“It is proof of what you deny. I see it in your eyes.” She touched his lids with her fingertips and smiled.
“You see too many damned things in my eyes that are not real.”
“They are real for me if not for you.”
“With this war raging…I can give you nothing.”
“You give without knowing, Joshua.” Gently, she cleared his forehead of brown strand heavy with perspiration. “And what you cannot offer is perhaps not worth having.”
“You are a child ignorant of tomorrow—and I am only a man, damn you, as flawed as the next.”
“I am not fearful any more. I have been to hell and back. I want you, Joshua. I want to be by your side. To raise our children. I do not fear the future, but I would fear it without you.” She looked directly into his eyes and said it again. “I love you.”
Juliet sighed, too overwhelmed for debate, too paralyzed by the weight of love too long deprived of its natural fulfillment. She was no longer fooled by his assumed posturing. “Then prove your flaws, Joshua Rutland,” she murmured dreamily into his ear as she leaned forward and kissed it. “Prove your flaws to me now!”
The last of his defenses crumbled. He swept her into his arms, growling curses and hoarse imprecations. He laid her back on the soft green moss, and swept aside her clothing, his hands wandering over her body, feeling licks of fire wherever they touched her skin. Gone were the doubts, the indecisions, the denials, and the uncertainties.
For an instant, one brief instant, he stilled. He sat up to drink in her wondrous body. She blushed, covered herself with her hands beneath his heated gaze.
“My God, you take my breath away. Yet this is madness,” he said. “Tell me to stop, Juliet.
“Tell you to stop?” she whispered. Very purposefully, she freed her hair from its pins so that it flowed in waves beneath her. “That, my lord, would be madness.”
His rich, alluring chuckle drifted over her. He stood to shed his buckskins letting them drop to the ground. She caught flashes of glistening flesh, hard and sinewy, damp with his day’s exertion.
“You fill my whole world, Juliet.” He kneeled next to her, hauled her into his arms, and held her tight in his embrace, as if shielding her with his body against all the torments, the fears and loneliness.
Cocooned within Joshua’s arms, Juliet closed her eyes and drank it all in—the man, the millions of ways he moved her. He rose again, lifted her ever so gently and carried her beneath the shade of oaks, reverently laying her on soft moss. She buried her face against his throat, so conscious of where his warm flesh touched hers.
The air lay thick like the heat of day. She dared to glide her hand down his shoulders, chest, and midsection.
He seized her hands. “Slowly,” he warned, perceiving her with hunger. He leaned down to kiss her. First his lips grazed hers, soft and fine as a breath of wind. She quivered at the brush of his lips against hers and the feeling swept downward, caressing the tips of her breast, the core of her belly, the place between her legs.
“Please,” she said, pressing close, seeking release from the delicious ache inside her. “Promise me it won’t be like before, when you made me rise to the sky and yet took none of your own pleasure.”
A quirk of a smile tipped his lips as the length of his body pressed close to hers, their legs quickly entwined, their mouths inseparable as tongues intermingled on one shared breath.
“Juliet.” He caressed and teased her flesh until her breasts budded and were full and heavy against his warm hand.
His hand splayed at the bottom of her spine holding her in intimate contact. She gasped as her bare breasts touched against the hairs of his chest, her cheek abraded into nettle stings, silken skin against stubbled maleness and the intimate contact of his arousal against her stomach. Suddenly, his hands were everywhere, her body aching for more.
Outlining the tips of her breasts with his fingers, Joshua brought their tips to crested peaks. Slowly, languorously, his hand moved downward, skimming either side of her body, exploring her thighs, then plunged down again searching the warmth that lay hidden intimately between.
“My Juliet. Do you know how hard it’s been for me to stay away from you? Knowing you were my wife and not being able to have you?”
“Yes,” she said, her fingers reaching down and caressing his manhood. “I think I might have a vague idea.”
His mouth came down on hers, sapping her strength, her body boneless while he plied her intimately with his finger, withdrawing and sinking, pushing her over some unnamed edge. She could not get enough of him; her impatience grew to explosive proportions, his expert touch driving her to higher levels of ecstasy.
Dazed, she opened her eyes to meet his blue gaze, dark as lapis…and poised above her… Lord Joshua Rutland, a man who struck fear in the British and Indians alike, a man who had the lethal power to kill a man. Yet all he had yielded to her was an aching tenderness.
“There must be more,” she beseeched, crying out in a frenzy of unendurable rapture, “please!”
For a fraction of a second Joshua’s hand stayed. His face ravaged with uncertainties, he hesitated. Then with a helpless groan, he buried his face in her shoulder. “There will be pain, my Juliet. There is no way I can spare you of that.”
She circled his neck with her arms and held him secure. “I love you, Joshua. I love you with all my heart.”
“I love you, Juliet. You realize this moment will change everything between us.”
