The Maid of Ireland (22 page)

“Caitlin,” he said, “I need you.”

She glared down, tight-lipped, regarding him with the esteem she might afford a toad. “If you need a woman that badly, I’ll buy you a whore in London.”

Her disdain slashed at his pride. In one swift motion he surged upward, clasped her around the waist, and pressed her to the bed. “I need
you,
not a whore.” He kissed her face, her neck.

Like a cat with a bad itch, she squirmed beneath him. “Get off me.”

“No. I’ve been honest about my needs. It’s time you were honest about your own.”

His words whispered a seductive song through her yearning heart. A wild hunger rose in her, and it was all she could do to summon back the anger. “Get off me, you ill-mannered Goth,” she said. “Or will you rape me? You English have much practice at that.”

“I don’t. You know that. Look, I can’t woo you with poetry. I can’t overwhelm you with my virility. Good God, what must I do to win you?”

“You’ll never win me. Get used to it.”

“What’s wrong with me? Am I ugly?”

She laughed without humor. “Faith, you know better than that. You’re as comely as heather in springtime. When I first clapped eyes on you, I thought you a vision spun by the fey folk.”

He dropped a kiss on her brow. “That’s encouraging.”

Caitlin knew no reason why his weight pressing on her should feel so agreeable, yet it did. In spite of everything, they were comfortable with one another. Their bodies...fit.

But she willed away the thought and said, “Take no encouragement from that, for the fact that you’re English makes you as loathsome as a troll to me.”

“Oh. Anything else?”

“Yes, since you’re after asking. I find you faithless and lacking in conscience. You swore a vow before God when you entered the novitiate. Yet see how eager you are to break faith.”

His thumbs circled her temples, finding the shape of her skull beneath tendrils of hair. “It wasn’t right for me. I knew that even before I met you.”

“How can I accept a man who tosses away pledges like so much rubbish? What of the wedding vow you made to me this very day? One day you’ll decide that, too, isn’t right for you.”

“This is different. You have to believe me—”

“I believed you when you claimed you were a deserter from the Roundheads, and a few weeks later you marched against the Irish. I believed you when you said you’d help me free the priests of Ireland, and you made me your captive. Why should I believe anything you say?”

His hands moved to cover hers, palm to palm. He laced their fingers and held tightly. His face wore a look of aching sincerity that she did not want to see. “I swore I’d not attempt to escape when I was your prisoner, and I held true to that promise.”

“Only because it served your purposes.”

“In time, all will become clear.” Wesley nearly choked with the effort to keep from confessing to her. He wanted to tell her about Laura so she would understand why he had lied, why he had forced her to marry him.

But not yet. He must not speak yet. He was too close to saving Laura to jeopardize his daughter’s life. He wanted Caitlin, craved her with a desire so vivid it staggered him. But he could not trust her with his secret, for her anger was too new, too raw. Reluctantly he remembered Hester Clench, a woman he had trusted. Caitlin had more honor, but she had a temper, too. And if anyone could kindle that anger hotter, it was Oliver Cromwell. He might goad her into revealing that Wesley had betrayed his part of their bargain.

Besides, he told himself, feeling an ironic smile twist his mouth, a man did not speak of his illegitimate children on his wedding night.

He pressed her against the bolster and nuzzled her neck. She tasted of scented soap and spindrift. The deep golden cloud of her hair cushioned his face. “I want to be in your life.”

“You can’t. I won’t let you, Mr. Hawkins.”

“I swear you will, Mrs. Hawkins.”

Red blotches bloomed in her cheeks as if he had slapped her. “Don’t call me by that name.”

“It’s your name now,” he pointed out.

“I took it only to save my neck.”

Instead of cooling his passion, her words merely sharpened the challenge. His ears strained to hear her cry out in passion; his mouth hungered for the taste of her. He wanted his babe in her belly. For the utterly practical reason that even Cromwell would bring no harm to a pregnant woman. And for the utterly unbelievable reason that he adored her.

The truth of it struck him. He had gone to her with no other purpose than to use her to regain his life and his daughter. But somewhere along the way, he had lost himself in the mystical enchantment of Caitlin MacBride.

Though she didn’t know it, Caitlin held his heart and his life in her sturdy hands. She had bound him in a spell of unbearable sweetness and overwhelming power. He gazed down at her, certain she would read the staggering message of love in his eyes.

“You look sick,” she said. “Are you going to be sick?”

The response was so unexpected, and so very much like Caitlin, that he laughed. “No, my dear love, it’s not a sickness of the gut that plagues me, but one of the heart.”

“You have no heart. And I have no skills for mending one.”

“You’re right. I have no heart because I lost it to you.”

She framed his waist with her hands. “Blarney.”

He expected her to push at him, but she held still, waiting. “It’s our wedding night.”

Her hands slid up his back, then down again. Closing his eyes, he reveled in the slow, massaging motion—until he felt the prick of a knife at his back.

“Get off me.” Her voice was strange, dark and rich, like silk gliding over steel.

Swearing, he got to his feet. She leapt up after him. Her fist was clenched around the dagger she had stolen from his hip sheath. Holding the blade with the sharp edge turned outward and the tip pointed up, she planted her feet on the gently shifting floor. “I will not honor a pledge you forced from me.”

Wesley took a step toward her. “It would be a sin to break a vow made before God.”

“It would also be a sin for me to kill you,” she retorted, “but that won’t stop me from slitting you from your gullet to your crotch. Besides,
you
broke a vow.”

“But I’m a desperate man.” He took another step. In all the weeks he had spent as her prisoner, she had not harmed him. He had to believe she would not harm him now.

Acting on pure instinct, he undid the row of small orb-shaped buttons that ran down the front of his doublet. She watched warily as he shrugged out of the padded garment.

“You see,” he said. “I trust you. I would bare my chest to you so that nothing stands between my flesh and your steel.” Lifting his hand, he found the tasseled ends of his collar tie. The
welsche
came loose and drifted to the floor. Clad in a white cambric shirt, the sleeves loose but tightly cuffed, the neckline gaping wide, he advanced another step.

“That’s far enough,” she warned.

He yanked the shirt over his head.

“Stop,” she said. “Put that back on.”

“Do you remember what I said to you that last day on the strand? Do you remember how I described all the ways I wanted to make love to you?”

She said nothing, but the furious blush that stained her face from neck to brow gave him the answer he sought.

“I still want those things. I want to feel your bare breasts against my bare chest. I want to touch you—”

“Stop it!” She edged backward so that her hips touched the table. “I’ll cut your tongue out!”

“Go ahead.” In one long stride he closed the distance between them and stood inches from her.

She lifted the dagger. Her gaze fixed on his broad chest. “You have a lot of scars. I suppose you lied about where they came from, too.”

“It hardly matters now. Are you going to stab me? You’re a warrior who knows how to wield a knife.” He pointed to the muscled flesh below his ribs. “This is a good spot here. No bones to get in the way of your blade.” He spread his arms wide and hoped she would not discern the wild pounding of his heart. “Here’s your chance. Will you take it?”

The dagger swung downward. Wesley tensed, awaiting the cold slice of steel. The knife fell with a clatter to the floor.

“Thank you, Jesus,” Wesley muttered. Then he reached for her.

She jumped back. “I’ll scuttle your knob with my daddle, see if I don’t!”

His gaze searched her, wondering if he had overlooked a second weapon. “What’s a daddle?”

“This.” Her hard, closed fist smashed solidly against his jaw, sending him reeling.

Bright points of pain sparkled before his eyes. The entire lower half of his face caught fire. Stumbling back against the bunk, he sank down, cradling his jaw in his hand.

Caitlin looked on with an uncertainty he had never seen in her before. He worked his jaw tentatively. Not broken. But bruised to the bone.

“Good God, woman!” he burst out. “I am heartily sick of your games. Would you fight to the death to protect your hallowed virginity?”

“Men and maidenheads! You’ve probably swived half of England. What matter is it if I’ve had a man myself?”

“Ah, so the Spaniard’s already had y—” He broke off, shook his head. “No. I know better. The first time I kissed you, I tasted your innocence.” He ran his finger along the throbbing tenderness in his jaw. Cavalier’s tricks, forcefulness and logic had gained him nothing. No man would ever have Caitlin MacBride but with true love.

How could he show her what was in his heart if she wouldn’t let him near her, if she clung to fanciful dreams of an elusive Spanish nobleman?

“I’d like to make a bargain with you.”

“I don’t bargain with faithless Englishmen.”

“Just hear me out. You claim to love this Spanish fellow, and I assume you believe he loves you.”

“It’s not a matter of believing, but of knowing beyond all doubt.”

Wesley lifted one eyebrow. “True love? The pure, all-forgiving kind that the poets sing about?”

Her features softened with reminiscence. “Aye. Pure as the green on the hills in springtime.”

“And all-forgiving?” Wesley persisted.

“Of course.”

He crossed his arms over his chest. “Well. I should not like to stand in the way of a love so great as that.”

For the first time, she seemed to relax, her hands opening and her shoulders sloping downward. “It’s glad I am that you’ve decided to see reason.”

“I’m glad you’re glad. Take off your clothes and get in bed.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“But you said—”

“I did. Play the wife. Share my bed and my life—just until we settle our business with Oliver Cromwell. Then if you still taunt the angels with your towering passion for the Spaniard, I’ll arrange an annulment. And then—” he let a teasing smile curve past his throbbing jaw “—you’ll have the rest of your life to remember how I made you feel.”

Perhaps it was a trick of the swinging lamplight, but he thought he saw her lower lip tremble. “I thought annulment was granted only in cases of consanguinity, or when a couple fails to—to—”

“Consummate the marriage. Quite right. But Father Tully will be more than willing to help us. Think of it. A few weeks with me, and you’ll be free to pine away for Don What’s-his-name. If the love you share is as deep and abiding as you say, then nothing you and I do together will change that.”

“But he’d—” She snapped her mouth shut and turned away.

“He’d what? Regard you as damaged goods? Not if he loves you.”

Caitlin shivered. She reached deep into the channels of her memory and sought Alonso. He hovered there, a shadowy figure, the echo of a whispered promise, the faint fragrance of masculine perfume, the tender brush of lips against her brow.

She swung back to face the Englishman. Alonso’s image drifted away like a wisp of fog before a blast of wind. Now there was only John Wesley Hawkins, standing with his bare shoulder propped against a support post, his chest wearing fearsome scars like medals of honor. His long rusty hair framed a face too comely to look at. One lock fell forward, a teasing question mark in the middle of his brow.

“Well?” he asked. “Is the MacBride not woman enough for an Englishman?”

“Of course I’m—” Caitlin couldn’t continue, for at last she saw the truth he tried so desperately to conceal behind his insouciance.

John Wesley Hawkins was afraid.

Fear shone in his eyes, visible despite the deep magic of his masculine appeal and the subtle wizardry of his smile. Like a siren song his vulnerability drew her, peeled away the layers of her resistance, mocked her denials, and found the truth at the very core of her.

She wanted him.

It was for Clonmuir, she told herself as she took the first step toward him. For the sake of Clonmuir and all the people who depended on her, she would give herself to the enemy.

To her husband.

A soft gasp escaped her. She felt his arms close around her. Her cheek brushed his chest and she turned and put her lips there, for she wanted to taste him.

He was so gentle, this enemy of hers. He lifted her face and lightly traced the outline of her lips with his finger. His hands and mouth seduced her with promises no man had ever made to her before. He was a light glimmering through the darkness, as captivating and compelling as an ancient song.

His fingers manipulated the fastening of her wide belt. The absence of the cinch gave her a feeling of freedom. She became weightless, boneless, a sailing cloud. The long tunic skimmed down her shoulders and drifted to the floor. The shift of gossamer lawn that had once belonged to a great lady followed in its wake.

She embraced a man who was her enemy. But where was the shame, the fear? She felt only a breathless anticipation, and then sheer intoxication as he brought his lips to hers. The madness of desire flowed into her, driving out doubts and fears.

Before long, an uncanny feeling of urgency took hold of her, and she gripped his shoulders. The magic seemed so tenuous and fleeting that she feared one wrong move or one errant thought would shatter the spell.

“Wesley,” she breathed against his mouth. “Hurry. Before I change my mind.”