The Scoundrel and I - Katharine Ashe Page 0,52

had in mind.

“Elle?” he said quietly.

“She is gone.” Another sob convulsed her body. “She is gone.”

“Gone?”

“In the night,” she said muffled against his coat. “I buried her this morning.”

“My God.” He wrapped his arms tight around her.

She wept and he ached for her. He longed to say something comforting or profound. He stroked her hair, held her close, and felt her sobs in his body.

“You made her proud,” he finally whispered. “I saw it, heard it in her voice. So proud.”

She sobbed harder.

Blast it. He truly was an idiot with words.

Eventually the sobs subsided. With an enormous sniff, she lifted her sodden face. Stroking his thumb across her cheek, he wiped away tears.

“I’m sorry, Elle.”

She blinked, scattering teardrops from her lashes. And abruptly the glimmer in her eyes changed. Then her gaze dropped to his lips.

Every muscle in his body went instantly on alert. Every muscle. He was the greatest scoundrel alive.

She pulled away, her damp gaze now slightly fevered and skittering up and down him, lighting him on fire.

“I should not have come here,” she said.

“I’m glad you did.” His voice sounded far too rough.

She stared at him, lips parted, her perfect breasts rising and falling on sharp breaths. He wanted her against him again. Not weeping, though. Sighing and moaning would do.

He locked himself in place. This was not the time, not with her grief so fresh. He could wait. He could wait forever if in the end she would be his.

“Elle, I—”

“Are you betrothed yet? Actually betrothed, not only technically? Or—” Her throat constricted. “Married?”

“No.” He swallowed hard. “I couldn’t.” Not as long as this woman walked the earth. “No.”

“You . . . couldn’t?”

“Of course not.”

She flattened a palm to his ribs and pushed him back against the wall.

She climbed up him. Mouth claiming his, she clung to his shoulders and he scooped his hands around her soft behind and hitched her thighs up about his hips, and they kissed like that, ravenously, fantastically. Her mouth consuming his was hot and tasted of lust and the remnants of tears, and her hands were all over him, in his hair, around his jaw, under his coat, then beneath his shirt, and he had to have her. Now. The devil take grief and gentlemanly restraint and waiting for vows or anything else to be said. She was his and she always would be.

He carried her to his bed.

First her long sable locks came down, cascading over the white linen like silk, as he had dreamed. Her bodice followed, unfastened and then tugged until her breasts were bared entirely.

Her eyes were spectacularly wide, her cheeks and throat flushed, and the perfect, pink peaks of her breasts tight with arousal. Nothing would come to his tongue, no words, not even sound. Wrapping his hands around her waist, he bent his head and rested his brow between her breasts, and breathed her in.

Her fingers threaded into his hair.

“Won’t you kiss me?” Her voice trembled.

“Everywhere you wish.”

“For what are you waiting?”

“Trouble with banquets, a man don’t always know where to begin.”

Laughter tumbled from her. “A man does n—”

He captured her lips with his. Then he took her breasts in his hands, passed his thumbs across the peaks, and felt her gasp into his mouth. He bent his head and with his tongue tasted one beautiful nipple.

Within a minute she was dragging at his coat with her eager hands, then his waistcoat, then his shirt, and groaning. When she arched her hips against his, he slipped his hand down her belly and between her legs and held her. The flavor of her skin was in his mouth, the texture of her beauty, her desire on his tongue, and he did not give her what she was urging him to give her swiftly.

This was his banquet. He would not be rushed.

Her body was strung like a leeward jib sheet, taut and straining. She whispered his name, then again more urgently. Her fingers scored paths along his arms, over his shoulders, into his hair again. He scraped his teeth over her nipple and she whimpered.

Now she was ready.

With the shift of his fingers over her skirts, he caressed her womanhood. She cried out. Thrusting her hips, convulsing against his caresses, she cried and cried again, sounds of desperation and ecstasy at once.

When her gasps subsided and her eyes opened, hazy and sated, she looked up at him. In all of his years sailing the seas, in every exotic land, upon every familiar shore, atop every magnificent