When the Rogue Returns (25 page)

When he hesitated, she feared he would brush past his childhood again. To her surprise, he admitted, “Although my mother was Belgian, my father was an English soldier. I spent most of my childhood in regimental camps across the Continent. One of those was in Spain.”

Tears stung her eyes. It was more than he’d ever told her about his family. She opened her mouth to ply him with questions, thirsty to know everything, but he cut her off with a long, passionate kiss that left her thirsty for something else entirely.

Next thing she knew, he’d dropped onto the sofa and pulled her astride his lap. He’d already opened her clothes enough to free her breasts, and as he filled his hand with one and his mouth with the other, she cried, “Victor . . . oh heavens,
Victor . . .
”

“I know what excites you,” he murmured, tonguing and teasing her nipple so enticingly that she clutched his head to her breast, wanting more. Always more.

After lavishing both breasts with attention, he pulled back to flash her a knowing smile and slipped his hand deep beneath her skirts until he found the slit in her drawers. When he fondled her there, she gave a low moan.

His eyes gleamed at her. “I know what makes you wet.”

Daringly, she laid her hand on the bulge in his trousers. “And I know what makes you hard.”

“You,” he growled. “
You
make me hard.”

Only me?
she wanted to ask, but she couldn’t bear to spoil this moment by asking if there’d been other women over the past ten years. She wanted to know, and she didn’t. How could she bear knowing?

He fumbled with the buttons of his trousers until he got them open, but was so impatient to undo his drawers that he couldn’t manage it, so she brushed his hands aside and did it for him while he shamelessly caressed her breasts.

When his shaft sprang free, she took it in her hand and began to stroke. “I remember this eager truncheon of yours,” she teased.

“A fitting companion for my new Isa,” he said hoarsely. “My bold, wanton Isa. My wife.” Taking her hand, he leaned forward to rasp in her ear, “Touch yourself,
lieveke
.”

“T-touch myself?” Surely he couldn’t mean . . . He couldn’t know . . . She drew back to eye him warily. “What are you talking about?”

He dropped his gaze to look at her below. “I always wanted to watch you caress yourself. Back then, you could barely share my bed without blushing, much less try something so naughty as to take your own pleasure—but I imagined it countless times.”

Casting her a challenging glance, he pushed up her skirts, then laid her hand between her legs. Lord help her.

“Don’t tell me you don’t know how,” he said in a guttural voice. “All these years alone, you never touched yourself intimately? Never thought of me as you put your hand inside your nightdress—”

“Victor!” she protested, though the thought of having him watch her while she did
that
made her decidedly hot and bothered.

He simply arched an eyebrow, and she knew she couldn’t lie to him. “If . . . if I did happen to do it, once or twice, it doesn’t mean I could . . . that I would ever . . .”

“Do it for me?” A wicked look of knowing crossed his face. “Not even a little?” When she swallowed hard, he added, “I’ll do it for you, if you’ll reciprocate.”

That
really
got her hot and bothered. “All right.” The
words were out of her mouth before she could stop them.

But his smile of satisfaction kept her from taking them back. He grabbed his aroused shaft and began to stroke, harder and more roughly than she would ever have dared to do. She watched, fascinated, as his flesh lengthened and grew darker.

“You too,” he rasped, nodding to her hand.

“Oh. Right.”

At first she did it only to oblige him, moving her fingers mechanically over the slick folds she’d learned to know so well—
too
well for a respectable woman—during all those achingly lonely nights.

But the more heated his gaze on her became, the more aroused
she
became. There was something so delightfully carnal about having him watch her and revel in her pleasure. Before long, she was panting and wriggling and feeling the rise of her release just beyond her reach.

With an oath, he lifted her onto her knees, urging her to rise up over his rampant arousal. “Come down on me,” he commanded. “Take me inside you, Isa.”

That was definitely not something they’d done together, but it didn’t take much imagination to figure out what he wanted. As she impaled herself on him, he let out a coarse cry that sent delicious shivers along her spine.

He began to move at once, grinding up against her. “Ride me,
lieveke
. Oh God, please . . . ride me . . .”

So she did. And it was glorious. She could control
the motion and set the pace, make him gasp or make him growl. She felt like a queen of old, able to seize and hold whatever she wished. In no time at all, she felt herself hurtling right to the edge.

He must have felt it, too, for his jaw went taut and raw heat shone in his eyes as he rose to meet her every motion. “Yes . . .” he hissed. “That’s it . . . Oh yes, wife . . .
My
wife. Always.”

“Always,” she echoed.

Her release came with a thunderous explosion that rocked her to her very soul.

Then she collapsed on top of him, spent and limp. He clutched her to him, both of them breathing hard. She could feel the racing of his heart against her breast, where her own heart clamored like the Scottish drums at a military tattoo. His hands stroked her bare thighs, calming her, settling her.

When at last his breathing slowed and his heartbeat steadied, he pressed his mouth to her ear to whisper, “And now I know what makes you come.”

A laugh bubbled up inside her. Turning to kiss his stubbled cheek, she whispered back, “And I know the same for you.”

He chuckled. “Then I hope we’ll be doing this more often.”

“We’ll see,” she said, flashing him a coy smile.

The kiss he gave her then offered promises that she prayed he could keep. Because there was still so much unsettled between them. So much to worry about.

When the kiss ended, the first of those things burst
out of her. “I suppose you’ve had a lot of experience at doing this with women,” she murmured, smoothing back a lock of his hair, unable to meet his gaze.

He stilled. “What do you mean?”

“It’s been a long time since we . . . Surely you weren’t . . . celibate all that time.”

“Would you believe me if I said I was?” he asked softly.

Her gaze flew to his. “I don’t know. You did think I had abandoned you, so—”

“You thought the same of
me
,” he pointed out. “Yet you remained faithful.”

“I’m a woman. It’s . . . different for me.”

“Is it?” A faint disappointment showed in his eyes. When he set her off of him onto the sofa so he could fasten up his drawers and trousers, she thought he wasn’t going to answer her.

But as she put her own clothing to rights, he draped his arm about her shoulders. “Perhaps it’s time I tell you about my family.” Then he drew her close. “My mother’s name was Elizabeta. She was a tavern wench in Ostend when my father, a duke’s youngest son, met her. He got her with child—me. Fortunately for her, he agreed to marry her, so that I could be born on the right side of the blanket.”

“That was fortunate indeed, for both you and her,” she murmured, astonished that he’d never told her this. “Not to mention rather surprising for a duke’s son. I would think that a man with his connections would just pay her to keep silent.”

“I wonder about that, too. But he didn’t. I’ll never really know why. He claimed to love her, though he enjoyed throwing her low connections up to her whenever they argued. But I know for certain their marriage was legitimate—the first thing my cousin the duke did when he found me was confirm that.”

She snuggled against him and waited for him to continue.

“Still, Father was no saint in his salad days. From what I understand, he sowed his wild oats liberally. By the time he married Mother, he’d already contracted syphilis during an earlier encounter with a whore.”

“Oh, Victor,” she whispered.

“The pox wasn’t too virulent and had no lasting effects, or so we thought. Mother said he showed no signs of it when they married. I only know of it because of what happened when I turned thirteen, and he . . . he . . .” He dragged in a hard breath. “He tried to stab Mother.”

Isa froze.
“What?”
she said incredulously. “Whyever for?”

“The reason he gave was that she burned his potatoes. But the real reason was the syphilis rotting his brain. At least that’s what one of the doctors at Gheel told us when we brought him there.”

That stunned her. For all of her life in Amsterdam, she’d heard of Gheel. Out of devotion to the Irish saint Dymphna, its inhabitants took care of the insane. “You brought him to the Colony of Maniacs?”

“Some call Gheel that, yes,” he murmured. “It was
certainly fitting for him. That’s where he lived until his death when I was sixteen.”

Three years. Victor had endured his father’s madness for three years! A chill went through her. The poor boy. His poor mother! Isa had lost her father at twelve, so she knew how difficult that was. But at least Papa had fallen prey to an illness she could understand, and she’d had him there in spirit until his death.

Victor had been forced to watch his mother suffer through the loss of his father in spirit and sense long before the man’s body had wasted away. How horrible for Victor! It created an ache in her chest that would not be banished.

She laid her hand on his knee. “Why did you never tell me?”

His gaze shot to hers, wrought with pain. “That my father went mad because of his whoring? That the rest of us were forced to work long hours in a neighboring village so we could afford for him to be fed and housed and kept from killing anyone? At twenty, it still mortified me to even think of it. I certainly wasn’t going to tell the woman I’d convinced to marry me.”

“I would have understood,” she said softly.

“Really?” he asked, his voice suddenly distant. “Your family convinced you that I had a suspicious past solely because I never talked about my background. Imagine how much more convincing their tales would have been if you’d known of my father’s sordid life and death. They would have made much of that, of my mother’s being a tavern maid and my father’s going mad.”

“Or they would have latched onto you as the descendant of a duke,” she pointed out.

“I didn’t know about that then.”

“Oh, right, I forgot. Rupert said it came out only a few months ago.”

Victor nodded. “As far as I knew, my father was an English soldier who’d paid for his whoring days by dying insane at Gheel.” His voice grew ragged. “And who made us pay for them, too.”

Suddenly she understood why he was finally telling her all this about his family. “So you’re saying you really did remain celibate all those years. And this is why.”

“Yes.” His jaw tautened. “Although at first it didn’t have that effect on me. When Mother wasted away from grief and then died herself, I joined the Prussian army because I knew the regimental life, and because I knew they would take me even at seventeen.”

“So that’s how you ended up fighting at Waterloo.”

“Yes. Father had instilled in me a hatred of Boney, so I was itching for glory, glad to be part of the fight against the French. And like any soldier, I played as hard as I fought, making frequent use of the camp followers.”

He laid his hand on hers and gripped it tightly. “But then a friend of mine caught the clap from one of them, and that brought it all back to me—Mother’s suffering, Father’s madness—and I realized how dangerous a game I was playing. I stopped consorting with camp followers then and there.”

Both of his hands now clutched hers. He stared
down to where they were joined, and his voice dulled. “After you left . . . I considered it again. I was so lonely that even a whore—” He choked off the words. “But I could never blot the image of Father trying to stab Mother from my mind.”

Tears clogged her throat, but she was careful not to let them out. Some instinct told her that he would not endure pity from her.

“Then I considered taking a mistress,” he went on, threading his fingers through hers. “Until I realized how lucky Mother had been, that when she found herself with child, Father was willing to marry her. I couldn’t marry anyone I sired a child upon; I was still married to you.” He cast her a sidelong glance. “In the end, I figured it was better to pleasure myself. Less risky.”

She could hardly breathe. “So . . . no other women.”

“No.” He caught her by the chin. “Not since you.”

His kiss was gentler this time, more like the kisses of their youth, and rich with memories of all they’d been to each other and a promise of what they could be, if they put the past behind them. It made her wish she could linger forever in his embrace. When he drew back, it was to settle her more firmly in his arms, with her head tucked beneath his chin.

“Tell me about Amalie,” he said.

The yearning in his voice made her heart twist in her chest. How she hated that her family’s actions had torn him from his child.
Their
child. “Oh, Victor, you’ll adore her. She can be willful at times, like any child, but she has a knack for seeing the good in everyone.”

“That can be a curse,” he said, and she knew he was thinking of her and her family.

“It can also be a blessing. Any disparaging remarks she hears about her mother who’s in trade or about her lack of a father roll right off of her back.” When he tensed, she added hastily, “She tells me that those people are just jealous because I’m so brilliant and they have boring, regular mothers.”

As she’d hoped, that made him chuckle, and the rumble of it settled her anxiousness over wanting him to like Amalie, to be proud of her and see her for the wonderful girl that she was.

“Does she have her mother’s talent for chemicals?” he asked.

“Not a jot. She says chemicals are messy, nasty things.” She nuzzled his chest, drank in the scent of his musk oil. “But if I have anything to say about it, she won’t need to learn a trade to survive. Not only is she pretty, but thanks to her schooling, she’s so accomplished she’ll have men clamoring to marry her.”