Julie Anne Long (20 page)

He needed to feel all of her against him. Now.

Connor pushed her back, gently, gently, against the bed, and his eyes left her no doubt there would be no turning back. Her eyes reflected back to him nothing but desire. Laughing self-consciously, they fumbled with Connor’s trouser buttons and struggled to disentangle Rebecca from the voluminous folds of her nightdress. Impatience ultimately got the better of them, and soon the buttons of Connor’s shirt once again littered the floor of the hunting box.

Soft amazed relieved laughter, then silence except for the first tentative glide of hands over skin now feverish with need. And as promised, Connor showed her: he placed a hot, gentle kiss in Rebecca’s palm and then guided her hand to the thick erection that curved up toward his belly, murmuring to her how he wanted to be touched. She dragged her fist up the length of him, testing; he inhaled sharply and closed his hand around her wrist.

“Connor? Was that—”

“—
too
good, wee Becca,” he rasped, on a choked laugh. “We’ll return to this later, aye?”

Connor swept her hair back with his hands and then gently, almost chastely, pressed his lips once more against the plush wonder of her mouth. And then his hands, trembling with tenderness and greed, traveled her body, claiming her: they roamed over her breasts and the smooth mound of her belly, skimmed the sharpness of her hip and the fullness of her buttocks, found the astonishingly silky, vulnerable skin hidden between her thighs and beneath her arms. Rebecca rippled under his touch, her breath catching; her eyes fluttered closed to isolate herself with sensation, then fluttered open again to watch his hands move over her. Connor paused a moment and propped himself up on his elbow, his hand fanned over her belly. He stared down at her.

“God, but you’re beautiful, wee Becca.”

Rebecca smiled shyly up at him. Connor brushed his mouth against hers; her hand rose to cup his face and she parted her lips beneath his. Their tongues twined languidly; Connor stroked the satiny side of her breast with the backs of his fingers, luxuriating in the feel of it. Then he took his mouth from hers and bent his head to her nipple; he wound his tongue around it, teasing the rose velvet into a tight little bead as his palm rubbed over her other breast, glided down over her ribs, skimmed the copper curls below the curve of her belly, lightly stroked, with just the tips of his fingers, the inside of her thigh.

“
Connor . . . oh . . . wonderful . . .
” Rebecca’s fingers combed up his neck into his hair, sending little rivers of flame through his limbs.

“What are you trying to say, wee Becca?” he teased.

“
Hush
.” She tried to laugh, but his fingers were dragging back up her thigh, up through the downy hairs there, dipping lightly, lightly into the damp cleft covered in copper curls, and the laugh became a gasp.

“Touch me, wee Becca.” A hoarse command. But her hands were already on him. Her palms moved over his chest and over his belly, over his arms and thighs, making the same discoveries, making the same claim on his body as he had made on hers. She gently raked through the hair on his chest with her fingers; with her tongue, she followed the trail of dark curling hair, tasting his flat nipples, tracing the seam between his ribs, drawing it along the swollen curve of his erection as her hands slid down over his thighs. A groan ripped from Connor’s throat; he closed his eyes, tortured by the carnal innocence of her exploration.

“What are
you
trying to say, Connor?”

He swore, half laughing, then seized Rebecca’s arms and pulled her roughly up over his chest. He took her mouth fiercely; their tongues dueled, and then they writhed together, a tangle of demanding hands and mouths sliding over sweat-sheened bodies. Connor gripped her buttocks and rocked her up against him and softly bit the cord of her neck; her tongue found the whorls of his ears; he gasped her name. Then Connor rolled her over and pinned her. He stared down into Rebecca’s eyes, lifted himself up over her, his arms trembling, and tormented both of them by rubbing his aching erection up through the cleft between her legs, slowly, once, twice, again. Rebecca’s knees fell open; instinctively, she arched against him.

“
Connor . . . I want . . . please . . .
”

He knew it was time. Connor lowered himself again and, taking her in his arms, turned her and gently lifted one of her legs over his hip. He dipped his fingers into the moist heat between her legs, stroking, circling knowingly, relentlessly. Rebecca murmured incoherently and moved her hips against his hand, clutching at his arms, making a breathless question and plea of his name, trusting him to take her safely to wherever it was she seemed to be hurtling.

At last, a string of soft cries tore from her and her body bowed and bucked, jerked upward by the force of her release. She sank back against Connor, her breathing quick and harsh.

Connor lifted her damp hair away from her face, tucking it behind one of her ears; he brushed his mouth tenderly across her kiss-swollen lips.

“Connor?” Rebecca’s voice was thick with awe.

“Aye.” He could barely speak through the lump in his throat. “It is like that.” Her tremors continued to pulse beneath his hand; he felt a tender triumph.
I did that for her.

“For you, too?”

Connor’s own need clawed at him. He lifted himself up over her again; the smooth muscles on his back quivered, his wounded arm shook. “Soon, wee Becca.” He looked down into her eyes; they were still glazed with passion and release. “It may hurt you a bit, but just the once. Are you afraid?”

She reached up and brushed his forelock away from his eyes. “I am the opposite of afraid,” she said grandly.

Connor smiled slightly; he could hear the bravado in her voice. “
I
am a little afraid,” he confessed.

“But why?”

He could not explain.

“Don’t be afraid. I am here with you,” she said softly, folding her arms and legs around him, fitting herself beneath him. And then at last he was filling her, murmuring words of reassurance, and then hoarse syllables of ecstasy, moving inside her slowly, then blindly, toward his own release.

He breathed her name when it came.

They slept a little, an hour or two, still entwined. Connor woke when he felt Rebecca stirring, and she smiled sleepily up at him. He brushed a kiss across the top of her head.

“I love you,” she murmured.

The words . . . it was though an entire sun had exploded in his chest.

He’d been ridiculous. His thrashing thoughts, his grand confusion and torment and helplessness—it was only love, had always been love, he supposed. It was no precipice he stood at, or rather precipices have little meaning when one finally acknowledges that one has wings. Connor stepped off.

“I love you, too.”

Such grave, inadequate words for what it was he felt.

Rebecca smiled and closed her eyes, and was soon asleep again.

He needed her with him forever. And somehow, through all the previous days, perhaps from the day he had met her, he had known it.

Everything was simple now, highwaymen and lockets and multiple identities notwithstanding. All he was, and all Connor could ever imagine being from that point on, was the man who held Rebecca while she slept.

Chapter Fifteen

“. . .
A
nd in Georgia, great scaly monsters with long snouts full of teeth live in the water. They can snap up a deer with one bite.”

“You are lying!”

“God’s truth,” Connor said solemnly. “They swim about in pools just like this one, only a bit murkier, and crawl out onto the shore every now and again to sun themselves just like we are doing now.”

Connor and Rebecca were lying side by side on a blanket at the bathing pool, nude and glaringly white in the afternoon sun, covered in little pearls of water. Rebecca had wanted another swim, and though Connor had at first been reluctant to indulge her impulse, grumbling about how they should at that very moment be on the road, he at least deferred to her argument that it could very well be their last opportunity ever to frolic naked in a pool together. “A very good argument indeed,” he had told Rebecca, solemnly.

And now he was regaling her with tales of America.

“Do they eat people?” Rebecca asked after a moment.

“Only on occasion,” he said breezily. “They are called ‘alligators.’ Would you like to see one someday?”

There was a beat of silence.

“Well, of course,” Rebecca said weakly.

“Are you quite sure?” Connor’s voice quivered with suppressed amusement.

“Of course I should like to see such an interesting creature,” she reiterated stoutly.

Still, she couldn’t help eyeing the pool with uneasy speculation. Another short silence settled over them.

And then Connor grabbed her thigh and roared.

Rebecca leaped nearly straight into the air with emitting a series of shrieks. “You beast!” She pounced on him and attempted to pound his chest with her fists while Connor laughed helplessly.

“My arm! My arm! Have a care for my arm!” he choked out between laughs, attempting to capture her wrists. She giggled and squirmed out of his grasp, but soon enough he was able to grip both of her arms, and rolled her over.

They were motionless a moment, entranced by the perfect fathomless joy they saw in each other’s eyes.

“Hello,” Rebecca said softly.

“Hello,” Connor replied politely, then licked a pearl of water from her breast. Rebecca watched his eyes go nearly black with desire, and felt a surge of exultation.

Connor lifted her arms over her head and pinned them there, grinning wickedly; Rebecca dragged her feet up the length of his calves in a slow caress and locked her legs around him. He eased into her, one long unhurried thrust, and then they rocked together slowly, slowly, savoring the feel of each other’s bodies, cool and slick from the water and warmed from the sun.
Beautiful.
The word filled Rebecca’s mind. Her head went back; Connor nipped at her throat, dragged his whiskered cheek against the smooth column of it, sought her lips and lost them again as her head thrashed with desire. She watched him, relishing the primal cadence of his hips as he thrust in and out of her; a white flame lit and snaked through her veins until she was incandescent, frantic with need.
Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful.
Rebecca cried out, a thin wild sound, arcing beneath the quickening rhythm of his thrusts, and then her skin dissolved into a thousand brilliant burning stars and she was quaking beneath him.

Connor collapsed against her, shuddering. She cradled his head, stroking that splendidly unruly thick black mop, sweeping his curving forelock away from his brow. They remained that way, in silence, until their breathing became more settled and even.

Connor finally rolled away from her reluctantly, but then immediately reached for her and folded her into his arms.

They lay quietly together until he began to doze, and Rebecca gazed up through the trees. Shards of blue sky glowed between the luminous green of the leaves; it was like lying beneath a ceiling of stained glass. She transferred her gaze to the arm that wrapped her and then delicately traced the faint blue road of the veins there with her finger, grateful beyond words for the life that coursed all through him.

She was awed by the very fact of lovemaking. By how their attempts to assuage their hunger for each other merely created more hunger, by the exhilarating, terrifying moment of utter surrender in the midst of it, when she could no longer say where her body ended and Connor’s began and could not imagine ever caring again. She gloried in all of it: in the weight of Connor’s body against her, in how her touch could make him bury his face helplessly in the crook of her neck and hoarsely murmur her name, in how his eyes went hot and distant, unseeing even as they never left her face, as he moved in her toward his release. And now her body ached thoroughly, deliciously, as though it had at last been used for the reason it had been invented.

Somehow, it all made learning to play the pianoforte seem that much more pointless.

And oh, God, how she loved him. But there was something she needed to know. As time and distance from the stables eroded Connor’s Irish accent, something that seemed more indelible was revealed. She saw the changes in his bearing, his voice, the very way he occupied a space, and she saw how they fit his body more truly. He fought and shot like a gentleman, he spoke like a gentleman, he wore his clothes like a gentleman. But there was something more, something almost intangible; his grace, his wit, the words he had at his disposal, his reflexive ease in commanding a situation. She needed to know.

“Connor?”

Connor opened one eye and cast it in her direction.

“Mmm?”

“Will you tell me who you really are?”

The woman did have a talent for asking the most unexpected questions at the most unexpected times. Wide awake now, Connor sat up and pushed a nervous hand through his hair. But he did not speak.

Rebecca continued, faltering a little. “It is just that . . . you remind me of the time that Papa tripped over something poking up out of the ground in the back garden, after it had rained for days and days, poured down, really. He rubbed at it with his handkerchief, and he saw that it was a little chest, and when he had Tom the gardener dig it up, it turned out to be full of Roman coins. Pretty things, and quite valuable, he found. But it might have stayed buried, and we would never have known about it, if not for the rain.”

Connor gave a rueful laugh.

“Ah. So I call to mind something that has been buried for centuries, wee Becca?” he said, quirking one corner of his mouth ironically. “I realize I am in need of a shave, but I am not certain I appreciate the comparison.”

But he was looking out across the swimming pond and beyond it, not at her.

Rebecca did not reply. She wrapped her arms tightly around her knees. Connor turned toward her, and his heart constricted at the pale tautness of her face.

“Please forgive me, wee Becca,” he said softly. “It’s that you are wondering what you will find in the chest when finally we have it all dug up, aye?”

“Aye,” she answered softly.

He looked back out across the pond.

“Are you perhaps in trouble with the law, Connor?”

“Not before I met you, wee Becca, upon my honor,” he replied promptly. “Now, however, it is a different story.”

She smiled a little at that.

“Then are you . . . were you . . . somebody . . . important?”

Connor still did not meet her eyes. He was gazing down the length of the river. Somewhere beyond the reach of his vision it met the sea, and across that sea was America, a new life. If only the tendrils of his old one did not strangle him before he reached it.

“Yes,” he said, finally.

The word seemed to land between them with the weight of a monument.

Rebecca drew in a short sharp breath. And then she nodded once, as though in confirmation of something she already knew.

They were both quiet for a moment, pensive, and then Connor stood and began pacing restlessly. He spoke, his words tumbling out in a rush.

“When I was injured in the war, wee Becca, I saw my chance. I hated the life I had led, and the life that awaited me when I returned from the war. Everything proscribed, dictated, stifling. I had, in fact, gone to war to escape it. And so I simply left it behind. I swear to you, there was no scandal. I left no wife or child. Everyone who knew me simply thought I was dead, killed at Waterloo, and so it was easy to begin a new life.”

“
I
would have known the truth,” she said softly.

“How would you have known, wee Becca?”

“You are my heart, Connor. I would know if my own heart had stopped beating.”

It was said so simply, so matter-of-factly. And once again, Rebecca Tremaine had left him speechless.

Connor stopped pacing.
She will do this always
, he thought.
And I need her with me always
. He looked down at her, his eyes tender, pleading.

“Oh, they believed it, wee Becca. If you had been at Waterloo, you would understand how easy a thing it was to believe. I left an immense duty behind, and wealth, too, and I am not proud of it. But I do not want it back. God help me, I am happier now than I have ever been. I pray you do not think less of me for it.”

Rebecca looked back at him incredulously.

“For heaven’s sake,” she said gently.

“Sorry?” Connor said, a little startled.

“I left my duty behind, too, Connor. It was my duty to marry Edelston and play the pianoforte and do embroidery and most likely live miserably alone in the country while my husband went off to the gaming tables in London. And you do not think less of me for forsaking it, do you? I could not bear the life that was meant for me, and so I took another one for myself altogether, with scarcely a second thought. With your help. How can I think less of you, Connor, when, of all the people in my life, you have always cared for me best, in your way? I cannot imagine you would have ever left anyone who truly needed you.”

Ah, yes, but
you
did not give up the seat your family has held in Parliament for hundreds of years, wee Becca. You did not give up the land we rest upon at the moment. You did not let your family and friends grieve you for dead. You did not leave a mistress without saying good-bye.

He almost said all of it aloud.

“Rebecca, it is not that simple. Duty is different for men and women—” he began softly.

“Bosh,” Rebecca interrupted cheerfully. “We are both of us selfish and I care not a fig. I care not as long as I am with you.”

Connor stared down at her in amazement. He wondered if there would ever come a day when Rebecca would cease to amaze him. There wasn’t a coy bone in her body; she had taken to lovemaking with relish and a humbling tenderness. Reveling with her in the discovery of her own body had been the greatest pleasure of his life.

But how callous and exclusive new love could be, recognizing nothing outside of its own bubble, Connor thought. They
would
care a fig for other things, in time, he knew. But the version of himself he saw through her eyes was seductive, and he wanted it to feel that simple; he wanted to be selfish, and to not mind being selfish. He thought perhaps, having survived the violence and wars in his life, he was entitled to a bit of selfishness. And included in that selfishness was the fact that he did not want to tell Rebecca the whole truth about himself, not just yet. Not until she was his entirely, legally. Not until it would be extremely difficult indeed for her to walk away from him out of disillusionment and disappointment, if ever she knew the full truth about him.

His palms went clammy. How was it that he had reached the ripe old age of twenty-nine without even considering marriage? It was not as though one aristocratic heiress after another had not been thrust before him from the moment he turned eighteen years old. Balls and soirees had been veritable gauntlets of fluttering eligible females, none of whom had registered for more than a moment on his awareness. He had been angry and self-absorbed, occupied with testing the limits of his freedom and his father’s patience. Perpetuating the ancient Dunbrooke bloodline had seemed a distasteful duty belonging to the distant future.

But from the moment he had awoken with Rebecca in his arms, marriage was all he could think about. God help him, what if Rebecca would not marry him? What if he asked, and she hesitated, or needed persuasion? He knew what he would do: for the first time in his life, he would beg. He would threaten, if necessary; frighten her by declaring that even now she could be carrying his child. By God, wedding her was the only true desire he’d ever had in all of his born days. And then he would make it up to her by making her happy for the rest of her life.

“Connor?” Rebecca said quizzically. “Are you quite all right?”

Connor had never heard of anyone proposing in the nude before. Doubtless there was precedent, however, as there was for nearly everything, if one only looked.

“Rebecca . . .” It came out a dry croak. Oh, quite the auspicious start.

“Connor, please sit down beside me. You look unwell. Is it your arm? May I look at it?”

“No!” he barked nervously.

Rebecca flinched.

“I mean . . .”

Perhaps this would go better if he knelt. Resolutely, he knelt next to her, but she scooted back from him an inch in a slight show of wariness. He had to stop himself from burbling a hysterical laugh. How did anybody in love perform this moment gracefully? How did proposals ever get made, when they were such an exquisite form of torture?

“Connor—”

“Hush, Rebecca,” he blurted, more irritably than he intended. “I am trying to ask you to marry me.”

Her mouth dropped open in astonishment, and she stared at him blankly for a moment. And then she began giggling.

Connor frowned at her darkly.

“Oh, yes, yes, yes,” she gasped, still giggling helplessly. “Of course! I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It’s just—‘
Hush, Rebecca
,’” she imitated sternly, her voice vibrating. “Oh, my. So romantic.”

Connor’s frown began to waver and curl up at the edges in the face of her peals of giggles, and then, finally, he opened his mouth and a great whoop of laughter and victory emerged. He supposed it mattered little that he had issued the world’s clumsiest marriage proposal, as long as, through all the giggling, he got the response he wanted.