by Jo Goodman
Although she remembered little of her past there were two things of which she was certain. In spite of the fact that Nathan Hunter was a convict, he was not an evil man, and she loved him absolutely.
“So,” she said, “if I didn’t let you ravish me in my bedroom, why did I let you in at all?”
Nathan laughed softly and immediately felt her attention drop to his mouth. His smile vanished. “I don’t think I’m going to tell you,” he said softly. “The doctor said there are some things you should remember for yourself.”
Her voice was husky, matching his, and all she could think about was his mouth. “How convenient for you.”
“Yes.” He bent his head and his lips hovered above hers. “Yes,” he repeated. His mouth slanted across hers, hard and hungry and wanting. He held her close so that she seemed a part of him rather than apart from him. And all the while he pleasured himself with her kiss he knew that what he was doing to Lydia was his greatest crime. He never once considered turning back.
They broke apart rather shakily as the deck beneath them jerked suddenly, then rolled and swayed with a greater pitch than before. The Avonlei was underway. Lydia went to the padded storage bench, knelt on it, and peered out the porthole. Moonlight was reflected on each crest wave, breaking and scattering every time a wave unfolded on shore. Outside the line of her vision was the city. She craned her neck to catch a glimpse.
“Would you like to go on deck?” Nathan asked. “You could bid farewell there.”
She shook her head and moved away. Her place was with her husband now. “There’s no one I want to see, nothing I want to say.”
Only because she couldn’t remember, Nathan thought. She knew she had parents because Nathan had told her. She knew they didn’t approve of Nathan because he had shared that as well. But Lydia thought she had left her family behind to marry him. There was no memory of Brigham Moore, the shooting, or the sleeping powder that had nearly killed her.
She didn’t know that Nathan had awakened at dawn, groggy and disoriented, discovered Brigham lying on the marble apron of the fireplace and her on the floor of the sitting room, her body blocking the door and the key lying beside her open palm. Like Brigham, she had barely been breathing, but there was no blood to explain it. Nathan put Lydia in his bed and went in search of Dr. Franklin, the only physician he knew in San Francisco whose silence could be bought.
It was more than twenty-four hours before Lydia came out of her deep sleep, and by that time Nathan had moved her to the orphanage. Using the confidentiality of the confessional, Nathan shared Lydia’s crime with the priest as well as his plan to protect her. While Samuel Chadwick had a troop of men, including George Campbell, searching the city for Lydia and Nathan, they were receiving sanctuary, if not a blessing, from Father Patrick.
Nathan did not know what to expect when Lydia woke. He considered a number of scenarios during those critical twenty-four hours when he thought she might die and prayed that she wouldn’t. In the end, everything he imagined fell far short of the mark because Lydia hadn’t even known her own name. That’s when Nathan understood he had been given another chance. The lies were told, one after another, until there was no turning back without losing her forever.
Dr. Franklin warned Nathan that Lydia might recover her memory any time or never. Nathan didn’t dwell on either possibility. He made arrangements to leave the country with her on the Avonlei. At his insistence Lydia penned a brief note to her mother and Samuel, telling them that she had married Nathan, that she was safe and happy, and that she hoped they could be happy for her. He gave that note and one he had written to Pei Ling to Father Patrick to be delivered upon their departure. Nathan suspected that in a few hours Samuel Chadwick would understand everything, and perhaps forgive him a little. The other possibility, that Sam would send someone to kill him for abducting his daughter, Nathan preferred not to think about. He did not want to spend the remainder of his life jumping at shadows. His eyes fell on Lydia.
Not when there were so many other things he wanted to do. “Would you like a bath?” he asked.
“Really? I could have one here?”
Nathan smiled because her pleasure was so evident, her eyes so guileless. “I think it can be managed.” He had paid a great deal for their passage so Lydia could have every amenity, and there weren’t many to be had on a Pacific voyage. Surely this small request could be arranged. The captain of the Avonlei was amiable in a gruff, bearish sort of way. He took on passengers to help defer a few costs. The Avonlei was first and foremost a cargo ship and Nathan suspected she did a profitable business in the opium trade in addition to carrying silks and tea from the Orient, and wool and lumber from Australia.
A copper-rimmed tub arrived in just under ten minutes. It required ten more minutes to fill. The captain sent along a white linen tablecloth to line the inside of the tub and a jar of lavender-scented bath salts. Lydia knelt beside the tub and added the salts, swirling them in the water with a lazy circling motion. “Do you think this belonged to the captain’s wife?” she asked, setting the jar on the floor.
“I don’t think he’s married.”
“A mistress then,” she said with a worldly air. It was at odds with the heat in her cheeks. Nathan laughed and she glanced over her shoulder at the sound. There was a dimple at each corner of his mouth and she imagined that she must have fallen in love with him very easily. “I wish I might always make you laugh. I can’t think of a better purpose for my life right now.”
Her very words erased Nathan’s smile, but Lydia had turned back to her bath and didn’t see. “Would you mind terribly if I had the cabin to myself for a little while?” she asked. “I’m feeling a bit nervous about…about—”
He hunkered down beside her. “I know,” he said. “I confess I’m feeling a bit nervous myself.”
“Oh.” Her arm stopped circling in the water. “But you’ve done it before.”
His eyes widened slightly. “Well, yes,” he admitted slowly. “But not with you.”
She looked at him shyly, her eyes not quite able to hold his gaze. “I might disappoint you.”
Nathan tipped her chin upward and kissed the corners of her mouth. “The only way you can disappoint me is by not being up to your neck in water when I return. I’ll give you ten minutes, then I’m coming in to scrub your back.” His mouth lingered a moment longer on hers and then he was gone.
Lydia placed a chair beside the tub and laid her nightdress and towel over the back of it, a washcloth and soap on the seat. She undressed quickly, glad that Nathan had left because she had no idea how to go about undressing in front of him. How could she manage any sort of delicacy and grace when she felt only eagerness and trepidation? Was one supposed to pull the gown over one’s head or let it fall over the hips? Did one remove shoes and stockings before the dress, or after? And then there were all those horrible red stripes left on her flesh by her corset.
Under the water Lydia’s palms smoothed the skin from the underside of her breasts to the tops of her thighs. Would he touch her this way? she wondered. Would her husband be a gentle lover?
She leaned her head back against the rim, closed her eyes, and touched her mouth with the tips of her fingers. His last kiss had been gentle, respectful, yet Lydia sensed he had been holding himself back, or at least she hoped that he had. She wanted him to want her as fiercely as she wanted him. It had been an undercurrent in all her thoughts since he carried her into their cabin.
She heard the rattle of the door handle, then the scrape of the bolt being thrown. She felt, rather than heard, Nathan’s approach.
Lydia was not, as Nathan requested, up to her neck in water, but Nathan wasn’t disappointed. Her breasts gleamed whitely just below the waterline, and the curve of her arched neck glistened with beads of water, a string of yellow diamonds in the lamplight.
He knelt beside the tub, took the face cloth, and wet it, then rubbed the sliver of scented soap over it. “Where should I start?”
> Her eyes opened then, darkly anxious. “I thought you would know.”
“Another first,” he admitted softly. “But if you’ll lean forward, I’ll start with your back as promised.”
She did, resting her cheek on her drawn up knees. Nathan began at the back of her neck and very lightly traveled across her shoulder, then lower, beneath the water and down the length of her spine to her buttocks. He lingered, then leaned forward and kissed her shoulder. She hummed her pleasure.
Nathan had never set out to give a woman pleasure before. The whores he knew didn’t expect it, some may not have known it was possible. Occasionally it happened, more by accident than design, but Nathan wanted it to happen this time. He wanted Lydia’s pleasure more than his own. If she never remembered anything else, he wanted her to remember this. And if she regained her memory he wanted her to know she had been dealt with gently by him, that he had cared enough to want to make her happy.
“Lean back now,” he said.
Her limbs were heavy, her mind cloudy with the infusion of pleasure at Nathan’s hands. She unfolded her body slowly, leaning against the tub and languidly raised her arm for Nathan to take. She realized she wanted him to look at her, touch her, and where she had been apprehensive before, she was deliciously anxious now, curious and wanting.
Nathan soaped her arm, running the cloth from her wrist to her shoulder, soaping the soft inside of her elbow, kissing her just above the pulse in her wrist. The other arm received the same treatment and then her legs, from ankle to hip. Each time his hand disappeared under the water his touch became a little more intimate, his washing a caress.
He abandoned the washcloth altogether when he washed her breasts. Palming the soap, Nathan’s hand fell to the hollow between her full breasts and circled lazily in a figure eight.
Lydia wanted to rest her head against the rim again, close her eyes, and pray that he never stopped touching her the way he was now. Her prayer didn’t change, but she watched him, fascinated by the beautiful lean-fingered hand that caressed her with such gentleness and raised such a burning between her thighs. His hand was dark against her skin, and the calluses on the pads of his fingers were deliciously abrasive as they spiraled toward her nipples.
He dropped the soap and made no attempt to recover it.
The pretense of washing her was put aside. It had only been an excuse to touch her and they both knew it. Their eyes met, held. His hand moved against her breast a little harder than it had before. Her eyes darkened as pleasure shot through her.
“You fit my hand,” he said, moving it to her other breast. He caressed and cupped her and she swelled slightly under his attention. “You like that?”
She bit her lower lip and nodded quickly.
Nathan smiled.
“You have dimples,” she said, watching his mouth, fascinated.
“I don’t.”
When the smile disappeared so did the dimples. Lydia raised one hand and touched each corner of his mouth with her forefinger. “Here…and here,” she said. “Only when you smile. And only sometimes.”
“Only sometimes?”
“It depends on the smile, I think,” she said. There were cold smiles, forced ones that were almost aggressive, more a baring of teeth than a welcome. She might have told him about the smiles she didn’t understand, the ones that made her think she didn’t know her husband very well at all, but his hand was drifting across the flat of her abdomen and lower, and she couldn’t think what she wanted to say anymore.
The tips of Nathan’s fingers caressed the inside of her thighs, parting her legs with their gently insistent pressure. His fingers dipped lower and touched the tuft of dark silky curls between her legs. He looked at her and saw that she was watching him. “Close your eyes,” he said. “Just feel, Lydia. I want you to just feel.”
His husky urging closed her heavy-lidded eyes. Her long dark lashes fluttered once then lay still. He kissed her lids and she held her breath, waiting, not knowing quite what to expect, only certain that she wanted to learn.
The sensations that Nathan caused to build inside her were extremes. The hot, white fire at the center of her made her flush and shiver, feverish and cold at the same time. He was stroking her now, touching her with deft purpose, so that she lifted against him as the pressure and intimacy increased, and then his finger was inside her, and even when she gasped he did not release her.
He kissed her on the mouth and whispered against her lips, “Feel, Liddy.”
She felt. Pleasure spiraled through her, a pinwheel of sparks fired each thread of tension that pulled at her limbs. Her breath came in short, shallow bursts, forced out of her by his touch. She held the sides of the tub, her fingers pressed whitely against the rim. There was the soft sound of pleasure rising at the back of her throat. Nathan felt it on her lips and smothered it with his kiss.
He felt her begin to shudder a moment before she knew what was happening herself. He drew back and let the cry come to her lips and took his own pleasure in the sound. His wolf’s eyes were narrowed, watching every fleeting expression of Lydia’s passion. There was a flush that rose from her breasts, across her shoulders, and finally colored her cheeks. Lydia’s lips were cherry red, parted, dewy. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, slumberous, deeply blue, and she was staring at him wonderingly.
Nathan took her wrist and raised it as he stood, bringing her with him. Rivulets of water ran over Lydia’s shoulders and between her breasts. She shivered, but it had the heat of Nathan’s eyes as the source, not the chilled air. He wrapped a towel around her, and when she looked at him oddly, he said, “So I can have the pleasure of taking it off.” Her eyes dropped away shyly but her faint smile was pleased. Nathan led her to the bed, sat down, and then brought her down on his lap. Her arms went naturally around his neck, and beneath her thigh she could feel his arousal. Their foreheads touched and her eyes were wide, searching. She shifted slightly and he sucked in his breath. “Don’t move,” he said. His mouth was very close to hers. She could almost taste his words. “Can you feel me, know how much I want you?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“I’ve never had a virgin before. I’m not sure I’ve ever known one.”
A little thrill shot through Lydia. She could offer something to this beautiful man that no other woman had.
“This first time,” he said, “I may hurt you.”
“I don’t mind.” Her lips touched one corner of his mouth. “You’ve already given me pleasure.” Lydia’s fingers threaded in the fine dark hair at the back of Nathan’s neck. She held him immobile as she pressed her mouth to the opposite corner of his lips, then to his cheek, his jaw, and finally to his ear where her teeth caught his lobe and tugged gently. She felt his lips on the curve of her neck and she offered it up, kissing his temples, his brow, and the bridge of his nose.
Nathan caught her mouth with his own. It was a tasting at first. A whisper of flesh, a teasing of tongues. Neither was satisfied with that. Their mouths parted and clung and the kiss became a seeking. His tongue glided across her lips, probed, sought a match with hers, and found sweet pleasure in her response. Their desire had an energy of its own, feeding on itself, making the kiss harder and deeper so that it foreshadowed the thrustings of their bodies.
Lydia was toppled backward onto the bed. Her fingers worked quickly on the buttons of Nathan’s shirt. He stopped her, rose from the bed, and turned back the lamps so that only the narrowest shaft of moonlight and starshine entered the cabin. She wondered about him extinguishing the lamps, wondered if it was unseemly, even wanton, that she wanted to look at him and be seen by him in turn. Perhaps she wasn’t a virgin at all, she worried. Perhaps she had made love hundreds of times except with the man who was her husband now. Oh, God, she thought, what if she had lied to him? How would she explain?
Then he was in bed with her, tugging at her towel under the sheet, and he pulled her hips close, seeking for the natural cradle of her thighs for his erection, and Lydia accepte
d that she had worried needlessly. She had never felt anything like this before, had never known this aching need he was creating in her at this moment. It was not something she could have forgotten.
Her hands fluttered to Nathan’s shoulders, smoothing his flesh from the curve of his neck to his arms. His skin was warm and taut and her fingers danced over it. She felt a ridge across his back, a raised line of flesh that should not have been there, and she paused in her exploration. Lydia would have asked about the scar, for surely, she thought, that was what she felt, but Nathan redirected her curiosity, taking her by the wrists and bringing her palms flush to his chest. Her thumbs brushed his nipples, raising them, and bringing a small moan of satisfaction to Nathan’s lips.
He found the pins that anchored her beautiful hair and tugged at them. Burying his face against the curve of her neck, Nathan’s senses were filled with the fragrance of her, lavender and musk. He kissed the hollow of her throat, traced the line of her collarbone, then his body slipped lower, and while his hands learned the shape of her body, his mouth suckled her breast, sipping, laving, drawing the tip into his mouth and pulling the threads of pleasure that radiated to every other part of her.
Her fingers clutched his buttocks, and she pressed against him, rubbing, wanting him to satisfy the ache between her thighs and unable to say the words aloud. Her legs slid against his. Her toes curled as his mouth moved slowly to her other breast, circled, teased, and finally licked the shell-pink nipple with his tongue. She said his name then, while all her other thoughts remained unspoken, but it was as if he heard the things she couldn’t say.
