“You are a good man,” Annabel said to him. He was lying on his back next to her. All that thick russet-colored hair had fallen into a patch of sunshine, and he was manifestly beautiful. “It was truly good of you to keep Rosy with you.”
“Don’t go thinking that I took care of her myself,” he said, reaching up and tugging on one of her curls. “She couldn’t bear the sight of me for a good while after the birth, for one thing. ’Tis my grandmother and the monks who’ve done the most for her.”
“But you didn’t leave,” she said. “You let her bite you.” She picked up his hand and kissed it, running her lips along the white scar.
“I’ve scars in other places,” he said, his eyes crinkling with wicked laughter. “Perhaps you’d like to kiss all of them?”
Suddenly temptation was running in her veins like the flowered wine, making her feel brave and curious. “You owe me a forfeit,” she said. “Anything I care to ask.”
“True.” The whole sunlit meadow seemed to be holding its breath, waiting for her to say something. Even the lazy hum of bees had faded away.
And yet she hadn’t lost her senses. The sweetness of this lazy afternoon was undercut by a sharp current of desire, strung between them as tight as wire. “Then I’d like you to remove your jacket,” she said, throwing caution to the winds. “And your shirt as well.”
His lazy eyes swept over her with a blatant invitation. “And if I’m unclothed—here—in the outdoors, what of you?”
“What of me?” she asked. “ ’Tis I who am owed a boon. By you,” she added, in case he’d forgotten.
With a mock sigh, he sat up and pulled off his coat. It was finely made, to wrap close to the body, and Annabel almost leaned forward to help him, but the gesture felt too intimate. She stayed where she was.
He undid his cravat, watching her the whole time, and threw it to the side.
“You’ll have to tell your valet it was uncomfortable,” she chattered, feeling slightly dizzied by—by something.
He smiled at her but said nothing, undoing the buttons at his neck. Then slowly he stood up and pulled his shirt over his head. It billowed for a moment, like the sails of a great ship, and fell to the side.
“And what do you think, Miss Annabel Essex?” he inquired. Amusement and desire entwined in his voice in a wine more spicy than that in their glasses.
He stood above her, dappled with the shadow of saffron oak leaves. And she had remembered correctly: his chest was thick with muscle, beautiful, covered with skin that looked like rough satin kissed by the sun.
In one smooth motion he came to his knees by her side. “When you look at me like that,” he said, “I truly feel that I am one of God’s creatures.”
Annabel couldn’t see what God had to do with it, but never mind. Close up, his stomach had no extra flesh, just rippled muscles that made her long to touch him.
“Put on this earth for no other reason than to adore you,” he said. “Do you know the lines we use in the Scottish marriage service: With my body, I thee worship?”
A smile uncurled on Annabel’s lips. “Isn’t that rather pagan for one as Christian as you?”
“Never. By worshiping you, I worship God. You are one of His most beautiful creatures, after all.”
Annabel liked the compliment, if it was a bit overmixed with theology for her taste. He could call it what he wanted: she saw hunger in his gaze. Hunger for her.
Ewan saw that little self-satisfied smile on his future wife’s face and it made him feel reckless and drunk, naked in the afternoon. She was the pagan, his wife, a glorious, deliriously beautiful pagan. He reached out without even realizing what he was about to do.
His fingers were deft, quick as lightning. Annabel’s traveling dress buttoned up the front, to make it easier for the traveler to unclothe herself in the absence of a maid. Those buttons flew apart at the touch of his fingers and Annabel—Annabel quivered like a newborn fawn, but she didn’t stop his hand. He told himself that if she said no, he would stop. But she made no sound other than the sound of a shaky breath…and that was so entrancing that he unbuttoned even faster.
One second, two seconds later, he eased the dress back over her shoulders. Of course, she was wearing more layers.
“Doesn’t that—” His voice caught in his throat. For she was smiling at him, the mysterious, timeless smile of a woman, and unlacing her corset.
Still without saying a word, he pulled her chemise up. Her cheeks took on a wild-rose color, but she said nothing, allowed him to tug the chemise over her hair…and there she was.
Sitting with her legs curled to the side, her dress still modestly clinging to her hips, but bare from the waist up.
And she was lovely. “Ach, lass,” he whispered, “you are the finest of God’s creations.” He wanted to kiss every inch of her skin, make her ache inside as he was doing. Her body was ripe in the sunlight, curved and shadowed with such delicious skill that his hands trembled to touch her.
“I daren’t come near you,” he said, his voice strangled in his throat.
Something about that seemed to give her cheer, and she grinned at him with a flash of her usual impudence. “I shan’t touch you either.” And then: “Do you really mean to say that you haven’t seen a woman since you were a lad?”
“I was older than a boy. But you were worth waiting for.” There was a note in his voice that she heard as the deep bell of truth.
He picked up one of her bluebells, its little bonnets hanging heavy, and drew it slowly over the delicate curve of her shoulder, blazing a path where his tongue could follow when they got to his lands.
She shivered and looked down. They watched together as dusky blue blossoms trailed over the generous curve of her breast, over her rosy nipple—
“Stop,” she breathed.
But he was entranced, watching her shiver under the flower’s caress, dazzled by the flash of creamy skin against deep blue.
She reached for her chemise and pulled it over her head so quickly that the flower flew to the side and landed in his glass of wine.
Ewan sighed. She was right, of course. As it was, his breeches were strained in an agonizing fashion.
“That did not happen,” Annabel said. By the time she dared look at Ewan, he was tying his cravat. His fingers looked perfectly steady. “We will not discuss it, ever.”
“There’s no need to discuss it,” he told her, his voice sending a quiver of pleasure down her legs. Or perhaps it was that look in his eyes. “I’ll never forget it.”
Annabel threw back her head and looked up. By evening, the sky might—just might—echo the beauty of the bluebells. But there was nothing in nature that came close to the beauty of Ewan’s green-gold eyes. Nothing.
Seventeen
Annabel woke at dawn. There was something nagging at the back of her mind, an elusive thought. Ewan was breathing next to her, long slow breaths. He slept like a cat: as quiet and contained as he was while awake.
Light was stealing through curtains of their bedchamber. For a while Annabel watched sleepily as the rays crept across the polished mahogany of their bedchamber in the Queen’s Arms…the very best bedchamber. Ewan had laughed last night when he discovered that the chamber pot was made of bronze, decorated by delicate satyrs chasing about the rim. Annabel had blushed and looked away; there were some aspects to the intimacy of marriage that she wasn’t prepared for, such as Ewan even mentioning such an object in her presence.The chamber pot was bronze. The desk was mahogany. These sheets were linen; well, they were Ewan’s own sheets, put on the bed fresh every night.