The Accidental Abduction (10 page)

L
eannah's eyes flew open, unable to understand this abrupt and terrible absence of Harry's touch. It took a wild moment of searching, but she saw Harry was beside her now. He was bent over with his arms out straight in front of him and both hands pressed flat against the wall. His breath rattled in his throat. A trickle of perspiration ran down his temple and dripped onto the cobbles.

“No.” He spat the word through clenched teeth. “No!”

She couldn't understand what he was saying.

“We have to stop,” he told her.

“I don't want to.”

He turned toward her and in his face she saw something painfully close to anguish. “Oh, my beautiful Leannah, we must.”

Slowly, she realized her wrists were still crossed above her head. She brought her arms down and her bandaged hands automatically searched for the ends of her shawl to wrap around herself. The shawl was gone. Her skin was damp with sweat and quickly growing cold. She felt exposed, but that exposure no longer felt like triumph. Shame, as cold as the night wind against her skin crept into her blood.

“Was it . . . something I did?”

Her question straightened him up at once. He had been trembling a moment ago, but now as he reached for her, his hands were steady and gentle.

“You did nothing.” He cupped her chin and lifted her face toward his. Harry's smile was suffused with such tenderness it raised a fresh ache in her breast. “You did nothing at all, except drive me to the brink of madness.”

“And you don't want that.”

The oath Harry uttered was blunt, and startling. “That's not what I mean. Leannah, I want you. I want everything you will give me, but not like this.” His thumb caressed the corner of her mouth. “Not up against a wall where anyone might see us, see you.” He brushed her trailing locks back from her cheek. “I will dare anything for myself, but I will not risk disgrace for you.”

It's not disgrace,
she wanted to shout at him.
It's perfection.
She wanted to grab him by the collar—never mind her wounded hands, never mind Mr. Jessop awake right on the other side of the wall. She wanted to kiss him until he forgot everything but her and their desire.

But he was right. She might hate that fact as much as she had ever hated anything in her life, but she could not deny it. She had been driven beyond caution by his kiss and his touch. She would have done anything in that moment and not cared at all. But if anyone had heard, or seen . . . If
Genevieve
had heard or seen . . .

Leannah's chill deepened. Reality came back, carried on dawn's cold wind. Genevieve was sleeping upstairs. Mr. Dickenson was sprawled on the sofa in the public room. She was Leannah Morehouse Wakefield and her family waited in their rented house for her to bring her runaway sister home and then settle back to dealing with all the other problems that had come with her father's many failures.

She was not free to indulge any shameless yearnings in the moonlight with this man, or any man.

Leannah shivered again and looked about for where the shawl had fallen. Harry spotted it first, lying in a crumpled heap by the inn wall. He lifted it off the ground. She saw him move to place it around her shoulders, and then think the better of it. Instead, he laid it across her arm.

He did not look away even for an instant as she wrapped the shawl around her shoulders. He stared at her hands as she raised the plain woolen folds to cover her bare, cold skin. Regret tightened her throat and its bitterness filled her mouth to overpower the last of the sweetness his kiss had brought. Leannah lifted her fingertips to Harry's mouth, and ran them across his lips. Harry closed his eyes and swallowed hard, but he did not move away.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “For giving me this moment.”

He caught her wrist before she could lower it, and planted a soft kiss against her fingertips. “I would give you so much more if I could.”

Leannah shook her head. “No. You're right. It's too dangerous.”

She meant to turn away, but he put his hand on her shoulder. “Only here, only like this. When we get back to London, we can find each other then.” He smiled and to Leannah it was as if the ground shifted beneath her. “I can even come calling if you like. You might not believe it, but I look very fine seated in a front parlor, and make excellent conversation with ladies of all ages.”

Leannah could not help but smile herself at this. “I believe you, but it wouldn't be advisable.”

Consternation knit his brows. “Are you promised to someone?”

“No. Not yet, anyway.”

“I don't like the sound of that, Leannah.”

She couldn't look in his eyes. She looked at her bandaged hand where it rested against the lapel of his coat. She didn't even remember placing it there. It seemed her traitor body was not ready to leave off touching Mr. Rayburn.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered. “I'm so sorry.”

“Tell me what's wrong, Leannah. Perhaps I can help.”

But she shook her head and she stepped away. She had to put at least some distance between them. The echo of the passions they'd raised still rang in her blood and bones. He'd called it madness and that was the right word. But it was more than that. When he held her, Harry made her feel she could trust him, and she wanted that trust as much as she wanted his touch. There had been so few people in her life on whom she was able to depend.

But trust and dependence were both dangerous. Trust could be betrayed, even when it was knotted up with bonds of blood and duty, never mind the flimsy ties of mutual need.

Leannah glanced over her shoulder. The moon had almost set. The last rays tangled in Harry's fair hair and his blue, worried eyes. She'd meant to say something, but the sight of him—her hero, her mad and dangerous lover—robbed her of speech. She took a trembling step forward and another. She waited for him to shy away from her. But he did not. He stood still, waiting for what she would do. She lifted her face to his, and brushed her lips against his mouth.

Then she grabbed up the hem of her nightdress and fled back to the safety of the house.

*   *   *

Harry watched the inn door close behind Leannah as she fled from him. He waited, to be sure she wasn't coming back. Maybe there was still hope. Maybe she wanted to come back. Maybe she wanted his determination to fail him so he would push her up against the wall again, and take her in his arms, plunder her mouth, suck on her breasts, finish what they had begun.

Only when he was positive that damned door wasn't going to open again, did Harry stride away. The inn's yard was not a big one, but there were several outbuildings, as well as a chicken house and the stable with its small forge and anvil. He was almost running by the time he ducked behind the farthest shed he could find. Utterly ashamed, but driven by pain and pure brute need, Harry undid his breeches fly as quickly as his trembling fingers could manage. He plunged his hand into his small clothes, grabbed his member and started to masturbate.

He pumped himself ruthlessly, angrily. In his mind, he saw Leannah. He felt her, with every fiber of his being. He smelled her scent on the wind, felt the silk of her hair and the satin of her skin. His palm held all the memory of the hot flesh of her thighs as he caressed them. In his mind, he pressed her up against the wall again. He fondled her breasts, sucked her tight, responsive nipples, squeezed her lovely, full derriere. But this time, he didn't stop, he didn't come to his senses and tear himself away. He grabbed her legs and raised her up so he could plunge his aching, swollen member inside her.

She cried out. She wrapped her thighs around him as her sheath surrounded him, hot and tight and wet.
Yes, Harry!
she moaned.
Like that. I like that. Harder! Harder!
She'd tighten around him, dragging him deeper in, demanding he surrender his body entirely to her pleasure . . .

Harry's release came suddenly, in a series of crude, violent jolts. He stayed as he was for a long time, doubled over, braced by one arm against the wall of whatever shed he was hiding behind. As soon as he could make his shaking body move, he shoved his now flaccid member back into his smalls and buttoned up his breeches tight. Then, Harry put his own back to the wall. He let his knees buckle so he slid slowly down until he was crouched almost to the ground. He wiped his streaming face with his sleeve, and began to curse.

He cursed slowly and thoroughly. He cursed moonlight and rain and thrown horseshoes. He cursed the club's whiskey in four different languages, along with whatever insanity drove a man to try to be a hero. When he'd exhausted this subject, he cursed his member for not understanding that when a lady closed the door, it was past time to stand down. It was not right to be in the back of a stable yard easing his lusts with the memory of Leannah Wakefield. It seemed utterly crude and distasteful to him.

As if almost fucking a woman he didn't know against the wall of a public house was refined. Harry hung his head and rested his forearms on his knees. He could barely believe it, let alone understand it. In the space of a few short hours he'd jumped aboard a careening carriage, been knocked down, aided a woman in distress, gotten into a brawl. Well, “brawl” was a bit much, considering Dickenson hadn't even raised his hand. But he had knocked a man down over that woman and her sister, come within an inch of brutalizing him, and then come within an inch of fucking himself and that same woman into delirium in the open air.

Harry knotted his hands in his hair. He wanted to blame the drink, or the blow Agnes Featherington had dealt to his pride. But that wouldn't be the truth. The truth was there was something about being near Leannah that drove him clean out of his mind.

God, but she was magnificent! From the moment his lips touched hers, it had taken every ounce of his self-possession not to fall on her immediately and ravish her. Not, he smiled, that she would have protested. She had made it clear she wanted him and he knew for a fact she was as strong in her passions as she was willing and eager. She'd be as wild a lover as she was a driver. He'd put her on top of him, slap that magnificent derriere of hers to take them both into a gallop, and she'd like it. He was certain she would.

His member twitched. Harry started cursing all over again. His rude little session of self-pleasuring had cured the immediate pain and pressure in his body, but that was all. It had done nothing to ease the aching desire he felt for Leannah.

Slowly, Harry realized it was no longer quite so dark. He pushed himself to his feet and tried to smooth his hair down with his clean hand. The landlord and his wife would be about soon—that is assuming they'd ever gone to bed. He moved out from behind the shed to where he could see the inn, and the window beneath the eaves on the second story. Was Leannah asleep up there? Or was she awake like he was, thinking of what they had done together, wishing it hadn't ended.

Why didn't she want to see him in town? Was she ashamed of the heated moment they'd shared? He didn't think that could be it, but it was so hard to be sure. Society winked and joked at the desires of men, but it frowned hard when those same passions found a home in women.

Perhaps it was the fact that he was a merchant's son. It was plain from Leannah's speech and bearing that she was gently bred. Perhaps she had a position to maintain that did not easily admit a man of his birth. At the very least, she must be her sister's chief guardian. He wondered about their parents and if they were living or dead. He wondered what was behind the “not yet” she'd spoken when he asked if she was engaged. Who was the man who earned a “not yet” from Leannah? Where was he now, while she was out here in trouble and alone? Any such man deserved to have his woman stolen out from behind his back.

A chuckle rose in his throat and Harry shook his head. Then, he did the only sensible thing he could. He strolled around the front of the inn to the horse trough. There, he plunged head and hands straight into the icy water.

The shock of it hit him at once and Harry welcomed it. He held himself under the water until he felt his lungs would burst. When he did allow himself to come up, he whooped and gasped. Great gouts of water sluiced off his scalp. Someone, Martin, probably, had hung a cloth on the pump and Harry used it now to dry himself, only to find it was soaking wet from the rain.

The sound of a bolt being drawn jerked him around.
Leannah?
Light glinted behind the shutters, and his mouth went instantly dry.
Leannah, you came back!

But it wasn't Leannah. The flickering lantern was held by none other than the importunate Mr. Dickenson. Harry let himself fade back against the inn wall and held his breath. Dickenson didn't see him. He just stumbled across the yard, making for the stables.

Well, well.
Once again, Anthony Dickenson was showing his true colors. Harry heard the hoarse sound of that man's voice issuing orders, which was followed by Martin's mumbling. There was a long pause, with much noise from the horses and, Harry suspected, a certain amount of cursing from Mr. Dickenson. Before too much longer, though, the landau, with its lanterns lit and its chestnut bay horses walking dutifully in step, came around the yard. Mr. Dickenson sat on the box with the ribbons in his gloved hands. He paused the horses by the inn door. Harry decided now was the time for action. He stepped out of the shadows, and tipped Dickenson a salute.