Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
A marriage proposal should come before this. No, a wedding ceremony. Isabella knew that. Other things she knew: Rowan wanted her but did not think he should have her, and this plan could likely fail.
But Mrs. Garrison had said to fight, and Isabella had no intention of surrender.
So, she curled her hands into Rowan’s cravat, held on tight, and kissed him hard. He did not retreat. Oh, no. He spun her around and pressed her against the wall, kissed her back with just as much abandon. But kissing was, all things considered, tame. Kissing made no promises. She wanted more. Needed him to give her more.
His hand on her breast, his lips on her neck, his knee sliding between her legs, parting them—all could be taken back, forgotten.
Only one thing could not be. Only one thing meant forever. And she would let him take her there. If he decided to. Rowan would stop if he could not promise forever. But her heart would die a little.
No use grieving for it now. Not when he touched her everywhere, when his breath hitched at her touch, when the bedchamber was so close, and her imagination—fueled by years of naughty books—so fertile.
Besides, she needed to know. She hated not knowing.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and jumped, wrapped her legs around his waist. He caught her and held her tight, his strong, corded forearms the perfect seat for her backside.
He pinned her against the wall with his body, knocking the breath out of her, knocking thought and logic and any tenuous hold she still had on good decision-making right out of her.
Her brain became a tumult of skin and tongue and teeth, of heat and need and him . She clawed at the cravat she’d tied so neatly that morning. There—the cravat fluttering to the floor, his neck bare and strong.
She kissed it, licked it, felt her entire body flush because she’d done so. The low growl in his throat said he loved it, though, so she did it again, dared to nip at his earlobe and taste the hollow behind his ear. Sweat and Rowan and what a potent aphrodisiac that was.
She was moving now, and she hung on tight as he carried her into his bedchamber. A hard boot to the door slammed it shut, and he sat on the bed, holding her, kissing her, tugging the shoulder of her gown down.
Good. The gown was too heavy, too tight, too itchy. Too everything horrid, and oh—she groaned. “I wish it were gone.”
“What gone? Tell me.”
“The gown. Horrid thing.”
He stopped kissing her, touching her, and he pushed distance between them to look down at her. “Hell, Isabella.”
She bracketed his face with her hands. “Will you abandon me? Will you tell me this is you pretending to be a husband, then tell the Barlows that your wife died, then put me from you forever?”
“I can’t do that.” How could he say those words as if it were a hell pitched black with flame and pain?
“No, you can’t, and it is not the end of the world. I do not want that. I want this, what is between us.”
“What is between us is an ocean of difference.”
“What is between us, Rowan Trent, is too many layers of clothes. Will you end this ruse we’ve carried on? Will you begin something new with me? Something real? ”
His eyes slammed closed like iron gates, his jaw clenching tight as the chains holding a struggling prisoner. Then he stood and set her on her feet.
That was that. She would not cry. She’d done enough of that. She would not give up, either. If he needed more time, she would give it to him. For her, there would never be anyone but Rowan.
“Very well,” she said through a tight throat. “I’ll return after you’ve had some time to think.”
One step toward the door, but he caught her wrist, tugged her back to him. “The pretend ends now.”
Her heart bloomed back to life.
“And the real begins.” He drew a line over her shoulder and down her arm. “Make sure you understand that before I peel every article of clothing off your body. Make sure you agree to marry an orphan whose parents had nothing before I bare myself entirely before you.”
“Yes.” She rested a fist against her heart. “Poor man, that you ever had a doubt.”
“You will not soon have cause to pity me. I intend to strip you and take you.” He rounded her, bending low to whisper in her ear with heated lethargy. “In every single way there is for a man to take a woman.” He disappeared, but his hands at her back announced his presence there, his intentions. She expected him to undress her slowly, to draw her desire out to the begging point.
But he did so ruthlessly and with quick, quiet efficiency. He knelt before her first, plucking off her boots and untying the ribbons holding up her stockings. Those he slid off in two quick swoops, a kiss to each calf before he stood once more.
Her gown—gone, pooled at her feet. Her stays—loosened and dropping with a thump to the floor. Her shift—whipped up and away from her body, leaving her bare and shivering. Not because it was cold. Then his hand settled on the slope of her shoulder, and he kissed her neck as his other hand delved into her simple chignon, found pins, pulled them. Each one dropped with a barely audible clip to the wood floor. And with each one, he kissed her neck, her shoulder, again and again and again, until her hair was loose and long, the tips brushing against the top of her backside .
He inhaled, long and deep, and then the world tilted as he swept her off her feet and carried her to the bed, laid her out there where he slept every night and stepped back, his gaze more animal than man as it roved the length of her body.
“I always knew you were otherworldly. When did you escape the fairy realm? When must you return? And bloody hell, will you please just take me with you?”
She felt like a queen with his green eyes roving over her as firmly as his touch, which she needed more than air.
But first…
“You must undress, too.” She wanted him long and hard and naked beside her, above her, in her. She would not allow him on this bed—her domain—until they were equal in every way, skin to skin and beating heart to beating heart.
He kicked off his boots and stockings first, as deliberate with his undressing as he’d been frantic with hers. The jacket and waistcoat came next with shoulders rolling back. He lifted the hem of his shirt, and she bolted forward, took the hem from his possession.
“Let me. I want to.”
He smoothed a hand down her hair and cupped the back of her head to bring her in for a searing kiss, and when he released her, she almost forgot her purpose.
The corner of his mouth ticked up.
“You smug rogue,” she said, lifting the shirt, revealing a tantalizing expanse of abdomen, flat and rigid.
Below, his fingers worked at the buttons of his fall.
She did away with his shirt, so she could watch the muscles of his arms work to free himself entirely from the confines of his clothes. Biceps bunching and abdomen flexing, the smooth planes of his chest rolling into rounded shoulders. A dark line of hair started at his navel and expanded lower as his pants fell.
She fell, too, backward onto the mattress to finally see him wholly—large and powerful, lean and masculine. So beautiful, so perfect. How could he think himself as anything less than that? Any less than her ?
“Now,” she said imperiously, scooting back toward the headboard and trying hard not to remember how very naked she was, “you may join me.”
He set a knee on the mattress at the very end of the bed, grabbing her ankle as he hefted himself up, kissing that knobby bit on the inside as he ran his thumb over her arch.
“This right here is damn delightful, Isabella.” He breathed the words into her calf as he ran his hand up her leg. He kissed her kneecap and her inner thigh. “This, somehow, even better.” He licked a line up to her sex, and her entire body clenched. She reached for him, for any bit of him she could touch, found the silk of his hair and held on tight as he licked higher up, the length of her slit, one hand tight on her hip, the other circling pleasure into her bud. Clitoris, she knew it was called. Such a sterile, medical type of word, so unlike what she felt beneath his touch.
What she felt—indescribable, no matter how many naughty pages attempted to do it justice. His other hand wandered away from her hip toward her breast. Not like that at all. More like a line of fire surged up her body, out of control, like a bolt of lightning shot through her breast where he pinched and rolled her pebbled nipple. She might shatter, burn up entirely, that mountain peak of pleasure he’d helped her to last night so very close.
But he left that aching space between her legs and dragged his lips up her belly, kissed her navel briefly, and growled low with a lingering kiss at her breasts. He never let her catch her breath, his fingertips skating across every inch of her skin, his breath warming her everywhere she might grow cold.
The cold never had a chance. Rowan banished the winter in her body. Likely forever.
He kissed the pulse at her neck, and then he consumed her mouth thoroughly and with great attention to detail.
Then he flipped her, trapping her arms beneath her body and between her breasts. She squealed, and he nipped at her earlobe before trailing kisses down her spine. Each kiss a shiver sending out tendrils of greedy sensation from where his lips touched her to every other place on her body.
So wonderful to lie here beneath his touch but frustrating, too. She wanted to touch him, and with her arms pinned, there was no hope of that. She spun swiftly and scooted backward toward the headboard, sitting up and leaning against it.
He crawled toward her, a prowling tiger confident he’d secured his next meal. “You can’t escape, a chuisle .”
“I don’t want to. I want to explore and claim every part of you.”
He straddled her legs, as she had his the night before, so very at ease with his nakedness. “Do as you please with me.”
She touched his chest first, that hard plain of muscle just over his heart. First her fingertips, skating over warm skin, then her palm resting flat and proprietary. Her hand seemed so small there. She was small, compared to this man, but somehow he made her feel larger than reality allowed for, large enough to stake a claim.
She curled her fingers on his chest. “This is Isabella’s.”
“Yes,” he said, the word a rasp against his throat.
She dragged her fingernails up to his neck, down his shoulder, and squeezed a chain around his biceps. “And this.”
“Yes.”
A short leap of her hand to his ribs, trailing downward over a rippling abdomen. She followed that line of hair ever more downward, learning the intriguingly delightful sensation of that crispness against her fingertips. “Mine,” she breathed.
“Yes.”
She hesitated, her fingers curling into her palms, before she placed one on the very tip of his shaft. “This, too.”
“God, yes. Only yours.” He placed her hand on his chest. “All I am and have is yours. Especially this.” His hand over hers melted the skin of her palm into that of his chest where his heart beat like a drum to the rhythm she set. “Do you understand?”
Yes, she did. His heart. That was hers. Especially. Her own heart gave a little painful leap. So much to feel all at once, so much emotion growing, growing… how could it all fit inside one tiny chest? Perhaps that’s why you needed two, so close together—to hold all the ever-expanding love.
Love. Yes. Absolutely and always.
All hesitation banished, she wrapped her hand around his shaft and squeezed. When he jerked and hissed, his arm shooting out to wrap a hand around the back of her neck, she began to stroke up and down, as he’d done to himself last night.
“It can just be this.” She hated the words, but he was not as sure as she, and she would not trap him, no matter how diligently she would try to make him fall far enough in love with her that titles no longer mattered. “Just my hand here, just me giving you pleasure… so you are not obliged to make me any promises you do not wish for.” She brushed her thumb over the head of his shaft, and his entire body tightened. “If this is all it is, you are not eternally tied to me. You can revel in the shadows, and I will return to my own life. Perhaps become an old maiden aunt to my sisters’ children. I will not ever marry if I do not marry you.” An impossibility to even consider anyone else.
“Isabella.” Her name a growl.
“But you might marry. A woman without a title.”
“Issy.”
“You can kill off the first Mrs. Trent and replace her with someone new, someone you are more comfortable with.”
“ A chuisle .” Not a growl now, a roar as he knocked her hand away from his shaft and dragged her down between his legs, settling his hot, hard body atop her. His eyes both cold emeralds and bonfires, his grip on her wrists like chains, pinning them to the mattress on either side of her head.
A wild man.
“I want only you,” he said. “I told you. This is real. No more pretend. I mean it. And I shall prove it to you.”
His hands were everywhere on her—her breasts, her hips, her thighs, her neck, her sex between her legs. His thumb pressed against her bud, and she rolled her hips against his, begging, clenching her hands in his hair. He slipped a finger into her first, then two, stroking in and out as he circled that needy, pirouetting place between her legs.
“You’re ready,” he whispered in her ear. “Are you ready?”
“Yes, yes. Please, Rowan.”
Then he was inside her, pushing in, filling her, stretching her, so big, so tight. She gasped, her muscles everywhere constricting.
“I’m sorry. ”
“Hush. I’m not.”
“I’m yours.”
“I know.” The pressure eased into a gentle humming as his hand circled through her curls, squeezing and teasing at her breast until all startled trepidation dissipated in a heady cloud of rising, spiraling need.
He began to rock, thrusting in and out, in and out, kissing her, kissing her, each kiss growing more languid, deeper, as his hips moved rhythmically faster and faster. She settled into a haze of loving as she rose high on a crashing wave of intense pleasure.
“Come now,” he breathed against her lips. “Break for me.”
And with Rowan around her, in her, everywhere—she did. And oh, how breaking made her, the momentary loss of self and shattering of body knitting her anew.
She’d never known.
Never imagined.
Imagination no longer needed.
He thrust one more time and moaned her name before collapsing on top of her.
Silence for a world of moments, languid, heavy limbs, tangled and incapable of movement. Chests heaving and hearts pounding and his lips whispering kisses along her neck where his face nestled.
She wriggled her toes first, found them mobile. Then she found the strength to trace the length of his spine with her fingers, then to feel the bulk of his muscle with her palm.
With a groan, he rolled to the side and gathered her into his arms. “Diarmuid and Grainne loved each other so much they lived their lives in constant movement.”
“Hm? Who are Dar… Diar… Who are they?” Impossible to talk when her tongue was so tired.
“It’s an old Irish story my mother used to tell me. Grainne was betrothed to marry a chieftain of some sort. A powerful man. But Diarmuid loved her and stole her away.”
“Did she love him back?”
He nodded, his chin rubbing against the back of her head. “She should not have, I suppose. Made for uncomfortable sleeping. The chieftain gave chase, and they never stayed in the same place more than one night, slept anywhere they could—field or cave or tree.”
“She didn’t mind. I’m sure of it.” Isabella rolled over and secured her arm around his waist, snuggled deep into Rowan’s embrace.
“They were caught eventually.”
“Oh. And the story does not end well, does it?”
His arms tightened. “Not at all. But I didn’t know that until I followed my father onto the admiral’s ship. He wasn’t the admiral then. Just a captain. One of his crew, an Irishman, told the real tale, the tragic one. I yelled at him first because it wasn’t what I knew. My mother told it differently.”
“How so?”
“In her version the Sidhe , the fairy people, took pity on the lovers and let them into the Otherworld where they still roam, hand in hand.”
“A far superior version of the tale. I hope you told that sailor so.” She poked his chest.
“His was the right version. But… I agreed with you, then. I agree with you now, too. Sleep, a chuisle . I’ll watch over you.”
“Sleep? How can I? We’ve much to plan.” She slung her legs over the side of the bed.
He kissed the back of her neck, her shoulder, his hand smoothing its way around her waist to dip between her legs. “No planning. I’ve just stolen you from a king. Let me enjoy my victory awhile longer.”
She wanted to, oh yes. She would let him, but he must realize one thing first.
She jumped from the bed and tossed his shirt over her head. “I belong to no man to be stolen from. If you will have me, you must only defy your own doubts.” She backed toward the door and slipped into the sitting room in seconds, and just as quickly heard the thud of his feet on the floor. She darted toward the study, but before she could reach it, his strong arm banded around her waist, and he tugged her against his hard and ready body. And he kissed her, laughing, in the sunlight.