The library door opened once again, but she did not look up. Strong arms wrapped about her, pulling her against the comfort of a familiar velvet-clad chest. “I’ll kill the arrogant bastard for hurting you,” Geoffrey’s cool voice surprised her.
“He hates me,” she sobbed. “He truly hates me. And for what? What have I done to him?”
“Do you hate him?”
“No!” she sobbed.
“Then he’s a fool to scorn your love,” came the reply.
“I don’t love him, Geoffrey. Not now. But he was once my dear friend and now he hates me. I did him no hurt, and that is what I cannot bear.” She wept as he held her tenderly, stroking her dark hair. Finally she managed to calm herself. “When did you get back?” she sniffed.
“A little while ago. Daisy told me Lord Burke had called on you, slammed angrily from the house shortly thereafter, and that you’d not come out of the library since then.”
“Is all well in Devon?”
“All is well, and in readiness to receive us. My girls eagerly await you as well as their stepsister and half-brother.”
“Let us go tomorrow!”
“All right,” he agreed, “we’ll go tomorrow.”
“Geoffrey?”
“What, my darling?”
“I love you!”
A happy grin split his handsome face. He walked to the library door and turned the key in the lock. She saw the grin fade into a look of passion. “Oh, yes!” she breathed in answer to the unaskedquestion. “Yes! Yes! Yes!” And holding out her hand to him, she drew him close. For a long, long moment he held her face in his hands, looking down into it. Then his mouth touched her gently, searchingly, and her lips parted eagerly beneath his, sending shivers of hot and cold up her spine. His kisses deepened and she became aware that his hands were loosening her laces, drawing her skirts off. Her own fingers were pulling at the bone buttons on his doublet, and when they had undressed each other, they slipped to the floor before the warm fire. His elegant fingers stroked her long back, her rounded buttocks. She grew bold, pushing him onto his back, her small tongue lapping eagerly at his nipples. “Damn you, Skye,” he growled through gritted teeth. “Ahhhh, God, sweetheart!” Her tongue followed the thin golden line of hair downward from his belly. She breathed deeply of his warm male scent, like a kitten licking lovingly at a kindly hand. She loved his great manroot with her tongue. He shuddered with pleasure. For several months now he had been denied the delights of her body. Strangely, he had remained faithful. Once having loved her, no other woman could satisfy him.
To fall upon her would have been so easy. He ached to bury himself deep within her, but Geoffrey Southwood was that rare man who gained his greatest pleasure by giving pleasure. Skillfully he turned her onto her back and slowly rained burning kisses over the long pure pillar of her throat. “I have longed for weeks to love you again,” he murmured, placing his lips against the jumping pulse at the base of her throat. His mouth moved to the tiny star mole at the swell of her breast. “Sweet, ah my darling, how sweet you are.”
They were lost in each other. Hands and lips loved and loved and loved again until the line between reality and fantasy wavered and finally disappeared altogether. They caressed, they tasted, they hungered until finally they were joined in one undying blaze of love that left them physically shaken, but strangely stronger. The gold-orange firelight played over their entwined bodies like a jealous third lover. Exhausted, they slept where they lay, waking an hour later to cuddle, to speak in hushed whispers of little things. They were man and wife, they were lovers, and yet they sometimes felt momentarily shy of each other.
“The harvest was good on the estates,” he said.
“Did you visit Wren Court?” she asked.
“They eagerly awaited Dame Cecily.”
“She’s as anxious to get home as we are. Oh, Geoffrey! Thank you for loving me,reallyloving me!”
“I love you as you love me, my darling. ’Tis love returned.”
“ ’twill always be returned, my dearest husband.”
What Niall Burke would not have given to hear those words. He had left Lynmouth House in a high rage. The meeting had not gone at all as he had planned. He had dared to hope that she would fling herself into his arms and beg to be taken home to Ireland. He had believed she would be ashamed of what had transpired in Algiers. Instead, she had behaved totally unlike the sweet Skye of his memory. His memory was faulty: Niall had conveniently forgotten the woman who had led her men into battle with Barbary pirates.
Moving through his house, he unlocked the door to his wife’s bedchamber and walked into the room. “Good evening, Mrs. Tubbs, and how is your patient tonight?”
A tall, stocky woman rose from her chair by the bed and came forward. “She was able to take some soup this evening, my lord.”
“Good. Go and get your own meal now. I will sit with Lady Burke until you return.”
“Thank you, my lord.” The big woman bobbed a curtsey and was gone.
Niall Burke sat down by the bed and stared at the sleeping woman who was his wife. Her beautiful pale golden skin had grown sallow, her glorious dark golden hair—braided now in two plaits—had become a lusterless brown, and lank. But a few months ago she had been the loveliest girl alive, and now—He sighed. Poor Constanza. He could never forgive her for what she had done, but they might begin again, and if he could get her with child perhaps she would become once more the sweet girl he had fallen in love with back on Mallorca.
Her pansy-purple eyes opened. “Niall?”
