Joshua wondered if she had yet realized that even if it had started out as revenge-or simply escape-the marriage was now a love match. And he wondered how much real love Freyja still felt for Ravensberg, mingled with the very real hatred and bitterness.
"Poor Freyja," he said softly.
She surged to her feet then and closed the gap between them in three strides. He clamped one hand about her right wrist when her fist was two inches from his nose, and about her left wrist as her fist brushed the underside of his chin. He came to his feet and bent her arms behind her back. He held them there by the wrists-her hands were still fisted.
Her eyes flashed at him. Her teeth were bared.
"Don't you dare pity me," she told him in her coldest, haughtiest voice. "My story and my feelings are my concern and no one else's. Certainly not yours. We are not even really betrothed. We are nothing but strangers who happen to have been thrown together by circumstances. We are nothing to each other. You are nothing to me. Do you understand me? Nothing."
He lowered his head and kissed her. He was taking a mortal risk, he knew-she might well take a chunk out of his lip with her teeth. But she needed comforting. Not that his motive was entirely selfless. Freyja Bedwyn in a raging temper was an infinitely exciting woman.
"Nothing at all, sweetheart?" he murmured. "You wound me."
"What I will do is knock your head off your shoulders if you will just stop playing the coward and release my wrists," she said, her eyes still flashing fury. "Are you afraid of facing the anger of a woman unless you have pinioned her arms?"
He grinned and released her. And chuckled aloud as he parried blows without grabbing hold of her again.
"Ouch!" he said as one of her fists connected with his ear.
But she was not finished with him and would not be, he suspected, until she had milled him to the ground and stamped him into the dirt with her heel. It was a good thing for him that she was not wearing her riding boots. To give her her due, though, he noticed that she did not attempt to use either her fingernails or her teeth. She fought fair.
There was only one course of defense open to him short of planting his own fist in her face. He caught her up in his arms, one about her waist, the other about her shoulders, hauled her tightly against him so that her fists flailed helplessly out to the sides, and kissed her again-open-mouthed.
"I dislike you intensely," she said coldly when he lifted his head a good while later. The rage had gone from her eyes and the fury from her voice. "And you are absolutely nothing to me. Less than nothing."
"I know, sweetheart," he said, and kissed her again.
Her anger might have subsided, he realized during the next few moments, but her passion certainly had not. She opened her mouth beneath his, somehow got her arms about him, and pressed as close to him as their clothes and their anatomy would allow.
"Don't stop," she told him fiercely when he lifted his head, desperately trying to hold on to his sanity. "Don't stop!"
"Freyja-"
"Don't stop!"
Who tumbled whom to the bed he did not know, but there they were moments later, wrestling and panting together in the narrow space, their hands all over each other in a desperate effort to find bare flesh. She pulled off his coat and waistcoat with a little cooperation from him, and she was tugging his shirt outside his pantaloons and sliding her hands underneath to press against his naked back while with his thumbs he hooked the low neckline of her muslin dress beneath her breasts and took them in his hands, rolling her nipples between his thumbs and forefingers. With his mouth he found the racing pulse at the base of her throat.
Somewhere sanity was trying to attract his attention. And another thought occurred to him too.
"Sweetheart." He lifted his head and looked down into her face. "Are you a virgin?"
Perhaps she was not if there had been that passionate interlude with Kit Butler. If she was not . . .
"Lift your arms."
He lifted them, and his shirt was off over his head and sailing over the edge of the bed to land in a heap with his coat and waistcoat.
"Are you a virgin?"
"Don't you dare stop." With one hand she pulled his face back down to hers. With the other she fumbled at the flap of his pantaloons.
He took it that the answer was yes. If it had been no, she would have said so and dispensed with his scruples. His bare chest came down onto her bosom and he pressed his tongue into her mouth. She sucked it deep.
"Let me do this," he whispered a few moments later, moving off her and undoing his buttons himself.
But she helped him remove the pantaloons after he had pulled off his Hessian boots and stockings. He drew her dress down her body, taking undergarments with it. Sanity, he half realized after he had pulled off her silk stockings too, had been stripped away with their clothes.
They came together again with fierce passion. If she was a virgin-and he would wager she was-there was no shrinking self-consciousness in her for either her own nakedness or his. But then he had known that being in bed with Freyja would be akin to lying with a pile of explosives with the fuses lit.
When he touched her between her legs, she opened to him, feverish and urgent. She was hot and wet and ready. He was hard and throbbing with need. He rolled fully on top of her, pushed her legs wide with his own, slid his hands beneath her to lift and tilt her, and mounted her.
She was a virgin. She was small and tight, and there was a barrier to impede his progress. She was also hot and wet, and her inner muscles were contracting about him and her hands were pressing down on his buttocks while her feet pushed her up from the bed. He pressed inward, heard her involuntary cry as he broke through, and embedded himself fully in her.
He might have taken her slowly and carefully after that, but she would have none of it. She was hot and fierce with passion, and he, God help him, felt an answering hunger that needed no further encouragement.
What followed was more like a wrestling match than lovemaking. He had no idea how long it lasted. He only knew that somehow he held on to some measure of control until she cried out and shuddered into a powerful release. Then he plunged toward his own pleasure and allowed his seed to spill into her.
They were both slick with perspiration, he discovered moments or minutes later-he had become strangely unaware of time-though the fire in the hearth had died down. They were also panting as if they had run ten miles apiece into a stiff wind. He lifted his head and looked down at her in the dim lamplight.
Her hair was in wild, wavy disarray about her head and shoulders. She was flushed. Her lips were parted, her eyes heavy-lidded.
"Well, sweetheart," he said, "if we were not in a scrape before, we certainly are now."
CHAPTER XIII
Freyja's legs were trembling as she dressed. So were her hands as she fumbled with her hairpins, dragging them all out and trying to tame and rearrange her hair without benefit of either a mirror or a comb. She was very thankful that Joshua had dressed faster than she and was at the moment kneeling at the hearth, cleaning out the remains of their fire and building a new one.
Glancing at him, she had a stomach-churning feeling of knowledge.
Gracious heavens, that splendid male body had just been naked and . . .
Well, never mind.
"This," she said in a firmly practical voice, "was all my fault."
He came to his feet and turned toward her, his eyes laughing, though there was a certain grimness about his mouth.
"Will you put a further dent in my self-esteem, then?" he asked her. "Have I just been seduced, Free?"
"You would not have done it," she said, "if I had not insisted. I will never blame you. It was all my fault."
Don't stop. Don't you dare stop.
How excruciatingly humiliating.
"If that were a bird's nest," he said, nodding toward her hair, which she was holding on top of her head while she jabbed in hairpins to keep it in place, "it would be impressive indeed. But I would guess it is meant to be an elegant coiffure?"