The Magnificent Rogue

by Iris Johansen

  She stared at him, startled. He was presenting an entirely different picture of her role in the passionate play of last night.

  “Power,” he said softly. “Is it not a seductive thought? All your life you’ve had no power, you’ve been crushed by circumstances and your kind Sebastian into submission. I’m offering you a battleground where you have greater power than any man alive.”

  It was seductive, she thought, and he was diabolically clever to have presented her with the one argument that would appeal to her mind and emotions as well as her body. “I have no desire to be the Lilith Sebastian called me. I will not walk that path.”

  “I’m saying you have the strength to be anything you wish, but do you really think I’d let you lure and use me against my will? Your soul is safe with me.” He smiled. “I only want your body.”

  She stared at him incredulously and then found herself laughing. “What a great comfort.”

  “It would not prove so to most women, but I knew the thought would appeal to you.” He took a step forward, draped her cloak about her, and buttoned it at the throat. “You have all day to think about it.” He suddenly frowned as he glanced at her hands. “I forgot about your gloves.” He took off his own leather gauntlets. “Take these. As soon as I put out the fire, it’s going to be icy in here.”

  She shook her head. “You’re no more impervious to cold than I am. You told me you had frostbite once.”

  He frowned. “Do as I—” He stopped as he saw her expression. “We’ll share them. You wear them for the first hour.” He met her gaze. “You see how you can impose your will on me? Enough but not too much. It’s all in striking a balance. Give me your hand.”

  She held it out, and he slipped the big glove on her hand. The outside of the glove was hard, rough, but the interior hugged her palms in a soft, pliable caress. She could feel the warmth from his body, and the leather’s embrace felt as intimate as his hand on her thigh. He put the other glove on her. “There. It’s not too bad sharing with me, is it?” He smiled down at her. “I promise I’ll make it very easy for you.”

  He was not talking about the gloves. She couldn’t seem to tear her gaze from his face. She whispered, “You have not … convinced me.”

  “I had no intention of doing so. You’re too intelligent a woman to let Sebastian rob you again. I intend to let you convince yourself.” He turned and put out the fire. “While we try to keep from freezing to death until it’s time to light another fire.”

  He kept her on her feet all day, walking, moving her arms, exercising the horses, allowing her no more than ten minutes in every hour’s span to rest. He left the cave only once, with a bucket to gather snow to be melted for drinking water for themselves and the horses. Other than that, he kept to the same regimen he set for her. He was silent, speaking only when necessary. It would have been easier if he had talked to her. It would have allowed her less time to think of his words.

  I intend to let you convince yourself.

  You have power.

  She had not felt powerful when she had been caught in the throes of their joining. She had been a mad, driven creature, caught in her own search for pleasure.

  But Robert had been caught in the same quest. He had led but not tried to conquer. He had been as helpless before that overwhelming carnal tide as she had been.

  You’re too intelligent a woman to let Sebastian rob you again.

  Sebastian had always tried to rob her of all the joys of life. How he would rejoice to know that he could put her back in the cage she had just escaped.

  No, she would never let that happen. She would fight it to the last breath and—

  “Rest is over. On your feet.” Robert was standing before her, holding out his hand. “You have to get moving again.”

  She let him pull her to her feet.

  He released her hand immediately and turned and went to the horses. She watched him as he took Caird’s lead and began to walk him in a circle around the cave.

  Dear God, he was beautiful. Sinuous and graceful, totally male, with that stormy secret intensity she had found fascinating since the first moment she had met him. She had submerged herself, drowned herself in that intensity last night.

  She felt a stirring between her thighs. Lust. Sebastian would have said she was completely lost to carnal sin, but Robert said lust could be clean and beautiful. Whom should she believe?

  Not Sebastian. Never Sebastian.

  “Why are you just standing there?” Robert asked over his shoulder. “You need to walk. It’s still—” He stopped as he saw her expression. “Yes?” he asked softly.

  She couldn’t speak. She could only stare at him and nod.

  He became still, and the air between them seemed charged, heavy, hard to breathe. “Then don’t look at me like that—we still have at least two hours to go before dark.”

  She was suddenly no longer cold. She wanted to touch him. Surely it would be all right just to go to him and touch his cheek?

  “No,” he said harshly, as if he had read her mind. “I’m holding on by a thread. Go get Rachel’s lead and exercise her.”

  “Very well.” She went to Rachel and began petting her muzzle. “It’s only because what you said has merit. Sebastian would be robbing me if I denied myself this enjoyment.” She took Rachel’s lead and began to follow him. “And I found you very … agreeable.”

  “I know.”

  “I think you must be very skillful at the act.”

  “You don’t have the experience to judge.”

  “That’s true, but you seem to know …” She felt her muscles tense as she remembered how he had made her body respond to his every touch. “Everything.”

  “I had excellent tutors.”

  “In Spain, you said?”

  “Aye.”

  “Where?”

  “At the castillo of Don Diego Santanella.”

  “It seems an unusual subject to teach someone.”

  “He was an unusual man.”

  “In what manner?”

  “Will your questions never cease?” he asked between his teeth.

  “This is all new to me, and I’m unsure. It makes me feel less nervous to talk about it.” With effort she kept her tone even. “I regret if I upset you.”

  “It doesn’t upset me.”

  “I believe it does. Why else would you be so short with me?”

  He whirled to face her, his eyes blazing. “Because I’m hard as a rock and trying to keep from pulling you down on that blanket and coming into you.”

  The crude words should have shocked her. They did not. Excitement rippled through her. “I do not think that would be such an unwise idea,” she said breathlessly. “I’ll only get more nervous as I wait, and it would—”

  “Christ!” He covered the space between them in two steps and grabbed her shoulders. He jerked her down to the blanket.

  He was shaking, the pulse leaping in the hollow of his throat. He buried his face in the hair at her temple. “Tell me no.”

  “Why should I tell you that when I just said—” His lips stopped her words, his tongue entering her mouth to toy frantically with her own. She had not known men kissed that way. He had barely touched her lips last night. She found the action darkly intimate and almost as exciting as that more carnal invasion. He did not give her a chance to savor it. He pushed her back, his hands fumbling at the buttons of her bodice. “Don’t move—I have to—”

  His lips were cold on her breast, but his tongue was moist and warm as he started to suck strongly, frantically. She arched upward, her fingers tangling in his hair. “Robert!”

  “Sorry,” he muttered. “I didn’t want this—No time.” His hands were under her skirt, reaching, searching, frantically adjusting his own clothing.

  He was inside her, big, warm, club hard, plunging, rutting. His warm breath plumed the frosty air as his chest lifted and fell with his labored breathing.

  Cold. Heat. Desire.

  She held desperate
ly to his shoulders as she met him, took him, merged with him.

  It was over in only a few wild minutes.

  She became gradually conscious of the hardness of the ground beneath her, of Robert lying next to her, gasping, his hand still covering her bare breast.

  “Did I hurt you?” he asked quietly.

  “No.”

  “It’s a wonder,” he said bitterly. “I … lost control.”

  The words brought an odd, bittersweet pleasure. Robert, who rarely lost control, had been stirred enough to abandon it for her. No, not for her, for her body. Well, that was still part of her. The pain that qualification brought was not reasonable.

  His hand on her breast tightened. “Jesus, look at you. It’s freezing cold, and I have you nearly naked.”

  “I … liked it.”

  “I promised you I’d go slow.”

  She was tired of him chastising himself. “You’re being very foolish. I thought it went very well. How do you know I would even care for this … this slowness?”

  He chuckled. “Oh, you’ll like it. I’ll demonstrate just how pleasurable slowness can be later, when we light the fire and get some warmth in here.” He rolled over and began buttoning her bodice. “So, fie on Sebastian?”

  She smiled. “Well put. Fie on Sebastian.”

  Kate gazed languidly into the fire. “If you learned all this from the Spanish, then they must be a very decadent people.”

  He drew her back against him, fitting her into the hollow of his hips. “At times.”

  How well they fit together, she thought contentedly. During the last hours she had been more aware of that almost magical togetherness than anything else. It was as if they had been two parts of a whole that had been separated and were now coming together. “But I believe I like this kind of decadence, so I’ve decided they must not be as bad as everyone says.”

  “Does that mean you’re contemplating asking Philip’s protection? Forget it.” He added lightly, “You mustn’t judge all Spaniards by my example.”

  “But you’re not Spanish, you’re Scot.”

  “Yes, I’m Scot.” He was silent a moment. “But my mother is Spanish.”

  She raised herself on one elbow to look at him. “Truly?”

  “Truly.” His lips twisted. “Doña Marguerita Maria Santanella.”

  “Will I meet her when we reach Craighdhu?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Curiosity again? I thought Sebastian’s example had taught you to avoid asking personal questions.”

  “This is different. Dreams are private. But why should you not tell me something everyone at Craighdhu probably already knows? You know everything about me.”

  “Not everything.” His index finger traced the aureole around her nipple. “I’m discovering new and splendid facets at every turn. Did you know that only one woman in a thousand has the ability to grasp a man with the power that you do? I thought I would go mad when you clenched around me and then squeezed until I—”

  “Hush!” Heat flooded her cheeks, and she slapped away his toying hand. “Decadence is well enough, but you do not have to put it into words.” Then the full meaning of his sentence hit her. “Thousand? Have you truly had a thousand—you are jesting with me.”

  “Am I?” He blandly met her gaze, and suddenly his lips were twitching. “Perhaps a slight exaggeration.”

  “A vast exaggeration. You would have time to do nothing else.” She frowned. “And I think you said it only to distract me because you didn’t want to answer my question. You’re not being fair.”

  His smile faded. “Why is it important to you that I answer you?”

  “It would make me feel … safer.” It was not the entire truth. He had possessed her, owned her in a manner that frightened as well as elated her, but she also desperately wanted to know him. That desire had obsessed her since the moment she had met him, and she doubted if he would ever be more open to her than he was at this moment. “Why will I not meet your mother?”

  “My mother is residing in a convent in Santanella, where she prays for my soul.” He smiled without mirth. “Though she is sure that her prayers are of no avail.”

  “A convent?”

  “She considered it her only recourse when I escaped from her brother, Don Diego, and returned to Craighdhu. She had failed, you see. They had tried to mold me into a true Spaniard and had only succeeded in exaggerating my deplorable Scottish savagery.” His lips twisted. “What a pity.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You wish to hear it all? I don’t know why, it’s all in the past.”

  “I want to hear it.”

  He shrugged. “When he was a very young man, my father traveled to a shipyard in Spain seeking to purchase a caravel for our trade with the Irish. Don Diego Santanella, a nobleman who owned the shipyard and practically everything else along the coast, invited him to stay at the castillo until the ship was ready. It was there that he met my mother. She was only seventeen then, and very different from the women he had met before. You may have noticed we Scots have a tendency to be deplorably earthy in nature.”

  “It’s come to my attention.”

  “She seemed shy and pure and very devout. She was also very, very beautiful. My father went mad for her. He had to have her. It didn’t matter to him that she was Spanish and a Catholic or that she wanted to go into a convent and forgo marriage. He went to Don Diego and asked for her hand. To his surprise, his suit was looked on with favor. Diego refused to give a dowry, but he acceded to the marriage. They sailed back to Craighdhu as man and wife.” His expression became shuttered. “She hated Craighdhu, she found my father detestable, and when I was born, she found me an annoyance. She spent most of her nights avoiding his bed and her days on her knees praying for deliverance. She had no time for a child. When I was nine, my father suddenly died of a stomach disorder. I’ve wondered since if it was not caused by a drop or two of poison in his food.”

  Her eyes widened in shock. “You believe she killed him?”

  He shook his head. “But her attendants were all appointed by Don Diego, and he appeared on the scene just two weeks after my father’s death. He arrived one night, and the next morning at dawn my mother and I were on a ship bound for Spain.”

  “Why would he want to kill your father?”

  “Craighdhu and our trade routes to Ireland are very valuable. Don Diego made it very clear once I was under his wing that was why he’d given my mother in marriage. He was an ambitious man, and the trade routes are a very rich plum. A plum he couldn’t pluck while my father was alive, but if he could mold and control the heir to Craighdhu, then he could control the trade routes. I spent the next four years at his castillo at Santanella being ‘tutored’ by the good priests and Don Diego.”

  “Tutored in what?”

  “I was a Protestant, so I had to be taught to abandon such heresy.” He added with irony, “Every day I received my gentle lessons from the priests Diego sent to school me.”

  She remembered the scars on his back. “With the whip?” she whispered.

  “Of course, how else? Protestant or Catholic, it is all the same. They all believe they’re right and must prove it at all costs.” His lips thinned with bitterness. “First, you’re given holy words, and next, the whip to enforce it. You should know that truth. Sebastian used his whip on you.”

  “But he was afraid of the lady, and I was not left scarred.”

  “Yes, you were.” He touched her forehead with a curiously gentle caress. “But not irreparably. You’re strong. In time the scars will fade, and you won’t even remember where you got them.”

  But he remembered where he had gotten his scars; he had permanent reminders. She wondered how many of his dreams concerned those afternoons at the castillo. “Didn’t your mother try to stop it?”

  “Oh, no, she had been raised by the priests and properly shaped in the way she should go. She even forced herself to sit in the same room while
they tried to rid me of my devils. She would plead with me to give in and not to make them do this to me.”

  “She watched them whip you?”

  “The priests would bring the whip to her before they started and she would pray over it, asking God to instill it with His holy power. Then she would kiss it and hand it back to Father Dominic.”

  She felt sick at the picture he painted vividly before her. She had thought her time with Sebastian a horror, but it had not been a systematic daily regimen of torture overseen by the one person who should have been his most ardent defender. The vision was too hurtful to contemplate. She changed the subject. “I don’t understand. You said you learned”—she waved a hand to encompass their extremely intimate situation—“this at Santanella. I’m sure the priests did not teach you.”

  He smiled without mirth. “Don Diego was not nearly as devout as my mother. He believed there were many pleasurable uses for sin. Many evenings he would send for whores from the town and then summon me to his chamber to demonstrate the pleasures that awaited me if I rid myself of my foolish wish to cling to my homeland.”

  “But you were only a child.”

  “I didn’t stay that way long. Unfortunately, I was too stubborn and lost in sin to accommodate either my mother or Don Diego, so it went on for four years. Punishment in the afternoon, a deliciously corrupt reward in the evening. When I reached my thirteenth year, I managed to run away from Santanella and made my way back to Craighdhu.”

  “How?”

  “Very laboriously. It’s a journey I prefer not to relive.”

  A boy alone, without means, hiding, afraid, traveling over land and sea. It was incredible he had been able to reach Craighdhu safely. “But if you had to get across the—”

  “Enough questions. It’s over and done.” He suddenly rolled her on her back. “You have an enchanting mouth, but there are uses I would rather put it to than talking.” His index finger traced her full bottom lip. “A divine mouth … Open …”

  For the first time she felt a quaver of uneasiness. She had thought she could embrace this pleasure as Robert did, but was this sense of deep, irreversible bonding entirely customary in these situations? If so, why did it not vanish when the mating was finished? She felt closer to him now than when they had been in the throes of passion.