The Pleasure of Your Kiss (6 page)

Ash reached over to snatch the canteen from his friend’s hand, discovering to his exasperation that it was nearly empty. “I hired you to help me abduct the sultan, not drink up all of our provisions before noon.”

“
Hired
would imply there was actually some expectation of payment for my services,” Luca drawled. “I’ve yet to see so much as a gold sovereign cross my palm.”

Ash slipped the canteen into the leather satchel slung across his chest, avoiding his friend’s knowing eyes. “I’ll pay you as soon as I can get to a proper bank and cash a cheque. I told you I’d experienced a recent setback to my own finances.”

“And by any chance did that
setback
have big brown eyes, long dark hair, and a most spectacular pair of—”

“Quiet!” Ash snapped, retraining his spyglass on the road as the sultan wheeled his mount around at the far end of the valley and came pounding back down its length, each strike of the horse’s hooves sending up a golden plume of sand. “Here he comes again.”

This time Luca actually stirred himself long enough to peek over the top of his rock. With his dark-lashed ebony eyes, flowing white robes, and the untamed mane of sooty curls tucked beneath the traditional kaffiyeh wound around his olive-skinned brow, Luca could easily have passed for a native Moroccan himself.

Since Ash’s golden eyes and light brown hair made such a disguise impractical if not impossible, his own buff riding breeches, ivory lawn shirt, and loose-fitting cutaway coat were designed to blend into the endless vista of sand and sun. As he studied their quarry through the spyglass, he absently stroked his jaw, welcoming the familiar prickle of beard stubble against his palm. At least he no longer felt like a shorn lamb.

“Now, why would the man go out riding without his guard?” he murmured. “It’s almost as if he’s begging to be ambushed.”

Even without his guard, the sultan appeared to be a formidable opponent. His crimson cloak rippled over the flanks of a massive black steed that looked to be more dragon than horse. Ash wouldn’t have been surprised if puffs of smoke had come belching from the beast’s flared nostrils. The man sat his ornate, silver-trimmed saddle like some emperor of old, wearing nothing but a pair of loose-fitting trousers and an open black vest beneath his cloak. The well-defined slabs of muscle in his broad chest and upper arms were clearly visible as he snapped the reins to urge the stallion into a harder gallop.

Ash’s gaze followed those arms down to the powerful hands wrapped around the leather reins. An image of those sun-bronzed hands splayed against snowy flesh danced through his brain, darkening the yellow sun to the color of blood.

Luca’s voice seemed to come from a great distance. “You all right, Cap? You look a trifle bit … well … insane.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It must be the heat.” Drawing off his wide-brimmed hat, Ash mopped at his brow as Luca continued to eye him with uncharacteristic concern. They both knew Ash had never been prone to the sun-sickness that plagued so many Englishmen in this region.

He jammed his hat back on his head. If his wayward thoughts kept drifting in such dangerous directions, he’d be less likely to kidnap the sultan than to plant a pistol ball between the man’s eyes.

“Just what are we supposed to do with this fair maiden once we’ve rescued her?” Luca asked.

“If all goes as planned,” Ash said grimly, silently praying that it would, “we’ll never even have to lay eyes on her. We’ll simply kidnap the sultan, then send a ransom note to his stronghold, agreeing to swap him for … for the girl.” In England his plan would have been considered barbaric, but Ash was familiar enough with the region to know it was one both the sultan and his court would respect. Such abductions and negotiations often occurred between the powerful potentates and tribal warlords who were constantly battling for supremacy in this area. “Once they agree to our demand, we’ll have her delivered to a place where my brother will be waiting to welcome her back into his loving arms.”

Until he said the words aloud and heard the hint of a growl in his voice, Ash had been able to pretend Max was simply a client who had hired him to rescue a stranger. But now in his mind’s eye, Ash could see his brother’s hands stroking the silky softness of Clarinda’s skin, his brother’s lips brushing her cheek and murmuring all of the tender words Ash had been too proud—or too foolish—to say.

The sun dimmed again and the past shimmered like a mirage before his eyes. Suddenly he wasn’t crouched behind a rock in the desert heat but standing beneath the spreading boughs of an old oak tree in the misty meadow where he had bid Clarinda farewell for the last time. When she had found out he was leaving, she had thrown a cloak over her nightgown and slipped out of her father’s house to intercept him. She had come running across the dewy grass, her feet bare and her fair hair streaming down her back like a child’s.

She had stumbled to a halt in front of him, her big green eyes darkened with accusation, and blurted out the one question that had been haunting him from the moment he had decided to go. “How can you leave me?”

He had stood there, holding his horse’s lead and steeling himself against the bitter reproach in her eyes. “You know very well why I’m going. Because I have nothing to offer you.”

“That’s a lie!” she cried. “You have everything to offer me. Everything I could ever want!”

He shook his head helplessly. “My ancestors have been piddling away the family fortune for generations. I haven’t a farthing to my name. And being the second son, I haven’t even a title to offer you.”

“And I haven’t a drop of noble blood in my veins. Why I’m as common as Millie the milkmaid down at the village dairy!”

Knowing he would regret it in the endless days—and nights—to come but unable to stop himself, he reached down to stroke the shimmering flax of her hair, marveling at its softness beneath his hand. “There is nothing common about you.” His palm glided over the downy curve of her cheek, the pad of his thumb skating dangerously near to her lips. “Once I’ve made my fortune, I’ll come back for you. I swear it.”

A breathless laugh escaped her. “But don’t you see? There’s no need for you to make a fortune. I already have one! Papa’s shipping investments have made me one of the richest heiresses in all of England.”

“All the more reason for your father to seek out a more suitable object for your affections and your hand in marriage if I don’t prove myself worthy.”

She lifted her stubborn little chin to an angle he recognized only too well. “If Papa won’t give us his blessing, then we shall elope. You just turned one-and-twenty, and I’ll be eighteen next month—old enough to decide whom I want to wed. We can run away to London or Paris and live in a garret. Why, I’ll take in ironing if I have to!”

“Do you even know how to iron?”

Her smooth brow puckered in a scowl. “No, but if I can play Bach’s Fantasia in A minor on the clavichord and conjugate Latin verbs in the first-person singular of the perfect indicative active, I’m certain I could learn. We shall sup on bread and cheese every night and read Byron and Molière together by candlelight.” Her voice deepened a husky octave, granting him an enticing glimpse of the woman she would soon become, the woman she believed she already was. “And after the candles burn down, you can make mad, passionate love to me until dawn.”

During her ardent declaration, she had clutched his arm and risen up on tiptoe until her lips were only a fragrant breath away from his. Their parted pink petals were so tempting, so tantalizing, so utterly unwavering in their idyllic—if naïve—vision of the life they could never share, that he was tempted to make mad, passionate love to her at that very moment. But if he succumbed to the temptation, if he lowered her to the damp grass and took her in the folds of her ermine-trimmed cloak, he knew he would never find the strength to tear himself away from her arms. He would spend the rest of his days despising himself for being the selfish bastard who had ruined her life.

He seized her by the shoulders, causing hope to flare in her eyes. But his next words dimmed it. “How long would it be before you would hate me? For taking you away”—he swept a hand toward the beautifully manicured grounds of her father’s estate, the graceful columns and chimneys of the Greek Revival mansion peeping over the top of the hill behind her in the distance—“from all this?”

She captured his hand and pressed her warm lips fervently to the back of it. “I could never hate you. I shall always adore you!”

Gently tugging his hand from her grasp, he took her by the shoulders once again, this time to firmly set her away from him. “I’m afraid it’s too late anyway. I’ve already enlisted in the army of the East India Company. The Burke titles may not be worth much more than the paper they’re printed on at the moment, but they still have enough influence to purchase me a commission. I’m to sail from Greenwich to Bombay on the morrow. Unless you want to make a deserter of me and see me hanged, you have to let me go.”

Clarinda stood gazing up at him as if he’d struck her, at a loss for words for the first time in their long acquaintance.

Ash forced himself to take up his horse’s lead, turn his back, and walk away from her.

He had never seen her shed a tear over anything, not even when she was nine and he was twelve and she had tumbled off her pony when trying to follow him over a difficult jump. Muttering an oath he wasn’t supposed to know, Ash had scooped her up in his arms and carried her all the way back to her father’s house. She had bitten her bottom lip bloody but had never uttered so much as a whimper. It had been Ash who had been forced to watch through stinging eyes as her distraught father ordered two footmen to sit on her so the doctor could set her broken arm.

She was crying in earnest now—great, gulping sobs that made Ash feel as if his own heart were being ripped from his chest. But when her voice finally rang out behind him, it wasn’t sadness that reverberated through it, but fury. “If you go, Ashton Burke, don’t bother coming back! I won’t have you! I’ll take your precious fortune and throw every coin of it right back in your proud, insufferable face!”

Ash hesitated, tempted to march right back and try to shake some sense into her. Or at least to kiss her more insensible than she was already being. But he squared his shoulders and forced himself to keep moving.

“I won’t wait for you, either, you know. I’ll marry the first man who’ll have me,” she vowed. “Why, I might marry the local curate or the village blacksmith or even an
American
,” she added with audible relish, not wasting any time in sinking to the direst of threats. “Or maybe I’ll just wed that strapping young viscount who was making calf’s eyes at me last week at Marjorie Drummond’s soiree.”

“Dewey Darby is as dull as dishwater and you know it,” Ash tossed over his shoulder. “You’d perish from boredom in a week.”

When he showed no sign of slowing, her voice broke on a fresh sob. “I hope you don’t even make it out of the harbor before your ship sinks! I hope you’re set upon by pirates and forced to become the cabin boy of the most corpulent sodomite to ever sail the high seas! I hope you contract cholera in India or maybe even the French pox and your manhood withers and falls right off!”

Ash kept walking, knowing that at any other time the imaginative fates she was wishing upon him would have sent them both into hearty gales of laughter.

“I might decide not to wed at all,” she called after him with a haughty sniff that warned him she had decided to change tactics. “If I’m to be denied the one man I want, then why should I settle for just one man? What better way to nurse the pain of my broken heart than to devote myself to pleasure?”

Ash stopped in his tracks, his eyes narrowing.

She sighed with such dramatic gusto that Ash didn’t have to turn around to see the back of her hand pressed to her creamy brow. Too late he remembered that as a small child, one of her favorite pursuits had been staging amateur theatricals to the delighted applause of her adoring parents. Even then, she had been a clever mimic, and he had been forced to suffer through more than one of her precocious performances himself. “Perhaps I shall succumb to my tragic fate by becoming one of the most practiced courtesans in London. My heart will be empty but my bed most certainly will not. Men will line up around the block and shoot one another dead in the streets just for a chance to sample the irresistible carnal delights of my—”

Dropping the horse’s lead, Ash spun around on his heel and went stalking back toward her.

His approach was fraught with such lethal intent that Clarinda took a few stumbling steps backward, her eyes widening. “W-w-what are you doing?” she demanded, the question ending on an alarmed squeak.

“Giving you a reason to wait for me,” he said grimly before snatching her up in his arms and sweeping his tongue through her mouth in a kiss that left little doubt as to who would be the first and
only
man to sample her carnal delights.

Her heel caught in the ermine-trimmed hem of her cloak, and then there was nothing to stop either of them from tumbling into its welcoming folds.

Ash regretted that moment the most. If he had walked away from her then, if he hadn’t gone striding back into her arms, he might have been able to dismiss his obsession with her as infatuation—a young man’s fancy for a pretty face. But that moment—and those that had followed—had made his feelings for her impossible to dismiss or deny.

“Captain? Ashton?
Ash?
”

Ash was jerked out of that misty dawn and back into the scorching sun to find his companion eyeing him with growing alarm.

“Perhaps you
are
suffering from the heat,” Luca said, reaching over to gauge the temperature of Ash’s brow with the backs of his own fingers. “I fear you might be taking a brain fever.”

Ash knew it was a fever of another kind that possessed him. But he no longer had the right to moon over that memory. No matter how much it galled him, Clarinda belonged to his brother now. He had promised to return her to Max, and that was exactly what he was going to do. With any luck, Max would never find out what had transpired between Ash and Max’s bride-to-be in the meadow that morning.