When he drew strongly on her, she started bucking against his hand in short, sharp rolls of her hips. He thrust two fingers deep into her heat and felt her body fist around him in pleasure. The sensations were in some ways more intimate than coitus, more punishing than a shared climax would have been. Inside his breeches, he was undergoing torture, but in his heart, he flirted with something approaching absolution.
“Ye wretched, pestilential mon.”
“You’re welcome.” He pushed her over to her side and spooned himself around her. “You’ll take a chill in a moment.”
“Not with your great, lovely self draped around me. You make me rethink my estimation of the English.”
“Don’t.” He tucked his arm around her, cradling a full breast in his hand.
She kissed the back of his wrist. “Are you giving me an order, sir?”
“I’m begging you not to trivialize this shared pleasure as some exercise in international diplomacy. Are you all right?”
He was not all right. He was suffering the pangs of unsatisfied lust, which he’d suffered often enough in his life, but he was also suffering more of that need to cherish a woman—this woman.
“No, I am not all right, Mr. Daniels. A relatively harmless, well-mannered if gorgeous fellow has just sashayed out under the stars with me and plucked from my grasp not only my very dignity, but also the one thing I could keep—”
Her voice caught a little. Matthew threaded an arm under her neck and gathered her closer. “The one thing you could keep?”
“Damn and blast you, Matthew.” She heaved out a sigh and shifted. For a frustrating moment, he thought she was going to sit up and start dressing, but she instead shoved him to his back and straddled him. “What just happened—inside me, between us—it has happened before.”
“Frequently, I hope.”
She left off nuzzling his throat to frown at him in the moonlight. “Only when I’m drowsing, ye ken. More asleep than awake. It never happened with my husband. I wouldn’t allow it.”
“Mary Frances MacGregor, you probably drove the poor bastard right out of his mind, which is exactly what he deserved for entrapping you.”
“I drove him to Canada.” This was said miserably, the words muttered against Matthew’s shoulder.
He recognized guilt and recognized even more when guilt had been carried too long. “Gordie had choices too, Mary Fran. A marquess’s second son has a damned lot more choices than an eighteen-year-old virgin has. He could have transferred to a ceremonial regiment, could have apologized, could have wooed you properly, could have admitted he’d been desperate to secure your hand at any price because he was smitten. You would have let him serve out a reasonable penance and then taken pity on him.”
She went still in his arms, her whole body in an attitude of listening. “I might have. I have a terrible temper, but I’m not unjust, usually. Fiona would say as much.”
Matthew traced the bones and muscles of her back, marveling at the texture of her skin, wishing he could count the freckles on her shoulders. Her silence suggested she was still thinking, reconsidering matters she’d long ago arranged in the optimum configuration for self-torment.
He knew how that felt too.
“When he took ship, I saw him off. The night before…”
Matthew gently squeezed her nape, and she sighed. “You forgave him. It’s good that you forgave him, Mary Fran. Men are much in need of forgiveness, particularly young men who’ve been spoiled their entire lives, and men afraid of losing their heart’s desire.”
When she said nothing, Matthew groped about for his shirt and waistcoat, piling them loosely over her. His next objective involved extracting his handkerchief from his trouser pocket and stuffing it into the hand she’d curled onto his chest.
While the stars winked into view and started their slow journey across the night sky, Matthew Daniels indulged—shamelessly and without limit—in the need to cherish a woman.
***
The season was flying by, just another summer, just another stretch of long, long days between the brisk months of spring and the brisker months of autumn, and yet Mary Fran had to admit this summer was also different.
Wonderfully different. The source of the difference walked along beside her while Fiona gamboled ahead of them.
“She has your energy,” Matthew observed, “your sense of things to see to.”
“My sense of recklessness. I worry for her.”
He patted the hand she’d curled around his arm. “You should make a list of the matters you must fret about. Write it down and haul it out at first light every day. Spend a full minute worrying about each item on the list—no skipping and no skimping—and then forbid yourself to waste any more time worrying until the next day.”
“You do not have children, Mr. Daniels. See how much good lists do you when that blessing befalls you.”
A shadow crossed his features, reminding Mary Fran that anything having to do with Matthew’s father, even something as oblique as an allusion to the baronial succession, invited that shadow into the discussion.
“I see one!” Fiona went scampering into the stables just as a marmalade kitten disappeared down the barn aisle ahead of her.
In the next instant, Mary Fran connected a tensing of her escort’s posture with the crunch of a boot on the walk behind them and a whiff of cigar smoke on the breeze. “I don’t know when I’ve seen a child exhibit such poor decorum,” the baron drawled. “Regular beatings are your only recourse at this point, Miss MacGregor.”
Matthew turned but kept his hand over Mary Fran’s knuckles. “Altsax, our hostess is Lady Gordon Flynn, if you’re to address her properly.”
“Lady Gordon Flynn? That means she’s claiming to have married the late Quinworth spare, and I would have heard of such a misalliance.” Altsax swung his gaze to Mary Fran, his smile diabolically ugly. “My own son is known as the corrupt colonel. You needn’t put on airs to gain the notice of the likes of him.”
Beside her, Mary Fran felt Matthew petrify with rage.
“Mama, come quick!” Fee’s voice, redolent with wonder, came from the stables. “I’ve caught one, and it’s purring!”
Altsax rolled his eyes. “No doubt my son has purred for you too, my lady. Alas for you, he’s purred for many. Pity you can’t ask his late wife about that, isn’t it?”
“Mama!”
Altsax offered Mary Fran a jaunty bow and spun on his heel as Matthew dropped her arm. Beneath his tan, he’d gone pale, his lips ringed with white. In his eyes, there was no emotion, no warmth.
“Lady Mary Frances, if you’ll excuse—”
She grabbed his hand, which he’d balled into a fist. “You’ll not let that man have the last word like this, Matthew Daniels. Do you honestly think I’d believe one word of the bile he spews? Your father is unnatural. Come.”
He hesitated as Altsax went whistling up the path.
“Matthew, please. You cannot help who your father is—what he is.”
Fiona emerged from the stables, cradling a ball of black and white fur against her chest. “He’s purring! I think he likes me—or maybe it’s a she.”
Mary Fran did not turn loose of Matthew’s hand, but she turned an indulgent smile on her daughter. “Of course the dratted beast likes you—they all do. Take it to the dairy, and I’m sure there will be a dish of milk about for a wee new friend.”
Fiona scampered off, leaving Mary Fran to half drag Matthew in the direction of the stables. “Say something, Matthew. Clootie Itnyre knows all the herbs and potions. I’ve half a mind to ask him what I should serve up to your father to permanently shut the baron’s foul, lying, obscene—”
They’d gained the aisle running between the loose boxes when Matthew spun her up against the wall and fused his mouth to hers.