The Scarred Earl (13 page)

‘How can you not find me repugnant and flawed?’ he asked huskily.

‘Easily enough on a physical level, my lord, since you always were vexingly handsome. It’s only on an everyday basis I find you somewhat trying.’

‘Too trying to tolerate?’

‘I’m here, aren’t I? If I found you intolerable, I should certainly not have come here tonight. Nor would I have suggested a rendezvous where I would be forced to share close proximity to a man who repulsed me in any way.’

‘I’m pleased to hear it, as no doubt Jack or one of your brothers would be when it’s the height of folly in you to meet me here at any hour, my girl,’ he said sternly, reverting to warrior type once more. ‘Coming here to
be closeted solely with me, in the middle of the night with the house sleeping about us, is madness. You must never risk your virtue and good name in such a reckless fashion again.’

‘There you are, you see?’ she pointed out indignantly as he went from oddly diffident about himself to a forbidding arbiter of ladylike behaviour between one breath and the next. ‘I was right all along; you really are the most trying of men.’

‘Because I’m brave enough to point out the obvious as nobody else seems inclined to?’ he asked, as if surprised she might find his condemnation irritating when it was so well founded.

‘You have no right to censure my behaviour, my lord. If you think me so very rackety, you should never have come here to risk your reputation in the first place.’

‘And leave you wandering about this great barn of a place alone and unprotected in the stilly watches of the night? What sort of a friend would that make me to your cousin and brother?’

‘Oh, never mind them,’ she rounded on him in a fury even she didn’t understand.

Chapter Nine

‘S
top trying to make yourself behave so impersonally towards me and join the rest of us faulty, living, breathing human beings in the real world for once. However hard you try to make yourself into one, you’re not a soulless automaton who doesn’t give a damn about anyone else’s feelings and never will,’ Persephone stormed. ‘You’re a passionate and driven man, Alexander Forthin. I won’t let you pretend otherwise to protect yourself from anyone who tries to get close to you, especially when it’s me,’ she ended with a smile she knew wobbled perilously on the edge of tears for this sensitive and mighty man who seemed to think he must hide himself from the critical eyes of the world.

‘Your wish is my command,’ he said with rather grim humour and grasped the hand she had waved at him in an attempt to get him to take her seriously.

Tugged inexorably closer, she went without a fight. Was this exactly the reaction her inner siren had been trying to provoke from him for weeks now, even if her wicked little secret was unknown to the rest of her? Persephone felt a mass of contradictory hopes and fears churn inside her as he watched her steadily with his blue, blue eyes, both signalling the same message and never mind the silvered blur across one of them. Both wanted her and intended she should know it.

‘Don’t you know by now that you should take a very long spoon with you if you intend to sup with the devil, Miss Persephone Seaborne?’ he murmured as her gaze blurred out of focus at last and his mouth came so close to hers she could feel him not yet quite close enough to kiss her but, oh, so temptingly nearly there.

‘You’re not a devil,’ she heard herself whisper as she struggled with the idea of him as a fallen angel in all his once-perfect beauty and arrogance. ‘You’re not even half as bad as you want me to believe and you’ll
never be in the least bit like your father or brother if you live to be a hundred, Alex,’ she carried recklessly on, knowing she was tempting him to prove himself right, but unable to believe anything he did would harm her as a hot and feral excitement stirred deep inside her and clamoured for attention.

It felt as if it could do such damage to what was growing between them if he
didn’t
kiss her now. Curiosity and frustration banished her instinct to shy away from the unknown, the unimaginable gap between mystery and reality she wanted to plunge into. She longed for any of the real Alex Forthin he would leave unprotected to give, even if it exposed her heart to hurt. Perhaps sometimes you had to take headlong risks with your most vulnerable self to reach out for something wonderful that might never be if you didn’t jump.

‘For Heaven’s sake get on and kiss me, you idiot,’ she finally blurted out, afraid this was as close to it as she would get.

‘You’re the fool to risk me so much as touching you, let alone anything more,’ he countered, but he did as she asked as if he couldn’t help himself, either.

Astonished at the tight-strung tension in his body, the urgent longing of his firm
mouth on hers, Persephone realised she’d underestimated Alexander Forthin. There was fire in his intensely blue eyes and his harsh breathing; his rigidly restrained mouth on hers explored hesitantly, as if he didn’t dare unleash his deepest inner need for fear of harming or shocking her with desperation for everything she had to give. Oh, yes,
he wanted her
.

How long had he been fighting against this utter intimacy, the wild heat and desperate longing? Far too long, it seemed, from the faint tremble in his hand when he swept a stray curl behind her ear and smoothed it as if everything depended on its precise arrangement. Suspecting he did it to steady himself, to give them enough time to measure out this sweet seduction of each other and somehow get back to their sensible everyday selves, she countered by reaching up to play with his sooty locks in her turn, feeling the springy softness of them under her hands as he let her distract him, then moved both hands back so they cupped her neck and held her spellbound and open to his ever more urgent kisses.

The first sweet touch of his mouth on hers had been surprisingly gentle and almost supplicating.
Now it became ever more hot and certain as she yielded everything she had to give without any caveats of Corisande-like possibilities interfering between them. This was uniquely special and for them alone.

Persephone felt a crucial spot somewhere near her feminine core threaten to melt when he opened his mouth on hers and urged her lips to part and let him in. Nothing could have stopped her doing so short of an earthquake and perhaps not even that. It felt impossibly urgent to open to him in every way she could as his driven eagerness to wind himself into the two of them utterly disarmed her. She moaned at the heady novelty of his tongue probing her mouth, his lips urgent and nigh desperate on hers while he taught her more about kisses than she’d imagined there was to know.

All thought of experimenting with passion for a few moments then drawing back before too much damage was done melted away. Driven by a compulsion to learn all she could about wondrous and mysterious Alexander Forthin, Earl of Calvercombe, she rose on tiptoes as he shifted his hands so they rested in the small of her back and clasped her as close to him as she’d thought
any being could get, until now when a wild instinct and feminine suspicions whispered there was far more for them to know, between lovers.

It felt terribly hot in this enclosed little world she had lured them into. She felt utterly preoccupied with this ardently true self Alex protected from the rest of the world so fiercely, but had finally let her see. She revelled in the intimacy, the trust of it. A conviction she might melt from the inside out after discovering how desperately she wanted the real man under all his armour washed over her at the same time that she knew to step back and learn distance from him again would be a move she’d regret for the rest of her days.

Uncertain where this intense need they had unleashed between them might take them, she stretched against him, greedy for hot, rigidly masculine Alex Forthin’s muscular torso hard against her suddenly painful breasts. He felt firm and fit, yet alien against her own hotly aroused body. She drifted exploring hands down his strong and intriguingly sensitive nape to search his wide shoulders and narrow waist, resting there appreciatively before he forestalled her curiosity
about his neat buttocks by lifting her a little more off her feet so she was perched on top of some long-dead queen’s elaborate Spanish chest and he could control her curiosity better.

Not sure that she wanted it controlled, she pouted her dissatisfaction and saw his mouth quirk into a grin that made her heart jump with urgent delight. Somehow that boyish look had become so dear to her when she wasn’t noticing. And that reluctant half-grin of his, the half-grimace that wanted to lock out the world but somehow still had to let her in, despite his self-doubts and fury.

Under her wariness and the anger and distrust she’d felt in him ever since that night by the lake more than two months ago, had this desperation for each other been growing between them all unknowing? It had certainly sprung up like a protected plant now, sheltered from the wild tempest around it by sprouting into unstoppable growth before either of them could kill it, and how glad she was of their ignorance if this was the result.

No wonder she hadn’t let herself like him when they met again. And she reminded herself even this physical closeness and intimacy didn’t mean he’d ever let her into his
locked heart. She yearned to cause such a crack in his defences he’d never be able to shut her out again. Sheer folly, maybe, but somehow the chance and a more basic longing of her for him kept her revelling in his kisses and caresses, wound tight into the web of kissing and exploring each other they were spinning between them with every touch and taste.

He splayed a broad palm over one of her eager breasts and centred it against a shamelessly roused nipple, rubbing an emphatic sensual circle on it through her silk gown with him and her at the centre of it. She moaned on a long gasp of pleasure and felt that fire burn ever higher, feeling frustrated that her eager body gave away everything it wanted from him while setting her away from his masculinity, leaving her to guess his need of her.

Unable to damp down her ardour, curiosity, or feelings as he wanted, she shifted on the centuries’ hardened wood he’d seated her on as she felt the ties of her gown give just enough so he could draw her normally demure evening gown down to gape and let the cooling night air excite her heated skin even more. Fascinated by his expression of awed
voraciousness in the soft light of that single wax candle, she forgot his sins of omission as he uncovered her eager nipples as if they were the most precious treasure he’d ever laid eyes on.

A faint flash of colour burnt high on his aristocratic cheekbones now, a heat even less unmistakable lit his bluest of eyes to the depthless glow of a high summer sky and his mouth was full and passionate from kissing. He was centred with her, fascinated by every nuance of him and her they were exploring together. Did she look as transformed by this unexpected wonder between them? She promptly forgot her outer image as the incomparable Miss Seaborne as the real, inner Persephone took over. He flicked a wondering finger over one of those revealed and revealing, tightly urgent nipples of hers and all that mattered now was that her lover had his hands and mouth and even his very breath centred on rousing her already achingly aroused body even more desperately and she wanted even more.

Sure he was the one man on earth she could bear to see her like this, to feel her flame and need so fiercely, she drank in the sight of him. The feel of his touch on one of
her most secret places flared and flushed and she was desperate for more and ever more as she watched, fascinated at how deeply he wanted her in return. His pupils flared and contracted as he felt her respond to his touch and to watching him touch. His mouth firmed as he seemed desperate to control himself in the face of that vast and uncharted welcome of hers to do what came next and hang the consequences. She realised he was going to be strong for her in some instinctive feminine fashion, but found it impossible to chide him for it when he was wreaking such endlessly deepening pleasure on her willing body that it soaked her usually acute mind in sensual lethargy and stopped her voice in her throat.

Aghast for just a moment when he dipped his mouth to her breast, she leaned back on her hands on the rather knobbly carved surface under her and let her head hang back with a soundless groan of pleasure she only just managed to silence, in deference to the night. The damp heat of his mouth on her was a glory she wouldn’t have even begun to imagine meeting in the marriage bed. Lucky really, she decided hazily, since she might have leapt into it in the wrong company if
she’d guessed it could be like this. Not that it would be so uniquely wonderful without him, a wiser Persephone whispered.

She let one hand prop her on the unwelcoming surface of the Spanish chest and raised the other to caress his head where he feasted so tenderly hungry at her eager breasts it made tears threaten behind her half-closed eyes, even as fire shot to the secret heart of her. Moved by the unexpected magic of them together, she flexed her upper body until she could kiss his noble, stubborn head while he nuzzled and drove her nigh crazy with the molten heat rippling like a rip tide between her hard peaked nipples and the hot core of her. The wild rhythm of it all seemed likely to drag her into either agony or ecstasy at any moment.

Raising his head as if he regretted every inch that separated him from her now heavily roused and yet hotly tight breasts, he met her eyes for a long moment of wonder before he put his hands about her slender waist and urged her closer to the edge of her impromptu perch. Unable to deny him anything he wanted of her, even while she was still struggling with her surprise that he was the
one
, her only lover, she let him splay her
slender legs a little further apart and hitch up irrelevant skirts before he shocked her with sensuality once more. This time he knelt between her legs and caressed the dark curls at her very centre before giving her a long look as if to tell her all he couldn’t say out loud, then he set his mouth to the heated core of her and gently held her still when she would have shied away in an instinctive protest at such an unmapped and undreamt-of intimacy.