The Devil She Knows - By Diane Whiteside Page 0,64
source, his knife automatically sliding into his hand.
Portia looked up, ready to throw another plum pit through the window into the water. Her blue eyes were as large and round as her mouth. They were also far guiltier than any time her stepmother had caught her throwing rocks as well as any boy.
Gareth rubbed his forehead then sheathed his big bowie knife. He’d never previously seen much need to carry a smaller blade.
At least she didn’t look frightened of him.
“Sorry,” she said in a very small voice.
He waved off the problem, wishing he could escape what she looked like as easily. The blond curls so loosely pinned up and meant to caress that slender white neck—or wrap around his hand while she pleasured his cock…
“It’s not important,” he assured her quickly. “I should have warned you I had one.”
She leaned forward and ran her hands down the front of her thighs, stretching the fine silk over her waist and hips.
“It’s just that I can’t stop thinking about our meeting with St. Arles,” she confessed.
“Are you worried that he’ll hurt you?” Gareth dropped his knife and its scabbard onto the table beside the bed then knelt beside her. “Honey, he can’t touch you.”
“He was furious. What will he do to—”
“Your friends?”
“Or the people here in Constantinople? He’s already gone back on his word to me and started destroying his own servants, the cur.” Angry and desperate, her goddess’s face would inspire men to take up arms. Then it crumpled into desperation.
“But what if he’s so angry at my refusal to help him that he becomes nastier to Constantinople’s inhabitants? He could shatter any deals he’d made with them. Perhaps start a revolution and turn this country into an empty husk, even kill his current allies lest they prattle about him.”
“Portia.” He grabbed her hands before they crushed a plum into oblivion.
“Gareth, it would be my fault,” she whispered. A single tear swam onto her eyelash.
“For the love of God, Portia, do not blame yourself for another man’s deeds. Any evil St. Arles does is because he himself chooses to.”
“But I can’t stop wondering—”
“If you don’t stop thinking about it, you will go mad. God help me, I know that all too well.”
Because I spent that entire monsoon season in Indochina, trying not to let the rain remind me of Kentucky mountains and make me escape into a bullet.
“Gareth, it would be my fault if—” she persisted.
He gave her the only escape he’d ever found which worked for any time.
He snatched her into his arms and kissed her with a man’s hunger, heedless of any shyness she might still have. She stilled, her hands fluttering on his arms like butterflies, before she tentatively held on.
He kissed her again, stroking her with his mouth, sharing his need, drowning her in hunger and desperation, where nothing existed but passion. Thought had no place here, only the body’s demands—and somehow an instinctive recognition of the other person with him.
She made an indistinct noise deep in her throat. Her lips opened under his and her tongue matched his. She softened to match his angle, surged to meet him.
His skin heated, blood rocking through as if it could leap across to her veins.
Her slender fingers lightly caressed his head, like angel’s wings.
“Portia.” By God, he wanted more. He pushed her back onto the divan and undid her tea gown, his fingers fumbling at the tiny buttons like a boy. Him, who’d undressed dozens of concubines and bored matrons.
Silk ripped, short and sharp and rough, like the sound of their breathing above the seagulls’ sibilant cries.
His cock thrust against his pants like a wild beast, desperate to find sanctuary between her white limbs.
She wrapped her leg around him and lifted her hips, needy little sounds breaking from her throat. She smelled of sweet cream and salty musk, woman and spring and homecoming.
And absolutely not his future.
With his last remnant of sanity, he forced himself to find a condom and rolled it onto his now-free cock.
He pushed her skirts aside and tested her with his hand. Wet, more than wet enough, yet he lingered to pleasure her and tease her.
“Gareth, please!”
He rolled her onto her back and knelt between her legs. God help him, she threw one leg over his hip.
He lifted her hips and plunged into her, tormenting himself with possessing her utterly, as if he owned her, as if she’d always belong to himself alone, as if she was his past, his present, and his future. As