Chapter 19 #2
“Tell me…how it feels,” Adam demanded, his body beginning to shake against hers. “Tell me!”
“Good, Adam…so wonderful. Please, hold me closer, hold me…oh, Adam!”
She stiffened in his arms, holding her breath as her entire body was rocked by rapturous sensations more intense than she had ever known before.
She barely heard him groan aloud for her own cries of ecstasy, but she felt him suddenly shudder from his head to his toes, the powerful throbbing of his body within her only adding to her delirious delight.
“Oh, God…Susanna.”
Her name was spoken before Adam realized it, and in that bright, blinding moment, he didn’t care.
Throwing his head back, he exulted in the sheer force of his pulsating release.
The sensation of spurting his hot seed into her tightening sheath was a thousand times more heady and tumultuous than what had led up to it.
For long, long moments he just stood there, clutching her fiercely against him, the aftershocks from their pleasure still shaking them both.
Only a curtain of cool rain slashing in upon them from the opened balcony doors helped him regain his presence of mind, and he opened his eyes to discover that the downpour had begun in earnest.
“Oh, it’s cold!” she squealed in surprise as he withdrew himself from her rain-spattered body and set her feet gently on the floor.
While she snatched up her dampened gown and whirled it around her shoulders to cover herself, he adjusted his breeches and then quickly shut the doors, wrestling with them against the fierce, gusting wind.
Finally he drew the bolt firmly into place.
Chuckling to himself, his mood lighter than it had been all day, Adam turned to find Susanna staring at him, a horrified look on her face. His laughter died in his throat, his intuition immediately telling him what must have upset her.
“Adam…your back. What happened?”
“Something else I had hoped never to have to tell you,” he replied evenly, although once again his tone dripped with bitterness.
He didn’t readily explain, but instead went to the table and poured himself a brimming glass of wine, then promptly drank it down.
Helping himself to another, all the while he kept his back to her as if he wanted her to get a really good look.
She swallowed painfully, wondering at his words and unable to tear her eyes away.
She was appalled by the severity of his disfigurement, thinking that the vicious lashings she had received at her father’s hands might have been inflicted with a feather compared to what must have been used against Adam.
Starting just below his shoulders, his back was crisscrossed with ugly pink scars, raised ridges of healed flesh which gave her the strong impression he had been severely beaten countless times.
And now that he was stripped to the waist, she could plainly see that while much of his chest matched the bronzed hue of his face, his sides and back were pale, as if he never completely removed his shirt while working out-of-doors because he didn’t want anyone to know what had happened to him.
“Seen enough?” he queried grimly, raising his second glass of wine to his lips as he turned to face her.
He took a long draught, then added, “You can touch it if you’d like.
You won’t hurt me. I can’t feel a thing on my back, haven’t been able to for years.
I think that’s what saved me after the hundredth beating. ”
Shocked, Susanna said softly, “Hundredth?”
“Yes, I quit counting after that. I was only eighteen then, so if you figure I was at Raven’s Point for six more years…” He shrugged, his voice very low. “I suppose I’m lucky to have any skin left there at all.”
“Did Dominick do this to you?” she asked, hoping that he would say no, that it was Dominick’s overseers who had flayed him so mercilessly.
But she sensed his answer before he uttered it.
This must have been what Adam had meant when he said James Cary hadn’t had to accept just his word for his horrible accusations.
No doubt the planter had taken one look at Adam’s back and come to his own grim conclusions about Dominick Spencer.
“What do you think?” was Adam’s only reply. Draining his glass, he set it upon the table and reached down to pull off his boots. “You’ll see when I take off my breeches that the damage goes much lower, and then there’s this…”
She started when a triangular chunk of wood with rounded edges tumbled from his right boot.
“I use that to help keep my balance,” Adam explained, rolling off his sock. “Fills the shoe.”
He paused for a moment to glance at Susanna, his set expression impossible to read.
“I’m not telling you any of this or showing you why I limp to drum up pity.
I just think we should discuss this now so you won’t have any more unpleasant surprises.
” His gaze moved meaningfully to the bed, then back to her, falling to the golden thatch of woman’s hair that peeked through the edges of her gown. “Then we’ve got other things to do.”
Gathering the gown more tightly around her body, Susanna flushed hotly at his hint of how they would spend the rest of the evening. Yet her flustered thoughts quickly turned to horror when Adam revealed his foot.
She felt a little sick. Only his deeply nicked big toe remained. The rest of his toes, along with a large, slanting portion of the flesh which should have been below them, had been hacked off.
“Oh, Adam…”
“It’s not a pretty sight, I admit. I probably would have died if they hadn’t stopped the bleeding with a torch—”
“Why?” she blurted, her hand flying to her mouth.
“Why?”
“I was foolish enough to run away not long after my mother drowned herself. Dominick’s dogs found me, then he and his men caught up. They executed my punishment right on the spot. I guess I was lucky, or else Dominick was in a charitable mood. He’s been known to chop off the whole foot.”
With sickening clarity, Susanna envisioned the grisly scene. Her stomach pitching, she dashed to the chamber pot in a corner not far from the bed. As she hunched over it, her body wracked by dry heaves, she was grateful she hadn’t yet had anything to eat.
“I’m sorry,” Adam said behind her. “I shouldn’t have shown you outright, but explained it first.”
“No, I’m fine,” she murmured, straightening to lean shakily against the wall.
As he closed the distance between them, carrying two full glasses of wine, she noticed that his limp was far more pronounced now that he didn’t have the support of his boot.
She accepted the wine with trembling fingers and drank deeply, almost gulping.
“Better?”
She lowered the half-empty glass and wiped her mouth and chin, where some wine had dribbled. “Yes, I think so. I’m sorry, Adam…I didn’t mean to—”