Rebel (14 page)

“But you weren’t meeting O’Neill?”

“No.”

“Ah, well, say that you didn’t arrange a meeting with O’Neill. Doesn’t it ever sink into that foolish little head of yours that running about naked can be dangerous?” he demanded furiously.

“I’m not naked—”

“Naked this afternoon; half naked now, Mrs. McKenzie!”

The way he said the words made her cringe inwardly, snapping out his own name with such contempt and anger that she had no choice but to fight back.

“No!” she cried. “No, I am not in danger, from you or anyone. I am not a weak and sniveling little thing ready to become a victim, sir. I can defend myself—”

“You can defend yourself?”

“I am excellent with a sword, sir.”

“Well, I didn’t notice that you brought a sword with you here,” he commented wryly, “but that aside, are you really so excellent that you feel you can defend yourself from all would-be attackers?”

“I took lessons for years. I bested a cavalryman quite easily this afternoon,” she informed him uneasily. He was circling her again. She had to keep turning to keep him from being at her back.

“Fine, then. Have at it with me,” he said. He gaze seemed like onyx. Hard, unyielding. Brutal.

“Have at it?”

“Indeed.”

“You want me to…”

He reached to the ground and drew his sword from his scabbard, tossing it toward her. It spun in the sandy dirt at her feet and she stared down at it before staring back at him.

“Pick it up,” he commanded. “Mine is a good sword. Peter’s is a silly dress sword, but I shall take it as my weapon and give you the advantage.”

“Don’t give me anything,” she warned him, wondering at what idiocy was driving her now. He was absolutely furious, she knew. And yet, he seemed as cold as ice. It made him all the more dangerous, his complete control.

“Pick up the sword; fight me.”

“For what?” she whispered.

A grim, taunting smile curled into his lip. She felt her breath catch, for his hair fell in dishevelment over his forehead, his gaze was ice-hard, and the taunting curve of his mouth was oddly sensual against the rock hardness of his handsome features.

He had Peter’s sword in hand. He swept it through the air and gave her a mocking bow. “You can defend yourself; so you have said, when I warned you of the dangers of your recklessness. Fight for your honor. Best me, and walk away. Run back to your island with your father. Lose, madam, and your honor is mine.”

“My honor will never be yours!”

“If you can defend yourself as you claim, no man could take it from you, am I right?”

“I can defend myself!”

“Are we agreed on the terms?”

“The terms?”

“My terms.”

“We are not—”

“Yes, we are agreed; it is the very crux of the argument, for if I were any stranger with ill will and the violation of your chastity in mind, I would simply seize what I wanted—were I to win.”

“No one can seize anything from me.”

“So you say. Then fight me.”

“I
will
win!”

“Pick up the sword, girl. Defend yourself. Show me how infallible you can be, and that I need not worry about your half-clad midnight meanderings to bring shame upon our marriage. The sword! Pick it up!” he roared at her.

Convinced that she’d be skewered on the spot if she did not, Alaina bent down quickly for the sword, leaped back, and prepared to face Ian. “You’re a fool,” she cried out. “I know how to use this and if you—”

His sudden movement sent the steel of his sword clashing against her own. The force behind his blow was staggering, but she kept her grip firmly upon her own weapon. Picking up the skirt of her nightgown in her left hand lest she trip on it, she determined that she must go on the offensive herself, before the force behind
his blows weakened her arm. She could move like lightning, and she went after him aggressively with a series of swift blows, nearly dancing across the soft earth of the pool’s embankment with the speed and grace of her movement. He fell back, and she felt a moment’s triumph. Then she realized that he was falling back merely to allow her to expend her energy while he feinted every blow. She had pressed him backward a good twenty feet when his sword suddenly started swinging in a series of arcs that she parried just by the skin of her teeth. She was forced back the twenty feet she had gained. They both paused for breath.

He made a sudden blur beneath the moonlight with his blade—one that she feared for a split second would indeed cost her her life as his steel just missed slicing into her breast.

She wasn’t cut. The delicate lace ties of her gown were neatly severed instead.

She knew better than to grow angry; a cool head was needed here. But she was infuriated. She began to attack him again with a swift series of blows. She was so swept up in her tempest that she made a swinging strike that would have severed his legs at the calves had he not been swift enough to leap from her attack and land on the fallen log just behind him. Not willing to lose the advantage, she attacked instantly, determined to bring him to the ground where she could rest her sword point against his throat and thus end the matter.

The log shattered; he lost his balance, falling flat upon his back. She leaped over the scattered pieces of wood, certain of victory, but just as she came for him, he made a miraculous flying leap back to his feet, striking her sword with a merciless blow that would have broken her arm if her fingers had not instinctively let go of the reverberating hilt.

Her sword flew, arced in the moonlight, came to rest point down in the earth about ten feet away.

She stared into the deep, damning blue of Ian’s eyes. She started to make a mad leap for her sword. His suddenly struck the ground before her, embedding his blade in the earth there in a manner that brought her to a dead halt.

She stood very still as he came around her, drawing his weapon from the ground. He raised the sword to her again, the tip of it resting just below her chin.

“Madam, do you surrender?”

She refused to answer, then inhaled sharply at the sudden flick of his weapon. But his blade didn’t touch her flesh. It lifted the fabric from her right shoulder. She felt the softness of the sheer gown and robe falling from her right side. She willed herself not to move. A second flick of the sword lifted the gown from her left shoulder. With the delicate lace ties slit, the length of the silky gown and robe pooled to her feet, and she stood naked in the moonlight, facing him.

He studied the length of her. Assessing her, his gaze amazingly dispassionate. He leaned upon the hilt of his sword. “Well?”

“Well?” she whispered, the breeze swept around her, seeming to touch her with strange fingers, so cool against the growing heat of her flesh.

“You have been beaten.”

“Never
beaten,
Ian; you have merely cost me my weapon.”

“You are beaten, and the point here is that you must learn that you can be beaten. If you would duel, you must meet the terms. Ah, the terms. I believe you’re supposed to seduce me.”

The breeze grew very chill; she burned against it. She remembered the feel of his hands, his lips….

“Seduce you! That was not in the terms!”

He grinned at her distress.

She moistened her lips. “I’ll die before I ever make any attempt to seduce you, Ian McKenzie,” she said without heed to her circumstances. She was standing there in front of him naked, and he was most probably still convinced that she had somehow made arrangements to meet Peter even after she and Ian had married. Perhaps she had best control her own temper and appeal to something in him other than the fury she knew she all too easily aroused. She curbed her tone to be very quiet and softly condemning: “You’re not behaving in the least like a gentleman.”

“Really, my dear wife?” His dark brows shot up. “Well, bear this in mind; Had you been acting like a
lady at any time in all this, we’d not be standing here now. Hmmm, let me think a moment… No. No, it’s true; I’ve yet to see you behave like a lady.”

“You should be horsewhipped, McKenzie,” she snapped. She wanted to lash out at him so badly. She felt so absurdly on display, feeling the breeze all about her naked flesh, trying not to move or tremble, to waylay the heat that burned so fiercely in her. She would not feel intimidated, yet she was shaking…

Awaiting…

His touch.

“I should be horsewhipped? For… ?” he inquired politely.

“For criminal nastiness! Now, it’s really very late. We need to return to the house,” she told him briskly. She started to reach down for her gown and robe. The point of his sword fell into the fabric, pinning it to the ground. She looked slowly up into the hard blue darkness of his eyes.

“I think not,” he said. “You like to be naked by water, and you detest my house and room. So we shall stay right here.”

She couldn’t talk, couldn’t move, and was suddenly both very afraid of what he intended, yet trembling with the fire and anticipation of it. She couldn’t bear it. She decided to abandon her gown and simply run, yet the second she leaped to her feet, he caught her arm, and she was spun around and swept cleanly from her feet. She landed flat upon her back on the cool earth, breathless, staring into his eyes.

His thumb moved in soft line across her cheek. “I won; you lost.”

“When you fight to defend your honor, sir, you do so until the last.”

“But you have surrendered.”

“I have not; you have merely seized my weapon.”

“Sometimes it is wisest to accept defeat.”

“I refuse to be defeated.”

“Well, then, think of it this way: Those taken in battle must accept the victor’s conditions.”

She started to argue further; no words escaped her lips, for his mouth formed over hers with a stark demand that both angered and aroused. The pressure of his body
bore her down; she was keenly aware of the rough wool of his uniform against her flesh and the soft sweet musky scent of the water’s embankment beneath her. More than anything, she felt the hot fire of his mouth, the savage demand of his tongue, invading and caressing, brutal, sensual, violating, coaxing, stroking again….

Then his hand curved around her breast, thumb against her nipple until she would have screamed with the sensation had she been able. She writhed with the encroaching whiplash of fire that seemed to dart through her, burning from those points where he touched her. His mouth flooded her body with warmth; his touch upon the naked flesh of her breast seared through her center and spiraled somewhere deep within her.

She gasped for breath, digging her fingers into his hair as his mouth left hers to suckle her nipple where his thumb had teased. She tried to form words to protest, but her mind failed to oblige her and she continued to do nothing more than gasp and twist and writhe, tearing at his thick black hair, dismayed to realize even that touch seemed oddly sensual to her fingertips. His hand slid slowly along her side, curving around a hip. Slid between the two of them, and then between her legs. The pressure of his thumb slid intimately down through the triangle of blond hair, parting her, stroking the most sensitive and intimate of female places.

She tensed like a jackknife, a scream forming in her throat. His mouth covered hers again with a frightening ardor and passion. She realized she’d not begun to estimate his strength until that moment when she lay pinned beneath him, realized his every movement was not guided by passion alone.

She pressed her palms against the hardness of his chest, but the force of his weight was such he didn’t begin to feel her protest. Nor could she cry out, for his kiss consumed her words. She twisted and writhed anew, on fire, seared by sensation, yet wild to escape the threatening pressure of his body. Her knees were thrust apart by a sudden supple movement of his body and the insistence of his weight. His chest and legs remained clad in wool; his hips were naked. She felt his hand and sex rubbing against her. A massive shudder swept through her. He burst into her with a single hard smooth thrust
so knifing it instantly broke all barriers. She never screamed, for she could not. Involuntary tears of pain instantly pooled in her eyes. She clenched them tightly together, turning her head to her side as his lips broke from hers at last. She felt him looking down at her, just as she felt the fierce burning at the juncture of her legs. She wished fervently that she had the power to buck him off. She wished a giant bird would swoop down out of the sky and tear him from atop her—and perhaps tear him into little pieces in the bargain. She waited for him to apologize.

He did not. He held still, watching her.

He began to withdraw.

Only to plunge into her again. She bit fiercely into her lower lip, then felt his hands on her face, drawing it forward. She opened her eyes and met his. Even as she managed at long last to croak out “No!” she felt herself somehow stilled by the cobalt fire in his gaze and rigid tension in his face. She tried to part her lips to speak again. But again his mouth formed over hers. Demanding still…

Coaxing. Bringing liquid warmth.

Slowly, the warmth of his mouth seemed to ignite the burning between her thighs. The heat remained; the agony began to still. She found herself enfolded in his arms, his hands sliding down the length of her back, forming over her buttocks, drawing her more flush against the increasing furious pulse of his thrusts within her. Her fingers curled into his shoulders, nails digging. Pain faded to a dull throb. The burning was part agony, part pleasure. She prayed for it to end, yet something else had begun within her. Something she needed, something that was a different kind of ache. She hated his touch, his stroke, and yet…

She yearned for it. She had wanted to escape it. Now she twisted and arched to feel it, to feel the growing sweetness pervading her.

A rigor seemed to seize him; then a violent thrust brought him so deeply within her that she shuddered with the force of it. Then once again… and the mercury of his climax filled her anew with a sense of liquid, burning fire. And almost as instantly, he eased his weight
from her, adjusted his Union-issue trousers, and lay staring up at the sky.