The Passionate One (18 page)

And when it was
over, his head fell against her damp throat, his breathing harsh in her ear.

“Damn the dawn,” he
ground out in a thick, dazed voice. “Damn the bloody dawn.”

Chapter Fifteen

Beltaine night
slipped away, its shadows replaced by the bright raucous colors of sunrise. The
freshening wind whipped color in the wan cheeks of maids and boys for whom a
night of revelry was no excuse for sloth. By noon even the privileged had
awoke, emerging to resume the business of celebration. By midday most of Fair
Badden had once again congregated in the town square around the gaily decorated
maypole, waiting for the next round of activities.

Not all, however.
At the Fraiser’s house, Ash Merrick sat at the long, scarred kitchen table, a
mug of milk cupped between hands that unaccountably trembled. He grimaced at
the white liquid.

Milk, for God’s
sake. He really had forgotten who he was. Last night he’d carried Rhiannon’s
slumbering form back to her room and left before Edith Fraiser scurried back to
find Rhiannon’s bed empty. It was a small enough act of kindness and one he
owed her after having taken her maidenhead on the day before the eve of her
wedding.

He drew his hand
across his face. He hadn’t intended to take her.

Or had he? He still
couldn’t believe he’d succumbed to the misguided impulse to find her and keep
her safe from predators—two-footed as well as four. He’d found her all right.
Half lying against a tree, her head thrown back, and her long, delicious throat
arched as if for a lover’s kiss.

But it hadn’t been
the sweet abandonment of her pose, or the swell of unbound breasts, or even the
length of exposed thigh that he had been incapable of resisting. No, ’twas her
feet that had overset every last shred of decency in him.

Bare and elegant,
long and slender, they’d emerged from beneath the garishly decorated milkmaid’s
skirt. Though the pink soles of her feet were stained with grass and dirt, the
nails of each small toe were nonetheless clean, glinting in the moonlight like
abalone shells.

He would have bet
his last penny that not one other of Fair Badden’s young ladies pretending to
be simple country lassies had gone unshod. Only Rhiannon Russell had kicked off
her shoes and felt the grass springing wet and fresh between her toes. The hint
of wildness, the suggestion of a sybarite waiting to explore a sensual world, had
filled him with lust.

He’d wanted her
more in that moment than he’d ever wanted anything before. He wanted to be the
lover she arched her neck for. Every other consideration had evaporated before
that sudden, single-minded intent.

So he’d set his
mouth to the base of her throat and felt the pulse quiver like a wild bird in a
trapper’s palm, sealing their fate. Because once he’d touched her, there had
been no turning back. Whatever brief prick of conscience had begged him not to
deflower a virgin before her marriage had been devastated by the answering
ardor of her mouth. Her strong young body had surged upward to meet him with
beautiful abandon, wrecking his tepid scruples, a battering ram destroying a
straw hut.

His futile attempt
to demonstrate his self-control had never been more than a bluff. She’d only to
whisper “please” for every other consideration to burn to cinders before their
cumulative need.

She’d been more
honest than he, he thought with a wry smile. For at least she’d known that
their pleasuring of each other had been a night-bred thing. Not real. He closed
his eyes. She’d said it wasn’t real. He must remember that.

Indeed, morning
would doubtless erase the easy truce she’d made with her conscience. Now it was
time to pay. One always paid.

She would be filled
with condemnation, as well she should be, for on her wedding night there would
be questions, and Rhiannon, honest, damnable Rhiannon, would answer them and
ruin herself in the process.

He scraped his hair
back from his eyes and stared out of the kitchen window. Rhiannon’s big bitch,
Stella, lay idly regarding a rabbit munching Edith Fraiser’s comfrey plants.
Ash watched her, remembering Rhiannon tenderly stroking the useless monster’s
ears. Smiling. Relaxed and happy. She should always be thus. His hands
tightened around the mug.

He would have to
stay until after Watt had married her. Because though Ash could offer Rhiannon
nothing of himself—having nothing worth offering, not even the decency to
resist the bride of a man who considered him a hero—at least he could offer her
the protection that fear inspired. That, at least, was one thing he owned: the
ability to instill fear. Today he would find opportunity to explain to Phillip
in very clear, very explicit terms just how dangerous renouncing Rhiannon
Russell would prove—

“Ash.”

He closed his eyes
a second. He should have known she wouldn’t avoid him, that she would confront
her seducer rather than avoid him. These people didn’t understand her at all.
They did not understand that though she had been subdued by wounds garnered at
Culloden, it was not in her nature to be subdued. He plastered a suitable smile
on his face—nothing too intimate, nothing too cavalier. The smile of a lover
who didn’t count. He looked around.

Her satiny skin
appeared more delicate than he remembered, and the sunlight revealed
violet-tinted stains beneath her eyes. They looked greener today, her hair
darker.

“Rhiannon. Miss
Russell.” He held up his hand, offering her the choice of what she would have
him call her.

She frowned and
skirted the room, moving to the window and a ceramic vase filled with wild
anemones. She touched the rosy petal delicately—like she’d touched him last
night.

“This is so hard,”
she murmured.

In profile her
hazel eyes looked glassine and brilliant. Tears? Yes. Of course there’d be
tears. He steeled himself because there was nothing else he could do.

“It was wrong.”

“Yes.” Wrong,
right—when had either made any difference to him? He gazed at her, tired beyond
endurance. “It was wrong.”

“I’ll make him a
good wife, you know.” She glanced sideways, to see whether she’d convinced him.
“I will. I know what we did last night was a sin and I know that you are
Phillip’s friend—” God help him before he laughed or sobbed, the pretty naive
wench. Did she not understand even yet? “But I must ask you... no, I must beg
you, please do not tell him.”

He exhaled in
relief, tension draining from his body. Good. She’d resolved to hold her
tongue, the only thing she could do if there were any chance at all she would
escape last night without consequence. She was still intent on marrying Phillip
and that was just as it should be—and this odd sense of betrayal? Nothing.

Phillip could give
her so many things and he could only give her—
passion.
Why, in some
twisted greedy corner of his heart, did that seem to him enough when he knew,
rationally, logically, it was not? “Yes. I mean, no. I won’t.”

“Swear it.” A
pleading note softened the demand.

“I swear.”

She turned toward
him, the movement swinging the soft waves of her unbound hair to settle over
her shoulder. It was like a cloud of silk, he remembered. But why unbound? Ah
yes, she was Queen of the May.

“You don’t know
Phillip as I do and I... it’s not that I think you would purposefully hurt him
but if you felt bound by honor to tell him he would feel obligated to call you
out. He mustn’t be hurt.” She held out a hand in an impulsive gesture of
appeal.

“Of course.”

“You must
understand, it’s best if I—”

“You don’t need to
say another word,” he broke in softly, unable to listen to more.

“Thank you.” Her
smile was sad and grateful. After what he’d done to her, she gifted him with
that wholly beautiful smile because—his eyes widened in shocked
recognition—because she believed that he felt the same. That he
cared
about Phillip Watt!
Because he was a gentleman.

The enormous irony
of it, her horrendous mistake, hit him like a blow. He looked away.

Enough of this,
he thought, suddenly savage.
I’m sick to death of carrying the
weight of her good opinion.

He would tell her
he didn’t give a damn about cuckolding her betrothed. He’d tried to tell her of
his true nature last night. Perhaps he should try again, disabuse her of her
provincial notions regarding his gentlemanliness, show her just whom she’d lain
beneath last night.

He’d only cared
about one thing: spending himself between her thighs. He still only cared about
one thing, as evidenced by the hardening of his loins as he looked at her.

Yet, somehow, this
little thing—her wrong-headed belief that he would act chivalrously, that he
was, in fact, better than he was—kept him from speaking.

“You are hurting,”
she said. She moved from the window, slowly diminishing the space between them.
He held his breath, willing her to stay put. She didn’t. “I can see it in your
eyes. I am so sorry.”

Why was she saying
this? What was she doing to him?

“It was...”
Whatever she’d been about to say died on her lips. A sad, lost smile gently
turned the corners of her mouth, like an echo of innocence. “Oh, Ash. I know it
is wrong, more wrong than anything I have ever done, but I cannot regret last
night.”

Utterly destroying
him.

“I will keep the
memory of it,” she went on inexorably, softly singing her way to the very core
of him with her lethal words. “It may seem to me now a meager sort of thing, a
memory, but in years to come I am sure it will— Please,” she moved a step
closer. Uncertainty clouded her expression, a quavering note of abashment
colored her voice. “Please, won’t you kiss me goodbye?”

He stared at her,
unable to speak.

She must have taken
his silence for acquiescence. Hesitantly she rose on her tiptoes and brushed
her mouth over his. But in forming the word “good-bye” her lips lingered an
instant too long. Long enough for the stunned paralysis to leave his limbs,
long enough for him to snake his arm around her supple waist and pull her
closer, deepening the kiss into something darker, stirring... infinitely more
satisfying.

She kissed so
sweetly. So tantalizingly. Her mouth was fruit, delicious and succulent, and he
was starving. Had been starving for years. Hungrily he traced her lips with the
tip of his tongue, slipping into the sleek, moist interior. Her tongue
fluttered against his and he stroked it lavishly, deeply.

With a sigh of
defeat, she wrapped her arms around his shoulders, tipped back her head, and
surrendered. She kissed him—Lord, how she kissed him—with all the longing of a
tragic, final leave-taking: yearningly, tenderly, despairingly. He cupped her
delicately molded skull between his palms, combing back her silky, dense hair,
mouthing soft, incoherent words of ravishment and seduction. Desire coiled and
sprang, confounding him with its power.

She withdrew from
the kiss and he followed her retreat. He lifted his free hand and rubbed the
pad of his thumb back and forth against her lower lip. His body shuddered with
the restraint he exercised. “Rhiannon...”

With a sudden,
hopeless sound she dropped her hands and pushed against his chest. She broke
free of his embrace and twirled. He heard the swish of her hem, the rapid
tattoo of her fleeing shoes, and the breathy echo of her sobbed “Good-bye.” By
the time he looked she’d disappeared through the kitchen door.

He slumped against
the table, groping for support, realizing what she thought. She thought him her
lover, her tender, considerate companion in guilt and that kiss had been his
severance pay, a memento. His lips curled back.

Absurd.
Horrifyingly naive. Unendurably so.

He’d bedded the
wench. He’d had what he’d wanted. It was past time he remembered why he was
here and where he was going. He should be in London, at the gaming tables,
working for Raine’s release, not here, lusting after some wench who had a
wrongheaded notion regarding his nobility.

His fists clenched
at his side, the thick scar tissue glistened like white. He stared about the
kitchen as if looking for a means of escape.

He must think of
Raine. He’d promised his mother he would keep him safe, and right now he didn’t
even know whether Raine was alive. Abruptly, Ash swept the mug of milk from the
table, shattering it. Like the reproachful stain of a maiden’s lost virtue, the
sweet milk spread across the tiles and seeped into the earth between. Tainted.
Lost. Gone.

He strode from the
kitchen, out into the backyard, and to the stable, calling for the boy to
saddle his horse.

The town square
hummed with drowsy activity, the bright streamers bedecking several
pink-cheeked lads and lassies attesting to the fact that the maypole dance had
recently ended. Watt and his cronies had gathered around a square table in
front of The Ploughman.