A Wild Pursuit (27 page)

It was her turn then to inch that shirt up his muscled abdomen. Her fingers were everywhere, delicate, admiring. The shirt billowed past his eyes and disappeared. Now her fingers were at his waist. But she couldn't seem to undo the buttons there either. She looked so serious.

“I thought you'd make my clothes fly off like greased lightning,” he said teasingly. But she didn't look up, so he pushed up her chin. “That was only a jest, Bea. In poor taste, to be sure, but a jest.”

“I—” Her eyes were larger, not so passionate now. Stephen felt a pang of pure fear. She'd changed her mind. She didn't want him. He was too old.

“I'm afraid I'll disappoint you,” she said.

“Never.”

“I don't—I don't have as much experience as you might think,” she said, staring fixedly at his waistband as she tried to undo it. The very feeling of her fingers fumbling around his pantaloons was driving Stephen crazy.

But once he registered what she'd said, he laughed. “I don't care what kind of experience you've got, Bea. All I want is you. You.” He pushed up her chin again. Her lips were swollen with his kisses. “Oh God, Bea, you're so beautiful.”

But she wasn't really listening. “You see, I did—that is, there was Sandhurst, but it was only once, and I'm afraid I didn't learn very much, especially as we were interrupted by Lady Ditcher. And then I allowed Billy Laslett, but I didn't truly enjoy it towards the end, and so I told him to go.”

Stephen laughed. “Are you trying to tell me that the bold seductress herself didn't find the experience pleasurable?”

Bea blushed. “No, I did. Although I wish I hadn't.”

“Why?”

“Because it would make me almost like a virgin, wouldn't it?” Her eyes were shadowed. “But I did—did enjoy it, up to a point. I haven't liked—well, that's irrelevant. I took another lover once too.” The last came out in a rush of admissions. “So you see, I've had three lovers. But I never gave anyone a second chance, and I'm not certain that I actually
learned
very much, if you see what I mean.”

Stephen threw back his head and laughed, laughed so hard that four starlings and a wren flew out of the crooked tree and wheeled into the sunlight. When he looked back, she was still there, blinking at him, looking a little defensive, extraordinarily lovely, and far too young.

“Bea, you are over twenty-one, aren't you?” he said.

“I'm twenty-three.”

“Good. Are you trying to tell me that you won't let me have a second round? That one time with lovely Bea is all any man could hope to achieve?” He let his hands settle on her waist.

She blushed faintly. “No.” But he could hardly hear her.

“Because I want more, Bea.” He lowered his head and brushed his mouth over hers. She opened to him, willing and shuddering. “I'm going to take more,” he told her.

Her eyes closed, and she wrapped her arms around his neck. “Take me, Stephen.”

An invitation no man could refuse. He took over the job of removing his pantaloons himself. And threw off his boots and every other stitch of clothing he had on as well. She sat on the ground in front of him, mouth open.

He laughed at her. The sun was warm on his shoulders, and under her eyes he had that sense of his body that he only seemed to have with her. A sense of powerful muscle and a lean stomach. He came down on his haunches. She watched him in fascination, her eyes looking either at the powerful muscles in his thighs—or between them. He wasn't quite sure. But she seemed to like what she saw. That faint blush in her cheeks had turned rosy.

“I can't believe you're quite naked in the outdoors!” she said. She had her hand over her mouth, but giggles escaped.

“Your turn,” he said, and her eyes grew serious.

“Oh, Stephen, I don't know…I wasn't thinking…” She kept squealing. But Stephen was very good at removing ladies' clothing, and so he had her dress over her head in a moment, and her chemise followed. She wore no corset, to his great interest. He left her only that flimsy little garment she called her pantalettes, a foolish little trifle of white cotton and lace.

The sun threw dancing spots over her ivory skin, skipping shadows of dappled color. Her face was quite rosy. She sat on the ground with her hands covering her breasts, for all the world like a timid virgin. Though of course, even an experienced courtesan might never have made love outdoors.

He kneeled just before her and put his hands over hers. “It's all right, love,” he whispered. “Truly, no one will come down the lane.”

“It's not that!”

He peeled one of her hands away from the alluring curve of her breast. They were perfect, rosy-tipped, uptilted, just the size for a man's hand. He bent his head and drew her nipple into his mouth, roughly for such a sweet bit of flesh. One hand flew away from her breast and curled around his neck instead.

He couldn't play this game much longer. It had been too long, weeks of longing for her, watching her secretly, watching her openly, dreaming of her. He swept her up in one decisive movement and then put her down gently on top of his jacket. As he kissed her, he let one hand shape her breast so she strained into his hand, and he let his other hand pull down that bit of cotton she called a pantalette.

She wasn't sure about that. “What if someone?…” but her voice was melting. He moved down, kissed her breast in passing until she squeaked out loud, until she writhed upwards, kept going further down her body until he found her. Until he had all that sweet, lemony flesh in front of him, and she was moaning, all deep in her throat and begging him, and begging him, and—

She reached out, grabbed his hair and yanked it hard. Bea could hardly breathe, because her whole body was on fire, but she knew there was a remedy here. There had to be. And his tormenting her was not going to be the answer.

“I want you,” she said fiercely, having got his face where she could see it.

“It's your seduction, darling,” he said. His lopsided grin made her heart somersault, and she almost forgot and just started kissing him again. Instead, she reached down and wrapped her fingers around him, and that did give her a shred of sanity. He was a great deal larger than Billy Laslett, and a great deal, well, firmer than Sandhurst.

For a moment she froze. What if this wasn't possible? Billy had been difficult enough. It was embarrassing to have been a party to that encounter. She had been phenomenally pleased when he'd stopped bucking about on top of her and taken himself away.

But Stephen was smiling down at her, and he seemed to know exactly what she was thinking. He unwrapped her fingers and brought himself forward, nudging her knee out of the way. Bea couldn't help herself. She arched up to meet him. But he was just teasing her, bringing her that hardness and taking it away again.

She may not have learned much, but she had learned one thing, because Billy Laslett had asked her to…. She brought her hands down from his neck and deliberately brushed his flat nipples with her fingers. He jumped and arched forward for a moment, deliciously hard. How could she ever have thought that—but this wasn't the moment for comparisons.

Instead, she gave him the same lazy, mischievous grin he gave her, and leaned forward and nipped him with her teeth. He groaned and drove forward. The rush of feeling was so exquisite that she flopped backwards and clutched his shoulders. And this time their eyes were serious.

“All right?” he said, hardly able to recognize his own voice.

And she nodded, clutching him so hard that he was going to have ten small bruises on his shoulders. He drove forward again. She cried out, unintelligible, the sound swallowed into the bright air. But it didn't seem to be pain she was registering.

He bent to kiss her, and she made startled, gulping sounds, as if she thought he might lose his balance if he tried to do two things at once. He finally managed to coax her mouth open, but she kept trying to speak.

“What is it?” he finally said, huskily.

“Nothing—oh! Don't stop
that!
”

Stephen smiled to himself. He pulled himself even higher and listened to her squeals floating into the meadow.

After a bit, he came up on his knees and caught her slender hips in his hands. She gasped and said, “No!” and then said nothing. So he taught her that if she lifted her hips to meet him, that was very pleasant too.

At some point she really did seem to have something to say, so he stopped kissing her. “Do you…”, she was panting. “Do you—could you just keep going a little longer?”

He grinned, a fiendish grin. “I'm better at this than I am at billiards,” he said. His voice was guttural, deep with desire. She was coming to meet him now, matching him. Her skin was gleaming with sweat in the sunlight. Stephen knew at that exact moment that his Bea had experienced no real woman's pleasure with those other lovers of hers.

She was a virgin, in all real senses of the word.

He felt as if the raw joy burning in the back of his throat might explode, so he simply tucked back, concentrating on showing the woman he loved that she didn't know a thing about making love. Great waves of passion kept swamping the joy. Far off in the distant recesses of his mind not occupied by the sweet undulations of her body, with the way she panted with surprise and the way her eyes were squeezed tight now, as if she were going somewhere that couldn't be seen, he was conscious of two things. One was that his buttocks had never been exposed to an English summer, and they were definitely beginning to feel as if a sunburn might be in the offing. And the second was that that infernal goat had stolen Bea's dress and galloped to the other side of the field with yards of white lace falling from its mouth.

But then even those bits of rational thought flew from him. He dove higher into her body, and she cried out, cries that spiraled, falling away into the bright air. Stephen ground his teeth and said hoarsely, “Come on, Bea, come with me!”

And Bea opened her eyes and saw him poised above her, outlined in the indigo blue sky, her beautiful, proper Puritan.

He stopped for a moment, bent his head and crushed his mouth against her. “I love you,” he said hoarsely. “My Bea.”

She arched up to meet him, heard his groan, lost herself in the prism of sunshine and pleasure that rained on her, spiraling through her arms and legs, driving her against his chest, telling her without words the difference between wooing and seduction.

“E
sme, what's the matter?” She was even whiter than when he'd seen her last, her face pallid and drawn. There was a gleaming trail of tears down her cheek. “Is William all right?” Sebastian sat down on the bed and peered at the babe. William looked just as moon-faced as he had last week. Long lashes brushed his cheeks, and he was snoring a little bit. Sebastian felt a funny sensation around his chestbone. He was a sweet-looking child, as children went.

“He's caught a cold,” Esme said, her voice strangling on a sob.

Sebastian could see that she had obviously been crying for a long time. He put an arm around her shoulder and peered down at William again.

His rosy little lips opened in a snore.

“There! Do you hear it?” Esme said.

“He's snoring,” Sebastian said. “Did Miles snore?”

“That's not a snore. He's caught a cold…probably inflammation of the lung,” Esme said, tears rolling down her face. “Now I'll only have him with me for a few days at most. I knew this would happen; I knew this would happen!” Her voice rose to a near shriek.

William stirred. He could hardly move, he was wrapped in so many blankets.

“I think he's hot,” Esme continued, and the broken despair in her voice caught Sebastian's heart. She put a trembling hand to the baby's head. “I keep feeling his head and one moment I think he's caught a fever, and the next he seems to be perfectly all right. What do you think, Sebastian?”

“I'm hardly an expert.” He cautiously felt William's forehead. It felt sweaty to him. “Do you think he might be wearing a few too many blankets? There's quite a fire in here, after all.”

“No, no,” Esme said, tucking his blankets around him even more securely.

“Why don't you ask your nanny?” Sebastian asked, inspired.

“I sent her to bed. She's too old to be awake at night.”

“The nursemaid, then? Surely you have some help at night.”

“I sent the woman away. She just didn't understand babies. She didn't understand William, not at all. She never forgave me for nursing him myself, and she was always trying to bathe him in the midst of a cold draft.”

“Oh,” Sebastian said. He fished in his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief.

Esme wiped her eyes. “She kept talking about
strengthening
him. But William is far too frail to be exposed to drafts, or to the fresh air. Why, she actually wanted to take him outdoors! She was being grossly imprudent, and I had to tell her so.”

She sniffed, and a few more tears rolled down her cheeks. “And then—and then she said that William was as fat as a porkchop and didn't have a cold at all. It was as if she'd never been around babies at all! Any fool could hear that William was having trouble breathing when he's asleep.”

William snored peacefully. Sebastian looked closely at Esme and was shocked. All the generous lushness in her face was gone, replaced by a drawn exhaustion and a brutal whiteness. “Poor darling,” he said. “You're all topped out, aren't you?”

“It's just that it's so tiring! No one understands William, no one! Even nanny keeps saying he's a brawny boy and I should just leave him in the nursery at night. But I can't do that, Sebastian, you must see that. What if he needed me? What if he were hungry? What if his cold worsened, or his blankets slipped?”

Sebastian pushed himself back against the headboard and then gently pulled Esme into his arms. She leaned back with a great, racking sigh, her head falling on his shoulder.

“He's a bonny lad,” he said.

“Yes.” She was utterly exhausted. He could see violet shadows under her eyes. Slowly he curled an arm around her and eased her back more comfortably against his shoulder. “Rest,” he said softly.

“You shouldn't be here!” she said, sitting up again. “My mother—well, surely you met my mother at dinner. She's come for a visit.”

Sebastian had decided not to say a word about Esme's mother. “She can have no idea that I'm in your chamber. Rest, Esme.”

William snored on. After a few moments, Esme's long eyelashes fluttered closed and her body relaxed against his. Sebastian waited for a few minutes more, eased her back against the pillows, and gently took William from her arms.

Esme's eyes popped open. “Make sure you hold his head up,” she said blearily. “Tuck in his blankets.”

“I will,” Sebastian said soothingly. “Lie down.”

“You mustn't forget to prop up his neck,” she insisted, but she was already toppling to the side, her whole body a testament to acute exhaustion.

Sebastian experimented cautiously for a moment and discovered what she was talking about. William's head seemed to be too heavy for his body. “I hope you outgrow this problem,” he told the baby, walking over to the rocking chair by the fire. Perhaps it was just because the child was sleeping.

In the light thrown by the firelight, he could see two things. One was that William was definitely overheated. His hair was damp with sweat and his cheeks were rosy. But it didn't look like a fever; it looked as if four blankets were too much. He gently loosened some of the blankets, and it seemed to him that the baby was a little more comfortable. The second thing he noticed was that William did indeed look like Miles Rawlings. His eyes were closed, of course, but surely those were Miles's plump cheeks and Miles's rounded chin? Even the fact that William had no hair seemed evocative of Rawlings's balding state.

So Sebastian, Marquess Bonnington, rocked the baby in front of the fire and thought hard about how much he wanted the child to be his, because he hoped that if the child was his, Esme couldn't deny him fatherhood. But fatherhood wouldn't be enough anyway. He looked over at the utterly silent mound of womanhood in the bed. He didn't want Esme as a wife merely because she felt it necessary to give his son a father.

He wanted Esme to love him for himself, love him so much that she braved scandal. It was almost comical. How on earth had it happened that he, an excruciatingly correct marquess whose ideas of propriety were so rigidly enforced, had ended up asking a lady to disregard social mores, cause a scandal of profound proportions, and marry him?

And more to the point, how was he to get her to that point? He knew instinctively that it was no use asking her to marry him again. She cared only for William at the moment. Somehow, he had to bring her around to see him as a man again. And herself as a woman, as well as a mother. Sebastian rocked and thought, and William snored.