Scandal in the Night (26 page)

He needed no other encouragement. He was there, swinging her into his arms, shouldering the door closed behind him without taking his eyes from hers, without breaking the fragile enchantment of the moment that separated them from everything that had gone before, and everything that was yet to come.

She kept her eyes open as well. She wanted to see everything. Wanted to feel everything—the beginning of whiskers along his jaw, the rough strength of his careful hands, the reassuring heat from the furnace of his chest. The heat that reached into the cold, empty center of her chilly existence.

He kissed her with heat and force, and a possessiveness so raw and open and full of lust and longing she had no defense against it. She wanted none. She was empty of everything but hope and searing need. Hope that had flickered in the dark hidden recesses of her soul, refusing to be extinguished. Need that grew with every stroke of his tongue, every taste of his taut, smooth lips.

He kissed her with everything he was and had ever been—every ounce of care and need, every iota of skill and finesse—drawing her out of herself until her body began to feel light and liquid and alive under the surface of her skin. As if the weight of fear had at least temporarily been lifted.

Her breath began flying in and out of her chest as he trailed hot kisses down the side of her neck, nipping at the sensitive tendon, finding the secret place at the turn of her nape that made her shiver. Catriona angled her head away, giving him greater access, appeasing the low hum of want that built like ripples across the surface of a pond, reechoing and growing stronger in every place he touched. His lips rounded to the hollow of her throat, and she could feel the rising cadence of her heart where it beat against his lips.

She needed to touch him, too. She needed to taste the warm salt of his skin, needed to run her hands through his silken hair, and tumble the short, unruly locks through her palms.

She kissed his face, letting her lips skate across the smooth warmth of his upper cheeks, along the pliancy of his mouth, taking little sips of him, as if too much at once might intoxicate her. But she had already drunk too deep, because he was loosening the buttons at her collar, and her head was falling back, arcing away to let him kiss across the delicate, sensitive skin along the top of her chest.

Beneath the layers of chemise and stays and gown, her breasts grew full and tight with longing, and she couldn’t contain the gasp of needy entreaty that wound out of her mouth as sensation flooded under her skin.

He came back to answer her unspoken question, kissing her silent with his lips and his tongue. Filling her senses until every thought and feeling began and ended with his kiss.

And she was falling again, or coming back. That was it. Coming back to him. To herself. To the rightness that had always been between them. But she
was
falling as well, her head cradled safely in the palm of his hand, until she was lying on the floor, secured there by the glorious weight of his body atop hers, and she could luxuriate in the press of his warmth, and the safety of his embrace.

Catriona felt heat build in her throat and behind her eyes, but she didn’t realize that she was crying until he stilled, and then kissed away the salt of her tears. Which only made her cry more. All those years, she had never shed a tear. All those miles, and she had not once crumbled.

“It’s stupid.” She sniffled, and tried to reach back into her pocket to retrieve the damp handkerchief.

But he did not object, or tease. He turned his head, and laid his head against her chest, and held her tight, as if all he wanted in the world was to simply be with her. As if he understood that once opened, the floodgates could not easily be closed.

They stayed like that, sprawled on the rug much as they had been on the lawn, his long-muscled legs twining with hers, pinning her skirts to the ground. But this time she welcomed his weight and his comfort while she tried to gather her thoughts—to figure out what came next, what else she needed to have the courage to tell him.

But what came next was that as her quiet gasps and hiccups subsided, Thomas began a slow exploration, idly reacquainting himself with the varied topography of her body. Though the rest of him remained perfectly still, his hand was quietly making its way down the length of her upper arm, tracing the span and curve of her waist, and delineating the seam of her stays beneath her ribs. Up and down, his clever fingers stroked, back and forth, bringing her senses back beneath the heated surface of her skin. Winding her higher and higher, until she was straining toward his hand, silently urging her breast into the weight of his palm.

And then not so silently. “Thomas. Please.”

He answered by curling his hand firmly around her breast, and kissing through the sturdy cotton of her gown, wetting and nipping through the layers of fabric until he found her nipple. The sensitive peak instantly contracted into a tight bud as need spiked through her, hot and nearly painful in its bliss.

“How long has it been, Catriona? How long has it been since anyone touched you? How long has it been since you let yourself feel pleasure?”

“Forever.”

He bit down gently through the material, teasing and abrading with his teeth and tongue, until she arced up off the floor, into the weighted pleasure of his hand, taut as a drawn bow, ready to fly loose at the slightest pressure. But he did not set her loose. He rolled the lean weight of his hips onto hers, fitting his body intimately with hers, and then took the same pains with her other breast, kneading and abrading the nipple into an exquisite peak with his hands and mouth.

Need—want and lust and desire—grew and grew until it was a physical thing, an insistent feeling of sharply pleasurable pain driving her on. Pushing her toward the irresistible lure of the pleasure he loosed within her. And she wanted more. “Thomas, please.”

More of him. More of the potent forgetfulness. More of the sensations that pushed her out of the narrow confines of Miss Anne Cates’s small existence. Away from distrust and fear. Away from hopelessness. Toward him. Toward Thomas Jellicoe who had never stopped loving her.

He gave her more, kneading her breast and toying with the sensitized peak with one hand while he used his clever wiles on the row of buttons marching like sentinels down the front of her gown. He spread the edges wide, and worked his nimble way loosening the ties, insinuating his long, agile fingers beneath the edge of her practical, front-lacing stays, and under the thin layer of her threadbare cotton shift to tweak the tight-nipped bud, and send streaks of jagged sensation stretching deep into her belly.

“So prim and practical,” he murmured with his lips against her skin. “You have no idea how erotic your practical, plain cotton underthings are to me. How I have fantasized about you and your prim, translucent English shift.”

Catriona wanted nothing more of primness and practical restraint. She wanted to reach up and rend her plain cotton shift in two, and boldly bare her breasts to him for her own erotic pleasure. She wanted to bare him as well. “Please.” Her voice was high, strained and eager, full of the turmoil of her need.

His answer was a muttered oath, more Punjabi than English, that vibrated and echoed through her into her bones, feeding her restlessness, making her shift and surge beneath him until his fingers closed around her nipple, tweaking it possessively before he took the peak fully into his mouth and sucked hard.

She gasped and squeezed her eyes closed, so there was nothing but his hands and his mouth and his possession of her body. But even as he laved and teased her with his lips and tongue, his other hand began to furl up the long length of her full skirts, gathering the hem of her dress and petticoats into his fists, sliding the heavy material up her legs, over her knees and sturdy stockings, across her thighs until she felt the cool air on the skin at the tops of her practical, unadorned garters.

But there was nothing sensible or practical left about her when his clever, clever hand found the warm entrance to her body with swift, devastating precision.

Her gasp echoed off the ceiling, and her thighs clenched around him in convulsive shock and helpless, keening want.

He levered himself off her, coming to kneel between her legs with his knees pressing against the inside of her thighs, pushing the rest of her skirts higher to give him unimpeded access to her body. And then he looked down and he stilled, one hand within her, and one resting on the scoop of her belly.

“My God, Cat,” he whispered above her. “I knew how it would be. I knew how your body would look.”

She opened her eyes to see him staring at her body, uncovered and naked from the waist down, and she wondered if she ought to be abashed at the earthy, impetuous force of her need. In Saharanpur, she had planned and prepared and groomed her body for him—had taken her own erotic excitement in doing so—had gone to him under the clandestine cover of the dark, not in the revealing, flat, gray light of a rainy English afternoon. Not on the floor of her employers’ house.

She would have twisted her thighs together to cover the primitive nakedness of her body, or pushed her skirts down to hide the shock of red hair covering her sex, but he splayed his rough hands across the tops of her thighs and up across the scoop of her belly, raking through the ginger curls, as he exclaimed with a sort of stunned wonder, “I always knew you were made of flame.”

And then he lowered his head to kiss her there. There, where the pulse of her flesh beat as strongly as the heart within her body. Where she ached to be rejoined with him. Where his clever fingers and tongue claimed her with the same sure possessiveness with which he had kissed her mouth. With the same skill he had taught her in the warm, perfumed dark of his India.

He angled his head to stroke her, pushing and pulling her back from useless thoughts of the past. Back into the present, back into the pleasure and passion of the moment—the time and place where nothing existed but the two of them and the obliterating pleasure he could give her body.

He set up a rhythm, slow and steady at first, and then escalating, stronger and stronger and higher and higher, until every part of her—her lungs and the palms of her hands and the muscles on the inside of her thighs—seemed to fill with pulsating heat.

He stroked her again with the tip of his tongue, and she was left gasping for air and grasping onto the rug for purchase, for something to tether her down, holding on for dear life so she would not fly into a hundred sparks of light and desire.

“Thomas.” His name was like a prayer on her lips, and then repeated over and over in the silence of her mind. Thomas, Thomas, Thomas. Higher and higher, tighter and tighter she climbed. Tauter and tauter he drew her. Onward and upward, until she was bucking and bowing, reaching out to scratch her fingers against the bare wood of the floor, pressing herself toward him. Toward the need and the heat and the pleasure that flew just beyond, hovering just out of her reach.

And then he turned his hand just so, and white heat burst within her, from under her skin. And she was gone. Grasping the brass ring of heat and smoldering bliss tightly within her grasp.

For a long, long moment the only sound was the heaving of their breath and the pounding of her uneven heart in her ears. She was so dizzy with release that she could have fallen over had she not already been sprawled in inelegant abandon across the floor. She felt upended, as topsy-turvy as if she had been tipped over the edge of Wimbourne’s ancient battlements.

“Thomas. My God.” Her lungs felt buoyant, as if she would take breath and float up to the ceiling if his hand across her belly had not been holding her down to the earth. She reached for him. “Oh, how I missed you.”

He kissed her again, and whispered against her neck, “I’ve missed you as well. But no more.” He was peeling off his coat, flinging it behind him and setting his hands to the buttons at the fall of his breeches.

And she spread her arms wide, welcoming him to her body. To her love.

He braced himself above her with one arm, as he kissed her mouth and settled his weight between her legs and—

“Thomas?” The door behind her head rattled. Viscount Jeffrey’s voice came again. “Thomas, is that you?”

Chapter Fifteen

Thomas shot his hand out over Cat’s head to brace the door firmly closed against his brother’s untimely interruption. For a long, nearly excruciating moment the only sound in the room was the heavy throttle of his heart in his ears and the huff of his labored breathing, but then the sounds of the house—of children’s voices and running feet, the gossipy chatter of rain against the windowpane, and the everyday clatter and noise of the busy house—reasserted themselves.

Bloody, bloody, bloody hell. Damn his brother to the far corners of the Himalaya. And damn himself. Because he had not done so much as wash the dirt of the road, or the grass of the lawn from his face before he had gone after Cat like a starving man.

“Thomas?” A heavy rap shook the panel. “Miss Cates?”

“One moment, please, sir.” Cat’s voice was unsteady, but she had already pushed her skirts down and scrambled up from the floor—good God, the floor. He had been about to take her on the bloody floor—and had hurried across to the other side of the small room to her washstand.

What must she think of him? Nothing to what he thought of himself at this moment. He had meant to woo her. He had meant to convince her that he could be relied upon. He had
not
meant to fall upon her like the jackal he had named Birkstead, devoid of all semblance of self-restraint.

And now he was shoving in his shirttails, and buttoning up his bloody breeches while the lord of the manor, his brother, made increasingly ominous noises on the other side of the door.

“Miss Cates, are you quite all right? Thomas, I know you’re in there. I can hear you seething.”

A glance at Cat showed her hiding a face gone scarlet with mortification. But Thomas refused to be embarrassed. And he refused to let her be mortified. “Not to worry. I’ll see to James,” he said, and ducked through the door.