The Pleasure of Your Kiss Page 12

  Ash began to pace around the pool, rubbing the back of his neck. It seemed he had only traded one set of walls for another. Everywhere he turned in this place, there were walls.

  Walls keeping him from the woman he had come to save.

  To a less jaded eye, the sultan’s gardens might not seem like a prison, but a sensual paradise. Swaying palm trees stood guard over the end of the garden overlooking the moonlit sea. Flowering bougainvillea twined its way up the stone walls, while a staggering variety of tropical plants set in fat clay pots flourished in every available bit of space. Their glossy green leaves were splashed with the dramatic colors of dozens of exotic blooms emitting a blend of heady fragrances designed by God for the sole purpose of intoxicating a man’s senses. Broad, flat stones had been laid in the sand to create narrow, winding paths perfect for enticing a man and woman to seek an even more shadowy—and private—corner of the garden.

  At any other time Ash might have appreciated the effort it must have taken to create this heavenly oasis at the very edge of hell. But on this night, the sultry breeze whispering through the palm fronds failed to soothe him, and the melodic spill of a fountain over stone only grated against his already raw temper.

  After watching him pace for several minutes, Luca cautiously cleared his throat. “Your brother’s fiancée is quite the beauty. I can see why he’s willing to pay so handsomely to get her back.”

  Ash wheeled around to face him. “A task that’s going to prove difficult—if not impossible—if I can’t find a way to get to her so we can work out a plan for her rescue.”

  Luca seemed to be choosing his words with great care. “Are you absolutely certain Miss Cardew wants to be rescued? From what I observed, she seemed perfectly content to play the role of the sultan’s pampered consort. Not that I could blame her for that, of course.” He let out a fresh groan as the slave girl’s nimble hands slid over his shoulders and down his chest, her long fingernails raking through the curling black hair she found there. “If Farouk invited me, I’d be tempted to move into the harem myself.”

  “I’m fairly certain you’d have to be a eunuch first,” Ash said pleasantly, resuming his pacing. “But given how many guards he has standing around with incredibly sharp scimitars, that could probably be arranged.”

  Wincing, Luca sank even lower in the water. “All I’m suggesting is that perhaps she’s truly fallen in love with the man.”

  Ash froze in his tracks. If he was going to be honest, he hadn’t even allowed himself to entertain such a notion. But then he remembered the quiet desperation in Clarinda’s eyes when she had talked about owing Farouk her life as well as her gratitude.

  “No,” he said with absolute certainty as he swung around to face Luca again. “Such a thing would be quite impossible. Which is exactly why she’s in even more danger than we originally feared.”

  Luca’s brow furrowed. “What are you talking about? The sultan clearly adores her.”

  “Of course he adores her! What man in his right mind wouldn’t? But don’t you see? It’s his regard for her that makes him so dangerous. His pride will be shattered when he takes her to his bed on their wedding night and discovers she’s been leading him on a merry chase for all these months.”

  “What are you saying? That her whole ‘I must spend a thousand and one nights learning how to pleasure a man’ is all a ruse?”

  “Precisely.” Ash shook his head with reluctant admiration. “I should have known she’d find a way to use her mind instead of her body to survive. She’s always been a clever girl, as quick-witted as she is quick-tempered. It would be a bloody brilliant plan if her time wasn’t running out. Once the sultan realizes he’s been duped and she’s no innocent, he’ll kill her.”

  Luca sat straight up in the pool, water streaming from the sleek, dark ends of his hair. “Wait a minute. How do you know she’s no innocent? Did your brother confide in you?”

  Ash just looked at him.

  Luca wasn’t an easy man to shock, but Ash had finally succeeded. “You? With your own brother’s betrothed?”

  “She wasn’t his then. She was mine.” Ash knew it was wrong, but he still felt a savage rush of satisfaction as he said the words. He’d had to bite them back for too damn long.

  “But if you dallied with her before you signed on with the Company, she must have been only … ” Luca trailed off, horror dawning in his eyes.

  “Good God, man, how depraved do you think I am?”

  Luca opened his mouth, but before he could incriminate himself, Ash held up a warning hand. “Miss Cardew is six-and-twenty, not twenty. She fibbed about her age to make the ruse of her innocence seem more convincing to the sultan.”

  Luca cocked an admiring eyebrow. “Impressive. She’s nearly as skilled a liar as you are. Perhaps it’s your brother I should be lecturing on his morals—or lack thereof. Even among the members of my mother’s Romany tribe, it was considered ill-mannered to poach your kinsman’s lover.”

  “Max never knew about the two of us. No one did.” Ash sank down on a stone bench, running a hand through his hair. “I’ve known Clarinda since I was just a lad in short pants. Her father’s estate bordered our lands. She was three years younger than me and always underfoot, seemingly hell-bent on embarrassing and tormenting me at every turn.”

  “And like any young lad puffed up with a sense of his own self-importance, I’m guessing you ignored the poor child’s every attempt to win your attention … and your affection.”

  “Of course I did.” As Ash remembered being a randy fourteen-year-old trying to steal his first kiss from a buxom goose girl only to have Clarinda chase the entire flock of geese into the barn before their lips could meet, Ash’s tone darkened. “Although there were times when I would have liked nothing better than to throttle her scrawny little neck. But then I went away to Eton and she went away to Miss Throckmorton’s Seminary for Young Ladies. By the time we both returned home, she wasn’t the same girl.”

  “She’d developed bosoms?” Luca suggested helpfully.

  “No!” Ash exclaimed, before sheepishly admitting, “Well, yes, she had. Rather impressive ones, if you must know. But it was more than that. She no longer seemed to have any use for me. Whenever I entered a room, she would turn up her haughty little nose and find some excuse to leave, usually on the arm of the nearest eligible bachelor.”

  “Aha! And naturally, you found her contempt for you utterly irresistible.” Luca sighed, his dark eyes going misty with remembered longing. “There’s nothing more enthralling than a woman who despises the very sight of you.”

  “You would know, wouldn’t you?” Ash’s jibe earned a reproachful look from his friend. “But perhaps you’re right. Once she made it clear she wanted nothing whatsoever to do with me, I discovered I couldn’t stop thinking about her. She haunted my every waking thought. And most of my dreams.” A wry smile curled one corner of his mouth as he remembered waking tangled in his sheets, his sweat-drenched body as hard as a rock and aching with the need for release. “One sweltering June night my father decided to throw yet another ball we couldn’t afford. I was stalking morosely about the grounds, puffing on a cheroot I’d pilfered from my father’s study, when I heard the sound of someone weeping inside the stables. I pushed open the door to find Clarinda huddled in one of the empty stalls, crying as if her heart had been broken.

  “Her ball gown was torn, her hair tousled, her beautiful face streaked with tears. At first I believed the worst.” Ash’s hands curled into fists at the memory. “I was shocked by the depths of my rage. All I wanted in that moment was to do violence to whoever had dared to harm her.

  “Then she looked up at me, her big green eyes still filled with tears, and said, ‘What are you gawking at? Have you come to make sport of me, too?’ That’s how I found out she had overheard some of the other girls at the ball talking about her behind her back, girls she had believed to be her friends. They were all from noble families and they were laughing at her because s
he was nothing but an heiress with a vulgar father in trade. They even intimated that she was hanging around my family because she had designs on my brother, but that a Burke wouldn’t look twice at such a common bit of baggage. Before they could catch her eavesdropping, she slipped out through a French window and ran away from the house. That’s when she tripped and tore her dress.”

  “And is that how your romance began?” Luca had gone all starry-eyed, as he always did when talk of love arose. “Did you take her into your arms, tenderly dry her tears with your handkerchief, and comfort her with your kisses?”

  “I took another puff on the cheroot and asked her why she didn’t tell them all to go straight to the devil because that’s what she would have done if it were me.”

  “What did she do then?”

  “She threw a horseshoe at my head and told me to go straight to the devil.” Ash grinned. “And that, my friend, is how our romance began.”

  “No one in your family, including your brother, ever knew about it?”

  “Not a soul.” Ash felt his grin fade. “Her papa wouldn’t have approved because I was the second son and he was richer than Midas and still had every hope of snagging a title for his darling little princess. My parents, who, ironically enough, were always one enraged creditor away from debtors’ prison in those days, would have thought her beneath me simply because some king had never awarded her ancestors a worthless scrap of paper for licking his boots or sacking a pile of rubble on the Scottish border. So in public we continued the charade of loathing each other, eluding the suspicion of both of our families, while in private …”

  Ash trailed off, remembering how he would stay hard for hours after Clarinda slanted him a sideways glance from beneath her silky lashes or teased his calf with the toe of her slipper under the supper table. Remembering the mischievous smile that would crinkle her nose whenever she managed to slip away and meet him in the woods. They would spend the entire afternoon lying on their backs on a bed of moss, holding hands and arguing over the best name for the firstborn of the dozen children they were going to have after they were wed. He had favored Clarence, while she had insisted Ashtina was a perfectly sound name since their first child would doubtlessly be a girl. After squabbling for a while and then making up with several deep, passionate kisses that left him even harder than before, they had finally settled on Charlotte for a girl and Charlie for a boy.

  It all seemed so innocent now. They had been children playing at love, contenting themselves with longing glances and stolen caresses even as a more dangerous and combustible spark began to flare between them every time their hands brushed or their lips touched.

  “I suppose we thought it was all some sort of silly, clever game,” Ash said, “never realizing it was one we could never hope to win.”

  “What happened?”

  “I left her.” Ash spread his empty hands and met his friend’s gaze, a wealth of regret expressed in those three simple words. “Despite what everyone believes, it wasn’t a thirst for adventure that drove me out of England and into the service of the East India Company but a hunger of another sort altogether.” He shook his head, unable to resist mocking his own stubborn romanticism. “I wanted to prove myself worthy of the girl I loved. I wanted to be able to return and lay not only my heart, but the world, at her feet.”

  “Then why didn’t you?”

  If Ash had any intention of answering that question, he would have done so long ago.

  As he rose from the bench, making it clear the formal portion of the inquiry was over, Luca slapped his open palm against the water. “Damn it all, Cap! You can’t just leave me hanging like that! Your tale has everything I adore in a story. Perilous secrets, a grand passion, star-crossed young lovers separated by fate. All it lacks is a happy ending.”

  “The only happy ending to this story will occur on the day I deliver Miss Cardew safely back into my brother’s arms.”

  Luca looked crestfallen. “You still intend to hand her over to your brother?”

  “Of course I do. That’s what we were hired for, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know the man, but I suspect he’s not going to be any happier than the sultan when he discovers his bride’s … um … bloom has already been … plucked. And by no less than his little brother.”

  “That’s not my problem, is it?” Ash said grimly. “My problem is figuring out a way to scale these walls and get to Clarinda.”

  “Clar-Inda?” Giving Ash a questioning glance over Luca’s shoulder, the slave girl touched her hair, then pointed at the glowing orb hanging low in the night sky.

  Strangely enough, Ash knew immediately what she meant—the girl with hair as bright as the moon.

  He nodded before echoing softly, “Clarinda.”

  As a glimmer of possibility dawned in his heart, he smiled with every ounce of charm he possessed and crooked an inviting finger at the girl. She rose without hesitation and padded over to him.

  Luca rolled his eyes in exasperation. “I offered to find you your own slave girl. There’s no need for you to steal mine. Besides, I told you—she doesn’t speak a word of English.”

  “She may not speak my language but I do speak hers.” Slipping a brotherly arm around the girl’s shoulders, Ash gently guided her to the bench, the Arabic words tripping from his tongue like music.

  Chapter Ten

  Clarinda lay belly down on the high, padded couch with her cheek cradled on her folded arms. If someone had told her a few months ago that one day she would be lying all alone in a room, wearing nothing but a silk towel draped over her rump, and waiting for a eunuch to come in and rub oil all over her body, she would have called a constable and had them consigned to Bedlam.

  She had to admit her daily massage was one of the less onerous duties expected of her as the sultan’s bride-to-be. Back in England, such a sensual indulgence would have been unheard of, except perhaps behind the locked doors of certain notorious gentlemen’s clubs. And while she might whisper and giggle about such places with her closest companions, no lady would ever publicly confess to knowing of their existence.

  The room was as dim as a cavern, lit only by a single oil lamp set in a latticed alcove in the wall. Some exotic incense that reminded Clarinda of Christmas morning smoldered in a brass brazier set on a teakwood table. Curlicues of fragrant smoke drifted past her nose, making her feel more than a little light-headed. Seduced by the cozy atmosphere, she felt her eyes begin to drift shut. She had spent another night sleeping only in restless dribs and drabs, her dreams haunted by images from the past. Failing to receive a summons to supper the night before had only increased her tension.

  She was just beginning to relax into a drowsy stupor when she heard the muted creak of a door opening and closing, followed by the soft pad of bare feet approaching across the tiled floor.

  Already anticipating the ease the eunuch’s touch would give her, she breathed out a contented sigh. “Oh, Solomon, I’m so glad you’re here. I don’t think I’ve ever had greater need of you.”

  Something about just being in the presence of the mute eunuch was soothing. He provided much needed relief from Farouk’s courteous yet exhausting attentions, Poppy’s prattling, and the constant chatter of the women in the harem.

  The footsteps ceased and she felt him standing over her, his presence itself nearly as tangible as a touch.

  “Feel free to tug down the towel a bit more if you need to,” she informed him.

  She thought she heard a sharply indrawn breath but quickly dismissed it as a trick of the silence and her overwrought nerves.

  She felt the towel drift an inch or two lower, as if guided by invisible hands. A stray draft teased the dimpled cleft just above the swell of her buttocks, sending a shiver of gooseflesh dancing over her exposed skin.

  She was still amazed by how quickly modesty deserted one in this place, especially around the other women and the eunuchs who guarded them. Back home an accidental flash of a petticoat hem was enough to
cause a scandal and condemn a woman to a loveless marriage. Here the women often paraded around the harem in little but their sandals and a smile.

  A smile curved her lips as Solomon poured a stream of warm oil over her back, beginning just below her nape and following the delicate curve of her spine all the way down to the hollow at the base of it. She wriggled her hips a little as a wayward stream of oil trickled beneath the towel, ending up in places it had no business being. The intoxicating aroma of sandalwood flooded her nostrils.

  Just when she thought she might be on the verge of perishing from anticipation, he put his hands on her.

  Although she wouldn’t have believed it possible, his hands were even warmer than the oil. His fingertips glided over the smooth skin of her back in a motion more akin to a caress than a massage.

  “Mmmm … ” she moaned, tantalized even more by that sly pressure. “There’s no need to treat me like a piece of fine porcelain, Solomon. You know I like it hard and I like it deep.”

  Those hands froze for a long moment, then resumed their exquisite torture, kneading the muscles of her shoulders and upper back with such skill she felt in imminent danger of melting into a puddle of bliss. To have those probing fingers seek out every taut sinew, every tender muscle that had secretly been aching for attention, was an indescribable luxury.

  She had pinned up her hair in a loose topknot to allow him free access to her shoulders. A fresh shiver rocked her as his hand slipped beneath the wispy tendrils that had escaped the topknot to take masterful possession of her neck. Trusting something so fragile to the brute power of those hands was oddly compelling. Especially when their one intent was to bring pleasure, not pain.

  He slid his other hand around the graceful column of her throat until his fingertips rested against the pulse at its base while his thumbs gently probed the tendons on each side of it. His attentions made everything in her body relax, including her tongue.