He was enraged—Mary Fran tasted that in his kiss, though the rage wasn’t directed at her—and he was in some desperate, silent frenzy that was expressing itself as passion. He’d lost a wife—that explained a few things, but exactly what it explained she could not fathom, not when she had to hang on to the man kissing her simply to keep her balance.
“I could love you,” Matthew whispered, his voice hoarse in her ear. “God help me, I could have loved you.”
“Hush, Matthew.” She lashed her arms around him, held him tightly, held him as if she could protect him from every injury. “You’re grieving. When the loss rears up, there’s a temptation to find comf—”
This kiss was different. His mouth moved slowly over hers, as if the tumult and desperation of the last kiss had never happened. His body no longer pressed her back against the hard boards behind her; it sheltered and warmed.
“Come.” She eased sideways and took his hand, leading him down the rows of stalls to the saddle room. Wherever this was going, she wanted a locked door between her and the prying eyes of the world.
God help me, I could have loved you.
She’d no sooner thrown the bolt on the saddle room door than Matthew had her back against a sturdy wall. He rested an arm against the wall and leaned down to run his nose along her collarbone.
“You cannot defend me against my own father, Mary Fran.”
The way he hung over her conveyed both passion and something else—despair, in his voice, in his posture.
“Kiss now, talk later, laddie.”
Kiss, caress, tease… a little dusty sunshine came through a small window high up on the outside wall. Time slowed, and Mary Fran let the moment seep into her bones: The good smells of horse and leather, the flutter of a small bird up in the rafters, the soft wool of Matthew’s jacket, and the certain knowledge that of her own volition, she was going to make love with a man worthy of the honor.
“Mary Frances?”
He was asking permission to love her, permission to make love with her. She answered him by easing back and meeting his gaze. In the gloom, his eyes were not blue; they were simply watching her, ready for her to sigh and smile, to leave him here alone with his father’s accusations wreaking their vile havoc.
She shaped him through the fabric of his riding breeches. He was wonderfully hard, ready for her. When she freed him from his clothing, his head fell back, and he hissed out a slow breath. She stroked his length, reacquainting herself with the odd wonder that was the male breeding organ in anticipation of its pleasures.
As she traced her fingers over the smooth skin of his erect cock, she saw the tension in him shift from arousal to self-restraint.
“I could love you too, Matthew Daniels.” In that moment, she couldn’t not love him. Couldn’t deny herself the pleasure of his body, hard, masculine, and pressed against hers in desire.
She hated her clothing, simple attire though it was. Drawers and stays and chemise and petticoats—the morning was cool—came between Mary Fran and the man she sought to possess. Between kisses, sighs, and a few muttered curses, she stepped out of her drawers; with some assistance from Matthew, she got dress and chemise shoved about enough and her stays loose enough to free her breasts from their confinement, but the delay, the damned, fussy delay, had her ready to scream.
“Matthew, I want…” Mary Fran lifted her forehead from his shoulder to glance around. They were in a saddle room. The plank floor was littered with dried mud and bits of hay and straw; the only solid surface was a pair of trunks along the opposite wall. The entire space was designed for hanging bridles, stowing saddles on racks, and storing brushes and riding gear.
“We can make it to the hayloft,” she said, trying to find something amusing about dashing up the ladder out in the barn aisle.
“Bugger the hayloft.” Matthew shifted away, his shirt and waistcoat flapping open, his neckcloth hanging loose and wrinkled. He bent, and in one mighty heave, stacked the two trunks one atop the other. His next move was to grab a wool cooler—a MacGregor plaid, no less—and fold it over the top trunk. When he turned, his clothing askew, his erection straining up along his midline, his expression was unreadable.
“Or I can come to you tonight,” he said.
Mary Fran eyed the trunks. “I’m not sure exactly…”
He hauled her across the small space and hoisted her onto the trunks. “You sit.”
She shifted back a bit on the trunks. The cooler was thick, folded several times, and the seat wasn’t uncomfortable. The one shaft of sunlight fell on Matthew’s red-gold hair as he stepped between her legs.
“You sit,” he said again, bending his head so Mary Fran felt the words breezing past her ear as much as she heard them. “And we love.”
The arrangement was perfect. Despite the clothing, despite the surrounds, despite the discord Altsax had tried to sow, as Mary Fran wrapped her arms around her lover, all she felt was pleasure and the sweet, sweet privilege of making love at long last with the right man.
Matthew’s hands traveled over her slowly, touching her face and hair, tracing the line of her collarbone then easing lower to cup her breast in a caress that could only be described as cherishing. Better than that, even, was the time he gave Mary Fran to learn him in similar fashion.
She tasted the pale scar on the side of his jaw, used her lips and tongue to explore the contour of his small male nipples. His scent was clean all over, like sunshine and cool forests.
And then the feel of him, ah, the hard, warm feel of him, pushing intimately into her body. He was careful at first, a soft nudge, a sigh, another easy little push. The sun had never coaxed a snowy little crocus to open to its warmth as gently as Matthew Daniels joined his body to hers.
“Matthew, you’re killing me. Killing—”
“Then we’ll die together.”
She could not rush him, could not affect his damnably tender pace one bit. She tried, tried to recapture their previous frenzy with hot kisses, except he somehow turned them into lazy, hot kisses.
She dragged her nails down his muscular back, urging him faster, but by the time her hands reached his buttocks, her harrying had turned into a caress.
He was relentless in his tenderness and patience, a one-man onslaught of caring who would neither be dictated to nor distracted from his intention to devastate her with pleasure.
Mary Fran was practical woman, a woman who knew when she’d met her match, so she did something she would have never have considered doing with any other man: she surrendered and let herself be loved.
Four
Mary Fran was heaven, and Matthew was a devil. He stored up the sounds of her sighs and groans, saved back the memory of her heathery-flowery scent, made a miser’s hoard of the pleasure of slow, deep thrusts into her heat.
He was wrong to abuse her trust like this, wrong to let her think Altsax had been spewing lies, wrong to make love to her for the first time in a damned stable—except it would be their only time, of that, Matthew was certain.
Mary Fran locked her ankles at the small of his back—her booted ankles. The clutch of her legs felt marvelous. The strength in her, the need, made a wicked, lovely contrast to the impersonal couplings he and his wife had shared.
Damn duty anyhow.
When Mary Fran started trying to scoot into Matthew’s thrusts, he wrapped his arms around her and buried his face against her neck. Her fingernails dug in low on his back, a fierce, unrelenting grip. Her breath came more harshly against his skin, and the sounds she made threatened to obliterate his control.
“Matthew—”