by Eloisa James
“A man who was untouched by the violence and death around him would not be a man, but some sort of animal. An uncaring animal.”
How did she know to say that? He had looked at his friend Philip sometimes, at the way he would tell a joke five minutes after a sailor died at his feet, see his blue eyes untroubled, clear… and think just that very thing. Philip was like a wolf, a predator who killed with impunity.
Grace’s next question eliminated all his interest in that thought. “Are you going to take off your clothes this time?” Her voice was an enchanting mixture of timidity and curiosity.
“I didn’t take my clothing off in the carriage?” Of course he hadn’t. His voice rasping, he said, “I didn’t treat you as you deserved, Grace. What an ass I was!”
“Because you didn’t take your shirt off?” Laughter threaded through her words, making the pain in his chest ease. “Or your breeches,” she added. “I had to button up your placket myself.”
“Unprincipled,” he muttered, one hand running down her back and pulling her ruined gown still lower, down around her hips. “Degenerate, repulsive, disgusting.”
She giggled. Grace. His solemn, sweet Grace. He thought for a second about where they were situated in the bed, and then pulled her underneath him. It felt safer this way. She was protected from anything that could harm her.
“Oh!” she gasped.
“Since we have to marry, we might as well practice what married people do.” He cupped a breast with his hand, found her nipple, and bent his head to it.
A moment later she wasn’t giggling any longer. The joy was still there, but she was twisting up, trying to suck air into her lungs, crying out with pleasure.
Colin waited until he thought Grace had breath again. “One thing I can’t remember,” he growled, the words caressing her skin even as he stroked her breast. “Did you touch me in the carriage, or did I just touch you?”
“No, I didn’t touch you.” She whispered it, and he felt a surge of white-hot possessiveness.
“Would you like to?” He held his breath. It might take months for Grace to be demonstrative. Especially since she had these ridiculous ideas about him stuck in her head. Love her? Damn, did she think that he could make love to another woman as he had to her?
Actually, what did she know? Grace had never been with a man before him. Had never . . .
It occurred to him that she had never said that she had been a virgin. But his hands knew it. He could feel the surprised pleasure in her kiss, in her every shiver. She didn’t love McIngle, so she would never have allowed him more than a kiss, not Grace.
“Yes,” she breathed.
He sat up, swinging his legs over the bed. It was the work of a moment to pull his shirt over his head, wrench off his boots, and strip off his breeches and smalls. Grace stayed quiet as a church mouse, even when he pulled the remains of her dress down her long, slender legs and tossed it to the floor.
“What do you think?” he asked, hands on his hips.
There was a giggle from the bed that made him aware that he was suffused with delight.
“This isn’t fair,” he said as he stared down at the general place he knew she was. “You are able to see, and I am only able to touch.” And taste, but he didn’t think she was quite ready for that, yet.
A soft hand stroked his knee with sympathy that he didn’t need. Luckily, he had an excellent memory, because he was able to swipe the remains of her gown back up from the floor.
“Are you enjoying the sight of me?”
“Yes.” She surprised him. There was nothing less than pure desire in her voice. She’d probably keep surprising him for the next sixty years of their lives. Grace had so many complexities, so many layers and feelings, and thoughts… he would happily spend his life trying to unwrap her.
Thinking about it, he tore a strip off the hem of her gown.
“What on earth are you going to do with that?”
Without answering, he put a knee forward onto the bed, making certain he knew precisely where she was. The last thing he wanted was to land on her like a felled tree.
He let a hand run from her stomach up and over those luscious breasts, causing a little hitch to her breathing. He lingered on her collarbones. They were delicate and strong at the same time, exquisitely shaped, like the rest of her.
And yet her narrow frame held a heart so large that it could encompass him. Even with his stupidity, with the way he never responded to her letters, with the way he danced with her sister… with his raw, unrelenting arse-hole qualities.
She loved him. He knew it. He could feel her love as a tenderness that fell on his skin like spring rain.
“You believe in fairness, don’t you, Grace?”
“Of course,” she said. But she was no fool: her voice was cautious.
Still, Grace was no match for hands used to tying sailors’ slipknots. It was the work of a moment to wind the scrap of gown around her eyes and tie it, not too tight, but snugly.
Three
“What are you doing?” Grace shrieked, her hands going to her head.
Colin caught both of her wrists and pinned them over her head. “Putting us on equal footing,” he said with satisfaction. He bent his head and caressed her lips with his own, letting a sharp ache of desire bubble up from his groin and fill his whole body. “I can’t see you, and now you can’t see me.”
“I liked seeing you.” She sounded a little sulky.
“This is our first time, Grace,” he said, kissing the arch of her cheekbone. “In the carriage… that was something else, a dream, really. But this is our first time truly making love.”
“Oh.”
He couldn’t tell what she was thinking, so he let his mouth drift down the angle of her jaw. “I want you to be with me,” he murmured, stroking her soft skin with his tongue. She shivered under him, and he laid a trail of kisses to her ear, nipped the elegant shell with his teeth.
She didn’t react, and he made a mental note, went back to her jaw and kissed his way to her neck. Then she sighed and arched her neck, giving him more flesh.
He made another mental note, and dropped farther down her body, allowing her hands to fall free. They dropped to his hair. “I want to see!” she wailed. “You didn’t undress in the carriage and you’re my first… You know that.”
Colin smiled against the soft skin of her breast. “Do I?”
She clearly heard the laughter in his voice. “Yes, you do. I only got to look at you for a moment, whereas you had your eyesight when you were with other women.”
He reared up, put a finger over her lips. “I will never be with another woman again. Not in the whole of my life, not if you die tomorrow and I live to be one hundred.”
“Oh.” She wasn’t a woman to give up easily. “Still…”
“You and I will find each other in the dark, and I swear it will be all the sweeter, Grace. I’ve never made love to a woman without my sight, before you.”
She made a little humming sound in the back of her throat that he loved. That he wanted to hear a hundred thousand times.
“We’ll both be new to each other.”
“All right,” she whispered, her fingers still tight in his hair. “All right. But I feel terribly vulnerable. It’s frightening.”
“When you can’t see, you have to trust your touch. My eyes would have told you everything you wanted to know in the parlor.”
“The windows to the soul,” she said, understanding.
“You would never have spouted that drivel about how I felt about Lily if you could have seen my eyes. Never.”
She shifted onto her side, her body sliding under his hands like water. The feeling of her skin sent a rage of pure lust up his body.
“All right,” she said. “All right. I’ll… I’ll touch you then.”
His hands stroked down her bottom and she startled. “I’ll touch you,” she dictated. “Not both of us at the same time.”
He sighed, rolled on his ba
ck, let his arms fall away. “I am here.” Though he didn’t like it. Lying on his back felt too exposed.
“Where?”
She sounded a bit tentative, but then her fingers descended on him like little flames. She started on his chest, her fingers tracing the muscles rippling under her touch as she stroked down his chest, across his stomach. Under her fingertips, he felt like a battering ram, a body honed into muscles for one reason, and one reason only: war.
He shook the feeling off. Somehow, it was easier in her presence. He hadn’t felt the drowning weight of black memory all day, not even when in the grip of laudanum.
Instead, his body was tingling all over, his tool rigid against her hip, his stomach clenched with lust. Perhaps his body wasn’t made for war, but for her. For her pleasure, for her amusement.
She had stopped caressing him; her fingers seemed to have stalled around his waist. “Here,” he murmured, pushing her hand lower. At the mere brush of her fingers, his hips rose in the air and a groan burst from his lips.
“I wish I could see you,” she breathed. Then she was silent for a moment, her fingers roaming from the curve of his inner thigh to an erection so pounding and fierce that he’d never experienced anything like it in his life. Her touch was close to causing him pain.
When her hand finally curled around him, he couldn’t stop a surprised curse from erupting from his lips. He had the sheets clenched in his hands, forcing himself not to touch her. Not to throw her backward and bury himself inside her.
“You like that,” she said, and the delight in her voice made the erotic hum filling his body more tight, more potent.
“I do,” he managed. Her fingers tightened as she stroked him. If she kept that up, he would find himself begging. “Do you think that you’ve touched me enough, darling?”
Her grip froze. “Darling?”
He couldn’t bear it another moment, not without losing all control and disgracing himself. He pulled her hands apart and then rolled her into what was quickly becoming his favorite position. He tucked her small body inside the shelter of his and kissed her, loving every touch of his fingers, the way her hands trembled as they caressed his shoulders.
“You’re mine,” he murmured, keeping his weight on his elbows. Then he kissed her forehead. “Mine. My darling. My Grace.”
Her hands stroked down his back, but she made a stifled noise, almost like a little sob. He let a smile curl his mouth, knowing she was blind to it. “And I’m yours,” he told her. “This body, such as it is, is yours, Lady Grace, soon to be Mrs. Barry.”
“Mrs. Barry.” Her voice was wondering, with an undercurrent of astonishment. But he knew her. Every word of her letters had taught him to love her and to know her. She was more joyful than surprised.
“My wife,” he said, with satisfaction. “Are you all right?” He kissed her nose.
He caught her yes in her mouth, stifled it with a kiss that went on and on. When he finally surfaced from a pool of desire, he found that he had lowered all his weight on her, and he was grinding into the soft cradle of her body, his breath coming fast and hot in his chest.
“I want you.” Grace’s words came with a sigh and a sob that sounded hungry. He felt between her legs, realizing his hand was shaking. She was wet and warm, and she cried out at his touch.
“I want to kiss you there.”
“No!” she cried, fierce as a warrior queen, pulling at him. “Just come inside me now. Do it!”
“Grace,” he whispered against her lips. “Weren’t you a bashful maiden all of five minutes ago?”
She was rubbing against him, as uninhibited as a lady of the night. “It’s this blindfold,” she breathed. “I feel as if my skin is alive. The feeling of you is making me mad.” Her hands stroked down his hips and then across his arse. “You are so… I love touching you.”
He loved it, too. The very feeling of her hands shaping his rear made the blood roar in his ears.
“I want you,” she sobbed.
He was her knight. He could not say no. “I’m afraid this will hurt,” he said.
“I know all about that. I understand. Just… just please come to me, Colin. I feel so”—she twisted up against him again—“strange. Like when you were kissing me, in the carriage.”
Kissing her? Thank God, it sounded as if he had done that, at least. He wanted to lick her now, but at the same time, if he didn’t plunge inside her, he felt as if he would die.
So he rubbed himself against her soft, wet folds and then slowly began to work his way inside. “Gods,” he gasped after a second. “You’re so tight, Grace. I’ve never felt anything like this. Is it painful?”
“No,” she replied, but her voice was a bit odd, so he paused.
“Really all right, or just telling me so?”
“It doesn’t hurt like last time. In fact, it feels quite good.”
He was spending every ounce of control he had going slow, desperate not to hurt her. “Just tell me,” he said through clenched teeth. “If it hurts, we’ll try again some other time.” When she didn’t answer immediately, he started to withdraw.
Grace’s hands tightened on his shoulders; she arched her hips and pushed back at him. “It’s not enough, it’s not enough. I feel… I feel empty and wanting.”
Her words were like a dam breaking during a storm. Colin heard the tone in her voice over the thudding of his heart. He felt her fingernails on his shoulders—gentle Grace, beside herself with passion, wanting him as much as he did her. He thrust inside her, seating himself where he most wanted to be.
She cried out, from pleasure, not pain.
He pulled back, felt her tighten as he escaped, heard a thread of sound. “Nooo.”
Captain Colin Barry hadn’t laughed in a year, perhaps longer. He had smiled now and then, with genuine amusement, sometimes. But laughter… laughter comes from joy, and joy comes from the heart, and his had turned to stone at some point.
Now, in Grace’s arms, hearing her cry out as he sheathed himself deep inside, then whimper again as he withdrew…
This laughter came from true joy, that of heart’s delight.
He only stopped laughing because Grace pulled his mouth down to hers. She was kissing him wildly, pulling his body closer as if she could stop him from leaving her body.
But he insisted on withdrawing, even though she sobbed every time until he thrust back again, and again, until the fire spread up his legs and through his body. He slipped a hand between their bodies and touched her… just the faintest pressure.
She tightened on him until it almost hurt, except it was the kind of pain he wanted to feel every day. Then she cried out again with a kind of guttural, raw pleasure, wrenched from her chest, followed by a pulsing that coursed through her body and gave wings to his desire.
He wrapped her in his arms and pumped into her, mad with lust, loving the fact she was tucked under him, safe, warm, his.
“I love you,” he gasped, at the moment when everything he had in his body and heart coursed out of him. “Oh God, I love you, Grace.”
She arched into him, caught by a second wave of pleasure. He caught her scream with his kiss, saying it again, and again, silently, without words.
It didn’t matter.
She had heard him.
“I love you. I love you, too,” she whispered.
Four
Grace woke early the next morning, just as a cool, pinkish light came over the windowsill. At some point in the night she had pulled off her blindfold. Colin, her Colin, lay beside her, tousled hair falling over his face, an arm thrown above his head.
She was so happy that her heart hurt. Colin loved her; he had said so again and again. He wasn’t pretending. She knew him better than anyone else in the world, so she knew that.
He was hers.
Just then he made a small noise and she saw his hand clench into a fist. His jaw tightened and he made a noise so pained that her entire body froze.
“Colin,” she whispered,
putting a hand on his shoulder.
“The blood,” he said, turning his blindfolded eyes toward her. “It’s running over my boots again. Send my boots to be cleaned.”
“I will,” she said, but his face remained anguished. So she moved and lay down on top of him, naked body to naked body. “Your boots are clean now,” she whispered into his ear.
She could feel little shudders running through his body. “Did you wash off all the blood?” he rasped.
“I did,” she told him. “I washed it all off.”
His hand touched her back. A small smile curved his lips. She held her breath. If he didn’t know who she was…
“Grace,” he breathed. “My Grace.”
She waited a long time, but his breathing became regular and he never woke up. Finally she slipped off his body, thinking hard. It seemed that war didn’t go away once a man walked off a ship.
She finally eased from the bed and crept to the bathing alcove. She used the chamber pot hidden in a small chair, and then washed at the basin. It was interesting to discover a jumble of little red marks on her body, as if his kisses had burned a pattern into her skin.
She washed herself between her legs and her touch caused a tingle, but not of pain. Her nipples seemed a darker rose, perhaps from all those kisses. She frowned at that, and then pulled on a nightgown: it was literally the only thing she had left to wear, given that Colin had destroyed two gowns.
The gown was a muted pear color, sewn from a silk that shifted color constantly, going from milk to faint pink. The problem was that she had never thought of wearing it in front of a man, though, of course, it was designed for just that.
Now a look at the glass showed her that the gown was more like a scrap of cloth with pretensions to being a garment. It didn’t even reach her ankles, and the fabric was far too sheer. She crossed her arms over her chest. That was not acceptable.
It wasn’t really a sound that warned her; it was more like a change in the very quality of the air. She turned and there he was, wearing nothing more than a twist of sheet around his hips. He was smiling at her, his eyes heavy-lidded and gleaming with an emotion she’d never seen in them before.
