Wicked Nights With a Lover (17 page)

His breath escaped in a chuckle against her mouth. “I won’t move unless you ask me to.”

“I won’t,” she vowed fervently.

Ash laced his fingers with her hands and stretched them above her head, settling himself into her … but not moving—not insinuating
that
part of him any deeper. Just as he promised.

She felt herself relax, trusting him. For whatever reason. Scoundrel she knew him to be, he would not harm her. A man did not chase another man down for mistreating a woman and then turn around and do the same.

His lips at her mouth deepened, the kiss turning harder, more demanding. He sucked her bottom lip, took it into his mouth with a gentle bite, then followed by licking the bruised flesh. His lips traveled along her jaw. At her neck he found her pulse and sucked.

A breathy sigh escaped her. Her heart felt as though it might burst from her chest. She turned her head, granting him better access. This was nice.
This
he could do all night.

The throbbing once again grew at her core. She stiffened at the first sensation, remembering only the pain to follow. But no pain ensued.

She gave the barest shift of her hips, testing. No pain. Just a spike of sensation. Her belly clenched and she groaned, the sound stark with longing.

True to his word, he didn’t move. Even when his breathing grew irregular, his body a hard, rigid board of tension above her. He dragged his mouth to her ear, and she shuddered as he blew hot air over the sensitive lobe.

Of their own volition her knees bent, rose up on either side of his hips. The movement brought him deeper, sank him farther inside her.

“Oh!” She skimmed her hand down his back, fingertips tracing the dip of his spine. Sensation rippled through her. Her body felt good, marvelous.

Still, he held himself as unmoving as marble inside her.

Emboldened, a slight smile curving her lips, she drifted her hands farther down, cupped his taut buttocks in her hands, lightly scoring her nails over the smooth flesh.

He groaned, dropping his head in the nook of her neck. “Marguerite.” Her name filled her ears, a guttural plea. The sound empowered her. She moved herself against him, experimenting, marveling at the sensation of their flesh dragging against each other.

Sucking in a breath, she pulled back, away from him, sinking into the mattress. She held herself for a moment before surging forward. Up. Delightful friction arced through her, racing along every nerve ending in her body. She cried out, shocked, delighted at the deep thrust. This was it then. What she’d been waiting for. She pushed up her hips, demanding more, all he had to give.

“Now,” she begged, understanding what was necessary to relieve the dark burn at her core. She understood enough. Enough to know only he could fulfill her.

“Marguerite,” he whispered into her ear, and he sounded different. A stranger. As wrecked and shaken as she was. He trembled against her, and her need for him only burned hotter.

“Now, Ash, now,” she gasped in his ear, saying what she hoped were the words to set him free and unleash the savage from its cage.

Ash needed no further encouragement. He let himself go. The hot need that had pumped through him from the moment their bodies first joined rushed free.

Grasping her hips in both hands, he unleashed himself, drawing in and out of her silken warmth and plunging back inside, seating himself to the hilt with an exultant shout.

He felt as if he weren’t himself. As if he were possessed by some strange entity, a spirit, a semblance of himself that had never known pain or loss. The deprivations and torment of his past fled as if they didn’t exist, as if shadows never dwelled inside him, haunting him and dictating his every move.

For the first time in his life, he felt free and unencumbered.

This
—his coming together with this woman—was no random occurrence. It didn’t matter to him anymore that she was Jack’s daughter.

He fought to ease his strokes, gentle the hard slam of his cock into her tight body, but easy movements eluded him, tender lovemaking impossible. A force he’d never known before compelled him. No matter how much, how desperately he wanted to make this good for her, he was too far gone with need.

Marguerite arched, offering her body for him in complete surrender, lifting her slim legs higher.

He grasped her thigh, circling it around his hips. A quick learner, she wrapped her other leg around him, coming off the bed and shouting her pleasure with each thrust of him inside her.

She gasped his name, over and over, a wild, bewildered sound that echoed in the still lodge. He reveled in it, in her. He struggled to cling to his anger, his sense of betrayal over her lies, but it was pointless. He felt only triumph, a deep sinking pleasure that he was the first man to do this with her.
And the last,
he vowed, pumping harder, need and possession spiraling his passion out of control.

Naked beneath him, she looked magnificent, shadows licking the curves and hollows of her delicate body, her hair fanning out in a black nimbus around her head. Who knew he would find such a responsive creature in the female who had treated him to such contempt and berated him before half of St. Giles?

He reached between their bodies, found her slick heat, that tiny nub of sensitivity and put his fingers to it, pressing, rubbing until he felt her shudder.

She shouted, nearly bucking him off from the force of her climax. He pulled her up, hauled her into his arms and clutched her tightly as he released himself, found utter fulfillment at last.

“How precisely does a mistress remain a virgin?” Marguerite’s hand stilled from tracing slow patterns on Ash’s bare chest, wincing even as she had known the question was coming. “I guess I wasn’t exactly his mistress. Yet.”

“Yet.” The word dropped heavily on the air. “What of this grand trip to Spain?”

“Oh, I was going to Spain with Roger … I imagine the matter of my virginity would have been dispensed with sometime on the voyage across.”

His chest seemed to harden beneath her cheek. “Do you love him?” he asked, his voice void of emotion.

She shook her head, not wanting to confess the truth, unwilling to admit that she knew Roger less than Ash. She had picked Roger for reasons that had nothing to do with love.

“Could you not find anything else to do? Something other than … than becoming some man’s paramour? Were there no other options left to you?”

How she had come to be a mistress would require explanations … catapulting her into a complicated mire that would probably land her in an asylum.

“You could have gone to Jack,” he suggested.

“No,” she snapped, going cold at the mention of her father. “I don’t want help from him. Besides, his answer would have been to marry me off to some blueblood.” A smile twisted her lips. “It’s doubtful I would be here with you then.”

His hand glided down her back in a possessive caress.

She slid her body over him, thrilling at the press of her bare breasts against the hard wall of his chest. “None of it matters anymore,” she murmured, her lips close to his.

“Roger doesn’t matter?” Ash pressed, apparently intent on that clarification. His eyes glittered in the shadows, bright with a hunger that echoed in the marrow of her bones.

She hesitated only a moment. “No. He doesn’t,” she answered. And he didn’t, she realized with a start. Even if she returned to London and found Roger waiting, she could never be with him. Could never resume her grand plans and hop on a ship bound for Spain. She could never be his lover. Not after this.

Not after Ash.

Apparently, Madame Foster was right. Some fates cannot be avoided.

Lowering her head, she kissed him with warm thoroughness. He stilled, as though he wasn’t certain what provoked the tender attention.

Finally he moved, cupping the back of her head. Threading his fingers through her hair, he intensified the kiss, keeping it deep and slow until all thoughts fled from her head.

Chapter 16

M
arguerite woke with a long stretch, sore in places she never knew existed. She rolled her head on the pillow with a happy sigh, settling her gaze on the thick gray air hugging the window panes.

Suddenly, she stilled, recalling the reason why she was so sore. The events of the previous night flooded over her. Ash. She inhaled and his musky scent filled her nose, surrounding her.

It had been wondrous. Aside from the initial pain, losing herself in passion had been everything she ever dreamed it could be. This was the reason Fallon’s and Evie’s faces glowed pink when their husbands entered the room. Now she understood. She had been a fool to judge them as tiresome in their feelings.

One could die peaceably having lived the night she shared with Ash. It almost made the notion of facing death something she could abide.
Almost.
One hard fact pressed down upon her.
She still wasn’t married.
Madame Foster insisted she would be married when the accident claimed her.

A chance remained. A chance to live. She couldn’t toss aside that hope now. She had her night with Ash, her taste of passion. She needn’t marry him now.

Her mind raced as she gazed up at the shadows dancing on the rafters. Ash slept beside her. A horse waited outside. She could just slip away—provided she was quiet and did not wake him.

Heart hammering in her chest at the audacity of such a move—to sneak away beneath his very nose—she turned her head to observe him in his sleep, as if she could find the answer in his handsome, well-carved face. As if one glimpse of him and she would know what to do. Would she regret walking away?

Her gaze fell on the bed. Empty space yawned beside her.

With a gasp, she lurched upright, clutching the coverlet to her breasts. He was gone. Her gaze swept the dim room.

“Ash?” she called, her voice small and thready. She swallowed, the thought of escape fading with the last of the clinging night.

No answer. Rising to her feet, she slipped on her chemise. Ignoring her chilled feet, she padded about the lodge, moving into the other room, chafing her bare arms. “Ash?”

At no sight of him, she moved to the large mullioned window. Thick snow blanketed the ground. She couldn’t see into the shadowed interior of the small stable, but she imagined his mount was gone.

Still, never for a moment did she think he abandoned her. Even without the intimacies of the night before, even without the tenderness in which he’d loved her body, he wouldn’t walk away from her. If nothing else, he’d invested too much time in her, and there was the score he wished to settle with her father.

She scanned the landscape. Where had he gone then?

Trapped, defenseless as any animal in a cage awaiting the return of its captor, she turned from the window. Past caring that she’d slept little the night before and should rest to gather her strength, she strode into the bedroom and dressed herself. With a deep breath, she settled down before the fire to wait.

aAsh shook the snow from his great cape and led the reverend and the requisite witnesses—his driver and groom—toward the hunting lodge, pausing outside the door to kick snow from his boots.

He’d left at the first hint of dawn while Marguerite still slept, determined, now more than ever, to see them wed. As far as he was concerned, the only thing missing from last night was that he could not yet call her wife. A matter he intended to rectify within the next few moments.

With a single knock, in case Marguerite was still in the delectable state of nakedness he had left her in, he entered the warm confines of the lodge.

She sat before the hearth in the overstuffed chair, leveling her wide eyes on him and his small party. She rose quickly to her feet, brushing at her mussed skirts. She’d attempted to arrange her hair, but he guessed she had been unable to locate all the pins. Only half of the thick mass was pulled up, the rest trailed over her shoulder in a meandering stream of liquid black. He remembered all that hair twisting like silk between his skin and hers, and his body tensed in eagerness, ready to repeat last night. Relive every delicious moment.

“Marguerite,” he greeted, unable to stop the thickness from entering his voice. The sight of her did that to him. Had he ever thought her anything less than soul-stirringly beautiful? Had he only thought her a means to secure his business? To get back at her father? He snorted. If he wasn’t careful, he would start reciting poetry to her beauty.

She said nothing. Her darting eyes reminded him of a panicked animal, skipping past him to the three lurking men. She thrust out her chin defiantly, once again girded in her invisible armor … almost as though last night hadn’t happened, hadn’t softened her toward him. Contrary yet again. He sighed. At least she would never bore him. There was no predicting with her. Unlike any other female of his acquaintance.

Ash motioned to the lanky man with mutton-chop sideburns, stepping aside so that he could move forward. “This is the Reverend James, Marguerite.”

“Miss,” the gentleman greeted, removing his hat and stepping fully inside, patting his gloved hands to his face for warmth. “Dismal weather, but with your happy festivity upon us, I am certain brighter weather is on the horizon. The Almighty shall see it so.”

Ash swallowed a snort.

“Reverend,” she murmured, her voice skeptical as she crossed her arms over her chest. Her boot peeped out from her hem, tapping out her ire. Fire sparked in her eyes, reminding him of the Marguerite he first met in St. Giles, ready to blast him with her venomous tongue.

The reverend tipped his head. “Indeed I am.”

“Then I am sorry for your trouble. There is no need of your services here.”

Ash cast a glance heavenward and strove for patience and understanding. After she had given herself so ardently to him—multiple times—he believed she had accepted their union. Apparently, he was under a misapprehension.

Her gaze drifted to him, as though sensing his annoyance. Her whiskey-eyed stare was flat, devoid of emotion. Nothing of the passionate creature from last night lurked there.