Page 20 of The Viscount and the Vixen
Glancing around, she settled her attention on a distant corner of the room. “Is that where you wedged yourself and climbed to the ceiling?”
He didn’t even bother to glance back. “As I understand it, yes.”
This room had an incredibly high ceiling, a huge fireplace, massive windows, and several seating areas. “I can see why your father was terrified. If you’d fallen, you might have broken your neck.”
“But I didn’t fall. Would you care for something other than port?”
Shaking her head, she took another sip of the thick, sweet wine.
“You didn’t drink much wine during supper,” he mused.
“I’ve never fancied wine overly much. For me a little bit goes a long way. I suppose you drink to excess.” Although she’d never heard any stories of him being three sheets to the wind.
“I prefer to keep my wits about me.”
No doubt because he’d witnessed his father losing his. Although she found herself liking Marsden, thought he seemed sweet. Her own father had been a strict, controlling man. She didn’t think Locksley would be living here if his father had been the same. He certainly wouldn’t be intent on protecting him, to the extreme extent of marrying a woman who before this afternoon he’d never even known existed. “When you were a lad, were you afraid of your father?”
“When I was a lad, I feared nothing.” He jerked his head back and to the side, indicating the far corner. “Obviously.”
“Do you fear anything now?”
“Going mad. Which is surely bound to happen if I delay much longer in taking you to bed.” Setting his glass aside, he rose, towering over her.
Her heart slammed against her ribs. She quickly downed what remained of her port, frantically wondering if she should ask for another. He held out his hand to her. Such a large hand. No aspect of it appeared soft. She could see calluses and evidence of nicks, tiny scars here and there. She wondered briefly what he did in order to have hands that more closely resembled those of a worker than a gentleman. No doubt they were souvenirs from his adventures.
Before she could decide if she should in fact ask him to refill her glass, he took it from her and placed it on the table beside her chair. Leaning in, he wrapped both his hands around her elbows and drew her to her feet.
“For a woman who spoke so boldly about coupling this afternoon, you seem rather nervous.”
“We hardly know each other. I’m not quite certain what to expect from you.”
“Expect to be grateful you’re in my bed, and that our chamber is far from my father’s, so he can’t hear you crying out in pleasure.”
“You are so blasted arro—”
His mouth slashed across hers as he hauled her up against him. Cloth provided no barrier against the heat seeping from his body into hers, as though he were already beginning to claim her, as though every aspect of him would penetrate her before the night was done.
During her short life, she’d experienced rare moments of pure terror. This was one of them. The past few months had taught her to separate her mind from the physical, had tutored her in the wisdom of not caring, of dispensing with emotion, of holding herself apart from the reality of what was actually happening. It was the reason that she had known she could lie beneath a man more than three decades her senior without nausea, without tears, without regrets.
But Locksley knocked down her barriers as though she’d built them of twigs. He wasn’t content to simply take. He wanted to possess. She felt it in the thrumming of his pulse at his throat where she laid her fingers, in the vibration of his chest as he growled and took the kiss so deep that she felt as though he were mining for her soul.
She was no stranger to the ways of men, and yet he seemed to defy everything she knew and understood. She’d never known a man to emit such a powerful hunger, to give the impression that the passion rising between them would consume not only her, but him as well. That he welcomed it.
He braced his hands on either side of her head, angling her slightly to better position himself for the assault. Yet for all the voraciousness of his urgency, she never once felt as though she couldn’t step away, as though she couldn’t stop it. If she wanted.
But she didn’t want to step away. And that alone was what terrified her. That he somehow managed to call to the wantonness inside her, that he made her long for all the dreams she’d held when she was young and innocent. That he made her believe that perhaps they were attainable, that they did in fact exist.
Tearing his mouth from hers, breathing heavily, he stared down at her. “That’s what I want. The fire and the vigor. Not the frightened mouse. I want the lioness in my bed.”
A lioness? If only he knew the truth about Montie—
He swept her up into his arms as though she weighed little more than a cloud in the sky. Never before had a man carried her. She didn’t want to admit how safe and secure he made her feel as he strode from the room with purpose, but then if she’d learned anything at all about him this day it was that he did everything with determination.
She knew beyond any doubt that she was on the verge of becoming his wife in truth. There would be no turning back once he claimed her.
As he took the stairs two steps at a time, guilt pricked her conscience. She should confess everything, before it was too late. Their marriage could be annulled. She could slink away in shame and mortification, find a way to survive, to protect all that needed protecting. As though a miraculous answer would suddenly reveal itself when it hadn’t before.
They passed the closed door to the master’s bedchamber. His strides quickly ate up the distance to the corner room at the far end of the hallway.
