Page 30 of The Rebellious Countess (The Ruined Duchess #2)
“After I heard the couple talking about the townspeople being ill. When you were…”
He winced. When he was burying the bodies of the men they’d killed. He’d gruffly sent her back to the stream with their horse to see to the animal’s needs.
He ran his hand through his hair. “He knows you’re not French.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“He was watching your mouth.”
“He was focused on my instructions.”
Women. Did they not know the male mind? Not only had the teenager been focused on the way her tongue moved when she spoke, he noticed her curves. Hell, he’d have to be blind not to notice them. Hag’s gown did little to hide the woman beneath, even if the gown was too big.
He turned toward their horse. “I better take care of the horse. You can clean up in the other stall.”
“Elias…”
He froze mid-step but wasn’t man enough to turn around and face her. When her hand touched his arm, he flinched, and she withdrew her touch.
“None of this is your fault.”
A snort slid from his lips. Everything that she’d experienced was his fault.
“You only did what you had to do to save Astley.” Her voice was soft and soothing, as if she spoke to a child.
He turned and grabbed her with so much force she stumbled back, but he was there, pressing her against the wall of the stable with a sneer on his face.
The venom in his voice split the silence of the night.
“Where is Astley, now? Is he safe? For all we know he died at the hands of the soldiers months ago, and if he did survive, who’s to say the sickness hasn’t already taken him, as it has so many others?
Will you say it was worth it then, when he is dead? ”
No, she would hate him for everything.
Her kindness did not disappear, despite his rough handling. “You will find him,” she reassured. “You will return him to his family…one way or another.”
He searched her eyes looking for her hatred.
She should hate him with every fiber of her being, every other lady of the ton would want him hanging from a rope for what he had put her through.
Yet in Máira’s fathomless blue gaze, he only saw forgiveness, and then she reached up to caress his check, her soft skin in direct contrast to the coarse beard he now sported.
Mon Dieu. It was there burning brightly within her, it was in her touch, her voice…
in the way her body pressed against his despite the distance he’d made certain to keep.
This was more than just curiosity and lust, this was the reason a woman said yes to a man.
He had convinced himself the emotion he saw in her eyes was the infatuation of a lady seeking a marriage of comfort and security, but he’d been wrong. It was something a great deal more.
It couldn’t be. They couldn’t be. Máira was everything he never wanted.
He released her and stalked the horse, who shied away from him the way Máira should, but didn’t. “Get cleaned up and get some rest. We leave at first light.”
Máira stood at the stall wall that separated them since he'd taken on the task of grooming their horse. She watched through a small hole as Elias cared for the stallion. The way he spoke to it, relaxing the horse with the smoky gravel of his voice as he whispered words she could not discern, only made her think of things he’d whispered to her in the heat of passion.
His touch was gentle and soothing, the exact opposite of what she would expect from large, sea-roughened hands, yet she knew exactly how tender that touch could be.
Watching the way he cared for the animal as he wiped down its lathered neck and brushed its sweaty coat, had mesmerized her.
It was as if the horse was being bathed in the luxurious care of his touch, and Máira was jealous—of a horse.
There should have been nothing erotic about what he was doing, but the way his body moved made a woman feel every last stroke.
From the moment she met this man, her body responded to him, acknowledged his presence before she was even aware he entered a room.
It was as if the very air she breathed became an intoxicant when he was present.
She counted herself lucky to be able to watch the way the muscles of his back and arms had flared to life with each stroke of the brush, and his buttocks…
Dear Lord, he had a glorious backside. Tight and rounded, his trousers clung to his form as if they were a part of him.
Like the flesh covering his bone, muscle, and sinew.
She had watched his arse tighten and flex, imagined stroking him there, feeling the strength of his movements under her fingertips as their bodies became one.
It had been torturous, and then when he’d finished and the stallion was grazing on grain, he’d removed his shirt to bathe!
She was supposed to be knee deep in her own ablution, but that was the trouble.
While she washed the dirt away from her person in one stall, she had noticed the knot hole in the wood panel and Elias’s masculine form move in the other.
What red-blooded English or French woman wouldn’t watch a display like that?
And so, she had watched him through the cracks.
It was naughty and sinful, but oh, so delightful as her own hand brought the wet cloth down her arms, and across her torso.
She had been transfixed when his own hand trailed across the dips and swells of the waves of muscle on his abdomen.
None of the sketches in the books she had seen depicting the acts of sex had come close to displaying a male form like his.
Looking at the books, she’d found the male body curious and interesting, not arousing.
No wonder they didn’t display the image of a man like Elias.
Every man of the ton would think himself unworthy, every woman would be greatly disappointed in her husband if they came across one of those books in her husband’s library and it contained one of Michelangelo’s male models pleasuring a woman.
The barn had become almost too warm to bear.
She had seen nude sculptures on her one trip to London, had been fascinated by the art and the reaction of the women to the art.
She’d thought it odd how the ladies found the sculptures to represent commoners.
They had made the sculptures seem vulgar when they exclaimed for all to hear, “No gentleman would ever look like that!”
No gentleman, indeed. Elias was more than a gentleman. He was her husband, and like the ladies of the ton , Máira could not stop looking at the muscled form created by God. What an awful existence she would have led had she never known a man such as Elias.
“Are you cold?”
She froze at the sound of his voice, then jumped back from the wall, her heart pounding. “No. I’m fine.”
“Very well,” he said, and Máira sighed with relief.
A shuffling sound, however, brought her attention back to Elias.
Máira bent over and watched once more through the cracks of the wood as her husband took off his shoes and then pulled his trousers down in one fell swoop.
It wasn’t the first time she’d seen his manhood, but it was the first time she had seen it in the light.
Long and thick with veining traveling its length, Elias’s cock was another aspect of the male anatomy she suspected to be uncommon.
There was no gratuitous slant that made him look ill-proportioned or false as the drawings in the books had been.
Elias’s manhood was just as long, if not longer than those depicted in the books her sister had shared.
The difference was how well the power of his cock seemed to match the power of his body as he fisted its length and slowly stroked it up and down.
And so she watched him as she washed her breasts, her nipples distending with the desire to be touched.
It was the first time she’d indulged in that craving only he had stirred.
She caressed her flesh until she was nearly moaning with fantasies of what Elias would do to her if she were truly his bride.
She dreamed of Elias pulling her into his arms, reveling in the strength of his embrace as he enfolded her into his heat. There was no other place she’d rather be than in that stable with him, naked and unafraid of what tomorrow would bring.
Her body came alive. It sparked and tingled as if a fire were springing to life in her core as she watched the color of his green eyes darken to a color deeper than any forest in Scotland. They glittered with what she had come to recognize as his desire, as his hand stroked his shaft.
There was no denying it. She loved this man with her entire being.
From their first meeting, she’d known he was the one.
She’d set her sights on him just as much as he had her.
He may not have wanted to marry her for the same reasons, but he had chosen her over her sisters.
He’d chosen her over Mary Wimberly. She knew he had married her out of a pretext to save Simon, but the spark between them was real; it was lasting.
It wouldn’t go away if he was rescuing a strange duchess from the wilds of India.
It wouldn’t disappear if he were ploughing through the rough and tumbled plains of the Americas.
Elias Allistair Drake was her husband. He wasn’t just a chapter in her life. He owned her, heart, body, and soul. Nothing could change that.
She didn’t care what society thought. She didn’t care that she was ruined, but if she was going to be ruined in the eyes of the ton , then she would make certain she was thoroughly ruined.