My Dearest Enemy (35 page)

"Tonight?" Avery asked incredulously.

"Not only tonight, but right now. Hob's waiting out front with the carriage this minute. Ah, well. Least ways maybe we'll all gets some sleep tonight. Teresa's babes do have right healthy lungs," she said morosely and left him standing alone.

Avery returned to his room, unhappily aware that he couldn't see the drive from here, but determined not to go downstairs and press his nose to the front window and watch them drive away. Still the sense that they'd abandoned him—no, that
she'd
abandoned him—gnawed at him.

He resented her going away without saying a word, even if it were only for the night. Then he realized that soon she'd go away not just for a night but forever and he wondered if she would take her leave like this, silently, without a word of good-bye. Emotion stirred and boiled within him, exasperation and grief dogging his footsteps as he paced the length of the room over and over again. He heard the door slam shut a final time, the gong of the hall clock mark the ninth hour, homely sounds coming from the back stairs and then silence.

It enveloped him, stretched about him, pure and wholly hateful. He settled into a chair and picked up a book lying on the table next to it. With Lily's departure Mill House had become a mausoleum, no longer the home of his imagination but simply a receptacle of funerary items, the mementos of a life already lived.

Ridiculous
. He opened the book and began leafing through the pages, his unseeing eyes fixed on the flow of senseless words.

He was simply romanticizing, as any man who has perhaps come a little too close to having taken his last breath might do. Soon Mill House would be his, as it should have been from the first. He would see Lily taken care of, with or without her approval, and he would live here and he would marry some worthy woman who would not have black hair and dark eyes or a mouth fashioned from a dream, but one who would bear him anemic blond children—

A letter fluttered off the table onto his lap. He stared at it, the ragged fold lines, stained with the grit of three continents. Tenderly, he picked it up. It was her letter, of course. He'd kept it with him since the first time he read it. With an oath, he surged to his feet. The letter fell from his numb fingertips. He hurled the book across the room.

He couldn't stay in this room. Even though she'd never been here, he felt her, she was with him, in the words of that letter, in the air that they shared, in spirit and body.

He made for the door, prepared to follow her, and drag her back, to make her say good-bye, but not, please God, not leave him here like this.

He jerked open the door and looked down into Lily's face.

Her courage having earlier failed her, Lily had finally found an excuse to come back. She would see if he'd had his dinner. There'd be no reason to bother Merry or Kathy—

"I can't stop thinking about you," he said.

She heard him and reality crumpled around her. This had to be some sort of dream, one from which she wanted never to wake. His face was strained and intense, his voice pleading and low.

She stepped closer, her chin tilted up as she listened, trying to read what was in his eyes.

"I—" He cast his gaze heavenward as though for strength… or inspiration. "I just want to kiss you so damn much."

It was the last thing she'd expected. In fascination, she searched his face. She must have moved closer, carried toward him by pure magnetism. With a dazed sense of disbelief, she waited for the next moment. She was a voyager in her own body: feeling her heart thudding anxiously, listening to the shallow rapid draws of her breath. The promise of his words, the stark hunger in his eyes bedazzled her and left her naked in her own mind's eye, exposed to whatever he wanted, whatever he wished.

This
was abandonment. And it never occurred to her to resist.

"Let me kiss you," he whispered. He raised one strong hand and using only the tips of his fingers, tilted her chin up. She rose on her toes. Her eyelids fluttered shut and she heard him make a sound halfway between a sigh and a groan.

Gently, his lips touched hers. They retreated, an absence measured in seconds, and returned for another exquisite kiss and then another and then, again, another. With each kiss, his lips clung an instant longer, moved deeper. His mouth opened just enough to steal her breath, though it felt more like he was stealing her soul.

Soft kisses, warm, moist kisses, kisses that made her light-headed with wanting more. Teasing, promising, leisurely kisses. Dozens of them. Enough kisses to make up for all the kisses that had never been, and all that would never be. And each one taking her heart into his keeping.

His fingertips skimmed delicately along her jaw. He slanted his mouth sideways, nibbling, coaxing her lips apart. With a sense of gratitude, of near relief, she felt his tongue tease the corners of her lips and his tongue glide into her mouth.

Light-headed and breathless, she could barely stand her legs were trembling so, and he only touched her with his fingertips—playing over her face, under her chin, directing the angle of her head with the slightest of touches to afford him better access, a deeper penetration, one with which she eagerly complied.

His kisses grew more demanding, casting her into a vortex of whirling sensation. She clung to him, anchored to the moment only by his mouth, his kisses, and the feather-like touches of his callused fingers. Her knees buckled and she started to fall. He caught her.

He swept her up against him, high up on his chest, breaking off the searing kiss.

She'd stopped thinking. Ideas no longer formed a cohesive pattern, only one image spurred her now, drove her with an imperative lash. She needed to get closer to him, was overwhelmed with the need to be part of him, in him,
one
with him.

Feverishly she worked to rid him of the shirt keeping him from her. Her hands plucked and fumbled at the buttons as he watched, his chest moving in deep uneven breaths, his mouth taut, his face rigid. With a little cry of triumph she finally uncovered him and spread her hands flat against his heated skin. Smooth and hard and tanned, his chest moved powerfully beneath her palms.

"I want—"

He stopped her words with his mouth in another kiss, his shuddering body attesting to the power he held just barely in check. She slipped her arms beneath his open shirt and wrapped her arms around his waist.

With a choked sound, he slid his hands down to cup her bottom, lifting her up against him, making her excruciatingly familiar with the hard bulge in his trousers. Her hands raked down along his satiny skin, through the dark, crisp whorls of hair on his chest to the flat, rippling belly, collecting a wealth of sensation as she searched over every masculine inch of him.

"Kiss me," he commanded breathlessly. Eagerly, fervently she complied.

She'd once disdained his exaggerated masculinity. She'd lied, to herself, to him. She gloried in it.

She loved his strength, the easy power with which he molded her body to his, the taste of his tongue, warm and tinged with brandy as he explored deep within her mouth, the masculine musk of the aroused male animal. He inundated her senses, he overwhelmed her, and she feasted on it; his potency and his aggression; his hunger and restraint.

She twined her arms around his neck and mind-lessly, instinctively wrapped her legs around his hips, pressing her mound against the promise of his evident arousal, rocking against him. Sparks of pure sexual excitement ricocheted behind her closed eyelids. Swirling, teasing dabs of carnal pleasure spiraled out from that contact.

Abruptly he broke off their kiss. She fell away from him, half-swooning, but he caught her, one hand cradling the back of her head, one arm tight around her hips, clamping her there. He rolled his hips against her, drawing his breath in a hiss of pleasure.

Her eyes fluttered open. She did not want simulation. She wanted the reality.

He wanted reality.

Each moment had led to this. Mistake upon mistake. He shouldn't have kissed her. He shouldn't have touched her. He shouldn't have picked her up and God knows he shouldn't have spread her against his cock like this.

Her head rested heavily in his palm and her breasts moved beneath her linen shirt, agitated by her shallow pants. Her eyes drifted open and even as he told himself to let her go, her gaze found his.

He held his breath, waiting for reason to return to her gaze, for comprehension to chase the seductive languidness from her black eyes. Deliberately, her gaze still locked with his, she pushed herself against him in a parody of his own instinctive thrust.

He groaned. He should go. She should go. A dark premonition gibbered unheeded in some portion of his mind. Everything he believed himself to be, everything he'd built his life upon, his code of honor, the principles he'd cleaved to when he'd nothing else of value, were being torn asunder in a hurricane of desire.

"Make love to me," she whispered.

Her gaze, always direct, pierced him with candor, dared him to disown the emotion he held silent and still within his heaving chest. He couldn't. He could no more deny her than his own heart, which were one and the same.

He tried. God help him, he tried. "Folly." He kissed her sweet, succulent lips. "Madness," he whispered against their lush promise. "Disaster." His tongue swooped into the sleek warmth of her mouth and returned, leaving him breathless.

"Please," she said.

He breathed his assent into her mouth. "Yes, love."

Their mouths still locked together, he felt her hands seeking between their bodies for his waistband, her fingers cool as they slipped beneath the material, touching his skin.

He dipped down and picked her up, unwilling to take her upright, like a doxy in an alley, and stilling her complaint with more kisses, moved with her to the bed. He deposited her with more haste than grace and with even greater haste wrenched his wretched shirt completely off, and tore the belt from his waist.

She lifted her arms, reaching for him and he forgot everything but the look of her, womanly and wanton beyond beautiful and the molten passion pounding in his veins. He needed to feel her skin on his, to absorb her texture, to taste her fragrance, and to breathe her excitement.

He reached for her as she reached for him, shedding layers of clothes as they rid themselves and each other of every barrier between them until his flesh pressed against hers, and their lips and hands clung and roamed in a ravishment of senses and thought and imagination.

Untutored by vast experience, he followed instinct, licking the under curve of her voluptuous breast, skating his teeth over the silky smoothness of her inner thigh, the column of her arching throat, suckling the tip of her tongue, kissing her eyelids, licking the delicate flesh at the curve of her arm, and finally finding the glistening petals of her womanly core.

Her gasps spurred his pleasure, taunted him with her own unfulfilled crisis. He was an adventurer on a spiritual quest, his thoughts murky and distant, his body a vehicle on fire, her own body his pilgrimage.

Her eyes, dazed with the sensual assault, looked wildly for an anchor and found instead his glittering eyes. She recognized the primal power, felt his masculine exultance, and answered it with a feminine one.

Innocent of expectation, she flung her leg over his hip, toppling him against her, and felt the thick hard prod of his masculine part. Instinctively, she hitched her hips upward. Instinctively, he rolled his own forward.

For a second they froze, joined as intimately as two bodies can be, hearts beating in tandem, mouths open in astonished sensation. And then he was moving in her, muscular arms enveloping her, each thrust penetrating deeply, filling completely before withdrawing and surging back within her again. She caught fire from the rhythm, squeezed her eyes shut, her heels digging deep against the mattress as she strained for the lifeline of repletion that danced just beyond her reach.

"Yes," he urged in her ear, his words a low, hoarse purr. "Love. There. Sweet, sweet Lily. My love."

His words drove her into a climax. Wave upon wave of pure pleasure spun out from the point of their union, rioted along her nerve endings and then she felt him tense, his big, masculine body adamantine. He pulled slightly away, the muscles in his neck cording, his jaw clamped and then the sound of him reaching his own crisis incited a surge of echoing pleasure in her.

It was all gone too fast. The little aftershocks, running through her body, pooling in her loins. Dimly she became aware of the laboring sound of his breath close to her ear. With a shaking hand she reached up and smoothed the dark gold hair from his forehead.

"Avery?" she whispered.

He gathered her closer, his eyes still closed.

"Avery?"

"Shh." His voice was low and infinitely sad. "Hush. Tomorrow's waiting outside this door. It's crouching there in an ocean of words and uncertainties. But it's not here yet and we are. Lily. Lillian. Love. I'm begging you. Let me love you again. Let me love you all night long."

She answered with a kiss.