I Loved a Rogue The Prince Catchers (33 page)

He kissed her mouth, her cheeks, her eyes as though she were air and he needed her to exist. Again, her mouth. “I am yours.”

She dragged herself from his arms. “Not yet.” She clamped her fingers around his. “But you will be.” She pulled him toward the door and shoved it open.

Upon the threshold in the rain, Betsy and the coachman stood side by side. Mr. Treadwell twisted his sodden hat in his hands. Betsy’s face was stern. She swept them with a sober perusal.

“Another minute, miss, and we was—”

“Betsy, Mr. Treadwell, you must stand witness now.”

“Witness, miss?” the coachman said with raised brow.

Eleanor’s grip tightened around Taliesin’s hand. She looked up into his face. “Mr. Wolfe and I will now say our wedding vows and you will be our witnesses.”

Taliesin’s mouth crept up at one corner and his black eyes shone. Her heart turned over.

“But—” Betsy sputtered, “neither Mr. Treadwell or me is a churchman!”

“Well, now, I’m thinking Gypsy folk don’t need a churchman to wed,” Mr. Treadwell said with a thoughtful nod.

“They need a broom,” Betsy declared. “I once heard a peddler say he’d gotten married over the broom. When I told Mama, she said her cousin got married over a broom too, and she married a blacksmith who’d Gypsy kin.”

“Should I fetch a broom, sir?” the coachman asked.

“No, Treadwell,” Taliesin said. “Miss Fortnum, you needn’t have concern. A church wedding will follow shortly.”

Eleanor threaded her fingers through his and traced his beloved face with her eyes that would never cease hungering for him. “Taliesin Wolfe,” she said upon a quiver of ecstatic nerves, “I want to be your wife. In truth, I long to be your wife. I give myself to you in marriage.”

“Eleanor Caulfield Bridgeport-Adler,” he said quite clearly, “My heart is already yours. With its every beat for twenty years I have given it to you. I offer my body and soul to you now. I offer all that I am and all that I have as your husband.”

“I accept,” she whispered, dancing up onto her toes. “I accept. I accept.”

Smiling, he drew her hands to his mouth and kissed them.

Betsy burst into tears.

Mr. Treadwell beamed and sniffled, then pulled out his kerchief and tucked it into Betsy’s hand. “There, there, miss. It’s all right. Everybody’s happy now.”

A gust of cold mist swirled about them. Taliesin swept Eleanor up into his arms and carried her across the hall toward the stairs.

She laughed and wrapped her arms around his neck. “Where are you taking me?”

“So that we haven’t any misunderstanding about the matter, I intend now to put action to words.”

“Do you?”

“I do. And then some.”

Heat flew into her face. “But Betsy and Mr. Treadwell, and your servants, they will—”

“Let them. I don’t intend to give you up. Not even for a moment. Not for anyone ever again.” He brought her into a bedchamber furnished simply with a canopied bed and woven rugs.

“Give me up?” She gripped his neck. “For anyone?
Again?
”

He set her on her feet, cupped her face in his hands, and tilted it up. He kissed her softly, then deeply, brushing her tongue with his, and she felt it everywhere in her body.

He drew away only enough to meet her gaze. “Did you truly believe that eleven years ago I left of my own will?”

“What else was I to believe?” she said with the little breath she still possessed.

“You found the message I left in the book.”

“A month ago.”

“A month ago only?” He released a long breath, stroking a lock of hair back from her brow. “Eleanor, it is time we leave the past behind.”

“But—”

“I did not go willingly. Not then. Not ever.”

“Not ever?”

“Every time I left Cornwall for the past twenty years, I left my heart behind me. Since the moment I first saw you.” He kissed her lips, her cheeks and throat with slow kisses now, and with each caress of his lips on her skin, she grew warmer, then hotter, longing for more. He drew her close and his hands shaped her body to the hard length of his.

“Taliesin? I’m frightened.” Quivering with need but terrified.

He placed a kiss behind her ear and she heard him inhale deeply. “Never be frightened of me.”

“Of disappointing you. Now.” She glanced at the bed. “There.”

“I’m fairly certain that’s impossible.” His voice smiled.

“But you know I haven’t any experience at—at
this
.”

He held her in the shadows of his eyes. “Then we are well matched.”

She stared, disbelieving. “I cannot believe it. In all these years, you
must
have . . .”

“I have never made love to the woman I love,” he said quietly.

Starlight lit the air.

“But what if I disappoint you,” she whispered.

“Feel what you do to me, Eleanor. What you have always done to me.” He placed her hand on his chest, and his hard heartbeats thrummed through her palm, his breaths deep and trembling. Then he moved her palm downward. Her fingertips shook as she traced the tight contours of his belly. She knew what he intended and could not contain her impatience. She covered his arousal with her hand. His intake of breath against her cheek fueled her confidence. Through his breeches he was thick and hard. Touching him, holding him, made her hot again, and peculiarly faint, the longing she had denied forever escaping from her heart and pouring into every crevice. Her body wanted him.

His words caressed her cheek. “Now, love, let me make you feel it too.”

By the bed, he undressed her. And he kissed her. Everywhere. On her throat and neck and breasts. Especially her breasts. Over and over until she was weak from it. Then on her wrists and belly and buttocks. She had not known that men did such things to women. She wondered if only he did. Then she became so lost in the pleasure of his tongue and lips stroking the inside of her thigh that she didn’t care as long as he never ceased. Her body became the landscape upon which his hands and lips traveled, his nomadism her pleasure.

Urging her onto her back on the mattress and bidding her spread her legs, he told her that this was what Perceval must have wanted to do to the seductive succubus that tried to destroy his chance of finding the Grail. For nothing could hold him back from such temptation.

She laughed and said that would make her the devil in disguise. Then his mouth on her most sensitive flesh shocked her into silence, then made her whimper in need, then cry out in desperation as she rocked her hips and begged him for more.

“It feels too good.” Her gasps came frantically. “But I want . . .” She clutched the bedclothes. “I want more.”

He moved up between her legs, his lean, hard body glorious, the candlelight bathing his muscles and sinews with gold. “You want this.” He fit himself inside her, a shocking, wonderful, breathlessness of intimacy. “You want me.”

He allowed her only a moment to adjust, to become accustomed to the revelation of his size and to begin to feel the pleasure of his possession of her. Then he thrust into her. Then again. Surrounding her jaw with his hand, he turned up her face so she looked into his eyes as he took her. Fierce and black and full of passion, his eyes spoke of his love and the years apart that were now forever in the past. He held her hips and drove into her and she wrapped her arms around him and urged him closer still, until she felt him everywhere. Snarls of his male pleasure tangled with her moans. He gripped her knee, drew her closer, tighter, and forced himself deeper, making her mad for him, for
more
. The tender lover had gone. This love was wild and powerful and real. With every touch, every caress, every interlocked cry of pleasure, he took from her and gave of himself to fill her empty spaces.

He laughed, an exultant sound from deep in his chest. “Not frightened any longer?”

“This is heaven.” She threw her head back and her hair cascaded as she closed her eyes. One hand gripped his shoulder tight, as though she would never release him. She cast her other arm to the side to clutch the bed linens, and her delight drew him in until he was drowning. He kissed her arched throat, swallowing her flavor and drunk on it.

“How foolishly we wasted time when we might have been doing this,” she said upon a brilliant smile.

“We have forever now,
pirani
.”

“I love you, Taliesin. I love you.”

Again and again she said it, her lips parted in ecstasy, her hips moving with his. With some magic of her body she was working his cock inside her, and he drove deeper, to take more of her, to have all of her. She moaned and sought him, crying out upon his thrusts until she gasped and gave a strident shout of triumph. He spent himself in her—his heart, his body. “
Eleanor
,” he choked, consumed with feeling her and knowing finally that she was his. “My love,” he whispered against her cheek.

“I love you,” she said again, her fingers tight on him, her breaths shuddering. “I love you.”

He stayed with her, tracing her lips with his fingertips and loving the rosy flush on her face and breasts that he had put there. When her hips moved against his, testing the sensations that lingered in her body, he gave her what she needed. She undulated beneath him and gasped again, her eyes flying open.

Then she relaxed entirely. Her lips curved. “Nice,” she whispered.

He smiled. “That’s all you have to say?”

She turned her face so that her lips brushed his palm. “We.” She sighed. “Win.”

He kissed her neck, her soft lips. The cushion of her body beneath him was too slender. But he would remedy that. He’d done it before.

He drew away and covered her with the bed linen. Then he took her hand into his and laced their fingers together. Palm to palm.

They lay beside each other for some time without speaking. The shadows had deepened into night, the room lit by a single candle by which he had been writing instructions to his staff when she appeared in his house—miraculously, like countless dreams he’d had and denied.

“I have acquired a new skill tonight,” she finally said.

He laughed and angled an arm behind his head, closing his eyes. In the perfect silence he heard her stir. A soft fingertip skimmed along the muscle of his arm, her touch sweetly tentative now.

“I don’t think I will ever be quite as good at it as you,” she said with a breathless sound.

He curled her fingers around his palm and brought them to his lips. “You are quite good enough at it already. Exceptionally good.”

“The bother of it is that I will not be able to improve myself without your assistance.”

He smiled. “It’s not a competition,
pirani
.”

“There must be books that will help me. The ancients were routinely scandalous. The medievals too, although they seem to have glossed over the most interesting bits.”

He shook his head in wonder. “How you ever doubted that I loved you . . .”

“You loved me then because you could not have me.” She spoke too quietly.

He turned his face to her. Flecks of candlelight lit her questioning eyes.

“I loved you then because you were an angel and you saved me,” he said.

“I was a plague on you. You said so more than once.”

“If you had not come to St. Petroc, and if you had not fought to best me at every letter, word, phrase and page, even at riding, I would not be the man I am now. I wanted to impress you and I wanted to be good enough for you.”

“You are saved,” she said. “You do not need that inspiration from me any longer.” Her throat constricted in a swallow of uncertainty. “Now that you have had me, will you abandon me again?”

He turned onto his side and propped an elbow beneath him to look down at her. “Did you come here imagining that after I took you to my bed I would throw you off in long-awaited righteous triumph?”

“No.”

“Then what do you imagine?”

“That I will wake up and this will have been just another dream,” she whispered. “I have had so many.”

For a moment, he could not speak. “Do you believe that you are the only one who fears waking up?”

“Then let us never sleep.” She trailed a fingertip down his chest.

He kissed her lips with great tenderness. “For a decade I tried to cease loving the girl you were, and I failed. I will never cease loving the woman you have become.”

Eleanor curled into him like a kitten begging to be stroked. He obliged.

“I’m glad I decided to seek adventure.”

“As I am. Immeasurably glad.” His hand stilled. “Married to me, Eleanor, you will not be received by your father’s family, and few others in your society.”

“It is not my society.”

“It is your sisters’.”

“Then let it be theirs alone. They will always welcome us, for they love you. The others matter nothing to me.”

“Are you certain?”

“Do you think that in all these years in the vicarage I have been pining for fashionable soirées?”

He grinned. “Haven’t you?”

“I have not. I have been pining for . . . No. I won’t say it again. You are sufficiently arrogant.”

“Yet I long to hear the words that you will not say again,” he said quietly.

“I have been living a simple life. Reading, writing, translating texts for Papa, keeping house, shopping at the market on Wednesdays, recording minutes for the Ladies’ Parish Commission meetings, taking tea with—”

“I fear I’m nodding off.”

“I said it was a simple life. And you aren’t nodding off, unless that thing you’re doing with your hand is something you can do in your sleep.”

“I cannot keep my hands off of you.” He nuzzled her neck. “I cannot get enough. I have never been able to get enough of you.”

“I like it, so you’re quite welcome to never get enough. I like this house too. I like the room at the top of the stairs for the library. Perfect . . . walls.” Walls against which he had made her feel things she had never known, like he was doing again now.

“Mm.” He brushed the coverlet aside and kissed her breast. “Perfect.”

His mouth upon her breast robbed her of words. Thoughts. She smoothed her palm over his shoulder, feeling the power he had used for her so many times.