Page 77 of The MacGregor's Lady
Instead, he caressed Hannah’s hair and kissed her temple, and—because with her sprawled on his chest, the temptation was too great—stroked his hand over the curve of her backside.
Somewhere in the affray, her nightgown had gone missing. This was convenient, because before he left the bed, Asher intended that Hannah’s wits go missing again too—even though he’d finally located his own wits for the first time since leaving Scottish shores years ago.
***
“By what feat of feminine cerebration did you conclude you were unchaste?”
The question was asked with lazy amusement, the same lazy amusement with which the end of Hannah’s braid was brushed across her lips. She rolled to her back to find Asher propped on his elbow beside her.
The birds were singing outside her window, while a faint gray light crept around the edges of her curtains.
She and Asher hadn’t much time, though she found it impossible to dismiss him from her bed.
“I was not a virgin. I lacked the requisite…” She batted sleep away from her brain, batted his braid-wielding hand from her face. “There’s a name for it, for the little scrap of flesh a girl is to guard with her life, and I parted with mine some time ago.”
He kissed her nose. “The name for it is invisible, in most cases. A woman as active as you are is unlikely to be sporting much in the way of a maidenhead so late in her life. Hymen, if you want the medical term.”
“Are you calling me old?”
He kissed her ear and spoke right next to it, which tickled. “I am calling you adult, also mendacious. Untruthful, but not quite a liar. Tell me, Hannah.”
He wrestled her over him, a position in which they’d made love sometime in the night. The memory was luscious and painful. Hannah curled down onto Asher’s chest and wished she could hold back the dawn.
“Hymen. I’d forgotten the word. Your medical knowledge has its uses.”
His hand on her back paused then resumed the slow stroking across her skin, which would have provoked her to purring were she capable of it.
“You were a virgin, dear heart. I would stake my life on this. Were you misleading me in an effort to hasten your ruin?”
He wasn’t going to let this go, but because he was going to lethergo—in a few minutes in one sense, in a few weeks in another—she tried to find the right words.
“When I jilted Widmore, he did not deal well with it.”
“Most fellows would take umbrage at being made a laughingstock at the altar. I certainly would.”
Hannah glanced at the window, listened to the caroling of the birds, and kissed her lover’s nose. “He went to my stepfather and stated quite baldly that he’d had carnal knowledge of me. If I refused to marry him, in public with full honors, he threatened to bruit it about that I’d enticed him into anticipating the vows.”
Asher’s languid caresses slid lower. “His name is Adventus Widmore. He resides at 28 East Breitling Place, Boston. He flunked out of Yale and was given work in your stepfather’s offices two years ago as a favor to some business crony. Widmore stands about six feet, is blond, blue-eyed, and has a nick in his left earlobe from where his younger sister aimed a rock at him as a lad. Shall I kill him for you, precious heart?”
“Such endearments. You shame the dawn with your efforts to cheer me.”
“Perhaps you’d prefer to see him gelded? Or—my medical training again—I could have him relieved of one testicle but not the other. It’s messy, there’s a lot of blood involved, and it’s quite painful, but a man can still—”
Hannah kissed him on the mouth. “You wax enthusiastic on a surgical topic, and I have yet to break my fast. I was never intimate with Widmore, though not for lack of trying on his part. I learned not to be where he could catch me alone. And I think he realized that smearing my reputation would not inure to his advantage.”
At some point in Asher’s surgical recitation, Hannah had become aware that in addition to the sun, something else, something equally lovely, was rising right there in the bed.
“So were you lying to me, Hannah? Trying to goad me past propriety?”
His thumb feathered over her nipples. Not a goad, an inspiration. Hannah flexed her hips, caressing his cock with her sex.
“My stepfather had a midwife examine me, but he gave the woman instructions first.”
“I am not going to like this midwife much either, am I?”
He’d probably want to disfigure the poor woman, which was unfair, though endearing. “I like that, the way you tease my nipples. Is there a medical term for the nipple?”
He gasped as she sheathed him in one smooth, sweet slide of her body over his. “For God’s sake, Hannah, hold still.”
