“Are you saying that I wasn’t a virgin?”
“No,” he said, having brought the stocking down past her heel, and up over her toes, then flinging it aside. “I’m just saying that anyone who was guarding her innocence as closely as you seem to think you were would have selected nightwear that was a little less … arousing.”
He tucked her left foot, now bare, back onto the cushion of the settle, then seized hold of her right foot.
“That,” Kate said, “is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard in my life.”
“The person who lures the other,” Burke said, unlacing her right boot a good deal faster than he had her other, now that he’d got the hang of unlacing ladies’ boots, “into sin through the use of her sensuality, is, by definition, the debaucher. Which makes you, Miss Mayhew, the guilty party. And you are not only guilty of debauching me, by the way, but of cruelly deserting me the following day, as well.”
“Only,” she declared, “because you were trying to make me your mistress.”
“And then,” he went on, as if she hadn’t spoken, “when I proposed, I was again coldly rebuffed.”
“You only asked me to marry you because you found out I come from a family that once had some money and property.”
“Not to be offensive, Kate,” he said, as he slowly lifted her skirt again and went to work on her right stocking, having made short work of her right boot. “But though I’m certain you loved your father very much, and he certainly might once have been a gentleman, he died under very different circumstances—”
“It isn’t true,” Kate declared truculently. “What everyone says about him. It isn’t true.”
“—and yet, knowing those circumstances full well, I still want to marry you. So how do you explain that?”
“Lunacy?” she suggested.
But it was becoming difficult to speak, because his fingers were on her again. She felt his knuckles graze the inside of her leg. This sensation, much more so than the feel of the heat of the fire, was what was making it very hard to remember what they were arguing about—or even that they were arguing at all.
“I’ve retained enough of my wits to have gotten us to Scotland in record time, haven’t I?” Burke pointed out.
“Only,” Kate said, “out of fear that your daughter might meet the same fate as I did.”
“Not so,” he said, gently peeling the stocking down the curve of her calf. “If I thought Daniel Craven loved Isabel half so much as I love you, I would not have been opposed to the match.”
She suddenly found it extremely difficult to speak. She cleared her throat. “That,” she said, and had to clear it again. “That—”
“It’s true,” he said. He ran his hand along the skin from which he’d just peeled the sodden stocking. “You know it’s true.”
“I don’t,” she said, having even more trouble speaking now. “I can’t—”
And then speech became completely impossible, because he had lowered his lips to the place where his hand had been. Kate nearly catapulted off the bench when she felt the prickly bite of his whiskers against the silken skin of her thigh, followed immediately afterward by the infinitely gentle caress of his lips—and then the feather-light but white-hot stroke of his tongue.
Kate’s hand flew out. She didn’t know what she was trying to do, stop him, or urge him on. But when her fingers met his thick, dark hair, they seemed to curl instinctively, until she was grasping him closer to her, and not pushing him away, No, not pushing him away at all.
“Burke,” she said, but the name came out sounding funny, more like a gasp than an actual word.
And it didn’t have the effect she’d wanted at all. Instead of stopping, instead of lifting his head, the marquis only became more persistent. He had tugged up the lace-trimmed cuffs of her pantaloons until they were bunched around the middle of her thighs. Now his mouth moved steadily up her leg, seeming to incinerate every inch of skin it encountered along the way—in a manner not unlike the way the fire, blazing before them, was rapidly turning the wood at its center to ash. Kate felt as if the marquis’s tongue was turning her to ash ….
And it wasn’t an unpleasant sensation, this being consumed in flame.
Oh, no. Not at all.
And then his fingers, sly and knowing, were slipping through the slit in the gusset of her pantaloons. Kate inhaled sharply as she felt them brush against her warm, moist core—not once, which might have been accidental, nor even twice, but three times, each contact sending jolts of pleasure through her.
And then they stayed there, those strong, competent fingers, purposefully pressing against that part of her which for so long had craved his touch. Kate’s own fingers gripped his hair verytightly now, tightly enough to have hurt, if he’d been in a state of mind to notice anything except her breathless excitement, and the eager pounding of his own heart.
But when, a few seconds later, he replaced the fingers with his mouth, Kate experienced a rush of sensations unlike any other she had ever known. The wet warmth of his mouth on that tenderest of all places, the infinite gentleness of his lips, contrasting with the purposeful thrust of his tongue and the roughness of the razor stubble on his chin and jaw grazing the softness of her thighs … it was too much. It was wicked. It was wrong. It had to be wrong, because nothing that felt this good could possibly be right.
Kate wanted to tell him as much. She wanted to tell him to stop. After all, she still had her bonnet on, for God’s sake. It couldn’t be right to have a man’s head between one’s thighs when one was still wearing one’s bonnet.
And yet it was extremely difficult to think about things like right and wrong when his lips and tongue were doing things to her, making her feel things she’d never imagined in her life were possible to feel. A part of her wanted to break away, push him back, clamp her legs shut and shove her skirts back into place, and stare down at him in outraged modesty. How else was she going to preserve her sanity? And yet another part of her—the stronger part—thought that sanity was overrated, and what was the point of pushing him away, when with every flick of his tongue, every movement of his lips, he was bringing her closer to heaven?
Besides, even if she’d wanted to, she couldn’t push him away. He had his arms wrapped around her hips, his broad shoulders wedged between her knees. His face was buried deeply between her thighs. She wasn’t touching him—not purposely—anywhere now. She’d flung both her arms up over her head, and was gripping the back of the settle, as if somehow, that contact with the world beyond the one he was creating with his lips and tongue would keep her grounded.
It was then, almost senseless with pleasure, Kate said his name—a gasp, really, just a breathless movement of her lips. But he heard. He heard. And his name on her lips was, as always, his undoing. Before she was even fully aware of what was happening, Kate felt his head rise—his whiskers raking he sensitive skin between her thighs in the most delightfully painful way—and his arms tighten around her hips.
Then, next thing she knew, he was lifting her, right off the settle, her skirts bunched up around her waist, her heart hammering like a rabbit’s, the gusset of her pantaloons drenched with her own desire. Lifted her straight up into the air, leaving her frantically pushing aside the rings of her crinoline, searching for his shoulders to seize and steady herself. Only by the time she found them, through all those yards of wool and lace, he was already setting her down again. She felt a mattress yield beneath her back, and then he was between her legs again, only this time, it was a knee nudging hers apart, as, above her, Burke struggled to undo his breeches. She watched him in a sort of daze, noticing, with a dizzy sort of sense of satisfaction, that his hands were trembling, and that, when he finally managed to unloose himself, he was huge with his need for her. Ha, she thought. I did that. I did that to him.
But then she didn’t have a chance to think anything more, because, without so much as another caress, he was burying himself into her.
Not that Kate minded. Oh, it was startling, of course—startling enough to cause her to gasp in astonishment, though certainly, this was not something they hadn’t done before. Still, it was startling to have this thick, solid mass suddenly invading her, where just seconds before, there’d been only the tenderest of kisses. Startling to have the full of his weight on top of her. Startling to reach out and feel the starched folds of his cravat, since they were both still fully dressed.
But perhaps most startling of all was how very little any of that bothered her, how very much she’d been craving this, how empty she had been feeling before, and now, how full—more than full, brimming … brimming with him. It seemed he only had to enter her, and she was already teetering on the edge of climax. Only because, she told herself, he’d brought her so close before, with his lips and tongue. That was the only reason. It wasn’t that she wanted him. It wasn’t that she needed him.
His lips were on her neck, just below her right earlobe. He’d pinned her wrists to the mattress when she’d tried to touch him, as if her touch were somehow dangerous. He was plunging into her, driving her deeper and deeper back into the mattress. And she was lifting her hips to meet him with every lunge.
All right. All right. She wanted him. She needed him.
And then she was slipping over the edge again. She didn’t want to go there, didn’t want to leave so soon. But he was pushing her there, with the raw emotion of his kisses, with the urgency of his thrusts. She wanted to cling to him, to keep from losing herself in the mindless pleasure toward which he was urging her. But his fingers were still wrapped around her wrists, as if she were a captive he was determined to keep from escaping, a prisoner upon whom he was intent on practicing the sweetest of tortures ….
She surrendered.
Waves of erotic pleasure rolled over her. Caught up in their inexorable grip, she could only writhe beneath him, her back arching, her hips raised against him. She let out a sound—a cry of helplessness—and then he released her wrists at last, and cradled her face with his hands as his body, too, was rocked with climactic release.
Kate, feeling much better than she had all day, was nevertheless a little bit ashamed. She found her voice after a few moments, and said sheepishly, “I never even had a chance to take my bonnet off,” sounding as if somehow, the fact that she’d been wearing her bonnet the whole time was infinitely more shocking than anything else that had happened.
Burke raised his face from her throat, where he’d buried it after the last of the spasms that had racked his body had left him. He looked down at her bruised lips and storm-cloud grey eyes. A long strand of her dark blond hair had escaped from beneath the bonnet, and lay across her neck. He rose up to his elbows, shifting some of his weight from her much smaller frame, and lifted that strand.
“Most improper,” he said, bringing the silken threads to his lips. “In the future, I shall remember always to remove your bonnet first.”
“I should hope so,” she said sleepily, quite forgetting that a future with him was the last thing she wanted.
Or was it the only thing she wanted?
When Kate woke the next morning, she hadn’t the slightest idea where she was, or how she had gotten there.
All she knew was that it had to be early, because she didn’t yet feel sick. And she always felt sick, like clockwork, by eight.
It wasn’t until she reached out, expecting to feel Lady Babbie’s silken fur, and felt something a good deal more coarse, that she realized she was not still at White Cottage. When she opened one eye to investigate, she saw her hand resting in a nest of ink-black chest hair. Chest hair, she realized, when she bent forward to examine it more closely, that belonged to the Marquis of Wingate, who was lying—quite naked—in her bed.
Or was it that she was lying naked in his bed? She wasn’t certain.
Then the events of the night before came back to her, and she sank back against the pillows with a quiet “Ohhh …” of comprehension.
Of course. They were in Gretna Green. They were there to find Isabel, who’d run off with Daniel Craven. Daniel Craven,who had once taken from Kate everything she held dear, and was now attempting, for reasons she could not begin to fathom, to do the same to Burke Traherne.
They were in an inn. The proprietors of which believed them to be married.
Well, they had certainly carried on as if they were. If married people even did things like that, which Kate highly doubted. She did not believe for an instant that her father had ever … Or that her mother had ever …
Her cheeks hot, Kate decided it was probably better not to link things like that. What had gone in her parents’ bed had absolutely no relation to what went on in her own. None whatsoever. Particularly when what went on in her bed included Burke.
Burke. She turned her gaze toward him. He was still sleeping, his furred chest rising and falling in heavy slumber. That was how she thought of him now. As Burke. Not as Lord Wingate. As his name, Burke. It was a strange name, more of a last name than a Christian name, and much too small a name for the complex man who held it. Burke.
She leaned up on an elbow so that she could look at him more closely.
He had, she saw, with some surprise, a few grey hairs intermingled with the black, both on his head as well as on his chest. Well, and why not? He was in his late thirties, after all. He had a full-grown daughter. Well, practically full-grown, anyway. He had been how old when Kate was born? Thirteen. Well, thirteen years’ difference wasn’t that much. And he certainly didn’t look it. No one, seeing him now, would think him as old as thirty-six. Thirty, maybe. Maybe thirty-one or two. But not thirty-six. Oh, no. He was much too vital, too robust, for so advanced an age. Not that thirty-six was old. Just old for a man who was capable of doing … well, what they’d done, as many times as they had the past few days.
But they were going to have to stop doing that, she thought to herself, drawing her hand away from his chest. Really. Because how, after they found Isabel, and Kate kept Burke from killing Daniel Craven, could they continue? It wouldn’t work. It couldn’t work. She couldn’t marry him, much as she wanted to. She had reached out again, to touch him. He seemed to draw her in that way. She constantly felt like touching him. Which was why, of course, she’d made him sit on the opposite seat all during those long hours in the chaise. She couldn’t have him near her, within arm’s reach, or she’d start touching him. She couldn’t help herself. He drew her. It was shocking how he made her feel.