Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
His.
The word anchored in Rory’s mind as he stretched Juliet’s arms over her head, her body vulnerable beneath him, and angled his head to kiss the curve of her neck…
Trailing his tongue along the line of her clavicle, down the décolletage of her breasts, her nipples taut and straining against the silk of her gown before his mouth ever reached them.
With his other hand, he tugged at her bodice, exposing her chemise.
He tugged again, baring her nipples to the night air and sucked, taking one into his mouth like the sweetest cherry.
Her back arched, pushing her into him, her lips parted and a soft sigh released to the crisp night air.
Lower went his free hand, which began tugging at her skirts, pulling them up, up, up until silk and muslin hems bunched at her waist. He shifted to take in the view of her—the beauty of earth below and sky above nothing to the beauty of her—long, stockinged legs…
twin patches of bare thighs leading to the dark curls of her sex…
her eyes half-lidded with desire…her kiss-crushed lips parted and releasing sighs and moans of want and need.
She needed him to touch her…there.
Light fingertips brushed across her creamy thighs. One moment she was squeezing them together, the next she was splaying them apart. She’d gone mindless with desire.
He tightened the hand around her wrists as the other found her mons pubis, his rough fingertips grazing along her slit, wet and swollen from desire, as he’d known it would be.
Her hips angled, pushing her against him, begging for more.
He smiled and kept his touch feather light, eliciting a moan of frustration from her.
When he decided she’d anticipated long enough, his finger trailed to the entrance of her sex.
Her breath caught as he slowly pushed inside. Tight. Wet.
“Oh, yes,” poured from the back of her throat, her eyes squeezed shut, her body a vessel of need.
A need he’d created.
A need only he could satisfy.
His.
His gaze fast upon her, she received the pleasure he gave and demanded yet more in return. “Greedy,” he rasped into her ear.
Another finger joined the first, stretching her, filling her, pulling more moans from her, making her wild beneath his hand.
When his cock could take no more, he withdrew from her, leaving her teetering on the edge of release, no doubt.
Her eyes flew open, both questioning and slightly outraged, demanding he finish what he’d started.
Then he had the fall of his trousers open and his cock free and pressing at her entrance.
In one swift, satisfying thrust of his hips, he was inside her.
He went still, letting her adjust to him, yes, but also soaking her into his senses.
Her slick heat around him. Her breath rasping humid against his neck.
Her crisp scent of sage and jasmine mixed with the heady sex scent of woman.
Her hips swiveled, and his cock throbbed. She arched into him, demanding the release promised. He began moving his hips, sliding in and out of her, and her quim picked up where his fingers had left it—on the brink of climax.
“Juliet, you’re going to release for me…” He licked his thumb and slipped it between their bodies, down to her sex, where her most sensitive flesh had only awaited his touch. “Now.”
He slid his thumb against the hooded nub—her breath caught.
He applied pressure and rubbed—she tensed and bit her plump bottom lip, a woman held entirely in his thrall.
Another slick stroke—her back arched, eyes squeezed shut, the entirety of her being concentrated on the patch of skin where he touched her—then another…
and she broke on a cry and pulsed her climax around his cock. “Rory,” she gasped against his neck.
“And that’s how I like you to say my name,” he rumbled into her ear.
A languid smile replete with satiety curved about her mouth. He released her arms, which would start to ache if he continued to hold them above her head, but he stayed inside her, his mouth still pressed to her ear. “Now we have the first one out of the way.”
“First?” she gasped. No small amount of awe in that gasp. “It can happen again?”
“Oh, aye, lass, and it will.”
Her pupils flared at the promise.
She fully intended to hold him to it.
He began to move inside her again, to penetrate her with measured calculation and purpose. His own desire began to transform. This was need, raw and urgent, heightened by an emotion coursing through him that he’d never experienced.
This wasn’t merely the coupling of two bodies.
It was the coupling of two souls…
Of two hearts.
And perhaps, she felt it, too.
This sense of oneness couldn’t be all him.
It took two halves to make this whole.
Her legs wrapped around his waist, insisting he penetrate her deeper…fully. He slid a hand beneath her bottom, tilting her hips so she could receive more of him, and gathered her close, giving her what she wanted with sure, deliberate strokes, burying himself inside her to the hilt.
She gasped. “That feeling—oh—it’s starting—oh—again.”
And with those words, his shaft buried deep inside her, taking all he gave, she brought him to the edge with her.
Sweat slicked his body as he thrust with intention, relentless, determined she would find release with him.
Her head arched back, digging into green grass and exposing the elegant column of her throat, as she surrendered to mindless abandon.
Control began to slip away as his rhythm increased and he lost himself inside her.
“Rory,” she cried into his neck for the second time tonight.
As her quim pulsed around him, he gave in to the animal instinct to pump his release into her on a shout, joining her in the vastness of climax as deep and unknowable as the inky sky above. “Juliet, my love,” he murmured as he collapsed to the side of her.
It was only when he began to return to himself that he realized what he’d said.
There wasn’t a syllable he would take back.
When he pulled his face from her neck, it was to find her watching him, a question in her eyes. “You are quite an expert at lovemaking,” she said. “Empirically speaking, of course.”
A lazy chuckle rumbled in his chest.
As funny as she was intelligent. How many people knew that about Miss Juliet Windermere?
He did.
That was all that mattered.
“Aye,” he said in answer to her observation.
He knew this about himself. He cared for the pleasure of his partner, unlike most men, apparently. He’d been told so on more than one occasion.
She went utterly serious. “You’re more than that, you know.”
“More than what?” Was he was missing something?
“You’re more than your ability to deliver an excellent tup.”
His laugh this time took on a note of discomfort.
“And those words you spoke?” she asked.
“Which ones?”
“Near the end.”
Juliet, my love.
Those words, neither needed to say.
“Aye?”
“Were they simply words spoken in the heat of lovemaking?” she asked, direct. “Words that won’t be felt as strongly in an hour or so?”
She was tossing his words from yesterday back at him.
Good.
He’d spoken them to provoke a response from her, and here it was, at last.
The time had arrived to give them a good airing out—and one word in particular.
He rolled off her completely. “I think we should be sitting upright—and bits tucked away—for this conversation,” he said, doing precisely that as he folded himself into his trousers and buttoned the fall.
She sat up, tucking her breasts into her bodice. “I think you’re right.” She’d begun securing her flower crown.
What was it about a woman messing about with her hair that was so transfixing to a man?
He pushed to a stand and held out a hand for her.
She grabbed hold, and he had her on her feet the next instant.
Their hands held onto each other for a heartbeat of time, long enough for them both to notice.
Neither wanted to break the contact, but each understood they must. He released her, and she retreated to a nearby outcropping of rock, balancing her hip against it for support.
He found his own boulder and waited. Juliet had something to say to him. Which was as well. He had something to say to her.
“Miss Dalhousie returns tomorrow for the performance.”
“Oh?” Rory could groan with frustration. In truth, he’d forgotten about the woman’s return. It didn’t concern him. Nothing about Miss Dalhousie did, or ever would. But…
The woman before him didn’t know that.
Right.
He’d made a right hash of matters, and that was a fact.
The time had arrived to fix them.
“I don’t care that Miss Dalhousie is returning,” he said. “I’ve never cared.”
Juliet’s eyebrows formed a straight line. “Never cared?”
“Not in a few years, at least.”
“A few years?” With every word she spoke, the famously cool, calm, and collected Miss Juliet Windermere became increasingly agitated.
“Further,” he continued. If she didn’t like what he’d already said, she certainly wouldn’t like this next bit. “I won’t be needing the poem.”
Juliet opened her mouth, but no words emerged, only stunned disbelief. Finally, she recovered herself and pushed off the outcropping. “What do you mean you won’t be needing the bloody poem?”
She stuck a hand down the front of her dress and began rummaging about, finally emerging with a neatly folded bunch of papers. She held them up accusingly. “I lost an entire night’s sleep finishing this.”
Rory crossed the short distance separating them and took the proffered papers. With the gibbous moon directly overhead, he was able to give the pages a quick scan. Five total, front and back, the script dense. “It’s quite, erm, prodigious.”
Juliet sniffed and lifted her chin. “I found a lot to say.”
“About Miss Dalhousie?” he asked, skeptical.
“Well, about waterfalls and such.”
He held a page close and squinted, just making out a few lines. “And about Hamish?”
She gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I figured she must love Hamish. Who wouldn’t?”
“Miss Dalhousie, methinks,” he said. Oh, why wouldn’t they stop talking about that blasted woman? She was beside the point, entirely. “I’ve never seen her take to an animal now that I think on it.”
Juliet’s observant eye narrowed upon him. “You lied to me.”
There they were. Some of the words that needed airing.
“Lie is a very strong word,” he said. “More false pretenses than outright lies, I would say.”
She exhaled a long-suffering sigh. “You sound like Archie.”
Rory snorted. She wasn’t wrong.
“Deceived,” she amended.
That was a worse word.
It was only the naked, unfiltered truth that would do.
And even then, he wasn’t so sure… But he had to try.
“I wanted to spend time with you,” he said. “And I wasn’t sure how.”
“You could’ve asked.”
“Truly?” he asked, incredulous. “Juliet—and I say this as a man who appreciates this quality about you—you’re not exactly the most approachable lass.”
Her eyebrows looked as if they might lift clear off her forehead. “That excuses you lying to me?”
“Perhaps a little.”
She gasped. If the sun had been shining, he would’ve detected twin patches of scarlet blazing across her cheeks, he was certain. “Again, you’re sounding like one of my cousins.”
“Which one?”
“Take your pick.”
“I think it’s still Archie.”
“You’re being incorrigible.”
He shook his head and took a step forward, closing more of the distance between them. “I’m simply a man trying to figure out how to be in the same room—or fairy glen—with the woman who has come to occupy his every waking thought and more than a few sleeping ones, too.”
“By making me your fool.”
“You could never be that.”
She set her gaze on the narrow valley below.
“I’m madly in love with you, Juliet.”
Her head whipped around. “You love me?”
“Aye.”
“You love me?”
“Erm, aye.”
She exhaled a sharp breath through her nose. “You certainly have an odd way of showing it. I spent all last night writing a poem to the woman you love.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“The dark circles beneath my eyes this morning could attest to it.”
“But you didn’t,” he insisted. “Not unless you wrote it to yourself.”
Her mouth snapped shut. She was thinking.
Which could be good.
Or very, very bad.
“I…I must go,” she said, moving toward the sheep scramble, her feet picking up pace with every step. “I need time with my thoughts.”
“I understand,” he said to her back. Juliet was a thinker. It was a large part of what made her Juliet.
And he loved Juliet. But…
“Juliet?”
She met his gaze over her shoulder.
“Allow yourself to feel, too,” he called out, his heart in every word. “What we have is more than what we’ve shared with our bodies.” He let that sit in the air for a moment. “Tomorrow evening…I’ll see you at the play?”
Though a storm raged in her eyes, she nodded before resuming her descent down the hill.
Clearly, she wished to walk alone. He could respect that, but still he followed at a distance.
After he watched her disappear safely through the wide double doors of the assembly rooms, he cut left, choosing to forego the rest of an evening of making idle conversation with neighbors and dancing with winsome daughters.
He’d never been skilled at faking jollity, so it was better he took himself off for a night’s ramble.
Besides, he had a poem to read by his favorite poetess, and perhaps Hamish needed a lullaby sung to him.
He’d, indeed, made a hash of matters with Juliet.
But now she knew he had.
And somehow that was better—though it was also worse.
He would see her tomorrow night.
It was the brittle twig upon which all his hopes hung.