Joan Wolf (30 page)

“So are you,” I said. And I meant it. Just looking at his body caused the heat to rise inside me. He bent his head to kiss me, and our naked bodies came together. I felt him pressed against me, hard as a spear, and a ripple of sensation fluttered through my loins. “Annabelle,” he said, and his tongue came deeply into my mouth.

Another ripple of sensation spread through me, then another. He picked me up and laid me on the bed. He began to kiss my breasts.

The ripple turned into waves of intense feeling.

“I love you,” he said. He kept on saying it while he continued to kiss me all over, and my heart began to race so swiftly that I thought it would jump right out of my body.

I said his name in a hoarse voice that didn’t sound like mine at all. I ran my fingers up and down his bare arms, stopping as I touched the familiar ridged scar above his right elbow that had been left by an arrow badly aimed by Jasper when Stephen was eleven.

His mouth came back to mine, and his kiss was so hard that it drove my head back into the pillow. I answered his urgency by opening myself so he could enter.

He surged into me, and little sobs of relief and anticipation caught in my throat. I could feel my internal tissues softening around the iron hardness that was Stephen, and I held tightly to his upper arms as I lifted my legs to take him even deeper inside.

He groaned.

His skin was hot and slippery with sweat. Inside, the core of me quivered and began to yield.

“Dear God,” Stephen said. It sounded as if he were talking through clenched teeth. “Annabelle.”

I believe I might have sobbed.

“Now?” he said, still in that clenched-sounding voice.

My fingers tightened their grip on his arms. “Yes,” I said, and he began to drive into me with such intensity that he pushed me all the way up the bed until my head was pressed against the headboard and we could go no farther. I felt the final explosion beginning to roll through me, shooting out in all directions from the part of Stephen that was responsible for making all of this fierce pleasure. I cried out.

Stephen responded, his voice sounding hoarsely in my ear. He drove into me once more, and I felt his own passion explode within mine. We clung together in our extremity, helpless as leaves driven before the typhoon of our mutual desire. Very, very slowly, Stephen collapsed on top of me. I felt the heat of his body, the laboring of his breath, the heavy hammer strokes of his heart, and was violently, triumphantly happy.

I reached my arms around him and held him close, and we lay together, unmoving, for a long time. My mind was empty of everything except the knowledge that we were together.

Finally Stephen’s heartbeat began to slow, and I heard him say, “I’m too heavy for you.”

“You’re not as light as you used to be,” I agreed.

He rolled off me, then once more gathered me close, so that my cheek was pillowed on his shoulder. I sighed and noticed that a few strands of my hair were spread across his chest, looking very pale against his deeply tanned skin.

“Do you think you are going to stay brown forever?” I asked curiously. My lips brushed against the bare skin of his collarbone, and it tasted salty from sweat.

I could feel the laugh rumbling in his chest. “I expect the color will fade eventually,” he said.

I was glad to hear this. I didn’t like anything that reminded me of the years he had spent in Jamaica.

Stephen said, “Annabelle, do we really have to wait for six more months?”

I don’t know what caused me to hesitate. After all, I had already made up my mind that I would many him. “I... I don’t know,” I said with uncharacteristic indecision.

“You don’t care the snap of your fingers for what people think,” he said persuasively. “You know you don’t.”

I sat up. My loose hair streamed over my shoulders and breasts, giving me the illusion of modesty. “Stephen,” I said abruptly, “why didn’t you communicate with me before you left for Jamaica?”

He raised his brows, as if surprised by my question. He replied in a soft, reasonable voice, “Papa locked me in my room, and the following day he packed me off to Southampton to board a ship. You know that, Annabelle.”

I knew it, and I also knew that he could have seen me if he had tried. At the very least, he could have gotten a message to me. I had not attempted to see him because I had not realized that he was to have only the one more night at home. But
Stephen had known. He had known, and still he had not tried to communicate with me.

I looked down into the deep, familiar blue of his eyes. Desire looked back at me, and tenderness, and love.

How could you have done this to me?

I wanted to scream the words at him, but I knew he would give me no answer.

He reached up one hand and tangled it in my hair. “God in heaven,” he said with suppressed violence. “I look at you, Annabelle, and I feel like a man who has been dying of thirst in the middle of the Sahara. All I want to do is drink, and drink and drink...”

He reached up with his other hand and began to caress my breast. The touch of his fingers was gentle, but I could feel the urgency he was trying to restrain.

“Good heavens, Stephen,” I said faintly. “Don’t you need some time to recuperate? “

“After five years of drought, I could do this all night,” he assured me. “Easily.”

I had sworn a solemn oath to myself that I would never ask him whether or not he had been with a woman while he was in Jamaica. If he had, I told myself, I didn’t want to know about it.

Consequently I was horrified to hear my voice asking, “Are you telling me that you remained celibate for the entire five years that you were gone?”

His finger lightly teased my nipple. “Yes,” he said in a preoccupied kind of voice. “I did.”

I believed him. Under similar circumstances I would not have believed any other man in the world, but I believed Stephen. He didn’t lie. Which, of course, was why I had been afraid to ask him that question in the first place.

“Why?” I demanded. “It couldn’t have been loyalty to me—not after you had learned I was married to Gerald.”

He ran his finger back and forth along the place where my breasts swelled out above my ribs, and the caress made me shiver.

“All of the white women were married, and the black women weren’t free to make their own choices,” he said. “I would never force myself on a woman who couldn’t say no.”

I couldn’t imagine any woman wanting to say no to Stephen, but I felt curiously satisfied by his reply.

I smiled down at him, and my hair streamed all around us, enclosing us inside a lavender-scented tent. I bent my head and fluttered a row of tiny kisses along the line of his jaw. He turned his face and captured my mouth with his own. He ran his hand down my side to my hip, then across my right thigh to rest between my legs.

Desire shuddered through me.

He murmured into my mouth, “Let’s do it again,” and before I quite knew what was happening, he had rolled me over, pressed me flat back upon the bed, and was entering me once more.

My body closed around him, and the delicious pleasure began to build again.

“God,” he said, “it feels so good.”

I arched my back and my neck, lifting the lower part of my body toward him.

“I love you, Stephen,” I said. Sensation sizzled through me, and I gasped out loud. His face was hard and concentrated.

“It’s you and me,” he said. “Just you and me, Annabelle.”

“Always,” I told him. “Always.”

He didn’t leave until an hour before dawn. “I don’t know what I’m going to say to the chambermaid,” I complained as he buttoned his shirt by the light of the lamp that we had never extinguished. “The state of this bed is suspicious, to say the least.”

Stephen gave up trying to tuck in his shirt and just let it hang outside his trousers. He looked at me and said firmly, “It will be far less scandalous if we simply go ahead and get married, Annabelle.”

It’s you and me, Annabelle. Just you and me.

Once I had believed that to be true. If only I could believe it again!

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

He yawned so enormously that his eyes watered. “Do you think Giles would mind?”

I was sitting up in bed, watching him dress, and I answered, “I don’t know, Stephen. Perhaps he would. Perhaps it would be wiser to wait.”

A tear from the yawn was clinging to one of his long eyelashes. “I have to go into Brighton today to see Tom Clarkson, and when I get back we’ll talk about it.”

I folded my arms across my bare breasts. “We had plenty of opportunity to talk tonight.”

He ran his fingers through his hair, pushing it away from his face, and the tear on his lash was dislodged. He said with a smile, “I had other things on my mind tonight.”

My own voice held a distinct quaver. “Stephen, if you really think someone is trying to kill you, is it wise to go into Brighton?”

“I will be careful, Annabelle,” he replied soothingly. “I promise.” His hair had slipped back over his forehead, and the curve of his mouth as he looked at me was tender. But I knew my Stephen. Nothing I could say would keep him home.

“We’ll talk after I come back from Brighton,” he said. And with that promise I had to be content.

Chapter Twenty-one

When I saw Stephen at breakfast five hours after we had parted, I greeted him with the same degree of casual pleasantness with which I addressed Jasper and Nell. I proceeded to fill my plate, then took a seat and began to eat ravenously.

“You seem unusually hungry this morning,” Stephen said from his place next to mine. I glanced at him and saw amusement in the faint narrowing of his eyes.

“I get a lot of exercise,” I said, and his eyes narrowed a trifle more.

Jasper said, “I wonder where Jack is. He isn’t in his room, because I looked in there before I came downstairs.”

“He is in the nursery, having breakfast with Giles and Miss Stedham,” Stephen said.

Damn, I thought. I had gone to check on Giles earlier, before the nursery breakfast was served, and at that time there had been no sign of Jack.

Jasper stared at Stephen. “And what were you doing in the nursery?”

“I just looked in to see Giles for a moment,” Stephen replied. He stirred some cream into his coffee. “Being shot at is an unnerving experience.”

“Yes,” said Jasper, the Peninsula veteran. “I know.”

I felt extremely encouraged by Jasper’s obvious displeasure with Stephen. “My goodness,” I said lightly, “Giles has become amazingly popular ever since he acquired such a beautiful governess.”

Nell’s eyes went immediately to Stephen, who was sipping his coffee calmly. I turned my own gaze on Jasper and found him looking grim.

I was delighted by this evidence that he was not indifferent to Miss Stedham’s charms.

“I promised Giles and Miss Stedham that they could accompany me on a ride to the Downs this morning,” I said to Jasper. “Would you care to join us?”

Like magic, the harsh lines in Jasper’s face transformed themselves into curves of pleasure. “I would enjoy that very much, Annabelle,” he said.

“I’ll join you, too, if I may,” Stephen said.

Jasper’s grim expression returned, and I had to repress a satisfied smile. My glee was short-lived, however, extinguished by Nell saying in an oddly hesitant voice, “I should enjoy a ride also, Annabelle, if you don’t mind.”

I shot her a quick look and found her stealing another glance at Stephen. “Of course I don’t mind, Nell,” I said pleasantly, but to myself I thought again, Damn.

It was beginning to look very much as if Aunt Fanny might be right about Nell having a
tendre
for Stephen. I turned to him and said, “You don’t have time for a ride if you’re going to the antislavery rally in Brighton today.”

“I’m not leaving until noon. I have plenty of time for a ride this morning.” His eyes met mine and he added gently, “It will be perfectly safe in so large a group, Annabelle.”

I bit my lip.

“Safe?” Nell echoed in bewilderment.

I sighed. “Well, if you must come,” I said to Stephen, “I have a horse I’d like you to ride.”

Jasper put down his fork. “Which horse is that, Annabelle? “

I poured myself some more coffee and reached for the sugar bowl. It was empty. I turned my head and the footman stationed next to the sideboard came immediately and took away the bowl to refill it.

I answered Jasper, “One of the Thoroughbreds I bought from Lord Carlton. His name is Magpie.”

“An unusual name,” Jasper murmured.

“Isn’t Magpie the black horse with the white blaze, the one that threw the groom who was delivering him?” Nell asked.

“He is a trifle nervous,” I conceded.

“A trifle nervous! I heard the groom talking to Grimes, Annabelle. That horse nearly put him under the wheels of a carriage three times!”

Nell was clearly upset by the thought of Stephen riding Magpie.

“He was probably afraid of the traffic on the road,” Stephen said. “Thoroughbreds can be very skittish.”

Jasper said, “Yes, but skittish horses do not make good hunters.” He raised his eyebrows at me. “Why on earth did you buy such an animal, Annabelle?”

The footman returned the sugar bowl to the table. “Thank you, William,” I said as I stirred a spoonful into my coffee. I looked at Jasper and explained, “Every once in a while I take a chance on a horse. This colt is extremely good-looking and extremely well bred.”

“If he is such a wonderful horse, then why did Lord Carlton sell him? “ Nell demanded.

I had to admit, “Because he is so skittish.”

“He’ll be fine,” Stephen said, and got up to help himself to another plate of kippers.

Nell gave him a worried look.

Damn, I thought to myself once more.

* * * *

An hour later, Jasper and I went down to the stables together.

“What did Stephen mean by being safe in a large group?” he asked me abruptly as we began to walk along the path that ran from the back door of the house directly to the stableyard half a mile away.

I couldn’t see any reason for keeping my suspicions a secret from my cousin, so I replied, “It looks very much as if Stephen were shot at deliberately the other day, Jasper.”