by Laura Parker
She reached up and entwined her arms about his neck to draw his head down to hers. “Show me,” she whispered softly into his ear. “Show me how to love you.”
She clung to him now, mindlessly, recklessly, feeling a soaring, a spreading and beating of the invisible wings of freedom that had lain closed and curled against her so long she had begun to believe she had only imagined such joy-
When the too-full moment burst upon them, his groans of fulfillment and her cries of startled joy mingled in the night, enthralling them as their bodies discovered the answer to the question as old as time.
Too bad, she thought a little forlornly as the last updraft of ecstasy deserted her and she drifted earthward. Too bad that he was not the kind of man a woman could love. For if he was, she was very much afraid she would.
Jack replaced the cigar he had taken from the humidor above the mantel without lighting it. The lure of aromatic smoke had lost its enticement for him. More alluring was the taste of Sabrina that lingered on his tongue. His lips were still damp and warm from her mouth.
He turned back toward the bed where she lay sprawled in innocent, naked slumber. He had taken her fully, completely, heard her cries of surrender and wonder before succumbing to the shudder of his own release. Yet his body was only slightly more satisfied than before. One glance at her was enough to return the tightness at the base of his belly. Naked as well, he reached down to adjust the sudden fullness.
She had come to be his so trustingly, so willingly, touchingly eager to experience his embrace, deliciously flushed in her passion. He should have been pleased. He should have been congratulating himself on the success of the seduction. She had been every bit as lovely as he had suspected and much more passionate than he had dared hope. Her kisses …
His body betrayed his brain again, his sated flesh rising hard and proudly from his groin at the memory of her lips on his feverish skin. When was the last time a woman, not his own perpetual capacity for lust, had directed his arousal?
His revenge was complete, his task accomplished. His involvement with her, though she did not yet know it, must now end. To continue the liaison would go against all reason. Why then was he feeling this flood of doubt about what he was going to do next? Yet he did feel it.
From the moment he had first spied her in the depths of her coach on that moonlit highway, the suspicion that they were fated to be together, to come together like this, had frequented him. He could not explain it nor did he doubt it. No gambler worth the name ever doubted his intuition.
Was it possible that he had lost the heart to act on the final part of his plan, to rise and simply walk away from her?
He had never subscribed to the more chivalrous aspects of the gentleman’s code of amore. A gentleman’s obligation to be considerate, courteous, and gallant toward his conquests, protecting her sensibilities, honor, and person had seldom crossed his mind. As long as they obliged and pleased him, he tolerated the peculiarities of the females who spent fleeting days or weeks within the orbit of his life. He had never before been equally attracted to any of them after their first interlude as before it. Anticipation, like courting luck at the gaming table, was everything. Some knew more than others, all tried to please him and thereby ensnare him. Despite the variation in packaging, once unwrapped, women blended together in his mind as so many tits and cunnys.
Sabrina had not attempted to dazzle or impress him. She did not possess the predator’s instinct for dominance. Her wondrous heartfelt responses had been as unstudied as the pleasure he had derived from pleasing her. That, too, astonished him. He was a selfish devil and he knew it. Yet without a word she had urged him to outdo himself with care and tenderness and the need to guard her sensibilities, even in the grip of his own lust. The need to be tender instead of master her was absolutely unique in his experience. And that was the most dangerous revelation of the night.
He came to the bed with silent footsteps. In winning her to his bed, he had exorcised no demons this night. He had loosed all the furies of hell and they wanted his soul as payment.
He could not leave her now, not until he felt that bargain between them had been satisfied. If that meant making a fool’s errand of a journey to Scotland, then to Scotland he would go. What the gods offered he always took.
He reached for her again.
“You were there in the tavern along the Thames?”
“I was.”
Sabrina stared at the patterns of the firelight upon the ceiling, determined to match his worldly sang-froid. Never mind that she was secretly appalled to be lying naked under the coverlet they shared. She had done many more bold things this night. The urge to tell him about their chance meeting at the alehouse seemed as good a demonstration of her nature as any other.
He turned on his side and propped his head with his hand. “Why did I not recognize you?”
Her expression was smug. “No one knew. I was dressed in the borrowed wig and breeches of a friend.”
The surprise in his face was unexpectedly genuine. She had never before known his expression was capable of so many subtleties. “Dressed as a boy?”
“A young gentleman on the town,” she corrected. “Lady Charlotte and I had thought it an amusing diversion. It did allow us to visit a rowdier side of life that ladies never know. I believe I liked it rather more than she.” She offered him a coy glance. “Shall I sing for you the ditty which I committed to memory that night?”
“Certainly!”
When she had finished the bawdy tune he laughed and then sprang up and pounced on her, rolling over her and pressing her shoulders back against the bedding as he leaned over her. “By God, you are a women after my own design. You are as much an outlaw at heart as I!”
“I very much fear that I am,” she replied in a contrite tone that did not match the wide smile of joy upon her face.
He frowned at her then and she wondered what she had done to erase his former joy.
“Never seek mercy or tenderness from me, Sabrina. This is all that I have to give you.” He folded her hand over his rigid flesh. “For now that will be enough for both of us. But one day you will find, as most women do, that it is too little to hold you to me. When that times comes, remember that I warned you. Do you understand?”
She opened her mouth to say yes, but the truth came out instead. “No.”
“Good. At least you are honest. Honesty is something I can promise you in return. One day soon you will understand what I tell you. And then you will hate me all the more because I predicted your pain. I suspect you will find, when your wounds have healed, in that integrity you prize so highly the ability to forgive me.”
“Then why speak of it at all?”
“A chivalrous attempt to protect you, perhaps.” There was a quiet assessment in his voice. “Do not expect me to always be so generous. I want you and I will have you as much and as often as I can manage. Are you frightened by that prospect?”
She looked at him and forced away the hurt his honesty caused. She had expected nothing else from him. Her hand tightened provocatively on his rigid flesh. “No.”
Desire leapt in his eyes. “She-wolf! Do you present me a challenge?”
She smiled provocatively, too happy to be abashed by the hand sliding upward between her thighs. “You tell me, my lord.”
“Jack. For now and always in bed together, call me Jack, Sabrina.” He leaned forward and encompassed a sweetly puckered nipple with his hot mouth.
Chapter Twenty-One
Scotland, November, 1740
“All out for Crailing!” The postillion appeared as a mere bulky shadow through the mud-streaked window of the public coach. “Crailing! Five-minute stop!”
The coach from Hawick to Kelso in the heart of the Scottish border country had just drawn up at a wayside inn to water its horses. The pause offered a momentary respite from the continuous jolting and bouncing of the ill-sprung vehicle that creaked and groaned ominou
sly with every jarring descent into a rut.
Desperate for that release, Sabrina pushed eagerly ahead of the other passengers to be first through the door when it was opened by the postillion. She ached in every part; her feet and hands, her spine and hips, even her teeth from the bone-jarring journey over what the Scottish laughingly called a highway. She was certain she could have covered on foot the same distance the coach had traveled this day over the all but impassable roads. Twice in as many days a wheel had broken in one of the damnable ruts, delaying the journey even more. While making repairs the driver had taken great delight in regaling them with tales of coaches whose axles had broken and of passengers who had been robbed by passing marauders and then left stranded for days without food or shelter. If he had thought to cheer his impatient and bedraggled travelers, he had failed miserably.
Since before dawn she and six other passengers had been wedged tightly in together. There was an Edinburgh merchant who, when he was not sucking on his pipe, shouted useless abuse at the coachman for mishandling his team. Occasionally he pulled from beneath his coat a vile-looking wedge of cheese riddled with mold and smelling suspiciously of his own body odor, which he pared and ate in great yellow curls, then belched for the next half hour.
The other passengers included a Calvinist minister, his wife, and three children, all of whose Lowland speech was so foreign, Sabrina had given up trying to understand their conversation. The two boys constantly tussled and argued among themselves until their father occasionally cuffed one or the other, exclaiming in a rough voice that they were, “Shilpit wee bauchles!” After every pause to water the horses, he would pull out his copy of The Paraphrases and begin what seemed an incessant lesson of reading and repetition. Until, finally, the deadly dull drone of his voice subdued even the boys’ natural boisterousness and they slept.
A girl, aged four, had been sick for most of the journey, occasionally causing the coach to pause, but not always before she had relieved the contents of her sensitive stomach.
If that were not bad enough, the weather had changed these last hours from mild and sunny to wintry dreariness. The northern winds sweeping across the wild Scottish moorlands brought leaded clouds weeping frigid tears of sleet and rain. The penetrating wetness found every weakness in the coach’s design and gradually dampened the interior.
A blast of that frozen rain greeted Sabrina as she descended into the blustery weather that had turned the afternoon to twilight and made of the stark countryside dark and misty shadows. The wind snatched at her cloak and raked her hood from her head, baring her hair and face to the biting damp. Drawing the damp wool back over her, she stepped rapidly to the rear of the coach in hopes of finding shelter.
All her high hopes of a week ago were now subdued by the sheer difficulty of the journey. The determination within her had tired until she was no longer certain what she had hoped to accomplish by coming to Scotland. The sheer daunting specter of traversing these roads with a sick brother had shaken her courage and belief in herself.
She did not look for Jack as she stamped the ground to try to bring the blood back into her half-numb feet. They had agreed to travel as strangers. To that end, he had opted for a seat outside, atop the coach. She wondered now if she might not have preferred that location herself, if only because she might then have burrowed beneath his coat and shared his warmth. No, that would have been foolhardy in the extreme. In a few short days he had come to represent a strength that she could ill afford to rely upon.
It amazed her, though she felt no shame in admitting in her thoughts, that she had become his mistress. It was only also to be expected that, in the deepest dark of night, wrapped in his sheltering arms, she had allowed herself to imagine that she was in love. He had offered his aid and protection, gone more than a step out of his way for her sake. How natural that she would confuse his indulgence with love. She was equally certain the feeling would not last—it must not, or it would destroy her.
Refusing even to give into the tempting weakness to look for his face among the other passengers, she gazed instead about the coaching yard. Though it was not yet dark, the lamp above the inn door was already lit. Heartened by that beacon of warmth and friendliness, she headed toward it.
“We do nae stop long here-aboots, Miss.”
She turned to find the postillion had addressed her. “We dinna dare, what with reivers n’ such, ye kin.” With his hat pulled low and his muffler wound up to just under his nose, he looked very like a highwayman in disguise himself.
A great wave of weariness buffeted her. “But I must have pot of chocolate or I shall perish from the cold!”
“Then chocolate you shall have.”
She turned about to find that Jack had come up behind her.
He smiled at her, and it was as bracing as the wind but infinitely more warm. “The lady wishes to warm herself by the inn hearth.” He glanced at the ostler who had come from the barn bearing a pail of water in each hand for the team. “She is as much entitled to a drink as your horses.”
Sabrina shook her head briskly, refusing to return his enchanting smile. “That is very kind of you, my lord, but I am fit for travel, I assure you.”
But Jack, who saw her white face and bluish lips and the plea in her violet eyes that were the only vivid color in her face, knew she had been pushed enough for one day. He placed a hand on her shoulder before shouting up a question to the coachman who remained on his perch. “When is the next coach through?”
The driver’s gaze shifted away from the Englishman’s as he rubbed his chin. “I couldna say. No’ for another week or more, mebbe.”
Sabrina gripped his sleeve. “No, I am ready to go on. I can do it.”
Jack squeezed her shoulder in warning. “I know, sweeting. But I am mortally weary and thoroughly drenched. Have mercy on a man.”
She knew he lied. Even pinched from the cold, he looked as fit as he had the evening they had ridden out of Bath together. It was her chest that ached from the cold and her fingers that could not seem to function. She could not release his coat sleeve. Puzzled, she gazed down at her hand, which refused to follow her command, and then up again into his face. “I—I …”
Jack caught her as her knees buckled and swept her up into his arms. With calm efficiency, he turned to the postillion. “Put my bag and saddle down in the yard. I will be staying awhile.”
The near frozen ground crunched under his feet as he made his way with his precious burden toward the entrance to the inn. The cold, unyielding ground was good for his mood. He was in a cold implacable fury, with himself. He, and no one else, was responsible for her collapse.
The sight of her, wan and weary beyond all imagining, had shocked him. Why had he not talked her out of this precipitous, ill-timed journey? He might have insisted upon time to rent a private coach, to provide them with foodstuffs and better, warmer clothing. Day by day she has grown thinner, the trek wearing her down like an oft-pared nib. What sort of man did so poorly by his mistress that she all but perished from lack of comfort and sustenance? A man whose brain had been addled by lust—that was answer. He had been afraid that in her stubbornness she would set off without him. To prevent their parting he would have agreed to a voyage to Shangri-La in a dinghy.
He had only to be near her for his body to grow tense and hot. That tension ran though him now, carrying her unresisting body in his arms. Odd that she had only to look at him to make him heavy and ready. And yet, inexplicably, her trusting gaze made him equally ready to protect her from every danger, even from his own hunger.
The sound of the coachman’s whip did not at first penetrate Jack’s blighted thoughts. But something in the driver’s anxious shout to his horses and the sudden rumbling of the coach along the cobblestones of the yard made him swing about.
“Damn and blast!” The coachman had made off with his bag and saddle.
“ ’Tis my fault. If I had not collapsed, it would not have happened.” Sabri
na glanced sideways at Jack over the rim of her cup of chocolate. His profile gave away nothing of his thoughts. “I am sorry.”
“If you expect blame, you won’t get it from me. But if you offer one more sniveling apology, I shall wallop you with joy. Now eat your ham. There’s a good girl.”
Jack’s laconic tone underscored his anger, but it was directed at himself. For, along with his belongings, he had discovered upon entering the inn that he had also lost his purse.
“I should have known the lass from Coldstream was a bit too friendly,” he had said with a polished sliver of a smile.
Though new to this game of posing mocking disinterest in what most concerned her, Sabrina refrained from asking what the Scottish woman had been doing so that Jack had not noticed her slipping his purse from his pocket. She suspected he would tell her, in great detail, and that she would not like the answer. Despite, or because of, his off-putting manner, certain women seemed to find the viscount irresistible.
I am now among them, she reflected miserably.
She sipped the warming, bittersweet beverage that had cost Jack his bag, saddle, and purse. She did not delude herself with the notion that thoughts of her occupied his jaded mind. The loss of his purse was of greater moment than her lost virtue. According to the world’s reckoning, all that she now possessed of value was her pearls. Did she dare offer them to him?
“How shall we pay for our accommodations?”
“It does present a challenge.” Jack eyed her speculatively as he lifted his glass of local brew the Scots called whiskey. “I don’t suppose you play an instrument? Or dance?”
She shook her head. “I’m a miserable hand with a lute. I avoided lessons at the harpsichord like the plague. My voice is little better than passable.”
