AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘Thank you,’ he muttered with obvious sarcasm. ‘And do you expect me to trust you?’ The taunt was murmured close to her ear.
‘Yes!’ she keened, scraping her scalp to and fro on hay. ‘You must...because I love you...and want to be your wife.’ Elise flung her face around, clasped his chin in a small hand. ‘You would have been equally suspicious...equally angry...had you heard I’d been seen embracing another man. I know you would, so don’t deny it!’
‘I’ve not once imagined you might have another man.’
Elise gulped a laugh. ‘You thought me a harlot the minute we met.’
‘And you thought me...?’ he enquired silkily.
‘I thought you...’ Her voice tailed off for if she were to be honest no flattering description could emerge from her lips. Her fingers slipped away from the abrasive skin of his jaw.
‘...a rake up to no good,’ Alex finished for her. ‘That’s what you thought me. Much as you do now. So why shouldn’t I prove you right, Elise? We might not suit as man and wife, but it seems I have a vacancy now for a mistress.’
Elise jerked up her arms, coiled them about his neck, ramming her face into his shoulder so she could no longer see the insolent burning gaze flowing over her, making her feel stripped naked. She was within a heartbeat of willingly allowing him any liberty he wanted to take. And when in a delirium of passion, she might agree to any role he offered her, simply so she might stay close to him.
He loosened her grip and his head lowered, but she whipped up a hand, covering her lips with four quivering fingers before he could touch her. Alex growled a laugh at her tactic to keep him at bay, removing the obstruction with insulting ease before letting their clasped fingers fall aside.
Elise turned her head, staring at eerie straw edifices. Suddenly she flung her face around, eyes blazing. ‘You will listen to me,’ she insisted, eyes darting to and fro, searching for words in the barn’s dusky atmosphere. She’d endured agonies on hearing how his mistress had flown to kiss him in the tavern courtyard. She’d make him admit it must have been harrowing for her to watch tears dripping from the end of her father’s nose because he’d had to shatter her dreams and give her that report so soon after celebrating her engagement.
‘I’m sorry if I’ve falsely accused you, but—’ Elise began firmly before being interrupted.
‘You have falsely accused me, but I’m getting over it, sweetheart,’ Alex murmured throatily, undoing with practised ease her bodice buttons and chemise ribbons, then lowering his mouth to tightening pink-tipped breasts.
Instinctively Elise arched to increase the exquisite sensation of his clever tongue circling on her cool pearly flesh. He drew hard on the taut little nubs and she gasped, jerking her hips up to grind against his rock-hard thigh. The arguments forming in her mind scattered as a wild ache streaked to the core of her. She instinctively parted her thighs to the relentless slide of his leg, whimpering his name as the limb scuffed its target.
Alex raised his head at that soft call and looked at her features, blonde head thrown back in tense rapture. From somewhere behind his crazed desire he dragged the realisation that no matter what heights of pleasure he took her to, tomorrow she would hate him. And so would her father. Walter Dewey would have been right to couple him with his uncle: a man who’d wrench apart a family to quench his selfish lust.
But Elise was no passing fancy as Arabella had been to Thomas Venner. In a way Alex realised he wished she were because then it would all be easy; there’d be no inner battle and his body wouldn’t feel like a tortured wreck going up in flames. He’d carry on and give them both release.
Elise was naïve, inexperienced in carnality, but instead of cherishing the gift of her innocence he was on the point of using it against her...because he was arrogant and immature enough to put his injured pride above that of the woman he adored.
‘What are you doing?’
The murmured question exploded in his head, sent him surging upright because he didn’t like the answer he’d found. He dragged together the edges of her cloak, concealing the enticing sight of her perfect body from his hungry eyes, before striding away.
Elise sat up slowly, her eyelids drooping in mortification. She drew up her knees, resting her forehead on them while trying to calm her raw emotions. It seemed even her body was no longer wanted by him and, instead of feeling ashamed of her wantonness, she felt bereft at being so wholly rejected.
