But could she and Jeremy not have shared the same in their marriage bed? Was the reaction to touch dependent on the other person so greatly that with one man you could share explosive passion and with the other feel nothing?
Perhaps she should try again. Kiss Graeme and compare it to the kiss that she’d shared with Jeremy. Last night, she’d been too nervous about her seduction to pay close enough attention.
Without another thought, she pressed her hands to Graeme’s chest, reached up on the tips of her toes, and kissed him.
Immediately he responded. His arm snaked around her waist, pulling her close to his warmth. Possessively close. His kiss was not rough, but tenderness was decidedly absent. Instead, his kiss was urgent, his tongue deep, his lips intense, but just as pleasant and thought-scattering as she’d remembered from the night before. Coils of pleasure wound their way through her extremities, up her legs, down her arms, around in her stomach, all swirling and moving toward the center of her body. The hidden area where Graeme had put his fingers.
Heat flamed in her cheeks and chest, and she knew pink stained her skin. The mere thought of their union brought color to her face. Not out of embarrassment, but pure unadulterated desire. She longed to get closer to him, longed to wrap her legs around him and have him ease the lust that pounded through her. Most interesting indeed.
They continued to kiss, and he kneaded her bottom, but she wanted more. No, craved more.
Without further thought, she hiked one of her legs up and wrapped it around his waist. He lifted her off the ground and pulled her tighter to him, pressing her to his erection. Yes, that was the spot; the pressure of him against her was precisely what she desired. In one swift movement, he flipped their positions so that her back pressed into the wall, and he pinned her in place. He lifted her other leg, and she wrapped both of them around him, her dress bunched up at her waist. In this position, nothing save her undergarments and his trousers stood between their skin.
He kissed her, and she bucked against him, rubbing herself along the hard ridge of his erection. Again and again, she moved until the pleasure unwound and the spiral of sensations burst through her. She did her best not to make a sound as her climax exploded through her.
Good gracious, but it was most fascinating how she reacted to him. He leaned against her, his warm breath scattering gooseflesh across her neck. Perhaps she’d misjudged lust, placing it in the same useless category as love. Lust was most pleasant, and between husband and wife, certainly it was appropriate, although perhaps too distracting to accomplish much.
Graeme lowered Vanessa’s legs to the ground and stepped away from her. Damned if she wasn’t a tempting little minx. And now he was so hard that he wanted to rip off her clothes and pound himself into her, but he couldn’t do that. Not here and certainly not now. He took a deep breath and pulled his mind out of his pants. He knew how to control himself. Hell, he’d been doing it his entire life.
He strained his ears to listen, trying to hear what Niall could be doing. He moved over to the wall and peeked around it, but Niall was gone. The stone barricade he’d made stood, but there was no other sign of the man. Graeme swore. He couldn’t even keep his hands to himself long enough to complete the task that he’d started this morning.
“This way,” Graeme said to Vanessa. He made no move to touch her this time since he struggled to keep his hands off her body.
But she followed obediently. They stepped around the boulder and entered the area where Niall had been working. Directly above them, the ceiling towered high, covered with long reaching stalactites. Then the chamber narrowed, rounding downward to form a tunnel. Damn it all, but Niall had already escaped. Gone into that tunnel? Or passed beside Graeme and Vanessa without being seen or heard?
“Son of a bitch,” Graeme bit out.
“What’s the matter?” Vanessa asked.
Plenty was the matter. While he’d been pleasuring his wife up against a wall, he’d allowed his target to escape. He exhaled slowly.
“The man you were watching, he left,” she said.
“My cousin,” Graeme corrected.
“Niall was here?” She stepped out into the open area of the cavern and started examining her surroundings. “Then for whatever reason were we hiding? If you wanted to know what he was doing, why would you not simply ask him?”
There was a simple logic to her question, and for a moment, Graeme wondered if that tactic would work. But he didn’t know if Niall trusted him enough to answer truthfully. Chances were, he would not. Were their positions traded, it was unlikely that he would trust Niall. But if the men of Solomon’s were suspicious, then they had good reason to be. They were cautious men, and by no means alarmist.
“It seems such a simple tactic is not possible.”
She shrugged. “Asking questions has always been preferable to me, than to wonder endlessly what someone is thinking or doing.” She looked around them, her nose wrinkled. “What is he building?”
“I don’t know. I need to look around,” he said, expecting at any moment that she would begin complaining about the temperature or the darkness or simply the fact that they were in a cave. But Vanessa seemed as at home here as he did. She nodded, then turned to investigate the stone wall Niall had constructed.
Graeme moved to the opposite side of the wall. Stone by stone, Niall had stacked rocks to the cavern ceiling. There appeared to be no significant reason, but that was unlikely. Graeme turned and looked back up at the high ceiling. Those long, narrow, and nearly flesh-colored stalactites pointed down at him. Accusatory fingers ready to blame him for failure. Echoes of his father’s voice whispered inside him. But Graeme wouldn’t give up so quickly.
He deliberately looked away, glancing down to examine the cavern floor. They continued looking for several minutes and still Graeme had found nothing that indicated what Niall might be up to. If the man was searching for the bloody Loch Ness treasure, why the hell would he build a wall? It made no sense.
Unless he’d already discovered the stone and was trying to block it off until he could remove it. Graeme turned in the direction of the wall just in time to watch Vanessa take a step around it, and then there was a huge blast. Dust exploded around them, and rocks tumbled to the ground.
A stalactite dropped, knocking Graeme to the ground. He tried to move and realized that the stalactite had speared through his arm, pinning him to the floor. Blinding pain surged through him, and he growled in response. As the dirt cleared, Graeme saw that the explosion had split open the floor of the cave, creating a huge gash separating him from Vanessa. She, too, lay on the ground, but seemed unscathed.
“What the devil happened?” he asked.
“Some sort of explosion.” She came to her feet and brushed the dirt off her skirts. She looked around her. She came to the edge, where dirt continued to fall into the hole below.
“Don’t move,” Graeme warned, holding up his free arm. “That ground is still unstable.”
