“There is no cause for losing one's temper,” she told him. “Particularly when you are not the one wronged. I did not ask you to marry me.”
“But you wanted me to do so.”
She closed her eyes and turned her back. “Yes, I did. I will not lie. But in the past few days I gave you every opportunity to avoid the event.”
“And I gave you no opportunity to avoid the event, because I did not wish to. I wanted you as my wife, and now I have you and I do not regret it.”
Justine tried to draw a breath. Her lungs seemed to push out the air.
“I am not repulsed by your scars,” Struan said from close behind her. “Your body could not please me more. You are my ideal, my dream. To touch you is heaven.”
She flamed. The secret places within burned and clenched.
He gathered her hair into a fist and drew her head, gently but firmly, back against his shoulder. “Your face is the only face I shall ever long to see. To simply feel your presence can fill my emptiness. To spread my hand upon your breast…” He did so, finding a way beneath the robe and inside the gown. “To mold and entice your flesh incites me as nothing has ever incited me.”
Justine leaned against him. Shifting, he slipped his arms beneath hers and loosened the front of her robe. The gown's shallow bodice slipped easily down, exposing her to the room's cool air—and Struan's warm, strong hands.
Her mind flew. The thoughts jumbled together, blurred by sensation, by need. Struan's lips were on her neck, her shoulder, her ear. His palms grazed her straining nipples and she rolled her head away.
Justine turned in his arms and slid her hands around his neck.
His tormented face shocked her. “What is it? Tell me.”
For what felt like forever he looked into her eyes, then at her mouth—then her naked breasts. He uttered a deep groan. His own lips were parted before they met hers.
This was different from the kisses they'd shared. This kiss she received, absorbed, while Struan dealt its power upon her like a fascinating weapon. He cupped her head and swept their mouths and tongues together with urgent force. Arched into him, she felt his hardness again and her own body answered with the scorching tension she'd already come to cherish.
“Struan,” she managed to whisper. “Struan, let us lie together.”
He buried his face in her hair.
“Struan—”
“Hush. Hush. I cannot bear it.”
Her heart beat fast and hard. “Tell me what—”
“No. God help me, no.”
Framing her face, he stared into her eyes. His fingers hurt her scalp. “I must find a way through this for us, Justine. You must allow me to do that.”
“Please—”
“What must be, must be. Trust me to do what is best. I cannot live with myself if I cause …” He shook his head.
Suddenly weak, she clung to him. “You are afraid of causing me harm. You are, aren't you?”
“Be led. That is all I ask.”
“Be led to what?” His cloak had fallen to the floor. Justine wound shaky fingers about his jacket lapels. “Be led to loneliness and misery? To perpetual longing for fulfillment?”
“You do not understand,” Struan told her, his teeth gritted. “I want you, but I cannot have you.”
“Because you believe I am less than a woman,” she said. Still holding his jacket with her left hand, with her right she stroked beneath his waist coat and over smooth linen where she felt the solid thud of his heart. Rising to her toes, she kissed his beard-rough jaw, slid her lips to the place where his collar met his neck. “I am not less than a woman, husband. I am whole. You have told me I am whole and I want you to help me prove that it is true.”
Struan caught her wrists and held her hands against his chest. “You do not understand, my love. There are so many things you do not understand. I am going to return you to your rooms, and I want you to—”
“I will not go.” To emphasize her resolve, she pressed her face to his chest, her bared breasts to the backs of his hands. “I will not.”
His cheek came to rest atop her head, and Justine swallowed a sob. “Listen to me,” Struan said. “There are matters we cannot speak of. Know that I love you. I have told you so and I do not trifle with such words. Remember them. Hold them in your heart. But do not press me—not now—perhaps never.”
Emotion poured upon Justine as a warm wind bearing daggers of ice. Confusion. Joy and despondency. Hope and fear—desperation.
“You believe everything my grandmother said.”
Struan caressed her shoulders, her back, her waist, with trembling hands.
“Don't you?” Confusion fled, leaving cold clarity in its wake. “Don't you, Struan?”
“I will not speak of it.”
She raised her head and found his eyes tightly shut. “You will not speak of the truth? But I think you should. My misguided grandparent has persuaded you that should you become my husband in the only true sense, it may cost me my life. She—”
“I insist you do not speak further of this.”
“And I insist that I do. And that you listen. Your concern is that you may hurt me.”
When he opened his eyes they shone black in the shadow. “That and more,” he admitted.
“Just as I thought.” She drew a deep breath. A bold idea formed. “Especially you fear making me with child.”
“No more, Justine. Do you understand?”
“Do you understand that you have nothing to fear?”
There was about him a glazed quality. “Come,” he murmured. “To your rooms and I will ensure you are warm there.”
“I shall be warm here. With you. Your body will keep me warm. You need not fear that I shall die from childbirth. It is clearly impossible.”
He stared at her and his gaze gradually became acutely clear.
Justine pulled his neckcloth loose and removed it. She kept her eyes upon his and worked his jacket from his wide shoulders and down his arms until it fell away.
Struan frowned.
She undid his shirt, pulled it from his trousers, and sent it the way of his jacket.
“I find I prefer you without clothes, my lord.” Once more she drew close, pressed her breasts to his rigid chest, and surrounded his waist with her arms. “Would you not feel more comfortable without the weight of your trousers?”
His response was the oddest sound.
The course she had embarked upon was reckless. “If I were likely to bear a child I should undoubtedly already have done so.”
Muscle grew solid beneath Justine's hands, and she closed her eyes. Whatever she did, she must not appear nervous. Breathing slowly through her mouth, she smoothed his buttocks and let her touch rest there.
“What are you saying?” His voice held an edge of steel. “Be careful how you explain yourself.”
Justine forced a laugh. “I only tell you to allay your foolish fears. You did not imagine Lord Belcher would offer for me out of simple generosity, did you?”
“I imagined nothing at all about Lord Belcher except that he was the fop you described. And that he was ninety.”
With her eyes lowered, Justine shrugged out of her robe. His trousers were complicated, as complicated as they were unfamiliar in construction, but she accomplished their unfastening.
Struan gripped her shoulders and shook her. “Justine?”
The trousers slid past his hips easily enough. “Ah, I see you have reason to thank me for my efforts,” she told him as his manhood sprang free and full. Her heart thundered now. Blood pounded in her ears and she feared she might faint away entirely.
“Explain yourself.”
She would try. Within the bounds of her scant knowledge, she would attempt to convince him of a lie. “Lord Belcher is considerably younger than ninety. I do not like him, but neither do I entirely abhor him.” Tugging Struan's trousers past his muscular thighs was a taxing task, and made the more difficult since her concentration threatened to fly away.
He stopped her at his knees and set her firmly away from him. In seconds he stood before her naked, his legs braced apart, his hands on his hips. “Satisfied, madam?”
Hot and cold by turns, Justine could not respond. Struan, Viscount Hunsingore, was a magnificent man. If she was indeed an unnatural woman for thrilling to the searing desire he aroused in her, then she wanted to be forever and increasingly unnatural.
Struan moved before she could react. He seized her by the waist and swept her from the floor. A few strides and she was deposited atop the counterpane on his ebony bed.
All air rushed from her lungs. Some intense emotion haunted his eyes, the lines of his face, the set of his entire body.
Anger. No, not anger—fury. Struan pulsed with fury.
“I—”
“Enough, Justine,” he said, his lips barely moving. “How many times?”
Quelling the urge to try to cover herself, she scooted to the far side of the mattress. “Come.” She smoothed the space beside her. “Hold me.”
“My God, I have been a fool. Tell me how often you've been with him.”
The question seemed odd, but at least she could answer it honestly. “Many times. His visits to the area were not frequent when I was much younger. He was a boon companion of the Prince of Wales. Then he fell from the Prince's favor after the old King's first great illness—when the King recovered—something to do with having cast his political lot with the King and causing the Prince to give him the cut direct. Lord Belcher returned to Cornwall some time prior to the late King's death, and since then I have been in his company often.”
“Often?” His tone faded to nothing. Slowly, he approached and climbed to sit, looking down at her. “Yet you pretended you detested the man and you allowed me to marry you thinking you an innocent—as you should be. You allowed me to play the fool with your damnable book. Did it amuse you to have me explain what you already knew?”
She had done what she set out to do. He believed she had done
It
with Lord Belcher. Justine suppressed a shudder of revulsion. If a woman were capable of bearing a child it would be as possible with one man as another. Therefore, had she been with Lord Belcher she would be as likely to increase as if she became wholly Struan's wife.
Justine smiled and felt muscles in her cheeks quiver. “I pretended nothing. You did not ask about such things. And I did—do need your help with certain aspects of my book. But that is not the issue here. Since I believe my grandmother is correct in saying you do not need more children, it seems to me the sooner we dispel your fears of my producing them, the sooner we can get on with the business of being husband and wife. Don't you agree?”
He did not answer.
She should withdraw the lie at once. Such falsehood was unfair to Lord Belcher, and she had accomplished nothing but evident disgust in Struan.
“Take off the gown.”
Gooseflesh rose along her limbs. “No. I think it better not to—”
“Take off the gown.”
“You are angry. I do not want you to be angry.”
“Do as you are told.”
His stillness turned her stomach. He was as some great, dark animal, its strength coiled, ready to leap upon her.
Struggling, Justine got to her knees. The room was chill but she did as he asked, pulled the gown entirely from her shoulders and pushed it down about her hips. “I have been wrong, rash and—”
“Say no more, I beg of you.” Struan rose to his knees also. Wrapping an arm around her waist, he lifted her to strip away the gown, then set her down once more so that they knelt, thigh to thigh, his shaft an iron pressure against her belly, her breasts pressed to his chest.
Justine's hand went to her hip.
“How unfortunate your modesty is a false thing,” Struan said. He bowed his head, but not before she saw the darkness of pain cross his features. He said, “What I have longed for does not exist—gentle honesty. I mourn its absence.”
“It is not absent,” she told him in a rash. “Not anymore. I have misled you.”
“Indeed you have.” His lips descended upon hers with little finesse, yet her eyelids drifted shut and she did with her tongue what he did with his.
He touched her everywhere, rubbing, pressing, probing her most sensitive places until she panted and felt herself grow slippery. Embarrassment mingled with anxiety, but if he as much as noticed she saw no sign of disgust.
He would not let her speak. Each time she opened her mouth, he filled it with his tongue. And he held her where she knelt, pushed her thighs apart and, amazingly, thrust
That
part of him between to rest against pulsing flesh.
Justine shuddered. And she felt an answering shudder in Struan. His skin grew heated and slick and his breath came in great drafts.
It
must be almost over. A wonderful, terrible, intoxicating and shattering thing. If he did not allow her to admit her lie—and forgive her—at least she would have been with him once, and if she were very fortunate there might be a child.
“You are so very wet, Justine,” he said against her ear. “Wet and hot, my dear. A passionate woman. How could one expect you to live the life of a nun?” His sudden burst of laughter was wild and near-crazed.
“Struan, please.” She plucked at his hair, attempted to pull his head away, to remove his mouth from its fierce sucking at her breast. A sheet of fire burst from beneath his lips, seared downward, tightened her legs against his shaft.
“A nun,” he sputtered. “That's rich. A nun and a…” Rather than finish, he made a simple chore of lowering her to her back, pushing her heels close to her body and burying his face in that “hot, wet” place.
Justine convulsed. She thrashed and pushed impotently at his shoulders. No words would form, only sounds with no meaning.
His tongue did
There
what it had done to her mouth, but with more devastating results. Those parts of her swelled, they swelled as her breasts seemed to swell and throbbed as her breasts throbbed. And another sheet of lightning heat burst beneath his mouth once more.
“Struan!”
Her hips jerked from the bed, but he did not stop.
She did not want him to stop.
The great building pressure exploded, shuddered until she cried out and was helpless to stop her legs from splaying wide.
Struan's mouth left her. Damp and throbbing, she struggled for breath and heard him extinguish the light.