Page 19 of The Rebellious Countess
Máira looked up and caught her husband grinning. He knew where her thoughts had gone.
She was a virgin, but she was far from ignorant when it came to bed sport. Her sister Iseabail might be the Duchess of Ross, but she had made certain Máira understood everything there was to know about what happened between the sheets and otherwise. The best of theton’scourtesans could not have goneinto their professions with a better education than Máira had going into her wedding night. Yet her marriage was not to be. Elias said he would return her to Scotland untouched, just as she wished.
“You can tease me all you want, Husband, but I know you want me.” She nodded toward his blanket.
Elias’s grin grew. “A man’s body reacts to a woman’s, just as a bull reacts to a cow.”
She snorted. “Fine.”
“Fine.” He repeated her words, but his tone was much different. Whereas hers had sounded pinched and succinct, his drew out with humor.
It was quite annoying.
“I need help with my gown,” she announced to the room at large, unable to look him in the eyes. If she’d been looking at him, perhaps she would have been able to discern if the hitch in his breath was her imagination, or if it came from a man who knew his limitations when it came to touching her.
“Come here.”
She did as she was told, her body aching for his touch with each step she took, which was ridiculous. He’d betrayed her. Lied to her. Used her for a business deal. And made fun of her. He did not want her the way a husband wanted his wife. He might want her the way a man desired a whore, but she was no whore.
He pulled in his legs as she approached then twirled his index finger around to indicate that she should give him her back. The chair creaked as he stood, and her body warmed with the heat of him. She remembered how hot his body was to the touch, so different from her own. Now she could feel the outline of him heating her to the core, and imagined his thighs pressing into her backside and his cock brushing against the upper cleft of her buttocks. She closed her eyes when his nimble fingers finallytouched her gown and she swore his breathing increased as much as her own. She wanted his lips to caress her neck, trail a path to the pulse point that betrayed what he did to her.
“Done,” his voice rasped a whisper into her ear.
She nearly moaned before she realized what he’d said.Done. He had finished unbuttoning her gown while she fantasized about his body joining with hers.
She hurried behind the screen, too embarrassed by her reaction to his proximity to care if he sensed how he flustered her. Heart pounding, she pulled the front of her gown down and flushed at the thought of being naked with him on the other side of a taut piece of linen…
“You can’t see, can you?”
“The shape of your breasts as you pull your gown down over your shoulders?”
Her breath hitched. There was only one way he would know that?—
He chuckled, deep and sultry, a sound that vibrated through every erogenous point of her body that she wanted him to touch. “No, Máira, dear. I am just quite good at painting a picture in my mind.”
“In your mind?”
“Didn’t you explore your fantasies as a child? Walk into the stables as if it were the palace itself and have every man fawning for your attention?”
No, she’d dreamt of helping children be born so that mother’s might live, of healing broken souls so that fathers struck with the tragedy of losing a spouse might be able to go on for the sake of his children. Death and grief had broken her family, and her sister Caillen was suffering again due to the loss of her new husband.
If she had been with Caillen and her beloved, maybe she could have saved him after highwaymen had left him beaten andbroken, with a gunshot wound that never healed. If she had been there, perhaps she could have kept his fever at bay and brought her sister joy, instead of the heartache and sorrow Caillen could not seem to escape long enough to come home.
Of course, Caerlaverock was Iseabail’s home, not the Blair family home, but Caillen would have been surrounded by sisters, not strangers.
“Tell me what you dreamed of,” she said, as she stepped out of her gown and then her undergarments. Her stockings were riddled with holes and her slippers could never be repaired. She had planned to save her wedding gown, cherish it as one of the happiest days of her life. Its current condition, however, made it more appropriate as a symbol of the miserable state of her marriage; it was in shambles and was never meant to survive.
“My dreams were of a more lascivious nature.”
Her skin flushed. “As a boy?”
He laughed. “I don’t remember any of my boyhood dreams. What I recall are the dreams I had as a young man.”
She stepped into the hot bath and had to catch herself from moaning. “What dreams do young men have?”
He laughed at that, and again she felt it vibrate through her body as if he were with her behind the screen, touching her.
“Do you really want to know?” He asked his voice barely above a whisper.
