And still in far too many clothes.
Chapter 8
“It occurs to me that I have seen you in far more a state of undress when we were veritable strangers, than I have now that you’re my wife,” he drawled, enjoying the way his words made her skin flush red.
“I am not sure undressing is a good idea, all things considered.”
Patrick rolled onto one elbow, though he sensed his leisurely approach was piquing her temper. Why did he enjoy needling her so much? Because no matter the strange fever that gripped his tongue around her, his body certainly wanted to further their acquaintance. Even now, even as she bristled with anger and the air sparked dangerously between them, he was stirring with marked interest. “Now you want to retain your clothes? It seems you have been shedding them much of the night. Why, I’ve scarcely blinked tonight and not found you close to naked.”
“All the more reason to keep my night rail on. I would hate to have you avoid blinking. I’ve heard it is a condition that can be quite painful.”
He reached out a lazy hand and ran it over the folds of her gown, gathering the fabric in one hand until the pale curve of one leg beckoned. The condition she would cause him by remaining clothed threatened to be far worse. He traced his fingertips lightly over her calf, brushing in light circles. He could feel the emotion threading just below her skin’s surface, her body’s instinctive softening to his touch.
“There is no need to stage a seduction, Patrick. I understand what the night brings. Neither of us needs to enjoy it, as long as it is done.” Her voice had taken on a lower, huskier tone that told him he was heading in the correct direction, even if her words contradicted her physical response. It was difficult to sort out whether this latest discussion was about maidenly nerves—which he doubted—or Julianne’s unbending need to control her world and everything that came with it—which had more the ring of truth to it.
He raised his eyes to meet hers. “An odd reaction in a woman who kisses like a courtesan and eagerly took her vows. No one forced you to do this, Julianne. In fact, I seem to recall it being your idea.” A pale cousin of the truth, perhaps. But she had voiced the idea out loud first.
Her lips firmed portentously. “It was the only way to ensure your return to Summersby.”
“Surely you don’t think this is only about Summersby.” His fingers tightened over the temptation of one lovely knee. “Because if you do, I would suggest that you apply your imagination and consider that it could be more. If you are going to talk about Yorkshire, the coming business is going to be difficult.” Even now, the thought of what awaited him on their return to his father’s house was enough to provoke a state of paralysis.
Not the effect one desired when attempting to bed a new bride.
She worked her lower lip between her teeth in a manner that made his body jerk back to life within the confines of his smallclothes. Slowly—decisively—she eased back onto the mattress. “I’m sorry.” She sighed, though she did not sound sorry in the least. “It has been a long day, and I confess my imagination, as you so eloquently put it, had foolishly anticipated something less tedious than the coach ride from Inverness.”
Hell’s bells. Nothing like having one’s abilities compared to an eight-hour coach ride to deflate a man’s enthusiasm. He leaned over her newly prone form, and closed the few inches that separated them with a deliberate angling of his body. But he stopped just short of kissing her. Because it would be a hard kiss. An angry kiss. A kiss that bespoke all the aggression he felt for her, and yet all the want she kindled in him.
Besides, despite her clear expertise on the subject, she looked none too interested in kissing him. Her eyes had fluttered shut—a promising sign—but her lips remained the farthest thing from pliant.
“Julianne,” he told her, his lips mere inches from her disapproving mouth. “This business between us . . . it can go quickly, if you want.”
Her body squirmed promisingly below his. “Have you not been listening to a word I said?”
Patrick knew his own enjoyment would be but seconds away if he just followed her instructions and hurried this along. But whether she understood it or not—and he was still unsure of the extent of her prior experience with kissing and the like—haste would not heighten whatever small bit of pleasure he could provide her this first time around. And given the less than honorable circumstances that forced them here, he was at least determined to offer her that.
He leaned down, tipping his forehead against hers, trying like holy hell to keep his instincts in check as the tempo of her breathing sped up in a favorable way. “But I would recommend another option. A slower experience.”
Her eyes opened suspiciously. “I am not sure—”
He silenced her with a finger to her lips. The conversation she seemed interested in having wouldn’t serve his purpose tonight. He should have felt too guilty to do this, to turn his mind to seduction as if theirs was a happy joining and a hopeful union. But he was discovering he was not above accepting this as his due, the consequences to his soul and their future be damned.
He wanted her. A simple enough emotion. That he could be angry with her before their coupling, and suspicious of her when it was over, was proving irrelevant.
And he had an entirely different idea in mind for that famously sharp tongue.
Patrick tossed her gown—the one Julianne had carefully folded to avoid wrinkles come morning—onto the floor with a callous flick of his wrist. She started to protest, but the blasted man curtailed her objection with a neat bit of trickery, stretching out beside her on the bed and pulling the coverlet up around their necks until she could scarcely breathe for want of space.
She struggled against an instinctive urge to both welcome and war with this man who would claim ownership of her body tonight. In retrospect, she should not have come above stairs alone. Not because he had told her to wait, but because the few minutes alone with her thoughts had given her far too much time to think about what was to come. She both wanted and resented his necessary attentions this evening, and could not wrap her head around what she ought to feel.
And yet . . . despite the duality of her emotions, she could not steer herself clear of a burgeoning curiosity in the process.
His lips met hers in a questing search, and she welcomed the press of his lips against hers. It wasn’t enough, though. Her body felt awkward, a strummed instrument not fully tuned. She wanted something. And it irritated her to no end that she could not place her finger on the nature of that want.
She kissed him back, putting everything she knew into it. She’d learned how to kiss properly this summer, taking full advantage of Brighton’s relaxed rules and fast set, away from the sharp eyes of her father and the perils of the London Season. But those had been muted forays into impropriety compared to the raw nature of this kiss.
It should have gone against her nature to kiss like this—openmouthed, tongues dancing—but it was also strangely exhilarating, like she was shedding her skin, stepping into another world. He smelled of sharply masculine things she could not identify. She could taste the whisky on him. It reminded her that he had tossed back several glasses with friends earlier this evening, while she had waited above stairs for her bag. At the memory, she took his lower lip between her teeth and nipped hard, intending to mete out punishment.
It had the opposite of her intended effect. A groan escaped his lips. His fingers tangled in her hair and she could feel them tremble against her scalp, a sign of his loosening control. She was grateful, now, for her daring this summer, those kisses she had accepted and experimented with. Because with the kiss she now employed with tactical skill against her new husband, she was wrestling the situation clean out of his hands.
Not that she was proving immune to the process.
Julianne’s skin felt stretched across her frame, quivering in need of this man’s touch. His tongue was both an invasion and a discovery, stroking her mouth, promising dark heat and wicked skill. In truth,
her Brighton experience with kissing had been a pale, civilized facsimile of this. And in the shift of his thigh, the slide of his tongue, Julianne found her skill eclipsed and turned on end. Now she struggled to keep up, to avoid being swept away by the delicious pull of desire. Good heavens . . . no wonder women of good sense and breeding risked ruin.
To be kissed in this manner was to stand on the edge of a cliff wearing only paper wings and believe you could fly.
She only barely swallowed the small, gasping sounds trying to work their way out of her throat. He was already confident enough. She refused to give him the satisfaction of hearing how he sent her sanity spinning out of control.
His hand at her breast proved a lovely distraction through the cotton of her night rail, as did his busy mouth, which was now tracing a path of fire down the column of her neck. His tongue pressed against the hollow of her throat, warm and wet.
Julianne’s expanding pleasure promptly stuttered to a halt.
Was he . . . licking her?
The realization burrowed deep beneath the very skin he laved. Her body shuddered as he continued his torturous, languid path, down one side of her cotton-clad breast, up the other, leaving a trail of cooler air in the wake of his attentions. Surely this wasn’t a necessary part of it. The thought of being licked by another human should have sent her bolting for the washbasin.
But it seemed she lacked the capacity for protest. He turned her into someone unrecognizable, someone she wasn’t sure she liked. Because she not only tolerated his tongue there against her skin, she wanted him to continue with a desperation that frightened her.
She opened her mouth, prepared to lodge a protest. But then his stern, sensual mouth closed over her nipple—still wrapped in its cotton prison—and she was lost to sentient thought. She sagged back against the mattress, the feel of his mouth on her breast sweeping her balance clean out of reach. She hadn’t known . . . she hadn’t imagined, that a man might do this to a woman. She had thought herself worldly, had counted kissing as a skill well learned. But now she realized she had experimented with the clumsiest of boys. Patrick’s mouth—working some kind of black magic on her breast—told her just how little she knew.
The moans she had struggled to keep buried now pushed out from between her stunned lips and hung in the air between them. The sound pulled his attention regrettably away from her breast, and the loss of his warm mouth felt cruel, somehow.
He straightened over her, a looming scepter that surely spelled her doom. “You don’t sound as though you think this is tedious.”
His knowing gaze felt like a heavy blanket over her soul, and she wanted to thrash about and throw him off. She exhaled hotly, wanting his mouth to return to its torturous—if unhygienic—path along her breast. She refused to give voice to that wish. She wanted what came next, and she was honest enough to admit that she was not someone used to waiting. The man seemed to actually take pleasure in the torture.
Inspiration struck. “It is a cold night. I’d hate to risk pneumonia because you meandered your way through this.”
He frowned. “Meandered?”
“I understand what is expected, and would prefer to arrive there a little faster.”
“Julianne, there is pleasure to be had if only you—”
“Now.” She might be a wife, but she was also a woman who would be in control of her destiny. She straightened her shoulders, welcoming the scratch of the coarsely spun sheets against her neck. “If you please.”
If she could credit him with any emotion, she might swear it was disappointment she saw in his eyes. But he fumbled beneath the covers to remove his smallclothes. Bent her legs and settled himself between them.
And then he seated himself inside her.
A sharp flash of pain erupted, pain she had been prepared for, and yet went so far beyond what she had expected. She gasped her surprise at the stabbing loss of pleasure.
Not that he seemed diverted from the path. He moved against her then, a rush of muscle, a slide of skin, and she was wrapped around him and praying for it to end. Miraculously, he obliged her, for once. She had no idea how long he labored, but it thankfully fell on the side of minutes rather than hours. And then he collapsed on top of her with a muffled groan. “I am sorry,” he breathed against her neck, his words an exhausted echo of her own feelings on the matter. “If we had gone slower . . .”
A haze of tears—all the more embarrassing for how unexpected they were—stained her vision. It was clear he’d been planning to take a more leisurely approach. But then, true to form, she’d opened her mouth and ruined it, just jumped in without thinking and forced his hand.
As well as other pertinent parts of his anatomy.
A droplet of sweat trailed down his nose to land on her cheek. Distaste kicked whatever residual pleasure she had enjoyed from the kissing part of it completely out of reach. “It was my choice, Patrick,” she told him, pushing her hand against his shoulder in an unmistakable demand. It was his rough, sweaty body causing her this pain, and now that he was through, she felt a desire to wrestle the situation back to heel. “You only did what I asked.”
“Yes.” He obligingly lifted his weight off her. “But I am beginning to realize you do not know your own mind.” He detached himself from where they were still joined, and that proved an indignity all of its own. She fumbled for the coverlet, the sheet, anything to cover her from his postcoital scrutiny. The warmth she had felt earlier had been extinguished like a guttering candle, and there would be no rekindling of it tonight.
“Julianne . . .” The mattress shifted as he moved to sitting. She gave in to the urge to look at him, but regretted it almost instantly. His eyes probed her face, and her night rail felt transparent beneath his inspection. If he was looking to identify some hurt, he really ought to look a little lower.
Or a little deeper.
He smoothed a wisp of hair from her brow. “Next time will be better. I promise.”
She accepted his touch, though it carried none of the flash of fire from his earlier caress. “I believe you,” she told him, putting on her false smile, the one she had practiced in front of the mirror for hours, the one that told the world she was just fine, thank you very much, and required neither sympathy nor assistance.
Only she didn’t believe him. If they restricted themselves to the kissing, or even—heaven help her—the licking, she might be inclined to trust his words. But the breaching was not something she could ever see herself ever growing accustomed to.
“Wait here,” he told her, which almost pulled a hysterical laugh from her, because really, where would she go? She was in Scotland, for heaven’s sake. In Patrick’s bed.
And he was legally entitled to keep her there.
He brought a washcloth from the nearby basin, and with deft hands washed the stickiness from her thighs. The thought struck her as slightly absurd, such tender ministrations in the wake of such a mindless, messy business. But she tolerated it, much as she had tolerated the coupling.
And then he stretched back out beside her, pulling the coverlet high over her shoulders. Gemmy jumped up to wriggle his way between them, clearly used to sharing this space with his master. Julianne suppressed a shudder at the thought of fleas from the little dog, unsure what morning would bring but certain of this:
She was going to be sore on the morrow.
And while her new husband might have gotten the kissing right, this part of marriage was proving a disappointment, at best.
Chapter 9
Patrick’s luck held out the first two nights of the journey to Yorkshire . . . not that luck was something perched on his shoulder of late.
He used the weight of his new title to justify separate rooms at the posting houses where they stopped each night. James, who was traveling with them as far as Leeds, had greeted the fact of those separate rooms with a raised brow, but wisely held his counsel on the matter of Patrick’s sleeping arrangements with his new wife. Separate rooms were expensive, but Patr
ick reminded himself that he was no longer a mere country veterinarian.
And surely it was a justifiable expense. His own conflicted thoughts aside, there was a slight stiffness to Julianne’s gait that made him feel like a bounder. He had wondered if she would come to their wedding bed an innocent, but then had treated her as if she was not. He’d hurt her, though it was her own insistence it be done that way.
He’d give her some time to heal before he mauled her again.
But luck and good fortune were not the same thing. Three days of sitting next to Julianne in cramped coaches and railway cars had left Patrick’s emotions in a frustrated snarl. There was no biologically plausible reason for the near-constant state of adolescent arousal he felt around her. No scientific explanation could explain the fact that no matter how far they traveled, no matter the press of sweating passengers on all sides or the smell of coal smoke from the steam engine, the damned woman smelled like a cake. The omnipresent scent of cinnamon seemed to hover beneath her skin.
What was the matter with him? He’d had her, for devil’s sake, even if he’d quite cocked it up. He was not a man prone to obsessive vices. One taste of a dessert usually left him satisfied. He had presumed that bedding Julianne would be little different. He would indulge in the novelty of her, and then cease to want her.
He had been stupidly, staggeringly wrong.
As they watched James’s train depart for London in a belching cloud of black smoke and screaming iron, Patrick heaved a sigh of relief. The plan was holding so far. James MacKenzie would begin the process of lodging the petition for Patrick to be recognized as the new earl. Patrick and Julianne would finish the trip to Summersby. Tonight offered one last chance for sleep and reflection before the challenge of facing his family tomorrow.
Moonlight on My Mind Page 10
