It Happened One Midnight (PG8) (19 page)

He didn’t laugh. He was struck motionless by the fact that she may have just described the only necessary ingredients for happiness.

She wanted a family.

How very fortunate he was in so many ways.

And just then she pushed back a strand of hair over her ear, and his eye watched the movement of her breast arc against her wet stays.

And for a moment he couldn’t breathe.

He wasn’t made of stone, for God’s sake. He ought to get the two of them covered up.

He didn’t move.

“I haven’t had much time to think of another dream,” she said defensively.

He was still thinking about the shadow of a nipple against the damp white.

“It’s a fine dream,” he said absently. “But I didn’t hear anything about marrying a title in that,” he said finally.

She pressed her lips together. And hesitated. And then: “It’s just . . . well, you won’t betray my secret to the ton?”

“Which secret? You’ve a
legion
of them.”

“This one: I just want to . . . choose my life. I don’t necessarily
want
to marry anyone.”

“The heresy! Ah, you see? We have a dream in common. I don’t want to
have
to marry anyone, either.”

She laughed.

“Why
did
your father issue that particular edict, Jonathan?”

He turned away from her then. “My father,” he said dryly, “doesn’t think very much of me. He thinks I’m on the road to perdition and a marriage ought to put me right.”

“Surely that’s not true!” she said with flattering shock.

“I didn’t put it quite the right way. Nothing has been expected of me.
He
doesn’t expect anything of me, apart from what I’ve always done. I’m to be dispensed with before I can do something to embarrass him.”

She mulled this somberly. “It’s hard to imagine he wouldn’t be proud of you.”

She meant it. He knew it.

He stared down at her and said nothing. And in the silence her unusual beauty lulled him, sunk into his bones, much the way the sun had, in a way he’d never before dared allow it to do. The slight cant of those sorceress eyes, that pale gold slope of her cheeks, the lines of her elegant slim limbs were why his breath was suddenly shallow. He suddenly felt her in his body as something primal, the way he felt the need for air or water, and he shifted restlessly. They were too long here, too little dressed, too alone.

“Tommy . . .” he began, his voice soft now. “. . . just because you survived being shot, and you’ve lived this long . . . doesn’t mean you’re . . .”

He was about to say “invincible.” And he realized it probably wouldn’t matter. And it was something he didn’t want to take from her: her belief in herself.

Besides, how did he know she wasn’t invincible, ultimately?

He would just have to hope he was there the next time she decided to put herself in harm’s way. Whether it was a midnight foray to steal a child, or an encounter with a duke.

Suddenly her mouth started to waver and turn up at the corners. She was stifling a laugh.

“What?” he said irritably.

“It’s just . . . Jonathan you look so . . . you should see your
expression
. You’re staring down at me as though you fear I’m flammable. Or covered all over in quills.”

His eyes were darker, unblinking as a rifleman’s. It wasn’t quite the look he wore when he threw those scissors at the wall. But it was close.

Still, he didn’t say a word.

She realized then that the atmosphere between them had shifted subtly.

A faint warning knell sounded somewhere in her, a warning about their stillness and closeness.
His eyes are blue
. She was suddenly alarmed by knowing this so definitively. Jonathan’s eyes are blue. Not like cornflowers, or the sea, or anything so safe and ordinary. They were more like . . . the sky just after sunset. That blue-purple of day finally surrendering to night.

A subtle color.

Funny, but subtle was definitely not a word she’d ever associated with Jonathan Redmond.

He still didn’t speak.

“I’m neither as dangerous
or
as fragile as all that, Jonathan.” For some reason she whispered the words, as if they were in a church. Such was the gravity of his gaze.

He hesitated. And then:

“No?” he said at last. With devastating softness and great, great skepticism.

And then tentatively, softly he laid his hand against her cheek.

Lightly as a moth it landed there. And softly, softly he dragged the backs of his fingers along her cheekbone, tracing that distinct line of her jaw, that might very well look like her father’s. Gently, purposefully. As though testing the blade of an exquisite weapon.

And it was as if his fingers had found the loose link in that chain mail wrapped round her soul and tugged, starting up a slow dangerous unraveling; she felt it in the filament of heat that seemed to start right at the crook of her legs, and travel up her spine.

“Because I fear,” he murmured thoughtfully, more to himself than to her, as if arriving at a troubling conclusion. “That you’re both, Tommy.”

She curled her fingers into the ground, an attempt to anchor herself to earth.

He’s going to kiss me, she realized, shocked. It was the fault of gravity, she supposed, and the fact that they were both more bare than usual, and if two pairs of lips hovered that near each other long enough, a kiss was bound to happen.

She hadn’t been kissed in . . . so long.

And he did. His lips bumped hers gently, once.

It was downright chaste.

She was on the verge of finding this very funny when his mouth returned to brush over hers, slowly, light as a breath.

Testing.

Lulling.

Mmmmmmmm.

Devil take it, but now she was curious.

She didn’t stop to reflect that curiosity had been the downfall of many a woman.

She would have thought him a taker. But this kiss was subtle, subtle like his eyes. It coaxed. It lured. It revealed to her, with deliberate delicacy, a world of sensation in her lips alone. Somehow with just his lips Jonathan marshaled nerve endings in far-flung places in her body, setting them one by one aflame, and coaxing nearly everything that
could
stand erect on her body into an upright position. The fine hair on the nape of her neck and arms, her nipples—as if they all wanted to see what the fuss was about.

The world she’d once known was dissolving into a new world of heat and decadent texture. Honey. Satin. A rich male sweetness. It invaded her veins like a fine liquor and spangled her thoughts. And she knew all of this because her mouth had opened beneath his like a flower opening to the sun, because why wouldn’t it? She was already drunk with it. Close to trembling.

When their tongues at last met, she moaned with relief.

She felt the sound of it arc through his body like a lightning bolt.

For his breath caught, and he tensed. And then he saw his advantage and took it immediately; the kiss became demanding, searching, and she met him hungrily. He raised up on his arms, bridging her body with his, then lowering down, down, gently down. And this was when some well-honed instinct for self-preservation made her flatten her hands against his chest, but this a mistake. It was like touching a warm satin-covered
wall
. She could feel pure lust humming beneath his skin, dangerous, unpredictable, as a riptide. His heart drummed beneath her palms. She almost felt betrayed, as though this hard, beautiful, unequivocally male body, this kiss like quicksand, were weapons Jonathan had hidden from her.

A different instinct said:
Give him whatever he wants
.
Take whatever he’ll give
.

He moved his mouth to her throat and she arched to abet him, to urge him lower. She knew he must have felt the thump of her pulse there. Lower, lower, now, to the valley between her breasts, and she prayed his mouth would skim her nipple. And instead of pushing him away, her fingers trailed down the gorgeous deep furrow made by the muscles ridging his spine, slipped into the gap of his trouser waist, slid over his hips. Another inch and her fingers would delicately skim his cock, which swelled against his trousers impressively.

“Tommy.” Her name evolved into a gasp that sounded like surfacing deep from the river again. He went still, pulling away suddenly.

He stared down at her stunned for a moment. And then fell like timber away from her.

And all she could hear now was breathing. Hers and his.

A duet in breath-catching.

It was a bit like the aftermath of an explosion, she surmised. Everyone surprised and a bit abashed to have screamed and run about like ninnies, but relieved to have escaped with their lives.

God. She’d actually
moaned
.

She almost moaned again at the memory. It was with a great effort that she refrained from throwing an abashed arm over her eyes.

Jonathan
Redmond
of all people.

And he was the one who’d had the sense to
end
it.

“So . . . I take it you’ve been kissed before?” He was trying for irony. But his voice sounded odd. Thick and pensive. As though he’d sustained a blow to the head.

“As have you, I suspect.” Hers sounded very like his in her own ears. She suspected they were both struggling to speak over the sensual tumult in their bodies. She felt like she’d been tossed rudely about on some kind of wave and thrown roughly to shore.

There was a pause.

“Apparently not,” he finally said cryptically, half to himself. He still sounded dazed.

She didn’t ask him what he meant. Speaking seemed superfluous in the wake of that, anyway.

When
he
said nothing more, she took him in a surreptitious sidelong glance.

He was lying flat, staring up at the sky as if he’d just plummeted to earth. One hand rested on his rib cage as if he’d been shot there. She watched that hand rise and fall, rise and fall with each breath, still deep but settling bit by bit. She wondered if he was trying to muffle the galloping sound of his heart. It was precisely what she was tempted to do, for she could still hear her own clanging away in her ears. The whoosh of blood heated to boiling in what felt like mere seconds.

She studied his profile as if she’d never seen it before. And so she hadn’t, not really. His dark brush of lashes cast a little shadow on his cheek. A faint line was cut into the corner of his blue eyes from years of squinting from horseback into the sun. The hollow of his cheek was filled with shadow, and this seemed fascinating and new. It occurred to her that she wouldn’t mind lying here all day watching how the shadows played over the curves and angles of his face. She suddenly wanted to see him in every kind of light.

And at that thought she felt exposed, and she was shivering. “My clothes,” she said suddenly.

“I’ll get them!” He shot to his feet like a sprung trap, scrambled up the riverbank, crashed through the underbrush, and vanished practically before she had time to blink.

Very like a man ecstatic to have an excuse to bolt.

Leaving Tommy alone with her thoughts, seldom a pleasant state of affairs.

And then he came into view on the bridge. Much smaller. Quite a distance they’d come, both literally and figuratively it seemed.

From a distance seemed a safer way to watch him, and she found herself avidly studying him as though he were a new species she’d never before seen: a lean, well-built, dark-haired man, bending to scoop up clothes. Not extraordinary from afar. Nor dangerous.

She watched him gently shake out and then neatly, carefully fold her dress, and for some reason this touched her unutterably. He retrieved her slippers, first one, then bending over to retrieve the other, yards away from the first, and she saw how small and absurd they looked in his big hands. She knew a sudden vertigo of understanding, of what hell he must have experienced when she had kicked them off and gone over the edge.

His hands. Skating her jaw, just so. She gave her head a rough shake and sucked in a long, hopefully cleansing breath and exhaled. Why should she feel
abashed?
She’d kissed men before and enjoyed it, though she certainly rationed her kisses, as she was practical above all else. She was hardly made of stone.

None of those
other
men had had the unmitigated gall to mine her very soul with a kiss.

She distracted herself from the tumble of her thoughts with tasks: she rolled on her stockings. She finger-combed her riotous hair, which was exhibiting dandelion puff tendencies, deftly braided it, then pinned it into a coil.

And then Jonathan came crashing through the brush like a great beast again, sliding down the bank, grabbing fistfuls of greenery for balance on his way down.

He froze when he saw her and stared. As if he, too, were seeing her for the first time. As if he couldn’t decide whether she was predator or prey.

“Catch.” He tossed her bundled dress to her.

She caught it effortlessly. He raised a pair of impressed eyebrows.

She shook it out gently, then gave it an extra shake, just in case any insects had taken a notion to explore it while it lay abandoned in a heap.

“Ought you to put it on over your . . . wet . . . things?”

The tone was all concern, but his face remained impassive, and
surely
that pause was deliberate and innuendo-drenched.

Wicked, wicked man. She could feel heat starting up in strategic places when he said it.

“I’m very nearly dry now,” she said pointedly. “But thank you.”

After a moment, he shrugged, and he gave a quarter turn, a superfluous bit of manners given that he’d seen her nipples through her shift, but hadn’t touched them, more’s the pity. But it was a bit of ceremonial reimposition of propriety.

She dropped the dress over her head and pushed her arms through.

She reached behind for the laces and drew them as tight as she could. He didn’t offer to assist.

He was already dressed, shirt buttoned and safely hidden behind his coat, and his gorgeous polished boots covered up to his knees reflecting the sway of leaves above, and his hair was drying in waves that bordered on comical. Part meringue, part Beelzebub.