Almost a Scandal (28 page)

It was the smile that did him in. A smile steeped in dreams, with her eyes blinking slowly at him in wonderment. Muzzy with sleep. A smile of contentment, and who knew what else, because his brain gave up the need to think for the more immediate gratification of feeling, and he was moving closer to her, bringing her lithe body closer, until he was holding her against him. In response she made a soft sound of pleasure and welcome, and he was lost to the wonder of her warm gray eyes.

It seemed the most natural thing in the world to kiss her again. To taste her again. To let his mouth drift down until her lips were there, beneath his. And she was soft and warm and yielding, and he kissed her slowly, breathing into her, filling her with his resolution.

“Mr. Colyear,” she whispered.

He laid his finger across her lips—plush and taut, and sweet, like ripe fruit. “Col,” he murmured, as he lowered his head to her lips. “For God’s sake, Kent, call me Col when I’m kissing you.”

She smiled on an astonished little gust of laughter, and her lips were already open—open and tempting—and he could not resist deepening the kiss.

She tasted tart, like the green apples they had gleaned. Fresh and earthy. A woodland imp come to tempt him into delight.

Her hand found its way along the line of his jaw, and he turned into the sweet chafe of her palm, rubbing the rough texture of his incipient beard against her like an animal trained to her hand. He sounded like an animal, too. The near-howl of low pleasure that wound its way out of his chest was barely civilized.

He pressed closer, letting his gravity settle down into her, importuning her with the weight of his growing arousal. He tried to go slow, to hold the clawing need at bay, so he kissed her carefully, unsure of his welcome, waiting for her to pull back again. To tell him they oughtn’t, to put him back onto the road to sanity. But she was kissing him, her mouth rising to meet his, her breath heating and tangling with his. And he was falling, falling into the improbable softness of her being, into the cinnamon-sugar sweetness of her lips. Her arms were around his neck, clinging to him, and then her hands speared into his hair, grasping his skull tightly, brushing and fisting into his queue as she pulled him closer.

He rolled with her in his arms and laid her down, pressing into her. The scent of crushed hay rose around them, wreathing them in the last breath of summer. He nosed his way behind her ear, where her hectic pulse beat under the fragile surface of her skin, where the scent of girl and apple mixed with the light perfume of soap and the heavy base notes of oak and tar on her coat. And he wanted more. He wanted, he wanted, he wanted.

He wanted to taste more than her mouth. He wanted to take her into himself and keep her there. He wanted her to be his in the most basic, primitive way possible. To bind her to him. He wanted to subsume her, to take her into himself and make her a part of him. And he wanted to be a part of her.

He rose up on his elbows to feel the lithe strength of her long body beneath him, to watch as his hands roamed over her of their own accord, searching out every interesting nook and exquisite curve. He kissed her closed eyes, and the soft spot beneath her ear, and the long line of her jaw, and lower, down the endless cascade of her neck, where he plied his teeth along the sensitive tendon, nipping his way to her collarbone. She shivered and sighed and tilted her head, all soft, yielding concession. He followed his lips with his hands, stripping away the knot in her black silk stock, pushing aside the lapels of her jacket, and undoing the long row of buttons down the front of her waistcoat.

And she was helping him, shrugging one arm out of her coat, only to leave off and attack the buttons on his coat as well. She would work three or four loose at a time and then seek his mouth for another intoxicating kiss. He couldn’t order his thoughts enough to effectively disrobe either of them, but it didn’t matter. One way or another, they would get it done.

“You’d think I’d know how to get breeches unfastened.” He kissed her nose, because it was there and it was attached to her. “But I’ve never gone at it from this angle before.”

“Nor I.” She was all laughing, tumultuous curiosity, with her beautiful, intelligent gray eyes wide open, watching his every move. He wanted to keep that fiery smile, that impish curiosity on her face. He wanted to extend their stolen moments into hours. He was so glad he was with her, and no other. With Sally Kent. “You’re so bloody wonderful. You have no idea how long I’ve waited for you.”

At his words, everything about her, all her sleek, strong edges, softened. She sighed into him and took his lip between hers, nipping and sucking lightly, learning the way of him, until she grew bolder. When she closed her mouth around his, and took his tongue into her mouth, his need became like a current rising in a storm, fast and driven. The taste of her mouth was like water, and he was nothing but a salt bed, parched and dry.

With Sally Kent, there was no coy retreat or astonishment. There was wonder and discovery. Her kiss was as lush and welcoming as he had dreamed, night after frustrating night in the hellish confines of his gunroom cuddy.

He speared his big hand into her hair, disrupting the silken queue, cradling her small skull, holding her still so he could angle her head to kiss her more deeply. He all but dove into her, holding her hard against him, pulling her into him as if he could absorb her essence, her very being.

She spoke, calling his name in little gasping pants of astonishment. “Col,” she said with every kiss, as if she were trying to convince herself it was real, that he was real, and that they were truly alone together, with no ship full of other people or walls between them now. There was nothing to stop them. Nothing but several layers of cotton duck clothing.

And he wanted it off. He wanted her to himself, completely and irrevocably. He wanted to taste her everywhere. He wanted to touch her everywhere. He wanted to see her everywhere. God, how he wanted to know everything there was to know about her. To leave no part of her body unexplored or facet of her mind unexperienced.

He went at her clothes the way he went at everything, with a single-minded concentration that drove him like a ship before the wind. For a tall girl, she was light and agile, and he spread his palm across her back and scooped her up as easily as if she were made of driftwood, instead of strong muscled flesh and bone, so he could strip her blue midshipman’s coat away. She was as impatient as he, pulling free her arm and divesting herself of the waistcoat to fling it aside, already forgotten.

And then she sat up, and lifted her shirt over her head, and she was halfway to naked. Her bare arms and shoulders were pale and dusted with golden freckles the color of marmalade, and he wanted to lick every last one, but she was not yet undressed. Around her breasts was the layer of wide cotton strips that wound around her like a shroud. She twisted to reach the binding.

“Kent. Let me.”

He unfurled her slowly, like a spinnaker, set loose to capture the lightest breeze. But she wasn’t a ship or a sail. She was a girl, hidden under all that blue coat, and competence and skill. She was a warm, pink-and-white girl, with small, perfect apricot-tinted breasts.

Col could only look at her, and marvel at the delicate perfection of her, this creature who had dragged him across half of France. It must have been through willpower alone, for she seemed as fragile as a bird. The architecture of her bones was as beautifully perfect and balanced as any ship’s spars—trim, nimble, and fast.

He looked and looked at her, drowning in his wonder, until she grew shy under his gaze and reached to cover herself. He could not allow it. He had to see her, to savor the beauty of her body—the wonderous unique strength of her.

He took her hands in his and spread them wide, and after he had decided that her nipples were the exact color of the inside of a tropical seashell, he began to kiss his way toward them. He kissed first the back of one hand, and then the pale pulse at the inside of her wrist on the other, working his way from side to side, from the sensitive joint of her elbow, to the exquisite hollow beneath her collarbone, until she opened her arms and fell back, granting him unlimited access to the treasure of her body. He kissed the soft, scented underside of her breast, and nuzzled his cheek along its sensitive peak, and only when she arched her back, raising herself up to him in silent plea, did he take the tight coral bud of her nipple into his mouth and suck lightly at her breast.

She made a sound of deep pleasure, like the strum of a well-tuned instrument, that vibrated through her and into him. He strummed and stroked her again, playing her to his touch, learning the way of her. And she helped, this responsive, tumultuous girl. Her hands were in his hair, cradling his head, holding and directing him to kiss her breasts and lavish her with pleasure.

It gave him an extraordinary amount of pleasure as well, brewing deep in his bones and surging deep into his soul. The taste and smell and feel of her beneath his hands and tongue only served to heighten his arousal and feed his insatiable hunger. And he wanted more. It was not nearly enough to see only her breasts revealed. He needed to see all of her. He wanted every last inch of male clothing stripped from her long restless body.

But as the last of the buttons on her wide nankeen trousers came free and she raised her hips to shimmy free of them, he had his first glimpse of her vividly colored mons. He all but froze, poleaxed by the splendor of her body as she worked the trousers down off her legs. And there she was.

The freckled skin of her body was like the night sky set on fire—a different sort of Milky Way filled with constellations as yet unmapped.

“Col?” She was looking up at him with eyes pressed wide with concern. “Are you all right? Has everything shifted again?”

Everything had shifted. “Nothing’s wrong. You’re naked. And you’re beautiful.”

She tucked her chin down to hide the sweep of pleasure blossoming across her face. “And you’re not. Naked.”

“By God, I will be.” He sat back to pull off his boots and she came to her knees to kneel before him with her hands on her thighs, an erotic, supplicant odalisque, waiting patiently for him to take off his clothes for her.

The sound that tunneled out of his chest was something in the space between a sigh and a groan. It was going to kill him, the wanting her. And his damn boot wouldn’t come off.

Kent misinterpreted the sound of his nearly painful frustration. “Col.” She reached for his shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” he repeated. “You’re naked and you’re beautiful, and my boot won’t come off.”

She reached for his boot then, slapping the back of his heel hard before she slid it off. And he was up and shucking his breeches, and scooping up his coat so he could throw it over the hay, and picking her up and carrying her down, and kissing her. Kissing and kissing her while his body sought out the exquisite torture of her blissful heat.

She felt so bloody, bloody good, so wonderful, he couldn’t think. He could only feel and want. And what he wanted was her. All of her.

He was reaching down to guide himself into her body and pressing himself within. Into her scalding heat.

The rush of ecstasy felt so sharp and so raw he couldn’t breathe, and he didn’t need to. He didn’t need anything but her and the fiercely beautiful friction of her body ever again.

Chapter Seventeen

The pain was a shock—unexpected and abrupt. His occupation of her body knocked the breath from her. Until that moment of intimate possession, it had been like a dream, a deep dream state of incendiary bliss and overwhelming sensation—a delirious suspension of reality and time and consequence. It had felt so good, the extraordinary, blissful rush of pleasure. Until it stopped.

“Are you all right?” His beautiful face was suspended above hers, his forehead creased with a touching mixture of anguish and concern. His eyes, so deep and warm and green—how had she ever thought them hard?—watched her, searching her face for her every reaction. It was remarkable, and utterly overwhelming, to be the object of that singularly focused attention, all that intimate concern.

“I … I think so.” It wasn’t much pain. It was only the slightest burning pinch, and there was something about it—the wonder and bliss that hovered behind it, not entirely gone, but hiding. Although she was uncomfortable, now that they seemed to be done. His long, strong body was heavy upon hers, but heavier still was the pressing tension within. She wanted something else. She wanted that heady rush and tumble of sensations, the pleasure and even the pain, to continue. But mostly, she wanted something else. Something more.

“Do you think, you could … say it? My name? Like you did before?”

Would he understand? Would he think her weak or needy—girlish—for asking?

“Sally.” He said her name instantly, and then over and over, punctuating each recitation with a kiss. “Sally. I’m sorry. I should have realized—”

He kissed her face, again and again, moving slowly from the corner of her mouth to her nose and then to the surprisingly, achingly sensitive tendons at the side of her neck, where they slid down to meet her collarbone. She turned her head away to grant him access, to give him greater scope for his tender explorations and closed her eyes as heat began to rekindle within, and her body heated with a rush that made her feel feverish and nearly uncomfortable. Little shocks of feeling sparked through her hands, and left her fingers tingling.

Wanting more.

“I want…” Except she didn’t really know what
more
she wanted.

Col must have heard the embarrassed frustration in her voice.

His smiled faded, and then reappeared, turned upon himself. “God, look at us.” Around them, a tangle of clothes was strewn about the loft of a half-destroyed, abandoned barn deep in the French countryside. “We have no bloody idea what we’re doing, do we?”

She didn’t have time to agree, because he had framed her face with his hands, and was looking at her again, in that focused way, seeing everything she was feeling, every bit of needy, confused yearning, in her face. “It doesn’t matter,” he assured her. “We’ll figure it out. It only matters that we’re together. We’ll go slowly and figure it out, and you’ll tell me what you like.”