And One Wore Gray (16 page)

“I know,” he said. But neither was that the message in his movement, for he had lowered his cavalry sword and was walking toward her.

Closer, closer, until he stood over her.

And then he smiled. Ruefully. Sensually. His fingers wound around the rim of the tub.

“I like my women to want me badly,” he drawled softly, his blue gaze burning into hers.

“Ah, but I don’t want you at all, Colonel,” she told him smoothly. What a lie. In all of her life she had never wanted anything so badly as she wanted this man now. Her lips were dry again, despite the steam that rose from the bath. She could feel the swell of her breasts, the hardening of her nipples. And dear Lord, what she could feel between her thighs …

His smile had deepened. “I like my women to want me very badly, Callie. I like them just as hungry as they can get. I like my women—”

She crossed her arms over her traitorous breasts and raised her chin in a taunting challenge. “Ah, but Colonel, I am not one of your ‘women.’ I am the enemy, remember?”

“Indeed, Callie. But what a way to do battle!” he murmured.

“We cannot do battle.”

“On the contrary, Mrs. Michaelson. I’m afraid that we must.” He lowered himself down on his haunches, his eyes on a level with hers. “You are one Yankee to best me beyond a doubt, Mrs. Michaelson, for I could not leave this room were I threatened with Hell’s damnation itself! To think!” he added softly, ruefully, “I mocked that poor fool last night, Callie, when I, myself, will want you now until I die.”

He could not know what he did to her, how he made her feel, how deeply, how desperately she wanted him in turn. But how could she dare touch him, stroke his shoulder, taste the salt upon his flesh, lie naked beside him….

Flashes of desire, like melting stars in the sky, caught fire and danced all through her.

“Callie!”

Her name on his lips was a caress. He stood above her once again, and still he had not touched her.

“Think!” she charged herself to say once again. “I am the enemy! Vile, fearsome—”

“Never, never vile!”

She drew her knees more tightly against her body. Sensations tore madly through her as he walked behind her slowly. To have him here, so close, where she could not see him! To know that soon he would touch her and then … She felt the blood begin to race through her body like wildfire and a raw, searing excitement bring shivers to soar up and down the length of her spine.

“Really. You have to go,” she whispered. She was barely able to create sound. The words were a breath on the air.

He knelt down behind her. “I know,” he said. But he made no attempt to leave. “Really. I have to go. Dear God, Callie, we both know that I cannot!”

Just when she thought she would scream with the waiting, with the anguish, with the denial, with the desire, she felt his lips at the back of her neck. Felt his kiss cover her flesh. Felt a searing, sensual heat that was so sudden and so startling and so welcome that it sent a burning ripping through her.

“Oh!” The softness of her cry escaped her. She nearly slipped beneath the water, but he was there. Lifting her up, pulling her into his arms. She fell against him. The water from her body formed rivulets that snaked along his. Her breasts were crushed against the dark hairs that had so fascinated her before, and now brought such a new rush of sensation to fill her. He held her still for one breathless moment, held her against him, feeling the mist-laden heat that fused between them. His hand stroked the side of her face. He
cupped her jaw. And he kissed her. Kissed her again and again.

Deep, wet, hungry kisses rained down upon her. Kisses that raped and ravished. Kisses so tender that she strained and ached to have more. Kisses that again plundered and excited, kisses that left her both weak and hungry. As hungry as he might ever have desired her to be.

Her arms wound around his neck and he lifted her high from the tub. Water sluiced over both of them, and neither of them seemed to notice. He stretched her out on her bed, freeing her hair from its wound knot as he did so, and splaying it over the white covering on the bed. He watched his handiwork as he surveyed the dark fire and sable strands, then his gaze met hers.

He found her eyes full of wonder.

Once again, he kissed her. This kiss was soft and slow and achingly tender. Everything wild and raw and urgent was held tightly back, and his mouth very slowly caressed her. Liquid and effusive, his lips moved over hers, his tongue tasted them, his teeth grazed them.

She felt the movement of his hand upon the length of her, his fingers grazing over her thigh and her hip, her ribs, her breast. His knuckles grazed the lower side of her mound, then his hand cupped around it. She realized that he was no longer kissing her, his eyes were on her once again. His gaze lowered, focusing on her breast, and on a tiny bead of water on the hardened red peak. Once again, his gaze touched hers. His head lowered against her body and the tip of his tongue touched the droplet of water, and moved erotically over the very crest of her nipple. His mouth closed over that taut bud and the dusky rose areole, and began to tease and taste and savor, to suckle and caress.

She cried out at the strength of the sensations that
seized a tight hold of her. Her fingers curled into his hair, and she heard herself calling out his name.

Deep within her body began a pulse, an urgency unlike anything she had ever experienced. She felt the power of his body over hers with every inch of flesh, with all of the searing fire now burning swiftly through her limbs. Her fingers moved in his hair, stroked down his neck, then down over his back. She stroked hard muscle, alive and vibrant. Flesh and muscle she had touched before, to cool, to heal.

And now she touched him, adding to the heat, adding to the fire.

When his gaze met hers again, she knew she was even adding to the healing.

“Should all the armies fall,” he said softly, “I do not think that I could regret this invasion of the North.”

She wet her lips, about to reply. He did not need one. He lowered himself against her again, just touching her lips with his. His mouth brushed briefly over her throat, against the hollow of her collarbone. His tongue teased the flesh at the valley of her breasts.

He inched himself lower, creating a searing liquid line of heat, slowly, surely, down her midriff, between her ribs to her navel. She wanted to cry out, she wanted to move. She wanted to fight the very force of the sensations he evoked. She could not. She lay still, feeling the tremors rock her body again and again.

His tongue moved leisurely upon her abdomen. Caressing, stroking, tasting. She tried to say his name again. The words would not come. She set her fingers once more into the rich mat of his ebony hair. She did not desist him in his purpose.

His kiss swept to her hip, and back to her navel. Fire, shooting, golden streaks of it, seemed to spring forth from the deepest, darkest, most intimate recesses of her desire as she felt the movement of his lips and the
searing wet stroke of his tongue. He couldn’t be intending to kiss her there …

Anticipation swept through her along with the protest that bubbled to her lips but went unspoken. Surely a flush covered the length of her body. The expectation was the sweetest agony. It was too intimate, too deep, too close to her soul….

He shifted. He kissed all of her flesh, the sweep of her stomach, the top of her thighs. He moved all along them. He came everywhere but there.

And then he was gone. She was cold and bereft, and she was in anguish! How she needed him, wanted him. Her body moved, as fluid as water, seeking his touch in a subtle undulation. It was the sweetest ecstasy of wanting, it was sensation so strong that it was anguish.

What did he now intend? She didn’t dare meet his eyes. The intimacy had gone too deep.

He lowered himself against her body, stroking her leg. His kiss fell upon the back of her kneecap.

And then that hot and molten trail of steaming moisture began to move up the length of her inner thigh once again. Higher and higher now until she trembled and writhed and waited.

She cried out, the breath escaping her, the very life seeming to escape her as he at last ceased to circle the velvet petals of her deepest desire and treasure them with his liquid caress. The world itself spun with the leisurely, supple movement of his intimate kiss. But it was swift, so swift, for the sweet, spiraling soaring was barely upon her before it burst into blackness, then came crashing down upon her in wave after wave of shimmering crystal, wracking her body with quivers. Words began to escape her then; if not words, then sounds. What she had done, what she had permitted—what she had felt!—came rushing in on her senses. Again she felt that the whole of her body must have
blushed a vibrant red, and she was wholeheartedly eager not to have to meet his eyes.

“Oh, no!” she whispered, but soft laughter greeted her, words that she barely heard in her sudden and swift desire to hide away.

His eyes were above hers, deep cobalt blue, so hot and demanding still, so very alive with their startling blue fire. In his arms, she was reassured. In his arms, she realized that he wanted everything. His mouth found hers even when she would have twisted away. His lips parted hers, his tongue plunged and plundered past her teeth, capturing her own.

Just as his body at long last captured hers.

Ecstasy had come so swiftly before. It could not come again. But he intended that it should, and those startling eyes pierced and held hers as he began to move. He entered deeply into her. More and more of him became a part of her, until she thought that she would shriek, for he could go no further, she could give no more. But he could, and he would.

And she could, she discovered, give endlessly.

His eyes remained upon hers as he began to move. She gasped softly, realizing that she was moving again herself, undulating, writhing, grasping again for the elusive wonder. His eyes closed and he clasped her tightly into his arms, and a sound choked from her as he gave a total free rein to the strength of the desire he had restrained so patiently, so very long.

And then it was as if a storm swept through her, wild, reckless, violent, encompassing everything within its pass. The thunder and the size and power of him seemed to rock her to her extremities, seize her in tempest. She clung to him, her arms around him, holding tight. And he lifted her higher and closer, whispering to her, until her legs were also locked around his back, until tears of pleasure and pain stung the back of her eyes.

Until the world, and all the stars within it, suddenly exploded.

Night descended, eclipsing the room, eclipsing life itself. She wondered if she had died. She knew vaguely that she had not.

She opened her eyes slowly. She was indeed alive. A silver sheen of perspiration moistened her body, and her body remained entwined with his. A hot flush covered her cheeks as she felt him, still inside her, still filling her with the searing sweet nectar of his climax. His body lay limp, though his thigh was still cast over hers, his arms still about her. The desperate tension was gone.

He slept, pray God, he slept. With her passion spent, she suddenly realized just exactly what she had done.

She had made love with a stranger.

No, no, not a stranger!

She had made love with her enemy.

A choked cry caught in her throat and hot tears of shame nearly fell then from her eyes. She had betrayed everything that she had been taught, and she had truly betrayed the love she had once known.

But she had wanted him. She had seen the male glory of his nakedness, and she had felt his kiss, and she had known that she wanted him.

Wanting him was one thing. Having him was another.

She cared for him. More deeply than she could ever dare admit!

He moved his forefinger tenderly over her lip. She looked at him to discover the warmth of his eyes upon her and compassion etched deeply into the cobalt of his eyes. She shivered. Even while lying here ashamed of herself, she wanted him again.

She liked his face. Liked the character there, and the honesty, and yes, the honor, and both the tempest and the peace.

He appeared very much at peace at the moment. But he did not appear smug, or triumphant, rather, it seemed that his features were touched by concern.

Daniel
was
concerned. Now that the ragged fires that had threatened to incinerate his very soul had been somewhat quenched, he was worried about the very object of those desires.

She had given him so very much. She had surrendered herself to his every lead. Yet even while he had lain there, spent, amazed by the climax of desire when he was not an inexperienced boy, she had begun to withdraw.

He couldn’t let her withdraw from him. Ever. Not now that he had felt the silken fire of her hair flow over his fingers when he held her. Not now that he had feasted upon the beauty of her nakedness, tasted the sweetness therein, known her, loved her. He was amazed still by the natural and fluid movement of her body, by all that she had brought forth in him. She was so alluring looking up at him with her dark lashes shielding those silver and gray eyes. Her lips, parted and moist and slightly open with the whisper of her desire, had sent him into new realms of need and pleasure, into a world he was suddenly certain he had never quite been before.

He held her when she would have turned away. “Callie, I am ever more entranced. Yet
you
look now as if you had truly come from battle.”

Her eyes, soft gray now, flickered shut, then met his again. “A battle lost,” she whispered.

“No, angel. A battle won. By North and by South.”

She still seemed distressed, and he understood. It was one thing in this world for a man to want a woman. But in that same social world, her wanting him would be condemned, time and time again. Prim and proper madams would whisper, and all would swear that their daughter would never be so bold or promiscuous. Be
she rich or be she poor, a woman should be chaste, so society claimed.

Daniel had decided long ago that society could be damned. What needs and emotions lurked in the hearts and minds of men and women could not be dictated by society. There were other reasons for Callie to have regrets now, when the flames cooled between them.