Fascination -and- Charmed (72 page)

She could not have stopped him—even if she completely remembered that she should. His touch was drugging. Pippa felt her lips part and could not close them. She rose to her toes and could not make her heels seek the ground again.

Keeping her hands against his mouth, he bowed his head until she could not see his face,

Pippa wanted to stroke his hair.

She wanted to caress his face, his strong neck, his wide shoulders.

His back had felt so good when she’d rested her cheek there.

Pippa
needed
to press her cheek to his back again—his naked back!

She gasped aloud.

Calum didn’t raise his face.

He was distant now, and…angry?

“You are angry?” It was as much a statement as a question.

Once, twice, he brought his brow down upon her fists; then he released her. He released her and put her, very deliberately, from him. “I am not angry, Pippa.”

He sounded angry. “You would like me to leave now,” she said, backing away.

“Do
not
leave me.”

The still fury in his voice took her breath away. “What is it, Calum? What
is
all this? What is happening to us?” She took a step toward him, but he retreated. “Please, tell me how I may comfort you.”

“No one can comfort me,” he told her. There was ice in his voice now.

“But you are in pain.”

“What would you know of pain?” His harsh laugh hurt her. “You have never known confusion. You have never known a moment of doubt. Not about who you are or what your life is bound to become.”

“No,” she said slowly. “That is true.”

“Well, I…” He pinched the bridge of his nose and she saw muscles flicker in his jaw. “I have been deeply troubled about a friend of mine. I have known him a long time, and of late, he has changed. That causes me grave concern.”

“Do I know this man?”

“He has moved in circles entirely removed from your own. Mostly in Scotland.”

“Ah, I see.” Her one visit to Scotland had been some years since. “Why do you think this friend has changed?”

His ragged breath seared her heart. Pippa reached for him, but he held up his arms, warning her off.

“Tell me about him,” she said gently.

“He is a man adrift,” Calum said. “Are you cold?”

“Not really,” she lied.

Calum removed his coat and slipped it around her shoulders.

“Now you are cold,” she told him, but she breathed in his marvelous masculine scent and held the garment close.

“I shall like that coat the better for knowing it has kept you warm.”

Tears sprang into her eyes and she blinked them away. His simple words could reduce her to trembling vulnerability.

And she adored that vulnerability—with him. “Your friend?” she prompted, praying he would not hear the depth of emotion he aroused in her.

Bowing his head again, he rested his fists on narrow hips. “He doesn’t know what he should do next in his life. He has encountered such tragedy. Such wasteful, useless tragedy.”

His full-sleeved white shirt billowed. Moonlight shone through the fine fabric, casting his powerful body in dark silhouette.

She wanted to put her hands inside his shirt and feel his warm flesh.

An evil, carnal creature.

Beyond help.

Pippa averted her eyes. “What was…If you would like to tell me. What was this tragedy?”

“He has confronted the fact,” Calum said, his voice so low she had to strain to hear it, “that he lost something very dear before he ever had it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“How could you? He has discovered that his parents died before he could meet them.”

“Oh.” Pippa stepped involuntarily toward Calum and this time he didn’t retreat. She slipped her arms around his waist and looked up at him. “How could such a terrible thing be?”

“There was a mistake. He was lost to his parents, and when he returned they were no longer there.”

“Poor man.”

“Poor man, indeed. Poor, confused man. He feels a great sense of loss, as if he is grieving, yet he had never expected to grieve.”

“This is so sad. We must help him.”

He looked at her then. “We?” He brushed the backs of his fingers over her cheek and tilted his head sideways to study her.

Pippa swallowed hard. “I am not a stranger to adversity. At Dowanhill, I was the one our people came to with their problems.”

“And you dispensed a little food and instructions for exercising greater thrift in future, no doubt.”

She should be angry, but she couldn’t be. “You are suffering for your friend,” she said. “That suffering is making you unkind. I am a good listener, Calum. Sometimes people most need to be listened to.”

“You are wise beyond your age and sex,” he said. “My friend is lost, Pippa. He is a man who has never really known himself. A man always playing roles and trying to be what he thought he was supposed to be without ever finding true comfort.”

A coldness stole about Pippa’s heart and she felt again the welling of tears.

Calum tucked back curls that had fallen forward from her chignon. “I have upset you,” he said gently. “I did not intend to do so. I would never willingly do so.”

“I think this friend of yours knows my heart,” she said in a voice that shook.

He appeared bemused. “How so?”

“Like your friend, I have never been entirely certain of my place. Or rather, I have known what I yearned for, but at the same time I have understood that it could never be.”

“It is not at all the same thing,” he told her curtly.

Pippa stiffened and tried to blink back the tears.

“Damn!” He swept an arm around her waist and drove the fingers of his other hand into the hair at her temple. “I have made you cry. I never want to cause you pain, sweet one.”

She shook her head, laughing through the tears that were overflowing despite her best efforts to stem them.

“Yes, I have hurt you when you sought to understand…You wanted to find a way to comfort my friend.”

“I would very much like to comfort him.”

“Would you?”

She would like to help this friend because she wanted to help Calum.

She would like at this very moment to be kissed by Calum.

“I would help him,” she said, her lashes flickering downward. “Tell me how I can do that.”

“He is very close to me. My happiness invariably makes him a great deal happier.”

“It does?”

“Most certainly.”

“And you are not happy?”

“I think I could be. And you could help me in this.”

“Tell me how.”

The scent of sweet Williams reached her on a breeze. Water from the fountain scattered upon marble, like crystal chips on ice-coated glass. From below the cliffs came the sound of waves shushing over rock and sand.

“How can I help you, Calum?”

His lips were parted when they descended to hers. Firm and commanding, his mouth slanted over hers. Pliant, clever, practiced, his lips and tongue sought and found, delved and tasted and stole what they sought. And Pippa began to crumple in his arms. Her legs wobbled and Calum brought her firmly against his body.

He was hard and honed and warm and strong.

And he was pulsing and pushing and huge and hot where That leaped at her belly through his breeches and through the gown that was too insubstantial to disguise the length and thickness of him.

“Yes,” she said on a sigh. “Yes, that is exactly it.”

“What is it?” he asked. His hands sought and covered her breasts beneath his coat. With his palms he made circles over her nipples and she began to melt. “Tell me, Pippa.”

She must not tell him. Inexperienced she might be. A fool she most definitely was not.

“Tell me.”

He eased her bodice the tiniest bit and cool air stroked her bared nipples.

“
Tell
me.”

Gently, with fingers and thumbs, he tugged her nipples. Pippa’s knees became nonexistent.

He bent his head and, with the greatest of care, sucked a nipple into his mouth.

“Don’t…stop,” she gasped. “I wanted to tell you not…to…stop. And I want to…I want to…touch you.”

She heard the
plop
as he pulled with his lips and let go before moving to her other breast. Working with the tip of his tongue, he paused just long enough to say, “You are touching me,” before he continued to roll her nipple back and forth and to swirl his tongue around it in a manner that blotted all conscious thought from Pippa.

“I should like to do whatever you would like me to do,” she told Calum, clinging to him by handfuls of his hair.

“Whatever?”

“I am in your hands.”

“And in my mouth,” he murmured, pulling hard enough to make her cry out with exquisite ecstasy. “I want you for my own, Pippa, and I intend to have you.”

“We can be together like this for a long time, I think.” She fumbled with his stock. “You are undoubtedly right. No one-will come looking for us.”

“That will not be enough.”

“No.”

“You agree?”

“Yes. Only I don’t know what I’m agreeing to.”

“You’re agreeing to swim naked with me. And sleep naked with me. And share everything there is to share between a man and a woman.”

“I should like that awfully much.”

Fastening his mouth to her breast again, he pressed a massive thigh between her legs and braced his foot on something Pippa couldn’t see.

“Oh,” was all she could say. The rest of her wits were required for her to cling to his shoulders.

She heard a tearing sound and realized her bodice had given way. “Oh, Calum, my dress.”

“Forget the dress.” He hadn’t finished talking before he held her to him with one arm and lifted her skirts up around her waist with his other hand. “I want to give you pleasure, Pippa. You are a passionate man’s dream and I want to be the passionate man you need. Give yourself up to me.”

Rocking her, he caused her to ride his thigh as if she were astride a bareback stallion.

“Calum—”

“Hush.” His big hands covered her breasts and his fingers beneath her arms anchored her.

Helpless in the grip of sensations that ripped from her slick center to parts deep within her for which she knew no name, Pippa filled her hands with Calum’s shirt and let her head fall back.

“So beautiful,” he said. “My God, I will have you, Pippa. I will make you mine, and no other man will ever be able to satisfy you but me.”

“I am not supposed to fe—el this.” Throbbing, pulsing waves of fire began to break. “It can only be because you are not my hu—usband.”

He kissed her throat and manipulated his fingers between her legs.

“Oh, Ca-lum.” She could not bear it. And she could not bear it to be over.
“Please.”

When she felt his finger press inside her, she tried, without success, to stiffen. “We must not do this,” she told him.

His finger was inside her and his thumb stroked back and forth over the small bud of flesh that felt swollen and slippery. He stroked her inside and he stroked her outside and the fiery waves crashed.

Pippa jerked; she bowed forward and found something with her teeth, something that gave just a little but afforded a means to stop her from falling through space and time forever.

Waves of fire became rings of fire, spreading outward as if her body were molten liquid heat into which Calum had thrust a silver arrow fresh from the smith’s oven.

Pippa could not guess how much time had passed with the fading ripples before Calum caught her up into his arms and held her so fiercely it hurt. She didn’t care.

Then she realized it had been his shoulder into which she had sunk her teeth, and she cried out, “I have wounded you”

“You have branded my shoulder,” he said. “I’ll wear your brand with pride, my sweet.”

“I do not understand myself,” she said when she could speak again.

Calum nuzzled her cheek and kissed her closed eyes. “I know you don’t. You amaze me. You are a treasure. My treasure. When I think I might never have found you, I am sick to my soul.”

She was weak. And her gown was in tatters. And there were many things to be said. Many things to be dealt with. She had been incapable of stopping what had just happened, but she knew it should not have happened.

“It must not happen again,” she said, knowing that she wanted, more than anything else, for it to happen again.

“You’ll not be hurt, Pippa. That I promise you.”

“Neither will you,” she told him. “This thing that happens between us is entirely my fault.”

She heard him draw in a breath and hold it.

“Yes, Calum. You are disturbed now that you consider the truth. I have tempted you into this behavior. I followed you because I cannot stay away from you. I am beyond help in this unless you go away where I cannot find you.”

“You tell me to go with your lips. Your heart tells me otherwise.”

“You are dangerous—the devil—tempting me, charming me, until I do not know myself. If I do not find a way to keep you from me, you are doomed…and I am doomed.”

“You really think Franchot would—”

“He would kill you, and if he spared my life, I would soon wish he had not done so.”

“Oh, my dear. I shall never let anything happen to you. Such a thing is unthinkable. I have known other women. You must know that without my telling you. But none could ever compare with you. You do things no fine brandy could do. You are golden sunrise and crimson sunset. You are ice patterns on winter windowpanes and sun scintillating through summer leaves. You enchant me.”

Tears again.
“You take my breath away, Calum.”

“You have entirely stolen mine.”

“Please put me down.”

“I don’t ever want to put you down.”

“Put me down now. Please, Calum.”

Carefully, sliding her down his length, he did as she asked.

Pippa surveyed the wreckage of her gown and set to work pulling and patching and smoothing. “Hopeless,” she said. “I must find a way inside without being seen.”

“We cannot act too quickly,” Calum said. “There are others to be considered now.”

“I will make certain we see as little as possible of each other,” she told him. It was the only answer.