way you have, too. You've ruled the roost around here for far too long, I'm thinking. Now the time's come to pay the piper."

  "Meaning you?" Her voice was scathing. His eyes narrowed, and then one corner of his mouth moved upward in a way that Susannah misliked.

  "Meaning me." So quickly that Susannah hadn't time to guess what he meant to do, his hands moved up to encircle her throat. He held her gently but implacably, his palms a high, warm collar while his thumbs tilted up her chin.

  "My name's Ian, Susannah. This time I'll make damned sure that you don't forget it."

  Then, even as Susannah reached up to clutch his wrists, tugging frantically in an effort to free herself before what she longed for and yet dreaded more than anything else in the world could happen, his mouth came down on hers.

  19

  Just as Susannah had feared, that kiss changed everything. Instead of punishing her, it was soft and warm, but insistent. His mouth moved over hers, brushing against her lips, nibbling at the corners of her mouth.

  Before it could go any further, she tried to draw back.

  "Ian," she began shakily, pulling her mouth free.

  "That's right, Ian," he said with satisfaction, and kissed her again.

  At this second touch of his mouth on hers, Susannah's body caught fire. Her hands, which had been tugging halfheartedly at his, stilled and curled around his wrists. Her lids fluttered down. Her heart speeded up, sending her blood pounding in a pagan rhythm that was foreign to anything she had ever experienced. His hands moved to cradle the base of her skull beneath the heavy braid, and her head lolled back against his hands. Her neck had suddenly grown too weak with wanting to support its weight.

  "Susannah. Open your mouth for me, Susannah." His whisper was hoarse, raspy. His fingertips stroked the tender skin at the nape of her neck. His mouth brushed gently over her lips.

  Susannah trembled and obediently opened her mouth. Never in her life had she expected to feel the way he was making her feel—as if she were on fire, her blood boiling in her veins, her skin searing all the way down to her toes from no more than the soft touch of his mouth. Vaguely she remembered the rough, crude way he had invaded her mouth before. Even that less than lover-like kiss had set off flares of wanting in the most secret regions of her body. But when she parted her lips this time and his tongue slid inside, there was nothing rough or crude about this taking of her mouth.

  His hands still cradling her head, he slanted his mouth over hers, touching her tongue with his, stroking her teeth and the roof of her mouth. She must have made a slight movement, or a sound, because suddenly the hands holding her head went rigid and his kiss grew fiercely insistent. Before Susannah could go limp with wanting or cry out with need or do any one of the dozen or so other things that her burning body seemed to want to do, he withdrew his mouth from hers. Her lids lifted, and she blinked, dizzy. His eyes seemed to glow with a reflection of her own heat as they gleamed down at her. Restlessly his thumbs stroked the soft underside of her chin.

  "Oh, my goodness," she whispered, her eyes moving down from his to focus on that beautiful, sensuously curving mouth.

  Her words surprised a laugh out of him. It sounded curiously shaken, and when she glanced up to meet his eyes she saw that they were not laughing at all, but ablaze.

  "I love the way you talk," he said, and then, as if he could not help himself, his mouth came down on hers again. This time he did not have to tell her to open her mouth. She parted her lips for him instantly, sighing into his mouth and leaning her weight full against him. Instantly her breasts, pressed against the unyielding strength of his chest, swelled, and her nipples hardened almost painfully. Her thighs, resting against the taut muscles of his, contracted. And her secret place made contact with a curious bulge in the front of his breeches that in a matter of seconds grew both enormous and rocklike. Spinster that she was, she still knew enough about men to recognize what was happening to him. The knowledge made her quake.

  "Susannah." Her name on his lips was a mere breath of sound, muttered into her mouth. He slid his hands down her back, stroking her shoulders and the length of her spine through the thin cotton nightgown. His arms wrapped around her waist, pulling her tight against him so that she could feel every muscle and sinew of his hard body pressing against her through their clothes. Susannah, knowing with the one tiny part of her mind that was still capable of rational thought that what she was about to do was hideously wrong, prelude to a sin that would haunt her forever, nonetheless lifted her arms to wrap around his neck and kissed him back.

  At her sudden fierce response he stiffened, and then his kiss changed. His lips grew harder, more demanding, his tongue urgent in its forays into her mouth. With a strange growling sound that emerged from somewhere deep in his throat, he bent her backward over his arm. One hand came up to crush her breast. Her nipple pressed into his palm, pebble-hard.

  Susannah whimpered, not with pain or fear but with acute wanting. She needed him, needed him as desperately as ever a starving man needed food or a thirsty one, water. Her body ached for him, trembled for him, cried out for him. The very savageness of his embrace, where before he had been gentle, told her that, surprising as it seemed, he burned for her too.

  When he reached down, scrabbling for the hem of
her nightgown to draw it up from the back, she made no protest but even undid the single button at her neck so that he could pull it over her head and throw it aside. Then, for just a moment as she knelt naked before him, the soft breeze from the open window caressing her skin, she was conscious of a dreadful moment of doubt. But the doubt was not about whether she should lie with him, in direct violation of every tenet of morality she had ever believed or been taught. She had already made her decision about that, maybe as long ago as when he had pulled her into bed with him that night in the parlor. The doubt was about whether he would look at her, naked, and find her wanting. If he should turn away from her now for such a reason, she would be forever shattered.

  His eyes were on her, touching her everywhere. Instinctively Susannah sank back on her heels and crossed her arms in front of her body in the classic pose of exposed femininity, one arm shielding her breasts, the other at the juncture of her thighs. Her wariness shone from her eyes as they lifted to his face. He paid no heed to her concern but reached down to gently catch both her hands and pull them wide.

  Susannah did not fight him. She had too much pride for that. In that instant in which she hovered between heaven and hell, she seemed to see her own reflection in his eyes. Plain square face, unruly curling hair confined in a plait as thick as his wrist, obstinate chin tilted defiantly up. Creamy pale skin, neck and shoulders acceptably attractive, with her collarbone showing through her skin and a frantic pulse beating in the shadowed hollow of her throat. Breasts that, like her hair, were the bane of her existence, too round, too full, almost the size of ripe cantaloupes and tipped with distended, darkened nipples half as long as her little finger. Below them her waist, its ridiculously small measurement only making her breasts seem larger in contrast. Then the lush swell of her hips, like her breasts emphasized by the marked indention of her waist. The soft curve of her belly, with its small dark navel, dipping down to the sable triangle of curls where her legs met. Her legs themselves, milky-skinned and smooth.