The Magnificent Rogue (22 page)

He was shaking, the pulse leaping in the hollow of
his throat. He buried his face in the hair at her temple. “Tell me no.”

“Why should I tell you that when I just said—” His lips stopped her words, his tongue entering her mouth to toy frantically with her own. She had not known men kissed that way. He had barely touched her lips last night. She found the action darkly intimate and almost as exciting as that more carnal invasion. He did not give her a chance to savor it. He pushed her back, his hands fumbling at the buttons of her bodice. “Don’t move—I have to—”

His lips were cold on her breast, but his tongue was moist and warm as he started to suck strongly, frantically. She arched upward, her fingers tangling in his hair. “Robert!”

“Sorry,” he muttered. “I didn’t want this—No time.” His hands were under her skirt, reaching, searching, frantically adjusting his own clothing.

He was inside her, big, warm, club hard, plunging, rutting. His warm breath plumed the frosty air as his chest lifted and fell with his labored breathing.

Cold. Heat. Desire.

She held desperately to his shoulders as she met him, took him, merged with him.

It was over in only a few wild minutes.

She became gradually conscious of the hardness of the ground beneath her, of Robert lying next to her, gasping, his hand still covering her bare breast.

“Did I hurt you?” he asked quietly.

“No.”

“It’s a wonder,” he said bitterly. “I … lost control.”

The words brought an odd, bittersweet pleasure. Robert, who rarely lost control, had been stirred enough to abandon it for her. No, not for her, for her body. Well, that was still part of her. The pain that qualification brought was not reasonable.

His hand on her breast tightened. “Jesus, look at you. It’s freezing cold, and I have you nearly naked.”

“I … liked it.”

“I promised you I’d go slow.”

She was tired of him chastising himself. “You’re being very foolish. I thought it went very well. How do you know I would even care for this … this slowness?”

He chuckled. “Oh, you’ll like it. I’ll demonstrate just how pleasurable slowness can be later, when we light the fire and get some warmth in here.” He rolled over and began buttoning her bodice. “So, fie on Sebastian?”

She smiled. “Well put. Fie on Sebastian.”

Kate gazed languidly into the fire. “If you learned all this from the Spanish, then they must be a very decadent people.”

He drew her back against him, fitting her into the hollow of his hips. “At times.”

How well they fit together, she thought contentedly. During the last hours she had been more aware of that almost magical togetherness than anything else. It was as if they had been two parts of a whole that had been separated and were now coming together. “But I believe I like this kind of decadence, so I’ve decided they must not be as bad as everyone says.”

“Does that mean you’re contemplating asking Philip’s protection? Forget it.” He added lightly, “You mustn’t judge all Spaniards by my example.”

“But you’re not Spanish, you’re Scot.”

“Yes, I’m Scot.” He was silent a moment. “But my mother is Spanish.”

She raised herself on one elbow to look at him. “Truly?”

“Truly.” His lips twisted. “Doña Marguerita Maria Santanella.”

“Will I meet her when we reach Craighdhu?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Curiosity again? I thought Sebastian’s example had taught you to avoid asking personal questions.”

“This is different. Dreams are private. But why should you not tell me something everyone at Craighdhu probably already knows? You know everything about me.”

“Not everything.” His index finger traced the aureole around her nipple. “I’m discovering new and splendid facets at every turn. Did you know that only one woman in a thousand has the ability to grasp a man with the power that you do? I thought I would go mad when you clenched around me and then squeezed until I—”

“Hush!” Heat flooded her cheeks, and she slapped away his toying hand. “Decadence is well enough, but you do not have to put it into words.” Then the full meaning of his sentence hit her. “Thousand? Have you truly had a thousand—you are jesting with me.”

“Am I?” He blandly met her gaze, and suddenly his lips were twitching. “Perhaps a slight exaggeration.”

“A vast exaggeration. You would have time to do nothing else.” She frowned. “And I think you said it only to distract me because you didn’t want to answer my question. You’re not being fair.”

His smile faded. “Why is it important to you that I answer you?”

“It would make me feel … safer.” It was not the entire truth. He had possessed her, owned her in a manner that frightened as well as elated her, but she also desperately wanted to
know
him. That desire had obsessed her since the moment she had met him, and she doubted if he would ever be more open to her than he was at this moment. “Why will I not meet your mother?”

“My mother is residing in a convent in Santanella, where she prays for my soul.” He smiled without mirth. “Though she is sure that her prayers are of no avail.”

“A convent?”

“She considered it her only recourse when I escaped
from her brother, Don Diego, and returned to Craighdhu. She had failed, you see. They had tried to mold me into a true Spaniard and had only succeeded in exaggerating my deplorable Scottish savagery.” His lips twisted. “What a pity.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You wish to hear it all? I don’t know why, it’s all in the past.”

“I want to hear it.”

He shrugged. “When he was a very young man, my father traveled to a shipyard in Spain seeking to purchase a caravel for our trade with the Irish. Don Diego Santanella, a nobleman who owned the shipyard and practically everything else along the coast, invited him to stay at the castillo until the ship was ready. It was there that he met my mother. She was only seventeen then, and very different from the women he had met before. You may have noticed we Scots have a tendency to be deplorably earthy in nature.”

“It’s come to my attention.”

“She seemed shy and pure and very devout. She was also very, very beautiful. My father went mad for her. He had to have her. It didn’t matter to him that she was Spanish and a Catholic or that she wanted to go into a convent and forgo marriage. He went to Don Diego and asked for her hand. To his surprise, his suit was looked on with favor. Diego refused to give a dowry, but he acceded to the marriage. They sailed back to Craighdhu as man and wife.” His expression became shuttered. “She hated Craighdhu, she found my father detestable, and when I was born, she found me an annoyance. She spent most of her nights avoiding his bed and her days on her knees praying for deliverance. She had no time for a child. When I was nine, my father suddenly died of a stomach disorder. I’ve wondered since if it was not caused by a drop or two of poison in his food.”

Her eyes widened in shock. “You believe she killed him?”

He shook his head. “But her attendants were all appointed by Don Diego, and he appeared on the scene just two weeks after my father’s death. He arrived one night, and the next morning at dawn my mother and I were on a ship bound for Spain.”

“Why would he want to kill your father?”

“Craighdhu and our trade routes to Ireland are very valuable. Don Diego made it very clear once I was under his wing that was why he’d given my mother in marriage. He was an ambitious man, and the trade routes are a very rich plum. A plum he couldn’t pluck while my father was alive, but if he could mold and control the heir to Craighdhu, then he could control the trade routes. I spent the next four years at his castillo at Santanella being ‘tutored’ by the good priests and Don Diego.”

“Tutored in what?”

“I was a Protestant, so I had to be taught to abandon such heresy.” He added with irony, “Every day I received my gentle lessons from the priests Diego sent to school me.”

She remembered the scars on his back. “With the whip?” she whispered.

“Of course, how else? Protestant or Catholic, it is all the same. They all believe they’re right and must prove it at all costs.” His lips thinned with bitterness. “First, you’re given holy words, and next, the whip to enforce it. You should know that truth. Sebastian used his whip on you.”

“But he was afraid of the lady, and I was not left scarred.”

“Yes, you were.” He touched her forehead with a curiously gentle caress. “But not irreparably. You’re strong. In time the scars will fade, and you won’t even remember where you got them.”

But he remembered where
he
had gotten his scars;
he had permanent reminders. She wondered how many of his dreams concerned those afternoons at the castillo. “Didn’t your mother try to stop it?”

“Oh, no, she had been raised by the priests and properly shaped in the way she should go. She even forced herself to sit in the same room while they tried to rid me of my devils. She would plead with me to give in and not to make them do this to me.”

“She watched them whip you?”

“The priests would bring the whip to her before they started and she would pray over it, asking God to instill it with His holy power. Then she would kiss it and hand it back to Father Dominic.”

She felt sick at the picture he painted vividly before her. She had thought her time with Sebastian a horror, but it had not been a systematic daily regimen of torture overseen by the one person who should have been his most ardent defender. The vision was too hurtful to contemplate. She changed the subject. “I don’t understand. You said you learned”—she waved a hand to encompass their extremely intimate situation—“this at Santanella. I’m sure the priests did not teach you.”

He smiled without mirth. “Don Diego was not nearly as devout as my mother. He believed there were many pleasurable uses for sin. Many evenings he would send for whores from the town and then summon me to his chamber to demonstrate the pleasures that awaited me if I rid myself of my foolish wish to cling to my homeland.”

“But you were only a child.”

“I didn’t stay that way long. Unfortunately, I was too stubborn and lost in sin to accommodate either my mother or Don Diego, so it went on for four years. Punishment in the afternoon, a deliciously corrupt reward in the evening. When I reached my thirteenth year, I managed to run away from Santanella and made my way back to Craighdhu.”

“How?”

“Very laboriously. It’s a journey I prefer not to relive.”

A boy alone, without means, hiding, afraid, traveling over land and sea. It was incredible he had been able to reach Craighdhu safely. “But if you had to get across the—”

“Enough questions. It’s over and done.” He suddenly rolled her on her back. “You have an enchanting mouth, but there are uses I would rather put it to than talking.” His index finger traced her full bottom lip. “A divine mouth … Open …”

For the first time she felt a quaver of uneasiness. She had thought she could embrace this pleasure as Robert did, but was this sense of deep, irreversible bonding entirely customary in these situations? If so, why did it not vanish when the mating was finished? She felt closer to him now than when they had been in the throes of passion.

He pressed on her lower lip. “Open … I want to come in.”

She wanted him to come in. She was being foolish to question this pleasure that was deeper than any she had ever received before. Her arms closed around him as she opened her lips.

Darkness lay beyond the opening in the barrier, but Kate could see no sign of snow drifting through that blackness.

“Why aren’t you asleep?” Robert nibbled at her earlobe. “If I wasn’t vigorous enough to tire you, perhaps I should try again.”

He was teasing her. He could not possibly wish to join with her again after these last hours of erotic play. “I think the snow has stopped.”

“Aye, earlier this evening. You were a trifle … occupied or you would have noticed yourself.”

“That’s a good sign, isn’t it?” she asked eagerly.

“If it doesn’t start again.”

“But the storm could have moved on. We could be able to leave.”

“Don’t think about it. The weather is treacherous this time of year. We could be disappointed a dozen times before we manage to get out of here.”

But it was difficult to suppress hope. She had never felt so strong, so alive. She did not want to die. “That’s a foolish thing to say. How can I think of anything else?”

“You managed earlier.” He went on quickly as she started to speak. “Tell me of this fine home you’re going to have someday.”

“You don’t want to know. You’re just trying to distract me.”

“If I didn’t want to know, I wouldn’t have asked you. Don’t you think I ought to be informed, since it’s my gold that’s to pay for it?”

It did seem just, but she would rather take advantage of his efforts to distract her in another manner. “Craighdhu. I want to know about Craighdhu.”

“You’ll see it for yourself soon.”

Would she? She shivered as she glanced out into the darkness again. “Tell me anyway.”

“It’s not a large island. Mountains, steep hills, rocky country. I told you about the barrens.”

“Tell me about the castle.”

“It’s old, very old. It was built by the Norsemen when they first came to conquer and then to settle the land.”

“Who was there to conquer?”

“A savage sun-worshiping tribe called the Picts and later the Scots, the first Gaels who came from Ireland.” He blew a tendril of hair at her temple. “They all made us what we are.”

“The great and fierce Highlanders,” she said teasingly. “What does the castle look like?”

“Like any castle. Turrets, stone, a moat. There’s
nothing unusual about the castle or my island.” He shrugged. “Many find it a forbidding place.”

“But not you.”

He looked into the fire. “Spain is warm and dry, and white jasmine bloomed in the gardens at Santanella. It was everything that poets call beautiful. On the day I stepped on shore at Craighdhu, I was barefoot and my feet were bleeding and the rocks were cold and rough beneath my feet. Night had fallen and torches were burning bright against the gray walls and mists veiled the mountains. It was chill, harsh, and spare.”