Chapter 21
Chapter
Catherine wakes to the sensation of McGann’s thumb against her collarbone. They’re in the bed, which is odd, because she knows for a fact she curled up next to him on the floor and fell asleep there. He must have woken and moved them sometime during the night. Not just her but himself as well.
He lies beside her, his arms wrapped around her tightly, as if she’s slept all night that way. She loves it, being tucked into his body—into his strength and his goodness, with his thumb idly caressing her collarbone.
She doesn’t dare move so she can keep this feeling of peace and safety and…
something else, too, a kind of building, simmering heat at the strum of his fingers against the ridge of her clavicle.
What began as a soothing transition from sleep to consciousness is rapidly becoming something else entirely under his soft, glancing strokes.
As surely as kindling starts a fire in a hearth, so his fingertips—against her collarbone for heaven’s sake—build a molten, melting feeling within her.
She closes her eyes, all the better to lose herself in that feeling, as he breathes softly beside her.
She isn’t even sure he’s aware of his movements and she feels a kind of illicit thrill in that, as if his touch is her secret, even from him.
A little moan escapes her lips and he jolts fully awake behind her.
She feels him stiffen and begin to pull away.
“Don’t stop,” she whispers to him, quietly. “Please don’t.”
She snuggles down into him, his thick chest hard against her back, other parts hard against her rear.
She knows in the broadest sense what those parts are and what they’re for; she hasn’t spent all that time with Violet in the medical clinic for nothing.
But she hasn’t ever imagined exactly this, either.
She gives a little wiggle and he makes a guttural noise and pulls her closer.
“Captain?” she whispers, even though she already knows the answer to her question. “Are you awake?”
“Andrew,” he replies, his voice husky and low, with a timbre to it she’s never heard before.
She twists herself in his arms so she’s facing him, blue eyes to green.
His fingertips resume their idle caressing, this time along the dips and grooves of her spine and the ridges of her shoulder blades. She feels herself arch into his touch.
“How’s your head?” he asks.
“It’s fine,” she says and presses herself closer to him. “Ship-shape.”
He snorts. “That’s not what that word means, Menace.”
She smiles, knowing she could lie there forever, happily ensconced in his arms, except for the strumming of his fingers against her skin.
His touch is sending some kind of cascading, tingling sensation down her spine and into her middle, where it pools between her legs and makes it hard for her to stay still.
She closes her eyes, to better feel that waterfall of sensation, and then opens them again to find him staring at her.
“You’re here,” she says.
“Aye. Though I shouldn’t be.”
“Why not? We’re married, are we not? Or did you forget already?”
She’s trying for levity. To combat whatever that seriousness is in his eyes. It hasn’t worked, because she feels his chest tighten at her words and sees the strain cross his features.
“Pretending doesn’t make it real,” he says.
“No,” she agrees, “it doesn’t.” She wriggles her way up his body a little so they’re face to face now, lip to lip.
“This makes it real.” She leans in so slowly, so carefully, that he could turn away in an instant if he wants to. She’s never taking away anyone’s choice again if she can help it.
“Lass,” he says, but his lips meet hers anyway.
She’s been kissed before. Dry, peckish affairs, such that she doesn’t know to expect anything different when she presses her lips against his.
Only that she wants, so very badly, to feel those lips.
And she wants him to feel hers. She wants to watch him lose that steely self-control that keeps his accent and his feelings and his heart locked up so tightly within his body.
She wants him to be free and undone from that self-control.
And she wants him to choose her to be free and undone with.
Last night, when McGann had fallen asleep with her pressed against his side, he knew he shouldn’t stay there. But he did anyway because he wanted to have this woman he’d desired for more than half a goddamned year by his side and beneath his fingertips.
He’d awoken in the middle of the night and escaped to the water closet to take himself in hand, but his bout of self-release did nothing to slake his desire or stop the ache low in his belly and between his thighs.
He craved her touch as much after as he did before.
So he’d simply resigned himself to it and lifted her into the bed, placing himself beside her.
This morning, he still wants her. Still craves her touch. Still wishes to wrap his thighs around hers and pump into her until she’s come apart in his arms.
But he can’t. He won’t.
What he can allow is the tiniest brush of his fingers against her collarbone and the curve of her shoulder. Innocuous places, he tells himself. Innocent pleasures.
He’s a goddamn liar.
There’s nothing innocuous about any place on her body. Her pinkie, her little toe, her belly button. Caressing any place upon her person makes him as stiff as a log. Hell, just touching her shoulder makes him tremble with need. And when she presses her lips to his, his control finally snaps.
He tightens his arms around her and makes some kind of noise, a guttural growl from the base of his throat he’s never heard himself make before. And he takes that tentative peck on his lips she’s giving him and turns it into something far more satisfying.
Something better, something new.
A slow, simmering press of his lips. A nip, a tickle, a slide of his tongue inside her mouth until he can feel her become languid and soft.
He kisses her and kisses her and kisses her again, as if he can never have his fill. As if it will never be enough. His hands slide down her back, which is even now arching into him, straining with a desire he understands and cannot, will not, do anything about.
Catherine loses herself in the moment, in that kiss, until the nervous tension that’s pushed her toward him feels as far away as England is.
She relishes every nip, every bite, every sensation as it slides down her back and pools in her belly, until she moves instinctively, throwing her leg over his hip.
She wants friction there, between her legs, deep in her core. She’s used her hands before—she knows something of what she’s after—but what she’s done to herself has never felt like this.
He pulls away from her though. As he always does. She wants to pull him back, but she won’t. She won’t push him. She won’t take anything from him that he doesn’t want to give her.
“Let me look at you,” he says, and she knows immediately that’s not why he’s retreated. She can read the evasion in his eyes.
“Andrew,” she reaches her hand up to caress his cheek as he’d earlier caressed her collarbone. “Be truthful with me. Tell me what you want. Not what you think you should do or what you ought to do. Tell me what you want. Please.”
He moves himself further backward, away from her, so that he’s pressed up against the wall and her thigh now falls onto the empty bed sheets between them. For a moment, he’s as still and silent as a Roman marble again.
“Don’t ask me that, Menace,” he says finally, his voice low and strained. She feels her heart break a little as she registers his tone.
He’s turning himself away from her, away from the places she thinks they can go without the gilded cage of the ton closing them in. She knows he cares for her—he’d told her so himself last night.
But perhaps England isn’t so far away after all. Perhaps they carry those cages within them without realizing it.
“Andrew,” she says, “I’ll give it to you, you know, whatever it is you want. If you only tell me what it is.”
“Menace…”
She can hear his voice is near to cracking. But he doesn’t say anything more, only shakes his head, his curly hair disheveled and falling into his forehead.
“Then let me tell you what I want,” she goes on, because he doesn’t answer her. “It’s you.” The truth in its simplest, barest form. “I always have, Andrew. I’ve always just wanted you.”