She smoothed the lavender silk sheet through her trembling fingers. “Come back to bed, Hawk.”
“I’m restless tonight, sweet.” He toyed with the stem of a large pale blue blossom. A half hour earlier he’d swept the dewy petals along her silken skin.
Esmerelda flinched at his open admission that he still had energy to spare. Sleepily sated, she could see that his body still thrummed from head to toe with restless vigor. What kind of woman would it take—or how many—to leave that man drowsing in fascinated satisfaction?
More woman than she, and ye gods, how that offended her.
Had her sister left him more sated? Her sister who had warmed his bed until Zeldie had found a way to take her place?
“Am I better than my sister?” The words were out before she could prevent them. She bit her lip, anxiously awaiting his answer.
Her words dragged his smoky gaze from the starry night, across the wide expanse of the bedchamber, to rest on the sultry, raven-haired Gypsy. “Esmerelda,” he chided gently.
“Am I?” Her husky contralto soared to a shrewish pitch.
He sighed. “We’ve had this discussion before—”
“And you never answer me.”
“Stop comparing yourself, sweet. You know it’s foolish …”
“How can I not when you can compare me to a hundred, nay a thousand, even my own sister?” Shapely brows puckered in a scowl above her flashing eyes.
His laughter rolled. “And how many do you compare me to, lovely Esmerelda?”
“My sister couldn’t have been as good as me. She was nearly a virgin.” She spit out the word with distaste. Life was too unpredictable for virginity to be a prized possession among her people. Lust, in all its facets, was a healthy aspect of the Rom culture.
He raised a hand in warning. “Stop. Now.”
But she couldn’t. The poison words of accusation tumbled out fast and furious at the only man who had ever made her pagan blood sing, and his boredom between her thighs had been chiseled in granite upon his perfect face this very eve. In truth, for many evenings now.
He suffered her rage in silence, and when at last her tongue rested, he turned back to his window. The howl of a solitary wolf ruptured the night and she felt an answering cry well up within her. She knew the Hawk’s silence was his farewell. Stinging with rejection and humiliation, she lay trembling in his bed—the bed she knew she would never be asked to enter again.
She would kill for him.
Which is precisely what she meant to do moments later when she rushed him with the silver dirk she’d slipped from the table by the bed. Esmerelda might have been able to leave without swearing an oath of vengeance, if he had looked surprised. Momentarily alarmed. Sorry, even.
But he exhibited none of these emotions. His perfect face lit up with laughter as he spun effortlessly, caught her arm and sent the dirk hurtling through the open window.
He laughed.
And she cursed him. And all his begotten and any subsequent misbegotten.
When he shushed her with kisses, she cursed through gritted teeth, even as her traitorous body melted for his touch. No man should be so beautiful. No man should be so untouchable. And so damned fearless.
No man should be able to forsake Esmerelda. He was done with her, but she wasn’t done with him. She would never be done with him.
“It wasn’t your fault, Hawk,” Grimm offered. They sat upon the cobbled terrace of Dalkeith sipping port and smoking imported tobacco in purely male contentment.
Sidheach James Lyon Douglas rubbed his perfect jaw with a perfect hand, irritated by the perfect shadow of stubble that always appeared just a few hours after shaving.
“I just don’t understand, Grimm. I thought she’d found pleasure with me. Why would she seek to kill me?”
Grimm arched a brow. “Just what do you do to the lasses in bed, Hawk?”
“I give them what they want. Fantasy. My willing flesh and blood to serve their every whim.”
“And how do you know what a woman’s fantasies are?” Grimm wondered aloud.
The Earl of Dalkeith laughed softly, a heady, confident rumble of a purr that he knew drove women wild. “Ah, Grimm, you just have to listen with your whole body. In her eyes she tells you, whether she knows it or not. In her soft cries she guides you. In the subtle turnings of her body, you know if she wants you in front or behind her lush curves. With gentleness or with power; if she desires a tender lover or seeks a beast. If she likes her lips kissed, or savagely devoured. If she likes her breasts—”
“I get the picture,” Grimm interrupted, swallowing hard. He shifted in his chair and uncrossed his legs. Recrossed them and tugged at his kilt. Uncrossed them again and sighed. “And Esmerelda? Did you understand her fantasies?”