“No. That is precisely what I want to prevent. There is no need for you to bear it alone. Shannon, you already have my heart. Take the protection of my name. I want you to have it.”
“Don’t press me now,” she pleaded, turning her head away. “I never wanted any of this to touch you. I don’t know what to do anymore.”
Brandon cupped her chin and forced her to face him. “Even if you do not marry me, I will do everything in my power to keep your past your own. TheCenturyhas long since sailed for England, and the record of your crime went with it. If the exact nature of your crime were somehow discovered, no one can know what provoked it. That will always remain between us, Shannon.” He felt a shudder ripple through her and his eyes bore into hers. “I will never believe that your stepfather’s death was anything but an accident, but even if it weren’t, even if you had held a pistol to his head and fired it, I could not find you guilty. Thomas Stewart was the vilest sort of thief. He tried to rob you of your dignity, your spirit, and your humanity. What he did to you was the heinous crime. He made you a slave to his whims. You were the victim, Shannon, naught else but his victim.”
“I want to believe that,” she said, searching his face. “Sometimes I feel so…so dirty. And then you’re here and I don’t think of it when you hold me. And when you love me…you make me feel beautiful.”
“Youarebeautiful.” He bent his head and brushed her trembling lips with his mouth.
Shannon’s hands rested lightly, tentatively on his shoulders, then she slid them around his back, holding her to him. “Love me now, Brandon.”
He unfolded his body beside her and returned his mouth to hers. Shannon’s response was sweet and giving, an echo of his own. His hands stole into her hair, fanning it across the lace pillow sham. Like ink, he thought, spilling on paper.
Brandon kissed her cheeks, her closed eyes, until she blindly sought his mouth again. Her tongue teased the soft underside of his lip. “Yes,” he said, against her mouth, then his lips parted to deepen the kiss.
Shannon’s hands tugged at his shirt, pulling it free of his breeches. They slipped beneath the soft linen to explore the breadth of his taut muscles. “Finger-whispering,” she told him as she traced the length of his spine and felt him shiver in reaction. She was helping him out of his shirt a moment later. When her hands returned to his flesh, there was more pressure than promise.
She felt Brandon’s breath against her throat before he placed his mouth on the curve of her neck. His hand dipped beneath the neckline of her chemise and fondled her breasts until they hardened and swelled, the tips sensitive to the lightest touch of his fingers.
Clothing became a barrier that frustrated them both, yet breaking away seemed equally unsatisfactory. In the end they disrobed one another, taunting each other with lips and hands and tongues, neither of them willing to surrender completely to the other’s seduction. The battle was simply too satisfying to have done quickly.
They wrestled playfully in a tangle of arms and legs, laughing until desire brought them up short with its breathless expectancy.
“Now, Brandon,” she said, trailing her fingers along his thigh. “I want you now.”
“Then take me,” he said. He rolled on his back and brought her on top of him. He smiled with wicked intent. “I’ll teach you to ride yet, sweet lady.”
Shannon blinked owlishly as his purpose registered, but she never considered resisting. She allowed Brandon to guide her until she had taken him fully. Her hair spilled forward, drawing a curtain about her face as she leaned over him and brought his hands to her breasts. Sensing the rhythm from the tracings of his thumbs across her swollen nipples, she began to move with it.
She felt her body contracting all around him, pressing him to her intimately. Her eyes closed as she concentrated on the source of her pleasure, feeling heat radiate from the center of her. Brandon’s hands fell away from her breasts and caressed her buttocks and thighs.
Shannon listened to the change in his breathing, the catch in her own. She knew he was watching her, that part of his pleasure was in seeing hers, and she felt a measure of pride that she hid nothing from him. Delicious strings of tension tugged at her limbs and arched her spine. She leaned back, her throat stretching tautly, as delicate threads of pleasure snapped one after the other.
Her climax shuddered into Brandon and he felt the last restraint on his own pleasure being severed. His fingers tightened on her hips as he gave her his seed. Shannon fell against his chest, resting her face in the curve of his shoulder and placing the heel of her hand against his thudding heart. Her breath caressed his flesh warmly.
“I may never move,” she murmured. He had made her feel beautiful indeed.
“I may never let you.” He thought he could feel the outline of her smile against his skin.
Of course they did move, although exceedingly reluctantly and not until their discomfort became a point of humor. Naked, Shannon slipped out of bed and disappeared behind her dressing screen, surprised when Brandon followed and asked her to wash him as well. Shyly she complied, finding this little intimacy a pleasure in its own right. She wondered at the urge she felt to touch him with her mouth and quickly tamped it down, certain she was wanton to even think it. Brandon, his eyes dark and searching, led her back to bed.
Much later, after he had shown her that wanton thoughts could be gloried in, Shannon asked him to tell her about the folly. “Did your great-grandfather really win it in a card game?”
Brandon was lying on his side, his eyes closed. “One of us did not sleep away the better part of this day,” he said significantly.
“That was perfectly clear,” she said. “There is no need to exert yourself by raising an eyebrow.”
He smiled sleepily. “Yes, he won it in a card game at some club or other in London. The story goes that he cheated shamelessly, but skillfully, to get it. He was deeply in debt, creditors demanding payment, threatening him with Newgate and whatnot….” Brandon stifled a yawn. “America was still very much unsettled in those days, and his friends thought it was…”
“Folly,” Shannon supplied encouragingly.
“What? Oh, yes, folly to leave civilized England rather than sell the land and settle his accounts.”
“Brandon.” Shannon said his name suspiciously. “Are you telling me the truth?”
“Swear it. Friends made a wager that he would return in two years. Proposed a toast to Fleming’s folly. Great-grandfather won the wager…never went back.”
“That’s a perfectly dreadful story,” she announced as she curled into him, settling her bottom against his thighs.
