Mia Marlowe (18 page)

If this were a dream, it wouldn’t have meant anything but a stain on his sheets in the morning and an unexplained smile over his tea at breakfast.

But if he joined Lucinda in her bed now . . . if she
allowed
him to join her . . . it would change everything.

Slowly, he walked toward the bed. It couldn’t hurt just to look at her.

But it did.

His chest ached at the sight of her, all limp and relaxed. Her mouth was softly parted, her hair spread in waves across her pillow, the peaks and valleys of her form only hinted at beneath the thick counterpane.

He yearned to touch her, to slide his fingers over her satiny skin. Without his conscious volition, he reached toward her cheek, but stopped himself before his fingertips brushed her soft skin.

It would mean surrendering his goal of reaching Lord Liverpool’s inner circle. His father would never realize his younger son wasn’t the wastrel he always took him for. He’d be stuck in Scotland for the foreseeable future. Probably forever.

Lucinda sighed in her sleep. He moved his hand another couple inches and stroked her cheek. Her eyelids fluttered open and she looked up at him wordlessly.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. The words seemed so small, but they were all he could think to say. He’d been nothing but a cad since he first laid eyes on her and discovered he was unexpectedly betrothed to her. She’d done nothing but try to make the best of a bad situation, while he’d hurt and embarrassed her at every turn.

Perhaps the words bore repeating. With emphasis. “I’m
so
sorry, Lucinda.”

He braced himself for a long-winded lecture. A strongly-worded reproof, at the very least. Instead, she did the last thing he expected.

She lifted her arms to him in silent invitation.

Alexander didn’t wait for more. He shucked out of his trousers and smalls in record time and sank into her embrace, covering her with kisses. Her neck, her chin, her closed eyelids—he lavished his wordless apology on each of the small freckles spattered over her cheeks and nose with a soft, questing mouth. Then he took her lips hard and she gave him absolution.

Lucinda opened to him immediately, receiving his thrusting tongue with a greediness that surprised and delighted him. He knew he’d ought to go slow. He should draw out this first loving till she could bear no more, till she screamed for release.

Unfortunately, he was already at the point where his own impending climax made his ballocks tense and his shaft pulse. To take the edge off the “Center of the Universe” between his legs, he started spelling random words in his mind, anything to ease the building pressure.

He took the lace at her neckline in his teeth and ripped her night rail to her navel. Her breath hissed in suddenly, but she didn’t complain. He lowered his head and began to suck one of her taut peaks. Oh, the feel of her nipple in his mouth . . . He sucked and sucked and sucked till his eyes rolled back in his head.

He was wrong. His cock wasn’t the Center of the Universe, after all. The woman beneath him was.

When she made little sounds of distress, he switched to the other nipple and gently twisted the one he’d just left with his thumb and forefinger.

Lucinda writhed under him. She clutched his head, holding him close.

As if he’d try to leave.

Her helpless little noises grew more urgent as he kissed his way over her ribs to sink his tongue into her belly button. He decided to switch to spelling backward in order to keep himself under control.

He forced himself to move with exquisite slowness as he pulled up her night rail to expose her sweet mound.

“Spread your legs, Lu,” he said, his voice passion-rough. “I want to look at you.”

“There?” She raised herself on her elbows to meet his gaze as he settled between her legs and slid both hands under her bum.

“God, yes.” She smelled like heaven—a musky, spicy heaven. “And I want you to watch me.”

“Why? What are ye going to—Gracious Sakes!”

 

 

Alexander’s mouth at her breasts had sent Lucinda into near delirium. The ache in her nipples shot through her body and settled in the spot she’d always secretly thought of as her
ruminella,
because no one had ever told her what the proper thing to think of it as was. She’d
ruminated
over its possible functions and uses and knew there was much more to it than she’d been told. Now she was learning what that part of her body was designed to do.

It was an instrument of torment.

She never thought it possible to want something so badly and not know exactly what it was she wanted. When Alex pressed his mouth on her, she ached. She throbbed. She wept moisture onto his lips.

He licked it up greedily. When he slipped his tongue into her tight channel, her head fell back.

There were no words. No concept for what he was doing to her. Possession was the closest thing that came to her mind. It was a claiming, a declaration that she no longer belonged to herself.

She was his.

Then his tongue found a tight nub that had risen at the top of the little valleys between her legs. He closed his lips over it and sucked.

Lucinda came apart from the inside. She convulsed. She bucked, but he gave no quarter. Bits of her soul were coming undone and floating away. She’d never be whole again.

She didn’t care. She didn’t care a lot.

Before the final pulse contracted her insides, Alexander raised himself over her, his “Much of a Muchness” poised where his blessed mouth had recently been. He kissed her lips and she tasted herself, all salt and musk. Lucinda wrapped her arms around his shoulders as he pushed into her slowly.

“More,” she pleaded.

His eyes glinted wildly. “I’m afraid . . . if I go faster . . . I can’t be gentle,” he said through gritted teeth.

“I dinna want gentle.”

Alexander shredded her then, thrusting his full length in one long stroke. The pain was sharp and quick, but it faded with the joy of holding him inside her. Fully seated, he drew back for another. And another. He hooked his elbows under Lucinda’s knees and nearly folded her in two. He bore down on her. His ballocks slapped her bum with each rutting thrust.

She moved with him, caught up in the heat and friction and grinding joy. Her insides tightened again and this time her release pounded around something.

Him.

This time, she was the possessor. She claimed him, declaring that he belonged to her.

He stiffened and arched his back as he drove into her. The hot flood of his seed erupting inside her in rhythmic pulses. It went on and on and she hooked her ankles behind his back, determined not to release him until he’d given her everything.

She’d earned it.

Finally, he stilled and collapsed a bit onto her, his weight settling on her lower half, while he kept his torso balanced on his elbows. Still, his head sank onto the pillow beside hers.

His chest heaved as if he’d run a mile. Lucinda was more than a little breathless too. She’d thought she was permanently shattered, but, one by one, the little pieces of her that had sheared off while Alexander claimed her returned. They gathered together again, sparking a bit as they reattached themselves inside her. Her entire being was reinvigorated. Whole.

She stroked his hair, letting the world slide past them. Nothing else mattered but this precious moment, this joining, this afterglow of something so holy, she couldn’t wrap her mind around the enormity of it all. When her sisters plied her with questions later, she knew she wouldn’t have words for what had happened inside her, even if she’d been willing to share it with them.

She and her lover—her husband!—were wrapped in the silence of bonding, giving their souls time to separate again after they’d mingled. They needed a few moments to settle back into their own bodies. Everything else seemed to stop.

Then after a little while, the silence became oppressive.

She wished he’d say something. Anything.

How was it that she and this man had just been closer than she’d been to another living soul since she left her mother’s womb, and she hadn’t a clue what was rolling around in his noggin?

She’d gone to bed that evening sick at heart, and not only on account of the cruel display Alex had put on at supper. Despite his assurance that he’d honor the other points of their marriage contract, she’d been convinced that he meant to wait a decent amount of time and then turn her out, since their marriage hadn’t been consummated. No more worries on that score.

But that didn’t mean things would get any easier for the pair of them.

Especially since, yes, there it was again. She wasn’t mistaken. The man was snoring softly.

She wedged her arms between them and heaved.

“Get off me, then, ye great ox!”

He came awake with a snort as he rolled to one side. “What’s the matter?”

“What’s the matter, the man says,” Lucinda fumed. “Ye fell asleep.”

He knuckled his eyes and blinked slowly. “I don’t know about Scottish customs, but sleep is a generally accepted pastime in England.”

“But no’ the now. No’ when ye’ve just taken me maidenhead.” She tucked the coverlet under her chin. “Have ye naught to say to me?”

“I said I was sorry.”

“And?”

“I . . . thought you forgave me.”

“Aye, I did, but have ye no words of—”
Of love,
she almost said, but she snipped off the words before they tumbled out. If the man had to be prompted to speak of love, he couldn’t have many deep feelings on the matter. “Never mind.”

He rolled onto his back and laced his fingers behind his head. “Now that I’m wide awake again, I have to say, you were . . . incredible, Lucinda.”

“Aye?” No one had ever named her incredible at anything before. Her heart leaped up in hope, but she reined it in. There were too many highs and lows with Alexander. When would they find that calm center she so longed for?

“Aye,” he repeated with a grin. Then he reached for her and tugged her close. He was so warm it was like snugging up to a banked fire. The embrace wasn’t a declaration of undying affection, but her skin tingled where it touched his. She wished he’d ripped her night rail even more thoroughly so more of her would be flush against more of him with not a scrap of fabric between.

“I suppose I shouldn’t have let myself go to sleep. Bad form,” he admitted. “But I was so relaxed after . . . and it felt so good to sink into a sleep without dreams.”

“Everyone needs to dream, Alex.”

“Not the dreams I have.”

“Do ye have night terrors then?”

“I don’t know if I’d call it that. Besides, it’s just the one. But it comes almost nightly.”

She raised up on one elbow and looked down at him. He was so handsome, he made her feel unaccountably shy. She distracted herself by teasing the sandy hair that whorled around his brown nipple.

“If the night phantom comes to ye that often, ’tis of some import. Tell me yer dream, Alexander.”

He rolled toward her, pinning her beneath his body, and kissed her again. Languid and slow, he nipped at her lips and teased her with his tongue.

“Ye’re trying . . . to distract me,” she said between kisses. He covered her mouth and the ache that had been stilled between her legs so recently throbbed afresh. Lucinda reached around him and squeezed his tight buttocks.

Oh, aye,
Knowledgeable Ladies’ Guide
, the man has an excellent seat, for certain sure.

But much as her body urged her to go blithely with Alex’s lead, her head told her not to be so easily turned. She shoved against his chest again.

“Alex, I mean it. No more playing. Tell me the dream now.”

“Then more playing?” He nuzzled her neck.

She sent him a smile full of promise. “Aye.”

He gave her one more lingering kiss and then sighed. “Very well. Since I became Lord Bonniebroch, I’ve been plagued with a dream of a weeping woman. The dream is dark, so I can’t see her clearly. I’ve no notion who she might be. All she does is sob . . . until it breaks my heart and I wake in a cold sweat.”

“And ye’ve only dreamed of her since ye came into yer Scottish title?”

He nodded.

An idea struck Lucinda, but she wasn’t sure she should mention it after what happened at supper. Still, if she could help him understand what he was dealing with, she had to try. “D’ye think . . . I mean, could it be your mother ye hear weeping?”

He rolled off her and sat upright. “After all these years why would I start dreaming of her now? And trust me, if I decided to dream of her, I’d make every effort for it to be a more pleasant one.”

“Ye may have no say in it. I’ve never met anyone who could direct their dreams. ’Tis too jumbled up with the spirits and memory and whether we had too many turnips at supper.” She sat up too. “Ye see, when we dream, I believe the veil between this world and the next wears a bit thin. The departed can get our attention more easily when we’re asleep.”

He cast her a dubious frown.

“Truly. I mind the time right after my grandsire died. I was a little girl then, but he came to me in a dream, smiling in that twinkly sort of way he had as he sat on the foot of my bed. And then he said to me, ‘Lucy-girl, tell yer grandmam I love her and that’ll never die.’ Then he winked at me and was gone.” She snapped her fingers. “Just like that.”

“And you really believe your grandfather appeared to you in a dream?”

“I dinna ken, but I do remember it pleased my grandmam out of all knowing when I told her of it the next day,” she said. “And why shouldn’t my grandsire speak to me so? Doesna the Scriptures say angels spoke to Joseph while he slept?”

Alex cocked a brow at her. “I bow to your superior knowledge of holy writ, but I’m not convinced. Besides, my mother has been gone for a long time. Why would she begin to trouble me now?”

“She was Scottish, aye? Now that ye’re in the Highlands, ye’re closer to where she spent a great deal of her life. It may be she can reach ye easier here. And I dinna think she means to trouble ye. Sounds as if she’s sorrowing over something.”

“She has plenty to be sorrowful over,” he said softly, then he shook his head. “But that can’t be it. The previous Lord Bonniebroch had them too. It’s doubtful my mother decided to visit
him
by night.” He narrowed his eyes and cast Lucinda a sidelong gaze. “How is it you know so much about dreams and visitations from the dear departed?”

Lucinda swallowed hard. It was the perfect chance for her to tell him about Brodie MacIver. But the bridge she and Alexander had built between themselves was so tenuous, she didn’t know if it would stand the strain of introducing her ghostly companion just yet.

So she arched up to kiss his jaw and nibble his earlobe. “So many questions. Are ye intending to talk all night, husband? I thought ye wanted to play.”