In moments he was up and over the roof and dropping through the window into the scribe’s small bedchamber. The cramped room was littered with the scribe’s possessions—a small writing desk, inkstands, parchment, goose quills—the tools of his trade. And with his clothes and other few belongings. But Dev saw none of those. He saw only the woman for whom his heart had hungered all these long months—the woman he had thought lost to him forever.
“Constance,” he said huskily—and took her in his arms.
When first she had seen him sitting there in the common room below, Constance had felt herself transported back to Hatfield Forest, to a world of young love and hope, and the breeze that rustled the leaves of the Old Doodle Oak had seemed to touch her hot face with its cool breath. There had been moonlight and magic in the sight of him, danger and gold and wild rides in the night. But now—now she had had time to consider, and other memories had come flooding back to her, bitter memories.
She pushed him away. “Where is Nan?” she asked.
“Nan?” He was startled. “In Lincoln, I suppose—with Gibb. Unless she’s left him. She has a restless foot, has Nan.”
She would not be beguiled. “I saw you leave with her, that day in Essex.”
So that was why she’d left him! A great joy came over Dev. It explained so much!
“She and Gibb were together then,” he told her. “She’s been with Gibb since Candless was hanged. A woman like Nan’s not one to stay long without a protector.”
She did not know whether to believe him or not. “Then you were not her protector?” Her violet eyes searched his face.
“Not after I met you.” Sincerity rang in his voice.
“But you lied to me,” she said. “You did not go to America—you went back to your old life on the road.”
“I had to, Constance.” He was sliding his arms around her shoulders even as he spoke. “I had given the last of my money to the couple who were to care for you until I returned. I could not leave you unprotected!”
Bright shame flooded over her suddenly. She had put a wrong construction on things, fool that she was! In her jealous heart she had imagined Dev run off with Nan, spending wild nights in “safe” inns and highway taverns, when all the time—!
“Oh, Dev,” she whispered, and melted against him. “I’m sorry for what I thought. I’m so sorry!” sorry too for all that I have done later, for taking other vows—and most of all sorry that I let my heart stray elsewhere. She let her pliant expressive body tell him of her regret, and sagged against him softly.
The soft inert weight of her, almost feather light in his arms, set Dev’s blood to racing through his veins. He had no need to tell her now how he’d managed to find her—it was enough to hold her, to love her.
It was as if they had never been apart.
They swayed together toward the scribe’s lumpy bed—and never felt the lumps. Her dark hair clouded out around her face on the coverlet, and the waning sunlight glimmered into the glory of her velvet eyes. Those eyes were speaking to him, telling him what he wanted so desperately to know:
Constance still loved him. She wanted him back.
And suddenly all that had transpired in the interim seemed to her a dream. Captain Warburton, who had loomed so large on her limited horizon, was gone like a ship in the night. She was back again on the highroads, back with her dangerous lover. Forgotten was Chesney Pell and the tangle she had made of her life. Her troubles seemed suddenly whisked away by the wind. Dev had come back and all was right with her world.
She opened her mouth to tell him so and he put a finger to her lips. “Don’t talk,” he murmured. “Just let me hold you. Oh, God, Constance, how I’ve missed you!”
Those words were to Constance the sweetest in the world.
Through the long soft summer dusk they dallied there, deeper in love than they had ever been, trying to make up for all the lost hours, all the lost nights. Dusk dragged into darkness, yet neither of them felt the need of food. Their hunger was of a deeper sort, a hunger for each other that would never be assuaged.
“How did you find me?” she wondered.
And he told her about that meeting with Hugh and Margaret on the Great North Road.
“She told me you had been living with your uncle. Have you been happy?” he asked.
Constance caught her breath. Now was the time to tell him of her farce of a marriage last February—but she could not. “Sometimes,” she answered evasively. “Sometimes I have been happy.” And told him a little about life at Axeleigh. “But don’t talk about me,” she added quickly. “Tell me about you. I want to know all that has happened since I’ve been gone.”
“There’s naught to tell,” he shrugged, for he knew she would not approve his ventures, that he stormed up and down the Great North Road, giving drays and wagons and coaches safe passage for a fee—and strewing gold as if it were water and taking his fun where he found it. Oh, no, she would not approve!
And then as the moon rose they forgot to talk and they made love again, slowly, wonderfully, with pent-up passion that surpassed even the heat of the afternoon’s delightful dalliance.
Constance had thought Dev’s lovemaking had reached its epitome in Essex, but she had been wrong. Tonight there was a tenderness in him that even she—so thrillingly responsive to his touch—had not known before. It was as if they hovered on the brink of some great disaster and they and their world would be swept away by morning, as if these golden treasured moments were all they would ever have. As if they were making love for the last time.
But the glow that suffused her body at his touch was the old glow she had known in his arms in Essex, and as his long body pressed against hers, crushing the softness of her breasts against his beating chest, she felt her senses flare up and with a little sob that welled unbidden in her throat she flung herself against him, clasping him to her, sliding her legs along his own, turning, twisting, urging him on.
But the tall young highwayman needed no urging. His quest for her had been a quest of the heart. It had led him westward all across England to Somerset. The girl in his arms was the one radiant guiding star of his life. He had found her! At last... And she was his.
The first time he had taken her, in Yorkshire, it was a boy’s lovemaking—intense, enthusiastic, inexperienced. A lovely interlude but one that had left her pensive, as if there could have been somehow—more. And her own responses had been a girl’s responses, instinctive but unsure.
Later it had been the rash young highwayman who had held her prisoned in his arms. A vigorous lover, untamed, questing, exciting. And she, still young and untried, had responded wondrously to his touch.
Tonight was different.
Tonight it was a man’s experienced arms that held her, a man’s hard chest and sinewy loins that pressed against her own. In the long months that had elapsed since he had held her last, Deverell had learned much—of himself and of life. And tonight was the test of that knowledge. He held Constance to him almost reverently for in his rough life he had not thought to see her again—except perhaps someday from a tall gibbet while she stared upward in horror. For surely forgiving God would grant such a small request.
And now, magically, she was in his arms again.
Dev buried his face in the soft hollow of her throat and counted himself the luckiest man alive.
And the lean young highwayman, who had dreamt of this moment through a hundred tossing nights in dozens of “safe” hideout inns and remote cottages and straw-bedded stables, or lying beside cold running streams with his head pillowed on his saddle—made the most of it.
In their hurry, they had not even bothered to undress and now at last, expertly, Dev managed the hooks down the back of her dress, reaching beneath her to do so, and all the while smiling down into her eyes—big and dark and wondering that her dream too could have come true. She felt his clever fingers trace a sensuous madness down her woman’s spine, for tonight she was aglow with passion. She reached up and ca
ught him to her again with a sob of joy before he could even wrest away her bodice.
“Oh, Dev, Dev, I have missed you so....”
But Dev’s hungry lips as they glided over the side of her body he had managed to bare, gliding along the fair expanse of her breast and down the lovely pale valley between her rounded breasts, had encountered something else besides the maddening silkiness of her skin.
They had encountered a narrow black riband.
Constance, lost in a wild world of passion, for it had been so long, so long, had scarcely noticed when Dev reached up to push the riband impatiently aside. Nor when his fingers had encountered what dangled from that riband—a ring. That it was a ring she had torn from her finger in anger he had no way of knowing—or that she wore it around her neck because Pamela insisted that the Squire would think it terrible of her to leave it off entirely. And she had not returned it to Chesney when she had sent the pearl necklace back to him because she had felt in fairness that she must see him when she gave it back, tell him face to face that she was a worthless wench who did not love him, who had used him only to get away—and that she was sorry and would disappear from his life forever.
Dev knew none of this. His fingers closed around that circlet of gold and a chill went through his heart—for this must be an important ring for her to wear it secreted beneath her clothes.
Even as he covered the soft pulsing mounds of her breasts with kisses, he was fingering that ring, weighing its significance in his mind. Even as his lips caressed and teased into hardness the delicate pink crests of those round breasts, even as he savoured their response, he was thinking.
A narrow band of gold—and he had given her none.
Constance had married someone. This was her wedding ring! She must have stripped it from her finger at sight of him! He thought back, even as his fingers ran lightly down her spine, making her squirm and shudder against him in joy, he tried to remember whether there had been a flash of gold on her hand downstairs. No, she had been wearing riding gloves, he would not have been able to see the ring on her finger.
But that was the reason for this secrecy—not, as he had thought with warm appreciation, a shielding of his identity from the law which might have been pursuing him.
For a moment harsh jealousy stabbed at him and he felt a puzzled wonderment go through her body as his own long frame momentarily stiffened. But then he relaxed against her, forgiving her even this last crushing blow.
Constance was the love of his life and he could forgive her even this. Instantly he was making excuses for her:
Great pressure has been put on her to marry, Margaret had said. And Constance had given way to that pressure. And why not? She had thought him unfaithful and she had been lonely—as he had been lonely. And had he been faithful to her on the road? Not his body certainly, although he knew now that his heart had never wavered from the girl he had first taken in his arms at magical Fountains Abbey and taken as his bride in Essex, made love to in filtering moonlight beneath the storied Old Doodle Oak. Constance had had to make her way without him—and making one’s way was more difficult for a lass than for a lad. Small wonder that she had seized what life offered and married some young buck who—as he had observed downstairs—could give her the luxury to which she was entitled. He discounted her talk of Axeleigh. She would be visiting Axeleigh, he felt, but making her home in some handsome country house where a doting husband waited.
But she was still the lady of his heart and it was a rich gift she was giving him—the gift of her love, a shining thing, untrammeled by explanations or recriminations, untroubled by thoughts of the future—a future in which he would obviously not be included. Life had made Dev lawless, but he had a deep sense of justice. To the fact that Constance was legally his he paid not the least attention—to him a woman belonged in the arms she felt most comfortable in. And who could blame any lass for not choosing to ride forever beside a highwayman who might smile into her eyes on a Thursday and lie dead in his blood by the roadside on Friday? Certainly Dev could not.
But for the wonderful gift of her love, so freely given, he would be ever grateful. This night, night belonged to him and he must not let her know, must not tarnish the open-hearted loveliness of what she was giving him. There in the warm intimacy of that lumpy bed, lying upon a worn coverlet in the scribe’s cramped bedchamber, they were sharing again all the joys they had known. They whispered and laughed and touched and dragged their lips playfully along each other’s bare skin, they swayed and moved together in an ecstasy that went deeper than any physical sensation, for it was a joining of the spirit, exalted, beautiful past anything they would ever know in other arms.
Deep in the heart of him, Dev forgave her. He ran his hands lingeringly down her body and along her smooth hips, he let his long muscular legs rasp lightly against the satin softness of her thighs, he entered her with the reverence one reserves for the most sacred of temples—and lost himself in a rash of feeling that swept over him with the stormy impetuosity of a millrace.
Tomorrow he would face the unhappy truth that she was his no longer, tomorrow.... But this night, night of love was his to keep.
Shaken by the glorious intensity of his lovemaking, Constance lay in thrilling wonder. She had known a moment of cold fear when Dev had touched the riband that held the ring she had torn from her finger with an angry, “And unless Chesney comes for me, I will never wear it again! Never!” (For in the excitement of finding him again, she had clean forgot she was wearing it.) But he had only groped to rid her of it, sweeping the riband with its metal object alongside her. And that moment when his body went rigid and she had felt her stomach muscles contract and her breasts shiver against his ribcage—that had been nothing. Perhaps she had inadvertently caught him with her elbow when she had sought to pull back the long tangled hair that was caught in the pillow. No, Dev had not guessed, she told herself. And whatever happened tomorrow—and she dared not face that really—this night, this wondrous voyage of rediscovery and of reclaiming, was theirs, would be theirs forever.
But to be on the safe side, she murmured, “Here—let me.” And pushed him back a little, just far enough that she could struggle out of her bodice—and incidentally rid herself of ring and riband, tangling them both hopelessly in the folds of amethyst silk material and pushing the bodice with its ring secreted, careless of wrinkled fabric, beyond her pillow.
She told herself contentedly that she was safe. Safe for the moment. And never dreamt that the man into whose arms she slipped again so gloriously, and whose strong arms welcomed her without reserve, had already guessed her secret....
But as he claimed her again, she blissfully forgot her worries. Her senses trembled and she, found her thoughts were tumbling, flying away from her with the authority, the boundless skill, the elegance of each new thrust. And as she flung herself against him, softly, rhythmically, her heartbeat seeming to pace itself to his, she had no need to think, only to feel herself shimmering in the glow of their burning passions. It was a dramatic joining, combining a boy’s impetuosity and a man’s skill and sureness in holding the fever pitch of mounting, cresting passions—a wicked delightful postponing through long shuddering shimmers of ecstasy that golden moment when, together, they went over the brink and were lost in the silken vastness of their love.
But afterward conscience gnawed at her. As they lay together, bodies touching, still a-thrill in the afterglow of that wild sweet joining, she told herself it wasn’t fair, she had to tell him. And then, once he knew the truth, if he wanted to leave her, to fling her away for contracting a bigamous unconsummated marriage, he could. But first she must tell him why she had done it. She had done it because—at this moment it was hard to remember in any logical fashion just why she had done it. Another man’s strong arms had beckoned and she had felt a need to run, to escape. And that need, combined with fury at Dev for betraying her, had driven her into marriage with Chesney.
For whatever reason she had done it—and ev
ery reason seemed paltry and unworthy now—she had done Dev a great wrong. And she who had never lied to him must now tell him what she had done and let him decide whether to forgive her or no.
“Dev,” she said in that soft languorous raw silk murmur that set men’s senses wild. “Oh, Dev, I’ve a confession to make.”
She was going to tell him about her marriage! And he didn’t want her to, for it would somehow change and damage this wondrous intimacy between them.
“Confessions should be made in sunlight,” he murmured. “Moonlight’s for something else. Let’s not waste it!”
And even as her lips parted to tell him everything, his own warm lips closed down gently upon hers and cut off the words. Then his tongue was probing intimately past, into her softly parted mouth, and she felt herself gasp again at the tingling feeling that went through her.
“Constance, my Constance,” she heard him murmur, the words echoing softly against the back of her throat. Or did she only imagine she heard him say that as his warm demanding body slid against hers and her world drifted away and explanations seemed unimportant and mistakes were forgotten and all that mattered or would ever matter was right here in her arms.
She would tell him, she promised herself guiltily. She would tell him and somehow, somehow he would forgive her.
And then she forgot that foolish unconsummated marriage, forgot it as if it had never been, and abandoned herself to the joy of being in Dev’s arms once again, those arms that for her would always be the only arms.
Elegantly, gently, he took her again and swept her with him on a magnificent upward march to the very peaks of passion. Had her senses been less shattered, her scattered thoughts less like butterflies that fluttered by only to flit away again, she might have asked herself—and worried—what brought this special quality to his lovemaking tonight, this feeling he communicated to her that they must wring from these moments enough sweetness to last a lifetime—a going-away feeling.
That feeling was still with her when at last, lingeringly, he let her go and cradled her warm, still-pulsating body in his arms, letting his hands run lightly over her bare skin, pausing to tempt here, to excite there, and to caress, as if he were stroking a cat’s silky fur, the richly gleaming triangle of dark curly hair at the base of her hips. Constance swayed toward him again and felt her senses ripple wildly at his touch.
Lovely Lying Lips Page 42
