Susan Johnson (18 page)

Like a woman too long denied, Elizabeth welcomed him, pulling his head down so she could reach his mouth more easily, straining upward on tiptoe so she could feel him hard against her, tearing at the buttons on his shirt so the heat of his skin touched hers.

“Hurry, Johnnie, please …” she whispered into his mouth, impatient, moving her hips in age-old enticement.

As if he needed any incentive to hurry; as if he had anything on his mind but consummation. As if he didn’t ache so desperately to bury himself inside her, he felt his brain burning away.

“You should take your dress off,” he murmured, acting the gentleman only with extreme effort, setting her at arm’s length, reaching for the bow at her neck. “For the grass stains,” he muttered. Shutting his eyes briefly against the overwhelming desire engulfing him, he groaned, a suffocated sound of superhuman restraint. Then, concentrating, he drew her cape from her shoulders and reached for the buttons on her frock.

Brushing his hands aside, she whispered, “I can’t wait.” Her eyes already heavy-lidded with passion, she breathed, “Please …”

Remembering her premature release at Goldiehouse, in a rushing second he stripped his plaid from his shoulders, unbuckled his belt to release the folds of fabric, spread the soft wool on the grass at their feet,
and, sweeping her up into his arms, whispered, “Wait for me.”

A second later he lowered her to their makeshift bed, swiftly pushing the fullness of her skirt and petticoats upward with a practiced touch.

“Hurry,” she breathed, the touch of his fingers leaving a trail of fire on her thighs, her breath caught in her throat as his fingertips stroked her mons.

“I’m almost there,” he whispered, reaching for the buttons on his breeches.

“Lord, Johnnie …” she pleaded, her eyes shutting against the flame-hot need streaking through her body, her arms reaching for him.

Heedlessly, he wrenched the last button off, dropped between her pale legs, and, still booted and spurred, plunged inside her.

She cried out, a high, keening pleasure sound, as he filled her, her hands clutching his muscled back. And he sank hilt-deep inside her, his breath in abeyance as violent sensation pulsated through his body and brain and heated blood. She was worlds better than he’d remembered; she was perfect … exquisite, the fit of her tight, sublime.

With the pressure of her hands hard at the base of his spine, she suddenly lifted her hips, reminding him of her four months’ celibacy, and he began moving in her, penetrating, withdrawing, sliding in and gliding out, bracing his booted feet to gain more leverage, plunging in again.…

She wanted this always, Elizabeth thought, almost purring with rapture, she wanted the feel of the Laird of Ravensby deep inside her, she wanted the solid weight of him under her hands and over her, she wanted this inexplicable feeling of bliss to never end.

Then she smiled at the notion, because after months of sexual deprivation, her orgasm was fast approaching, and “never” had a finite quality.

In a flashing heartbeat her breathing changed, intensified. Her hands slid lower down his back, and he matched her new rhythm, following her, until at the peaking last he drove in and held himself hard against
her womb. With her arms laced around his neck she arched into the hard length of him and clung to him as if he were the indispensable center of her world. And he was, for that long, endless, feverish space of time that melted reality into oblivion. As she shuddered around him, he poured into her with a pent-up wildness, soul-stirring, tumultuous, explosive.

Trembling, shaken, moments later they gasped like swimmers rescued from drowning.

“I’m … not used … to this,” Johnnie panted. A spontaneous utterance—his climax so pure, so relentless, he was near prostrate, a unique sensation for the suave, sophisticated Laird of Ravensby.

“Nor I …” Elizabeth whispered.

He smiled down at her, an odd triumph in his eyes, as if he’d won a great victory. Her pale hair lay like shimmering pearl on the subdued colors of his plaid; her gleaming emerald eyes looked directly into his, a glimpse of their recent vision of paradise in their depths. She was unutterably glorious, he thought.

Elizabeth had never felt the exquisite wonder of carnal lust and utter happiness, of warm affection, and more—a kind of hot-blooded passion fused with inexpressible joy.

“How could you … have married him?” he whispered, a kind of shock in the words. It seemed a sacrilege, although he knew how prevalent the practice of bartering young girls for family profit. But she was too perfect to be sold away to an old man of Hotchane’s evilness.

If I had known you then, she wanted to say, I would have killed myself before I’d ever gone to Hotchane. “I didn’t realize I had a choice,” she said, her voice unconsciously touched with her newfound jubilation so his brows drew together at her seeming indifference.

Unlacing her arm from around his back, she touched the crease of his scowl in soothing gentleness. “Now I wouldn’t have,” she said, moved by his concern. “Now I would have rather picked turnips in the fields or begged work at the village school.” She smiled then, a small exultation
of the soul. “Now that I’ve met you.” She kissed him, a butterfly kiss of sheer joy. “And I’m glad you rode after me,” she confessed. “I shouldn’t tell you … but … I’ve only wanted
you
since Goldiehouse. I’ve never felt that way before … about a man—desperate to feel him.” Her words came tumbling out in a rush of emotion, liberated after months of yearning. “I even considered inviting one of my guards to sleep with me to clarify whether it was actually you or simply some unfathomable impulse, or, well … your—” A blush stole over her face; she drew in a swift breath and quickly said “enormous size” in a tiny voice. Lifting her lashes, she found him grinning and grinned back. “But I never did,” she quickly added, plunging on as though the words had been locked away for four long months and
required
divulgence. “Sleep with my guards or George Baldwin, who’s forever underfoot and pleading for a kiss, or—”

“George Baldwin?” Johnny interrupted, as if he had the right to inquire.

“A neighbor who’s very kind and sweet—”

“Sweet?” The single word was a sibilant hiss.

“Are you jealous? How interesting,” she added before he could deny it or even consider the astonishing possibility. “But he’s
only
nice, like an amiable curate.”

“He’s a curate?” A curious sense of relief colored his tone.

“Well, no …”

“Well, what is he?”

“He’s not
you
, darling,” she replied in her blunt way that continued to fascinate him. “Nor is any man I meet. And I
really
shouldn’t tell you this, because even a tyro in dalliance should know better, but I
passionately
desire only you, and even my brawny guardsmen don’t intrigue me. So much as I considered bedding them—or one of them …” she quickly modified when his brow rose in conjecture, “I couldn’t.”

Inexplicably, he found her artless naïveté had a lurid effect on his psyche. And the discovery that she’d saved her delectable passion for him
alone
strangely provoking.

Arousing.

Exciting.

“So I was wondering … since you rode so far …”—her lashes half lowered over saucy green eyes—“to—keep me company,” she delicately teased, vividly conscious of his swelling erection. “I was wondering whether I might impose on your—er—renewed interest.”

He grinned. “Greedy child.”

“My abstinence, no doubt,” she explained, her voice altered to a throaty lushness as his arousal filled her.

The concept of abstinence stupefied him, the doctrine mystifying to a dissolute worldly man. But he had no difficulty interpreting the muted suggestion in her voice. “Could we approach this with less speed this time?” he inquired with a charming smile.

“I’ve all day,” she replied in a languid whisper, moving her hips in a lithe, imaginative incitement.

His body instantly responded to the compelling invitation of “all day” with Elizabeth Graham, to her stirring stimulation. “In that case,” he offered with a wolfish grin, “I’ll set my mind to some more leisurely pleasures. Beginning,” he said, touching the rumpled lace kerchief at her bosom, “with fewer clothes and more—contact.”

“Ummm … I like that.”

“I like it with
you
.”

“Good. I’m not too forward for your sensibilities?”

He smiled and shook his head.

“I can attack you then with impunity?” She was enjoying herself like a young child practicing a new game.

“You can
always
attack me with impunity.” A lazy insouciance drawled through his words; he’d been playing the game for a long time.

Always
. She liked the sound of the word although even she knew better than to mention permanence to a man of Ravensby’s notoriety. Bracing her feet, she experimented with a delicate form of attack, lifting her hips so the sensation of pleasure intensified, so the throbbing pulse inside her quickened, so she felt him penetrate farther.

And his hand slid behind automatically to grasp her lifted thigh, forcing it higher, forcing himself deeper.

And they both stopped breathing for a moment as stabbing ecstasy trembled anew.

“You don’t understand,” he whispered when he found his breath again, releasing his hold on her leg, relaxing as much as possible in his present position of arrested intercourse. “You’re not having your way this time.”

“But I like having my way.” And she moved in a slow rhythm of arousal, the undulating friction delectable. Part teasing, partly testing her newly discovered powers of persuasion, she smiled up at him with a flaunting coquetry.

“No,” he said, his voice deceptively soft. “Although,” he quietly went on, his graceful smile mitigating his unrelenting authority, “if I didn’t plan on making love to you all day, I might be more susceptible to your enchanting temptation.”

“I shall pout,” she warned, which she did with melodrama and sweet charm.

He grinned. “And I shall remain immune.” His immunity was the consequence of a decade of pouting females.

“You’re unkind,” she declared with a credible sullenness.

“No,” he gently replied, “I’m about to show you a new degree of
kindness
. Now let me go.” He nudged her thighs still holding him tightly. “And I promise you,” he said with a facetious lift of his brows, “your forbearance will be rewarded.”

Her thighs relaxed, although her pout was more genuine now and less theatrical.

“Look at it this way, darling,” Johnnie said, withdrawing from her and resting back on his heels, still booted and fully dressed except for his unbuttoned breeches. He grinned. “It’s one small lesson in obedience.”

She lunged upward, her fingers already closed in a fist.

And he rolled away so swiftly, she grudgingly decided he’d had frequent practice.

“I could have you skinned alive,” she said, sitting in the center of his plaid, fists clenched, a spark of fire in her green eyes.

Lounging at his ease a safe distance away in the sweet-smelling grass, he looked entertained. “But then I wouldn’t be much good to you.”

“I hate masculine control.” A long history of uncharitable men prompted her outburst.

His blue eyes held hers for a grave moment, and his voice when he spoke was utterly without badinage. “I was only teasing.”

She looked at him suspiciously. “I won’t be obedient to you or any man.”

“It’s the last thing I’d expect from you.” Johnnie Carre preferred women of spirit; obedience for him was no more than a playful dare.

And while she was debating whether to believe him or not and whether her hot-blooded desire could stand on principle at all, Johnnie spoke very quietly with deference and courtesy. “You set the rules.”

“Perhaps … I overreacted,” she said in a small whisper, his good-natured indulgence reminding her of the vast differences in men.

“I understand overreaction too,” he commented, a slow smile drifting across his mouth. “I had Munro out of bed this morning
extremely
early.”

“You’re very kind.”

His eyes gleamed with mischief. “It was a long ride down here.”

She smiled. “Am I taking this too seriously?”

He shrugged, a well-bred ambiguity. “War is serious; national honor is serious. Famine, people dying …” He inclined his head in a mild disclaimer. “This doesn’t have to be serious.”

A small silence fell between them, only the sound of birdsong conspicuous in the stillness, miles of towering pine a barricade between them and the contentious world. A man and a maid and tremulous passion …

He didn’t importune, nor had he ever in his commerce
with women. But he wanted her, that was plain. And after a very short moment of reflection, she held out her hand, smiled, and said, “Come, make me happy.”

He rolled back onto the plaid as deftly as he’d escaped her. The fragrance of his cologne surrounded her, his smile brought with it his own special sunshine, and his voice when he spoke was familiar in its irony. “Now that we’ve disposed of the profundities—”

“And very easily too,” Elizabeth interjected, feeling lighthearted again.

“My specialty, madam,” he said with a small dip of his head. “Ask anyone.”

“I
know
what your specialty is, Ravensby,” she replied with a sidelong glance.

“Ah … well then,” he murmured, shameless. “Would you mind, Lady Graham,” he went on, all teasing deference and amusement, “if I undressed you now? I know we have all day, but then”—he paused in delicate emphasis—“we’ll
need
all day.…”

Sitting cross-legged, her yellow gown rumpled around her, her platinum hair tousled, her cheeks flushed, she gazed at him playfully. “I’d be foolish to say no, wouldn’t I?”

He only smiled and nodded.

“Arrogant man.”

“I’m the one who chased after you, darling. Hardly an act of arrogance.”

“You have a charming honesty, at least.”

“And several other cultivated charms eager to be put at your disposal …”

“Cultivated in the boudoirs of other women, no doubt.”

“Developed solely with your interests in mind,” he smoothly replied.