Passion for the Game

Chapter 16

Amelia slipped through the forest filled with anticipation. It was silly, perhaps, to be excited about a kiss that she planned rather than accepted in a moment of passion, but she enjoyed the idea anyway. She was also eager due to the missive in her pocket. She had stayed up far too late the night before, trying to find exactly the right words to write to her sister. In the end, she had chosen the short and direct route, telling Maria to contact Lord Ware to arrange a meeting.

The fence was directly ahead. After making certain that the guard was still far enough away to miss seeing her, she hurried toward it. She did not see the man hidden on the other side of a large tree. When a steely arm caught her and a large hand covered her mouth, she was terrified, her scream smothered by a warm palm.

“Hush,” Colin whispered, his hard body pinning hers to the trunk.

Her heart racing in her chest, Amelia beat at him with her fists, furious that he had given her such a fright.

“Stop it,” he ordered, pulling her away from the tree to shake her, his dark eyes boring into hers. “I’m sorry I scared you, but you left me no choice. You won’t see me, won’t talk to me-”

She ceased struggling when he pulled her into a tight embrace, the powerful length of his frame completely unfamiliar to her.

“I’m removing my hand. Hold your tongue or you’ll bring the guards over here.”

He released her, backing away from her quickly as if she were malodorous or something else similarly unpleasant. As for her, she immediately missed the scent of horses and hardworking male that clung to Colin.

Dappled sunlight kissed his black hair and handsome features. She hated that her stomach knotted at the sight and her heart hurt anew until it throbbed in her chest. Dressed in an oatmeal-colored sweater and brown breeches, he was all male. Dangerously so.

“I want to tell you I’m sorry.” His voice was hoarse, gravelly.

She glared.

He exhaled harshly and ran both hands through his hair. “She doesn’t mean anything.”

Amelia realized then that he was not apologizing for scaring the wits from her. “How lovely,” she said, unable to hide her bitterness. “I am so relieved to hear that what broke my heart meant nothing to you.”

He winced and held out his work-roughened hands. “Amelia. You don’t understand. You’re too young, too sheltered.”

“Yes, well, you found someone older and less sheltered to understand you.” She walked past him. “I found someone older who understands me. We are all happy, so-”

“What?”

His low, ominous tone startled her and she cried out when he caught her roughly. “Who?” His face was so tight, she was frightened again. “That boy by the stream? Benny?”

“Why do you care?” she threw at him. “You have her.”

“Is that why you’re dressed this way?” His heated gaze swept up and down her body. “Is that why you wear your hair up now? For him?”

Considering the occasion worthy of it, she had worn one of her prettiest dresses, a deep blue confection sprinkled with tiny embroidered red flowers. “Yes! He doesn’t see me as a child.”

“Because he is one! Have you kissed him? Has he touched you?”

“He is only a year younger than you.” Her chin lifted. “And he is an earl. A gentleman. He would not be caught behind a store making love to a girl.”

“It wasn’t making love,” Colin said furiously, holding her by the upper arms.

“It appeared that way to me.”

“Because you don’t know any better.” His fingers kneaded into her skin restlessly, as if he couldn’t bear to touch her, but couldn’t bear not to either.

“And I suppose you do?”

His jaw clenched in answer to her scorn.

Oh, that hurt! To know there was someone out there whom he loved. Her Colin.

“Why are we discussing this?” She attempted to wrench free, but to no avail. He held fast. She needed distance from him. She could not breathe when he touched her, could barely think. Only pain and deep sorrow penetrated her overwhelmed senses. “I forgot about you, Colin. I stayed out of your way. Why must you bother me again?”

He thrust one hand into the hair at her nape, pulling her closer. His chest labored against hers, doing odd things to her breasts, making them swell and ache. She ceased struggling, worried about how her body would react if she continued.

“I saw your face,” he said gruffly. “I hurt you. I never meant to hurt you.”

Tears filled her eyes and she blinked rapidly, determined to prevent them from falling.

“Amelia.” He pressed his cheek to hers, his voice carrying an aching note. “Don’t cry. I can’t bear it.”

“Release me, then. And keep your distance.” She swallowed hard. “Better yet, perhaps you could find a more prestigious position elsewhere. You are a hard worker-”

His other arm banded her waist. “You would send me away?”

“Yes,” she whispered, her hands fisted in his sweater. “Yes, I would.” Anything to avoid seeing him with another girl.

He nuzzled hard against her. “An earl…It must be Lord Ware. Damn him.”

“He is nice to me. He talks to me, smiles when he sees me. Today, he is going to give me my first kiss. And I’m-”

“No!” Colin pulled back, his irises swallowed by dilated pupils leaving deep black pools of torment. “He may have all the things that I never will, including you. But by God, he won’t take that from me.”

“What-?”

He took her mouth, stunning her so that she couldn’t move. Amelia could not understand what was happening, why he was acting this way, why he would approach her now, on this day, and kiss her as if he were starved for the taste of her.

His head twisted, his lips fitting more fully over hers, his thumbs pressing gently into the hinges of her jaw and urging her mouth to open. She shivered violently, awash in heated longing, afraid she was dreaming or had otherwise lost her mind. Her mouth opened, and a whimper escaped as his tongue, soft like wet velvet, slipped inside.

Frightened, she stopped breathing, then he murmured to her, her darling Colin, his fingertips brushing across her cheekbones in a soothing caress.

“Let me,” he whispered. “Trust me.”

Amelia lifted to her toes, surging into him, her hands sliding into his silken locks. Unschooled, she could only follow his lead, allowing him to eat at her mouth gently, her tongue tentatively touching his.

He moaned, a sound filled with hunger and need, his hands cupping the back of her head and angling her better. The connection became deeper, her response more fervent. Tingles swept across her skin in a wave of goose bumps. In the pit of her stomach a sense of urgency grew, of recklessness and flaring hope.

One of his hands slipped, caressing the length of her back before cupping her buttock and urging her up and into his body. As she felt the hard ridge of his arousal, a deep ache blossomed low inside her.

“Amelia…sweet.” His lips drifted across her damp face, kissing away her tears. “We shouldn’t be doing this.”

But he kept kissing her and kissing her and rolling his hips into her.

“I love you,” she gasped. “I’ve loved you so long-”

He cut her off with his lips over hers, his passion escalating, his hands roaming all over her back and arms. When she couldn’t breathe, she tore her lips away.

“Tell me you love me,” she begged, her chest heaving. “You must. Oh God, Colin…” She rubbed her tear-streaked face against his. “You’ve been so cruel, so mean.”

“I can’t have you. You shouldn’t want me. We can’t-”

Colin thrust away from her with a vicious curse. “You are too young for me to touch you like this. No. Don’t say anything else, Amelia. I am a servant. I will always be a servant and you will always be a viscount’s daughter.”

Her arms wrapped around her middle, her entire body quaking as if she were cold instead of blistering hot. Her skin felt too tight, her lips swollen and throbbing. “But you do love me, don’t you?” she asked, her small voice shaky despite her efforts to be strong.

“Don’t ask me that.”

“Can you not grant me at least that much? If I cannot have you anyway, if you will never be mine, can’t you at least tell me that your heart belongs to me?”

He groaned. “I thought it was best if you hated me.” His head tilted up to the sky with his eyes squeezed shut. “I had hoped that if you did I would stop dreaming.”

“Dreaming of what?” She tossed aside caution and approached him, her fingers slipping beneath his sweater to caress the hard ridges of his abdomen.

He caught her wrist and glared down at her. “Don’t touch me.”

“Are they like my dreams?” she queried softly. “Where you kiss me as you did a moment ago and tell me you love me more than anything in the world?”

“No,” he growled. “They are not sweet and romantic and girlish. They are a man’s dreams, Amelia.”

“Such as what you were doing to that girl?” Her lower lip quivered and she bit down on it to hide the betraying movement. Her mind flooded with the painful memories, adding to the turmoil wrought by the unfamiliar cravings of her body and the pleading demands of her heart. “Do you dream about her, too?”

Colin caught her to him again. “Never.”

He kissed her, lighter in pressure and urgency than before, but no less passionate. Soft as a butterfly’s wings, they brushed back and forth across hers, his tongue dipping inside, then retreating. It was a reverent kiss, and her lonely heart soaked it up like the desert floor soaked rain.

Cupping her face in his hands, he breathed, “This is making love, Amelia.”

“Tell me you don’t kiss her like this.” She cried softly, her nails digging into his back through his sweater.

“I don’t kiss anyone. I never have.” His forehead pressed against hers. “Only you. It’s only ever been you.”

“Maria.”

The sound of her name spoken in Christopher’s raspy voice made Maria whimper with a mixture of need and fear. He heard the sound and pulled her closer, his lips moving urgently across hers.

She did not know how to handle the feelings he incited in her, the strange mixture of endless desire that went beyond the physical and wavering hope, as if something could come of this affair between them.

“I wanted you with me when I woke this morning,” he said, his arms strong around her.

She stared up into his austerely handsome features, noting that his skin was pale beneath his tan and his countenance as weary in appearance as hers. “I wanted to stay, but this,” she gestured between them, “cannot be between us.”

“It was, perhaps, fortunate that you left. Otherwise, I might never have realized how it would feel to lose you completely.”

Lifting her hand, she pressed her fingertips to his lips, stemming the intimate confession. She winced as he caught her wrist and pressed an ardent kiss into her palm. What happened to the pirate she first met in the theater? Physically, the man before her looked the same, perhaps even a little worse for wear, but the eyes that stared back at her were far different. Though familiar. For a long moment, she stared at him, trying to place why she felt such a mad fluttering in her stomach. And then it came to her in a flash of frightening comprehension.

“What is it?” he asked, frowning with concern.

She looked away, her gaze darting around the room, trying to find something, some object that would ground her in reality.

Christopher caught her shoulders, preventing her from escape. “Tell me. By God, we have too many secrets between us. Too much left unsaid. It’s killing us.”

“There is no ‘us,’” she whispered, sucking in a fortifying breath only to find her senses inundated with the scents of bergamot soap and starch. The scent of Christopher.

“You know I wish that were true,” he said softly, his head lowering, his lips parting an instant before they touched hers. His hand slipped into the neckline of her chemise and cupped her bare breast. She gasped at the lancing heat that burned through her, and he took advantage, his tongue gliding deep.

Expert fingers found her hardened nipple and pinched it, rolled it, plucked at it until her knees weakened.

He caught her up then, lifting her feet from the floor and carrying her to the bed.

“How will we end this,” she asked, with her hot face pressed into his shoulder, “if we make love again?”

“That question requires reason to answer it,” he murmured, laying her down carefully. Leaning over her, his hands on either side of her hips, he gave her that slow seductive smile that she was helpless to resist. “But there is no reason to what is between us. There never has been.”

Maria was touched by his gentleness. Her heart began to race, and suddenly unable to look at the emotion in his eyes, she closed her own.

She felt the mattress dip as he sat beside her. His fingertip dipped into the hollow of her throat and then slid downward between her breasts. “Talk to me,” he urged.

“I’d rather-”

His hand cupped the weight of her breast, then moist heat surrounded her nipple through her chemise. Her back bowed upward in startled pleasure and her eyes flew open.

Christopher sat up again and shrugged out of his heavy silk coat. “Tell me. Before I move on to more persuasive forms of coercion.”

“I am a woman grown, but you make me feel like an adolescent,” she confessed, experiencing a riot of emotions such as a girl of Amelia’s age would-frightened but curious, anxious but eager. Her stomach fluttered in anticipation, although she knew well what was about to happen.

This time would be different, she knew. Beyond her experience.

A dark golden brow arched as his fingers moved to the ivory buttons of his waistcoat. “My first sexual encounter was against a wall in a filthy alley. She was a decade older than I, and an accomplished whore. I pretended to the others that I was highly knowledgeable in such matters, but she knew and took it upon herself to instruct me. She caught my hand, led me outside, and lifted her skirts. I was determined to hold to the lie, of course, so I rode her hard and well, and didn’t stop until every one of the men I wished to impress had heard her coming.”

Although his voice was light, she heard something beneath it that touched her deeply. Who was this man? How did he become the lover undressing in her bedroom? A man who would come to her, as she had gone to him, attempting to save a relationship that had nowhere to go?

Christopher stood and divested himself of the waistcoat, then quickly followed it with his shirtsleeves, breeches, stockings, and heels. Gloriously naked, he crawled onto the bed next to her. He rolled her into his side, arranging her into a similar position as the last time. Once she was properly situated, he sighed with deep pleasure.

Her hand over his heart, Maria looked out the window through her sheers and appreciated how, for the moment, she felt cocooned from the world at large.

“So tell me,” he murmured, his lips in her hair, “what do you mean when you say you feel as an adolescent would?”

If we cannot discuss the present, that leaves us with only our pasts.

“Dayton was many years older than I,” she said, her breath gusting through the light matting of golden brown hairs on his chest.

“I had heard that.”

“He was very much in love with the first Lady Dayton. But even had he not been, I think he would have found my age off-putting regardless.”

“Oh?”

Maria felt the expectation and curiosity within the tension of Christopher’s frame. “But I was young and curious, and-”

“Hot blooded,” he supplied with an affectionate kiss to the crown of her head, which she returned with one pressed to a hard brown nipple. “Do not attempt to distract me,” he admonished. “You will finish your tale first.”

“Dayton noted my growing preoccupation with ogling young men and took me aside. He asked if there was one of the servants in particular I found most appealing.”

“You told him?” Christopher tilted her chin up to reveal his raised brows.

“Not immediately. I was too embarrassed.” And she still was, if the heat she felt spreading across her cheeks was any indication.

“How lovely you are when you blush,” he murmured.

“Don’t tease, or I will not be able to finish.”

“I’m not teasing.”

“Christopher!”

He smiled, his eyes sparkling, making him look younger. Not adolescent, by any means. A man who had seen and done the things Christopher St. John had would never be able to recapture any hint of innocence, but the transformation of his features amazed her and affected her deeply. She had wrought this change in him.

She touched his cheek with reverent fingers and his smile faded, his gaze heated. “Hurry with your tale,” he urged.

“One day, Dayton sent for me, telling me to meet him in the bachelor house. It was not an unusual request.” It was where they had studied maps and cryptology, away from the prying eyes and ears of servants. “But when I arrived, it was not Dayton who awaited me, but the handsome young man who had caught my fancy.”

“Fortunate bastard,” Christopher said.

Maria returned her cheek to his chest, her hand cupping his lean hip. “He was kind and patient. Despite being young, randy, and obviously eager, he tended to my pleasure and comfort before he saw to his. It was an exceptional way to manage the task of losing one’s virginity.”

Christopher rolled and pinned her beneath him, gazing down at her with liquid, heated eyes. “I feel rather dull-witted. I still cannot collect what it is about today’s encounter that goads feelings of adolescence.”

She pursed her lips, afraid to reveal any more.

“Must I resort to coercion, then?” Reaching between them, he tugged down her bodice and freed her breasts, his warm furred skin an intimate delight when pressed to her nakedness.

“Christ,” he said, leaning his weight on one arm while rolling a nipple between the fingers of his opposite hand. “You are so beautiful.”

“Silver-tongued devil,” she teased, pressing a kiss to his chin before spreading her legs, allowing his hips to sink intimately between them.

“You like my tongue,” he purred. “And I am prepared to use it on you to gain your confession. Now tell me how and why you feel like a schoolroom girl so we can move on.”

“With a threat like that, why would I say anything?”

Christopher nipped her lower lip with his teeth. “Very well, I will guess, then, based on what you have told me so far. You feel apprehension, but also desire. Surprise, but also eagerness. Uncertain, but also decided. You don’t want to have me, and yet you do.” He smiled. “Am I close?”

Maria lifted her head and rubbed her nose against his. “I suppose the first time feels the same for everyone.”

“I felt nothing of the sort the first time,” he scoffed. “All I felt was a physical desire to spend my seed. Emotional feelings had nothing to do with it.”

Her brows rose. “Then how do you know how I feel?”

“Because,” he whispered, his lips lowering to hers, “I feel that way about you.”