The Perils of Pleasure (24 page)

Colin sat all the way up and touched Madeleine’s shoulder to gain her attention, pointed at her, then pil
lowed his hands beneath his tipped head. Sign language for:
You. Sleep. Tonight.

He rolled the blanket to make a pillow long enough for the two of them to share without sleeping right on top of each other, and then gave it a little pat and made an exaggerated
For you
,
my lady
fl ourish with his hands.

And after a moment’s hesitation, Madeleine gave a mockingly regal nod. Scooting slowly, inching, actu
ally, so as not to tempt the loft into creaking or the straw into rustling overmuch, she made her way to the pillow, then stretched out and exhaled luxuriously as her head sank into the pillow.

Colin watched that exhalation avidly, as it was an eloquent sight indeed, that lift and fall of neat round bosom beneath muslin. He wondered if the sigh was for his benefit, then decided perhaps optimism and nobly restrained desire had prompted that speculation.

And then he slowly, slowly, stretched out alongside Madeleine, a good foot away or so from touching her, and within excruciatingly close reaching distance of that bosom.

God, how he wanted to roll over and show her pre
cisely the nature of his own genius, in all its infi nite variety.

But oddly . . . he also wanted her to sleep. He wanted her to
abandon
herself to sleep. It would mean she trusted him, and he wanted this as much as he wanted to touch her skin. And the realization surprised him so thoroughly he almost forgot to feel noble about it.

He breathed in, and there it was: lavender. He half smiled. It did nothing to calm his blood.

Beneath them, large, slumberous animals breathed and shifted on their hooves, and for a time Colin simply was still, and listened to Madeleine’s breathing, listened to the crickets, listened for dogs, listened to the cows chewing and sighing, tried not to think about spiders and how much they enjoyed dark places like lofts. His ankles itched; his wounds were healing. He didn’t scratch. The familiar farm smells ached in him.

And in that instant he wanted Pennyroyal Green. He
wanted . . .
familiar
. He wanted simplicity and peace and Louisa Porter, and the life he’d always imagined for himself, the life that a bizarre injustice had taken from him.

And this was when the rage he’d kept tamped for so long finally reared up and swiped at him with long claws.

It shocked him; it was a sneak attack. His lungs locked, his hands curled into hard knots, his every muscle went rigid. He struggled for his equilibrium as surely as though he were engaged in actual combat, but his enemy was abstract: it was injustice. In this imposed silence, he couldn’t banter or spar with Madeleine to deflect a little of it, or keep moving in order to outrun it, and so it simply had him now. He needed to let it have its way with him. It was something new to accom
modate, this rage, and he wasn’t quite certain how to do it. It was something else that hadn’t been a part of him before Newgate.

But through all of this came the sound of Madeleine breathing softly and deeply. In and out. Waves rushing up to the shore and drawing back again.

Sometimes being heroic means showing uncommon grace in the face of untenable circumstances.

Colin focused on her breathing, began to breathe in time with her, and little by little the anger eased from him. He thought to court peace by imagining it was Louisa who lay next to him, breathing softly, her gold hair spread over a pillow. But the image wouldn’t come. He simply couldn’t picture Louisa Porter on her back in a loft after having been boosted into it with a gratuitous arse squeeze.

Peace eluded him. In part because he didn’t think he could bear another moment without touching Mad
eleine Greenway. He slowly propped himself on his elbow, one knee up, and gazed down at her, thinking to inventory her features in the dark. And testing a suspicion.

His heart stuttered.

Because, as it turned out, Madeleine Greenway wasn’t sleeping at all.

Madeleine had kept her breathing even, pretending to sleep. But she was in truth listening to Colin Eversea . . . think. It was a familiar enough sound to her, the sound of a man with something weighty on his mind. There was something about the quality of the silence. A difference in his breathing, a tension that hummed nearly audibly from him, the way he lay very still on his back. It was something you learned about a man only over time.

She thought she was beginning to know this one. In some ways, it was though she’d always known him and was simply rediscovering him.

And then she heard the rustle, and looked up to meet his pale eyes in the dark. Her heart gave a mad, joyous thump.

She gazed back at him now as he looked down over her, propped up on his elbow, one knee up. She didn’t doubt for a moment that Colin Eversea wanted her as badly as a man could want.

But he also wanted her to choose.

She inhaled deeply, sighed out an uneven breath. And chose.

She lifted her hand up, and, as lightly as leaf drifting from a tree, dropped it softly against the inside of his thigh.

Colin stopped breathing.

She felt her touch reverberating through him in the tension of his thigh, and he exhaled softly. His light eyes remained fixed on her, a pair of stars in the dark.

His held breath shuddered out softly.

And for a moment Madeleine savored the sensation of lean muscle beneath her hand, and reveled in sharp anticipation, in the question she knew was vibrating through him, and the power she possessed to tip this moment in any direction she chose.

But this is what she chose: she slid her palm lightly along his thigh, toward the crook of his leg. And quite decisively closed her hand over the bulge in his trousers.

Colin’s head jerked back a little involuntarily; he hissed a breath in between his teeth. That moment of anticipation had clearly done for him what it had for her: he was hard, and stirring, and growing harder be
neath her hand. Desire burned low and hot in Made-leine’s belly, rayed through her veins, tensed her limbs.

And all at once she wanted to crawl over him, strad
dle him, take him now.

She also wanted to first give him pleasure that was nearly unbearable.

Madeleine opened his eyes, finding his on hers. They remained locked in a dare of sorts. And there was si
lence. Critical, utter silence, complicit and excruciat
ingly erotic for all of that. For what she was doing now, what they were very likely
about
to do, was danger
ous for a dozen different reasons, not the least of which included the various noises one inevitably made in the throes of passion, the whispers and sighs.

And as her hand slid over him, discovering his con
siderable contours, Colin ever so slightly shifted his thighs farther apart to allow her access, to ease his fast
burgeoning arousal. She could feel his belly rise and fall swiftly as her hand stroked harder, more deliberately, more specifically, over the straining erection beneath the nankeen of his trousers, and she couldn’t bear not feeling his skin, so she felt for Colin’s trouser buttons, and discovered his other hand already there, already struggling to unfasten them. In the silence, in the soft dark, together they worked upon his buttons, and it was torture to do it as quietly as possible because it meant doing it much more slowly than either wanted, and they were both trembling now, and her own breathing was staccato.

She felt an almost absurd surge of exultation when one button fell open. She worked another, he another.

And then at last Colin was free, springing hot and thick and silky into her waiting hand, and his breath rushed out against her face, soft and warm. The musk of desire was already so thick and heady between them Madeleine’s head swam; she was drunk from it.

Dangerous
.

She kept her eyes even with his, closed her fi st over his cock and dragged it slowly down.

Colin’s head jerked back, the cords of his throat taut, and his pleasure spiked through her and became her own, made her breath come shallow, tensed her mus
cles. She leisurely dragged her fist back up, and then down over him again, glorying in his growing thick
ness, the heat and strength of him. And then she did it again, until Colin’s head rocked forward and he ducked his chin into his chest. His breathing was frayed now and swift, his shoulders visibly rising and falling with it. He was trying to hide the sound of it.

For no one would mistake this sort of breathing for mice at play in the loft.

This was madness.
In a moment neither of them would hear a pack of big healthy farm dogs baying toward the barn. Villagers with pitchforks and torches, a battalion of English soldiers accompanied by horses pulling cannons, would not make themselves known. Then again, Madeleine thought perhaps there were worse ways to die than to be discovered in a loft making love to Colin Eversea; it seemed, at the moment anyway, that she would die if she couldn’t have him.

So she drew her fi st up his cock again, lingering this time over the satin rim of it, trailing her fi ngers around it. She watched his head tip back again, saw his throat move in a swallow. His hips began to move just a very little, rocking into her fist in that primal rhythm that means the body has mutinied against sense. Mutinied? Sense, in this instance, had in fact already been bound and tossed into some inner dungeon.

That little movement of his hips made the loft groan its age.
Creeeeeak
.

They instantly froze.

Madeleine held her breath. Her heart thumped per
haps six or seven times, hard as a drum inside her chest.

But apart from the blood ringing in her ears, she heard no other sound. Just crickets.

She released her breath, and bit down on her lip when a mad laugh threatened to escape.

It was Colin who risked a whisper.

“Mad.”
He breathed the word into her ear. All sear
ing longing and astonishment.

His hand skimmed over her bodice, finding the fabric soft and fragile from wear, and his fingers slipped into it; his fingertips found the rough-silk knot of her nipple, the cool firm satin of her breast; he slid his fi ngers be
neath it to free it from the bodice.

But she covered his hand with her own to stop him, and then suddenly took her hand away from his erection.

He was immediately nostalgic for it.

But then slowly, slowly, excruciatingly slowly, to pre
vent the bloody loft from creaking and the straw from undue rustling, she tipped to her side to show him her back.

He understood: with fingers clumsy with impatience and the unaccustomed need to rein it in, his arousal brushing against her back, Colin worked her laces loose and spread them wide, and stifled a blissful sigh, for he’d uncovered an expanse of pale glowing skin. He drew greedy fingers down between the blades of her shoulders, finding her gloriously satiny and warm, feel
ing her skin prick up in gooseflesh in the wake of his touch. He leaned forward, intending to touch his lips, his tongue, to the valley between those blades.

But Madeleine was, as usual, focused on her objec
tive, and already she was slowly, slowly, tipping back up to face him, her hands at her bodice tugging her dress down from her shoulders to free her breasts.

Ah, but she was too impatient: the fabric sighed down over her skin with a sound of nearly human satisfaction.

The sound was deafening when compared to the si
lence in which they’d been cushioned.

Motion, breathing, everything suspended. Colin could have sworn his blood stopped moving. Crickets played a bar or two more of their endless symphony.

Once again: no dogs.

And then there she was, leaning back on her elbows, lovely breasts uptilted and bared, head tipped back. It was all he could do not to lunge.

He hovered over her, arms trembling with the effort to be quiet, dipped lower to take one nipple into his mouth, nipped it lightly. He had the pleasure of feeling her breath catch, her rib cage jump up. He turned his cheek to brush his whiskers against the satiny round
ness of her breast, and when he did, he felt the swift beat of her heart against his skin.

Her hands were working at tugging up her dress as he did, and together they got it up noiselessly, which meant of course doing it slowly, and every torturous second it took to gather all that muslin ratcheted his anticipation almost unbearably, heightening the most minute of sensations until every moment seemed to contain a lifetime’s worth of desire. Every second he wasn’t inside her scraped like a blade across his desire, honing it and honing it until the point of it was savage.

He was certain it would kill him before he could sat
isfy it.

What a lovely way to die.

Colin slowly pushed his trousers down about his thighs, which was as far as they needed to be, really, to accomplish what he needed to accomplish. He glanced down, saw beneath him Madeleine’s soft pale belly and long slender pale legs and dark triangle of curls, and white knees drawing slowly, slowly up, the straw shifting and rustling ever so slightly beneath her. He moved—oh God, so slowly—to kneel between her legs.