“You do not have children, Mr. Daniels. See how much good lists do you when that blessing befalls you.”
A shadow crossed his features, reminding Mary Fran that anything having to do with Matthew’s father, even something as oblique as an allusion to the baronial succession, invited that shadow into the discussion.
“I see one!” Fiona went scampering into the stables just as a marmalade kitten disappeared down the barn aisle ahead of her.
In the next instant, Mary Fran connected a tensing of her escort’s posture with the crunch of a boot on the walk behind them and a whiff of cigar smoke on the breeze. “I don’t know when I’ve seen a child exhibit such poor decorum,” the baron drawled. “Regular beatings are your only recourse at this point, Miss MacGregor.”
Matthew turned but kept his hand over Mary Fran’s knuckles. “Altsax, our hostess is Lady Gordon Flynn, if you’re to address her properly.”
“Lady Gordon Flynn? That means she’s claiming to have married the late Quinworth spare, and I would have heard of such a misalliance.” Altsax swung his gaze to Mary Fran, his smile diabolically ugly. “My own son is known as the corrupt colonel. You needn’t put on airs to gain the notice of the likes of him.”
Beside her, Mary Fran felt Matthew petrify with rage.
“Mama, come quick!” Fee’s voice, redolent with wonder, came from the stables. “I’ve caught one, and it’s purring!”
Altsax rolled his eyes. “No doubt my son has purred for you too, my lady. Alas for you, he’s purred for many. Pity you can’t ask his late wife about that, isn’t it?”
“Mama!”
Altsax offered Mary Fran a jaunty bow and spun on his heel as Matthew dropped her arm. Beneath his tan, he’d gone pale, his lips ringed with white. In his eyes, there was no emotion, no warmth.
“Lady Mary Frances, if you’ll excuse—”
She grabbed his hand, which he’d balled into a fist. “You’ll not let that man have the last word like this, Matthew Daniels. Do you honestly think I’d believe one word of the bile he spews? Your father is unnatural. Come.”
He hesitated as Altsax went whistling up the path.
“Matthew, please. You cannot help who your father is—what he is.”
Fiona emerged from the stables, cradling a ball of black and white fur against her chest. “He’s purring! I think he likes me—or maybe it’s a she.”
Mary Fran did not turn loose of Matthew’s hand, but she turned an indulgent smile on her daughter. “Of course the dratted beast likes you—they all do. Take it to the dairy, and I’m sure there will be a dish of milk about for a wee new friend.”
Fiona scampered off, leaving Mary Fran to half drag Matthew in the direction of the stables. “Say something, Matthew. Clootie Itnyre knows all the herbs and potions. I’ve half a mind to ask him what I should serve up to your father to permanently shut the baron’s foul, lying, obscene—”
They’d gained the aisle running between the loose boxes when Matthew spun her up against the wall and fused his mouth to hers.
He was enraged—Mary Fran tasted that in his kiss, though the rage wasn’t directed at her—and he was in some desperate, silent frenzy that was expressing itself as passion. He’d lost a wife—that explained a few things, but exactly what it explained she could not fathom, not when she had to hang on to the man kissing her simply to keep her balance.
“I could love you,” Matthew whispered, his voice hoarse in her ear. “God help me, I could have loved you.”
“Hush, Matthew.” She lashed her arms around him, held him tightly, held him as if she could protect him from every injury. “You’re grieving. When the loss rears up, there’s a temptation to find comf—”
This kiss was different. His mouth moved slowly over hers, as if the tumult and desperation of the last kiss had never happened. His body no longer pressed her back against the hard boards behind her; it sheltered and warmed.
“Come.” She eased sideways and took his hand, leading him down the rows of stalls to the saddle room. Wherever this was going, she wanted a locked door between her and the prying eyes of the world.
God help me, I could have loved you.
She’d no sooner thrown the bolt on the saddle room door than Matthew had her back against a sturdy wall. He rested an arm against the wall and leaned down to run his nose along her collarbone.
“You cannot defend me against my own father, Mary Fran.”
The way he hung over her conveyed both passion and something else—despair, in his voice, in his posture.
“Kiss now, talk later, laddie.”
Kiss, caress, tease… a little dusty sunshine came through a small window high up on the outside wall. Time slowed, and Mary Fran let the moment seep into her bones: The good smells of horse and leather, the flutter of a small bird up in the rafters, the soft wool of Matthew’s jacket, and the certain knowledge that of her own volition, she was going to make love with a man worthy of the honor.
“Mary Frances?”
He was asking permission to love her, permission to make love with her. She answered him by easing back and meeting his gaze. In the gloom, his eyes were not blue; they were simply watching her, ready for her to sigh and smile, to leave him here alone with his father’s accusations wreaking their vile havoc.
She shaped him through the fabric of his riding breeches. He was wonderfully hard, ready for her. When she freed him from his clothing, his head fell back, and he hissed out a slow breath. She stroked his length, reacquainting herself with the odd wonder that was the male breeding organ in anticipation of its pleasures.
As she traced her fingers over the smooth skin of his erect cock, she saw the tension in him shift from arousal to self-restraint.
“I could love you too, Matthew Daniels.” In that moment, she couldn’t not love him. Couldn’t deny herself the pleasure of his body, hard, masculine, and pressed against hers in desire.
She hated her clothing, simple attire though it was. Drawers and stays and chemise and petticoats—the morning was cool—came between Mary Fran and the man she sought to possess. Between kisses, sighs, and a few muttered curses, she stepped out of her drawers; with some assistance from Matthew, she got dress and chemise shoved about enough and her stays loose enough to free her breasts from their confinement, but the delay, the damned, fussy delay, had her ready to scream.
“Matthew, I want…” Mary Fran lifted her forehead from his shoulder to glance around. They were in a saddle room. The plank floor was littered with dried mud and bits of hay and straw; the only solid surface was a pair of trunks along the opposite wall. The entire space was designed for hanging bridles, stowing saddles on racks, and storing brushes and riding gear.
“We can make it to the hayloft,” she said, trying to find something amusing about dashing up the ladder out in the barn aisle.
“Bugger the hayloft.” Matthew shifted away, his shirt and waistcoat flapping open, his neckcloth hanging loose and wrinkled. He bent, and in one mighty heave, stacked the two trunks one atop the other. His next move was to grab a wool cooler—a MacGregor plaid, no less—and fold it over the top trunk. When he turned, his clothing askew, his erection straining up along his midline, his expression was unreadable.
“Or I can come to you tonight,” he said.
Mary Fran eyed the trunks. “I’m not sure exactly…”
He hauled her across the small space and hoisted her onto the trunks. “You sit.”
She shifted back a bit on the trunks. The cooler was thick, folded several times, and the seat wasn’t uncomfortable. The one shaft of sunlight fell on Matthew’s red-gold hair as he stepped between her legs.
“You sit,” he said again, bending his head so Mary Fran felt the words breezing past her ear as much as she heard them. “And we love.”
The arrangement was perfect. Despite the clothing, despite the surrounds, despite the discord Altsax had tried to sow, as Mary Fran wrapped her arms around her lover, all she felt was pleasure and the s
weet, sweet privilege of making love at long last with the right man.
Matthew’s hands traveled over her slowly, touching her face and hair, tracing the line of her collarbone then easing lower to cup her breast in a caress that could only be described as cherishing. Better than that, even, was the time he gave Mary Fran to learn him in similar fashion.
She tasted the pale scar on the side of his jaw, used her lips and tongue to explore the contour of his small male nipples. His scent was clean all over, like sunshine and cool forests.
And then the feel of him, ah, the hard, warm feel of him, pushing intimately into her body. He was careful at first, a soft nudge, a sigh, another easy little push. The sun had never coaxed a snowy little crocus to open to its warmth as gently as Matthew Daniels joined his body to hers.
“Matthew, you’re killing me. Killing—”
“Then we’ll die together.”
She could not rush him, could not affect his damnably tender pace one bit. She tried, tried to recapture their previous frenzy with hot kisses, except he somehow turned them into lazy, hot kisses.
She dragged her nails down his muscular back, urging him faster, but by the time her hands reached his buttocks, her harrying had turned into a caress.
He was relentless in his tenderness and patience, a one-man onslaught of caring who would neither be dictated to nor distracted from his intention to devastate her with pleasure.
Mary Fran was practical woman, a woman who knew when she’d met her match, so she did something she would have never have considered doing with any other man: she surrendered and let herself be loved.
Four
Mary Fran was heaven, and Matthew was a devil. He stored up the sounds of her sighs and groans, saved back the memory of her heathery-flowery scent, made a miser’s hoard of the pleasure of slow, deep thrusts into her heat.
He was wrong to abuse her trust like this, wrong to let her think Altsax had been spewing lies, wrong to make love to her for the first time in a damned stable—except it would be their only time, of that, Matthew was certain.
Mary Fran locked her ankles at the small of his back—her booted ankles. The clutch of her legs felt marvelous. The strength in her, the need, made a wicked, lovely contrast to the impersonal couplings he and his wife had shared.
Damn duty anyhow.
When Mary Fran started trying to scoot into Matthew’s thrusts, he wrapped his arms around her and buried his face against her neck. Her fingernails dug in low on his back, a fierce, unrelenting grip. Her breath came more harshly against his skin, and the sounds she made threatened to obliterate his control.
“Matthew—”
He kissed her to stop her from begging verbally, though her body was shameless in its demands, and even more shameless in their satisfaction. As she seized around him, hard, repeatedly, her kiss became a plundering of his reason, her pleasure his complete undoing.
He tried to pull away, but her legs were scissored around his waist, and she would not allow it. He growled her name and made another attempt to withdraw, but she held him, her arms and legs a vise, and the struggle itself only heightened his arousal.
“Surrender, damn you, Matthew.”
A command. Matthew understood about taking orders, and his body understood opportunity. Pleasure flooded him body and soul, a wracking release that had him pounding into his lover until his legs threatened to give out and he had to hold on to Mary Fran for both balance and sanity.
He managed to remain standing, if only to bask in the way her hand winnowed through his hair in a slow caress. She kissed his throat, nuzzled his breastbone, and still did not drop her legs from around his waist.
“We need…” His voice was hoarse, as if he’d been shouting for too long. “My handkerchief is in my left pocket.”
Thank God she obliged and dug into the breeches sagging around his hips. Matthew did not want to turn her loose from his embrace, not ever.
Though he would. Altsax had seen to that handily enough.
“The next time we do this,” Mary Fran said, “we’re going to have a damned bed. My bum can’t—”
His cock slipped from her body, slunk away in defeat more like. “There will not be a next time, Mary Fran, not unless you agree to marry me.”
She stopped dabbing at him with his handkerchief. Her head came up, and the smile disappeared from her well-kissed lips. “Are you trying to trap me, Matthew Daniels?”
Just like that, she’d emotionally come about and swung her gun ports open, which was fortunate, because for the hash he’d made of things, Matthew deserved to be sunk at sea.
***
Gordie had done the same bloody thing—started spouting off about marriage before he’d even stuffed his pizzle back in his knickers.
His relatively unimpressive pizzle, come to that.
And Matthew did not look smug or even nervous. He looked so very, very serious, even with his shirt hanging open and his breeches not properly fastened.
“I owe you an explanation, Mary Frances. I’d rather you hear it from me, because Altsax seems all too willing to give you his version of events.”
“Put yourself to rights,” she said, reaching under her skirts to make use of his handkerchief. She hadn’t understood why he was trying to pull out until the instant he’d given up the effort. She’d come again, unbelievably hard, when he’d spent in her body.
Marriage wasn’t out of the question, if the damned man but knew it.
“I can put my clothing to rights,” he said, tucking himself up, “but to untangle what’s between us…”
He ran a hand through hair Mary Fran herself had put in thorough disarray. She tidied herself up as best she could and scooted to one side of the trunk. “Sit with me, Matthew, and let’s have none of your English dramatics.”
This earned her the smallest smile, the smallest, saddest smile, but he sat beside her. He didn’t take her hand, so she took his.
“I am the corrupt colonel.” He recited this like a penitent’s catechism.
“And I was Gordie’s Highland whore. Did you lose a shipment of the cavalry’s horse blankets, then? Slip them off to some orphanage?”
“I do love you, Mary Fran.”
“Must you make it sound like this dooms you to misery?” Her attempt at a light moment failed utterly, and where a rosy, even optimistic glow had tried to take root in Mary Fran’s heart, dread began to form.
“I love you for your fierce heart, for your courage, for your passion,” he went on. “And because I love you, you must know the truth: I publicly compromised my general’s daughter, and I did so while my wife of less than two years lay dying. My disgrace took place”—he kissed her fingers and then deposited her hand back in her lap—“my disgrace took place at the regimental ball.”
Cold shivered over Mary Frances, a cold even worse than when, after deflowering her, Gordie had poured himself a drink and toasted their future.
“You would not do such a thing.” She wanted to reach for his hand, but his posture was so calm, so self-contained, she stifled the impulse.
“I did such a thing. The girl—she was only twenty-two—went home under a cloud of scandal. I resigned my commission and put it about that my father was demanding my return. Ask anybody billeted to the Crimea, and they’ll tell you all about the corrupt colonel. They have worse names for me too, of course…”
The cold became something worse, something like panic, dread, and rage, all rolled into Mary Fran’s middle and jammed against her heart. “I don’t believe you.”
“You must believe me. It is the truth. We were found in a shocking embrace by no less than the girl’s mother. Had I been single, the girl would very likely be my wife now.”
“Did you make love with her?”
Why this should matter, Mary Fran did not know. For most men, particularly aroused men, the difference between kisses, caresses, and coitus was simply a few more minutes of privacy.
“I kissed her thoroughly, had my hands
where a gentleman’s hands do not belong, had my tongue—”
“But not your cock.”
He reared back a bit, as if he’d just walked in on a scene such as the one he was describing. “Not my cock, but you have only my word for that, and the word of a cad should never be trusted.”
Except he wasn’t cad. Could not be.
She’d had the same argument with herself over Gordie. Told herself he would never take advantage of her curiosity, never proceed if she decided to call a halt. Gordie had made no pretense of withdrawing, and Fiona was the result. Matthew had tried to protect them from such consequences, and Mary Fran had prevented him.
“Tell me the rest of it, Matthew. If I can put this in context…”
He rose from the trunk and straightened a bridle hanging on the opposite wall. “I compromised a decent woman. What context could possibly excuse that?”
“You were grieving.” Mary Fran hunched in on herself, the very idea of making excuses for him rankling—he would never make excuses for himself. “Maybe the girl grabbed you and threatened to scream if you didn’t oblige her. Maybe you were drunk—very drunk. Maybe you were trying to distract her from a fellow who would make her miserable or give her diseases.”
He shook his head and tidied another bridle, but in his very silence, another idea tried to crowd into Mary Frances’s misery, more a feeling than an idea.
“You aren’t telling me the whole of it, Matthew Daniels.” She knew this the same way she knew when Fiona was lying or her brothers had done something they were uncomfortable with. “What do you think to spare me? I’ve been compromised. I’ve been labeled a whore. I’ve watched my family work themselves nigh to death just to keep up appearances. I’ve buried a husband I had no intention of grieving, only to find myself devastated by guilt. I’ve put up with groping old men and sly young ones…”
He did not look at her. He faced the whips lined up from longest to shortest on the side wall, though Mary Fran doubted he saw what was before him. “I wanted to dally with you, Mary Fran. I wanted to give you some pleasure, some relief and comfort.” More catechism, which only confirmed Mary Fran’s suspicion he was holding back.
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