Fascination -and- Charmed (64 page)

He was telling her…She must not misconstrue. She must not, out of her need to feel loved, imagine what did not exist. “It was dark,” she told him. “He had returned very late and I happened to be standing in the red salon. I like it there, particularly at night if I cannot sleep. My mind is very active, you see—too active, so I’ve been told. I often cannot sleep.”

His short, sharp laugh sounded again before he said, “My life seems well fated to encounter brave spirits too busy about their imaginings to stay in their beds at night. Tell me more about your encounter with your betrothed—unless I am being too inquisitive.”

She would tell him anything—gladly. “There is little more, really. He had, I think, partaken of rather too much…well, he was not entirely himself. He stumbled upon me and tried to…I moved my face and…This is embarrassing.”

“Then do not make yourself repeat it, sweet one.” Calum brushed her cheek and brushed and brushed again, and tilted his head to smile into her eyes.

“He bit my ear!” She announced it so loudly she startled herself. “It was somewhat painful, and I’m afraid I failed badly in what the dowager told me is so imperative.”

“Which is?” he asked very ominously.

“That whatever is required by one’s husband must be endured in silence. But I screamed. Oh, dear, I should not be talking about this!”

His gaze centered on her mouth. “You did not scream when I kissed you.”

“You did not bite me.” Pippa looked at Calum’s mouth. “In fact, I have found your kisses…”

“You found them pleasant?”

“Mmm. Yes.” Much more than pleasant.

She was not aware of leaning against him, or of raising her face and closing her eyes—until Calum’s lips settled upon hers. His breath was fresh and clean, his mouth faintly salty in the way she’d remembered. And his tongue, when it touched the soft inside of her lips, tickled, just as she’d remembered. And this time when he reached his tongue a little further into her mouth, past her teeth, to flicker across the tip of her own tongue, her body became softly warm and intensely aware of every sensation.

When his mouth left hers and slipped across her cheek, she turned her face, following it, but he took her earlobe between his teeth and nibbled—and little muscles in Pippa’s stomach tightened with pure pleasure.

“There,” he said, breathing delicately on sensitive skin. “You see. Nothing
has
to be unpleasant, sweet.”

“No.” She arched her neck. “Oh, no.”

Calum spread his fingers over the soft rise of her breasts above the neckline of her bodice, and her eyes flew open.

He smiled down at her and kissed her lips again, more insistently this time. With his free hand he surrounded her waist and drew her against him.

That
part of him was easily felt. Most interesting, Pippa decided through senses that seemed determined to float away on ripples of hot wanting. Really, her fascination with That did grow stronger with every encounter.

Again the wanting.
What
did she want?

His little finger slipped beneath her neckline and Pippa froze. She clutched at Calum’s shirtfront and stared at him with wide open eyes.

“What is it, sweeting?” His gaze was fervent. “You don’t want me to touch you—here?” A little further beneath the neckline went his stroking fingertips.

Pippa braced. “It—hurts.” Once more a fiery blush suffused her cheeks.

Calum’s eyes regained hard focus. “Did your good fiancé hurt you in that way also?”

She tried to hide her face, but he would not let her.

“He did? Well, it seems to me that I will be doing His Grace a favor if I prove to his future wife that she should not have to fear his touch.”

Pippa shook steadily. Calum swept his hand entirely inside her gown to surround and lift her breast.

“You
should
not,” she told him.

“I think I should,” he said through his teeth. White lines formed beside his mouth. “I should do this and a great deal more.”

He could be such a puzzle.

For an instant he released her, but only so that he could slip her small sleeves from her shoulders and push them down her arms. With them went her bodice and shift. She felt cool air on her bared breasts and turned her head sharply away in shame.

What she felt next was her final undoing. Calum’s mouth, fastening on a nipple while he tugged lightly on the other with his fingertips, rendered her legs useless.

“Oh, my sweet, untried one,” he murmured, catching her as she started to fall. Sweeping her up, he went with her to the little tapestry couch and set her down. He knelt before her and took the dress all the way to her waist.

“No,” Pippa said indistinctly. She fell against the back of the couch. “I want…I
want.
”

“Tell me what you want.” He pushed her skirts up, parted her legs and moved between her thighs so that he could kiss and suckle her breasts until she wanted to scream—this time with unbearable ecstasy.

Calum straightened long enough to work off his coat and throw it aside. He tore away his neckcloth and shirt and Pippa gasped afresh. His body was as powerfully muscled as she’d imagined—and she
did
want to touch all of it.

Before he could return to his lavish attention upon her, she released her arms from the constraining sleeves and began feeling him. He was rough where dark hair covered his chest and narrowed to a thin line that disappeared inside his trousers. Where skin shone over strongly muscled shoulders and arms, he was hard and toned. Skin at his sides felt softly firm and taut. Around his neck hung a talisman fashioned of worn leather with a gold inscription so faint she could not read it.

Pippa touched the leather. “What is this?”

“Just something I have always worn,” he said, reaching for her. “My good-luck charm.”

Her eyes flew up to his and she found him smiling at her with the faintest hint of a question.

“You touch me as if it gives you pleasure, Pippa.”

“It does. Such great pleasure. I have never seen a man without his shirt before. I have never seen a man other than entirely dressed before.”

He cupped her breasts and she glanced down, blushing yet again. Against his tanned skin, her small breasts, pointed and uptilted to pale crowns, were white. While she watched, he slowly suckled first one, then the other. A strong pulsing began between her legs. This pulsing was something else she had never felt before.

“You and your good-luck charm must have cast a spell on me,” she said at last as her hips slid forward on the couch. “And I want to feel it forever.”

“Forever would be the end of both of us,” he said, dragging harder on her breasts with his mouth.

“No. Oh!” Just when she thought he could make her feel no more undone, he found that pulsing place between her legs and eased a thumb back and forth over a small bud of flesh. “I don’t think…” She
couldn’t
think. The bud became a throbbing thing that blazed with each burst of fire. Pippa grabbed Calum’s wrist—to keep him, not to thrust him away.

The fire broke over her and welled brighter and hotter. And then, slowly, it faded, flickering away in spreading ripples. And when it was gone and the man with hot black eyes stroked her breasts once more, kissed her lips once more, spoke to her of her beauty once more, she knew that if it was possible, she would come to him again and again.

“I do not think this is what the dowager meant,” she told him when she could speak.

“No?”

“Is it possible that allowing one’s husband to do what he will could mean this…what has just been between us?”

“Oh, yes. Between us it will…” He closed his mouth before continuing. “If you and I were husband and wife, it would be this and more.”

“There is more?” It seemed amazing, except for that other—That. She would very much like an opportunity to explore That.

“Will you try to make me understand why I should not go to Franchot Castle, Pippa?” Even as he spoke, he caressed her breasts, traced her ribs, bent to quickly dip his tongue into her navel. “Surely you want me to after all.”

“No,” she said with certainty. Now, more than ever, she was convinced he must not do so.

“You must do better with your explanation than that.”

“I know, even better than I did before I arrived here this night, that you must on no account travel to Cornwall with the duke and his entourage.”

“Not convincing. It is an order, not an explanation.” He seemed intent upon drawing an entire breast into his mouth, and Pippa began to pant. “Do better,” he instructed.

“If you come, His Grace will find cause to engage you in a duel. You are a stronger man, but
he
is experienced in the matter of these dreadful, deathly encounters.”

“And you do not want me to die?”

Helplessly, she arched into him. “If you die, I shall also die.”

“Do
not
speak of such things.”

“Stay in London.”

“What will give the duke an excuse to kill me?”

“This,” she said simply, slipping to the floor, to kneel between his thighs this time. Before he could guess her intention, she surrounded and kneaded
That
part of him.

Calum groaned aloud and his chest rose in a great pant. “You must not, sweet.” He did not try to stop her. “If you do, I may not manage to let you leave at all.”

“As to that, of course you will not stop me. I will leave, and very soon. But I am merely trying to explain myself. The duke would never tolerate finding me doing such things to you.”

A deep, amazed frown puckered Calum’s brow. “
Finding
you doing such things?”

“Indeed,” she said, looking down while she judged the length and form of That part and found it considerable in all respects. Promptly she released it, ran her hands up his thighs and leaned until she could reach around and cup his buttocks. “All of these things.”

He chuckled, but was almost immediately serious again. “Are you suggesting you are likely to…you mean you might, at any time,
touch
me intimately?”

“Most definitely.” She ensured that her expression conveyed the seriousness of the situation. “I am most fascinated by That.” With one finger she touched the part of him that instantly leaped. “I find myself looking at it, and at all of you, and wanting to touch. To touch and taste and hold. And I want you to be naked when I do so.”

“Really?” He sounded strangled.

“Oh,
really.
And I am certain that if the duke discovered me so engaged, he would call you out on the spot and that would be that.”

“That would be that?”

He seemed to be having difficulty understanding the clearest of explanations. “The end,” Pippa said seriously. With great reluctance, she stood up and began replacing her dress. “The duke would be very unlikely to understand that I have these yearnings to do as I will with you.”

At that, Calum seemed incapable of speaking at all.

Good, she had made him see the seriousness of the situation.

“There,” she said when she was finally clothed properly again. “So we are in agreement.”

“We are?”

“Yes. To safeguard you from my…
unnatural
preoccupations, you will write and decline Franchot’s invitation.” She looked away. “I shall think of you, Calum. Very often. But I cannot allow you to suffer the embarrassment—and the inevitable danger my nature represents when I am with you. Will you accept my apologies.”

“You are unique.”

She still throbbed where the fiery sensation had so recently burned. “I shall certainly have difficulty forgetting you.”

“You have never had these—
urges
—before? With any other man?”

It was Pippa’s turn to frown. “Of course not.”

He shrugged and stood up, but made no attempt to cover himself. “I only ask because it seems possible that a passionate woman such as you might be likely to have such
difficult
longings whenever she was faced with a—er—man who appealed to her.”

Amazed at such ignorance in a man of the world, Pippa waited for him to place her cape around her shoulders and retrieve her reticule before she explained the situation to him as clearly as she could. “If you consider the matter carefully, Calum, you will realize that such a thing could not happen—that one could not experience such urges for more than one man.”

He drew her hood over her hair and stood there, his thumbs pressed together beneath her chin.

“There is in the world one man for each woman.”

“For every man and woman?” Calum asked. His beautiful mouth did not smile at all anymore.

“Oh, yes. The sadness lies in the fact that, most often, they do not meet each other.”

“But we are such a man and a woman?”

“You know we are.”

He looked toward the ceiling. “Pippa, if you believe this—and I believe this—perhaps you should not leave me. Perhaps you should remain with me and never return to Franchot.”

She let her hands fall to her sides. Surely he toyed with her.

“I am not a wealthy man,” he continued. “But I have a reasonable living left me by my guardian—and my expertise in estate matters always assures me of a position.”

“You are asking me to…You
would
not.”

“I would and I am.” He held a hand toward her. “I have already asked you. Walk away from him, Pippa. Reject Franchot.”

Pippa felt she might die—from a desperate longing to say,
Yes, yes!
And from fear so intense it threatened to choke her. “Oh, Calum,” she said. “Thank you.”

He watched her in silence.

“I cannot.” Just as she could not bring herself to say that she feared her fiancé might be a madman, and that if she left him—shunned him—publicly dishonored him—he would hunt Calum down and kill him. Franchot would, she had no doubt, kill them both.

“Why?” Calum asked at last.

“Because sometimes even when the right man and woman actually meet each other, there are other responsibilities that intervene.”

“And they should not be abandoned?”

Pippa frowned at him. “You know they should not. That they cannot. I am promised to the Duke of Franchot and I will become his wife. From the day of my birth, it has been known that one day I would be the Duchess of Franchot.”