Bride of the Shining Mountains (The St. Claire Men) (23 page)

In his mind, he rode Euripides through the streets like a madman,
and, pulling the
animal
to a heart-pounding stop before the front gate, he flung into the
house, past a grave-faced Antoine Garrett and a crying Bessie. “Papa met me on
the stairs, and from the look on his face, I knew. Stunned, sick with grief, I
pleaded with him to let me pass. I had to see Clay. I had to—”

“But he would not let you.”

“No. It seems the man Clay had sent to find me lingered outside
just long enough to hear the argument, yet not long enough to see me depart and
he seemed to feel duty-bound to carry his conclusions back to my father. As I
pushed past him, he grabbed Grandfather’s sword—”  He broke off, and it was a
full minute before he could go on. “The blade was well honed, despite its age,
and laid my face open to the bone. Papa looked shocked by what he had done, but
he never reached a hand to help me as I stumbled from the house and into the
street. Just beyond the gate I fell, and it was there that Uncle Navarre found
me a short time later. I owe Navarre my life. If not for him we would not be standing
here now.” He took a deep, cleansing breath and looked down into her upturned
face, steeling himself for the worst. “So now you know.”

She nodded, her eyes suspiciously moist, and as he watched, a
single tear bridged her lashes and trickled slowly down her cheek.

“Reagan, love, do
not.”
He plied his thumb, smoothing the moisture away, and another tear
took the first one’s place. This one he kissed away, taking her face in his
hands, nuzzling her lowered lids, her cheek, her temple. To enfold her in his
embrace, to murmur endearments meant to soothe in her ear, seemed the most
natural thing in the world. More than mere words, they slipped easily from him,
seeming all the stranger for the fact that he meant every word. “You are sweetness
itself, all woman. Pure temptation.”

Jackson lowered his dark head, touching his mouth to hers, tasting
the salt of her tears, wanting more than he had any right to ask.

He was her guardian, her sworn protector, and the irony of the
fact that he happened to be the one she most needed protection from was not
lost upon him. It did not, however, prevent him from taking what she so sweetly
offered.

From the moment he touched her, Reagan was lost. She had begged
for the truth, and he had given his all. But the experience had forged a bond
between them that Reagan suspected could not be easily broken.

She felt it now, warm and pliable, yet steely strong, winding its
way around them, drawing them closer, closer, until they met and melded,
straining, one toward the other.

He kissed her thoroughly, deeply, bending her back over his
forearm, ravishing her lips with his, driving her to the edge of madness, and
perhaps a single step beyond.

She wove her arms around his neck, tangled her hands in the thick,
cool silk of his hair.
Love me
...
oh, Jackson,
love me.
The words were a silent litany, an
unspoken prayer repeated again and again, and she could only wonder when she
had come to care for him so deeply.

It wasn’t wise.

It wasn’t something she could admit.

But it was there. Was she falling in love with him? The thought
terrified her, making her pull back in alarm.

Undaunted, Jackson bent to kiss her throat, nibbling his way
unerringly down. With a well-placed hand beneath his chin, she forced his head
up, shivering when he raked her with his burning gaze. “Is it customary for a
guardian to kiss his ward in so scandalous a fashion?” she asked a trifle
breathlessly. “In Kentucky it’s considered highly improper for a woman to have
intimate knowledge of a man who is not her husband, prior to the vows being
said.”

“Alas, my love, we are not in Kentucky. We’re in Saint Louis, a
city second in sin only to New Orleans. A number of improper things occur here
at any given moment, and since it seems that the scandalous, as well as the
improper, are my forte, I should be more than glad to instruct you.”

Reagan moaned as Jackson crushed her to him, raining a trail of
scorching kisses along the curve of her jaw and down her throat to the ridge of
her collarbone.

She should stop him now, she thought; then Jackson found her
nipple through the thin lawn of her night rail, and all she could manage was a
startled gasp.

Heat assailed her, sweeping through her, threatening to overwhelm
her. She reached out to push him back, and her fingers threaded into his hair
instead, curled lovingly at his nape, holding him there as the petals of a
burgeoning passion unfurled in the pit of her belly. Foreign, yet familiar, it
glowed white-hot, then grew molten, bubbling up to sear her vitals and stream
along her veins.

Through a haze of desire, Reagan felt him urge the robe from her
shoulders, and she lowered her arms to accommodate him, suddenly wanting it
gone. With a sibilant hiss it fell to the floor at their feet, and was
instantly forgotten as Jackson left one breast in favor of the other.

He worshiped each fully, teasing the nipple to aching hardness,
abrading its sensitive nib with his teeth and the tip of his tongue, then
drawing it into his mouth and tugging gently.

Reagan’s breath came quick and shallow. The torment went on and on
until she could stand no more. Then she took his face in her hands as he’d done
to her a moment ago, tipped it up, and kissed him.

It was a deep kiss, filled with all the longing, the pent-up
passion she’d endured in stoic silence on the wilderness
trail,
the loneliness she’d felt
here in Saint Louis. He was everything to her, and silently she told him so,
slowly working the buttons that closed the front of his shirt from their
moorings, slipping the garment down over his broad shoulders, and whisking it
away. In a thrice it joined the wrapper on the floor of the gallery, a splash
of ghostly white against the bottle green. “This is madness,” Reagan said
softly.

Jackson made no reply, catching the hem of her voluminous night
rail instead, sliding his hand underneath. Reagan felt his hand graze the
sensitive flesh of her inner thigh, and her breath caught in her throat. “I
want you, Kaintuck. Tell me that you feel what I feel.”

His fingers glided over Reagan’s skin, higher, higher. “Wanting
isn’t good enough,” she insisted. “Wanting doesn’t last beyond the moment.”

“Only the sun, the moon, and the stars last forever,” he said.
“Human lives are frail, fleeting. Moments like this one are all that matter,
the only thing of any value in this world.” He kissed her again, determinedly,
persuasively. He kissed her until she could not catch her breath, until her
limbs were wobbly and weak and she had no more will to resist. Slowly, almost
of their own volition, her hands came to rest on his warm, bare chest, her
fingers splayed, reaching. As she tried and failed to form a convincing
argument in her mind, Jackson covered Reagan’s hand with one of his own,
guiding it down over the satiny skin of his chest to the waistband of his
trousers and beyond.

“Will you touch me,
ma cherie
amour?”
he asked softly, so gently. “I’ve
an unquenchable thirst for the feel of your small, deft hands on my body.”

Reagan did touch him. She knew she should have been shocked, but
propriety and outraged virtue were swept far beyond her grasp as his fingers
found the secret place at the apex of her thighs, and all thought of the
consequences of their actions, all thought of tomorrow, of prospective husbands
and marriage beds, drifted slowly away, leaving the growing certainty that
Jackson was right.

She could not live for tomorrow, could not deny herself the chance
to live her dream, even if that dream was fleeting. She’d wanted him for what
seemed like an eternity, and it occurred to her that when she was old and gray,
and wed fifty years to another man, she would have the memory of this night and
her love for this tragic man to cherish, and to sustain her.

And she did love
him
.

She’d loved him almost from the beginning. She loved him for his
kindness and thoughtfulness and generosity, his arrogance, his dark, dangerous
good looks, and the fact that he snored. Most of all she loved his intensity,
the way he was looking down into her face as he touched her
there
... as he kindled a fire in
her blood and her loins that threatened to rage out of control.

The way he watched her made her blush; instinctively she tried to
turn her face away, to bury it in the curve of his throat, anything to avoid
his penetrating gaze.

Selfishly, he would not permit it, and forced her back. “Don’t
turn away from me, Kaintuck. I want to watch your rapt expression as the
ecstasy claims you. I want to see your torment, your triumph, and know that I’m
the cause of it.”

‘ ‘You would strip my soul bare and leave me bereft,” Reagan said.

Chuckling darkly, he bent to his task, teasing her senses,
manipulating her woman’s body, silently promising heaven, then deliberately
holding it back. “Not bereft,” he whispered. “Never bereft. I would never leave
you wanting.”

Reagan was not so certain. The tension that gripped her, that made
her heart flutter like a wild thing in her chest, was mounting at a terrifying
pace. It was terrible and wonderful, frightening and delicious. She wanted it
to go on forever; she wanted it finished.

Gripping his shoulders, she silently willed him to end it, begged
him without uttering a sound to give her surcease. Jackson replied just as
silently, opening the front flap of his trousers, wrapping her in his embrace.
Then, with the wrought-iron support at her back, he caught her left leg at the
knee, bending it, guiding it over his hip.

As Reagan stared up into his shadowed visage, he brought her hips
against his, the rock-hard shaft of his manhood, now fully aroused, taking the
place of his hand, slowly stroking, caressing, coaxing the burgeoning ache in
Reagan’s woman’s flesh to a painful, pleasurable peak without ever achieving a
true penetration.

On and on it went, until Reagan thought she would die from
wanting. Clutching at him, she tried to wrench control from him, tried to force
him to claim her in truth. She wanted him inside of her, she wanted all of him,
everything he was willing to give. He denied her, withdrawing so far that she
feared he would leave her completely, then thrusting again.

Just when she could stand no more, just when she thought she would
go stark, raving mad from die unbearable intimacy of the act, the spasms
claimed her, flooding her senses with a pleasure so intense that it left her
shaken and weak.

Watching her closely, Jackson saw her lids drift down, saw her
face go slack, felt the throb of her woman’s flesh, and knew that he had
brought her to the pinnacle of physical bliss. Then and only then did he allow
himself to follow, thrusting once, twice, and melting against her.

Reagan was on her knees peering under the bed when an insistent
scratching sounded on the bedchamber door. “In a minute, Josephine,” she said
impatiently, continuing to grope the dim recesses beneath the four-poster bed
in search of the bottle green wrapper. “Hang it all, it’s got to be here
somewhere!” The scratching came again, accompanied by a woman’s voice. “Mam’selle?
Mam’selle, are you awake?”

Startled, Reagan raised up, hitting her head on the heavy wooden
bed frame. Biting back an epithet, she scrambled from under the bed and sat rubbing
her head while Josephine, curled cat-fashion at the foot of the bed, looked on.

The scratching came again. “Just a minute,” Reagan called out,
scanning the room with a frantic glance. And then she remembered the heavy
thunder, the blue-white flash of lightning, the soul-shattering moment on the
broad gallery when the cool satin had slithered down her arms, and she gave an
inward groan.

It all came rushing back as she glanced at the long French
windows, open now to the blinding morning light... every touch, every kiss, all
of the mind-numbing sensations and the feeling of being swept up and borne
away, beyond rational thought, far beyond the reach of her moral integrity,
from her knowledge of right and wrong.

She’d lost her mind last night. She’d let her heart have sway over
her woman’s flesh, and it didn’t bode well for her future that she suffered no
scalding sense of shame for her actions. All she could think of as she snatched
a quilt off the brass-bound trunk at the foot of the bed and wrapped it around
her was that she’d gotten precisely what she wanted.