The Pleasure of Your Kiss (17 page)

She trailed off. Knew what? That her life would never be the same? That she would never know another moment without longing?

Despite the deft ministrations of Solomon’s hands, she stiffened, deliberately steeling her heart against the wistful ache the memory had evoked.

“That was probably his last official act of chivalry,” she said crisply. “Captain Burke may be a knight now, but it’s going to take more than a tap on the shoulder from the king to make that man a hero … or a gentleman. Why, his brother has more honor in his little finger than Captain Burke has in his entire—
ow!
” she wailed as Solomon’s hand came down on her right buttock in a stinging swat. “What on earth are you—”

Before she could finish, he gave her other buttock a slightly less vigorous smack. Then both of his hands settled into a brisk but more gentle rhythm, their steady tattoo strangely soothing.

She relaxed again, and by the time he had stopped smacking and started massaging again, his powerful thumbs working their own brand of magic as they dug into the softness of her silk-covered rump, she was ready to forgive him anything.

She could feel the heat of his hands even through the silk, almost as if he was imparting a soaring fever from his skin to hers. As his thumbs traced the inner curves of her buttocks, straying dangerously near to the cleft between them, a different sort of tension began to coil deep within her. She had been receiving these massages for months, but she had never been so aware that a few inches were all that separated those clever hands from what lay beneath the silk.

As the beguiling friction of Solomon’s thumbs sent a delicious little throb through the most vulnerable and tender part of her, she resisted the temptation to wriggle her thighs even farther apart and instead curled her arm closer around her face to shield her burning cheeks. Was she losing her mind? The man was a eunuch, for God’s sake! Had she finally been too long in this den of iniquity or was it Ash’s reappearance that had stirred such ridiculously wicked feelings in her?

Hoping to distract herself from her mortifying descent into debauchery, Clarinda let out a prim sniff. Unfortunately, since her face was still buried in her folded arms, it sounded more like a snort. “I wonder if Captain Burke considers this simply another one of his fine adventures. Do you think he intends to write a paper for the Geographical Society of London on the carnal habits of the Moroccan harem girl?”

She breathed a sigh of relief as those hands ceased their exquisite torment and began to glide up her back. They finally came to rest against her shoulders, gently imprisoning her against the table. The eunuch leaned over her, so close she could feel the heat radiating from his body.

His warm, cinnamon-scented breath stirred the baby-fine tendrils of hair at her nape as he said in a husky whisper she would have recognized anywhere, “I don’t know, my little gazelle. Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

C
larinda’s eyes flew open in shock. She rolled off the couch and leapt to her feet while snatching up the length of silk towel and wrapping it around her to shield her nakedness.

Ashton Burke stood there, smirking at her in the rosy glow of the lamplight. He’d retrieved the freshly laundered ivory shirt and buff riding breeches he’d been wearing when he arrived at the palace, and all it took was the briefest flick of a downward gaze at the snug-fitting fabric of those breeches to prove he wasn’t nearly as unaffected by their situation as he was pretending to be.

She jerked her gaze back to his face, clutching the bunched-up fabric between her breasts in a white-knuckled grip. “You, sir, are no eunuch!”

His smirk deepened until an all-too-familiar devil-may-care dimple appeared in his left cheek. “And you, miss, are no twenty-year-old virgin.”

“And whose fault is that, I might ask you?”

“Yours, I suppose, since you were the one who seduced me.”

She gasped, outraged anew.
“I
seduced
you?”

“As I recall it, my choice was between you and a corpulent sodomite.” He lifted one shoulder in a negligent shrug, his expression as innocent as a choirboy’s. “What was a fellow to do?”

Clarinda didn’t know whether to be flattered or alarmed that he remembered every word and nuance of their last exchange as clearly as she did. “You may recall it that way if it pleases you, but I most certainly did
not
seduce you.”

“You’re right.” Disarming her with his congenial tone, he leaned down and whispered, “You practically ravished me.”

With an incoherent sputter of rage, Clarinda spun around and paced away from him, determined to put some distance between them. She was nearly undone by her ire when her toe caught in the trailing hem of the towel, bringing her up short and offering him the briefest flash of her naked bottom. She snatched the slippery silk back around her, her cheeks burning with mortification and some other emotion too unsettling to name.

Whenever she had allowed herself the wicked luxury of picturing this moment, she was usually wearing more than a towel. (Although not always, if she was being completely truthful with herself.) There was something dangerously stirring about being in the presence of a man as virile as Ash while he was fully clothed and she … well … wasn’t.

She stopped in front of the teakwood table, gazing down at the wisps of smoke drifting up from the incense brazier as if they could divine both the future and the past. How could she ever have mistaken him for Solomon? How could she have allowed herself to forget the power of those hands against her flesh?

“If you were any sort of gentleman,” she said, “you wouldn’t speak of such things.”

“Weren’t you the one who just said it would take more than a tap on the shoulder from the king to make me a hero … or a gentleman?”

Clarinda winced, struggling to remember exactly what other incriminating things she might have revealed while under the influence of those devilish hands. “I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to Solomon.” She swung back around to face him, seized by an even more terrible thought. “Oh, dear Lord, what have you done with Solomon? Have you killed him?”

Ash tilted his head to give her a reproachful look. “Despite the stories you may have read about me in the scandal sheets you’re so fond of quoting, I’m not given to bashing eunuchs over the head with rocks. I figure the poor devils have already suffered enough. Have no fear. Your trusty Solomon has simply been sent to the market on a fool’s errand.” A troubled frown furrowed Ash’s brow. “Although from what I’ve been able to gather, the man is no fool.”

“What about the other harem guards? Did you send them to the market as well?”

“No, I poisoned them.” When her mouth fell open in dismay, he rolled his eyes. “There was no need for such dire measures. Thanks to the dubious romantic charms of a certain Italian Gypsy of my acquaintance, I was able to coax a lovely young miss into revealing the location of a secret passage into the harem.”

As their eyes met, Clarinda realized this was the first time they had been alone together since that fateful morning in the meadow. She had done her best to vanquish him from her thoughts, but not a single day had gone by since then when he hadn’t flitted through her heart like a phantom. Now he stood before her once again—in the flesh yet somehow still larger-than-life.

As that reality began to sink in, her outrage shifted to alarm. Casting the door a desperate look, she strode back over to him. “Do you realize what sort of risk you’re taking? If any man besides the sultan or one of his eunuchs is discovered in the harem, the penalty is death. You could lose your head!”

Ash’s gaze took a leisurely stroll up her body, drinking in the well-toned length of milky-white thigh exposed by the uncooperative towel, the uneven rise and fall of her breasts with each shuddering breath, the disheveled tumble of her hair, the traitorous flush riding high in her cheeks.

By the time his eyes reached hers once again, there wasn’t a trace of mockery in them. “I think it’s too late. I may have already lost it.”

For a painful moment, Clarinda stopped breathing altogether. She had forgotten how it made her feel when he looked at her like that. Or had she? That look made her wonder what he might do if she loosened her panicked grip on the towel and let the sleek silk slip right through her fingers to ripple into a puddle at her feet.

She dug her fingernails into the fabric as if it contained the only remaining thread of her sanity. Hadn’t she learned the hard way that a moment of such folly could lead to a lifetime of regret? If she let him melt her resolve with one look, how was she ever going to prove to him she was no longer the love-struck girl he had left behind but a woman grown?

How was she ever going to prove it to herself? Or to Max?

Pretending she was wearing her most severe morning gown instead of a thin scrap of silk, Clarinda lifted her chin. “If you’ve come to execute one of those daring rescues you’re so famous for, Captain Burke, we’d best make haste. I may be the sultan’s favorite pet at the moment, but he still keeps me on a fairly short leash.”

The wicked gleam had returned to his eyes. “Why the sudden urgency? From what I understand, you’re not scheduled to get married until the sixth anniversary of your twenty-first birthday.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “They weren’t paying any attention to my age when I arrived at the palace. They were all too busy gawking at my hair.”

He reached down to capture a strand of it from her naked shoulder. As he sifted the silvery-blond skein through his fingers, his reverent touch sent an unbidden shiver of longing through her. “You have to admit, it is your most striking feature.” He let his gaze glide down her once again. “Or at least
one
of them.”

She smacked his hand away. “I can’t believe I let myself forget how insufferable you always were.”

He leaned closer to her. “I’ve certainly never forgotten how much you always enjoyed making me suffer. Do you remember the time you shoved me over the cliff into the thicket of thistles while we were playing blindman’s bluff?”

“I should have found a higher cliff.”

Just like that they were nose to nose, glaring at each other as if he were twelve and she nine. It was exactly that crackling cord of tension that had finally yanked them into each other’s arms that long-ago night in his father’s stables when he had kissed her for the first time.

Clarinda didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved when Ash was the first to snap that cord. He moved away from her to lean against the scrolled end of the couch, crossing his booted feet at the ankle and folding his arms over his heart like a shield. “After watching the sultan make moon eyes at you, Luca isn’t entirely convinced you require rescuing. Given how cozy the two of you seemed, he thought that perhaps you’d fallen in love with the man.” Judging by the dryness of Ash’s tone, one would have guessed her reply was of no particular import to him.

“Farouk is a genuinely nice man with a kind heart. He has an unfortunate tendency to think of women as possessions, but I don’t really see how that makes him any different from most men of my acquaintance. Don’t our English laws presume the very same thing—especially after a man takes
possession
of a woman by wedding her? Once she agrees to take his name, she has no more rights than a prize hunting hound or a broodmare.”

“If you’re trying to convince me you’d be content being any man’s broodmare, I’m not buying it. I know you haven’t changed
that
much from the girl I knew.”

“You’re right,” she admitted with a sigh. Tossing the trailing hem of the towel over her arm as if it were the train of some extravagant ball gown, she began to pace back and forth in front of him, her words coming out in a relieved rush. “Everything I’ve done since the day Farouk purchased me, every word I’ve spoken, every promise I’ve made, has been a desperate attempt to postpone the inevitable. I’ve coaxed. I’ve cajoled. I’ve sung. I’ve danced. I’ve batted my eyelashes and licked my lips and twirled my hair around my finger and told every silly joke and witty story I could remember. I’ve agreed with Farouk when it pleased him and argued with him when it pleased him more. I’ve pranced about in front of strangers in little more than my unmentionables. I’ve been combed and brushed and prodded and poked and massaged and bathed and oiled and perfumed until I wanted to scream. And I’ve lied through my freshly polished teeth with every breath!” She stopped directly in front of Ash, throwing up her hands in exasperation. “Do you know how utterly exhausting it is to be charming every infernal second of every day?”

Though Ash remained as straight-faced as an undertaker, a muscle in his cheek twitched. “For you, I’m sure it’s a tremendous challenge.”

Giving him an evil look, she slumped against the wall, still clutching the towel in front of her. “Your friend was wrong. I have no desire to stay here and spend the rest of my days as the sultan’s pet, no matter how pampered or cherished.”

“I’m sure my brother will be relieved to hear that.”

Clarinda slowly raised her head. “You’ve spoken to Maximillian?”

“Of course I have. Why else would I be here?”

His words were so casually cruel that they took her breath away. To hide their effect, she choked out a brittle laugh. “So Maximillian doesn’t care enough to come for me himself but he cares enough to send you? What am I to make of that?”

“You can make of it whatever you like. My brother has never been one to let his heart rule his head. And his head knows I’m the man most likely to get you out of here alive. Besides, from what I witnessed during our short time together, my brother’s devotion to you was not in question. Let me see … how did he phrase it? After effusively praising your kindness, your courage, and your passion for life, he exclaimed, ‘She is more than just a bride, both in my eyes and in my heart!’ His passion was really quite touching, if a bit overwrought.”

Clarinda lowered her eyes, hoping to hide her bewilderment at Max’s impassioned declaration. He had never said anything remotely that romantic to her. He’d been trying to talk her into marrying him for years, but he had always couched his intentions in the most practical of terms—how well they would suit, how advantageous their match would be to both their families, how she deserved a second chance at happiness while there was still time for her to have children, a family of her own.