He glared up at the lighted window of the second-story room he would share with his virgin bride on this night. At the moment he could think of any number of
creative
perversions
he’d love to practice on her, starting with that beautiful mouth of hers.
He couldn’t have said why he was in such a baleful temper. Catriona hadn’t exactly double-crossed him. She had simply anticipated his next move and put him neatly in check, beating him at his own game. His exasperation was tempered by an even more dangerous thread of admiration. He didn’t often encounter such a worthy opponent, either at the gaming tables or on the dueling field.
How could she have known he had every intention of making off with his half of the money and leaving her stranded in Gretna Green? Could the blasted woman read his mind?
He slowly uncurled his fists, wondering when he had clenched them. He had never believed in responding to defeat with anger. That only gave your opponent the upper hand. He had always been able to deflect his father’s taunts and bullying with a well-timed roll of his eyes or a flippant quip. And if that strategy occasionally backfired and earned him a vicious caning from one of his father’s footmen, he would simply slip into the library after everyone was abed and steal one of the old man’s wildly expensive bottles of port to take the ache out of his bruises and the dangerous edge off of his temper.
His lips curved in a lazy smile. He had allowed the new Mrs. Wescott to make him forget one of the most valuable and hard-earned lessons of his boyhood.
******************
Catriona sat cross-legged in the middle of the narrow iron bedstead, hugging her faded plaid around her nightdress. Judging from the chill she’d glimpsed in her bridegroom’s eyes before he’d slammed his way from their bridal chamber, she was going to need it.
She’d made a halfhearted attempt to light the stingy bundle of kindling in the fireplace, but the meager flames had already subsided into embers.
Despite his promise, Simon had been gone for well over an hour. He was probably halfway to Edinburgh by now, she thought glumly, having decided that neither she nor her dowry were worth the bother.
She frowned as a cheerful scrap of melody came drifting through the door, at distinct odds with her mood:
Me bride, she is a bonny lass,
As fair as she is fey.
She stole a peek beneath me kilt,
And fainted dead away.
Catriona’s eyes widened. Although the ditty was being bellowed out in a Scots burr thicker than the spring heather on a Highland hillside, the rich masculine baritone sounded alarmingly familiar.
When I asked her what distressed her so,
She blushed and ducked her head.
She dinna ken if she could take
A stallion to her bed.
Catriona’s jaw dropped, then snapped shut as the door came crashing open. Simon stood in the doorway, gripping an open bottle of Scots whisky in one hand and an enormous sausage in the other.
He leaned against the doorframe and gave her a lopsided grin, charm practically oozing from his pores. “Hullo, darling. Miss me?”
S
imon looked strikingly more cheerful and far more disheveled than when he’d stormed from the room. Somewhere during his travels, he’d managed to misplace both his coat and waistcoat. His rumpled cravat was draped carelessly around his neck and his shirt was open at the throat and half untucked. Oddly enough, the slovenly ensemble suited him, giving him a dashing flair usually reserved for pirates or long-lost princes.
His tawny hair was tossed as if he’d repeatedly run his fingers through it. Catriona’s lips tightened. For his sake, she hoped it had been
his
fingers.
As if reading her mind, he waved the bottle in the air. “I hope you don’t mind, but I bought a few rounds for the lads down in the common room. Of course, you’ll have to make good with the innkeeper tomorrow.” He touched a finger to his lips as if to shield a shocking secret before whispering, “My purse is a wee bit light and my credit is none too good.”
“I thought you were bringing supper.”
“And so I did. This is your supper,” he said, tossing the sausage at her.
Catriona awkwardly caught it, unsure how to properly handle the thing. It was a good ten inches long and three inches thick and looked more menacing than appetizing. If an intruder broke into their room, she could probably use it to club him insensible.
“And this is my supper,” Simon finished, tipping the whisky bottle to his lips and taking a deep swig of the amber liquor.
“I believe you’ve had more than enough
supper
for one night,” Catriona noted.
As if to prove her point, Simon took one steady step toward the bed, then began to stagger to the right.
He frowned. “Is it just me, or is this cabin listing to starboard?”
Tossing the sausage away, Catriona scrambled to her feet and rushed to his side. She wrapped one arm around his upper back, bracing her shoulder beneath his to keep him from falling.
Leaning heavily on her, he buried his face in her unbound curls and inhaled deeply.
“You’re certainly the prettiest cabin boy I’ve ever seen.”
“Well, at least I haven’t a mustache,” she replied dryly, plucking the whisky bottle from his hand and setting it on the table before half tugging, half dragging him toward the bed. His lips found the back of her neck and began to nuzzle it in a most distracting manner.
By the time she shrugged him off of her shoulder and dumped him unceremoniously into the bed, she was starting to feel a little tipsy herself.
Before she could back out of his reach, he caught her hand in a strong grip and tugged her down on top of him, giving her a clear view of the golden haze of beard shadow that had begun to darken his jaw.
“The ship is spinning,” he said solemnly. “Go tell the captain that we must be caught in a whirlpool.”
“The ship’s not spinning. Your fool head is. Close your eyes and it will stop.”
He obeyed. “Mmmm…you’re right. That feels much better.”
Catriona had been right about something else as well. The bed wasn’t nearly large enough for two occupants to lie side by side. But it was the perfect size for her to stretch out on top of Simon, her thighs straddling his hips and the softness of her breasts molded to the muscular contours of his chest.
She might have protested when he wrapped one arm around her waist, but for once he didn’t betray even a hint of lecherous intent. He seemed perfectly content to cuddle. She hesitated for a moment, then cautiously rested her cheek against his breastbone, secretly savoring the novelty of being held. Especially by him.
“When I was just a lad,” he murmured, rubbing lazy circles on the small of her back, “my mother used to tell me that my bed was a tall ship and the night was the sea. She promised that if I’d close my eyes, I’d soon be sailing away on all sorts of magnificent adventures.”
Catriona lifted her head, gazing intently at his face. A faint smile curved his lips, but his eyes were still closed.
She knew it was wrong to take advantage of his drunken state. But what could be the harm of engaging him in a conversation he probably wouldn’t even remember on the morrow?
“What was she like?” she asked softly. “Your mother?”
He sighed. “Kind and beautiful, with a wicked wit and a generous heart. She had several lovers, of course. There will always be men who consider opera dancers to be little more than whores. Unfortunately, my father was one of them. But he underestimated her. She might have been beautiful, but she was savvy too. Savvy enough to leave a signet ring he had given her in a moment of passion with a solicitor so that upon her death he had no choice but to acknowledge me as his spawn.”
“How did she die?”
Simon shrugged without opening his eyes. “A lingering cough. A stormy night. No money for a doctor. For a tragedy, it had all of the elements of a classic farce.”
“You must have missed her terribly.”
He nodded. “Whatever her other failings, she was a good mother. No matter how many men she took to her bed, she made it clear that I was the love of her life.” A winsome smile quirked one corner of his mouth. “I suppose I inherited my ‘passion for passion’
from her.”
Catriona pondered his words for a moment. “Do you believe she was looking for passion in the arms of all those men…or for love?”
Simon opened his eyes, his sleepy green gaze devoid of mockery. “Aren’t they one and the same?”
“Only if you’re very lucky,” Catriona whispered, realizing too late that his lips were only a scant breath away from her own.
He slid his big warm hand beneath her curls, cradling her nape in his palm. Her eyes fluttered shut as he drew her mouth down to his, sending his seeking lips on a quest all their own. His tongue gently played over the seam of her lips before delving deep enough to sweep away all of her inhibitions. His kiss tasted of whisky and sin and all of the dark delights a man and a woman might experience in the lonely watches of the night.
Reminding herself that this was an encounter he also would not remember on the morrow, she kissed him back with all of the pent-up longing in her soul. In that moment she didn’t care if he was looking for passion or love or just a fleeting thrill, as long as he was looking for it in her arms.
She sprawled on top of him with inelegant abandon, straddling not only his hips but also the unyielding ridge of flesh straining the buttery-soft fabric of his trousers. Breathing a tender oath into her mouth, Simon arched his hips off the bed, forcing her to ride him in a rhythm that echoed the sweet, slow slide of his tongue in her mouth. The motion sent shivers of delight cascading deep into her womb. The starched linen of her nightdress and the doeskin of his trousers only heightened the delicious friction between them.
The bed was a tall ship, the night was the sea, and he was the magnificent adventure drawing her deep into a whirlpool of sensation she had no desire to escape.
As those tremors of pleasure mounted, threatening to spill over into rapture, Catriona heard a heartrending groan she would have sworn was her own. Until it was followed by a rhythmic banging that made the entire wall next to the bed shudder and a caterwauling screech that made the tiny hairs on the back of her nape stand straight up.
Still straddling Simon, she sat up on her knees, alarm dousing her desire like a bucketful of icy water. “What in the name of heaven is that? Do you think someone is being murdered? Should we alert the innkeeper?”
“Only if inciting
le petit mort
is a crime.” Wrapping an arm around her hips to steady her, Simon sat up, pressing his ear to the wall. “If I’m not mistaken, I do believe it’s our eager young friends from the forge.”
“How do you know?”
He cocked his head toward the wall. “Listen.”
Catriona didn’t even have to press her ear to the wall to hear the impassioned wail of
“Oh, Bess!” followed by a piercing cry of “Oh, Jem!”
“Oh, hell,” Simon snapped. “How in the devil are we supposed to get any sleep with that racket going on all night?”
It turned out that
all night
was an optimistic estimate. Just a few seconds later, Jem roared like a bull while Bess hit a trilling note worthy of an operatic aria. Blissful silence followed. Apparently the newlyweds had expired simultaneously.
Simon and Catriona had just breathed a mutual sigh of relief when the banging and moaning resumed, even more vigorously than before.
Simon collapsed onto his back with a groan of his own. “Oh, to be two-and-twenty again!”
Catriona shook her head in dismay. “I can’t believe how thin these walls are.” An even more terrible thought struck her. “So if we had…would they have…?”
He nodded, eyeing her from beneath the decadent length of his lashes. “Every moan.
Every sigh. Every syllable as you cried out my name and begged me to—”
She clapped a hand over his mouth. “What makes you think
I
would have been the one doing the begging?”
She felt him smile beneath her hand. Then he rolled, neatly reversing their positions so that she was imprisoned beneath the muscled length of his body. Lacing his fingers through hers, he pinned her hands on either side of her head. “Give me ten minutes of your time and I’ll show you.”
With his eyes glittering down at her like shards of emerald and the hard, hungry weight of his hips still nestled between her thighs, it was a challenge that was nearly impossible to resist. But he was deep in his cups, she reminded herself. When he was sober he had walked away from her bed without a backward glance.
“As you were so quick to remind me earlier,” she said softly, “I hired you to marry me, not bed me.”
His eyes darkened, warning her that she was hardly in any position to bait him. He could just as easily restrain her with one hand while he unfastened the front of his trousers and shoved her nightdress up and out of his way. It pricked her pride to know that in some dark, wicked corner of her heart, she almost wished he would. He wouldn’t even have to be rough with her. A few artful strokes with those deft fingers of his and she would be singing an aria that would make young Bess next door sound like a fishwife hawking her wares on the docks.
“You’re absolutely right,” he finally said, loosening his grip on her hands and rolling to his side. He propped himself up on one elbow and gazed down at her. “And since it seems I’m not to be compensated for either service, I should stop trying to ply my wares where they’re not wanted.”