Affair of Honor (21 page)

“I’ll marry you,” she agreed obediently.

“If only for the opportunity of straightening out my male chauvinism?”

“I never could resist a challenge.”

She felt a tremor of laughter go through him and he kissed the curve of her shoulder. Brenna lifted her arms to wrap them around his neck. “Oh, Ryder, I love you so. I kept telling myself you were all wrong for me but I guess that was because I was afraid of realizing how very
right
you really were.”

“In spite of my past? I know I don’t have the kind of background you probably expected to find in the man you married…”

“It’s not your past I’m interested in.” She smiled. “Only your present and your future.”

He sighed, a kind of relief evident in the sound. “And your future, Brenna? Do you know what you want now?”

“I know, I want you. As for the rest, I’m open to suggestion,” she admitted. “For as long as I can remember I’ve kept myself on the straight and narrow path of academia. It’s a good path and someday I may go back to it. But right now I think I’d like a change. At least for the next few months. I wonder if you would be interested in seeing a little of the world with me? There are some things I’ve missed during the past few years. Things I’d like to catch up on.”

“As a matter of fact,” he said gently, “I was thinking of taking a couple of research trips after I finish this current book.”

“I should warn you that, unlike Craig, I like my adventure with a few luxuries.”

“Oh, it will be first class, all the way.” He grinned. “It’s the only way I’m interested in traveling now myself!”

“And when we get back I will rethink my career plans. I’m not really sure what I want to do, and it’s rather nice thinking that I have the freedom to change everything if I wish. I’ve never given myself that freedom before.”

“Well, since your future is still a little unsettled,” Ryder drawled, “would you be interested in hearing some plans for the immediate present?”

“I feel quite open to suggestions.”

“Fine. Then this is what we’re going to do. First, I will bundle you into the car and whisk you off to the nearest wedding chapel. Then we shall have a light lunch of champagne and caviar and then I shall carry you off to the bedroom where we can celebrate our future in style.”

“I love it when you’re being masterful,” she said, grinning, eyes sparkling.

———

Three hours later Ryder poured the last of the champagne and saluted his new bride. “To the lady cat burglar who came crawling through my window at two in the morning.” He downed the champagne with relish.

“I think you must be running short of toasts to resort to that one,” Brenna observed, the gold of her new wedding band catching the afternoon sunlight as she obediently sipped from her glass.

“That’s a very important one,” he protested, rising to his feet and setting down the glass with a deliberate air. “After all, that was the night I began to realize I was fated to marry a most adventuresome lady. And I was right, wasn’t I? Just look how you seduced me the night we went gambling!”

“I didn’t seduce you!”

“Our first married argument? How charming.”

“Ryder? Where are you going?” She watched him disappear into the hall.

“To get a blanket. We’re going down to that little cove on the lake where you read
The Quicksilver Venture
.”

“We are? I thought you were going to carry me off to the bedroom.”

“I’ve changed my mind. A captured lady cat burglar needs something a little more exciting on her wedding day.”

Brenna laughed softly. “So we’re going fishing, instead?”

“Not quite.”

He led her down to the private cove and spread the blanket out with aplomb. Brenna watched him lovingly, enjoying the grace in his body and the sureness of his movements. But when he straightened and turned to look at her, she wasn’t prepared for the sudden hesitancy in his silver eyes.

“Ryder?” she whispered, not understanding.

“Brenna, I love you, and now that you’re mine, now that you’ve finally accepted my claim, I find I’m suffering an attack of groom’s jitters. See?” He held out his hand and there was, indeed, a faint trembling.

Brenna stared at his hand and then her gaze flew to his shimmering eyes. “Are you jittery because you think you may have made a mistake in marrying me?” The words almost stuck in her throat.

“No! Damn it, don’t say such things. That’s not it at all!” He closed the distance between them in one gliding stride and hauled her into his arms. “My God, woman, how can you even say that? I’m shaking like a leaf because nothing has ever been as important to me as you are. I want to be the perfect husband, the perfect lover. I want you to love me for the rest of our lives. When you want something that much, you get a little shaky!”

“Maybe that’s why I’m trembling, too,” she confessed, collapsing against him in the relief of knowing she wasn’t the only one who was suffering from bridal jitters. “I want to be the perfect wife for you.”

“Lady, lady,” he crooned gently, his hands moving on her back, sliding down to her waist.

She lifted her mouth to his and he took her lips with an urgent longing that spoke of want and need and love. They held each other until the case of nerves had subsided. It was a silent time of tenderness and passion that somehow set the seal on the wedding vows they had taken earlier that day.

When Brenna felt the heat rising in Ryder’s body, she crowded closer to him and her nails slipped delicately down his back.

“I love you, Ryder.”

“My sweet Brenna, I love you so much!” He sank down onto the blanket, pulling her to him in a rush of emotion that could not be halted now that it had begun. With hands that trembled now from passion rather than nerves, he undressed her, fumbling occasionally and cursing a little at his own unaccustomed clumsiness.

The muffled words made Brenna laugh tenderly and she captured his hands to still them for a moment when he would have unzipped her jeans. “Wait, you’re getting ahead of me!”

He raised his head from where he had buried his lips in her throat and looked down at her questioningly.

“It’s only fair to let me fumble a little, too,” she whispered, releasing his hands and putting her fingers to the buttons of his shirt.

“I suppose we’ll get slicker at this as we gain experience,” he murmured ruefully.

“I suppose.”

“On the other hand I may never get used to the idea of really having you all to myself!” With that he went back to sliding off the jeans and pushing aside the edges of her shirt.

When they both lay naked at last, Ryder slipped his hands roughly, passionately along the length of rounded thigh and up to the softness of her breasts. The possessiveness in him was a tangible force.

“Oh, Ryder, my love!” Her voice was a soft moan of wonder and love that he responded to with a flaring desire. She thrilled to the touch of his tongue curling around each nipple, coaxing it tautly awake. His leg moved over hers, forcing her thighs gently apart so that the hand he was trailing across the satin of her stomach could begin teasing the tangled thicket between her legs.

She shifted languidly beneath his exploring, probing touch, her body caught up in the sweet passion being generated between them. Eyes closed tightly in mounting ecstasy, she trailed her fingertips across the crisp hair of his chest, blindly seeking the flat, male nipples. When he groaned she moved, sinking her teeth lightly around the area she had just been caressing.

“Lady witch,” he breathed and slipped his hand through the thicket to the dampening heart of her desire. “You open for me like a flower. A hot, luscious passion flower.”

“Ryder!” His name was a husky cry on her lips as he boldly stroked the petals of the flower. He leaned close to drink the sound of her moan from the other blossom that was her mouth.

Brenna felt entranced, enthralled, and overwhelmed with the hard strength of him, and she ran her hands again and again across the contours of his back and the muscled power of his thighs. When she trailed them lingeringly, daringly to the point where the tapering chest hair became enmeshed with the provocative curls below his waist, he moved against her. Deliberately he pressed his hardness against her.

“Touch me, lady!” he half commanded, half pleaded. “I love the feel of your soft hands.”

But when she willingly did as he asked, his body seemed to surge against her fingers, seeking far more than the caress of her hand. He lifted himself and came down along the length of her body, using his ankles to open her legs farther for his advance. She was ready for him.

“I want you,” he grated. And then he was thrusting himself forward against her softness, losing himself in her body even as he mastered it.

Brenna gasped at the delicious impact of him, knowing it would always be thus between them, a kind of mastery and a kind of surrender that blended so that it would be impossible in the ultimate moment to know where the boundaries were or which of them was responsible for which emotion.

He seemed to relinquish all control, giving himself completely even as he took. Brenna clung tightly, her nails raking his back in the heat of her aching need. When he slid one hand down to her buttocks to lift her even more tightly against him, she cried out with husky fierceness and clutched him with a sweet savagery that seemed to call to his most elemental maleness.

His body surged hungrily into hers again and again, sweeping her with him into a taut, whirling vortex from which there was only one exit point.

Brenna let herself go as he flashed with her toward that ending. It was an incredibly exhilarating sensation to know that she could abandon herself to Ryder’s embrace, emotionally, physically, even intellectually. They belonged to each other.

The tight, spiraling ecstasy within her snapped with unexpected fury and she heard herself calling his name as if it were a talisman.

“Ryder!”

“Yes, sweet lady,
yes
!”

Her body went into a shivering delight, and the tiny convulsions seemed to be more than his own hardness could resist. In an instant he was sinking his fingers deep into the skin of her shoulders, arching himself against her with a near-voiceless shout of triumph and satisfaction. Brenna held him to her with all the passion and love in her heart.

Slowly, lingeringly, they surfaced, still wrapped tightly together. In a tangle of perspiration-dampened arms and legs they let themselves float back to the real world and the privacy of the cove. Lovingly Brenna pressed her lips to his throat, inhaling the scent of their lovemaking as it combined with the mountain breeze. Ryder’s fingers moved with tender idleness along her arm and she felt him smile into her hair.

“My wife,” he murmured in tones of gentle wonder. “My God, I waited a long time for you to walk into my life!”

“You’ve been looking for a wife for a long time?” she teased.

“No. Didn’t even realize I wanted one until you came sneaking through my window that night. But once I realized that, I knew I’d been waiting for quite a while.”

“I was not sneaking!”

“Scared the daylights out of me,” he protested.

“Ah, well, it probably served you right,” she decided. “I don’t think you’ve had much opportunity to experience being scared.”

“Oh, I’ve been scared a lot since that night,” he vowed gently. “Scared Damon Fielding might lure you back, scared you wouldn’t be able to tolerate my past, scared you’d try to run from me after I’d made you mine.”

“You overwhelm me,” she breathed. “I had no idea. But I’ve been a little scared myself.”

“You’ve had a hell of a lot to deal with these past few days, haven’t you? The crisis in your career, Craig’s announcement that he wasn’t going back to the university…”

“And you. Above all else there was you to deal with, Ryder Sterne,” she concluded, rising on one elbow to gaze down at him. “You were the most complicated thing of all to deal with and you must know that.”

“Because I wasn’t what you’d always admired and wanted in a man?”

“No, because you were exactly what I’d always admired and wanted in a man but you didn’t come packaged quite the way I had expected you to be packaged. No tweed jacket, no year at Oxford, no Ph.D., no academic credits.”

“Wait a minute,” he broke in, grinning. “I
have
been published!”

“You’ve got a point there. Of course, it wasn’t quite the sort of publishing I had expected my future husband to be doing,” she agreed thoughtfully.

“The pay is good,” he pointed out hopefully.

She giggled. “And, damn it, the writing is good, too!”

“You liked the story?” He slid her a speculative glance.

“I loved the story. Except for the violent parts. The love scenes were terrific.”

“Sex scenes,” he corrected. “I don’t write love scenes.”

“Anybody as good as you are at doing love scenes for real can’t help but write them beautifully!” she proclaimed grandly.

He groaned and pulled her down, trapping her head close by locking his hand around the back of her neck. His other hand traced the outline of her breast lovingly, finding the nipple and coaxing it forth. Ryder’s mouth found hers in a kiss of recent satisfaction that combined with a promise of future need. Gently his tongue pried apart her willing lips and he tasted deeply for a long moment of the warmth behind them. With slow reluctance he released her mouth.

“So you want to do a little adventuring before you decide whether or not to go back to the academic world, hmmm?”

“Being with you will be an adventure in itself,” she said, smiling, knowing it was the truth.

“You won’t mind being married to a macho writer of sleazy men’s fiction?” The silver eyes were gleaming with laughter but Brenna chose to take the question seriously.

“I don’t mind being married to a man who lives by a code of honor, a man who will always stand beside me when the going gets rough, a man who knows how to love even if he’d never allow the word into one of his sleazy novels!”

“Is that how you see me?” he asked wonderingly.

“Yes,” she admitted simply. “You know more about honor and ethics than any of my colleagues seem to know. The advantages of being a self-taught man, I guess.”