Susan Johnson (44 page)

And stopped midway in his descent when her wet palm cupped him and her fingers gently squeezed. “Let’s not start that,” he softly said a moment later after he’d fought back the leaping flame of response. “It’s only been a few days since your fall.” Easing her fingers loose, he stepped back beyond her reach.

“I feel perfectly fine. I feel
extremely
fine. You look—wonderful,” she added in an appreciative murmur, her eyes on his rising erection.

He was helpless against his body’s instant response but resolute in his decision, the memory of Elizabeth’s crisis in the shepherd’s hut still too fresh.

“Bathe me,” she whispered.

“Only if you behave.” His voice was rough, hoarse with a self-imposed discipline.

“I’ll try.” But she had the look of a breathless young siren.

His stern glance impaled her.

“I’ll really try,” she promised.

He exhaled, discomfited, his spirit at odds with his body. “As you can see,” he softly said, “I’m more than willing to—”

“Come in here with me.…”

“Or come in you anywhere,” he said, emitting another
frustrated sigh. “But I’m worried about the child.…”

“I don’t feel sick though, I feel rested and warm and amorous and you look—” Her eyes rested on his arousal and he saw the familiar tempting eagerness.

“No,” he said with soft emphasis. “I won’t.”

His refusal was flat, unequivocal. “I understand,” she said to the forbidding words. “I’ll be good.”

After rummaging through his pack to find the bar of soap Mrs. Reid had sent along, he began with her hair, working up a lustrous lather so the fragrance of clover filled the room. He kept his distance though, maintaining a kind of detachment, not leaning in too close, not making intimate eye contact. And after he’d scooped out the suds from her tub and rinsed her hair with fresh water, he said, “There,” with the inflection of a man who’d wrestled a bear to the ground.

“It feels wonderful to have clean hair again,” Elizabeth said with satisfaction, raising her arms to run her fingers over her damp tresses. Her gesture lifted her breasts partially out of the water so they floated like luscious half-moons, the nipples peeking out, water running in trickles over their slippery whiteness.

“You can’t do that,” Johnnie said on a suffocated breath.

“Do what?”

He saw the sly, secret enticement in her eyes and it took enormous self-restraint to resist in the warm heated room with their journey almost over, with the wife he adored posing for him like a courtesan. “You better wash yourself,” he gruffly said, holding out the soap.

Her arms drifted downward and sank under the water. “I’m too tired.…”

“This is going to be very fast then,” he muttered, moving toward her with a glowering look. And he soaped her breasts while silently reciting the constellations in the southern sky in alphabetical order, but even then his erection grew. It didn’t help that Elizabeth’s nipples hardened as if by magic the second he touched them or that she felt so soft and inviting when he washed her bottom.

He abruptly pulled her to her feet after that, bringing her bath to an end. His control fast eroding, he quickly and with a deliberate neutrality rinsed her off. Wordlessly he lifted her from the tub, placed a towel around her shoulders, and stalked away.

Unfamiliar with abstinence in the presence of his nude, amorously disposed wife, pressed to almost unbearable limits, Johnnie stood at the far side of the small room, gazing out into the night, his hands clenched at his sides.

He heard her come up behind him a few moments later but he wasn’t in command yet of his body and he didn’t stir.

When she touched him lightly on his hip, he shuddered faintly, steeling himself against the hunger twisting in the pit of his stomach, forcing his attention instead on the darkness outside.

“Could we make an exchange?” she inquired softly.

“If it’s as tempestuous and charged as the one that brought us together,” he said, his voice grating and sharp, “no.”

“It’s easier.”

“Nothing’s very easy right now,” he brusquely replied. He’d never kept himself from a woman before. But he wouldn’t make love to her and risk harming the baby, no matter what she said.

“You don’t have to make love to me.”

He digested the words, warily assessing them if he were circling a trap, then slowly turned around. “I’m listening,” he said with caution.

“I could do something with this,” she said, touching the swollen crest of his rigid arousal, the veins on the velvety skin visibly pulsing.

“So could I,” he said, removing her hand.

“
I’d
like to, though.”

“As you can tell, I’m resisting. I worry about you.”

“When I fell up in the hills, that was different, Johnnie. I fell really hard and the wood tumbled on top of me and …” Her words came to a whispery end. She took a deep breath to steady her trembling body. “That
was different than this. I’m burning for you, I need you to touch me.”

He hesitated; he had the strength to resist. Within him was a hard, nerveless core. But he wished to please her too. “It’s not that I don’t want to. You understand that, don’t you?”

She nodded, a small barely perceptible movement.

He expelled a deep tormented sigh. “Maybe I could … help you some other way,” he softly suggested.

Her smile reminded him of the artless woman he’d made love to that first night at Goldiehouse—unsure but ardent.

“I’d be very grateful.” Her whisper held the temptation of the ages in its innocence.

“I’m being very careful,” he warned, standing apart from her, his urges held tautly in check.

“I know,” she said, standing perfectly still before him, only her fingers trembling slightly.

And when he took her hand in his to lead her to the bed he seriously wondered if he was capable of this benevolence. He lifted her onto the curtained bed in the heated room, their young bodies clean and smelling of soap, their hair cool and damp, their lust a palpable spirit between them.

And he piled pillows behind her so she reclined on the stark white linen, lush and fertile, her skin flushed from the warm bath and from the desire burning inside her, her eyes half-shut against the urgency of her need.

He began very gently, not quite sure himself how far he could proceed, how fully he could respond to her eagerness. Sitting beside her, he lightly touched her nipple with a brushing fingertip. Suddenly a drop of fluid appeared on the pink crest. Intrigued, he bent his head to taste it.

Elizabeth sighed as the light contact trembled through her swollen breasts, coiled in heated rivers down between her legs.

And two more drops of pearly liquid appeared.

Johnnie lifted her large breasts in his hands and watched the little droplets form, kissing away the wetness as it emerged. Elizabeth would whimper at each
delicate suckling contact of his lips on her tingling nipples, at the intoxicating river of sensation that flowed downward.

“Look …” Johnnie murmured, gently squeezing her breasts. “You have milk …”

When her eyes lazily opened in response to the fascination in his voice, he smiled at her, then bent his head and took her moist nipple in his mouth. As he sucked, she felt the bewitching tremors and the flash and heat and sparking conflagration clear down to her toes. Her eyes drifted shut again, her hands came up to hold his head to her breast, the new, startling rapture captive under her palms. “Do it again …” she whispered.

Johnnie smiled around the nipple in his mouth. And his voice when he spoke was muffled by her soft breast. “Like this?”

“Ummm …” Her sigh was low, throaty, her fingers tangled in his hair, her mind slipping away.

He accommodated her wish for more until she began to need him frantically … and then he lay between her legs, softly opened her with exquisite care, and captured the swollen bud of her clitoris with his fingertips. He rubbed it gently, sliding the pad of his finger in slow circles around the pliant nub.

She was glowing hot against his hand, impatient after a few moments, arching up to tempt him. And he was as eager as she to be drawn in.

But his fingers slipped inside instead, cautiously, gauging the distance, a steely determination keeping temptation at bay. He swept his fingers gently over all her lush surfaces, stroked, massaged, brought her teetering to the feverish brink.

She wanted
him
, though, not the alternative, no matter how lush the seduction. With ravenous desire stoking her nerves and brain and pulsing senses she tried to touch his erection but he held her firmly against the pillows, pushing her hands aside, calling on every shred of will he possessed to say, “No, don’t, or I’ll stop.”

She fell back with a smothered sob, and he kissed the silky skin of her thigh as sweet recompense, his tongue tracing a slow luscious path upward until his
mouth grazed her heated pouty flesh. Parting the sleek folds of her labia with his fingers, he licked the melting wet tissue. His tongue slid inside her, plunged, submerged, penetrated her throbbing sweetness.

As Elizabeth writhed under his mouth and hands he bit her gently, tasted her scented flesh, felt the answering spasm with his tongue as it rippled up her slick interior, heard her heated whimper. Nibbling on her succulent sweetness again, he slid in three fingers past his mouth and her high wild cry began.…

“Are you feeling better now?” he asked long moments later when she’d returned to a cooler reality.

“I think I’ll keep you,” Elizabeth purred with the sultry half-smile of a sated woman. “You’ve passed all the tests.”

“Thank you, my lady,” Johnnie murmured as he lay beside her, his grin brazen impudence. “I try.”

“And with sublime results,” she murmured. “I can’t move, I’m too weak.”

“Weak with love. Languid, shaken, drowsy with love …” He traced a lingering path from her shoulder over the curve of her breast and pregnant belly, ending in the blonde curls between her legs. “I’m available,” he promised, stroking her pale crisp hair, “whenever the mood strikes you.”

“You look available now,” she said with a grin, her gaze on his arousal.

Johnnie glanced down briefly. “We’re on holiday until after the baby’s born.”

“You’re a compassionate man,” she whispered.

His eyebrows rose in surprise. “Maybe I am for you,” he softly said, this border lord who’d lived most of his young life by the sword, “and for our baby …”

She opened her arms to him, the tears always so close to the surface now springing to her eyes. “I love you, Johnnie Carre, so much it makes me cry.”

He gathered her in his arms, tucking the blankets around her, cradling her body against his, kissing her
nose and eyebrows, nibbling at her earlobes, telling her how much he loved her too in a dozen different languages. They giggled when she tried the strange languages he’d learned at school and in all his travels and then they kissed some more because bliss enveloped them, dissolved around them, filled their noses and tickled their toes.

They existed in a delicious, isolated contentment, the sound of the sea that would take them away lashing against the shore outside their windows.

They finished eating much later when they finally left the comfort of the bed. They ate fresh salmon, hotch-potch soup, and potatoes, taking inordinate pleasure in the simple meal and in each other’s company.

And when Johnnie left shortly before eight, neither spoke of the uncertainty of his return. He hugged her and said, “I’ll be back by morning. You know where the money is.”

“Don’t say that,” she whispered, refusing to consider the possibility he might not come home to her.

“Then I’ll just say au revoir.…” He kissed her, a tender, warm kiss. Then he unwrapped her arms from around his waist. “Go to sleep,” he whispered. “It won’t seem so long. Lock the door behind me.”

Staying off the main road to Berwick-on-Tweed, he arrived on the outskirts of the city before ten and went directly to a tavern by the sea where Carres had sold French wine and brandy to Charlie Fox for years, where his father before him had considered Charlie a friend.

Dressed plainly in a blue coat and dark breeches with no jack, no obvious weapons other than his sword, he entered the low doorway and sat down on a bench against the wall, surveying the smoky, low-ceilinged room, alert for the presence of British soldiers on this side of the border, or possibly for some of Harley’s men,
who wouldn’t have been as easy to distinguish. No soldiers, at least, met his gaze. He relaxed his grip on the pistol in his coat pocket. When the young serving girl Meg came up to him in her circuit of the tables some minutes later, he distinguished from her startled glance that official inquiries had already been made concerning him.

“Surprised to see me?” he queried with a wicked smile.

“They’re lookin’ for ye, Johnnie, from Wick to London,” she fearfully murmured, leaning close to his ear so her words wouldn’t travel. “Get yerself to Holland.”

“I’m trying to. Have you heard where Robbie might be?”

“Aye, the sweet boy was in here three days ago, askin’ for you. He’s waitin’, but the cruisers are making the coast right hot. He talked to Charlie. I’ll tell the old man ye’re waitin’ outside. Now git where it’s darker.”

And moments later, when Charlie Fox walked outside, Johnnie moved out of the shadows and greeted him with a tap on the shoulder.

“Christ’s blood,” the stout man exclaimed, startled. Spinning around, his eyes lighted on Johnnie, and his expression became stern. “Get the hell back in the dark,” he warned, pushing Johnnie around the corner of the building into a small alleyway. “They’ve emptied Harbottle Castle looking for you,” he growled. “The price on your head is enough to tempt even an honest man.”

“Godfrey’s anxious for my property.”

“Ye should have killed him after your pa died.”

“A youthful indiscretion,” Johnnie drawled. “Which I plan to resolve one day, but now I have to get a message to Robbie or else hire a vessel to take me to Holland.”

“The government agents talked to all the captains hereabouts; I wouldna trust any of ’em. Robbie’s movin’ along the coast, stayin’ out o’ the way of the cruisers, waitin’ for you. He couldna anchor in the cove with the blockade so tight.”