Bride By Mistake (31 page)

His knuckles slid down, across the linen casing, and she felt her nipples rise, hard and aching to meet them. Back and forth his big knuckles moved, a friction that barely touched her, yet her breasts were on fire.

He bent and kissed the exposed skin and then nibbled his way up her throat to claim her mouth, and as wondrous sensations shimmered through her, she felt suddenly looser, freer.

He’d removed her corset. And then she felt a draft of air against her legs and he pulled back from kissing her a moment and tugged the chemise up… up… and over her head. She folded her arms over her breasts, feeling inadequate, wholly exposed as his dark blue eyes roved hotly over her.

“Don’t be shy; you’re lovely,” he told her, sliding his hands around her waist and drawing her nearer. “Perfect and sweet and lovely.”

A rush of delicious warmth surged through her. She leaned eagerly into him, sliding her hands around his waist, lifting her mouth for his kiss. Blindly, feverishly, she found the hem of his shirt and started to drag it up his body.

“No.” He caught her hands and brought them up to his chest, pressing her palms down flat on the fabric. She felt hard little nubs under her fingers. Male nipples. Remembering the pleasure of his caress through the fabric of her corset, she lightly scraped her nails over the tiny bumps. They hardened and she heard his low growl of pleasure.

He ran his hands down her spine and cupped her bottom. “Ready?”

She nodded, gasping, not sure what he was planning, but willing to go along with it.

He lifted her, and she felt her thighs drag against a thrusting
male hardness. He turned and laid her back onto her mother’s high, soft bed. A heavy bulge pushed against the fabric of his undergarments. She was naked to his gaze; she wanted to see him naked, too.

She reached for his shirt again, but he caught her hands and kissed her palms, lingeringly, one at a time. She shuddered delicately, and her fingers curled involuntarily around his jaw, cupping his face, as if holding the kiss in her hand. Who knew that the center of your palm could be so sensitive?

He pressed her back on the bed, his mouth devouring her while his big, warm hands slid over her ribs, down her hips, and up again, caressing her in a ceaseless hypnotic rhythm. Wherever he touched her, hot ripples flowed inside her, gathering in a place deep within her.

And all the time she felt the hot, heavy hardness of him pressing at her center.

He cupped her breasts, teasing the nipples with his fingers until she cried out with the frustration of it, not really knowing what she wanted until his hot mouth closed over one breast and sucked, and she gasped, arched, and shuddered violently, clutching his hair and holding him close.

He paused, and her eyes fluttered open. She was dazed, gasping for air, and she saw a gleam of white as he smiled. He was panting, too, and yet he was still almost fully clothed. She wanted to feel him, feel him against her, skin to skin.

“Please,” she heard herself moan. “Please.”

He pulled back. “No… not yet,” he panted thickly. His eyes burning into hers, he unfastened his cotton drawers and kicked them off.

She reached for his shirt. His mouth closed over her other breast, and she almost screamed as a kind of lightning flashed through her. She grabbed his shoulders and held him tightly, but it wasn’t enough, so she opened her thighs and wrapped them around him. She writhed beneath him, wanting to get closer, aching for more.

He moaned. Kissing and nipping the soft skin of her stomach, he slowly worked his way down her quivering body until
his fingers slid through the hair at the base of her stomach, and between the folds, caressing her there until she could hardly bear it.

She moaned and lifted herself, pushing against his fingers. “Now, Luke, now,” she panted.

And then he parted her and placed his mouth on her and she lost all control. Her body wasn’t her own. Each time his mouth moved, she quivered and shuddered with helpless pleasure. It built and built until she thought she would burst, and just when she thought she could stand it no more, he lifted his mouth off her and entered her in one long, smooth thrust.

She panted, pulling him closer, wrapping her legs tighter around him as he thrust into her again and again. With each thrust, deep convulsions racked her, and she didn’t know where she ended and he began as she shattered and screamed and plunged into oblivion.

B
ella wasn’t sure how long it was before she drifted back to full awareness. She could tell by the shadows on the curtains that the sun had moved quite a bit, so she must have slept for a while.

Luke had pulled the covers over them both. She lay with her head on his chest, his arm around her.

She stretched, feeling like a very satisfied cat. And laughed.

“What is it?” Luke murmured.

“Mama was wrong,” she said. “It is exactly like animals. I was like a cat in heat there, and you—” She broke off.

“And I?” he prompted. “Though I ought to know better than to ask.”

She smiled and rubbed her cheek against the fabric of his shirt like the cat who ate the cream. “You were a stallion.”

She felt him laugh, rather than heard it, a deep vibration of his chest.

“So, I’ve graduated from being a rat?”

That reminded her. “You did make provision for me in your will, didn’t you?”

“Not a single penny do you receive from me,” he said softly.

But she wasn’t deceived. She lifted her head and looked him in the eye. “But I won’t be dependent on your mother and sister, will I?”

His eyes gleamed. “No.”

“I knew before dinner it was a lie.” She lay back down on his chest and idly twirled a small curl of chest hair that peeked from the neck of his shirt.

He stroked her shoulder. “How did you know?”

“When you told me your mother was a very kind lady, I knew then you were lying.”

“But my mother
is
a kind lady.”

She could hear the smile in his voice. She tweaked his chest hair.

“Ouch!”

“So, what provision have you made for me?”

“I told you, none.”

She smacked him lightly on the chest.

He kissed her. “I’ll tell you when we get to England.”

“Why not now?”

“Because, my dear, you are a terrible liar, and we don’t want to get Cousin Twice-Removed all het up and murderous again, do we?”

“Tell me or I’ll make you bald in the chest.” She slid her hand inside his undershirt and encountered a patch of hard-ridged skin in the hollow beneath his shoulder. “What is that?”

He jerked her hand away and sat up roughly, spilling her back on the bed. “Nothing,” he said brusquely.

“But—”

“Siesta is over.” He flipped back the bedclothes, pulled on his drawers and breeches, and dragged his shirt on over his head. “Do you want to stay at Valle Verde and sort out something with your sister, or shall we leave now and kidnap her for her own good?” He grabbed his neckcloth and tied it with deft precision.

Bella sat up, pulling the bedclothes around her, watching her husband pretend nothing had just happened. What was
hidden under that shirt he wouldn’t take off? He wasn’t shy. When she’d first met him he’d taken off his shirt in the heat. He had no problem going bare-chested then. He had a rather beautiful chest, as she recalled.

Was that it? Some hideously ugly war wound he felt he had to hide from her? What kind of a shallow person did he think she was? Did he think she didn’t know that soldiers could be wounded and scarred?

He avoided her gaze and finished dressing. She could tell by the set of his mouth that he wasn’t going to talk about it.

But she wasn’t going to let it go. She wasn’t going to go through her marriage with a man who slept in his shirt. But now was not the time.

“I’d like to go for a ride later, if Ramón will let us,” she said. “I would like to show you the home of my childhood. I will ask Perlita.”

She glanced at the looking glass on the dressing table and remembered what she’d been doing before Luke had distracted her. She pulled her chemise on and ran across to the dressing table.

“What are you doing?”

She slipped her fingers into the open side drawer. “There’s a secret compartment and I hid them here before I left. At dinner I got such a fright realizing Ramón had sold furniture—that he would do that never occurred to me. Thank God he didn’t sell this.” She grimaced, trying to move the hidden lever. “I didn’t know I’d be gone for eight years, and Papa had said not to risk them on the journey. Besides, I would have had no use for them in a convent.”

“Use for what?”

“Mama’s pearls—oh!” The secret drawer sprang open and she stared into it, dismayed. “It’s empty. Mama’s pearls are gone.”

L
uke made as quick an exit as he decently could from the bedchamber, leaving Isabella to dress by herself and speculate some more on what had happened to her pearls.

Luke wasn’t surprised they’d disappeared. It was naive of her to imagine they’d be where she’d left them, secret drawer or not. Ramón would have gone through this place with a fine-tooth comb, stripping it of anything worth selling. The pearls were long gone, he imagined. Pity, but there it was.

He’d buy her more pearls when they got to London.

In the meantime, he needed to get away. He was starting to feel… he wasn’t sure exactly what. A bit out of control, perhaps. Usually he liked the feeling that anything might happen, but this was different.

He walked out onto the terrace. It was lined with scraggly weeds. Ramón didn’t waste a penny on anything that was not productive.

Luke breathed in the cool air sliding down from the mountains. Times like this he almost wished he’d taken to cigarillos, as so many men had during the war. He imagined it would be a soothing thing to be able to step outside and blow a cloud. A kind of declaration of privacy.

But he hadn’t picked up the habit. And his privacy… well, the less said of that the better. It was very much under threat.

Luke strolled along a pathway that led around the back of the house. Stupid idea to come to Spain on his own. He should have brought a companion, or at least a manservant, someone to keep them from being alone together all the time. He should have hired her a maid.

He could do that now, hire someone from Valle Verde, someone she could talk to, someone from home. Brilliant idea. He strode along, feeling better.

It would help if he could keep his hands off her, he thought. But he couldn’t. Her slender, lissome body, all silken skin and warm, responsive eagerness. He recalled the feeling of her limbs twining around him, the blind rapture of her face lifted to his as he entered her, the feeling as her body closed around him and clenched tight… He groaned. He was ready, right now, to turn, march back to the bedchamber, and bed her all over again.

Control. He needed more control.

It wouldn’t be so bad if it was only her body that obsessed him, but she had an… allure about her that he couldn’t resist; an honesty, a zest for life that entranced him.

And she was very good company. He enjoyed talking to her almost as much as bedding her. Almost.

God, he couldn’t recall the last time he’d lost control so completely with a woman. Lost all awareness of who and where he was. Never before…

He shoved the thought aside.

Luke walked past the stables. He would have liked to go in, see what was happening there. Ramón had an eye for good horseflesh, he could see, but a man’s stables were private. One needed an invitation.

He walked on. There was a spring in his step that hadn’t been there for… he didn’t know how long. And the bouts of restlessness and gloom that had plagued him ever since…

His headstrong little wife kept him busy, that was all. Careering all over the country.

His nightmares, too, were less severe. Isabella woke him almost as soon as they started. She seemed to know, even in her sleep, that he was dreaming again.

All this time he’d never realized the solution was not to sleep alone. Simple, really.

In many ways marriage suited him surprisingly well. It was just a little too… intimate.

He could still almost feel her fingers touching that damned scar. Blast it. She’d see it eventually. And then the questions would start. Stripping him bare.

Behind the stables half a dozen women sat around by a trestle table laughing and chatting as they stripped the husks from cobs of maize. They smiled at Luke and bobbed their heads. Luke greeted them and walked on, his thoughts miles away.

He’d had a wound once that had been treated and bandaged and left to heal. The bandage had become glued to his wound. It had been quite all right; there was no pain, just some throbbing, which was quite bearable, and a faint smell, but only if you sniffed it up close.

Finally Rafe and Gabe insisted he remove it. It was crusted on, part of his flesh. He’d tried soaking it, but it wouldn’t come off. Luke was all for leaving it as it was; no harm, it would eventually fall off of its own accord.

But Rafe had fetched a physician, and the fellow had taken one look and ripped the bandage off, painful, tearing the old wound open again and releasing a flood of pus.

The healing had to start all over again, and yes, exposed to the air it healed quickly, but to this day Luke was sure if left alone it would have healed by itself. And far less painfully.

He wasn’t going to let anyone rip off his protective covering again. Not even his wife.

Especially not his wife. She still had… illusions.

Vanity, thy name is Luke, he thought ruefully. But he’d deprived her of her home, her country, and any choice in marriage, and he didn’t want to rid her of her last illusions about her husband.

Vanity? No, he decided. Cowardice.

So be it. A man was entitled to his privacy.

He would get her a maidservant to talk to. That would put an end to this… galloping intimacy.

B
ella sought out her sister and broached the matter of the pearls.

“And so is revealed the real reason you decided to ‘drop in’ to Valle Verde,” Perlita said in a hard voice. “Those pearls.”