Kiss Me, Annabel

  Now she lay before him like a feast of raspberries and cream, and desire was surging through him like molten fire. Disjointed thoughts about the sanctity of marriage flew through his mind, but none of them mattered. She was his, and she would be his until death.

  In fact, it was a great thing they were doing, because their wedding night could be a proper celebration, once they’d gotten all the fear out of the way beforehand. He could see her breast rising and falling with little pants but she said nothing. And she didn’t take her hands from her eyes.

  “Are you all right?” he whispered, coming on his knees over her. Ewan didn’t know anything about the art of seducing virgins, of taking virginity, of introducing a woman to the pleasures of the bed. But he knew one kind of kiss they had both enjoyed, and one at which he appeared to be quite able. He let one hand slide between her rounded thighs and pushed them apart slightly, then began to kiss his way down her creamy stomach, down to that buttery patch of hair again, down—

  “You needn’t do that,” she said, her voice stifled by her hands, which covered her whole face.

  “I want to,” he said simply. And then, two seconds later, her moans were flying into the night air again. One hand even fell from her eyes, and her legs slid restlessly up to form a perfect cradle for his body. Soon, he promised her silently, soon. Tremors were wracking her now, and she was whimpering, crying, coming to him—and then she flew free again, hands over her head, her body arched into the air…and falling back down, gentle as thistledown.

  It took everything he had to stay in control. She was sweet, swollen, ready for him…He said, “Annabel, could you open your eyes now?” And then: “Please?”

  So she did, dewy, smoky blue peering at him. He nudged against her, and her eyes grew wider.

  “Don’t shut me out, sweetheart,” he breathed. “I want to see you…if only this time. This first time.”

  A shaky smile curved her lips. “I—”

  Annabel caught back her words, shut her eyes tight, remembered and opened them—because he was there, he was sliding inside her, and there was no pain—

  “Ewan!” she cried. Then she arched and he came to her, all the way.

  “Thank God,” he said, as if it were wrenched out of him, and then: “Does this hurt?”

  And it didn’t.

  And none of it did. Not even when he started taunting her, pulling back and smiling down at her as she tried to pull him down to her, then choosing his moment and thrusting home. Not when she decided to taunt him and, dimly remembering Tess’s advice, let her hands slide to his hard buttocks and linger there…

  He groaned and then took her mouth, hard and purposeful, the wild kind of kiss that meant something quite different now. Annabel tasted the moment Ewan lost control. He plunged deeper and deeper, his breath coming in gasps. He was grasping her hips, driving forward as if they could grow ever closer.

  At first she just enjoyed looking at him, but then a feeling started growing and growing, a kind of molten desire that spread from their joining through her whole body, and she found herself rising to meet him, her fingers clenching on his muscled shoulders.

  “Annabel,” he said, in a growl that was half a moan. “Oh, God!”

  And she didn’t think he was referring to a deity now. The feeling was growing and growing, and finally Annabel just let herself slide into the chaos of it, into the sweat and rhythmic madness of it…

  Until she cried out against his shoulder and he thankfully let his jaw unclench and drove home, home to her, to his still center, to his wife.

  Twenty-four

  It was the middle of the night. They’d fallen asleep curled together, but Annabel woke after an hour or so to find that Ewan had lit the candles on Peggy’s table and built up the fire.

  “What are you doing?” she asked sleepily.

  “Looking at you,” he said, and there was such a deep languorous satisfaction in his voice that she smiled. So much for all her plans to trade her body and her bankable kisses for a man of wealth and title. Now she knew with a bone-deep instinct that her body was always meant to be here, adored by Ewan, even—even worshipped.

  “I’m thirsty,” she whispered.

  He tried to hold the tin cup to her lips, as if she were a child with a fever, but water ran down her neck. He kissed the damp away, and then Annabel suddenly realized that she could have all the kisses she wanted from Ewan, for free, without asking questions.

  “Kiss me,” she said.

  “Annabel—”

  She pulled his head to hers. “I am not marrying you because you have a castle,” she said against his lips.

  Of course there was laughter in his voice. “Nay, I know all too well that you will marry me because you have to do so. Although now you have a double reason.”

  “I just want you to know that I had no idea you were so rich,” she said. “None!”

  “I know that,” he said. “It was obvious in your desperate eyes when you accepted my proposal. Plus, no one in London seemed to know a thing about me, except your sister’s husband, Felton. He knows everything about finances, it seems.”

  “Lucius Felton knew you were rich?” Annabel said.

  “You can’t move stocks and such without encountering a few of the men interested in doing the same thing. We’d never met, naturally, as I send my secretary around to do such things as have to be done in person—”

  “Ewan,” Annabel interrupted. “Just how rich are you?”

  He smiled at her, and there wasn’t much of the simpleton about him now. “I expect I’m the richest man in Scotland, give or take a castle or two,” he said.

  Annabel let her head fall back. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Because I am willing to take risks,” he said, looking at her, amused. “I have had little trouble increasing my possessions. Father Armailhac always says that possessions bring with them responsibility. And sometimes I think that I try to shed responsibility by shedding possessions.”

  “But everything you make comes back to you tenfold,” she guessed.

  He nodded. “If you don’t wish for money, it comes to you easily. And if you don’t wish for responsibilities, they come in droves.”

  “I don’t believe you. How would you feel, would you really feel, if you were no longer the Earl of Ardmore? It’s such a part of you, almost as if you were a medieval feudal lord, with the crofters and cottagers, and all the people who live in the castle, and the way they depend on you.”

  He took her questions seriously, even when there was no question of kisses, and she loved that.

  “So I lose the earldom…”

  “Yes.”

  “And the castle…”

  “Yes.”

  “And all the trappings, all the possessions—”

  “More than that. You lose all the people who love and depend on you.”

  “Gregory and Rosy?”

  She nodded. “And the cottagers, your staff, Mac. All the people and things that make you formidable in the eyes of the world.”

  “Are Gregory and Rosy safe and well-cared-for?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then…do I get to keep you?”

  There was a note in his deep voice that made her shiver, and she said, rather breathlessly, “I suppose so. I thought I was marrying a penniless earl.”

  “Then I don’t care.” He wasn’t even touching her and she felt as if she’d received the sweetest caress of her life. “If I had you, Annabel, I could start in this little cabin and make us a living.”

  Annabel tried to smile, but it trembled on her lips. “I’m glad we don’t have to live here,” she said finally.

  “I could eat your potatoes with butter every day and be happy.”

  “You would have to,” Annabel said with a little gurgle of laughter, “since that’s all I know how to make.”

  “It isn’t so bad, is it?”

  And she was silent, thinking about the rosy, clean little house, and the way Ewan c
aught her when she fell, and the way he laughed when the milk spilt. “No,” she said finally, “It hasn’t been the way I would have thought.”

  “Father Armailhac says that one should be able to give up the things of the world without a moment’s regret,” Ewan said, turning over and nuzzling her shoulder.

  “Good for him,” Annabel said, a bit crossly. “I don’t believe that you could do it, for all you say so. This is only for a day or so.”

  “Believe it,” he said, but his voice was muffled by kisses. He was kissing his way down her throat, past her collarbone…

  “What if you didn’t have me either?” Annabel asked. “What then?”

  He didn’t even hesitate. “If I had no responsibilities and I had to live without you, I’d become a monk. Or a priest. Something of that sort.”

  His lips were drifting across her breast; Annabel was terribly glad that Ewan hadn’t disappeared into a monastery. “I have another question.”

  “Mmmm,” he said, not paying her close attention.

  “If you haven’t been with a woman for years…how on earth did you know about that kiss?”

  “Which kiss?” he asked with maddening obliviousness. He was running his fingers over the curves of her breasts as if he would never get enough.

  “You know! That coney’s kiss,” she said.

  “Oh, that.”

  “How did you know how to do it? How did you know what it was?”

  He was stroking the undercurve of her breast with his lips. “I made it up.”

  “You what?”

  “I made it up…well, part of it. Men are always telling jokes about coney-catchers, you see. Coney being a rabbit, but also—”

  “I know,” she said hastily.

  “So I was trying to think of a way to horrify your sister, and I made up a coney’s kiss. It worked, didn’t it? And as for how to do it…’twas instinct, darling. I trust my instinct a great deal.” His mouth closed around her nipple and she squeaked aloud. “My instinct tells me that you like that,” he said, smug as a cat by the hearth. “And I know I do.”

  She swatted him.

  “It’s a God-given gift I have, obviously.”

  He was laughing against her breast and kissing her at the same time, and Annabel, for once, had to agree with him on a matter of theology. It was, indeed, a God given gift.

  In the end, they had no sleep at all. They were cuddled together in an exhausted, boneless state when the sun began stealing under the curtain. By then Annabel had decided that her new favorite activity was to make the amusement disappear from Ewan’s eyes. So she said to him, “Do you know what Tess told me about marital consummation?”

  He shook his head. “I trust it wasn’t some foolishness about lying back and enduring.”

  “She told me that whatever my husband does to me, I should do to him,” she said, making her voice as provocative as she could make it. And since Annabel had practiced the art of provocation for years, she was very, very good at that particular skill. “That means, oh, my almost-husband,” she clarified, “that tonight…”

  There wasn’t a trace of laughter on his face now.

  She let her smile turn from provocative to wicked. Then she reached out one finger and put it on the smooth skin of his chest. Delicately, delicately, she trailed that finger down…down…

  “And what do they call the coney’s kiss when it’s not a coney being kissed?” she said, relishing the tightness of his jaw.

  Her finger swept down to the rigid length of him. Ewan shuddered. He hadn’t taken his eyes from hers, though. And he wasn’t laughing.

  She pursed her lips at him and then he was there, rolling over on her with a strength that she was powerless to resist, plunging into her mouth with a ferocity that made her shudder against him as if she weren’t limp with pleasure but a moment before.

  “Tonight,” she whispered against his lips, once she regained her breath.

  And he was the one who closed his eyes this time.

  Twenty-five

  Annabel woke some time later to a persistent banging noise. “What on earth?” she asked sleepily.

  Ewan didn’t seem to notice the noise. His strong arms came around her from behind, pulling her against him. Annabel’s body melted. “No,” she said uncertainly.

  “Yes,” he said into her hair.

  Bang! went the shed door.

  “The cow needs milking,” Annabel said. If Ewan kept doing that even one more moment, she’d—she’d—

  He groaned and rolled away.

  Annabel sat up and then edged quickly to the side of the bed. The tablecloth appeared to be slightly soiled.

  “I would give a sovereign for water to wash my face,” Ewan muttered, pulling on his breeches. All the while the cow kept slamming its stable door.

  A few moments later the noise stopped, and then Annabel found that the chicken had very kindly laid an egg in the butter mold.

  She felt less charitably inclined when she discovered that the bird had also soiled their only chair. Without water, she couldn’t clean it, so she found her brush and started to work on her hair. But given the absence of a looking glass, she could only wind it into a graceless bun.

  Ewan returned with a pail of milk in one hand and a pail of water in the other. His hair was wet.

  “There’s a stream down to the right, behind the woodshed,” he said. “It’s cold as the devil’s behind. The only way to get clean is to jump in.”

  Annabel shivered. She would bathe without taking such drastic measures, even if she had to heat pans of water all morning. “Would you build up the fire, please?”

  Ewan threw on two more logs, and then helped her swing a pot with the egg in it over the flames. “I’ve thought of a problem,” he said.

  Annabel had thought of about four hundred, but she was trying to keep them to himself.

  “I don’t expect Kettle has any tea or coffee.”

  “I doubt it,” Annabel said. “We only had coffee on special occasions, and we were far better off than the Kettles.”

  Ewan didn’t seem too happy.

  “Did you see the other chickens?” Annabel asked, giving the white hen an oatcake.

  Ewan shook his head. “Is there any bread left from the picnic basket?”

  “No, but there’s the egg,” Annabel said, making a valiant effort to be cheerful.

  Ewan grunted. At least she thought that’s what that particular noise was known as. He did eat the egg, after some argument. But Annabel spent five minutes scraping that egg from the bottom of the pan, and she’d never yet eaten an egg the color of coal, so she won the squabble. It seemed to take a lot of chewing.

  Finally he left, saying that he was going to try to root a large rock out of Kettle’s field.

  Annabel ate an oatcake and heated up four pans of water before she felt clean. Then she scrubbed the little house, shooing the chicken out the front door. The real problem was sheets. She couldn’t possibly sleep on that stained tablecloth…she’d have to wash Peggy’s sheet. She looked for a washbasin, and finally decided that Peggy did her laundry in the stream.

  The ice-cold stream, according to Ewan. She shivered at the thought. But if she didn’t wash the linens soon, they wouldn’t dry. Who knows how long it took a sheet to dry? Probably at least an hour. She gathered them into a bundle and headed out the door.

  The river frothed and gurgled on its way through the woods. It was surrounded by large stones. Anna found a flat one, knelt down and dropped the sheet into the water. It immediately turned an even darker gray color. She pulled it back out, splashing freezing water all over her skirts, and tried to rub soap over it. But the sheet seemed to weigh four times as much as it had previously, and it was so cold that her fingers ached just to touch it.

  Annabel gritted her teeth. She wasn’t going to be defeated by something as simple as laundry. She pushed the sheet back in the water, hanging on to a portion with her freezing hands. The sheet floated below her, looking as if
it were getting dirtier by the moment. A surge of water dragged at it, and Annabel almost let it go. Her hands were wrinkled and aching from the cold; her skirts were pasted to her legs with water, and the sheet seemed to weigh fifteen stone.

  But finally she wrestled it back out of the water. Clearly there was no way to return to the clearing without getting wet. So she took a deep breath and picked up the sheet. Icy water flowed down her neck, soaking her arms and skirts. Her teeth chattering, Annabel started running back to the house as quickly as she could. Once in the clearing, she did her best to wring out the water. Then she spread the sheet on top of a low bush.

  Back in the house, she dragged her wet dress over her head, using her nightgown as a towel. Her arms ached, and her fingers were blue with cold. Then she looked in every nook and cranny of the cottage for tea. There was none. She sat on the step and drank a cup of steaming water. Surely the Kettles ate more than just boiled potatoes and an occasional egg? Peggy must have a larder somewhere.

  Ewan emerged from the wood, looking as tired as she felt. “I can’t move the bloody rock,” he said without ceremony.

  “I’ve washed the sheet!” Anna said with a flash of pride.

  He looked at the huge puddle of water around the root of the bush. “Do you mind if I inquire what we are going to sleep on tonight?”

  “It will dry in time,” Annabel said, hoping she was right. She looked around, suddenly noticing that the clearing seemed ominously quiet. “Oh, Ewan, I think we lost the last chicken!”

  “Look for a happy fox.”

  “Surely not! She was here a moment ago.”

  “Perhaps she’s roosting in a tree,” Ewan said, hoping he was right. He fully intended to eat that chicken for supper.