Proper Scoundrel (24 page)

She kicked him and damned near ended all chance of their having children.

“Will you stop that!” He made to spank her, but ended up palming her neat bottom and enjoying the process.

Jade mocked him with her laugh. “Don’t you ever stop thinking about your baser needs?”

“My baser needs have grown stronger and more persistent since the day you circled me wearing this wicked costume. Yours have rather blossomed as well. Remember that morning you—”

She smacked his back with both fists. “Go to hell, Marcus Fitzalan.”

His gasp ended on a chuckle. “Only if you come with me, Jade Smithfield.” He stroked her inner thigh, thinking to awaken some of her needs, heightening his own, instead, until she began to fight him in earnest.

By the time they neared her smuggler’s cave, she’d become a true hellcat, biting, scratching and kicking, so Marcus walked straight into the Channel and didn’t stop even when the salt water worked seared the burn on his hip with a soothing, healing magic.

To stop Jade from kicking and screaming about the freezing water, Marcus dropped her in.

When he pulled her up, she gasped and swallowed air. “You rotten scum of a serpent’s spawn,” she said, before she pushed him under.

Above and below the water, they grappled, until Marcus’s burn felt better for the consistent salt water wash, and his baser needs, however cold, stood at full alert. He wanted to put period to her fury and get them inside to a warm fire and a blazing reconciliation.

Above water once again, Marcus waylaid Jade as she lunged his way once more. “Wait!” he said. “What’s that?”

Like a shot, she wrapped her arms around his neck, and her legs around his waist. “What?”

“Big and scaly,” he improvised. “Swimming this way.”

Jade screamed, and clung, and Marcus made for the beach, as quick as he could, though Jade somehow managed to reach land ahead of him.

Halfway to the cave, she fell to the shingle, panting. “I can’t go on.”

He bent to skim her long black hair back from her eyes and hook it behind her ears. “You can.”

“No,” she wailed. “Leave me here to die.”

Marcus kissed her brow. “We were too close to death already tonight. If you don’t mind, I think we should celebrate life.”

She stilled and looked up at him.

He fell to his knees. “Kiss me Jade, like you mean it. As if there’s no tomorrow. Kiss me like the scandal you’re so proud to be.”

The kiss she bestowed formed a perfect blend of the innocent and the erotic, but before she felled him with its intensity, and they ended on their backs with sand where sand should never go, Marcus broke the kiss and rose to swing her into his arms.

Jade held on and lay her head on his chest. “What kind of a celebration?”

He didn’t speak, he kept walking, and once they stood in the stairwell and she grabbed the lantern from the landing, he saw her gaze, as intense as his, eyes smoky, lids heavy. They may be covered in gooseflesh, but between them they were so hot, ’twas a wonder the English Channel hadn’t come to a boil.

Almost since he met Jade, he’d dreamed of making slow exquisite love to her, over and over again, of savouring her to his heart’s content, of having her all to himself for time without end ... which remained impossible and would do so until they settled the widening track between them.

But tonight, he would take every moment he could get.

He’d imagined taking her hard and fast or so slow, she’d beg for completion. He’d imagined sleeping with her in his arms for longer than a moment, longer than a lifetime.

When he got to the landing near his room, he stepped through his door. “I want you in my bed,” he said in response to her questioning look.

The smouldering gaze she gave him made him stand her up and strip her in a fever, frenzied and desperate, the same way she stripped him.

When Marcus stood naked and proud before her, Jade stopped denying heart and mind and accepted Marcus Fitzalan as her destiny. Not that she would give her self over to him, or to any man, but this man she would take to her bed.

Time to live up to her name and prove what a scandal she could be.

They’d known each other for eternity, he’d said, and he’d been right. She’d been waiting for him forever, she knew. She simply hadn’t known his name.

Whether berating her, or saving her, going over ledgers or walking fussy newborns, his gentleness called to her. His touch awakened her from the slumber of youth and made her crave womanhood in his arms.

He’d turned wallflowers into hot-house beauties, calmed a little girl’s fears and turned them to giggles. He’d encouraged his brother to heal, championed a baby boy, and opened a heart Jade believed eternally locked—her own—tossing a life’s worth of lessons over the chalk cliffs.

Marcus Fitzalan, scoundrel and friend, the love of her life.

Whatever their place in society, Earl or Lady, rich or poor, friend or foe, the secrets they harboured, and the directions their lives took—and they must go their separate ways—her heart would remain forever his.

Marcus wrapped his arms around her, bought her scorchingly, sinfully close, skin to skin for the first time ever. Splendid silk, cool, soft, vibrant and alive, a fast-beating heart, warm rippling muscles.

“My very own Scandal,” he whispered. “It’s time for learning and soaring. Time to do what I wanted the minute I saw you at the beginning of time.”

He yearned as she did. Then and now. Glory.

His kiss, sweet and tender, chaste even, made her heart race and her body quicken, this coming together soared beyond the melding of bodies to a mating of spirits.

“I want you,” he whispered, hoarse with passion, teasing her upper lip with his lower, coaxing and prodding, breath warm, his hands working a special magic.

“Have your wicked way with me,” she whispered. “Please.”

Marcus raised a brow. “My pleasure, my darling Scandal.”

His husky voice purled heat through Jade in spiralling coils. She sifted her fingers through the whorls of hair on his chest, testing and abrading, pebbling a nipple, licking and kissing. She rubbed her nose against the silk as well—spearmint, freshened by the sea. “I wanted to do this, and more, when you nearly blacked out after the babies were born.”

“I would have let you.”

“I was afraid.”

“Are you still, Jade? Are you finally ready to step into the fire?”

“I’ve been cold and yearning for your heat since the day we met, but I didn’t know it.”

After a long, tongue-stroking kiss, Marcus lifted her into his arms and nibbled her neck, her throat, the hollow beneath her collarbone, sending shafts of white-hot lightening to every hidden place in her body. Shafts of heat that shivered, and sparkled, sizzled and melted.

Jade shuddered. Her nipples pebbled. “Teach me to love you, Marcus. I want the something more you spoke about, the ultimate rise to the stars. Show me. Take me with you.”

With an oath, Marcus placed her on his bed, covering her and touching her everywhere at once, and Jade absorbed each sensation with the joy of new discovery. When her breasts grazed his chest and his arousal met her pulsing centre, she arched and moaned.

She never left her hearth, yet she had come home.

He hovered above her, his cobalt eyes intense, his passion hot and fit to singe, his man-part throbbing-ready and ... huge.

Huge? “No! Wait! It’s too thick, too long,” she said. “It won’t fit.” Jade scuttled out from under him, until she leaned against his headboard, arms around her upraised knees. “You may be a stallion, Marcus Fitzalan, but I’m no mare!”

Marcus’s arms gave out and he fell to the mattress, laughing so hard he rolled to his side to catch his breath.

Jade crawled down the bed to hover over him, her fear forgotten for the moment. “I love it when you laugh like that.”

He touched her cheek. “I love it when you smile like that.”

“Oh, look,” she said with relief. “It got smaller. It’ll fit better now.”

“No it won’t,” Marcus said with another fit of laughing. “It won’t fit at all now.”

“I don’t believe you,” Jade said. “Prove it.”

Catching her off guard, he tumbled her on her back, reversing their positions, him grinning above her. “Your challenge shot it with anticipation,” he said. “It’s big again.”

“It’s magic,” she said.

“Tell me that when we’re finished. Please.”

Marcus probed Jade at her centre to prepare her for his invasion, giving her pleasure, he saw. Thank God! Her eyes had barely widened before they turned soft and shimmery. He entered her a bit, pulled slowly back and away. He found her sweet spot with his hand and made her moan until she wanted more of him. Then he slipped a bit further inside her, repeating the teasing process again and again, testing limits, hers and his, until she surged to take him deeper.

“I adore you,” he whispered against her lips, holding himself still, with rigid discipline. “I adore you.”

“I’m fascinated by you,” she said.

“Are you certain, Jade?” he asked before breaching her final barrier.

“I am fascinated.”

He released his breath in a gasp, his body tense and pulsing as he fought to keep from burying himself in her velvet sheath. “Are you certain this is what you want? We will both be changed, not outside, but in our hearts and deep into our souls. Of this I am certain.”

She stroked his lips with a finger, arched, and rolled her hips, absolutely aware and proud to torture him. “Be my lover, Marcus. Come inside me.”

Jade revelled in Marcus’s shout of triumph, mindful of his gentle care, his patience and love as he delved deeper and deeper, and brought her higher and higher.

In one swift move, he surged and buried himself so deep, discomfort blazed for a blink, then fire cooled and became a soothing salve, a warmth, that radiated outward and about them, pulling him with her into a cocoon of satisfaction. Alone in the universe, desire grew like stars flaming to bright scintillating life, the essence of pleasure almost too intense to bear.

Jade ascended to a plane higher than she thought possible where paradise glowed a luminous azure, burnished and pure, the clouds a cushion upon which to float. In Marcus she saw a matching glory as the gods set them gently down to marvel in wonder at where they’d been.

In the aftermath, they touched, they kissed. Jade knew Marcus as well as she knew herself, this soul mate God created for her.

“I’ve been sick with missing you,” he said. “And tonight ... I was so bloody scared tonight. Jade, I couldn’t bear losing you.” He pulled her hard against him, imprisoning her with possessive hands. “I’m so worried about you.”

Because she couldn’t change a thing, Jade refused to address his worry. “You broke me when you left for London,” she said, addressing his former statement, instead. “Everyday you were gone was a form of torture. Why didn’t you write? I was so angry and so sad that you didn’t write.”

“I wrote to you every night,” he replied, finding her breasts in particular need of attention, and distracting her in the bargain. “In my mind as I lay awake wanting you beside me, I wrote you, and afterward, I made slow sweet love to you.”

He surged to renewed life and she took him home again. Back to heaven, they went, faster and more frenzied this time, their arrival nothing short of cataclysmic.

Lazy minutes later, he rolled her over and atop him, as if content to memorize her with his hands and kiss where he could reach, and she lay her head in the hollow of his shoulder to sleep.

Sometime during the dark of night, he suckled her to completion and slipped inside her, filling her, fulfilling her, adoring her with his body, their loving slow and languorous and breathtaking, the most marvellous awakening of Jade’s life.

She welcomed his every thrust, discovering she could enhance their play with her movement. She learned to pull him in, hold him tight, and make him moan and shout her name. She would release him to withdraw, only to pull him back again. With her love, she milked him, and with his seed, he filled her.