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“Yes,” she panted. “Yes, yes.” She likely would have agreed to anything at that moment. Because she felt, at that moment,exactlyas eager as he’d accused her of being. Every inch of her screamed with the knowledge that there was something more that would happen, and she needed that elusive thing to start happening. Immediately.

Caleb pressed his mouth to her core.

The breath gusted out of her, more a sob than mere air, as he pressed against her, strong and vicious and sure. It felt filthy,the knowledge that his mouth was pressed against her sensitive place, the place even she scarcely dared touch, but in a way that she found intoxicating rather than appalling.

He moved and it wasbrilliant, his movements controlled and sure in a way that left her free to give herself over to him, to trust in whatever plan he held for her. In this, at least, she felt safe in his hands.

“Fuck, lass,” he panted. “I—fuck.”

“Yes,” she said again. His rough language made her feel like her dress was too tight, like she should be tearing it from her body. She clutched the edge of the table so hard she wondered if the wood would bear the imprint of her fingers.

If her words were little more than incoherent panting, his were not much better. He growled at her as he touched his mouth to different parts of her—her legs, her center, a sensitive spot that made her back bow off the table—letting her hear only every third or fourth word clearly.

Aye—that’s it—good lass.

The sensations, the words, the pounding of her blood—they all ratcheted her higher and higher until she was poised on a precise. It took only scant seconds after he slipped two broad fingers inside her, his movements sure and devastating, for her to fall, a scream ripping free from her throat.

Pleasure wracked her and her breaths became sobs before she could slow them entirely. Gently, almost tenderly, her husband withdrew from her body and draped her skirts back over her legs. Grace left her eyes closed for a long moment, feeling the sturdiness of the table beneath her, knowing that if she opened her eyes and he had already left, it would destroy her.

But neither could she ignore the problem and simply lay here forever, for if the servants found her sprawled here, for one, she would have to simply walk until she hit the sea and keep going until it swallowed her whole.

When she gathered her courage and opened her eyes, she sighed with relief. He was still there.

His expression wasn’t tender, but neither was it hard, and Grace found she could survive it. The thought gave her hope. Maybe this whole farce of a marriage would be…manageable. It seemed foolish to think so just because he’d given her physical pleasure—though a great deal of physical pleasure, in fairness—but Grace had learned the benefit of taking what one was given and accepting it, if she could.

Outright hostility with her husband, she decided, she could not abide. But this? Lovemaking without love—so long as it was without hate, too?

She supposed she could manage it.

He extended a hand to help her gain her feet. Her fingers were stiff from how intensely she’d been clutching the table.

“Are ye all right?” he asked, a bit awkwardly, as if solicitousness were a foreign language.

“I’m—yes,” she said. “Are you?—”

She knew enough about carnal relations to know that act had not tended to his needs. She nearly glanced down at his trousers before she stopped herself.

Even so, he caught the movement. Of course he did. He missed nothing.

He turned from her before she could see anything, then cast a parting shot over his shoulder, as if he didn’t care much one way or another—though Grace had the suspicion that wasn’t entirely true.

“Go to bed, Grace,” he commanded gruffly. “Before I change my mind.”

Grace let him go without comment, though she could not decide if himchanging his mindwas more a threat or a promise.

CHAPTER 11

Something strange was going on with his wife. Caleb didn’t like it.

He sat on one of the upper balconies, which had just the right angle that he could see, in the distance, where the full moon glinted against the dark water of the North Sea. It was, technically, a tactical weak point in the keep, this place where you could see the waves over the walls, but since it had been five or so centuries since someone had besieged Montgomery Estate by sea, Caleb felt that this weakness could be easily borne.

Besides, he liked to come here sometimes, when he needed to think.

He had learned something when he’d made the likely ill-advised decision to pleasure his wife against their dining room table.

He hadn’t merely discovered that Grace’s breath hitched in the moments before she hit her crisis, nor that bringing her pleasurehad been as satisfying as achieving his own. He hadn’t just found that she was tantalizingly obedient when she put her mind to it, nor that she blushed all the way down the neckline of her gown when aroused.

No, he’d learned, more than all those other things, that his wife was—or had been, until the day prior—untouched.