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And she felt him jerk against her. He thrust one more time, shoving his entire length into her, and she came again, a sweet, warm, washing wave of pleasure after the intensity of before. He withdrew suddenly, and hot semen splashed her thigh. He was immobile above her, his breath coming harshly, his weight still holding her lower body pinned to the bed. She wished he could stay like this, with his hard body pressing her into the bed, but it was inevitable that he roll to the side.
He slid away from her and stood beside the bed, taking off his clothing, moving slowly as if terribly wearied. He climbed in beside her, nude, and drew her close, and that was better. Wordlessly he fitted her body against his larger, harder one, and tucked her head into the crook of his arm.
She watched sleepily as his chest rose and fell, the beat of his heart slow and steady under her cheek. She wondered what they would do if they got the children back. If he loved her and if they could ever have a life together.
And finally she decided it was all too much to think about right now. So she closed her eyes and went to sleep.
WHEN HELEN WOKE again, the room was nearly dark. Alistair was in the process of gently pulling his arm from beneath her head. The movement was what had awakened her. She made no sound but watched as he stood and found his smallclothes and breeches, sliding them up his long legs. And she remembered something that she’d meant to ask him earlier when he’d first returned to the hotel.
“Where did you go?”
His hands, buttoning the fall of his breeches, stilled at her voice and then resumed their work. “I told you. I went to the docks to see about a ship.”
She propped her head in her hand, lying on her side. “I’ve told you my secrets. Isn’t it time you told me yours?”
It was a gamble based on their recent lovemaking. He might still retreat into that hard anger he’d borne toward her for the last week. He might simply pretend he didn’t know what she spoke about.
He did neither. Instead he bent and picked up his shirt, holding it in his hands and staring down at it as if he’d never seen white linen before. “Nearly seven years ago, I was in the American Colonies. You know that. It’s how I came to write my book. It’s also how I lost my eye.”
“Tell me,” she whispered, not daring to move or breathe lest she break his narration.
He nodded. “My purpose in the Colonies was to discover new plants and animals. The best place to look for undiscovered things is where men haven’t already explored—the edges of civilization. But because it’s the edge of civilization and because we are at war with France, that was also the most dangerous place to be. Naturally, then, I found it expedient to attach myself to various army regiments. I spent three years thus, tramping where they tramped, collecting samples and making notes when they camped.”
He was silent a moment, still staring at the shirt in his hands until he shook his head and looked up at her. “Forgive me; I’m delaying the crux of my story.” He inhaled deeply. “In the fall of 1758, I was with a small regiment of men, the 28th Regiment of Foot. We were marching through a thick forest, our destination Fort Edward, where the regiment intended to barrack for the winter. The trail was narrow, the trees oppressively close when we came to a falls.…”
His voice broke and trailed away, and a look crossed his face that she’d never seen on him before. Despair. She nearly cried out.
But his face smoothed and he cleared his throat. “Spinner’s Falls it was called as I found out later. We were attacked from both sides by the French and a band of their Indian allies. Suffice it to say that we lost.” A corner of his mouth twitched in something that might’ve been a smile. “I say ‘we’ quite deliberately. In the midst of battle, one is never a bystander. Though I was a civilian, I fought just as hard as the soldiers standing next to me. We fought for the same thing, after all: our lives.”
“Alistair,” she whispered. She’d seen how he’d touched Lady Grey’s dead body, seen him patiently teach Abigail to fish. He wasn’t a man who would commit or recover from violence easily.
“No.” He waved away her sympathy. “I’m prevaricating again. I survived the battle relatively unscathed with several others, and the Indians rounded us up as captives. We marched for many days through the woods and then we made their camp.”
He frowned down at the shirt and carefully folded it. The muscles of his bare arms shifted in the fading light. “The native peoples in that part of the world have a sort of custom when they win a battle. They take captive the enemy who survives and they torture them; the object is part celebration, part demonstration of the enemy’s cowardice. At least that’s what I believe the object is. Of course, there may not be a reason at all for the torture. Certainly, there’s ample evidence in our own history of peoples delighting in inflicting pain purely for the pleasure of it.”
His voice was even, almost cool, but his fingers folded and refolded the shirt he held, and Helen knew that tears were coursing down her face. Had he thought like this as they’d tortured him? Tried to take his mind away from the pain and horror by noting and analyzing the people who had captured him? The thought was too awful to bear, but bear it she must. If he could survive what had been done to him, the least she could do was hear what had happened.
“I’ll come to the point.” He took a deep breath as if to steady himself. “They took us and stripped us naked. They tied our hands behind our backs and then strung a rope from our bound hands to a stake so that we could stand and move a bit but not go far. They played with a man named Coleman first. They beat him and cut off his ears and threw burning embers on him. And when he collapsed to the ground, they scalped him and heaped burning coals on his still-live body.”
She made a sound of protest, but he didn’t seem to hear.
hen she brought her lips back to his, he was able to kiss her gently this time. Sweetly. Worshipping her.
His eye was still closed—perhaps he no longer wanted to see the reality of their situation—so he only felt when she ran her hands over his chest, the pressure light through the layers of his clothing. Her hands descended down toward his breeches, and a primal male part of him waited, breathless, to see what she would do. Her fingers moved over the buttons of his fall, loosening, freeing him.
He reached for her then. “Helen.”
“No,” she said, quite firmly. “No, let me.”
And his hands fell away, because although he was a man of honor, he was by no means a saint. He heard the rustle of her skirts as she knelt, felt her fingers on his throbbing cock, and then the brush of her breath.
He made a heroic effort and tried one more time to dissuade her. “You don’t have to.”
Her whisper blew across the swollen head of his cock as she said, “I know.”
Then her hot wet mouth enveloped him, and he could only groan and brace his legs so he wouldn’t fall. God! He’d paid a whore for this once, long ago, but it’d been a disappointment. Then, there had been rough sucking and pulling and he’d barely been able to finish. Now… Now there was gentle pressure, the velvet touch of her tongue, and most of all, the knowledge that she was doing this to him. He couldn’t help himself. He opened his eye and looked down and nearly came on the spot. Her golden head was bent over him, his reddened prick sliding in between her pink lips, her fingers delicate and white against his rude flesh.
She looked up at him, his cock still in her stretched mouth, and her harebell-blue eyes were dark now. Mysterious, feminine, and the most erotic thing he’d ever seen in his life.
