Chapter 16
Sixteen
The sky was still cloudy the next morning. There was an even colder wind than before. They stood outside the coaching inn, Arabella shivering, and Alasdair longed to put his arm around her, there in the yard.
“We’ll be in England in two hours,” Paterson told them.
“What of these clouds?” Arabella asked, looking up.
Paterson shrugged. “We’re close enough to England to have English weather. I only ken Scottish weather.”
Alasdair also shrugged. “We may have some snow, a few flakes.” He had no care for the weather. He was anxious to get into the carriage, to be closeted with Arabella, to have his arms around her, to kiss her.
“Ewen,” Arabella said. “It’s too cold for you to be outside with Paterson.”
Alasdair’s heart sank at this. He had spent much of the night in anticipation of the hours ahead, what she might allow, what he might dare. He did not want Ewen MacEwen in the carriage with them.
He was elated by the boy’s response.
“We’re going south, ’tis bound to get warmer as we go,” Ewen said. He winked in Alasdair’s direction before he turned to climb up on the driver’s seat.
Then they were together in the carriage, and Arabella was the one kissing Alasdair, up on her knees on the seat next to him so he did not have to bend his head to hers.
She held his face and kissed him, pressing into him, making sounds of impatient arousal.
She was fevered, rushed, sloppy with her kisses.
Oh, the throbbing and the frenzy she was causing in him. The unbelievably sweet thrill of doing this with her. And the wonderful agony of pushing back against his overwhelming desire to lift her up and put her astride him and have her sex against his with only his trousers between them.
She took her hands from his face and unbuttoned his coat and then hers and took the hand he had on her waist and put it on her dress-covered breast.
He held his hand still as she continued to kiss him. Then he squeezed ever so slightly. She moaned. He squeezed with more force. How wonderful, so firm and yet soft, such a perfect handful of flesh. Oh, how he longed to see it.
Now he wanted to see her naked breast. Could he never be satisfied?
She broke her mouth from his, panting.
“We don’t have much time today,” she said. “Either the snow will come and we will have to break off our journey or it will get so cold Ewen will have to come inside the carriage.”
“Ye are in a hurry, then,” he said.
“Yes.”
“But we must be careful.” He felt he should say this. Be the voice of caution to this tiny but unbelievably powerful force of nature who had the capacity to induce an ache in his heart that matched the one in his groin. “There is so much hurt that can come from impulsive acts.”
She knit her brows together. She got off her knees and sat next to him. His hand slid from her breast as she moved, and his fingers ached, missing the roundness and the softness already.
“Is it impulsive though? It has been more than three and a half years,” she said.
“In the eyes of the world, I am already ruined because I was headlong and foolish. But the foolishness was in the man I used as a substitute for you. And there need be no danger of a child, Dr. Andrews.” She ran her hand over the front of his fall.
He groaned. “Miss Lovelock, I am sorry, I dinnae . . . I mean, I do want . . .”
He felt her hand move, and he looked down as she unbuttoned his fall and his engorged shaft sprang free and she grasped it.
For the first time in his life, he felt a hand other than his own on his member.
He shuddered as she wrapped her fingers around it.
Her small hand. The world fell away and all he could feel was the most intense pleasure centered on his cock.
He was unable to resist but felt he should make her aware of his limitations.
“I . . . Miss Lovelock. I willnae ken . . .”
“I will show you, Dr. Andrews. And you must know the feminine anatomy in question.”
She moved her hand.
That one swift rub on his shaft, from the base up to the head, combined with his imagining of her own most private place, undid him. A dizzyingly swift climb to the heights of pleasure. And then, to his enormous shame, he spent himself.
He was only glad he did not get it on her coat or on her dress. Otherwise, he had no place in his heart or head for anything but mortification.
He could not find the words to express himself. His speech had fled. But what was there to say? There could have been no worse outcome for this moment.
He could not look at her. He turned from her, knowing his face was the same color as his hair. He fumbled with his trousers, to button himself up, and to get away. From her.
The woman he craved with every bit of himself.
She would not want him now.
He felt her get up from beside him and move around him so she was on the seat on his other side and he could not escape her. His eyes were down, but she put her face close, and he felt the softest brush of her lips on his. A hand on his hand, staying it so the fall of his trousers was left open.
“Have you coupled with a woman before, Doctor?”
Here it was. How he wished now he had taken up offers from other women in the past so he could have been better prepared for her touch. So he would have made his mistakes with those others instead of the woman he hoped to make his wife.
But she had bravely faced her past with him yesterday.
“Nae.”
“But you like women?”
He raised his face to her. “Aye!” He did not want her to be in any doubt of that.
She made a strange noise—half gasp, half whistle—and spoke almost as if to herself. “I knew you were the not-stupid man.”
He allowed himself a bitter smile. “In this moment, I very much feel I am the stupid man.”
“Do you desire me?”
He looked at her face, her intelligent eyes, her sweet mouth. There was no place for equivocation here. His cock had not equivocated.
“Aye,” he said.
“Then your eagerness is a compliment to me.” She studied him.
“But for me . . . so quickly . . . like a boy.”
“You are a man. The man of my dreams.”
His head spun. She had said that yesterday before he kissed her, but he had not believed her.
She was speaking again. “You have denied your appetites for so long, is it any wonder you are like a boy in this singular way?”
“I regret—I widnae have myself be that way with ye.”
She touched his lower lip with her thumb and brushed it slowly. “I would rather have you spend quickly with me than know you had used other women and had become inured to this kind of pleasure.”
“I could ne’er become inured to ye.” And indeed, he could feel his tumescence beginning to return just from her thumb on his lip. But then she took her thumb from his mouth and moved her hand away from his face and rested it on his waistcoat, on his chest, over his heart.
She left her hand there a long time. He remembered it was the same place she had first touched him, in her cottage.
Aye, ’tis my heart. Ye have it. Be careful, dauntless Arabella. Please be more careful with it than ye were with my cock. I can only spill my heart once.
“I would be quite willing,” she said, “to undertake a program of exercises to build your stamina.” She trailed her hand down his waistcoat to his member and took it in her hand again, and he felt how hard he already was.
He gasped, afraid he might spill abruptly once more, but he did not.
“Miss Lovelock,” he said carefully. “I’m sorry, but I wonder if ye might remove yer—”
“Clothes?” One eyebrow of hers quirked, and her mouth was in a mischievous pout. “I think that will have to wait until we are in a warm room with a closed door.”
And again he feared he would spill, this time from only her grip and her suggestion that he might see her body bared. That ripe, surely perfect body he had imagined so many times over the last three years as he had lain in his own bed, alone, at night.
But he did not know what to make of this saucy Arabella who took his shaft in her hand and pouted and hinted at future nakedness.
It aroused him. Unquestionably. But, for the first time, he wondered if she might have changed.
Maybe she was no longer the Arabella whom he had worshipped in his mind for so long.
He struggled to speak clearly. “I was going to say remove yer hand.”
“Yes, Alasdair.”
She released him. He had a momentary pang of want and need, but his name in her mouth. For the first time. Oh, blazes. He wanted that even more—for her to call him Alasdair—than her hand on his cock.
“’Tis nae what I imagined,” he said, his hands at his waistband. He had some difficulty, but he was finally able to button his fall over his engorgement. “Forgive me, but ’tis nae romantic.”
She was no longer turned towards him but instead faced the opposite carriage seat.
“No,” she said flatly, her eyes ahead. “It is not. Most decidedly, it is not. I was fooled by romance, and I will not be fooled again. I want only harsh light and cold air and your desire and mine.”
So. She had changed. Had hardened. How was he to steer their course now?
“Miss Lovelock—” he started.
“You have spent in front of me, you can call me Arabella.”
Last night, she had nearly thrown open the bedchamber door at the inn and invited him into her bed when she saw his smile and his dimples.
How she had wanted him on top of her, holding her, having her.
But she did not want to scare him. She knew how lucky she was that he knew her past and still wanted to kiss her.
So she had restrained herself and did not invite him into her bedchamber.
But in the carriage today, she had forgotten her resolve.
She was restive. She yearned for him. She could feel the slick of her own wetness, the ache of her bud, the stiffening of her nipples. She did not mind that he had spent precipitously. She wanted the same for herself. With him.
But when she told him he could call her Arabella because he had spent with her hand on him, he drew himself back and colored deeply again.