Man of My Dreams (16 page)

When she later felt a coolness on her legs, it didn’t register that her skirt was being raised. When she felt a tugging on her drawers, that didn’t make much sense either, but she finally
asked, “What are you doing now?”

His mouth came back to hers for a deeply stirring kiss before he said, “Showing you everything. Isn’t that what you wanted? Or are you afraid now?”

“A little.”

“You should be.”

It was the wrong thing to say, or the right thing, challenging her stubbornness and curiosity at once. “Don’t stop, Devlin, not yet.”

He kissed her again, so that she barely noticed her drawers coming off completely. But she couldn’t miss warm fingers slipping between her legs. She shrieked in surprise, but the sound was muffled by his mouth. Then she was moaning, and gripping him to her, and reveling in the most startling sensations yet. Her legs parted of their own accord, her body and its responses were taking over, and she didn’t care.

“Is—is this part of kissing?” she gasped out when his mouth returned to her neck, then her breasts.

“Yes,” he lied without the least qualm.

“Then I have to do that to you?”

“No,” he croaked, knowing he’d never survive it.

“But I want to.”

“I’m going to die.”

She thought she was, too, especially when he moved on top of her, placing his hips between hers, and that hard part of his body was pressing into the place he’d heated with his fingers,
giving her the same pleasure as before.

But then a sharp pain swiftly pierced her and there was nothing pleasurable in that. Her eyes flew open in shock. How? No, maybe not. Maybe that pain and fullness inside her now wasn’t him, but still his fingers. Yet she could feel his hands, both hands, beneath her back, holding her tightly to him. She felt shock again. This wasn’t supposed to happen.

“Tell me you aren’t making love to me,” she demanded in rising panic.

He became very still, suffering some shock of his own. “I’m afraid it’s too late to tell you that.”

“But you can’t be!”

“I’m sorry, Megan, truly, but the damage is done.”

Her shock turned rapidly to resentment as all the repercussions bombarded her. “I won’t marry you.”

That wasn’t the wisest thing to say to a man who’d just broken every scruple he possessed. “I bloody well wasn’t going to ask you to—”

“Good!”

“—but now I have to.”

“Well, aren’t you fortunate that you already have my answer,” she retorted acidly. “Now get off me!”

His face dropped into the curve of her neck with a groan. “I can’t, Megan.”

She wasn’t interested in his problem. “Of course you can. You said you would.”

“That was when I could. Now—oh, God.” He thrust once, twice, then was still again.

That hadn’t hurt, but she was too furious to notice. “I’m getting hysterical, Devlin. If you don’t want a crying, screaming woman on your hands, then—”

“In all fairness, I owe you a climax. You’ve come this far, you might as well—”

“I didn’t mean to come this far and you know it!” she hissed.

He rose until he was leaning over her and she was able to see at last his own upset. Guilt was tearing into him much more sharply than her verbal abuse, and in his present inebriated state, he couldn’t handle either too well.

“Then you should have left when I warned you to!”

“That’s right,” she bit out. “Absolve yourself of guilt, why don’t you?”

“If I was doing that, I wouldn’t have offered to marry you.”

“You know very well I can’t marry a horse breeder! My father would never allow it, either.”

“On the contrary,” he said with a full measure of his arrogance. “Once the circumstances are explained, your father will give his wholehearted approval, I do assure you, so don’t use that as an excuse for refusing me.”

“Don’t you dare tell him what you did to me! Don’t you dare tell anyone. This did not happen.”

“Megan, you can’t pretend—”

“I can do anything I please, and if I please to go on with my life as if this didn’t happen, I damn well will.”

“Fine! You do that!”

He rolled over and got to his feet without swaying. Megan scrambled to her feet just as quickly, then spent a few moments gasping over each proof of his crime that she could see—and feel. She had been made love to and she was still fully clothed—well, almost. She swiped up her drawers and marched to the doors, throwing back the bolt. Devlin she didn’t spare a glance for, but he was watching her with brooding eyes.

“When you come to your senses, brat,” he said to her back, “you know where I’ll be.”

“You’ll be in hell before I come to you again for anything,” was her final retort before she stomped out, still without looking back.

Devlin turned and, with a growl, smashed his fist through the nearest wall, then went back to his room and smashed his remaining stock of brandy.

Megan stayed in her room for three days brooding, though the word went out in the household that she was merely under the weather. But there was only so much brooding someone of her exuberant nature could tolerate. So she’d made a mistake. It wasn’t the end of the world, at least not yet. And the fates couldn’t be so cruel as to visit upon her clear evidence of her one and only fall from grace. She believed that wholeheartedly—but she’d wait until she had actual proof of that before celebrating.

In the meantime, she got back to her daily routine, with one major exception. She gave up riding for a while, or anything else that would cause her to send to the stable for anything. That, of course, kept her housebound,
and there was only so much of that that she could stomach, too.

Finally, she packed a trunk and went for an extended stay with Tiffany, giving her father the excuse that they had innumerable plans to make for the upcoming trip to London, and that could be done more easily if they were together—which was nothing out of the ordinary. They had frequently, through the years, spent weeks at a time at each other’s houses. It was nothing to cause comment about, nor did it imply she was running away from something. Only an arrogant horse breeder might get the latter impression, and she wasn’t the least bit concerned about what he thought.

At least she wasn’t until he showed up at Tiffany’s house her second day there, requesting to speak with her. Apparently her absence from the stable hadn’t bothered him as long as she had been at home and accessible, but now that she’d left home, he had something to say about it.

Of course, she refused to see him. And he went away—what else could he do?—without leaving a message, which told her it couldn’t have been anything serious that he wanted. But he came back the next day, and the next, and that told her something else. The man wasn’t going to give up until he’d said his piece. But Megan was nothing if not stubborn. She wasn’t going to hear it.

The trouble with that was that this new, uncommunicative war they were having
couldn’t be fought privately. Tiffany’s servants were beginning to talk, Tiffany was dying of curiosity herself, and Tiffany’s butler, male that he was, was taking sides and starting to give Megan reproving looks.

But she could withstand all that easily enough. Obstinacy had its uses, and she had plenty to spare. It was her own urges that she was having trouble dealing with, for ironically, despite what had happened, she was beginning to miss Devlin. She missed their fights. She missed the sight of him, which was always, no matter how angry she might be with him, a pleasure to her senses.

But she still wouldn’t receive him at Tiffany’s. And she wasn’t going to go home, where he had access to her house and could search her out, until she could tell him, truthfully, that he had nothing to worry about, that there would be no unwelcome results from their indiscretion.

She didn’t even blame him anymore for what had happened. She blamed her curiosity. She blamed her body for liking too much what he’d been doing to it. And she blamed that part of her that had talked her into letting him teach her about kissing, when her common sense had been against the idea from the start.

“Are you ever going to say why you’re so mad at him?” Tiffany asked one day over lunch, after Megan had given the order, for the ninth time, to tell Devlin she wasn’t available.

“Do I look mad?”

“Well, no—but you must be. Why else don’t you want to talk to him?”

Megan tried to shrug the matter off. “You advised me to stay away from him, remember?”

“And how often do you follow my advice?” Tiffany countered. “Now come on, why are you hiding here?”

“I’m not hiding.”

“This is your best friend you’re talking to.”

Megan sighed. She was amazed that Tiffany had held her tongue this long. But at least she had two shameful experiences to choose from for this confession, and the first was no longer as shocking as the second one.

“The man thinks he’s my father.”

“Oh, come now,” Tiffany scoffed. “His interest in you
can’t
be paternal.”

“In this one instance it most definitely is,” Megan insisted. “He claims I need a keeper, and he’s backed up that contention by assuming the role, complete with disciplinary measures. He—he—”

“He what?” Tiffany prompted impatiently.

Megan looked down at her plate, her cheeks starting to scald. “He spanked me.”

“He did
what
?!”

“He put me over his knees and—”

“I know how it’s done! But he’s a—he’s only a—how could he dare?”

“Easily. Devlin doesn’t behave like he ought to, nor has he ever done so. The fact is, there’s
not a subservient or deferential bone in his body. I suppose that’s one reason he’s so fascinating. He just doesn’t fit into the standard order of things. He’s a servant, but a servant who won’t take orders, who can’t be dismissed, who’s got more arrogance than ten pompous lords.”

“You’re making excuses for him?”

Megan glanced up to see that Tiffany’s shock was mounting. “Absolutely not,” she assured her friend, then shrugged. “But you asked how he could dare. That’s how.”

“Then he must have been surprised when he got dismissed despite that ridiculous stipulation in the stallion’s sales contract,” Tiffany said, drawing the wrong conclusion. “Is that why he’s trying to see you? To beg your forgiveness so he can get his job back?”

The thought of it was so preposterous, Megan couldn’t help laughing. “Devlin beg? He wouldn’t know how.”

“He doesn’t think he can force you to reinstate him, does he?”

Megan squirmed now, seeing no way to avoid admitting, “He wasn’t—”

She was saved for the moment when the Robertses’ butler knocked and opened the double doors to announce in an aggrieved tone, “He’s back, Miss Megan. He says he won’t leave this time until you see him.”

Tiffany shot immediately to her feet. “Of all the
—I’ll
see to this.”

Megan rose, too. “Tiff, no—”

But Tiffany was already out the door, and Megan could hear her accosting Devlin in the hall. “Your gall is astounding, Mr. Jefferys. How you can dare come here after what you did is beyond comprehension. And even if Megan would agree to see you, I wouldn’t permit it, so leave this house and don’t come—now just a—you can’t—”

Megan braced herself, expecting to see Devlin marching into the dining room, and he did, not stopping until he towered over her. Even though this was a situation she had tried to avoid, her senses still ate up the sight of him.

“You
told
her?”

She knew what he thought. “Not about
that
,” she replied in a furious whisper. “About the other.”

“What other?”

“That you abused my—my posterior.”

“Oh,” he said, the heat going out of his expression, to be replaced, incredibly, with genuine concern. “Are you all right, Megan?”

“Certainly,” she said uncomfortably.

“We have to talk.”

“No.”

“You can’t avoid me forever.”

He said that with such confidence that Megan’s stubbornness reared its ornery head. “Actually, I can—at least until I’m safely married—to someone else.”

That answer wasn’t to his liking; it made him so furious, in fact, that Megan cringed to see his reaction. But he made no reply to her.
He stalked out instead, though not before he growled at Tiffany’s stiff figure in the doorway, “She deserved it.”

“Well, I never!” Tiffany said huffily and slammed the door shut behind him. “Is that the kind of behavior you had to put up with?”

“Constantly.”

“He should have been dismissed sooner, regardless of any stipulations.”

Megan sat down, a strange kind of dejection coming over her that made her feel like bursting into tears. Dispassionately, she said, “He wasn’t dismissed.”

“You can’t be serious! What
is
your father thinking of?”

“My father doesn’t know anything about it. I never told him.”

“Megan! What can
you
be thinking of? If that wasn’t grounds for dismissal and worse—”

“Even if I did deserve it?”

“Yes, even so. It wasn’t
his
place to correct you—Did you?”

“Sort of—yes. But I told you that he gets overly concerned about me, and he was furious that I’d put myself in danger that night.”

“That night? This wasn’t the night you followed him, was it?”

“The same.”

“And you kept that to yourself when you told me about it?” Tiffany said reproachfully.

Megan was feeling worse and worse and finally gave in to the urge to cry. “I didn’t want to mention it now, either,” she said miserably.
“I’m not exactly proud of the fact that I was treated like a child.”

“Oh, Meg, don’t,” Tiffany said contritely. “I shouldn’t have pried.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Megan retorted. “What are friends for if not to pry?”

It took a few seconds before they were both grinning at that bit of nonsense. Megan wiped at her tears before adding, “Devlin was just trying to open my eyes to the fact that the most horrible things can happen when you recklessly ignore good common sense.”

So why didn’t I pay closer attention?
she asked herself bitterly. But her inner voice was conspicuously silent on that one, and a week later Megan couldn’t ignore the truth any longer. The fates had been cruel after all.