Pretty Poison (26 page)

“Just like that, love,” he growled before positioning himself between her thighs and bringing the engorged head of his cock to her center once more.

He pushed forward, rocked back and pushed forward again, easing his straining flesh into her welcoming warmth. He dragged one hand from her hip and across her belly into the crisp curls between her legs. He found her clit and pressed two fingers over the tight little bud, circling with the pressure he knew she craved.

She moaned, dropping her head forward and drawing a shuddering breath.

He began to move, slowly, steadily thrusting into her, giving her more of his hard shaft with each pass, careful to restrain his lust as he stretched and filled her.

Emily made it damn difficult with her panting moans and undulating hips. She was wild beneath him, wilder than he’d ever seen her. She met each of his thrusts with a backward push of her hips, each of his retreats with a forward lunge against his fingers between her legs.

“Oh, God… Oh, Nicholas… Please…please…” she cried and he knew she was close, so close to release. With one hard thrust he buried his cock in her wet channel and leaned over her until his open mouth found the tendon at the juncture of her shoulder and neck. He latched on, his lips and tongue and teeth pulling, sucking her flesh into his mouth. He pressed his fingers hard upon her swollen bud and thrust into her, hard and deep, his cock pulsing with the need to spend.

Emily let loose a long splintered moan as she climaxed around him, her inner muscles clenching, clutching him from base to tip.

“Oh Nick… Oh Nick… Oh Nick…” she chanted as she bucked beneath him.

He savored her orgasm, allowed it to heighten his pleasure, until with a low groan he released her flesh from his mouth, gripped her hips in his hands, lunged back and thrust in to her still quivering flesh, again and again, each thrust harder, deeper, faster than the one before until he was completely out of control, lost in the wonder to be had in her tight cunny.

“Jesus, Em!” he groaned as his orgasm rushed over him with the force of windstorm, tightening his balls, shivering over his skin, sinking into his bones. The pleasure was so sweet, so pure, it bordered on pain.

He fell forward, his cheek landing on her back, his chest heaving as he struggled to drag air into his starving lungs.

Emily fell onto the mattress, her face buried in the pillow, her back heaving.

Nick dropped down beside her and threw one leg over her thighs and tossed one arm across her back. She was shaking, making the oddest little hiccupping noises.

“Emily, are you all right?” he asked in alarm.

Her head bobbed up and down but she did not raise her face from the pillow.

“Em?”

“It’s just…just like…” She turned to look at him and Nick realized she was laughing, giggling uncontrollably.

“What?” he demanded.

“A stallion!” she cried. “You… Us… That way… You bit my neck… Just like a stallion covering a mare!”

Chapter Thirty

Emily awoke as the first rays of the sun broke over the horizon, painting her room in shades of pink and orange. She stretched luxuriously, memories of the previous night drifting around the edges of her awareness.

Her foot bumped against something hard and warm. An incoherent rumble rose from the bed beside her at precisely the moment she heard the soft click of the doorknob turning.

Please let it be Tilly, she prayed.

She watched in suspended fascination and horror as her bedroom door swung open and her father’s cheerful, ruddy face appeared around the dark wood.

For one fleeting moment their eyes locked, his filled with fond greeting, hers surely filled with shock. She saw the exact moment he noticed the sleeping man beside her, watched as all of the color drained from his face and his mouth fell open. He blinked, his fluttering lashes the only movement in the silent room.

Pain shot through Emily as she recognized his expression, placed it in her mind, absorbed it in her heart. Confusion, swiftly followed by denial and finally horrified acceptance. It was the same expression she’d seen upon his face when she’d awoken that summer morning to find him sitting beside her bed and she’d been forced to admit that she’d fallen into a little blue bottle, that she’d drowned her sorrow and fear in the laudanum that filled it.

Emily sat up, dragging the rumpled coverlet up to cover her nakedness, her mouth open but no sound emerging.

They stared at one another for what seemed an eternity, but could have been no more than three or four seconds. Then Charles Calvert disappeared as suddenly and silently as he had appeared, the door closing with the same soft click.

Emily sat frozen in her bed, numb with shame.

“Love?” Nicholas murmured beside her, his hand coming to rest low on her bare back.

“My father.” She might have spoken the words, or perhaps she only thought them. They roared in her head.

“Hmm?” The bed dipped as the man beside her rolled to his side, his muscular arms wrapping around her, his warm lips coming to rest against her hip.

“My father!” Emily pried his arms from around her waist, tossed the blanket aside and scrambled off the bed. She hit the floor hard, nearly fell to her knees, her legs as wobbly as jelly. Stumbling across the room, arms flailing about in a desperate bid to regain her balance, she careened into the vanity table, her hip connecting with a sharp thud. Bottles, brushes, combs and powder went hurtling to the floor. The stopper of her perfume bottle rolled in one direction while the bottle rolled the other and a cloud of powder wafted around her. The scents of lemon, lilac and talc filled the air.

She spun back around to find Nicholas sitting up amid the tangled covers staring at her as if she’d sprouted an extra head on her shoulders.

“My father!”

“Emily?” he asked, his drowsy voice raspy.

“My father!” She tried to rein in her whirling thoughts, tried to make sense of the last thirty seconds, but her sluggish mind would not cooperate.

“Your father?” Nick asked carefully, as if the wrong word might send her shrieking naked from the room.

“Da saw you in my bed,” she ground out between clenched teeth, stalking toward the bed with her hands clenched into tight fists, her entire body thrumming with rage and humiliation, all of it aimed squarely at the man who sat naked with only a sheet covering his hips.

“What?” he asked stupidly, his eyes blinking.

“What are you doing here?” she wailed. “Why didn’t you return to your bed?”

“Emily.” He raised his hands as if she might launch herself at him and pummel him.

“I told you not to come to my room last night!”

“Emily,” he tried again.

“But you had to have your way!”

“I don’t remember you complaining.”

“How could you?” she screamed.

He dropped his hands, tilted his head and gifted her with the mischievous little boy smile she loved so well.

Emily saw red. She literally saw red spots jump before her eyes so great was her anger.

“Get out,” she roared, one trembling arm rising to point to the door. “Get out of my bed chamber, Nicholas Avery!”

“Calm down,” he said and even through her anger she could see his own temper rising. It was there in the lowering of his brow, in the loss of his smile, in the way he squinted his eyes at her, in the muscle that ticked along his jaw.

“Do not tell me to calm down you idiot, you gargantuan imbecile, you ridiculous brute,” she shouted.

Emily looked away from him, saw his robe on the floor and marched over to pick it up. She threw it toward him then stomped her foot in frustration when it fluttered uselessly to the ground some two feet from the bed.

Nicholas barked out a rusty laugh as Emily bent to retrieve it. She strode around the bed and shoved the silk garment at him, holding it out to him with shaking hands.

Nicholas ignored the offering, raked his eyes over her naked form, and Emily could have sworn he hesitated on the hideous scar between her heaving breasts.

“What a pretty picture,” he murmured.

Emily sucked in an astonished breath, heat rushing over her. Mortified, wishing the floor would open up and swallow her, she took one unsteady step back, her nerveless fingers releasing his robe. She brought her trembling hands up to cover the jagged little circle.

Nicholas’s gaze shot to her face.

They stared at one another in silence across the wrinkled and mussed bedcovers.

Emily felt as if her heart had been torn from her breast, as if his big hands had reached right through the ragged circle and ripped it out.

What a pretty picture. What a pretty picture
.

Like an echo, Nicholas’s words repeated over and over in her head, in her heart.

He kicked his legs free of the covers and the sudden motion jolted Emily from the eerie stillness that had settled over her. Blinded by tears, she turned and ran across her chamber and into the bathing room, slamming the door behind her, fumbling with the key until she managed to turn it in the lock.

In the silence of the cold marble bathing room, she lowered herself to sit on the rim of the tub, her head falling forward into her hands. She thought she might cry, wished she would. But her eyes were dry, painfully so. Dragging a stuttering breath into her chest, she released it on a low moan.

A sharp rapping on the door startled her and she looked up, suddenly unsure whether she’d locked the door. The knob rattled but the door remained closed.

“Emily, open the door,” Nicholas called from the other side.

She shook her head wildly, never mind that he could not see the movement.

“Come on, love,” he persisted. “I know you’re upset that your father saw us, but we’re going to be married. I’ll explain it to him. It’s not the end of the world, Em.”

He didn’t understand. He couldn’t. How could she possibly explain to him the look she’d seen on her father’s face?

“Oh, Da,” Emily murmured.

Nicholas stared at the closed door in confusion. How had things gone so wrong so quickly? He’d awoken not five minutes ago lying beside Emily after a night of unbelievable passion. His first thought had been that this was precisely how he would awaken every morning for the rest of his life.

Then she was shrieking at him, screaming and raging that her father had come into the room and spied him in her bed. Charles Calvert would surely be angry, justifiably so. But he knew Nick intended to marry his daughter. Hell, there wasn’t a person at this damn house party who did not know he intended to marry the stubborn lady.

Good Lord, what a temper she had. He’d seen hints of it to be sure, but Emily in a full fledge temper tantrum was a sight to behold. A pretty picture, indeed. As she’d stalked around the room bare-assed, her luscious breasts heaving, her skin flushed and her hair whipping about her in an unruly red cloud, he’d wanted nothing more than to wrestle her back into the bed and revel in all that passion.

But somehow he’d got it all wrong. In his mind he saw again the moment she’d dropped his robe and pressed her hand over that damn scar, the scar she still wouldn’t tell him about, no matter the intimacies they’d shared.

Ah, hell. When had he ever understood the woman? She’d been leading him on a merry chase since the first moment he saw her dozing through the first act of
King Lear
.

“There’s not a chance in hell your father only named you willful seventeen times!” he shouted at the closed door. He waited for a response, shook his head in bemused frustration before shrugging into his robe and opening the door to peer out into the deserted hallway.

He opened the door to his room and strode in, barely refraining from slamming the door behind him.

“Stubborn woman,” he mumbled as he dropped his robe to the floor. “Seventeen willfuls, my ass.”

Two hours later Nick found Charles Calvert galloping across brown and gold fields miles from Lady Margaret’s stately home. Hearing his approach, Emily’s father looked back over his shoulder and slowed his mount to allow the younger man to catch up with him.

“I have my eye on a pretty little cottage just over that rise.” Charles pointed to a gentle knoll that rose to the north of the narrow road bordering his sister’s property.

“You’re thinking to relocate?” Nick asked in surprise.

“Never,” Charles answered promptly. “I wouldn’t think of leaving Emerald Isle. No, I’ll die on my own land and they’ll bury me in the family cemetery between my fragile Anne and my cheerful Martha.”

“Then why purchase a home in England?” Nick asked as they started down into the valley that lay before the rise Charles had indicated.

“For Em, of course.”

“Sir, I have two properties left to me by my mother,” Nick reminded the man. They’d discussed his prospects the day before when he’d asked for Emily’s hand in marriage.

“Ah, yes, your wonderfully large lands to the North.”

Nick felt heat sweep up his neck and reached up to tug at his cravat.

“Those properties are all well and good but when I come to London, as I will in the future, I’d rather not spend my time traveling all over creation to see my daughter. You didn’t think to live in Town did you?”

“Of course not,” Nick assured him. “I know Emily is a country girl at heart.”

“At least you got that part right. So I’ll purchase the cottage as a wedding gift.”

Silence descended around them but Nick could feel the other man’s eyes on him as they rode side by side.

“Mr. Calvert,” he began, not quite certain how to set things right with his future father-in-law.

“You’d best call me Charlie. We’re to be family, after all.”

Nick cleared his throat, feeling decidedly out of his depth. He’d expected to find Emily’s father ready to pummel him and here the man was inviting him to use, not only his given name, but the diminutive used by only his sister. “Charlie, about this morning.”

“Now you listen to me, son,” Charles said, his head swinging around, his green gaze fierce. “I won’t say I wasn’t shocked to find you in Em’s bed. She’s my little girl, no matter that she’s a grown woman. But I’m not so foolish or naïve as to think betrothed couples don’t anticipate the wedding night. And hell, she’ll have to marry you now. She won’t be driving you away with her wild ways or the secrets of her past.”

“No, sir, she won’t” Nick agreed while wondering when in the bloody hell she would share those secrets with him.

“And you’ll treat her well.”

“I can promise you that without reservation,” Nick pledged in all sincerity.

“Don’t you go shaming and humiliating my Em,” Charles continued gruffly. “She’s had more than enough of that at my hands. You likely don’t know it, but I wasn’t the most faithful of husbands. My Anne was a gem, a real lady, and I should have done right by her. Bah, that’s all in the past. The point I’m trying to make is that Emily is not like her mother. She won’t turn a blind eye to any peccadilloes. She’s a strong woman, tough as nails is my Em, but she’s got a soft heart that bruises easy.”

“Mr. Calvert… Charlie,” Nick said in exasperation. “I have no intention of being unfaithful. Ever.”

Charles whipped his head around. “Damned right you won’t. By God, I’ll sail across the sea if I hear even a rumor you’ve strayed.”

“By the time you arrive Lady Margaret will have seen to my punishment,” Nick told him with a grimace.

“Threatened you, did she? That’s my Maggie,” Charles replied around a chuckle. “What’d she threaten you with?”

“A rusty blade to my bollocks,” Nick admitted.

Charles roared with laughter and Nick couldn’t help but smile.

“I told Maggie you’d make my Em a fine husband,” Charlie said when he’d gotten his mirth under control.

“You did?” Nick asked in surprise.

“Maggie’s letters have been filled with your exploits for years so I knew you were a good, strong man. Just the sort to appreciate Emily. And once that lily-livered Peter Marshall started in on a long engagement I knew the wedding would never come about. Emily can only behave herself for so long. And I’ll be damned if I wasn’t right.”

Nick shook his head with a laugh. “And all this time I thought it was Margaret who proposed the match.”

“Ha, Margaret doesn’t know my Em. Even now she knows little of what goes on in my girl’s head. How could she? She’s never encountered another lady like her. And neither have you for that matter. The lot of you, thinking to lead her where you’d like her to go. Good God, that’s the least likely way to get her from here to there.”

Nick arched a brow when the other man fell silent.

“Still haven’t figured it out, have you?” Charlie asked on a bark of laughter. “Listen well, Nick, as I’ll only tell you this once.”

“I am all ears.”

“If you’ve a mind to convince Emily of something you just do it in such a way that she thinks it was her idea.”

Nick smiled, remembering Emily’s use of the very same words when explaining how she finagled extra funds from her father.

It wasn’t so great a revelation. He’d known for some time that Emily would marry him only when she’d worked it out in her mind, allowed it to settle into her heart and decided for herself that marriage to a fortune hunting Englishman was what she truly desired.