Highland Heat 2 - All The King's Men (2 page)

There was no question that he meant what he said. And because I’d never taken a whipping in my life—so obedient a child was I—my lower lip wobbled in apprehension. He could easily have me clasped in chains for treason; now might not be time to press my luck.
 

I sullenly slipped back into bed beside him, keeping as close to the edge of the mattress as I could get. He was undeterred by my obvious anger. “You are
extraordinarily
lovely, do you know that?” he asked, brushing a tendril of red hair from my eyes. “Even when you’re scowling like a child whose had her sweets snatched away.”

“I’m not a child,” I snapped.

“You’re behaving like one,” he said, with only a wee bit of censure. “I did not
force
you to become my mistress, after all. I very clearly laid out the conditions of our arrangement. I told you exactly what I expect from you. Exactly what to expect from me. I have kept to my end of the bargain in every particular, have I not?”

He had, at that. He let me want for nothing. I merely had to point to a bauble and he would make a gift of it for me. Dresses, bonnets, combs, gloves. There was very little he denied me in, or out, of his bed. But it hadn’t been the promise of enrichment that had lured me there. “
Why
did you plant a false book for me to find?” I asked, seething, still wondering where he must have hidden the real one. “Just to torment me?”

The major sighed. “Isn’t it obvious that I want to teach you?”

“Teach me what?”

“Spycraft and
oh
, so many other things…”

My mouth fell slightly agape. “
Spycraft
?”

“Surely you’ve deduced, by now, that the services I render the crown are not of an ordinary nature…”

What I had deduced was that there were many things about him that made no sense. He had the bearing of nobility, but no title. He spent more lavishly than someone might on a soldier’s salary. He had a very vague notion of morality, a suspicious lack of anxiety about all sexual matters, and was entirely too dashing for an Englishman.
 

Suddenly, my hopes soared.
 

My God, were we actually
allies
?
 

I lowered my voice to a pitifully hopeful whisper. “Are you saying that you’re a foreign agent? Are you a Frenchman secretly working against the English for Charles Stuart?”

He looked as pained as if I had run him through with a sword. “I would never betray crown and country. Much more importantly, I’m
not
a Frenchman!”
 

He said this with all the affront only an Englishman could bring to bear, and my hopes were entirely dashed. “Then I don’t understand. If you’re not a spy—”

“Yes, continue with that thought. If I am not a spy
against
the English, and I’m obviously not pretending to be a Scotsman
for
the English, then what must I be?”

“A
spymaster
,” I breathed.
 

“Very good,” he said, with an audible smooch to my nose. “You can learn the craft from me. I find it rather gratifying to teach you…” He then smiled as if delighted that I had come to the correct conclusion, dipping his head to press a hot kiss on my bare shoulder.

As always, his mouth ignited a fire beneath my skin, but my stomach went cold with horrified understanding. He recruited and trained spies in Scotland. And he thought he was recruiting and training
me
!
 

But I would never betray the Jacobites. My chest heaving with offense, I said, “I fear you have misjudged me completely.”

“Have I?” he asked, slowly, wickedly, nibbling his way up my neck to growl in my ear. “Oh, I don’t think I have. I think you’re a brave, adventurous sensualist who has been sorely neglected and overlooked by the very countrymen to whom she’s so fiercely loyal…”

That struck a nerve at the core of me. My father had never seen me as fit for more than a nursemaid to care for him in his dotage. My brothers dismissed me as the little sister who kept the kitchen at the tavern. And the fierce highland warrior I had wanted to marry abandoned me at the first obstacle to our love.
 

But that didn’t mean I would betray them.
 

“You can’t turn me,” I insisted, even as I hissed with helpless pleasure at the way his teeth gently scraped at the soft lobe of my ear.

“I don’t need to turn you, my dear Sorcha,” he whispered, his steely arm wrapping around me to draw me closer. “Do you know what makes for the most pleasurable sexual experiences? There’s an art to it, you know…” An art he knew well. But in spite of all the ways in which he’d debauched me, I still felt a novice in the ways of lovemaking.
 

“Surrender?” I guessed.

I felt him smile against my neck as his hand drifted between my legs. “Surrender is certainly a pleasurable thing between the two of us. You enjoy surrendering, and I enjoy your surrender. But that is unique to the two of us. Still, it proves the general point. The art of sexual pleasure is in seeking the nexus of common interest. The very place where both lovers get what they want and need.” He said this just as his fingers found the very place between my legs where I most needed him to touch, and I moaned in spite of myself.

“I always look for those common interests with a mistress,” he murmured, his breath deepening with his own arousal. “And it is the very same thing I look for in a spy. I don’t need to
turn
you, Sorcha. I only need to find the sweet spot to exploit where our interests are precisely the same.”

 
“You are
diabolical
,” I hissed again, this time with pleasure, the nub between my nether lips swelling and hardening under his attentions.

“Do you
really
think so?” he asked, amusement in his accented voice as he drew me into another long night of pleasure. “I rather like to think that I’m on the side of the angels. After all, I love to make you cry
Oh, God
…”

~~~

“What is troubling you, my dear?” Major Anderson asked the next Sunday morning as I splashed water on my face, my shaking hands apparently having given me away. From his side of the bed, where he was pulling on his breeches, he said, “Don’t tell me you’re still agitated about the blank book…”

“My courses are late,” I whispered, not daring to look at him.

The room went silent for a moment. Utterly silent.

“For the first time since I took you for my mistress or the second?” he finally asked.

“The first,” I snapped, because I knew precisely why he was asking.
 

Mercifully, my woman’s blood had flowed a few weeks after he’d shared me with his men in my father’s kitchen. At least I could cling to the fact that if I was with child, I would at least know the name of its father. And I suppose that was the answer he wanted to hear, too, because Major Anderson quickly closed the space between us, grasping me in his arms, his blue eyes gleaming. “So then it’s mine. You’re to bear my child!”

It was, for me, the worst possible thing that could happen. Which made his possessive and smug exuberance entirely unbearable. “I never said I was with child. I said my courses are late. Which, could signify nothing at all. It’s far too early to tell.”

“Oh,
no
,” he said, caressing my back, hands drifting lower to my derrière, which he squeezed tight. “I’m sure it signifies exactly what you think it does, my lovely. You see, I’ve made a close study of your body. A
very close
study. I’ve noticed the increased tenderness and sensitivity of your breasts when I suckle at those delicious nipples—which appear a darker burgundy recently. Much darker than before. I believe you’re going to have a baby, my dear.”

A part of me was flattered and amazed that he noticed every tiny detail about me and my body. But how could he be so pleased about a possibility that made me miserable? “I’m going to have a
bastard
, you mean.”

“Ah, yes, well. But that’s nothing to be concerned about!” He planted a kiss on my cheek. “Plenty of bastards have done very well for themselves in life, haven’t they? Some of them have even got titles of nobility. Besides, making a show of manly virility by conceiving a by-blow with a mistress is practically a rite of passage for the men in my family. I couldn’t be more
delighted
, Sorcha. Truly.”

Oh, how I wanted to slap him! I felt so shamed an scared and sick. And like a trapped animal, I lashed out, “What if I’d said it wasn’t the first but the second time I’d missed my courses? Would you still be clasping me against you, grinning like a fool?”

“Yes, but for entirely different reasons, of course. I’ve never made love with a pregnant woman before and I’ve always wanted to know what the experience feels like. Moreover, if your courses were late twice, then it would make for a very amusing guessing game as to which of my men the father might—”
 

He caught my flying fist mid-air, squeezing my wrist tight in his grip. “Now, now, Sorcha. If you’re going to land a blow against a trained soldier, you need to learn not to signal your intention quite so clearly.”

“You bastard. You
bloody
bastard!”

“Not, actually,” he said, with perfect calmness in the face of my fury. “My parents were married when I was born. What they got up to before then, I can’t say. But I have my father’s name.”

With my blood pounding furiously, I said, “Well, my child will never be an
Anderson
. I’ll take some consolation in that!”

The major’s lip gave a slight furl. “You don’t really think that’s my name, do you? What sort of spymaster would I be if I went about using my own name? No. That would never do. And if I were to ever bestow any name upon my child, you can be sure it won’t be something so dreadfully common and uninspiring as
Anderson
.”

He was truly the most infuriating man I’d ever met. Mysterious and utterly incomprehensible. With a furious and defiant tilt of my chin, I said, “Maybe it isn’t your child.”

“We’ve just been over this, Sorcha. You’ve been in my bed and only my bed in the past month or so…”

“Are you sure about that?” I asked, wanting to hurt him. Wanting him to share a little of the feeling of panic and anxiety I felt. Not wanting to be seen as the plaything of an Englishman the rest of my life, which is what I would surely be if I bore his bastard child. A bairn would be eternal evidence of my sin. “Maybe there have been others…”

The major withdrew from me a bit, stroking his chin in contemplation, as if wondering just what I was capable of. “So, what are you saying, Sorcha? That you’ve prowled the fortress and seduced men or been seduced by them?”

I didn’t like the picture that painted of me, but perhaps it was worth it if it meant he would take a turn to feel humiliated. To wonder if people were laughing at him. “Maybe that’s precisely what I’m saying.”

He snorted. “No, I don’t think so. As intriguing and arousing a prospect as that might be, a voracious and slatternly Sorcha is merely fodder for my fantasies. The reality is that you’re ridiculously loyally, really. I think we both know that if you
did
decide to betray our agreement and take another man without my permission, it wouldn’t be another English soldier. No, I’m sad to say it would be some ruddy, traitorous Highland savage running about in plaid. The only ones nearby are in our jail, and I daresay the guards might have mentioned to me if my lady had visited them there.”

I rarely used vulgar language, but this time, I snapped, “Maybe I fucked the guard, too, to keep him quiet.”

My reward was a bark of laughter. “Yes, well. That’s good thinking. You might have done. But you didn’t. So why don’t we stop playing this tiresome game so that we can celebrate what ought to be a very happy occasion.”

“You want to
celebrate
?” I asked, positively confounded.

“Of course I do. What sort of cretin wouldn’t want to lavish the mother of his unborn child with the adoration she deserves? I want to spoil you. I want to shower you with little gifts. I want to stuff your sweet pink lips full of sugary pastries and lap up bubbling champagne from the hollow of your belly before it swells with child, at which point I will want to drizzle honey on it and lick that, too. Come now, while all the dullards are attending church services, let’s make an utterly wicked day of it…”

~~~

“Will that be all?” the shopkeeper asked, glaring daggers at me as she made a pile of the hats, ribbons and parasols my lover bestowed upon me.

Mistress Cleary was a Scotswoman and when she looked at me, she saw an Englishman’s harlot. I could scarcely blame her for her hostility, and I lowered my eyes, trying to fight off the rush of heat that shame brought to my cheeks. “Yes, I think that will be all.”

“You’re forgetting the locket, my dear,” Major Anderson said, dangling a lovely little piece from a ribbon. “Didn’t you like it?”

Under the shopkeeper’s scrutiny, I swallowed, unable to take pleasure in the beauty of the thing. “It’s a bit—it’s a bit garish.”

The shopkeeper snorted, as if nothing were too garish for the likes of me. And Major Anderson narrowed his eyes. “Well, I should like for you to have something sentimental. Hats and gloves and combs are all very well. But they don’t advertise to anyone that a woman is
cherished
…”

Did he cherish me? I softened to hear it, in spite of myself.
 

Then, with a thin smile that ought to have terrified the shopkeeper, my lover asked, “Do you have anything more delicate in the back? Perhaps something that would suit my lady better?”

The shopkeeper’s lips pinched together in obvious disapproval. “I’m not sure we have anything suitable for her.”

“Why don’t you
check
,” the major said, tightly.

When Mistress Cleary bustled into the back, with a gait that that managed to be both efficient and insolent, my lover leaned back against the counter. “Is that woman a relation of yours?”