Rexanne Becnel (20 page)

Except maybe Mr. Guinea, whom Mr. MacDougal had pummeled on her behalf. But somehow she did not think it was him. Could Mr. MacDougal have been followed here by someone else? Someone from his past who held a grudge against him?

It would have to be a considerable grudge, to justify murder.

“He’s been askin’ for you,” Mrs. Hamilton said when she finally released Sarah. “Probably wants to thank you for plucking him out of the river.”

If only that were true
. Sarah knew she had to face him, but the thought of his horrible accusation overwhelmed her. If it were any other man she would be indignant, indeed furious, at such an unreasonable suspicion. But Marshall MacDougal was not just any other man. To think that he believed her to be that awful was crushing. Though she knew she must convince him otherwise, she wasn’t certain she was quite ready to do so.

“I’ll go and see him later.”

“Better you wait till tomorrow. That arm of his is going to throb all night. So I gave him a dose of laudanum and minted honey to help him sleep. Sleeping promotes healing, don’t you know. Come, now,” she added, guiding Sarah toward the door. “Let’s go on down to the kitchen and find you something to eat.”

Sarah ate because it was the only way to appease Mrs. Hamilton. But after a half bowl of mutton stew and a portion of bread and butter, she made her excuses and returned to her bedchamber. Pulling a chair up to the window, she sat there with a lamp at her shoulder and a book in her lap, watching the sun go down. The dusk stretched out a long, lingering time, as was typical of spring in the northern climes. Azure to deep blue to lavender streaked with coral. Then slowly, slowly deepening to the dark purple blue of a clear spring night. The stars appeared one by one, spreading silently across the heavens, and at some point she dozed off.

That was how Marsh found her.

He’d awakened groggy and disoriented in a bed he did not recognize. With one shift of position, however, and the piercing pain that resulted, he recalled everything. His confrontation with Sarah at the river; her departure; the gun blast.

Looking at her now, he was hard-pressed to believe she’d had anything to do with the attack on him. He stood in the open doorway to her dimly lit chamber and simply stared at her. She sat slumped down in a chair beside the window. The lamp had begun to burn low, but the meager light was still enough to illuminate her.

Her hair cascaded loose over her shoulders and chest, a thick curtain of lustrous silk that fell nearly to her waist. Though a dark rich brown, the golden light lent it a burnished color, like sunlight shining through amber.

Her thick lashes made innocent crescent-shaped shadows on her pale cheeks. Her lips, by contrast, enticed him with every pink, pouting curve.

Despite the ache in his arm, the doubts in his mind, and the lingering effects of the laudanum, he felt the distinct rise of desire. If ever a woman had drawn him to her, Sarah did. She, who was the one woman he should turn away from, was perversely the only one he wanted to cleave himself to. Even now, when he could not be certain whether she was friend or foe, she remained the one woman for whom he seemed willing to alter all his plans in order to possess.

Only he could not have her, especially not the way he’d so cruelly propositioned her.

God, but he was a hateful bastard! He could hardly blame her if she
were
his attacker. Any man who’d propose so vile a deal as he had, deserved to be shot.

All he could do now was agree to her original offer. To allow her to buy her family’s freedom from the threat he made to them. For his mother’s sake—but mostly for Sarah’s sake—he knew now that he must give her that freedom.

And to do that, he must leave Scotland forever.

He knelt on one knee before her and rested his good hand on her knee. “Sarah. Sarah?”

She stirred, shifting sideways in the chair, and a small frown marred her previously serene features. “Go’ way. Just go…” Her mumbling trailed off.

“I’m going. Just as soon as we finalize our agreement.” He jiggled her knee, excruciatingly aware of her warmth and the firm flesh of her thigh. He reluctantly pulled his hand away. “Sarah, wake up. We need to talk.”

Though her eyes remained closed, she smiled, a soft, slight curving of her lips that made the blood pool in his loins. Such a beautiful, guileless smile. Then she opened her eyes and for a moment she simply gazed up at him. “Mr. MacDougal.”

“Marsh,” he said. “I want you to call me Marsh.”

“Marsh,” she repeated, still smiling.

He shifted, leaning nearer, then grimaced at the pain in his arm. At once her smile began to fade. Her eyes cleared, and he realized with a stab of disappointment that she’d been dreaming. When she’d smiled and used his first name, she’d not been fully awake

But she was awake now. She scooted upright in the chair, blinking at him. “I did not shoot you.”

How he wanted to believe that.

“Nor did I hire someone else to do it.”

He sat back on his heels and forced himself not to notice her sleep-tousled hair or her thin, clinging wrapper that gaped open in the vicinity of her bosom. “Do you have any idea who did it?”

She shook her head. “No.” Then, “Why are you here in my room? It’s the middle of the night?”

He rose to his feet. “You would not come to me.”

“With good reason,” she shot right back at him.

He tilted his head in acknowledgment. “My accusation was probably hasty.”

She lifted her chin to a haughty angle. “If I wanted you dead, I would not have plunged into the river to save you.”

“Unless your conscience overcame your fury,” he snapped, goaded by her arrogant attitude. As casually as she was garbed, curled up like a child in that chair, she still managed to make him feel like a gauche boy.

“You have your nerve, talking to me about conscience!”

“I did not come here to argue with you.” He leaned over her, bracing his good hand on one arm of the chair, effectively trapping her there.

“Then why did you come?”

They were but inches apart, her face turned up to him, her wary eyes clashing with his. He’d come to find out if she’d been the one to shoot him. And to find out why she’d saved him. But mostly he’d come to find out if she could ever forgive him for the hateful demands he’d made of her. He’d come to get answers to all of those questions—and none of them, he realized with sudden clarity.

The truth was, he’d come for no other reason than that he had to. Everything that drew them together was wrong. He knew that. Yet it was too strong to resist.

So he leaned down lower, lower, until one of her hands came up to press against his chest. His heart thundered so violently he was certain she must hear it, for never in his life had he been so aroused by a woman.

“I came for this,” he said, lowering his face to hers. “I came for you.”

S
ARAH
stared wide-eyed at Mr. MacDougal. Only he wasn’t Mr. MacDougal to her anymore. Somewhere along the way he’d become Marshall. He’d become Marsh.

She felt his warm breath upon her cheek and felt his heart drumming beneath her hand. Her own heart drummed as fiercely as if she’d run all the way from Kelso.

He meant to kiss her.

She closed her eyes as any thoughts of resisting fled. He meant to kiss her, and she knew she had to kiss him back. There was no way she could not. Just his nearness, just the anticipation, just the touch of her palm to his thinly clad chest, were enough to dissolve any last remnants of logic and self-preservation she still possessed.

She could have averted her face, or turned away—or even cried out in alarm.

But of course she did not. For she was reckless enough to want to kiss Marshall MacDougal, consequences be damned. Besides, given the trauma they’d just gone through, was kissing him really so awful?

So her lips clung to his when his mouth finally touched upon hers. And her breath mingled with his. Even their heartbeats, so fast and frantic, seemed to find a tandem rhythm. Mad, but tandem.

When he pulled a scant inch back from her, Sarah let out a faint, telling moan, and her fingers tightened in the ancient silk of the dressing gown he wore.

He murmured something. It sounded like “Yes” against her lips. If there was more, the words disappeared when she pressed up to kiss him. And he accepted her kiss.

Any tentativeness on his part disappeared too. For this time he forced her down into the chair, and her head back against the rest. Like a long-festering wound finally lanced, emotion erupted between them. One of his hands tangled in her hair. His lips parted; his tongue probed; and she opened fully to him.

Could a person be devoured body and soul, and yet revel in the devouring? Could a person submit her will, her sanity, and every modicum of good sense, and yet rejoice in that surrender?

Oh, yes, she thought as he somehow reversed their positions and drew her down onto his lap. Oh, yes, a person could be devoured, could surrender everything, and never care for the consequences which surely must follow. For she was doing so now.

Her arms wound around his neck; her legs draped over the arm of the chair; and her bottom nestled wantonly against his hard thighs and harder arousal.

She knew what that was and how things worked. Yet instead of fear, she knew a terrible yearning to learn more. And she squirmed in anticipation.

He growled in his throat and thrust up against her bottom. Then she felt his hand slide up her side, from her waist to just below her left breast.

She dragged in a greedy gulp of air. But as if he feared that she meant to voice some objection, he swiftly recaptured her mouth, delving deeper this time, thrusting his tongue in and out of her mouth, stroking her sensitive inner lips, and driving her mad in the process. Then he cupped her breast, lifting the unbound weight of it, and dragged his thumb back and forth across the taut nub of her nipple.

She thought she would expire of pleasure!

He must have known how intensely that simple little movement affected her, for he continued the wonderful, terrible caress until she was writhing in mindless passion. He used his lips and tongue to pleasure her mouth, and his hand to pleasure her breast.

Yet it was much lower, in the nether regions of her belly and the warm vee of her legs, that the greatest portion of her pleasure was centered. Everything he did made her hotter and wetter down there. Every touch, every movement—every breath he shared with her—ignited an inferno in her belly. And she remembered from before just what an explosion he could coax from her down there.

She shivered in anticipation—in fear and longing. But there was no stopping. Not now. And anyway, hadn’t she already decided to accept the terms of his agreement?

In truth, agreement or no, she wanted this as much as he did. Maybe more.

So she rose up against his hand, almost fainting at the feel of his warm palm making an erotic circle, flattening her breast and making her press harder still against him.

The cool night air fairly boiled between them. She felt too hot for her own skin. Again his thumb flicked her aroused nipple, and she gasped at the exquisite agony. Mindless with the intense pleasure of it, she arched her head back.

“Marsh…”

“I’m here,” he murmured as he moved his mouth down the column of her throat, kissing, biting, eating her alive. His hand loosened the already gaping neck of her wrapper and she felt his callused palm move over first one bare breast, then the other. No pliable muslin to protect her skin from his. No slippery fabric to soften the rough scrape of his thumbnail across her taut, aching nipple.

Skin to skin, as man and woman were designed to be.

“I’m here,” he repeated. Then he bent her farther over the chair arm, and his mouth fastened upon her breasts.

Her arms fell away from his neck and clutched instead at his arms.

“Marsh!”

The cry was a plea, not a protest, and he seemed to understand that. For he parted the wrapper wider and cupped both her breasts with his hands. He turned the attention of his lips, from one to the other, sucking, biting, squeezing, and kneading until she was quivering beneath him, melting over him, given up wholly to him. She was his, and he knew it.

He knew also all the secret uses of her secret body parts, the parts that she might swipe with a washcloth, but never lingered over. But he lingered over them. Her breasts, her earlobes. The hollow of her throat. The indentation along her collarbone. And her breasts. Again. His mouth and fingers lingered over every one of those secret places.

He did not acknowledge, however, the one place that pleaded most for his attention. Though she squirmed and rubbed her bottom shamelessly against his rigid manhood, his hands never strayed down to the melting heat between her legs.

Didn’t he know what he was doing to her? Couldn’t he tell how she yearned for him to stroke her as he’d done before? In desperation her fingers stole down past her belly to that aching place between her legs.

But he caught her hand in his. “Sarah.” He breathed the word hot and moist against her palm.

She opened her eyes and met his dark, searching gaze. Though she was draped over his lap like a pagan offering, her wrapper open to reveal every part of her body to him, it was not her nudity which most unsettled her. Rather, it was the intensity of his stare, the total awareness in it. His hand cupped hers, their fingers intertwined, opening her palm to his lips, and as she watched—as their eyes held in the most intimate of connections—he kissed the center of her palm.

Why that should push her over the edge, Sarah did not know. Nor could she reason it out. He pressed the kiss to her open hand, his tongue made a slow, hot circle there, and she erupted just as she had that night in the carriage.

It was terrifying and wonderful, and was made even more intense because he watched her every response. Though she wanted to close her eyes and somehow hide from him, she was unable to. Her body stiffened as the tremors rushed through her; her skin seemed to quiver over the length and breadth of her entire body; and he watched and saw it all.

Only when the tremors ended and her body went limp did he release her hand—and release her captive gaze.

But he was not done with her, that was plain, for both of his hands began to move over her, knees to thighs, across her belly, up her sides, then stroking up from her arms, raising them to her neck once more.

“You have tortured me too long,” he murmured. “Too long.” Then, with one hand beneath her knees and the other cradling her back, he rose and carried her to her bed.

She clung to him, only remembering his wounded arm when he grunted as he lowered her to the bed. “Your arm! Oh, Marsh, I forgot. Are you hurt?”

He came down on the satin coverlet, stretching out beside her. “I’m in agony.”

“Oh, no!” Despite the lethargy lingering from that most personal explosion, she pushed up to her knees. “What can I do to help?”

“Open my robe.”

She fumbled with the tie of his robe, then opened it and pushed it gently down from his shoulder until she saw his bandaged arm. At least the wound had not bled through. “Just try to relax,” she murmured.

“I can’t.”

Sarah bit her lip. “What can I do?”

“Open the bottom of my robe.”

Her gaze jerked back to his face, only to be scorched by the potent heat in his eyes.

“Open it,” he repeated.

“But…but your arm.”

“That’s not what hurts me, Sarah. Open it.” His chest rose and fell with every harsh breath he took. “Open it and soothe my pain.”

Soothe his pain.
That
pain. Sarah blushed a hot red when she finally understood. She knelt over him, her own gown gaping open, her body still thrumming from the pleasure he’d given her. Could she do anything but what he asked?

Slowly, with shaking hands, she parted his dressing gown. Then she just stared at the mighty arousal that awaited her ministrations.

Tentatively she reached out and stroked it with the backs of her fingertips. At once it lifted, as if wanting more. She glanced up at his face. His eyes had closed and he looked as if he were caught somewhere between absolute pleasure and excruciating pain.

On impulse she said, “Look at me.”

When he did, she stroked him again—and again. She progressed from fingertips to thumb to a full hand caress. And the entire time she stared into his midnight-dark eyes.

Though she’d never done such a thing, nor ever imagined such intimacy with a man, Sarah somehow sensed when he was near to his own breaking point. She felt very near there again herself.

She gripped the hard, hot, incredibly silky shaft of his manhood, wanting to see the rest, to watch him erupt as he’d watched her.

But he had other plans. He caught her wrist with his one good hand and swiftly rolled her back onto her bed. “Not this time,” he murmured, as he lowered himself over her. He swallowed her protest with an urgent kiss.

Though disappointed at being thwarted, Sarah did not long regret his high-handedness. For one of his thighs parted hers and she felt the rigid heat of him press demandingly against her belly. At once she was as aroused as before, wet and yearning for that one intimate act they’d so far danced around. She wanted to feel him inside her. She wanted to feel it all. Everything.

She circled his neck with her arms and arched insistently beneath him. In a moment his other thigh forced her legs wider apart, and she felt him shift lower. The proud tip of his arousal slid down past the aching nub of her desire to a place below it that throbbed with need.

He levered himself upon one elbow, breaking their kiss. “This may hurt a little,” he warned, staring down at her.

“I’m not afraid,” she whispered, meeting his gaze.

He took her at her word. With their gazes locked, he pushed into her, each thrust going a little deeper. Each thrust stoking the fire that already burned out of control. He thrust, stroking her harder, filling her deeper, until with one powerful move he pushed past the barrier of her maidenhead.

It did hurt—but only for a moment. And she regretted it for an even briefer moment.

She sucked in a short breath, then exhaled when he flexed his maleness within her.

“Oh, my.”

He smiled, then began to withdraw.

“No. Wait—”

He thrust back in.

Her eyes widened farther. “Oh, my.”

“Oh, my,” he echoed with a grin. Then he began a rhythm of thrust and withdraw which she quickly joined in. It was like dancing, some fragment of her mind decided. He led and she followed, but as in a waltz, it took their efforts together to make the movements beautiful.

And beautiful it was, like nothing she’d ever known. They moved in a perfect tandem. One rose and the other met. One pulled back just far enough to prompt some answering motions, and the other responded to the unspoken command. They dipped and swayed and whirled higher and faster. Like some unearthly music, the melody called to them and they responded. They danced their midnight waltz across the sheets in the shadows of her room until the rhythm grew too frantic, too violent, until Sarah could do nothing but hold on to him and urge him on.

Thrust. Withdraw.

Hold on tight.

And breathe. Breathe.

Then came the explosion, the crescendo where the physical met the ethereal.

She cried out and he swallowed it up with a kiss of such fierce possession it left her deaf to all but him and his own shout of physical release. She erupted; he erupted; and the eruption went on and on, a single, interminable moment of capitulation and triumph.

Afterward they collapsed, their bodies melded together—forever, it seemed. For Sarah was certain she could never move again. Never. Nor did she want to. A huge wave of lethargy washed over her, weariness, completion, and an unprecedented sense of contentment. And all on account of this man, so warm and heavy in her arms.

She smiled into the dark, absurdly pleased with herself, then sighed when he rolled to his side, keeping her wrapped in his arms. Though some part of her knew she should regret this—indeed, that someday she
would
regret it—for now she refused to acknowledge it. How could she ever regret such soaring, powerful feelings? At that perfect moment in time, she was certain she never would.