Stranger:. Zoe Archer
and other Blades.
Except it wasn’t. Gemma Murphy was not a Blade, and his body somehow knew the difference. He tested her slender ankles with gentle attention, trying like hell to dampen his reaction to her. “Does this hurt?”
“No.”
Her legs needed to be checked for breaks or sprains. Over the skirt, or under it? He had to be thorough. “I’m sorry, but—” His hands slid under her skirt to touch her calves.
Some mystic in India once taught Catullus special breathing techniques to help gather his thoughts, calm his mind and body when the world grew too present. Catullus drew upon every drop of that training to help him now.
Good God, she had gorgeous legs. He could not see them, but he could feel with a greater sensitivity. The muscles of her calf were sleek and lithe beneath the coarse knit of her stockings, not the calf of a leisured lady who reclined upon a chaise all day, but the kind that attested to an active life full of motion and purpose. And, damn him, if he didn’t find that unbearably arousing.
He wanted so badly to take his hands up farther, over her knee, across her thighs to feel those muscles and the band of bare flesh above her stockings. But he could not. That would be a violation.
He pulled his shaking hands away, and carefully smoothed down her skirts. “Try moving your legs.”
Her skirts rustled as she did this. He set his teeth against the sound.
She said, “They’re fine.”
“What about … your ribs? Are they bruised?”
She made to bring her hands up to feel them, but the movements were fitful as she struggled to regain her strength. “I don’t know.”
“May I?” He was a tongue-tied boy again, simple words stuttering in his mouth.
“Yes, please.”
So he lowered himself beside her, and, at her nod, ran his hands along her sides. Her dress was worn thin, and he felt beneath the fabric the material of her corset, each individual lace and hook that constrained her body. It was a corset for traveling, lightly boned, so that he knew now, to his deep joy and dismay, that the curves of her waist were entirely hers and not the result of a corsetmaker’s art.
What he wouldn’t give to slide his hands up higher, cup those exquisite, full breasts in his hands. He had large hands, but she would spill from them with their abundance. He wanted to touch her so badly, his own breath sawed through him, louder than a steam engine.
“Does this hurt?” he asked, hoarse. Because it was hurting him.
Beneath his hands, her breathing quickened. “N-no.” She stared at him, eyes wide but unafraid, and her soft, pink lips parted slightly. “It feels … nice.”
He was braced over her now, his body stretched alongside hers, so that he had only to lower his head to touch his lips to hers. Thoughts of the Heirs, the Primal Source all dissolved like vapor beneath the sun of his and her shared awareness. Her gaze flicked down to his mouth, as well, and the dropping of her lashes and flush spreading across her cheeks revealed that not only had she shared his thought, but wanted it, too. What would she taste like? Both the scientist and the man within him needed to find out.
Slowly, slowly he bent lower, suspended in liquid time. His heart slammed within the cage of his chest, and he was tight and hard everywhere. He cradled the juncture of her neck and jaw, feeling the rush of her pulse at that tender convergence. Such delicacy. Combined with remarkable strength.
“You’re a very courageous woman,” he breathed, close enough to count freckles.
She brought her hand up to curve around the back of his head. “I know,” she answered.
He smiled at that, a small smile. And then he stopped smiling, because he kissed her.
Soft, at first. Just the brush of lips. Then more. Her mouth was silken, yielding, yet had its own demands. When he deepened the kiss, she met him with an equal need, opening her lips to take him inside, her tongue touching his without hesitation.
Heat tore through him with the strength of a firestorm. He’d never experienced in his life a kiss this potent, overwhelming him with desire. Catullus, rousing even more, took the kiss further, slipping from the reins of his control. Had he some sense of himself, he might have been shocked at the way he was devouring her. But she devoured him, in turn, and so he had no sense of himself. No sense of anything but his need for her, the taste of her, which, he learned, was the taste of summer fruit warmed in the sun. Sweet and ripe.
And so damned responsive. As they kissed, she moaned softly into his mouth, her fingers gripping tighter on the back of his head. His free hand began its ascent, tracing the curvature of her ribs, and then higher, until it brushed the underside of her breast.
Sweet heaven, yes.
“I see you survived the jump.”
Catullus broke the kiss and looked up with hazy eyes to see Astrid and Lesperance standing some five yards away. Lesperance trained his gaze studiously on a nearby farm outbuilding, as if it was truly fascinating. But Astrid stared at Catullus with her arms crossed over her chest, wearing a distinctly frosty expression.
Catullus felt like a boy caught just before supper with a mouthful of plum cake.
He edged back from Gemma. “Yes, well … Gemma … Miss Murphy had, ah, taken quite a tumble—”
“Or was about to,” Lesperance said, sotto voce.
Catullus glowered at Lesperance, but had recovered enough to get to his feet. Thank God he had on his overcoat, or else he’d treat Astrid, Lesperance, Gemma, and the sheep grazing nearby to the sight of his aching erection. The cashmere coat provided a welcome bit of privacy.
He held out a hand to Gemma. “Can you stand?”
She nodded, and slid her hand into his. The feel of her skin against his own ensured that he’d have to wear his coat for a good while longer.
Catullus helped her to standing, and he couldn’t stop himself from noticing her lips, red from kissing, and the riotous mass of her unbound hair cascading over her shoulders. She looked like a woman moments from being ravished.
He felt both exhilarated and appalled by his behavior. The Heirs could, even now, have reached the next station and be heading back to finish what they’d begun on the train. Meanwhile, Catullus had been caressing and kissing a woman in a ditch—a ditch!—as if powerless to stop himself from the pull of desire between them. He’d never done anything like that, not once, in the whole of his existence. Why, after forty-one years, would he do something like that now?
It was her. A woman unlike any other he’d ever met. Gemma Murphy, watching him with her crystalline eyes and flushed, freckled cheeks.
“Are you truly all right?” he asked her lowly. He’d flog himself before hurting or taking advantage of her.
“I really am,” she answered. “And this has been one of the most interesting days of my life,” she breathed for his ears alone. A tiny smile bowed the corners of her mouth.
Her smile held both a woman’s experience and a girl’s freshness, and Catullus, a rational man of sober temperament and restraint, felt against reason a small gleam of happiness.
But reality set in. And his happiness winked out, like a doused lamp.
“The day isn’t half over. And neither is the danger.”
They would have to keep to bridle paths and game trails. The main road was far too trafficked for safety. If the Heirs knew enough to put some of their men on the correct Southampton-bound train, they’d have the roads watched, too. Time, always in short supply, became even more scarce.
So, collecting their strewn baggage, Catullus, Gemma, Lesperance, and Astrid quickly made their way to a narrow, seldom-used path running parallel to the main southern road.