Chapter 12 #2
“How dare I speak the truth?” Culross laughed—cold and cutting. “Which would you rather, Meghan? That I lie as I often do, or give you the truth raw as it stands?”
“Please.” She spat the word like a nail driven home. “Let us not pretend there is anything honorable about you, Lord Culross.”
Had she been a man, he would have cut her down for the insult. The sting was worse because it was true. There was nothing honorable about him. And even so, he would not endure her disrespect.
“I should bend you over my knee for that,” he snarled.
The image tightened his body with brutal heat.
Meghan’s face flushed the prettiest shade of defiance. “You wouldn’t dare!”
Ah. But he would.
“Once again, you prove how little you know me, Meghan.” He lowered his lashes. “I not only dare, kitten. I would relish it.” He let his gaze linger deliberately. “And you would love it even more, sweetheart.”
Meghan stared at him, her already enormous eyes wider still, ablaze.
Then she barked a laugh in his face—sharp, mocking—and damn if that old fire in her didn’t make him harder still.
Their eyes locked.
Her amusement faded.
“I mean everything I say, Meghan,” he whispered. “Everything.”
And with that warning, he tapped his boot against the carpet she had laughed over with Greyhold.
“My family will kill you,” she said softly, neither threat, nor promise. Just a sadly stated little fact.
“They will try,” he promised. “But that is all they will do.” His hands pulsed at his side.
A flicker crossed her eyes.
Pain? Fear for her kin? For him? Surely not the latter.
Ah, yes. Culross scoffingly recalled her profession last evening. She took them for friends—correction, former friends now.
Either way, she had never been that to him.
Friends did not want to rip another friend’s skirts off and bury oneself ballocks deep in the other one the way Culross did her.
“Now.” He gestured. “Get in.”
Shoulders back, Meghan glided over. She stopped two feet from the carpet. Her glittering eyes held his—and then she spat on the Axminster.
His jaw slipped. “Given your exchange with Greyhold, I take it you have a problem with the carpet.”
Meghan notched up her chin. “You could lay down Dacca muslin, dip it in chocolate, and I still would not step on your carpet.”
A muscle jumped beside his eye. “Would you have me fetch Greyhold, as you seemed all too eager to oblige him?”
“Oh, yes.” If sarcasm were a person, its name would be Meghan. “And let you leave so you may play the coward twice this day, my lord?”
His eyes bulged.
“No,” she scoffed. “I’d far rather take my chances keeping off that carpet with you than with the seven-foot tree you planted in my room this morning.”
The rage that had filled him at seeing her cozy with the viscount eased.
His lips twitched.
Oh, Christ.
He caught his mistake too late.
Her brows dipped. “This is amusing to you?” she demanded, storming over.
Culross fell back. “No—ow.”
Meghan drew her finger back to flick him a second time. This time he ducked.
“I know better than to use my finger against you men and your big, stupid chests.” The lady pointed accusingly at the offending area.
He glanced down.
His mistake proved costly.
Her finger struck his forehead.
Hard.
He winced.
“You needn’t worry, August.” A vibrant glow surrounded her like an aura dimmed. “I am well aware you do not see me as worthy of being your countess.”
That cynical smile came easier and easier.
And cut him sharper each time.
Then what she had said registered.
That is what she believed?
Floored, he rocked back on his heels.
“But if you believe I will let you take me aboard your ship and be at the mercy of your crew, where I will be announced as anything other than your wife, then I will cut off your ballocks, fold them in that carpet”—she kicked the corner, curling it over—“you are so determined to keep me off of and give them a proper sea burial.”
Blood filled his ears. Filled all of him.
God, she was breathtaking.
Why hadn’t he seen it before?
Why hadn’t he seen her before?
“Consider this me borrowing your title.” She gestured vaguely. “You are free to have it for whomever it is you select as your countess.”
The minx kicked the carpet again for good measure. It rolled back too quick for the lady’s liking. Meghan kept at it. She buried her slippers into the plush fabric several more times.
That little act of defiance would have been adorable if it weren’t so heartbreaking.
Muttering to herself, she drew her leg back once more.
Culross caught her by the waist.
Meghan gasped, lost her balance.
Breathing heavily, his gaze tunneled to her and to only her.
Meghan’s chest rose and fell quickly. His did too. From something he had done so many times before, but now felt brand new.
Her eyes widened, only a moment.
He caught her mouth under his, capturing her sigh, and then Meghan as her legs went out from under her.
Culross settled his arm heavy around her waist.
His pulse hammered in his ears. He worshipped her hips as their due.
She crept her arms around his neck. His bold, daring Meghan found the way on her own, learning him.
She skimmed her questing little fingers over his back.
Guiding his lips over hers, learning every angle.
Her breath came hard, in short little spurts.
As if she had run a footrace but wanted to keep running.
At last, he knew the taste and feel and contour of her forbidden mouth.
And Meghan, as bold in his arms as she was in every unapologetic way she lived, met him with shyness.
She didn’t know how to kiss. Fired by that knowledge, he taught her. Palming her nape, he bowed her, coaxed her open.
Culross stole inside to take of her heat and warmth. She shivered and moaned.
No other man had charted this path—until Culross. It would only ever be Culross.
Take. Take. Take. It was what he did.
From her. The sea.
She had been the prize hiding in plain sight, there the whole while.
Culross palmed her breast in his other hand. Crying out, Meghan twisted her exploring fingers into his hair. “August!”
And giving.
He buried another smile in her mouth.
Occasionally, he gave.
Meghan moaned and pressed herself against him, rubbing and arching. He teased the pebbled tip through her gown.
“I dreamed of your mouth,” he rasped with each joining. “I wondered at the taste of you.”
He felt her smile. Felt it move through him.
“We are even, August, because I have dreamed of you far longer than was appropriate.”
Culross nestled his mouth in the curve of her shoulder. “My dreams did not begin just now, Meghan.”
She loosed a dreamy sigh and he swept in, drifting his tongue around hers in a slow dance.
Kissing had been the bow or curtsy to lovemaking. A precursor and nothing more. This… This felt like nothing he had ever known.
He slid his tongue along the long, slender column of her neck.
His throat burned with the ache of wanting her. Culross glided his hands over her lithe, wondrous form, in the same sense of discovery she did his.
“You would marry your family’s enemy.” His voice was rough with want.
It should be shame.
“I would,” she breathed.
He kissed her again.
“Why?”
She glided her fingers over his neck. “Because he is not my enemy.”
Culross made to lay his next siege.
But her words pierced a place he didn’t think could be pierced—his hungering for her.
He is not my enemy…
Passion blazed from eyes that could pierce his very soul. “And even though I see him as a friend, he does not see me as one,” she whispered softly, returning every hurt he’d ever leveled at her.
Their hearts raced to the same beat.
“If I loved him,” she said quietly, “I would most certainly do so.” Meghan lifted tentative fingers and brushed them along his lips.
Culross caught her wrist. “That is it there exactly, Meghan,” he breathed, pressing a kiss against the pounding beat there. “Then…why?”
The air grew heavy.
The emotion pouring from her eyes cut him open. But it was not the way a blade splayed a man wide.
“I love you, August,” she said softly. “Beyond reason.”
She gave a little smile, as if to say I wish it weren’t so, but there it is.
For a moment, Culross could not breathe. “But…”
All this time, all the hours he had spent with her last year, and he had never seen it. He moved his eyes over her face. He touched his gaze every place. Her swollen mouth. Her freckles. He could not stop.
He had never seen it because he had not been looking.
He had not opened his eyes until now.
“Hartwell.” His mind spun. “You were going to—” Culross could not force the rest past a sudden tightness in his chest.
“Marry him?” She nodded. “Why should I not?”
Funny, until these past two days, he could have only given one reason.
An ache throbbed in his chest. And had Culross not abducted her, she would even now be the Duchess of Hartwell. Which…somehow seemed to matter more than it had yesterday, for reasons he could not sort out. “This from a woman who believes in love matches but would have settled,” he said hoarsely.
“What did it matter when I was in love with a man who loved my sister and never even noticed me?”
“I—”
That’s what she believed. How could she not see she was the fire that consumed him. Anything before with her sister was nothing, because Meghan was…Meghan was…
His heart knocked sickly against his ribcage.
August froze.
Oh, Christ.
Her sister.
It wasn’t the countess he gave two jots about, but Meghan, and two others: a cousin and a younger sister to be exact.
Meghan’s sister and cousin: Miss Smith. Lady Fleur.
“I…Meghan,” he said, hoarsely. “If you’ll excuse me. There is a matter of great urgency…”
And then with Meghan’s mouth ripe and wet from his kiss and her eyes still clouded with desire, Culross did the hardest thing he had ever done in his life—he left her.