And when she brought her lips back to his, he was able to kiss her gently this time. Sweetly. Worshipping her.
His eye was still closed—perhaps he no longer wanted to see the reality of their situation—so he only felt when she ran her hands over his chest, the pressure light through the layers of his clothing. Her hands descended down toward his breeches, and a primal male part of him waited, breathless, to see what she would do. Her fingers moved over the buttons of his fall, loosening, freeing him.
He reached for her then. “Helen.”
“No,” she said, quite firmly. “No, let me.”
And his hands fell away, because although he was a man of honor, he was by no means a saint. He heard the rustle of her skirts as she knelt, felt her fingers on his throbbing cock, and then the brush of her breath.
He made a heroic effort and tried one more time to dissuade her. “You don’t have to.”
Her whisper blew across the swollen head of his cock as she said, “I know.”
Then her hot wet mouth enveloped him, and he could only groan and brace his legs so he wouldn’t fall. God! He’d paid a whore for this once, long ago, but it’d been a disappointment. Then, there had been rough sucking and pulling and he’d barely been able to finish. Now… Now there was gentle pressure, the velvet touch of her tongue, and most of all, the knowledge that she was doing this to him. He couldn’t help himself. He opened his eye and looked down and nearly came on the spot. Her golden head was bent over him, his reddened prick sliding in between her pink lips, her fingers delicate and white against his rude flesh.
She looked up at him, his cock still in her stretched mouth, and her harebell-blue eyes were dark now. Mysterious, feminine, and the most erotic thing he’d ever seen in his life.
HE TASTED OF man and salt and life itself.
Helen closed her eyes, savoring the sensation of Alistair’s penis in her mouth. She’d done this a few times with Lister, but she’d found the act distasteful then. Something she’d only performed to please him. What she did now pleased her as well. There was power in holding the most elemental part of a man between her lips, feeling him tremble as she stroked him, hearing his breath come quick and hard as she sucked.
And there was something else. She liked the taste of him, liked licking his smooth head. Liked stroking the soft skin of his shaft and feeling the steely hardness beneath. This was erotic. Primal, and just a little bit naughty. Her breasts were swollen beneath her bodice and stays, her nipples sensitive and pointed. She could feel wetness at the juncture of her thighs, and she pressed them together and sucked strongly on him at the same time.
“God!” he rasped above her.
She felt like the most alluring woman in England at that moment. She reached carefully, tenderly, into his breeches and found his stones, heavy in their sac. They were like eggs in the softest of leather bags, and she rolled them gently in her hand. She sucked again.
He growled.
She looked up. His head was back, his hands clenched by his sides, and she could feel his thighs, hard and tensed by her head. She could continue this, sucking him until he lost control and spewed his seed into her mouth. The idea was wickedly seductive, and she pursed her lips to draw strongly on him.
But she’d misjudged him. He bent suddenly, scooping her up in his arms so fast she squeaked in alarm. He threw her on the bed, and she hadn’t finished bouncing when he landed beside her.
“Enough,” he snapped.
He tore at her laces, ripping her bodice from her and flinging it halfway across the room.
“Enough playing. Enough cock teasing. Enough drawing this out.”
He pulled her skirts from her and flipped her before she had time to react. He pushed and pulled her until she was on her knees, braced on her elbows, and threw up the skirt of her chemise. He entered her from behind without warning, and she gasped.
Hot and hard. Long and full.
She bit her lip, trying not to cry out at the sensation. He was so right, so perfect. He withdrew a bit, adjusting his hold on her bare hips before slamming back into her. Thrusting fast, thrusting deep. Her arms slid forward under his hard lovemaking, until she caught herself and braced again. Then she closed her eyes and simply felt. His strong slide against her wet, soft flesh. The heat building at her center.
He stopped suddenly, and she did cry out this time—in disappointment. But he reached beneath her, still sheathed to the hilt in her body, and ran his hands over the tops of her breasts. He pulled a bit, and her nipples popped over the top of her stays, hard and abraded. He pinched them roughly, and she bit her lip, pushing back at his hips.
He laughed, a breathless growling sound, and resumed pounding into her, one hand holding her firm to receive him, the other still teasing her nipples. She groaned and looked down, watching his big, tanned hand playing over her white breasts. The sight made her clench internally, and she exploded suddenly, wrenchingly, her arms giving out from beneath her at the force. Light flew from her center, blinding her and making her limbs weak from pleasure. She collapsed flat on the bed, and he followed her down, still thrusting powerfully, his cock a live thing within her, demanding submission, demanding pleasure.
And she gave it. Without volition. Without conscious thought. Her belly rippling with the orgasm that continued unabated. She panted into the sheets, filling her mouth with the corner of a pillow to keep from screaming aloud.
She felt his upper body lift away from her, causing his pelvis to press into her more heavily. She saw out of the corner of her eye one of his arms braced beside her shoulder. He withdrew. Slowly. In this position, beneath him, with her legs only hip-width apart, the pressure was intense. He was crammed so tightly within her. His cock dragged against her as it retreated from her soft flesh. She closed her eyes, lost in the intense feeling. He pushed back in, just as slowly, and she felt his entire hard length reenter her. This was bliss. This was sensation beyond anything she’d ever experienced before. She could lie like this and submit to him forever, reveling in his hard flesh, his male scent all around her.
“Helen,” he rasped. “Helen.”
And she felt him jerk against her. He thrust one more time, shoving his entire length into her, and she came again, a sweet, warm, washing wave of pleasure after the intensity of before. He withdrew suddenly, and hot semen splashed her thigh. He was immobile above her, his breath coming harshly, his weight still holding her lower body pinned to the bed. She wished he could stay like this, with his hard body pressing her into the bed, but it was inevitable that he roll to the side.
He slid away from her and stood beside the bed, taking off his clothing, moving slowly as if terribly wearied. He climbed in beside her, nude, and drew her close, and that was better. Wordlessly he fitted her body against his larger, harder one, and tucked her head into the crook of his arm.
She watched sleepily as his chest rose and fell, the beat of his heart slow and steady under her cheek. She wondered what they would do if they got the children back. If he loved her and if they could ever have a life together.
And finally she decided it was all too much to think about right now. So she closed her eyes and went to sleep.
WHEN HELEN WOKE again, the room was nearly dark. Alistair was in the process of gently pulling his arm from beneath her head. The movement was what had awakened her. She made no sound but watched as he stood and found his smallclothes and breeches, sliding them up his long legs. And she remembered something that she’d meant to ask him earlier when he’d first returned to the hotel.
“Where did you go?”
His hands, buttoning the fall of his breeches, stilled at her voice and then resumed their work. “I told you. I went to the docks to see about a ship.”
She propped her head in her hand, lying on her side. “I’ve told you my secrets. Isn’t it time you told me yours?”
It was a gamble based on their recent lovemaking. He might still retreat into that hard anger he’d borne toward her for the last week. He might simply pretend he didn’t know what she spoke about.
He did neither. Instead he bent and picked up his shirt, holding it in his hands and staring down at it as if he’d never seen white linen before. “Nearly seven years ago, I was in the American Colonies. You know that. It’s how I came to write my book. It’s also how I lost my eye.”
“Tell me,” she whispered, not daring to move or breathe lest she break his narration.
He nodded. “My purpose in the Colonies was to discover new plants and animals. The best place to look for undiscovered things is where men haven’t already explored—the edges of civilization. But because it’s the edge of civilization and because we are at war with France, that was also the most dangerous place to be. Naturally, then, I found it expedient to attach myself to various army regiments. I spent three years thus, tramping where they tramped, collecting samples and making notes when they camped.”
He was silent a moment, still staring at the shirt in his hands until he shook his head and looked up at her. “Forgive me; I’m delaying the crux of my story.” He inhaled deeply. “In the fall of 1758, I was with a small regiment of men, the 28th Regiment of Foot. We were marching through a thick forest, our destination Fort Edward, where the regiment intended to barrack for the winter. The trail was narrow, the trees oppressively close when we came to a falls.…”
His voice broke and trailed away, and a look crossed his face that she’d never seen on him before. Despair. She nearly cried out.
But his face smoothed and he cleared his throat. “Spinner’s Falls it was called as I found out later. We were attacked from both sides by the French and a band of their Indian allies. Suffice it to say that we lost.” A corner of his mouth twitched in something that might’ve been a smile. “I say ‘we’ quite deliberately. In the midst of battle, one is never a bystander. Though I was a civilian, I fought just as hard as the soldiers standing next to me. We fought for the same thing, after all: our lives.”
“Alistair,” she whispered. She’d seen how he’d touched Lady Grey’s dead body, seen him patiently teach Abigail to fish. He wasn’t a man who would commit or recover from violence easily.
“No.” He waved away her sympathy. “I’m prevaricating again. I survived the battle relatively unscathed with several others, and the Indians rounded us up as captives. We marched for many days through the woods and then we made their camp.”
He frowned down at the shirt and carefully folded it. The muscles of his bare arms shifted in the fading light. “The native peoples in that part of the world have a sort of custom when they win a battle. They take captive the enemy who survives and they torture them; the object is part celebration, part demonstration of the enemy’s cowardice. At least that’s what I believe the object is. Of course, there may not be a reason at all for the torture. Certainly, there’s ample evidence in our own history of peoples delighting in inflicting pain purely for the pleasure of it.”
His voice was even, almost cool, but his fingers folded and refolded the shirt he held, and Helen knew that tears were coursing down her face. Had he thought like this as they’d tortured him? Tried to take his mind away from the pain and horror by noting and analyzing the people who had captured him? The thought was too awful to bear, but bear it she must. If he could survive what had been done to him, the least she could do was hear what had happened.
“I’ll come to the point.” He took a deep breath as if to steady himself. “They took us and stripped us naked. They tied our hands behind our backs and then strung a rope from our bound hands to a stake so that we could stand and move a bit but not go far. They played with a man named Coleman first. They beat him and cut off his ears and threw burning embers on him. And when he collapsed to the ground, they scalped him and heaped burning coals on his still-live body.”
She made a sound of protest, but he didn’t seem to hear.
