Ashes and Memories (25 page)

Shaking herself mentally, she carried the nightgown to the dressing table, avoiding Reece’s gaze in the mirror.

She gathered everything she would need for several nights’ stay at the hotel, then closed the valise and turned, finally ready to face Reece.

He stood beside the bed, his expression sober. The impact of his dark masculinity caught her off-guard. Awareness shot through her at the casual intimacy of his gaze, the sensuality that always lurked beneath his surface calm like a banked fire.

She wondered what it would be like to release all that passion, and the very thought turned her limbs to liquid.

“Aren’t you forgetting this?” he asked, breaking the spell that had consumed her. Bending slightly, he retrieved her pistol from the bedside table.

Emma’s heart stopped. “I told you I’m never using that again.”

He picked up her gun belt and slipped the pistol into the holster, then held it out to her. “Take it. Humor me.”

Emma held her hand out, but drew back at the last minute, unable to touch the weapon. “I can’t. How can you do it? How can you go on killing and live with yourself?”

The fire in his eyes flared to life, fueled by a bitterness that overshadowed the sensual heat that had thrilled her only moments earlier.

“I do what I have to do.”

“No, it’s more than that. My God, what happened to you, Reece? What’s going to become of you?”

He shook his head negatively, his eyes filled with the pain he tried so hard to deny. “Emma, I can’t discuss this with you tonight.”

“Just tell me you don’t feel anything,” she pleaded, coming to stand close in front of him so that he had no choice but to look her directly in the eye. “Tell me you felt nothing this morning when you hanged those men. Tell me that and I’ll leave you alone.”

“They were murderers.”

Emma smiled with bittersweet satisfaction. He couldn’t tell her because it wasn’t true. He had felt something. “That’s not what I asked. I don’t care what they did, I care what you did. What did you do to earn that war medal? How did you come to be here like this?”

“Like what?” He glared at her with an expression meant to silence her. Feigning indifference, he dropped her gun belt in a chair and began tugging a glove on.

Emma’s hand on his stopped him. “So angry, so driven by something I can’t even understand. It’s like you’re trying to kill everything inside of you. Why?”

His jaw worked beneath his beard as he tried to drop a mask over his features, but he could not seem to drive the desolation from his eyes. Blinking furiously, he turned away, steadying himself with a deep breath.

“I broke the rule. I wasn’t supposed to care. If you don’t care, you can’t feel....” He took a deep breath, rubbing his thumb across his lower lip. “I could lose everything tomorrow and I could get it back. I’ve done it before. But if you let yourself care.... You can’t bring back the dead.” He jerked around to face her, the bitter fire back in his eyes. “They’re all dead, Emma. Murdered for no good reason. My mother, my grandfather. My wife.” Reece wiped a hand over his face. “God, she was so innocent, so.... I promised her I’d take care of her, protect her, but I wasn’t even there when she needed me most.”

Reece inhaled a ragged breath. “I died that day, standing there in the middle of the ashes. I swore nothing, no one would ever make me feel that way again.”

His voice nearly broke on his last words. Emma gave him a chance to regain control before she spoke, reeling from the revelation that he’d been married. “I’m sorry, Reece. I’m so sorry. But you can’t go through life not caring about anyone. Everyone needs to belong. Without that your heart would starve.”

“Don’t you understand? I’d rather feel nothing -- nothing -- than this.”

Unable to resist, Emma touched his cheek and he turned his face into her palm, closing his eyes as a tremor ran through his body.

She couldn’t speak. Instead, she tilted her head and strained toward his lips, and he met her kiss with a hunger that fired her blood and touched a kernel of fear deep in her soul.

His gloves slipped from his grasp, and his hands moved to cup her face. He pulled his lips from hers, though his face was so close she could see the amber highlights in his eyes and feel his breath on her face. She clung to him, her arms twined through his, their bodies pressed against one another so that she could feel his muscled form in intimate detail.

“Emma,” he whispered huskily, pressing a soft, feather light kiss to her swollen, sensitive lips.

The desperation in his eyes and in his voice tore at her heart. He was like a drowning man, clinging desperately to a lifeline.

He ran a hand over the slope of her shoulder and around her back, drawing her against his hard chest while his other hand twined in her hair and his mouth possessed hers once more.

“Emma,” he whispered against her throat. “I want you so badly. I want to make love to you.”

Her bones turned liquid, her breath so rapid and shallow she feared she might faint. She couldn’t speak, so she answered by pressing her body against his in a way she would not have thought herself capable of only moments ago.

She wanted to stay in his arms forever, wanted to forget that there was anything beyond this room and the two of them.

“Tell me to stop,” he murmured. “Tell me to stop and I’ll take you back to the hotel right now.”

He waited for her response, forcing her to choose her own fate when a part of her wanted him to take the choice from her.

If she asked him to stop now, he would take her to the hotel where she would sleep alone. If she did not, they would share her bed, and he would introduce her to the secret ways of men and women, to the things she’d only read about in novels she’d smuggled into her room at the Formbys’ house. Things so terribly intimate she couldn’t even imagine what it would be like. But she knew she wanted to explore them with this man and only him. Come what may, she wanted him, wanted to give herself to him, wanted....

Slowly he unbuttoned her shirt. Her chest rose and fell beneath his hands with the intensity of her breathing. Closing her eyes, she willed herself to remain still, to stand when her legs threatened to give out beneath her. Cool air caressed the tops of her breasts as he made his way down the row of buttons. The back of his hand brushed against her breast, and she gasped as a wave of molten fire coursed through her body, leaving her breathless and slightly dizzy.

He bent his head and pressed hot kisses to her collarbone, slipping her shirt and the coat that covered it over her shoulders and down her arms until the garments fell to the floor. Gently he covered one aching breast, his thumb tormenting a surprisingly sensitive nipple. She moaned deep in her throat, clinging to him as an unaccustomed wetness gathered between her thighs, and heat burned her flesh from her fevered brow to her practically useless legs.

He tried to pull away, and she knew he wanted to look at her, but she held him fast out of embarrassment and uncertainty, pressing her nakedness against the coarse wool of his vest.

“I’m afraid,” she murmured.

He responded by folding her gently in his arms and running a hand down her back.

“I know.”

He wanted to lie to her, to tell her he would never hurt her, but he could not. He was going to hurt her. If he made love to her, he would hurt her, there was no way around it. He would do everything in his power to make it easier for her, to make her understand that it was unavoidable and that it would happen only once, but he shuddered in anticipation, remembering why he had avoided virgins for most of his life.

“Tell me to stop, Emma,” he whispered against her soft hair. “Say you’ve changed your mind.”

Emma deserved better than this. She deserved someone who would love her, cherish her, marry her. But Reece couldn’t bear the thought of Emma with another man and he couldn’t bear the thought of letting her go now. He needed her with an intensity that terrified him. He hadn’t needed anyone like that in a very long time, maybe ever.

And tomorrow....

He couldn’t think about tomorrow, not with the blood pulsating through his veins and her lips parting so sweetly beneath his and her heart pounding against his chest in unison with his own.

She ran a hand down his chest, and the breath caught in his throat as she fumbled with the buttons of his vest. He slipped out of his duster, aware for the first time of the chill in the room.

He should build a fire, he thought inanely as he removed his vest and took her in his arms again, kissing her hungrily, eliciting a deep moan from her throat that only intensified his own ardor. His hands traveled down her back to her soft, firm hips and he pressed her against his arousal, releasing the pressure when she reacted to the shocking contact, his breath rasping in his throat at the exquisite torment.

It was a delicate dance, arousing her without frightening her, winning her trust, heightening her desire until she forgot the fear and clung to him in breathless need.

He swept her up in his arms and carried her to the bed, laying her gently on the chilled sheets. He kissed her, coaxing her lips apart. His tongue explored her mouth as his hand moved down her body in a slow caress that set her heart racing and stirred a deep, aching hunger that threatened to devour the fragments of fear and the twinge of embarrassment that waged war inside her.

His teeth tugged at her lower lip before his mouth claimed hers again, hungrily this time, demanding, breathtaking. Her body strained toward him as he caressed her breasts, avoiding the turgid peaks that ached for his touch.

No one had ever seen her like this -- naked, vulnerable.

No one had ever touched her like this -- intimately, tenderly.

His patient gentleness broke through her natural resistance and pushed her toward something, some culmination she could not name. He was a hard, sometimes brutal man, but right now he touched her with a tenderness that gave her cause to believe she could make him love her.

Slowly his lips traced a path down her throat to a sensitized breast, and she moaned aloud when his lips closed over a taut nipple. Sensation flashed from that point to her every nerve ending and she forgot everything else but the heat building inside her.

His breath was warm and fierce on her breast, his hand caressing its way over her rib cage, down her abdomen, touching her, teasing her, causing her body to react as if it knew what she did not. His touch stirred an exquisite hunger that swelled and swelled inside her, slowly smothering the remnants of fear that lingered in her soul.

She lifted her hips to allow him to remove her breeches, her breath as heavy and labored as his own. He kissed her while he slipped his suspenders over his shoulders, stopping long enough to unbuttoned his shirt and discard it.

She wanted to touch him, to feel the muscles that flexed along his shoulders as he leaned over her. But embarrassment held her immobile, and she contented herself with studying him in the flickering light. Her gaze roamed over his chest, the hard planes and taut muscles, the dark, flat nipples, the dark hairs that dusted his golden skin.

Reece rose from the bed and cross the room to extinguish the lamp. She watched his dark form move toward her through the shadows. The bed took his weight, and in a moment she heard his boots hit the floor before he stood to finish undressing, his back to her.

She tried not to look, embarrassment warring with curiosity. In the end, she couldn’t force her eyes away. She watched the way the muscles in his back rippled as he worked to remove his pants, saw the way his torso tapered from broad shoulders to narrow, muscled hips, startled by the appearance of long, faint scars that criss-crossed his back.

His breeches fell to the floor, and he turned to face her. Emma did look away, but not before she saw the proof of his arousal. She trembled with breathless anticipation as he came back to bed, crouching over her like a great cat intent on devouring her, his dark shoulder-length hair framing his face like a lion’s mane. The passion in his amber eyes sent pinpricks of alarm and something that wasn’t quite fear over her flesh.

But his kiss was so tender, his touch so sweet he transformed her fear into an all-consuming desire. And she did touch him, running a hand over the hard smoothness of his chest, slipping her arms around his solid back, her fingers drawn to the rigid scars she’d seen earlier. He shuddered at the contact, but did not draw away. His gaze returned to hers and he caressed her in the most private of places.

He held himself above her, his gaze sweeping slowly from her face down her throat to her breasts as his fingers brushed against a raw nerve, and a bolt of sensation tore a gasp from her lips.

He knew where to touch her to make her writhe with pleasure, knew how to reassure her, how to coax whatever reaction he wanted from her, knew her body better than she knew it herself.

Moaning low in her throat, she arched upward, yearning, needing, giving herself to his seductive power as the tension built inside her, and his lips claimed hers again, fiercely this time, almost roughly. His tongue plumbed the depths of her mouth while his hands turned her body into a seething, trembling inferno, and when she was sure she couldn’t bear it another moment, her body spasmed so violently she thought she might die.

He drew his head back to look into her eyes as she cried out and clasped his shoulders, vaguely aware that his breathing had increased apace with hers and that he was using his leg to pry hers apart.

This was what she wanted, to be loved by and to love this man. But the reality of lying here beside him, so much of his naked flesh pressed against hers, terrified her almost as much as it excited her. This was so different than she’d ever imagined, so much more intimate, more intense.

His face hovered so close above hers he could surely read her every thought, every emotion, every secret. She wanted to close her eyes, but she was mesmerized by the tender fire she’d never seen in his eyes before.

She knew a moment of panic at the touch of his erection against her thigh, the feel of his fingers sliding into her moist depths. But the fire he’d built so skillfully consumed her again and she cried out with a stark, unbridled reaction full of ecstasy and terror.