She looked down at her napkin, then up at him. Her eyes looked damp—and he felt responsible. If he’d been asked yesterday about his own good sense, he would have said he was blessed with more than his share, and Jessie had been blessed with less. But apparently she’d infected him with her madness, for she was crying over a tragedy ten years gone, and he was feeling guilty over the same tragedy. She was a dangerous woman. A most dangerous woman.
“Really?” She clutched her napkin until it resembled a starched, wrinkled ball. “Most men want to run away when a woman reminisces or gets…emotional.”
“That is the way I feel with most women, but not you. Not with you, my darling Jessie.”
She audibly caught her breath. “Does this mean that you would like to…I mean, are you saying you would consent to…?”
“There was never any doubt that I would like to…” he teased. “And I think your revelations have made it quite necessary that I consent to…”
“Good!” Her magnificent bosom swelled against the pink velvet gown. Then she shrank back against her chair. “That is …do you know, I have been wanting you to say just that, and now that you have, I’m nervous?”
She caught at his gut, at his heart. He had to have her, and tonight would be the night. Tonight, with no ghosts of the youthful, callous Harry or the childlike, impetuous Jessie. Tomorrow was soon enough for the truth. “Come with me.” He helped her to her feet. “And I’ll teach you never to be nervous of me.”
The stranger stood in the shadows of the inn and watched them pass. He was a nobleman of Russia, welcome in every exalted household, and he had come a long way to wreak vengeance on Lord Granville. At first he had thought he would kidnap Granville’s mother. But no. Granville’s mother, in all innocence, had given him direction. She confided that she had recently arranged a betrothal for her son to a Lady Jessica Macmillian, and she cheerfully predicted great happiness for the couple.
The stranger could not allow Granville to obtain happiness, large or small. So he had discovered Lady Jessica’s whereabouts and traveled to the Wildbriar Inn. There he had taken a single meal in the dining room, and at once heard the buzz of scandal about Lady Jessie—and the buzz of sympathy, too. She had met two of her suitors, dreadful men, and tomorrow the last of the suitors would arrive—the Earl of Granville.
But tonight Lady Jessie was with a man, a Mr. Windberry of Derbyshire. How amusing. Before the stranger killed Granville, he would happily report that Granville’s intended bride had cheated on him—and that the charming young lady had painfully died for the sin of being betrothed to the Earl of Granville.
He would make Granville suffer.
Six
Jessie shivered as they mounted the steps to Harry’s cabin. She had irrevocably committed herself, and so he reminded her with the way he guided her, hand at the small of her back. She thought that, for all his usual watchfulness, tonight he scarcely took his gaze off her.
“Cold?” he asked, and his deep, velvet voice caressed her nerve endings and made her shiver again.
“No,” she said, although the breeze off the ocean was chilly, and the porch was dark, lit only by candlelight through a window from some room at the back of the cottage. “I’m a little nervous of you.”
“You have no reason to be.” In the shadows of the porch, he turned her in his arms. “I will never hurt you, Jessie, I vow I will not.”
Doubts assailed her. “You’re bigger than I am,lots bigger, and stronger, lots stronger, and in my experience, men have a tendency to use their strength to get their own way.”
“You, my darling, have been keeping company with the wrong sort of man.”
She peered through the darkness, trying to discern his features, needing the reassurance contained in his blue eyes, for although her heart insisted she could trust Harry, her mind told her to have caution. “I have the right to second thoughts. After all, I’m not only a virgin, but an old maid, too.”
“Not so very old.” His body shook slightly as if he were laughing at her.
She didn’t care. His amusement contained nothing of viciousness or aggression, rather an indulgence that reassured her she had made the right decision. So while it wouldn’t do to depend on a man like this, she had no grounds for maidenly trepidation. Tonight was her single chance to experience passion.
In the dim shadows of the porch, she grabbed his lapels, pulled at him—she moved toward him rather than the other way around—and opened her lips on his.
Wrapping his arm around her waist, he allowed her to buffet him with her need. His hand slid up her spine, gentling her. He cupped her head in his hand, his mouth slanted and opened, and he tasted her as if she were a succulent morsel. He held her as if she were precious and dear, and his tenderness drove away her fears and her doubts. This was right.
She didn’t know everything about this man, but she knew the important things. She knew his name, his home, that he hunted in the autumn and drove up to London in the spring. He was a gentleman, a man of her class, and that air of mystery that clung to his rough edges was nothing more than her own imagination. Yet for all the warmth of his embrace and her own self-assurances, when she drew back and looked up at him, she could see nothing but darkness and the gleam of two eyes. She caught her breath and pressed her hands against his chest.
His arms tightened around her. In a voice rough and gravelly, he said, “No, love. There’s no turning back now.” He kissed her again, his tongue thrust into her mouth, and his kiss possessed her, not gently, but backed by the full weight of his determination.
Her
fingers dug into his coat. The darkness pressed against her closed eyelids. As his tongue plunged into her mouth, as his body compelled hers, they were melded into a single entity, one she feared and wanted in equal measure.
Breaking off the kiss, he leaned his forehead against hers. “Will you come with me willingly? Or do I have to carry you?”
Such a suggestion struck her as the perfect compromise. “How romantic! Would you carry me?”
He laughed aloud, the sound amazed. “Over my shoulder like a pirate, or in my arms like a bridegroom?”