The Blood of Roses (18 page)

“But the soldiers … the militia …”

Alex’s gaze followed his hand. His thumb stroked the velvety crown of her nipple, and he watched it grow taut and rigid beneath its veil of silk. Catherine’s eyes were fixed unwaveringly on his face, on the square, rugged jaw-line, the dark slash of eyebrows, the twin crescents of long black lashes. She felt the motion of his thumb and she felt the pressure from each individual finger against her breast. Icy shivers of anticipation raced across the surface of her flesh, growing more and more insistent at each slow circuit of his thumb.

Suddenly the obsidian eyes were gazing deeply into hers. The muscles in his arms were tense and unyielding, his body seemed strained to the limit of his composure. Was it her imagination, or had the months of rigorous army life added even more strength, developed even more formidable breadth to his shoulders and chest, whittled a lean new hardness to his waist and hips? His hair was as long and unruly as she remembered it, and, responding to an impulse, her fingers released the thin black ribbon binding it and let the glossy waves spill free and curl forward over his shoulders.

His hands had not been idle. They had roved lower on the smooth, silk-clad outline of her hips and thighs, and returned with the captured hem of the nightdress. He drew it above her waist and left it in a shimmering crumple under her arms while he sent his fingers skimming back down into the soft golden thatch below her belly. Catherine endured the first light, delicious strokes in silence, awed by the sweet, sharp ache of shameless pleasure. But as the incursions became deeper and more determined, she rose against him, arched against the shivering torment with a need she could neither conceal nor deny.

“Easy, love,” he whispered. “Easy.”

“I … can’t.” She gasped. “It’s been so long. I—I’ve missed you so badly.”

“Shhh. I’m here now.”

“I didn’t know if you were alive or dead. I didn’t know if I would ever see you again, if you would ever come back to me. I began to wonder if I had imagined it all … everything … Achnacarry … everything.”

A sob of sheer ecstasy was torn from her throat as he lowered his dark head to her breast. His lips claimed the tightly crinkled nipple, drawing the succulent flesh into the heated well of his mouth where it was taunted and tormented with the same skillful thoroughness his fingers were demonstrating elsewhere. When she was a breath away from orgasm, he withdrew his hand and his mouth covered hers, smothering her harsh groan of frustration. His tongue plunged repeatedly over and around hers, the sensations coiling downward and inward until she felt like a molten sheet of flame.

His mouth blazed a trail of fire from the underside of her chin down past the laboring rise and fall of her breasts. From there his tongue swirled onto her belly and into the seductive little indent of her navel. Restlessly he traveled lower, prompting shocked reverberations that weakened each of her limbs and made her quiver with expectation as he eased them apart. His hands curved beneath her hips and held her firm while his lips and tongue explored the tender pink junction, lashing over and over again at the remaining shreds of her composure.

Reaching down with frantic, disbelieving hands, she clawed her fingers into the thick, raven mane of his hair. Her lips drew back in a soundless cry as hot, shivering spirals of pleasure whorled through her body and, tasting them, delving for them, his tongue set wave upon wave of fiery convolutions rippling inward and outward until she stiffened and shuddered again and again and again.

With a groan that mocked his own self-restraint, Alex rose above her, his muscles bunched and trembling, his hands shaking where they still cradled her hips. He drew her forward and upward into his first thrust, burying himself so deep there was not a breath or gasp between them, no nerve left unscathed by the joining. She locked her arms around him, locked her legs around him, helpless to forestall the white-hot surge of ecstasy that gripped them both in endless volleys of sharp, blinding pleasure.

Dazed, they clung together, straining and writhing with the need to savor each prolonged tremor until it shimmered into memory. Only then did pent-up breaths make a startled, rushed release; only then did the shivering, quaking tension drain away to leave the two damp, entwined bodies collapsed and panting softly against one another. From somewhere Alex found the strength to raise his flushed face from her shoulder and kiss her—a kiss as honest and naked in its emotion as the shine betrayed in his eyes.

“I did not think a man could miss his wife as much as I have missed you,” he admitted shakily. “A mistress,’ aye. As a former rogue, content in my bachelorhood, I could more easily understand the intrigue and fascination there … but a wife?”

Catherine’s eyes opened slowly, two dark pools of violet swimming with unshed tears of happiness. His lips caressed each lid, the tip of her nose, the luscious pout of her lips, and her arms tightened reflexively, as did her limbs, when she felt him start to ease himself away.

“Please don’t,” she pleaded softly. “Don’t leave me just yet.”

“I have no intentions of leaving you. I just thought—”

“Don’t think. Don’t do anything. Just hold me … as close as you can.”

Aware of his superior weight, Alex compromised by gently rolling with her onto his side. He wrapped his arms tightly around her and Catherine pressed her face into his shoulder, the inner turbulence of her emotions finally seeking relief through quietly muffled tears.

“Catherine—” He brushed his lips over her temple and stroked a hand through the tousled length of her hair. “I never meant for this to happen. I never wanted you to worry about me or be afraid. If there had been any other way to ensure your safely, I never would have let you out of my sight, you must know that.”

“Sometimes”—her voice caught on a sob—“I think I would rather risk any danger on earth than suffer such loneliness as I have these past months.”

His arms hugged her closer.

“The rest of the time”—she angled her head upward, her face streaked and shining—“has been spent contemplating divorce, revenge … even murder. Three months, Alex. Three months and you never once wrote to me. Not a note, not a letter, not one single paltry word to let me know you were still alive.”

“I wrote hundreds of them … thousands. In my head. Every day.”

She dashed the back of her hand across her cheeks to dry them and glared. “As if anyone could ever read what was in your head.”

“You can if you try.” He cradled her chin in his hand. “Look again.”

Catherine did indeed look. And they were all there: The hundreds and thousands of words and feelings he had been unable to commit to paper were gleaming deep within the midnight depths, thrilling her with fresh shivers that prickled all the way to her toes.

“Oh, Alex, when you are with me, I know you love me,” she cried, burrowing against his shoulder again. “But when you are hundreds of miles away … it just isn’t the same.”

“I guess it isn’t. Mind you, I didn’t exactly see a flood of mail coming from this direction.”

Catherine pushed herself upright. She stared into his eyes another long moment before twisting out of his arms and climbing off the bed. With the rucked-up folds of the gossamer gown sliding back down to gild her body, she snatched the lamp from the night table and disappeared inside the dressing room. A loud scrape and bang of a drawer conveyed her anger, and when she returned to the bedside, her arms were full of unposted letters. After dumping them unceremoniously on the bed, she planted her hands on her hips and favored him with a scowl.

“I did not know where to send them.”

Alex dragged his gaze away from her face and scanned the impressive pile of letters. Most were several pages thick, folded into wads that required several seals and a string binding to hold together.

He reached a tentative hand out to select one but, with an angry gesture, Catherine brushed them all to the floor.

“No. What’s in them doesn’t matter anymore. They were … a way of passing the time.”

“Catherine, I am sorry. But your husband is supposed to be away in the colonies,” he reminded her gently. “How would you go about explaining letters and notes that arrived regularly from northern England? Or suppose they were intercepted and opened? I doubt if even your quick wit could produce an adequate excuse for being in receipt of letters from a captain in the Jacobite army. Especially if they contained anything half as inflammatory as most thoughts I have about you.”

“Don’t try to wriggle out of it by being logical and rational.”

“All right, I won’t.” His arms snaked out and curled around her waist, pulling her back down onto the bed in a flurry of silk. “I’ll make it up to you instead, by being perverse and avaricious.”

His mouth made good on the threat, and when the kiss ended, she was flushed and laughing as she clung to his broad shoulders. She was also naked, the nightdress flung up and away somewhere in the shadows.

“How did you get in here tonight? The militiamen have the manor surrounded.”

“One of them was generous enough to lend me the use of his uniform.”

She frowned and raised her head, peering at the door. “You just walked into the house and came up the stairs to my room?”

“I came in the same way any lusty Romeo would think to come—by way of a very obliging trellis that leads straight from the ground up to heaven. Remind me to show you how to keep those doors locked from now on; that latch isn’t worth a damn.”

“It wasn’t meant to keep out intruders, only drafts.”

“Nevertheless, I want you to keep it locked tightly when you are in here alone.”

“And when I’m not? Alone, I mean.”

The dark sapphire eyes narrowed consideringly. “By all means leave the doors unlatched. But choose your lovers carefully, madam, with an eye toward swiftness and an ability to fly, for if I ever paid a visit unannounced and found some addlebrained Lothario trespassing on territory I have clearly staked as my own …”

A growl defined the consequences, and Catherine welcomed the roughness of his kiss as well as the lusty stirrings elsewhere in his body. Unfortunately, another fit of muffled laughter brought an unwanted end to both intimacies.

“You find the prospect of infidelity amusing?” he demanded with a frown.

“Only the sudden image of my vaunted lord and husband chasing some hapless scoundrel about the room at the tip of his sword.”

“Your own pretty buttocks would find nothing to smile about, I assure you.”

“They have nothing to fear,” she said, and pressed a chaste, tender kiss over his lips. “For the situation will never arise. You are lover enough for me in this lifetime … indeed, ten lifetimes.”

Snorting contentedly, Alex shifted his weight lower on the bed and rested his head between the firm white mounds of her breasts. He kept one arm curled around her waist and a muscular leg hooked over hers so that it was impossible for her not to be aware of the masculine texture of his body. She traced her fingertips over the hard-surfaced flesh of his shoulders, marveling that she did not suffer the least pangs of immodesty. Six months ago she would have died from shame had anyone glimpsed a bare ankle, and the thought of lying naked with a man—even a husband—would have mortified her to the very core. Yet here she was, very happily naked, cradling a magnificently naked man to her breast and wishing with all her heart his mouth was a scant inch or two more to the right.

In an effort to exhibit some measure of restraint, she turned her thoughts to safer subjects.

“Have you had any word from Achnacarry? Is everyone well? Lady Maura, Jeannie, dear Auntie Rose?”

“The news is erratic, naturally, but the last we heard, everyone was fine. I imagine Maura has her hands full keeping the household running smoothly. Rose had a bout of the ague—it seems to settle in her bones every fall—but she’s coping. And Jeannie … well, Jeannie is Jeannie. She was fit to be tied when both Donald and Archibald forbade her to accompany the army, and I don’t expect she is making anyone’s life a joy as a result.”

“Jeannie wanted to march to war with you?”

“Scots women are a strong breed, didn’t you know? Some take up the sword and fight right alongside their men. Others … well, they leave the fighting to the men but contribute their, er, services in other equally vital areas.”

“Such as?”

“Oh … cooking and tending the wounded.” He nuzzled his mouth against the plump swell of flesh beneath his cheek. “Tending the needs of the healthy.”

Catherine tilted her head forward, the better to see the angular planes of his face. “Dare I ask what that entails?”

“There is always a certain degree of tension in a camp full of men—especially before a battle. It makes sense practically and militarily to provide some sort of outlet.”

“Mmmm. Are you justifying their presence … or confessing to something?”

“As a matter of fact”—he raised his head briefly and smiled—“it so happens I have been the flattered recipient of several interesting offers since the army began its march.”

“Have you now,” she said dryly.

“Yes, indeed. And I considered each one quite seriously; weighed the advantages and disadvantages—warm nights versus cold, the young and energetic volunteers versus the older, more experienced veterans—that sort of thing, you know.”

“And?” she demanded.

He smiled and settled his head comfortably again.

“Naturally you chose the young and energetic ones. It would be more in keeping with your character.”

“Would it?” He frowned, as if debating the notion. Helping him mull it over, his hand slid upward and began toying with the button of the nipple that loomed in his direct line of view. “Am I as flawed as all that?”

“Flawed,” she agreed, trying to ignore the immediate, tingling response that coursed through her veins. “Unconscionable. Brutish. My first mistake was in not obeying my own well-bred instincts to have you shot as a poacher the first time we met.”

“Your
first
mistake?” He wet the tip of his finger and touched it upon her breast, making the outthrust nub sparkle in the firelight. “You mean you are admitting to having committed more than one mistake in your lifetime?”