Everything I Ever Wanted (35 page)

"Most assuredly not. I cannot think of anything more certain to land you in the drink. I will trust you to be quick about it."

He was. South took the proffered book and stepped back a respectful distance.

India glanced in his direction when he did not move toward the stairs. One of her eyebrows lifted in mock admonishment. "You are hovering, my lord."

South looked down at himself. His feet were definitely planted. He only felt as if he were floating. That was what India did to him with her arched eyebrow and coolly remote smile. He had triedand failednot to notice that her naked shoulders reflected the translucent gold and orange flames of the fire or that a diamond drop of water was sliding slowly from the hollow beneath her ear along the line of slender neck.

"You're beautiful," he told her.

India looked away from his darkening eyes. "Don't."

"I understand why he wants to paint you."

"No, you don't."

South stood there a moment longer, taking in the stubborn alt of her chin and the unyielding set of her mouth. She would not explain herself now, even if he pressed her. He bad already learned that nothing helpful came of that. South sorted for the stairs, pausing only briefly at the bottom. "Will you come to my room tonight, India?"

"Yes."

He waited for her to meet his eyes. When she did not, he merely nodded once and continued slowly up the stairs.

India did not move until she heard South open and close the door to his bedchamber. Even then, she rose only a few inches higher in the tub. It was enough that when she looked down at herself she could see the white curves of her breasts above the water and the rosy aureoles below it Deeper still, she could make out the pale length of her thighs and calves.

She would have to tell him, of course. She could not bear for him to call her beautiful again. The hushed and almost reverent tone he had used should never have been directed toward her, but reserved for something that inspired awe. Far from being flattered, India had merely felt ugly and undeserving. It was not South's fault, she knew, but hers. He did not know what Margrave had done to her body, how it had been made hideous by his admiration so that even she could no longer abide looking at it.

So, yes, she thought. She would have to tell him. But when? Tonight? India shook her head in response to her silent question. She was too selfish to do it this evening, when the promise of his loving her was the last thing she had heard in his voice. Will you come to my room tonight, India ?

He meant to take her into his bed, his arms. He would press his body against hers so that she could feel the heat of his skin and know the planes and angles of his lean frame. There would be his mouth next to her ear, then again at her throat. His palms would be filled with her breasts and the curve of her hips. His knee would separate hers and nudge the sensitive inner side of her thighs. She could feel him hard and hot against her belly, and he would come into her because it was what she wanted.

No, she would not tell him tonight. Perhaps in the morning, she thought, when darkness could no longer shield her, and the memory of his loving would be bittersweet. She could tell him then.

She was brave enough for that. She hoped.

Sighing deeply, India found the sponge trapped between her hip and the tub. She rubbed it with the sliver of scented soap Mrs. Simon had bought for her in the village. The fragrance of lavender filled her nostrils. She leaned back once more and closed her eyes and remembered how South liked to bury his face against her hair.

With that vision keeping her warm, India sank slowly beneath the water.

India set her candlestick on the bedside table and stepped out of her slippers. The floor was cold enough to make her hop immediately onto the bed. South was waiting for her with a cocoon of blankets as soon as she lay back. She snuggled into the curve of his body, giving up a contented little sigh and shiver as she did so. His wicked smile was imprinted in her mind as he leaned over her to extinguish the candle. Her arms looped around his shoulders.

"You warmed my side of the bed," she whispered. "Thank you."

South's smile deepened. He very much liked the idea that she had appropriated part of his bed as her own. "Your side? I was not aware you had a side here."

India stopped rubbing the cold soles of her feet against Ms legs. "I did not mean"

His lips unerringly found the fullness of hers, and the kiss he meant only to silence her lingered long past the first sweet moment. Slow and measured, in the end they were both drugged by it. South raised his head and felt the faint tug of her mouth as he parted from her. His voice was husky.

"I was teasing, India. You may make any claim here that you wish. Indeed, I hope you do."

The firelight's dim glow allowed her to see the arched eyebrow that gave South's features such a deliciously wicked cast. "I think you have something specific in mind."

"Mmmm." He bent his head and brushed her lips again. "Perhaps you are right."

India stretched under him, liking the weight and warmth of his tautly muscled frame against her. Her fingers threaded in his hair, and she held his head still when he would have drawn back. "Then I claim you, my lord."

The soft growl at the back of South's throat signaled his surrender. He felt the slight pressure of her fingertips against his scalp, and he lowered his head until his mouth was a hairbreadth from hers. If she said anything at all, he thought he would be able to know the shape of her words before he heard them.

She said nothing, though. What she did was kiss him.

Her mouth nudged his open. The tip of her tongue made a damp trail on the sensitive underside of his upper lip. It flickered along the ridge of his teeth, then probed more intimately, teasing, tasting, and finally engaging him in a deeply carnal kiss.

India's fingers drifted from his thick hair to his nape, where she could ease the fine cords of tension in his neck. Her hands slid still lower, resting lightly on his shoulders, his upper arms, then his back. His muscles shifted under her touch, his skin grew warm. Her thumbs traced a line on either side of his spine until they rested in the small dimples at the base, just above his buttocks.

There had never been a moment since entering his bed that India was not aware of his body's response to her. South's erection had pressed hot and hard against her hip when she had first nestled against him, and he could have opened her thighs and taken her then, whether she was prepared to accept him or not. The fact that he did not lent her courage now.

When she felt him grow even more rigid against her belly, she sucked in her breath to make room for her hands to slip between their bodies. She made a cradle for his penis with her palms, then drew them along the length of his heavy erection.

South thought he would come out of his skin. He reared back as she repeated the motion, then thrust himself against her hands. His eyes closed. He tried to hold back, but his hips ground against her anyway. Her fingernails lightly scraped the underside of his scrotum. The words he uttered against the base of her ear were unintelligible.

"Let me," she said. "I want to"

She could do whatever she wanted, he thought. Here was torture he did not properly know how to resist, even if it were his desire to do so. It was not. "Yes," he said. "Yes."

Emboldened now by South's hoarsely whispered encouragement, India wriggled out from under him and pressed him onto his back. He helped her raise the hem of her voluminous nightgown as she rose to her knees. It bunched around her hips as she moved across his body to straddle his thighs. He would have raised it higher, but she pushed his hands away. She ignored his throaty chuckle and caught the material in her fists instead. He fell perfectly silent as India lifted the filmy batiste fabric past her hips and waist, higher still over her breasts and shoulders, and finally over her head. She let it dangle at the end of her fingertips before she dropped it over the side of the bed.

For a moment, her body was limned by the firelight. The contours of her slender frame were given the clear, sharp detail of one of her sketches. Instead of the dark definition of a pencil, the tilt of her head was outlined in golden light. It was the same with the slope of her breasts and the curve of her arm.

South's glimpse was only fleeting. There was no opportunity to enjoy the sight of her before she bent over him and drew up the blankets. Her body was in deep shadow once more, but now it didn't matter, because he could feel the shape of her as she stretched out along his length: her breasts, her hands, her thighs, her mouth.

All of her was beautiful, though he refrained from saying so. It surprised him to hear the words anyway, more so to realize they hadn't come from his lips but from hers.

"You are," she whispered against his lips. "I thought so from the first."

For once South was glad of the darkness, because it hid what he was certain was his ruddy blush. He pinched her lightly on the backside to let her know what he thought of her outrageous compliment.

India was not deterred. She merely wriggled against him, the consequence of which was for South to press his fingers against her buttocks to hold her still.

"I think you are a witch," he said.

"Then I am glad of it." India kissed him again at her leisure, touching her mouth to the corner of his, making her way along his jaw, nibbling at his earlobe. She worked her way down his throat, across his collarbone. She kissed his shoulder and spread more across his chest. Her body slid down his; her hands lightly grazed his skin. He had to give up the grasp he had on her bottom and let his own fingers glide along her back as she slipped lower. He made out the crown of her pale hair just before it disappeared under the covers.

"India?"

She found him with her mouth and hands. South's heart tripped over its own beat, then hammered hard against his chest. Blood surged hot in his veins, and he felt its rush from his brain to his groin. He was touched as if by a fine madness, lost to coherent thought, driven forward by carnal instinct. This was the heady power of lust, hers and his, and he had only to feel it.

The hot suck of India's mouth, the light pressure of her fist at the base of his penis, drew a short, harsh groan from South. Under the covers, his fingers dug into her silky hair as if to give himself purchase. Her tongue laved his flesh. Her hand squeezed. Each foray imitated the thrust of his body in hers, and she did for him here what he had done between her thighs, taking him deeply and wetly and with snail murmurs that were equal parts frustration and satisfaction.

"India." He said her name softly, huskily. "Stop. You must" He felt her shoulders stiffen. "You must stop." Her mouth lifted slowly. Her lips lingered near the head of his engorged shaft. South pushed back the covers, laughing a little desperately when India's head poked out. "Come here."

Uncertain, she pushed herself up on her forearms and inched herself up his body until she was stretched along his length again. "I have repulsed you," she whispered, her breath hitching.

There was a faint roar in his ears, and South had to strain to hear her. It was more difficult to comprehend her meaning. "No!" Then more gently, "No. Can you not feel all evidence to the contrary?"

She certainly felt the pulsing outline of his erection against her belly. '"That? It signifies nothing. You were in such a state when I came to bed."

South thought he would choke in an effort to hold back his laughter. It occurred to him that she meant to kill him in exactly this manner, and that all men should die so happily. With just such an end in mind, South cupped her bottom, lifted her, and, hearing no protest from India, eased himself into her. "I was in such a state before you came to bed."

"Is it the Gothic novel that makes you so?"

In response, South's hand snaked upward and grasped the nape of India's neck. He pressed her head down and kissed her hard. When he was quite certain she was breathless and would have no more sauce for him, he told her, " Castle Rackrent is absorbing, my dearest India, but hardly arousing. And well you know it." South did not miss the flash of her siren's smile or the way her body contracted around him. He laid his palm against the side of her face; his thumb brushed the underside of her chin. "You did not repulse me, India," he said softly, solemnly. "Let us leave it at that."

She nodded. Turning her face into his hand, India kissed the heart of his palm. She felt him shudder under her, and then the vibration became her own and the frisson was traveling up her spine and across her shoulders. She felt it in her fingertips as she pressed them into the mattress on either side of his shoulders and raised herself up. Her body began to slowly undulate, lifting, falling, sliding, rocking. She pressed her pelvis against him. The pulse in her throat beat out the the rhythm of her most intimate contractions. Leaning toward him, India offered her breasts to his hands. He cupped them, brushing his thumbs across her nipples until they hardened to small pink stones. Her pale hair fell forward over her shoulder and lay lightly across the back of his hands. Her breasts swelled under the exquisite caress of his fingertips.

She looked down at herself and was moved by the sight of his hands on her body. Here was the proof that it did not have to be ugly, she thought. There was some part of her that had always known it must be so, though she had never been able to embrace it as the truth. It crystallized the difference between understanding and believing.

"What is it?" he asked.

India smiled faintly, ruefully. She shook her head, deflecting his question. The curling tips of her hair swung across his hands, and she moaned softly as her nipples scraped his palms. She closed her eyes as his fingers trailed from her breasts down her rib cage. She sucked in her breath, held it, then released it slowly when his touch finally passed over her abdomen.

South slipped his hand between her parted thighs. The little heart nestled in the folds of dewy flesh pulsed against his fingertips. He stroked her once. Twice. He teased her with the tip of his nail. She cried out as the hood of her clitoris was pushed back and the pleasure became too intense to bear. He eased his caress, rubbing more gently now, flesh against flesh, each stroke deliberate and unhurried, paced to the tempo of her breathing and the rhythm of her slowly undulating hips.

He stared up at her, his throat arched, his chest rising and falling in a slightly uneven cadence. There was the faint igh of his breath in the quiet room. He felt the hot strings of tension being pulled taut, first in him, then in her. South grasped her hips, and his fingers dug into the soft flesh of her buttocks. He urged her body faster and harder over his. He bucked. She rode. India gripped him with her thighs, a look of fierce concentration coming over her features as she brought him to climax.

He gave a hoarse shout as he spilled his seed into her. India held him tightly. She leaned forward and pressed a kiss in the curve of his neck, breathing deeply of his masculine scent. The smile that shaped her lush mouth and branded his skin was one of delight and triumph. Her small white seeth nipped his flesh.

South slapped her bottom.

She merely wriggled it against him.

Entirely spent, he was unable to fathom that she could rouse a single sensation in him, yet it was undeniably a prickling he felt under his skin. One of his dark brows arched. "You are feeling very full of yourself."

"No, m'lord. Full of you."

Still joined to her, South swiftly turned India on her back and nestled his hips firmly in the cradle of her thighs. He caught her wrists and lifted them to either side of her head; then he kissed her hard on her damp and parted lips. At first he thought it was only his kiss that had quieted her laughter; then he realized she was far too still under him, her breathing fixed and measured. "What is it?" he asked. "No, do not shake your head at me. Tell me."

"If you would but release me."

South loosed his hold on her wrists and began to move away.

"No," she said quickly. "It is enough that you let me go."

He stayed where was, resting his weight on his forearms. "Better?"

She nodded.

For a moment he thought she might say more, but then she seemed to reconsider the wisdom of it. South let it pass, loath to disturb the peace between them. There was still the matter of India's own satisfaction to attend to. Her body shifted restlessly beneath his, seeking it. Her movement was enough to raise his roguish smile.

"Lusty wench," he murmured against her ear.

"Yes," she whispered. "It must be so."

His smile deepened because she said it as if it startled her. South slipped from between her thighs and turned onto his side. India whimpered softly at the loss. "Shhh," he said and turned her toward him. He stroked her hip, then the curve of her thigh. He drew her leg across his so that she was parted for him again. He caressed the soft inner side of her thigh. Her hips jerked as his hand drew closer, and she sucked in her lower lip. He pressed the heel of his hand against her mons and felt her press back. She was silky here, too. Warm and wet. His fingers found the hard little nubbin of flesh, and he deftly manipulated it until he felt her breathing change. She reached for his arm as if to shake him off; then her hands found purchase in the sheets instead.