Fallen Angel (27 page)

In answer, she gripped the arms of the chair and tried to rise. He prevented her by the simple expedient of sweeping her thighs apart and dropping to his knees. They were groin to groin. Maddie made a vain attempt to twist backwards. His powerful arms wrapped around her shoulders and he dragged her forward. He gave a low, throaty chuckle.

"Simpleton! Don't you know that the laws of the land are made by men? This is the only kind of consummation that means anything to a man."

He dragged the hem of her skirt to her waist.

Maddie closed her eyes against the spectacle of uncaring masculine hands desecrating the most beautiful gown she had ever had in her possession. This was no ordinary gown. It was a work of art. From the moment Mr. Forsythe had drawn her attention to its magnificence, she had harboured the whimsy of treasuring it like a family heirloom. A mother ought to have something to hand down to her daughter. Her own mother had been wed in little more than her shift.

She heard the soft rending of silk and her eyes flew open. A small tear had opened up along the seam of her bodice. She hopped from one foot to the other. "Oh, Jason! Please! No!" And she captured his hands and flung them from her.

Her rejection stunned him. "Maddie!" he protested. "Don't you want me to?" and his hands found the soft flesh above her knees and squeezed persuasively.

"Oh" she wailed. "Look at the creases. My gown was perfect when I walked into this room."

She pushed to her feet, and Deveryn sat back on his heels, his nose pressed tantalizingly close to her softly rounded stomach. He couldn't stop himself. His hands spread out behind her and he dragged her close. He buried his head in the lower part of her body and kissed her passionately with moist, wet lips through the silk of her gown. One tug brought her across his thighs, her knees splayed wide. He captured her hands and held them behind his neck.

"Jason, please, my gown," she mewed in his ear.

"I'll buy you a dozen," he grunted and eased her skirt to her hips. He shifted her in his arms till the valley between her thighs cradled the full length of his arousal. The protective clothing was ineffectual as a barrier. Each was intensely aware of the body heat forged by their mutual proximity. He rotated his hips, an invitation and a promise. Maddie clung to his neck and threw back her head in abandon. Her weak, strangled sound of pleasure drove his passion higher. His mouth coursed down her throat, and through the taut silk of her bodice he found a swollen nipple and grazed it with his teeth.

Maddie jerked. "Jason, it's my
wedding gown"
she entreated.

That her distress was genuine gradually penetrated his passion drugged senses. After a moment's indecision, he growled, "Damn if I can understand women," but his hands moved to her back and he laboured to release each tiny pearl button from its buttonhole.

"Now help me take it off," she implored, but her head lolled against his shoulder, her body boneless as if the gown were forgotten.

"Damn!" He wouldn't take the chance of being stopped again. He shimmied the dress over her shoulders and peeled it from her. One swift toss and it fell on the bed in a heap.

She did a little jig of distress on his lap. He sucked in his breath and stilled her movements. "Maddie, for God's sake, have a care," and he nipped at her shoulder to
reinforce his
command.

She moaned, "Oh my gown, my beautiful gown. Please let me hang it up. I want to keep it for our daughter."

"We haven't got a daughter," he pointed out.

"No, but one day we may! Oh Jason, please?"

Comprehension slowly dawned. Hadn't his own sisters married in his mother's wedding finery, with a few alterations, of course, to allow for the changes in fashions? Maddie's distraction seemed more understandable. These trifles meant a lot to a woman.

With a smothered sigh of resignation, he lifted her effortlessly and dumped her in the chair. "Don't move a muscle," he told her, then stalked to the bed and removed the crushed gown and spencer. It took only a moment to hang them in the clothes press. Even so, when he resumed his kneeling position in front of Maddie's chair, he knew at a glance that she had gone cold on him. Her knees were glued together and the fingers which curled around the arm rests were rigid with tension. He thought she looked adorable in her frilly drawers and chemise.

His hands cupped her knees. "Open your legs, Maddie," he pleaded softly.

If anything, they tightened against him.

"It's . . . indecent and . . . undignified," she whispered, and her eyes wandered to the shaft of light streaming in the window.

His fingers found the ties of her drawers and inexorably began to release them. "You heard the solicitor," he said persuasively. "The marriage must be consummated—male fashion. Just close your eyes and think of, of . . . Scotland," he quickly invented.

She thought of Scotland then gave a little gurgle of laughter. Her knees relaxed a fraction. "That won't help," she said without thinking.

"Why not?" Surreptitiously, he wedged an elbow between her parted thighs. His other hand trailed with studied idleness inside the loosened opening of her drawers.

Because,
she thought to herself,
the emblem, of Scotland, is a lion rampant.

Very deliberately, he touched his fingers to the triangle of auburn curls, softer than satin, at the apex of her thighs. She tightened her knees too late to prevent his gentle invasion. Her head arched back, and her thighs opened. He swept them apart. She was moist and ready for him, her body open to him. And he was done with gentling her.

Impatiently, he hooked one powerful arm behind her waist and hauled her bodily towards him, twisting, turning, till his back was braced against the chair and she lay just as he wanted her. One arm quelled her flayling arms and elbows, and his mouth cut off the words that spilled from her lips. His fingers found her and slipped inside the moist warmth that both excited and reassured him. She wanted him. Deliberately, he flexed his fingers and the girl in his arms tensed then melted, moulding herself against him, silently, unmistakably, inviting his fuller possession.

He released her mouth and he rested his forehead against hers, their breaths hotly mingling, his harsh and laboured, hers slow, shallow, painful.

"I don't know what it is you do to me," she told him on a thread of a voice she scarcely recognized as her own. "I find myself doing what I swore I wouldn't do."

"Good," he grunted. "That makes two of us."

He stripped her of her lacy underthings and tossed them aside. His hands went to the buttons of his trousers and he moved slightly till he eased them down, kicking them off to lie in a heap at his feet.

"I'm all yours," he said to her, his eyes dancing with wicked enjoyment. "What do you want to do with me?"

She hung her head. "Jason, I'm not very good at this."

"You're not a novice," he encouraged. "You know what I want," and his mouth dipped down to take full suckle at the breasts he had been so intently studying a moment before.

She cradled her hand to the silky length of his shaft. "Like this?" she whispered, sliding with the featherlight pressure he had taught her once before.

His fingers tangled in her hair and she was rocked back on her heels. "Maddie," he rasped, his voice a whisper of apology. "I meant to go slow," and his lips slanted across her lips in a hungry demand, his tongue delving and receding in her open mouth in an unmistakable rhythm that sent her senses spinning.

She was turning, turning like a kite blown about by the wind till he brought her to a safe landing. Languorously, she stretched out on the floor before the hearth. He knelt between her knees and nudged them further apart.

"You're wet for me," he told her with a grunt of satisfaction, and he settled himself against her parted thighs.

Passion put to flight all inhibitions. "What do you want me to do?" she asked throatily, and rotated her hips in deliberate invitation.

He braced his forearms on either side of her head. "I want you to say the words to me, Maddie," and he teased her bottom lip with the tip of his tongue. "You've never said the words to me," he breathed into her mouth. "Say them," and his hips rocked against her heated flesh in tantalizing arousal.

The silence seemed to throb with a thousand misgivings that kept her from him.

"Say it," he urged.

"I'm . . . afraid." She needed time to sort things out. Everything had happened too quickly. He demanded too much of her.

"Then say you don't love me."

"I can 't

With a kind of hopeless anguish, he thrust into her, filling her aching emptiness with his masculine complement. "I'll make you love me," he promised.

And then began the erotic dance as he taught her body the measure and counterpoint to match his rhythm, each thrust driving her pleasure higher, higher. With tender restraint, he held himself back till he felt her sudden leap to ecstasy. He followed, a mere heartbeat behind. Unfettered now, his movements became rougher, deeper, and as he spilled into her, he groaned her name over and over and over.

In blissful repletion, he slid from her and dragged her to his side. He trailed wet kisses from her eyelids to her ear and along the underside of her jaw. "You do love me. You just won't admit it," he told her fiercely, and cradled her limp body more securely to his own. Maddie was strangely silent.

He raised on one elbow and looked down at her tousled head. "What is it, love? What are you thinking?"

"Splinters," she mumbled into his chest. He had to strain to hear.

"Splinters?"

"I think there's one embedded in my . . . posterior."

Laughter was quickly followed by dismay when he pulled to his knees and looked down at a hotly blushing Maddie. He could scarcely credit that he'd taken her on the bare floorboards in the middle of the afternoon. The girl was his bride, gently bred and innocent, and deserving of his utmost restraint. Yet here he was, again, abusing her abominably, as if she were the veriest trollop he had picked up at the Cyprian's Ball.

With infinite tenderness, he lifted her in his arms and carried her to the bed. He rolled her onto her stomach. As he knelt beside her, scrutinizing her derriere, Maddie hid her burning cheeks in the pillows. He saw at once the cause of her distress. Imbedded in the soft rise of one cheek was a wicked looking tack.

"Good grief, girl. You must have been in agony."

Maddie blushed even hotter. "No,
I. . .
I felt nothing
till. . .
till afterwards," she confessed in a small voice.

He was glad that she could not see the smug grin that creased his cheeks. There was something exhilarating in knowing that one's lovemaking could make a woman totally oblivious to pain.

He left her for a moment and returned with a washcloth and a bottle of brandy.

"This is going to hurt," he warned. She made no protest as he pulled the tack from her flesh, but when he poured the brandy into the small puncture, she writhed deeper into the covers.

A drop of dark blood oozed from the wound. He dabbed it with the brandy-soaked washcloth. Maddie squirmed. The bleeding seemed to have stopped. His eyes leisurely travelled over her, calmly taking possession of what he regarded as his private stock. She was small boned, perfectly proportioned, and totally female in her rounded contours and deeply carved valleys.

"Has it stopped bleeding?" she asked softly.

"No," he lied.

The scents in the room were intoxicating—a heady mixture of apples, brandy and most inflaming of all to his rapidly arousing senses, the pervasive scent of their lovemaking. His resolution to be a temperate lover for his bride began to wane. The struggle with his
better
nature was short-lived. "What the hell," he thought. He dumped the washcloth on the bedside table and climbed into bed.

Maddie turned her head on the pillow as his lips grazed her shoulder.

"What are you doing?"

Wordlessly, he lay prone on top of her, taking some of his weight on his braced arms. With the tip of his tongue, he traced a wet path from her ear to the throbbing pulse at the join of her shoulder. He heard the soft, liquid sound deep in her throat, and his body tightened, squeezing his lungs till his breath came hard and fast. He closed his eyes against the pounding in his ears and rested his bowed head on the shadowed hollow of her back. He breathed deeply, forcing himself to a slower pace. She was warm, soft and trembling beneath him. Her scent filled his nostrils.