Susan Johnson (26 page)

His face lit up.

“I’ve missed you,” she murmured.

Swiftly closing the distance between them, he took her in his arms and held her tight, and for several moments they savored the bliss. “I was miserable without you,” Robbie murmured, lifting her chin to brush her mouth with a kiss.

“I missed you every second.” The corners of her mouth curved into a teasing smile. “Especially at night.”

“I know. I drank every night. In fact,” he whispered, a half smile playing over his lips, “I’ve been celibate so long, I’m not sure I remember what to do.”

His celibacy pleased her, more than she thought possible after having lived so long in the fashionable world where fidelity was only for the naive. “Such self-discipline builds character, I’m told.”

His brows flickered in roguish dissent. “A delusion. I’m only extremely horny.”

“Which accounts for your climbing three stories.”

“With ease and no memory of so doing,” he replied with a grin. “It must be love.”

“It had better be, if I’m going to throw my life away for you.”

“I’m worth it.”

“So it seems,” she murmured, the feel of him like going home after a lifetime in the wilderness.

“You’re my everything,” he whispered, stroking her back.

“A fortnight is a very long time.” He’d always represented the most intoxicating kind of physical temptation to her; desire shimmered through her senses.

“Thirteen and a half days too long. But you set the pace,” he offered, intent on pleasing her.

The gracious yielding in his tone encouraged an impertinent impulse, predicated perhaps by the minutest need for vengeance against the Janet Lindsays in his life. “I can order you about?”

His audacious gaze held hers for a moment, and then he murmured, “Be my guest.”

“How intriguing.”

His smile was wicked. “We try.”

“Would you undress at my bidding?” She moved back a step to better appraise his reaction, but after the smallest hesitation he dipped his head in acknowledgment and began untying his neckcloth.

Further encouraged in her sport, she pulled up a chair and motioned him back a few paces. “So I can see
everything”
she dulcetly murmured, sitting down in a rustle of cobalt green silk.

“Youre enjoying this, aren’t you?” But beneath his careless flippancy echoed an inherent restraint.

“It’s not every night I have the opportunity to order you about,” she playfully observed. “Do turn around, darling, so I can peruse all your considerable charms.”

She didn’t notice his minute hesitation before he complied, so involved in the game was she. When he faced her once again, his erection straining the black silk of his breeches, she murmured, “Mmmm. The
full
extent of your enthusiasm is very enticing.”

“I live to entice you,” he drawled.

“Soon, perhaps,” she casually noted, as though she were considering the advantages of his offer. “Do take off your shirt.”

He obeyed, the smallest tension evident in the set of his shoulders.

“Now your breeches.”

He’d not taken orders since early childhood, and even then only sporadically. He was uncomfortable in his submissive role. But he acquiesced nevertheless, unbuttoning his breeches, sliding the dark garment down his slim hips, kicking it aside. “Have you had enough sport?”

“Indulge me, darling. You look magnificent—everywhere,” she murmured, her gaze on his splendid erection.

“And you look like a woman ready to be fucked.” She tipped her head slightly and gazed at him with a discriminating fastidiousness. “Not yet.”

He smiled tightly.

“You find it difficult to be docile?”

He shrugged. “Not my choice of words.”

She offered him a speculative glance.

“I was thinking impossible,” he quietly said.

“And if I were to insist?”

“I’d have to change your mind.” He advanced toward her.

She stiffened slightly. “You weren’t tractable very long.”

“Sorry.” Restless under his sexual urges, impatient, he spoke with the greatest constraint. “Perhaps I could indulge you some other way.”

“Such as?” He was very close. She had to look up.

“Three guesses,” he whispered.

“Is there a prize if I guess right?”

“There’s a prize even if you don’t guess right.”

“Ummm. Are you in a rush?”

“Take your time.” He picked her up from the chair with an effortless strength and carried her through the dressing room into her bedroom. “You can deliberate at length while I’m making love to you.”

“What if I took issue with your presumption.”

He smiled down at her.

“If you didn’t want to be fucked so badly, you might.”

“If I didn’t want
you
so badly, you mean. Or don’t you differentiate?”

“You’re asking me?” His gaze narrowed as he placed her on the bed.

“When I could have had any of a dozen women tonight?”

She wrinkled her nose at him.

“But then, I’m a one-woman man,” he whispered, moving over her, lifting her skirts away with a deft touch, settling between her warm thighs.

“You’d better be.”

“Or?” He guided his arousal to her heated warmth. “Or I’d have to refuse you.”

The most frivolous of words, for her thighs were opening wide beneath him. Slowly sliding into her, he murmured, “Why don’t we talk about it later?”

How could one forget the flamboyant, dissolving pleasure, she wondered, as he slipped deeper, the exquisite rapture trembling down her spine, thrilling her senses, heating her blood so she felt as though sunshine were streaming over her. How strange that those finite degrees of sensation weren’t etched indelibly in one’s memory. How strange that she could think for even a second of never feeling this again.

“I promise to be tractable tomorrow,” he whispered,
wanting to please her, wanting to give her everything in the world when she could make him feel like this.

“Love me instead,” she breathed, overwhelmed by his strength and power, selfishly wanting all of his deft, lascivious skills, wanting his love always. But she knew better than to verbalize that wish in these troubled times. These moments were enough, this glorious bewitchment and luxuriant rapture plenty.

“I’ll always love you,” Robbie replied, younger, less buffeted by adversity.

“Perfect.” She wanted to believe in transcendent perfection, and thought she was presently experiencing the ultimate, unparalleled masterstroke of that conceit.

“On both counts,” Robbie whispered, as though he could see into her mind and feel what she was feeling.

They joined completely, their every nerve and impulse quiveringly susceptible to his extreme invasion—she engorged, he engulfed. Pulsing tissue and silken flesh touched and melded, with his large, rigid length buried deep inside her. They were both momentarily breathless and still. Then he moved first. Or did she? With sensation peaking by swift, excitable degrees, neither was completely capable of clear thinking.

“I’m never letting you go,” he growled, gliding deeper, feeling, remembering, vetting the blissful familiar, insensible to all but his overwhelming need to possess her completely.

“I’m keeping you in my bed.”

He lifted his head marginally and looked into her eyes.

“I can be possessive, too,” she murmured.

Balancing on his elbows, the scar on his biceps
conspicuous, he exuded potent virility and power. “Lucky me.”

Wanting to savor the moment, he took her slowly to climax, but she was more insistent, impatient as always, and twice he had to calm her, partially withdrawing while she whimpered and pleaded.

“Wait, wait, it’s better,” he whispered.

“No, no, no, no, no…” An ardent hedonist, she rebelled at his delay.

But he knew exactly how to keep her just short of orgasm, and when at last she was at fever pitch, when the world had disappeared and desire alone infused her mind and body, he slid so deeply inside her, she screamed in ecstasy.

“Now,” he whispered, as if she could stop.

She came and came, endless spasms of rapture coiling through her hot, rapacious core as she melted around him. And in the grip of two weeks’ celibacy, he forgot himself that night and met her whimpering orgasm with a violent, fierce, raging release, as if he didn’t know better, as if he owned her body and soul.

W
AKING EARLY, HAVING HARDLY SLEPT THAT
night, they smiled at each other in the dawn’s light. “Stay for breakfast,” Roxane murmured, his body warm against hers.

“I’ll send for my valet.”

“If you don’t mind the children. We always breakfast together.”

“Do they still throw their food at one another?”

“Does it matter?”

He grinned. “Hell, no. I just thought I’d warn Gordie. He thinks my clothes are his personal treasure.”

“Wear something washable.”

“Are you trying to scare me off?” He knew her family, had known them for years. And they weren’t any more wild than he’d been as a child.

“I just want you to be aware—”

“Of what I’m taking on?”

“Don’t jump to conclusions. You haven’t heard my list of demands yet.”

He lifted her onto his chest in a ripple of honed muscle and took her face between his large palms. “I don’t care what your demands are, you’re marrying me just as soon as I can get a license and minister.”

“I so dislike domineering men.”

“We’ll have plenty of time to discuss that in the next fifty years. But you decide how to tell your children.”

“That their new stepfather is only five years older than Jeannie?”

“Don’t even bring up that tired old argument. I can show you any number of marriages like ours. You’re too damned vain. Now let me distract you from idiocy like that. Hmmm, you feel—”

“In love?” she whispered, smiling.

“Sexy and in love. My favorite kind of wife.”

“We don’t have much time.”

“This won’t take long. You’re so easy,” he said with a grin.

And as first light framed the rooftops of Edinburgh, the lovers greeted the new day in their own style of heated welcome. Until Roxane, breathless and newly sated, said, “The children will be up soon.”

Robbie’s valet arrived fifteen minutes later, and their baths and toilettes were completed in a rushed half hour. When the children trooped into the breakfast room shortly after, their mother and Robbie were drinking their coffee and reading the latest news in
The Edinburgh Courant.

“Uncle Robbie!” they cried, throwing themselves at him as if he were a long-lost playmate. “You’ve been gone ever so long!”

“I’ve been busy with the parliamentary debate,” he replied, hugging them en masse. “But your mother has graciously invited me to spend more time here now, and I will.”

“Can we ride your racers?” Jamie exclaimed.

“I’ll bring them over.”

“And bring your rapiers, too,” Alex said. “Everyone says You’re the best in Scotland. I want to learn.”

“Me, too.” Angus exclaimed, dancing from foot to foot.

“And what can I bring for you?” Robbie said, addressing Jeanne, who stood slightly apart. “A new gown or some pearls? You’re old enough for your own pearls, aren’t you?”

“Let me ride Titan.”

Robbie glanced at Roxane. “It’s up to your mother.” Titan was a brute of a horse that had taken most of the purses last year on the downs.

“Under supervision,” Roxane quietly agreed.

“I can hold him, Mama. Uncle David says I can ride anything.”

“Why don’t we all go to Bransley Hill next week and do some riding at my practice track?”

The children’s screams were deafening.

Roxane smiled across the table at the man who brought such pleasure into her life.

Robbie smiled back and, putting his paper aside, said, “As soon as we’re done with breakfast, let’s go and see if Wilson’s has any new toy shipments.”

“I’m thirteen,” Jeanne said.

“Some fashion dolls, then, from Madame Tonnere’s shop.”

Jeanne cast a questioning glance at her mother. “If you like, darling,” her mother replied.

“And why not a grown-up gown,” Robbie added.

“Mama,” she breathlessly declared, beaming with delight.

“Don’t spoil them completely,” she warned Robbie, but she was smiling.

“No more than their mama,” he pleasantly replied.

A
FTER BREAKFAST, THE CHILDREN LEFT TO GATHER
their coats for their shopping excursion, and Robbie and Roxane shared a quiet moment before the bustle began once again. “Don’t be too extravagant with them,” Roxane admonished.

“Just a few things,” Robbie declared. “I’ll have the most fun.”

“They could be overwhelmed.”

“Your children? Please. The only thing that might overwhelm them would be the hand of God himself. And I’m inclined to think even He might be run over in the charge to first shake His hand. I’m not disparaging them, darling,” he quickly interposed. “I like children with spirit. You’ve raised them beautifully.”

“How charming you are.”

“Am I not,” he teased, winking at her. “Later tonight, I’ll show you the full extent of my charm.”