Stormfire (24 page)

Her tormentor was unperturbed. "Stop squalling. It's exactly what you need."

"More
water?" Ignoring her, Culhane began to scrub her heat-flushed skin vigorously with a bar of scented soap. She scowled at him, spitting bubbles away from her face. "Just once, I'd like to bathe myself!"

He dropped the soap into the tub with a splash, and said casually, "Fall to."

Fiercely, her wrists rubbed the soapy water from her face. Then, ignoring him, Catherine began to apply the soap with leisurely dignity. Her head snapped around when his sodden breeches hit the floor, but she had little time to protest as he slipped into the tub. "There isn't room for two,'" she sputtered, trying to evade his long legs and exploring toes. With a grin, he held out his hand for the soap. Glaring at him, she deliberately dropped it, but was forced to repent the impulse as his fingers sought the slippery bar in the most unlikely places. She was flushed and furious as he victoriously fished it up. "One might easily believe your brains are between your legs. Don't you ever think of anything besides fornication?"

"Ah, 'tis a temptin' morsel you are, lass," he responded in a lilting drawl and with an exaggerated leer. "Just enough to whet a man's appetite and leave his belly lean. It's not greed but starvation that keeps me howling at your door." He wiped a handful of lather off his face and dabbed it on her offended nose. "Your hair is gluey, little one. Wash it"

She grabbed his head and ducked him, pushing herself up. "Your hair is soapy, sir. Rinse it!"

He came up sputtering and grabbed her in a bear hug before she could escape the tub. He pulled her down, shrieking. Grabbing the soap, he ducked her in turn and scrubbed her head. "That's for children who play in the bath." Ignoring her squeals, he ducked her again, then grabbed a bucket of clean water from the floor beside the tub and dumped it over both their heads. As water splashed everywhere, Catherine howled, struggling to her knees. Laughing, he rubbed his cropped head against her breasts and belly and she began helplessly to giggle, digging for his ribs and shrieking as he tickled her. Suddenly their slippery bodies sliding together made her eyes widen, and a flaring desire to couple with him made her shudder. All too sensitively aware of his small antagonist's change of mood, Sean brought his mouth down hotly on hers, stifling her breathless gasp of surprise. She struggled feebly, but her hardening nipples rubbed wetly against his chest and the hard heat of his loins thrust against hers as their bodies tangled.

Quickly, he caught her up in his arms and carried her to the bed, then covered her slippery body with his own. Exhausted from her ordeal with Maude, Catherine pushed weakly against his shoulders and twisted, but her writhing only made his breath come more raggedly in her ear and his body slide more intimately against hers. He slipped "a wet finger between her thighs and she cried out against his mouth as he brought her to exploding, arching pleasure.

He kissed her throat, her breasts, her mouth, whispering love words, sex words, until her thighs parted of their own accord to receive his first slow thrust. Each deep, warm stroke of his manhood intensified a burning, pulsing ache in her loins. She gave up fighting for feeling, for yielding, for the sheer urgency of his life within her, the source of life banishing death.

Sean took her languorous body with a tenderness he had never before shown her or any other, wanting to lose his soul utterly in her softness, to take her thorny, stubborn spirit inside himself and ease the prick of her fears. When at last the quickening rhythm of his desire carried her with him to fulfillment, he found effortless peace. Afterward, he drew up the covers and brought her close to him. "You haven't won yet," she whispered sleepily.

"Not yet, little one," he whispered back, and brushed her forehead with his lips as she burrowed closer.

Near midnight there was a hesitant rap at Sean Culhane's bedroom door. With drowsy reluctance, Culhane disengaged from Catherine's body and slipped out of bed. Opening the door a crack, he peered out, smoothed his hair, then opened the door completely. ''What is it?"

Rafferty stared at his naked master and cleared his throat. "Ah, Peg thought ye might want a bite of supper, seein' as—" He touched his forelock to Catherine, who, like a small, ruffled owl, regarded him from the bed. "Evenin', miss . . . ye an't had dinner today."

Seemingly oblivious of the other man's embarrassment, Culhane nonchalantly turned to Catherine. "Are you hungry, English?"

Rubbing sleep from her eyes with a fist, she nodded. "Starved."

"Tell Peg she has two for dinner." He started to close the door, then added casually, "Clean this mess up, will you?"

Rafferty scowled as he tramped back downstairs. "Lord of the manor, bah!"

Catherine rolled up the sleeves of one of Culhane's shirts and grinned as she took a handful of material in at the waist of his breeches, which threatened to drop about her ankles. Recklessly, she pirouetted. "Rawther dashing, 'ay wot? Mawster Brummell would be green!" She gave them another hike and looked at him mischievously. "Your household may think you've developed a peculiar taste in bedmates."

He grinned as he tucked in his own shirt. "Your school days of passing as a boy are done, girl."

Frowning, she peered skeptically into the pier glass. "I cannot have changed so much in two months!"

"Take a roving bachelor's unprincipled word for it, lass. That little broadside could sink the King's Navy. As for those topsails, pack them into one of your Le Roy dresses and Napoleon himself would heave to."

Ignoring his roguish grin over her shoulder in the mirror, Catherine said abruptly, "You were well informed before you abducted me, weren't you? Even about the contents of my wardrobe." He turned and began to rifle through his chest. She advanced on him, still gripping her drawers. "Was Mignon, my new French maid, one of your spies?"

"Use this for a belt." He slapped a scarf into her hand. "Your birthday ball during the Christmas holidays was a great success; the London papers covered it with complete gush about your wardrobe."

As they walked downstairs, Catherine commented, "It's good of Peg to hold dinner. Her days are long and this one must have been particularly difficult."

"She's hoping to divert my inclination to hang Moora by her thumbs," Culhane laconically replied. '

Catherine came to an instant halt. "Please don't hurt her! She has a wretched existence. The fish make her ill . . ."

"Why do you say her life is wretched? People elsewhere in Ireland are starving in droves. Moora will be as round as her mother by the time she's forty. And she has Sundays off. What do you have?"

She unconsciously laid a hand on his arm. "Don't you see? You and I have known all sorts of advantages. Moora cannot even read. She could be a lovely young woman, but instead she's worked like a farm beast from sunup to sundown. And the cruelest part of it is she's totally, miserably aware of her lot. She has every right to hate me!"

"But no right to murder." At her anguished look, he covered her hand with his. "Don't worry, I won't stretch her thumbs, even if she does bake croissants like rocks."

Not completely mollified, Catherine slowly accompanied him down the final flight. He had not said he would forbear from punishing Moora, and she was well aware that what Sean Culhane did not say could fill volumes.

Peg, waiting at the foot of the staircase, looked Catherine up and down and sniffed, "Barefoot." She glared at Culhane. "She'll catch her death! Supper's in the Rose Room." With that, Peg flounced upstairs.

As he seated her in the rose-silk-lined salon next to his study, Catherine could swear her escort looked a trifle sheepish. He surveyed the elaborately set, damask-covered table critically. "I wonder where Peg got the flowers?"

Sniffing the delicate perfume of the arrangement of winter roses between lighted tapers, Catherine smiled. "She has a plot in the kitchen garden. It seems incredible that Ireland has flowers even when the rest of Europe is buried in snow."

He slipped into his chair. "We owe our even climate to the Gulf Stream; it brings warm waters from the tropics as far away as South America."

Rafferty shambled in with a towel over his arm and a chilled bottle of champagne. As he dourly poured glasses for them in the approved fashion, Culhane commented dryly, "The larder must have been short of leftover stew tonight." Averting his eyes, Rafferty plugged the bottle into the ice bucket and shuffled out.

"What a lovely room," Catherine murmured, surveying the fine paintings and crystal chandelier. She sipped the champagne, her eyes twinkling mischievously over the rim of her glass. "So intimate. Do you entertain here often?"

"I don't usually bother with preliminaries," he said flatly.

She laughed without humor. "No, you don't. In that sense, our first meeting was unforgettable.

He started to reply when Peg bustled in with a tray of cold meats and cheeses. At a decorous distance from the food was folded a pair of men's woolen stockings. Her nose tickled by bubbles, Catherine blinked and sneezed over her champagne. Culhane laughed. "Be a good girl, English, and don Peg's offerings."

Peg snorted, but she did not budge until Catherine had pulled on the stockings and thanked her. " Tis glad I am to see some has manners about the place," she huffed, with a look at the unrepentant rogue grinning back at her. "Don't ye smirk at me. Rafferty's right, ye know," she gruffly admonished him as she headed for the door. "Ye've got all the charm of an Irish mule." His roar of laughter followed her out of the room.

Catherine stuck her nose up over the table as she finished adjusting the stockings. "She adores you." - He looked at her for a moment with his long-lashed green eyes and sipped at his champagne. "Yes, I suppose she does."

Giving a last twist to the stockings, she eyed him thoughtfully. A good many women probably adored him; he made other men seem tame as sheep. The white shirt, loosely open to his slim waist, set
off
the
dark
good
looks
of
his Moorish ancestry. Long fingers negligently about the glass of pale amber champagne as he relaxed in the opposite chair, ruffled black hair curling slightly about his face, he regarded her lazily. Suddenly realizing she was staring back with open assessment, Catherine flushed and sought refuge in her champagne.

"Don't drink that so quickly," Culhane warnted. "It works havoc on an empty stomach."

"Thank you for the advice, but I was virtually weaned on champagne."

Serving her a portion of meat and cheese, he grimaced. "What a spoiled little hussy you must have been!"

"Completely," she mumbled unabashedly with a full mouth. She drained the champagne and held out her glass with an impudent smile, eyes iridescent in the candlelight.

Culhane refilled her glass. "Did your grandmother teach you to use your eyes like that?" he asked suddenly.

She stared at him in bewilderment.
"Use
them? How do you mean?"

He smiled slowly at her confusion. "You're singularly unaware of yourself. Haven't men ever flattered you?"

She picked at the meat, irritated. "Of course. But flattery is mere verbiage, and in my case, embellished with expectations of dowry."

"You think a man would want you only for your money?" he murmured, absently popping a grape into his mouth.

She took another sip of champagne to cool her cheeks. "No, not entirely. There's a title to consider, and of late . . . just before I left England . . ."

"Before you left?" Sean pursued intently.

"Men seemed to find me appealing for other, ah, more basic reasons," she finished lamely.

"I can imagine," Sean commented a trifle sourly. "And how did you react?"