My Surrender (18 page)

She did, though the hand he still held captive fisted into a little ball of tension, and the eyes she turned to him were apprehensive and eager and wary.

He felt himself grow hotter, harder, the imperative to do as she’d asked swelling him. His body was rigid and graceless, unwieldy when he wanted to move with her effortlessly in a dance as old as time.

“Let me go,” she whispered.

That was it, then. He couldn’t refuse her, even though he longed to caress her, to take her, to play with her body, to get drunk on all that sweet femininity, become tangled in her arms, in her glossy curls, in the snare of scented silky flesh and smooth, tapered limbs. He straightened and released her wrist.

Her fingers rose as hesitantly as smoke in a still room, finally settling on the side of his face. She traced the crescent-shaped scar beside his mouth. “I won’t leave. You do not have to force me to stay by holding me captive. I am captive without constraints. Don’t you see? I want
you
to make love to me, Dand.
You.”

“Oh, Lottie.” It was all he could say. Roughly he hauled her up into his embrace, bruising her with a kiss, his hands plunging into her thick hair, rocking her, desperate and aching for what she could give him. He turned, rolling onto his back and pulling her down on top of him, taking her weight so that she lay fully on him. He spread his hand low on her back, his other hand cupping the back of her head as his mouth plundered hers.

He shifted, turning, moving her beneath him, seeking between their bodies for the edge of her gown, yanking it away from separating them and—! Lord. Skin like butterfly wings, tender with a powdery sort of silkiness and higher, crisp curls and softer flesh yet. He settled his hips into that perfect lee, his erection pushing between her legs, gasping with the exquisite sensation.

A fever was rising in him, the need to take her almost unbearable in its urgency. He gripped her shoulders, using his lips to burnish her temples and eyelids, cheek and neck, the lobe of her ears and the point of her chin, before recapturing her mouth, feasting on the little sounds she made. All his best intentions for gentleness dissolved before need, as he pulled at the gown’s neckline and heard the hiss of ripping seams as he bared her to the waist. The dim light revealed her breasts, soft little rose-tipped mounds.

He slipped his arm beneath her waist, pulling her up toward him, drawing a nipple into his mouth, his tongue flat against it. Exquisite pain pooled in his groin. He molded her to him, rocking into the jointure of her thighs and heard her make a sweet sound of pleasure and fear. Benediction? Or curse? God, he could not tell anymore. It was muddled and jumbled, a black moonless night, unnavigable and empty of answers.

“Want me,” he muttered roughly, licking her breast. “Desire me.”

She answered as if his words had been the permission she’d waited to hear. She tore at his shirt, dragging it from his shoulders, the sound of buttons popping and skittering across the floor. With unerring deviltry, her fingers found the cursed scar on his chest. He felt the instant she recoiled, the second that passion fell before realization. With a growl, he heeled back, letting the light wash over his chest, letting her see how he’d been branded. He waited.

Charlotte had never seen anything so blatantly male. His body was so beautiful, so perfectly knit, strong and healthy. Long bulging muscles crafted the arms holding him suspended above her. His broad shoulders tapered down his rib cage, his chest carved of planes and shelves covered with dark hair that thickened in a vee, growing denser as it traveled in a line down his belly to disappear beneath the waist of his trousers.

The sight stirred the embers of her desire, painfully renewing the ache that built beneath the unfamiliar bulge pressed intimately between her legs. Need throbbed low in her belly, in her breasts, in her lips, causing a tenderness that only roughness could cure.

She knew she should be scrambling to cover herself, but all she could think was that she wanted to feel him, press her bare breasts to the hard contours of his chest. There…against the infamous rose brand, a pearly raised scar the size of her palm. How much it must have hurt! How much he had suffered!

She pushed herself up on her elbows and slowly, purposefully, brushed her lips against the angry scar. His chest swelled on a harsh, indrawn breath. She kissed him again, gently. His skin was hot, moist, the flesh fine-grained over the dense muscle beneath. Desire grew and held her imagination captive. Bold and lascivious thoughts skittered through her mind. Desires for things she hadn’t names for, places she wanted to touch that she could not identify with words, feelings he roused in her that she wanted to rouse in him.

A man’s body, she thought wonderingly, was fantastically graceful and unbelievably sensitive. She had only to blow lightly across his throat to send tremors coursing through him, only to give the lightest nip at the base of his neck for him to squeeze his eyes shut and breathe heavily through his nostrils, only to set her tongue delicately in the corner of his mouth to—

He swept her arms from under her, forcing her down into the pillows, his face taut, his eyes burning. He reached between them, pushing her legs apart, and he was there, between her legs, a thick, hard shape pushing into the most intimate softness of her body.

She stared up at him, suddenly apprehensive, her fingers digging into his shoulders. He looked so foreign to her, so hard and angry, nothing like the companionable rascal who’d teased and taunted her. He looked…like a man in extremity, holding on by the smallest of margins.

With a sound of capitulation, he fell forward, his face fitting into the curve of her neck, his breath harsh and heated in her ear, his hand diving beneath her hips and spreading under her buttocks, lifting her. Then…he was coming
into
her, pushing
inside
of her, and he was thick and large,
too
large, stretching her as he slowly thrust a portion of his body into hers. The intimacy of it shocked her more than the discomfort. She twisted, trying to pull back from the intrusion. This could not be the end promised by all those mounting tensions and flickers of deep, deep pleasure? Not this.

He would not let her go. He pulled up, bracing himself on his arms, his hips still canting forward, staring down at her through half-closed lids, his eyes black and unreadable, his jaw tight as he pushed until he’d hilted himself fully within her, buried to the root. She dared not move lest the discomfort grow, and waited anxiously, feeling betrayed by her sisters, by Ginny, and by her body, which had gone from aching anticipation to tense suspension.

He swallowed, his breathing staggered, his face covered with a fine sheen.

“Dand…?”

“Yes.” His breathing was like a bellows now and his torso and arms and face glistened in the low light. His gaze was hard, as penetrating as his body, just as implacable. “Yes. My God, Charlotte. You are so small. So tight.”

Closing his eyes he rocked slowly against her. With him so deep inside of her, the movement pulled at her most intimate parts, tickling to life a nascent sensitivity. He retreated from her body, just a matter of a few inches, but the movement tugged against some central bud where pleasure dwelled, drawing from her the most extraordinary desire to arch against him. Pleasure pulsed at his slow reentry, the stimulation he provided quickened with his next thrust and became desire at the next.

Her muscles tightened. There was more. Her body instinctively knew it, sought it. Without knowledge, without expertise, she could only follow what instinct dictated. She wanted, she needed. He could provide.

He was too far away, braced over her on arms whose muscles quivered with each thrust. She slipped her arms around his rib cage pulling him down over her, making him look at her, his weight a welcome stimuli, vital and virile and masterful. He caught her knees and pulled her legs up over his hips. Again and again, faster, deeper, his body hard with strain, he thrust into her and with each hard penetration she heard her answering gasps and barely recognized them as her own.

Her world was reeling, each stroke of his body intensifying the liquid spiral of pleasure coiling tighter inside of her, bringing her nearer to the unexplored moment of crisis, of perfect pleasure, the culmination of desire. Exquisite. Torturous in the building anticipation. She clung to him, seeking an anchor against the careening whirlpool of sensation. She couldn’t see, couldn’t think, could not hear anything other than her staccato pants, his savage breathing as he took her harder, deeper. It was there…just out of reach…taunting…teasing…needing only…

Yes!
Her body bowed, arching, straining in grateful welcome.
Yes!
Pleasure exploded like gunpowder, brilliant, shocking, and powerful.
Yes!
Tears ran down her cheeks. Laughter bubbled up in her throat.
Yes!

Even as the astonished laughter tripped from her lips, Dand rocked back and once more came into her, his head thrown back as he breathed a shuddering sound like a prayer. He held there for one long eternity, every inch of his beautiful body shivering. And then he was sinking down, rolling to her side, catching her and folding her against him.

And while he held her and exhaustion seeped into her limbs and pleasure drugged her mind, she could not help but be glad that he did not let her go, but held her as tenderly and fiercely now as when they had moved as one and said nothing of leaving her. And so she let her thoughts drift and for one short space, pretended there would be no tomorrow.

The rain had stopped by the time Charlotte awoke, her cheek resting on the warm dense musculature of Dand’s chest, his arm, heavy with sleep, wrapped about her. For a few seconds she held her breath and let herself believe that this was only the first morning of many more exactly like it, that the passion they had roused themselves to share again and again during the long and turbulent night would be repeated again, day after day, week after week, across many seasons, and through the course of many years. It was easy to do in the predawn darkness with the scent of their lovemaking still hanging heavy in the air and his body closely entwined with hers.

But then she heard the sound of heavy wheels passing on the street below her window. A bird trilled from somewhere far away and she knew that morning would not be far off.

Dand must leave before then.

She closed her eyes, rubbing her cheek against his chest.

“Lottie.” He pulled her closer and she wondered how long he had been awake, how many minutes they might have shared that she’d wasted in sleep. Too late now. Far too late.

“My maid will come to me soon,” she said. “You must be gone by then or the Polite World will next decide that we have reconciled.”

“Put St. Lyon off for a few days,” he said, his voice grim. “I just need a few days more. Say you haven’t the right clothes, you need to make arrangements—”

“Dand, we haven’t time. You know it as well as I. The auction could begin at any moment. I need to be there before the letter leaves Scotland with a new owner.”

“A few days more—”

“May spell disaster.” She rose up on her elbows, balancing her forearms on his hard belly, her fingertips resting over his heart. “Dand. I have to go.”

She saw the shadows move across his face, a pale glint as if he’d bared his teeth. From deep in the house she heard a door shut. The tweenie going to clean and light the grates.

“You have to leave, Dand. Please. We can’t risk St. Lyon hearing of this.”

“To hell with St. Lyon.” With a growl, he rolled her beneath him and with unerring aim found her mouth in a hard, desperate kiss. She responded in kind, desperate to entangle herself with the very fabric of his being, only…The dawn was here. Obligation and responsibility jeered at her, poisoning her pleasure until she finally broke away.

“Please,” she whispered, wanting more than anything for him to stay, to make love to her again, to never leave, to never know of wars and the letters that could change the course of them. “Please.”

He lifted his head. “I’ll go. I’ll think of something. And I’ll be back this afternoon.”

“When?”

“Three o’clock. Four at the latest.”

“It better be afterward. Six o’clock. I’ll let the staff go again.”

“Six it is.”

He moved away and she felt the bed dip as he sat up and groped for the clothing she’d helped him shed in their eagerness and haste. She watched him in silence as he stood up and could not help but admire the tensile strength of his silhouette, the broad shoulders tapering to the trim hips and long, muscled thighs and calves. He pulled on his clothing and looked down at her.

“You’ve utterly destroyed my intentions, you know,” he mused quietly. She could not guess his meaning. “But I swear if there is any way in heaven or hell to do so, I’ll make this all come right. Watch for me this evening, Lottie.”

“Yes.”

He started to go but then, as if proof against a terrible foreboding, swung back around, dipping low and lifting her up to meet his questing lips. She answered him with more passion than she’d intended, wrapping her arms around his neck and kissing him back with all the hopeless longing in her heart. Finally, he released her and eased her down, with almost courtly care, tucked the cotton sheet about her before straightening.

“Until evening,” he murmured and like a ghost dissolved into the lightening gloom, only the quiet catch of the doorway leading into the still black hall alerting her to the fact that he had indeed gone.

And only then did she allow herself to reply, as tears overflowed her lids and ran down her cheeks. “Good-bye,” she whispered.

LeMons dungeon, France
March 1800

T
HEY COULDN’T SEE
the sky, but the weather always had a way of finding even the deepest pits of the LeMons castle dungeon. In the winter the cold whistled down the shafts and stairwells numbing fingers and toes: in the summer, the darkness baked with a humid fetidness. And now, in spring, the rain seeped down the mold-blackened dungeon walls, pooling on the uneven flooring.

Dand squatted next to the wall, his head lolling forward, his back pressed against the damp stone. They’d taken Douglas away early yesterday, before dawn. Kit had been returned at the same time, staggering in, clutching a blood-soaked rag over that hideous disfiguring brand. A rose, he’d gasped, grimacing as Ram had swabbed the burned tissue with a bit of brandy he’d bribed from one of the guards.

Anytime now and they would come back and then they would take either him or Ram. And question them as they had Kit.

They’d asked him who had aided them on their journey, whom they had contacted at Malmaison, which of Napoleon’s guards were loyal and which secret Royalists. Kit hadn’t told them, of course. When Kit had refused to tell them, the warden had decided to exert more pressure by burning a rose into Kit’s chest.

Little did the warden know how ironic his torture had proved. They had come to France masquerading as Scottish sympathizers, ostensibly bringing Napoleon’s wife Josephine a rare new rose for her collection. In reality they were to meet co-conspirators at her home, Malmaison. But they’d been found out. As a symbol of their treachery, the warden had fashioned an iron brand in the shape of a stylized rose.

How fitting that Douglas’s precious brotherhood be forever marked with the symbol of their fidelity.

Dand glanced at Ram, standing a short distance off, somehow even in these squalid pits managing to emit an elegant detachment. Beside him stood Kit looking grim and exhausted, shadows carving diabolical angles in his gaunt face. If they lost too much more weight, they’d all end up looking like gargoyles, unfit for anything but scaring children.

He closed his eyes. There were more important things than personal honor. Ram understood. Kit, too. But he never had been able to make Douglas see past his childish notions of chivalry. The poor bastard really did think they were knights and this a glorious crusade. Some glory. All that was wanted was—

The sound of feet and chains dragging over rock roused him.

The barred door swung open and Douglas came in moving very carefully, uncertain of his strength. His face was blanched and stark, his eyes blinking rapidly, unseeing, his lips moving in trembling little fits and starts. His startled gaze fell on Dand, as if he hadn’t expected to see him there. He gasped and held out his hand.

Dand struggled to his feet.

Douglas’s shirt did not conceal the thick, bloodied pad on his left breast. “I…I wasn’t…” His hand shook with a terrible palsy as he spoke and his face contorted. “Please. You have to know that I couldn’t…I did not…”

“I know,” Dand rasped, sickened. “You did not break faith. I am sure you were entirely noble, my friend. True to the end. No one would ever doubt it—”

“Time to pay the warden a little visit, monsieur,” the guard who had led Douglas back to the cell announced dolefully.

“Yes,” Dand said. “I expect it is.”

Culholland Square, Mayfair
August 4, 1806

“What do you mean, she’s gone?”

Handsome and fit as a young Greek god, Curtis was also no fool. For all his picturesque athleticism he recognized that he was no match for the angry man facing him across the threshold. The first bloody streaks of twilight pricked Monsieur Rousse’s amber eyes with a devilish glow, causing the young footman to back up a step.

“She left early this morning, sir,” he gulped. “A carriage came and the driver loaded her luggage—”

“Luggage?” Monsieur Rousse leapt on the word.

“Yes, sir. A great pile of luggage.” Curtis glanced worriedly around at the nearby residences. So far he didn’t see any interested maids looking through their sidelights, nor had any passersby paused to see what new disaster their unwanted neighbor had visited on their once respectable enclave.

Curtis liked Miss Nash. He would not want to see her prey to even greater scandal than she already was and this man, despite his hitherto easygoing nature, had been the instrument of her downfall. That he had the nerve to look as if he had every right to be here, demanding to know where she was and with whom, almost made Curtis want to test his mettle. Almost.

Instead, he asked, “Won’t you come in, sir? Perhaps one of the maids knows more than I.”

“Yes.” Monsieur Rousse strode through the door as Curtis stood aside. “Fetch the maid Lizette.”

“I am sorry, sir. I cannot. Lizette is accompanying Miss Nash.”

The Frenchman froze. His face grew very still, very calm. His composure alarmed Curtis even more than his former anger. It was the eyes, Curtis thought, trying not to meet that black gaze. Humor, fierce black humor with the promise of violence, blossomed in their dark depths.

“So she lied,” he said, his lips twisting in a terrible smile.

He swung around and descended the steps in a single bound, striding down the street with his greatcoat billowing behind him as his parting words were caught by the wind and sent back to the footman. “Who would have guessed it of the adorable little minx?”

And Curtis thought he had never heard foul language sound so damning as Rousse’s endearment.

She had lain in his arms, let him drink the sounds of passion from her lips, shared her body with him over and over again during the course of one night seared more deeply in his soul than the brand marking his chest. And all the while she had been lying, knowing that she would be leaving, going to St. Lyon in the morning. Knowing that when he came back for her he would find her house empty, as she must have known he would because, by God, they had made love, and a lover did not relinquish his adored to another, and he was that lover.
By God,
he should be proud of the wench, she had read him so very, very well.

That had been yesterday morning, barely twenty-four hours ago. He had accomplished much in that short time, but not nearly enough. Not yet.

Well, darling, my dearest,
he thought with a terrible smile as the hired hack careered through the streets,
as expertly as you played me, you do not know quite everything about me. I might yet surprise you.

The carriage slowed as it threaded its way into the dockyards, where workers loaded and unloaded the sloops and merchant vessels still transporting cargo and sailors spilled from the subterranean doors of gin shops and taverns, taking their fill of pleasure before boarding ships or celebrating having survived another dangerous voyage. They were all dangerous journeys, these days.

The embargos and blockades Napoleon had set against England had slowed the traffic in and out of the London docks, but there were still captains with confidence in the fleetness of their ships and their own formidable seafaring skills willing to risk unfriendly waters for the right price, or the right prize. It was with one such man Dand Ross had arranged a meeting.

There was still much to consider. His plans were collapsing. Unless his network of colleagues was informed of his new strategy, things could take a terrible turn. There were important messages to be composed and sent, agreements to be reached, and all must be accomplished by the time the tide went out and he left.

With a sound of impatience, he banged on the hack ceiling, calling for the driver to halt. He opened the door and swung to the ground before the carriage had stopped. He tossed the driver his fare and in the same motion gestured at one of the linkboys that hung about the taverns looking to run errands.

“Which one is the
Mudlark
?” he asked.

The boy pointed at a small sloop with freshly painted black sides. A pair of sailors were rubbing the sheen from the paint with handfuls of sand. A wise captain, Dand thought appreciatively, did not chance the moon’s light bestowing a bright kiss on his helm.

He reached into his pocket and withdrew a thick envelope. He stared at it, wavering, fighting the impetus that thundered for his attention.

He did not want this. He did not need this. He had vital matters to attend to.

When all was said and done, when images of Charlotte spent with passion, or tense and arching as he pushed into her, or wide-eyed with surprised pleasure, or drugged with postcoital lethargy filled his mind and the scent of her still clinging to his body conspired to ensnare his reason and ambush his intent, there was still the past to be reckoned with, still enemies to be found, still a place to be reclaimed in the world.

Still an old debt to pay.

He handed the letter to the boy with a few quick instructions. Then he pressed a shiny coin into the lad’s grimy paw and a hissed a grim threat into a filthy little ear, because he knew boys. He knew what treachery they were capable of, and he knew exactly what words to say to make them pay attention. The boy gulped and bobbed his head emphatically, and Dand Ross headed down the gangplank toward the
Mudlark.