Something had happened, something indefinable had changed, for both of them. Annie was filled with the same ecstatic terror she’d felt while standing on the parapet of the south tower.
She willed herself to step back, out of Rafael’s reach, but she couldn’t move. Her heart was hammering so hard that she honestly feared it might do irreparable damage to itself, and her breathing was too shallow and too quick.
Rafael laid his hand to the back of her head, spreading his fingers, burying them in her hair. He frowned and said her name and as simply as that, she was lost. She would have let him do almost anything, and the realization shook her to the very core of her being.
“One kiss,” he said raggedly, as though making an 68 oath to himself, not Annie. “Just one kiss—I promise.”
She stared up at Rafael, trusting him, baffled and a little shaken to know the extent of his power over her. She raised her face and his mouth came down on hers, not gently or tentatively like before, but with a pleasant ferocity. A hunger.
Annie was transported. Mysterious parts of her, parts she’d never dreamed she possessed, were awakening and making themselves known. She ached, and when Rafael’s tongue entered her mouth, she took the thunder and lightning inside herself, into every curve and plain of her body, every secret fold of her soul.
He continued the kiss, and at the same time he caressed her breast with one hand, causing the nipple to ache beneath her shirtwaist and camisole. She willed him to unbutton her bodice and he did, slowly. Ever so slowly.
Annie watched his face as Rafael bared her breasts and looked at them with wonder as well as desire; she sensed his reverence and saw it in his eyes, and she wanted him even more than before.
“You are so incredibly …” Rafael’s words fell away into silence. Holding the small of her back with both hands, he bent and took one of her nipples into his mouth, and she arched against his palms and cried out because the sensation was so glorious.
He conquered her other breast, drawing on it hard, at the same time bending to lift her into his arms. He suckled her as he crossed the room toward the bed, and Annie couldn’t help the soft, eager sounds she made, though she knew they were wanton.
Rafael laid her gently on the mattress and opened the buttons of her skirt, sliding his hand beneath while he drank hungrily from her breast.
Annie sobbed his name, putting all her wanting, all her needing into the sound. “No, my hellion princess,” he rasped, against her well-suckled nipple. “The treasure you would give me is for another man, on another day. But I can teach you pleasure—by God, I will have that much of you!”
Annie felt his hand move beneath the waistband of her wet and clinging riding skirt, beneath her drawers. She raised herself to him, wanting something she didn’t fully understand, offering everything.
Rafael reached lower, finding that most sensitive place, and she felt his fingers part the moist folds of her femininity.
She uttered a low, insensible cry and bucked against his palm, but he only murmured, “Soon enough, sweeting. It will happen soon enough.”
Annie felt as though she’d been taken with a fever—she was delirious and light-headed, and her body writhed wildly under Rafael’s hand. Gently, he pinched the little nubbin of flesh where all her passion seemed to center, and she moaned in desperation and impatience.
“I might have kissed you here,” Rafael teased quietly, stroking her now, in a rhythmic circle made of fire, with the pad of his thumb. “I might have taken this into my mouth, the way I did your nipples.”
The suggestion, coupled with the spiraling sensation between her legs, made Annie pitch and toss under his patient ministrations like a wild creature. When Rafael bent over her, and took her breast again, she came apart in an explosive riot of heat and satisfaction, shouting hoarsely, raising her hips high off the bed to follow his hand wherever it might lead.
He continued to suckle, more gently now, until she had settled back to the bed, until the sweet, convulsive flexing of hidden muscles had ceased. Then, as she lay dazed, still not truly understanding what had just happened, he stroked her forehead and her hair.
“Shh,” he said, consoling her in her inconsolable joy.
After a long time, she turned her head and looked into his gray eyes, seeing sadness there, as well as passion. “I want you to do that to me,” she told him. “What you said before—about taking me into your mouth.”
He groaned. “Annie, love—have mercy. A man is allotted only so much honor and forbearance.”
She didn’t know then, perhaps she would never know, what caused her to be so brazen. But she was. She raised her hips off the bed and, at the same time, pushed down her skirt and drawers, revealing herself to him.
Rafael made an elemental, innately masculine sound, somewhere between a moan and a curse. Then he removed her boots and her stockings, as well as her skirt and drawers, and she lay before him, naked except for her gaping shirtwaist and camisole.
“May God forgive me,” he murmured. And then, still kneeling on the floor, he turned Annie, so that she lay sideways on the bed, with her legs on either side of him.
A primitive cry of welcome escaped her when he burrowed through the silken tangle and took her hungrily, greedily, into his mouth.
* * *
What in hell had he done? Rafael asked himself, after Annie had been sated not once but several times. What demon had possessed him, that he would teach an innocent young woman the finer points of pleasure?
“Rafael?” She was still naked, but he’d put her legs back on the bed and covered her with a musty blanket brought down from the chest in the loft. The fire was burning low, and if Barrett or his men were out looking for them, they must have run into trouble….
He turned his back on her and went back to the hearth, making a fuss with the fire, wanting to hide the hard arousal pulsing behind the buttons of his trousers. Whatever his other sins, he had not plunged inside her, even though he’d never wanted a woman more than he wanted Annie Trevarren that rainy afternoon.
“Are you angry with me?” she asked, in a small voice, and Rafael cursed, for he did not want her playing the game so many women played, torturing herself for doing and feeling things that were perfectly normal, even instinctive. No, he would have Annie revel in her glorious femininity, not feel shame for it.
“No,” Rafael said, but he would not look at her. Indeed, he could not. “There’s been no harm done, Annie,” he said, testing her clothes, which he’d hung over the backs of chairs close by the fire, for dryness.
“Harm?” he heard the corn husks inside the old mattress rustle as she sat up. “Of course there’s been no harm—it was
wonderful,
but—”
Rafael ran one hand down the length of his face, wishing she would be quiet and at the same time feeling her voice brush the strings of his soul like a soft breeze passing through a harp. “But?” he prompted, moving to the window, hoping to convey an air of disinterest. He saw the gelding, still tethered to his branch, ears laid back, hide soaked, flanks quivering, and felt profound pity for the beast.
“But I don’t think you enjoyed the experience—” She stumbled in the middle of the sentence, and he knew without looking that she was blushing again. “I don’t believe you were as—happy as I was.”
Happy
. The word struck Rafael funny, and he might have laughed aloud if he hadn’t known Annie was serious. She was especially vulnerable now and he didn’t want to hurt her.
“It’s all right, Annie,” he managed to say, turning around at last. She was sitting up in bed but, God be thanked, she pulled the blanket he’d given her up to her throat. “I’ll be fine.”
Something flashed in her eyes, a sort of wounded fury. “You’ll turn to some other woman,” she accused. “Miss Covington, perhaps.”
Rafael schooled himself to patience. Annie was a woman, and a young one at that, and such things were vitally important to her. He must be gentle, for she might well remember this afternoon for the rest of her life, and he wanted her recollections to be pleasant ones. “I’m a man, Miss Trevarren, not a rutting boar. I can govern my physical desires quite nicely.”
He heard the horses then, and knew his interlude of joyful madness was at an end. Now, he would have the rest of his life—a relatively short time, in all probability—to remember that he’d made a fool of himself this day. That he’d wanted a woman badly enough to put aside his values and his better judgment to play her sweet body as if it were a dulcimer or a lute.
He had been a self-centered bastard, and not just because of the things he’d done to Annie, however much she’d enjoyed them. No, his crime lay in the fact that he’d trifled with her feelings. She was young and unsophisticated, a product of the privileged life Patrick and Charlotte had given her, and she might well expect a devotion he simply could not give.
“Get dressed,” he said, tossing the still damp garments to her. “Someone is coming.”
Annie scrambled out of bed and into her clothes, and Rafael couldn’t help watching out of the corner of his eye as she wriggled and tugged in her haste to avoid being caught in a compromising situation.
Little did she know, Rafael reflected, as a thunderous knock sounded at the door, practically shaking it on its hinges, that it was already too late.
“Your Highness,” Barrett’s voice boomed through the thickening twilight, “Are you there? Let me in!”
Ruefully, Rafael glanced back at Annie and saw that, although she was decently clad again, her red-gold hair tumbled down her back, unconfined, her eyes blazed with a lingering, deep-seated pleasure and, if those things hadn’t been revealing enough, there was a telltale glow to her skin. Unless Barrett had gone blind since Rafael had last encountered him, he would know exactly what had been going on.
“Yes,” Rafael called back, unable to hide his irritation. Despite the noble things he’d said to Annie about controlling his physical desires, he was vastly uncomfortable, and he would remain so for some time. “I’m here.” With that, he wrenched open the door and stood facing his friend and guard.
Barrett wore a cape, splotched with rain, and his expression was uncommonly anxious. “Great Scot, Rafael, I thought you’d been captured, or broken your neck—” He saw Annie then, it was plain that it all registered, in an instant.
Rafael stepped back to admit him. “You took your time starting a search,” he remarked, while Barrett studiously avoided Annie’s gaze. His neck was a dull crimson. “I might have been hauled halfway to France by now.”
Barrett started to speak, cleared his throat and began again. “Lucian said he’d seen you out riding, and that you’d be gone a while,” he explained awkwardly. “I know you like to have some time to—to yourself now and then, so I wasn’t concerned. It was only when the rain didn’t stop, and twilight came on—”
Rafael touched his friend’s arm. “It’s all right, Barrett,” he said quietly. He suspected that the man had been occupied with some pursuit of his own that afternoon; that would account for his embarrassment, as well as his delay. “Have you brought a horse for Miss Trevarren?”
“We didn’t know she’d left the keep,” Barrett said.
For the first time since Barrett had entered the cottage, Annie spoke. Her voice was clear and strong and ever so slightly defiant. “Didn’t my mare return to the stables?” she asked.
Barrett forced himself to look at her. “If it did, miss, I wasn’t told.”
“Never mind,” Rafael interjected. “Miss Trevarren will ride back with me.”
Minutes later, they were mounted, with Annie in front of Rafael on the impatient gelding. It was a singular torment, feeling her soft, delectable body against his, breathing the scent of her hair, the faint, musky perfume of her pleasure, and the fresh smell of spring rain. He could endure a great many things, he thought fancifully, as long as he could summon that distinct bouquet and remember Annie as she was at that moment in time.
Annie cherished the sensation of being safe within the circle of Rafael’s arms. She knew she would regret her shameless behavior soon enough, but that time had not yet come. In fact, she was still responding to Rafael’s lovemaking, feeling delicious little spasms of pleasure deep in her most womanly regions. Her nipples were hard beneath her damp camisole and blouse, wanting the touch of his tongue and the excruciatingly sweet tug of his lips. If she could have lain with him then, in the wet and fragrant grass, and taken him inside her, she would have done just that.
Too soon, they reached the stables, and Rafael swung out of the saddle and reached up to lift Annie down. She allowed it, though she could have dismounted on her own with no difficulty at all, simply because she wanted to feel his hands touching her again.
The rain had turned to a slight drizzle, and the keep and stables were glowing with lantern light. Rafael curved his finger under Annie’s chin and raised it, once Barrett and the others had left them, taking the gelding with them.
Annie ached to hear him say he loved her, even though she knew he wouldn’t. The events of that afternoon had been a dalliance to Rafael, an hour’s amusement, that was the truth of it, and she would forget that at her peril.
“Don’t tell me you’re sorry!” she pleaded, before Rafael had a chance to say anything at all. She hadn’t planned the words, and was wretchedly embarrassed that she’d blurted them out that way. Still, she meant them with every fiber of her being. “Please, Rafael, don’t ruin the best afternoon of my life by apologizing.”
He pulled her against him, not passionately, but in an effort to lend comfort, burying one hand in her mussed and tangled hair. “All right,” he said hoarsely, his breath whispering, warm, across her ear. “I won’t. But I want you to keep in mind that there are many such afternoons, and long, wonderful nights as well, in your future. Only the man will be different.”
No,
Annie mourned inwardly, her face buried in the prince’s strong shoulder, shuddering at the prospect of another man—no matter how kind and handsome and honorable he might be—touching her the way Rafael had. She understood Phaedra’s trepidation at taking a husband she didn’t love as she couldn’t possibly have done before.