Nicholas pressed his point. “There would be no happiness with Huber. Being with him would be worse than being alone.”
“Brother Huber would be worse than anything,” she rasped.
Nicholas agreed. The thought of Abbigail forced to accept that man’s embrace heaved in his belly like a spoiled meal. He had to make her see she must refuse the man. “You would have to kiss him.”
She snatched her hands from Nicholas’s grasp and spread them across her breasts as if the ultimate intimacy of marriage-and with a man like that-had just assaulted her.
“No one ever kissed me.”
“Well, it shouldn’t be him.” It should be me. The thought was physical, powerful.
Eyes open, Nicholas bent his head toward her mouth, his heart hammering in his chest. Wrong, wrong, wrong. He had kissed so many girls, but always with permission. “Abbigail?”
Her lashes were long and dark and thick, and she blinked softly. “No one. Ever,” she whispered.
His heart skipped a whole beat, then jolted into service. “He would not do it right,” he pointed out, persuading her. Persuading himself.
Her limpid brown gaze clouded, darkened. “I would not know right.”
He gave brief thanks to a wise God for all those stolen kisses that enabled him to say now with confidence, “This is right.” He lowered his head to her desolate face.
Abbigail accepted the chaste, brotherly salute that Nicholas offered for a kiss. Then he pulled away. Disappointment stung her.
“Ah. Is that all?” It was far, far more than she would ever want from Brother Huber, but not at all the heated embrace that had fired her recent dreams of Nicholas. Perhaps this was all a man like him could offer a woman like her.
His broad chest rose and fell.
“No, not all,” he said huskily.
With slow deliberation, his hands framed her face, his leonine head angled down, and his mouth covered hers. The force of his tender assault swept her like the wind. Like a consolation for every day of her lonely, spinster’s life. Softly searing, his lips branded her, and all on its own, her body curled toward his.
She froze, breathless, afraid that any move she made would signal him to stop. Or to continue. She did not know which. Poised on the brink of her fledgling flight, she did not know whether to trust the wind or risk the fall.
His arms decided her, enfolding her as if to prevent escape and banish fear. He lifted his mouth a feather’s width away.
“Breathe, Liebling,” he whispered. “Relax and close your eyes, and let me show you.”
She nodded in confused assent, and her unbound hair tumbled in her face.
He freed one arm, gently brushed a thick lock away, and gave her a tender smile that came from the man behind the charm. “I promise to stop when you say so.”
A spinster faced with marriage should know the weight of kisses, she told herself. Besides, the sweetness of his wry reassurance gave her all the freedom and permission even she could ever need.
Expelling a pent-up breath, she closed her eyes and waited.
His mouth, so generous with smiles, was munificent with kisses. Warmth drizzled over her newly, acutely awakened mouth, which up till now had been engaged in futile speech and fruitless eating all her life. His lips touched hers like the merest wingbeat of a butterfly, then moved across her mouth in little loose nibbles, clinging, releasing, clinging again. In answer, her lips allowed, softened, clung.
His sighs roared in her ears.
The heat of his breathing fanned her face.
A slow, sweet burn kindled in her belly, and her throat closed on a small, high cry-a trill, she knew, of pleasure.
Which he answered with a moan that rumbled up from deep within his chest. Then his strong, large hands tenderly drew her down beside him on the featherbed where he had pinned her only moments ago. She could not struggle now. She could not will herself to move except as he might ask her to.
He asked mutely, his thick strong arms pulling her to his broad chest, his mouth claiming hers. She gasped at the strangeness, the intimacy, the rightness of his embrace. In his arms, sheltered by his massive bulk, she felt protected and free enough to fly.
His kiss went on and on, lasting fifty, a hundred leisurely, fraught breaths, overwhelming her. She lost count, could only feel. Nicholas, charming, fearless Nicholas, the man she thought she knew, was deeper, steadier, more intense. Hot and wet, his tongue ran along the seam of her mouth, delicate but insisting that she part her lips.
Bemused, beset, besieged, she yielded, thinking-to the extent that thought would form-she had not bargained for this. She knew what kissing was. Lips pressed to lips, and that was that. But he probed at her teeth as he had at her lips. Unsure of what he wanted, unsure what to do, she opened her mouth for him awkwardly. But he groaned with unmistakable approval, and his tongue sought hers.
Shocked, she broke away, an inch away, opened her eyes, and saw stark hunger on his face. Hunger for her. It warmed her to her bones. It shook her to the center of her being.
“We’re not finished, Abbigail,” he said softly. “Let me kiss you.”
Not finished! His consuming kiss swallowed up her startled “Oh!” Her teeth clanged into his, his tongue possessed the inside of her mouth, and his own sweet taste and rich, masculine smell gusted through her remaining senses.
Still cautious, she accepted him, amazed when tremors quaked an inner core she never knew she had. For his deepening kiss rolled through her body like thunder, flashing her senses like lightning on a sultry afternoon. Emboldened by his sheer energy, she flew full-strength into the storm. Exuberant from the sensations streaming through her body, she wriggled closer to him, pressing her tingling breasts against his chest, her trembling stomach against the muscled flat of his, her very hipbone to his … his …
What she encountered was no hipbone.
A thick, stiff, heated rod jammed against the parting of her legs. She went still, utterly at a loss what to say or do. She knew just enough of sanctioned love to recognize that this must be his manhood, must be the most private, intimate evidence of his desire.
Abruptly, he released her and flung himself back across the bed, self-contempt flashing across his face.
“Abbigail, I am sorry…” His voice was gravelly, vexed. “A man shouldn’t… A man can’t help… with someone he likes …”
She had done something wrong. She forced a small smile. Sitting up, she fussed her gauzy neckerchief into place. She needed to get her clothes in order. She needed to get her emotions under control.
“I take it that was a kiss?” she asked pertly.
He scrubbed his hands over his face. “Liebe Gott,” he muttered.
She pressed her lips together, hiding the eagerness she had felt and the tiniest bit of amusement. The charmer who took nothing seriously had never been so serious with her.
“Adding swearing to fornication, I see, Brother Blum.”
He lurched up, his massive frame sitting heavily apart from her on the edge of her creaking bed. “That was not fornication!”
“Perhaps you could define fornication for me then,” she said, deliberately, excessively prim.
He jabbed his fingers through his golden mane of hair, which she had tousled. She, as if she were his lover, and not merely his friend in need of comfort. Feeling a hot blush rise, she looked away. When she could bear to look again, he was shaking his head.
“I wouldn’t define fornication for my own sisters if my soul depended on it.”
She relented from her teasing and gave his hand an empathetic little squeeze. “No need, Nicholas,” she said softly. “I know the difference between what we just did and that.”
“Ah. Gut. Sehr gut.” He paused, straightened his stock, then made a point of adjusting the blousy sleeves of his shirt which their embrace had twisted.
She resisted the urge to help him.
“Then I have made my point,” he said.
“Your point?”
She crossed her arms and tapped her foot, mortification swamping her best effort at control. She would have sworn that he had shown her passion. But what did she know-a spinster Single Sister virgin who had never been kissed in her whole life? More likely, he had kissed her so to win a point in argument. Her heart shriveled. His demonstration had not meant to him what it had meant to her.
“Indeed.” She managed not to spit the word out in his face.
“Well.” He grinned at last, evidently taking her restraint for approval of his lesson. “You might enjoy kissing a friend, but you wouldn’t want to kiss Christian Huber. Not like that. Not for the rest of your life.”
All the anger that had simmered in her for days boiled up. “Idiot,” she bit off. “Friends don’t kiss like that. I know that, sheltered spinster that I am.”
Chagrin did not make him less handsome, she noted, as he rubbed his strong jaw. “Nevertheless, you must not marry Brother Huber,” he said. “I truly meant to spare you that by giving you an example. Nothing more.”
She was hurt, not assuaged. “Nothing more? Then what do you call what happened between us on my bed?”
He stood and paced the confines of her little room, stopped in front of her, and took her hands in a chaste, demanding clasp.
“Sweet, Abbigail. What happened between us was sweet. And hot and wonderful. And wrong of me,” he said with an earnestness that cleaved her heart. “I owe you my deepest apology for letting it go that far. I know better. I know how upright and principled you are.”
His words dropped into her soul like stones. He had given. Now he was taking away. He liked her enough to give her a soul-consuming kiss, but not enough to do it again. Her old familiar sense of isolation swirled through her. Upright and principled never warmed her bed at night. Upright and principled never seared her soul.
Cords of regret banded her heart. Misery hollowed her stomach. Pride lifted her chin. “You need not worry about me and Brother Huber,” she said briskly, resolved at least to appear to take his ill-considered kiss in the spirit it was intended.
As a lesson. From a friend. For the rest of her life.
14
Nicholas saw the prideful lift of Abbigail’s head and gave her a short, unhappy nod. He had carried his point. Now he could count the cost. She was hurt, her friendship lost.
“But we should worry if Brother Huber finds us here,” Abbigail said.
She whisked over to the window and peered into the street, tiny and efficient and in command of herself again. He admired her self-control. But he watched the graceful precision of her movements.
“Singstunde is over,” she said.
And the sun was setting and everyone was walking home and he was a prize idiot, Nicholas thought. Despite her quick recovery, he would not let Huber find them and hurt her further.
“I’m leaving,” he said, backing from the room into the unlit hall and heading for the stairs.
“Wait.” Her light tread padded up behind him. “This is yours.”
She handed him the walnut case. “More plunder, I take it,” she said in a too-bright tone, and followed him down the stairs.
“Treasure,” he replied, hoping a joke they had once shared would restore their former standing. “You must see them before I put them away.”
As if willing them to return to earlier times, she lit a square tin lantern and joined him downstairs in the tiny office. Explaining how he came to buy the watches for her father, he lifted the lid for her inspection. Her eyes narrowed keenly, then widened with appreciation.
“French enamel. Very nice.”
The knot of tension in his gut loosened in relief. He had found a neutral topic; she was showing interest, real or feigned. He demonstrated the watches’ fine workings. Taking the key from his pocket and opening the safe, he continued, “Your father will have my hide, however, for extravagance on his behalf.”
She smiled blandly, a shadow of her old openness. But still, he hoped, progress. Perhaps he hadn’t blundered past repair. His chronic optimism surfaced.
If there were kissing cousins, could there be kissing friends?
“My father will not scold. Not if there is profit in them, Brother Blum,” she said, and slipped out of the office.
She was still on his side, he thought. But he watched her go with a jab of remorse that he had hurt her. A jolt of regret that his morals had not let him finish what he started. No, he told himself, he could not rue that. He had protected her from his worst self-the thoughtless sensual ogre Mary Clark had unleashed.
He tendered his treasure to the security of the safe. He even hoped for a bite of stew before going to the Brothers House for the night, as he absentmindedly pocketed the key.
She swept back in and placed a packet in his hand. “In all the fuss, I almost forgot. News for you from home,” she said breezily.
She had recovered, he realized, strangely disappointed. She put no more stake in their mind-shattering kiss than he had intended to. Intended, that is, until he tasted her sweet passion. She could walk away from him. Gut, zehr gut, he told himself. She should walk away from him, as he had to walk away from her.
His heart wrenched. Resolutely, he ignored it.
“Well, open it,” she said after he delayed. “I know how you welcome news from home.”
He wanted to open it, but later, in privacy, when his mind was less distracted and his senses less disordered. Still, he would pretend that all was well.
He tore into the packet and flattened the sheet of heavy paper on the counter next to the dolls. “From my brother,” he said, struck by the oddity that he would write at all.
“Which one?” Abbigail asked with friendly interest, fingering the dolls’ muslin dresses with approval. She picked one up and examined it, head to toe, waiting for his answer.
“Matthias.” He scanned the letter worriedly, then with disbelief. There must be some mistake. Hot blood flooded his face. The air deserted his lungs.
His intended bride, stolen out from under him.
He had asked his brother to keep an eye out for her, not claim her for his own. How could Matthias do such a thing? How could his father and God and the Elders conspire to let it happen?
“Is he the younger younger brother or the older younger brother?” Abbigail quizzed, apparently amused.
“The older younger brother,” he all but snarled.
“Nicholas …?” She asked, her voice softening.
Nicholas looked up from the letter. Abbigail’s face was bright with interest. The words tumbled from him, pulled by her sympathy.
“Matthias is to wed my Catharina.”
The brightness faded. “Your Catharina?”
“Catharina is in love with me. And I pledged myself to her.”
A few minutes later, George Till returned from Singstunde. “Out of the question!” he said when Nicholas tendered his request to leave. “You cannot go to Salem to attend your brother’s wedding.”
Not to attend it, Nicholas thought grimly. To stop it.
Abbigail, too brisk and too efficient, was setting the stew on the table without a sign of being the willing woman who had melted in his arms. Disheartened by her sudden distance and the darker turn his day had taken, Nicholas sat to eat with Till. Huber joined them, his aquiline nose aquiver at the prospect of another set-to.
“Let me explain,” Nicholas said to Till. But he could not explain the damning words in his thieving brother’s letter …
… astonishing good fortune… accepted the Lot… safe with me…
Till shoveled a spoonful of beans into his mouth, chewed, then spoke. “No explanation is needed. No one expects you to forsake your duty here to attend a simple ceremony. It is not our way. Besides, traveling three hundred miles there and three hundred back would take a month. A month I cannot grant you.”
Nicholas looked to Abbigail for help. But she was setting ale d
own at her father’s place, her pretty, strained face shutting him out.
“My family wishes I would come,” he said, not quite accurately.
I wish you could share my joy, were his betraying brother’s words.
Till’s mouth thinned into a denying smile. “Knowing you cannot. Knowing your time is mine.”
“My family is very close. They will want me there.”
“Bah! You are bound to me. You may prove yourself otherwise, but your father is a man of his word.”
Nicholas bristled. He too was a man of his word. For years, he had made promises, albeit veiled, to Catharina. Who here-for that matter, who there ?- would understand? Abbigail plunked a mug of ale beside his plate, her gaze shuttered. She knew enough, she must see his awkward position. But she could not stand by him the way she always did.
The way Catharina should have. But no, he would not blame Catharina. She, he reminded himself firmly, was his mainstay, the woman he had built his dreams around. Her tender acceptance had been his mooring as the Elders had shifted him from trade to trade.
But for her to marry his brother! What change had come to pass? Surely there was some error. Catharina loved him. She had as much as said so. He had to stand by her in this fiasco of the Lot drawn wrong. Only he could extract her from the disaster of marrying against her heart’s desire.
“I must go, Brother Till, with your consent or not.”
Till’s face darkened. “Go then. But don’t expect to saunter back.”
Saunter back. Careless, reckless Nicholas. His reputation followed, even here. “I honor my contracts,” he said firmly. “I will return.”
Till shoved his plate away, only a tremor in his hands divulging his anger. “Go without my consent, and that contract is broken.”
For the first time since their kiss, Abbigail met his gaze then turned to her father. “Papa, really If his family wishes-”
Till cut her off. “I regret, Brother Blum, that I have no choice.”
“But you do, sir. I’m no lad, no apprentice, but a man full grown. And as such, you can let me go, banking on my word for my swift return.”
His Stolen Bride Page 13
