“Will you spend me such pleasure, then?”
Marmaduke scarce heard her, so thick was the haze of his arousal, so achingly sweet, the powerful verging of his need.
“Sweeting…” He looked at her. “What did you say? I didn’t-”
“I asked for pleasure,” she said, the vulnerability in her eyes piercing his heart. “Will you indulge me? Can you do so knowing I wish to keep all emotion out of any physical intimacies we share?”
That he heard.
But any protest died in his throat, overrun by a moan when she brought his hands even closer to her breasts. Clearly mistaking the pitiful sound for his agreement, she touched his fingers to her flesh.
“Caterine,” her name burst past his lips the instant his passion broke.
“Then you agree?” Her voice cut through the fog swirling around him.
He nodded, unable to deny her aught in that moment.
Even such a fool proposal as she’d just suggested.
One he had no intention of keeping.
But now, this moment, he had greater concerns on his troubled mind. Such as how to keep her from noticing the telltale stain dampening his hose and the front flap of his tunic.
For he, Sir Marmaduke Strongbow, champion of fair ladies and slayer of dragons, had just joined the ranks of lesser men.
Chapter 26
Enchanter of women.
A charmer of untold skill and finesse.
Capable of seducing the virtue from a self-sacrificing virgin saint, or so his men claimed.
Caterine puzzled, his men’s boasts echoing in her ears. If they spoke true, why had he pulled his hands from her grasp - away from her bared breasts – and dropped to his knees on the rush-strewn floor? Kneeling before her, his head bowed, he looked anything but a man so famed in the fine art of winning female hearts.
In anything, he appeared defeated.
Worse, he struck her as pained.
Not sure what to say, she worried the folds of thearisaidbunched on her lap. She sought the wrap’s comfort even as she willed her champion to raise his head and look at her.
To touch her again.
Mercy.
She should be scandalized, shocked to the bone by such wicked, wanton wishes.
Yet…
He’d stirred something inside her, and now she only wanted him to rekindle that flame. Again give her the pleasure that spun through her the instant his hands had touched her.
Had he drawn back because he found her brazen?
The notion curled talons of mortification around her pride, cruelly dashing every last remnant of the exhilarating tremors called to life by his caress. Tingle by tingle, they fizzled into a congealed pool of cold doubt somewhere in the pit of her belly.
She stared at him now, one half of her admiring the way his hair gleamed in the moonlight, the other half cringing when her gaze fell on his tightly clenched hands.
He was clearly unhappy.
