Chapter Six
Charlotte drew Ewan into her chamber and smiled. There in the corner was a big brass tub, filled high with steaming water and even a few flower petals. Perfect, because of course Ewan had designed it to be perfect.
As always.
She faced him as he shut the door behind them and smiled. “We’ve rushed before,” she whispered. “I would very much like to take my time with you this afternoon.”
He nodded slowly, and she watched as his gaze flowed over her like a waterfall. Even with her soaked to the bone, covered in sand and dirt, with her hair wild from the wind and rain, he looked at her like she was a goddess. He made her feel that way.
And he was her match and her mate, even if he didn’t believe that. Yet.
She moved forward and touched the wet front of his shirt. It was half-plastered to his broad chest, and she glanced up at him in approval as she unfastened each button slowly. He slipped the shirt away and stood in just his trousers. She licked her lips. Damn, but he was muscular. Cut as if he were made of granite. She touched him and she could believe it was stone beneath his flesh, he was so hard and so perfectly formed.
He was still as her fingers trailed down his chest and found the flap on his trousers. She loosened it without breaking eye contact and let it fall forward. He was hard already, his cock curling toward his stomach in a proud display of the desire he’d fought for so long.
She caught him in one hand and stroked him from base to head, eliciting a deep sound from his chest and a sharp exhalation of air. He dipped his head back and she studied him in fascination as pleasure softened his expression, stole some of his control.
She wanted all of it.
But he seemed to have different ideas. Without warning, he straightened, grabbed her shoulders and turned her, pressing a hand into her back to bend her slightly as he tugged at her dress, popping buttons loose with a flick of his fingers. The warm air of the chamber hit her chilled skin and she let out a sigh of pleasure. One that doubled as he shoved the contraption down, peeling it off her arms and tugging it off her hips so it pooled in a damp pile around her feet. She toed off her boots and rolled her stockings away, then turned to face him and found that he, too, had removed the rest of his clothes.
He was staring, just staring at her, and she blushed even as she arched her back slightly, trying to give him the best angle on her body. The way he swallowed hard, the way his pupils dilated, she knew he liked what he saw.
So did she. His broad shoulders, his carved chest and stomach, his trim hips, his thick thighs, his heavy cock, all of them could have been designed out of a book of her fantasies. Or perhaps that book had long ago been written with him as the muse.
Right now it didn’t matter. What mattered was that she wanted him. And while he would still allow that he wanted her, she was going to take advantage of every single moment they shared.
She shimmied forward and stopped just in front of him. “And now what?” she whispered. “What do you want, Ewan?” He pointed to the tub, and she laughed. “By myself?”
He shook his head slowly, then guided her to the tub. He took her hand and balanced her as she stepped into the water. She hissed out a sound of pleasure as the steamy water hit her cool flesh. When she had situated herself, he knelt beside the tub, watching her through the clear waves. She tilted her head, examining his face as he reached into the water to smooth his fingers along her bare thigh, her hip.
It was hard to remember that just yesterday he’d told her he was a virgin. Making love to him had been immensely powerful, but she had to recall that he was still learning her body and her likes, as well as discovering his own.
She parted her legs slowly, draping one leg out of the tub to open her sex as she settled back. Her breasts were only barely covered by the water. He jerked his face toward hers, a question.
“I assume you want to see,” she said, maintaining a lilt of innocence to her tone. “To touch.”
He didn’t answer her by signing, but by returning his attention to the assets she had just laid out before him. He stroked one breast gently, rubbing his thumb over her nipple as she gasped in pleasure.
“I like that,” she whispered, barely able to form words. “Just a bit harder, though?”
He obliged, firming his thumb around the hard nub until she gripped at the edge of the tub with a soft cry she couldn’t hold back. He smiled at the sound and moved to the opposite breast, swirling and pinching the same way. Already she could feel the slick readiness of her sex. The tingling anticipation of his body fitted into hers.
But he wasn’t finished with his exploration. He dragged the back of his hand down the front of her body, stoking her stomach, her hip, and then her open sex.
He slid a hand behind her and lifted her slightly, pulling her lower body to the top of the water. She understood then what he wanted. To see her. So she lifted higher and gave him what he desired.
He stared, his hands shaking, and then he cupped his palm against her sex. She jolted against him, turning her head as pleasure mobbed her. It was amazing how just a tiny touch from him could make her alive with electric desire. Her husband had never done that. It had taken work to come. With Ewan, it seemed she might do it from just the barest touch.
But he wasn’t satisfied with that bare touch. Gently, he parted the folds of her sex, opening her and revealing the wet slit of her opening and the glistening pearl of her clitoris. His sharp intake of breath made her tingle as much as his touch, and she closed her eyes to focus as his finger traced her entrance.
She reached down and covered his hand with hers, their fingers tangling against her slick sex as she maneuvered him into position. She pressed his thumb to her clitoris and slowly they circled it together. When she opened her eyes, he was staring at her face, and she smiled.
“Just like that,” she gasped, releasing his hand so he could guide this pleasure on his own. And he did, so perfectly. He used the same amount of pressure she had asked for against her nipple, and it didn’t take long for her to jolt in electric desire and lift her hips toward him in a seeking rhythm.
“This is where you find your pleasure,” he signed with the hand that wasn’t busy.
She was having a hard time finding breath, let alone words as he circled and circled and circled in maddening consistency that had her just at the edge, but not quite over it.
“Yes,” she gasped. “Oh, yes. When you touch me there, when you grind yourself against it while we make love…some men even…”
She trailed off and a hot blush filled her cheeks. God’s teeth, it was difficult expressing these things. A lady wasn’t meant to do so—she’d been taught that all her life.
“What?” he signed, his movements jerky.
“Put their mouth against it,” she gasped as she gripped the edge of the tub with both hands.
His eyes went wide at that suggestion, and he slowly licked his lips. “I want to do that,” he signed.
She nodded, though she might have agreed to anything he suggested at present, her pleasure was so close to the edge. “Later,” she groaned. “Right now I want to—”
She didn’t get to finish. His slow, steady ministrations reached their peak in that moment. She jolted in pleasure, grinding against his fingers as wave after wave of her orgasm rocked her. She dipped her head back, crying out in the quiet of the room, not caring that water was sloshing from the tub as she ground against his fingers.
She was just coming down from the ultimate high of pleasure when he rose up and climbed over the tub edge. She opened her legs wider, creating a narrow space that he filled as he speared her trembling sheath in one heavy thrust. She lifted against him, waves crashing over them as his mouth found hers.
During her marriage, she had sometimes found herself fantasizing during sex. Picturing this man, of course, doing these things to her. It had helped her find her pleasure in the space of her marital bed.
But now Ewan was here. It was his big body rolling over her, his mouth dragging to her damp throat, his cock filling her, his hips swiveling against her to grind against her clitoris and set her on fire all over again. There was no need for fantasy anymore.
She wrapped her arms around him and surrendered to sensation instead. His weight against her, his lips tracing her shoulder, the tiny nip of his teeth against her flesh, his hands cradling her back. Every finger clenched against her skin, lifting her closer, as if they could merge as one entity. The water was still hot against her skin and he was hot against her skin. The boundaries between them blurred and then faded, and all they were was moving energy, seeking to make something beautiful.
The second orgasm hit her harder than the first and she rocked against him, her fingers digging into his wet flesh as she flew and flew into the oblivion of release. She only came down when he withdrew with a heavy sigh and his face strained with his own release.
She pulled him in, lifting to kiss him once more. She was shocked by the intensity of their connection, driven to never let it or him go. And knowing that in the end he might not allow her to keep him.
Ewan wrapped his arms around Charlotte, drawing her to lie back against his chest. After everything, somehow they’d managed to actually get clean in the tub, and now her wet hair curled around his chest and arms. He liked it that way.
“Thank you for your help. It was cold, hard work,” he signed.
She turned over so that her breasts flattened against his stomach and she rested her head on his chest as she smiled up at him. “I told you already, I was happy to do so. You have wonderful people on your estate, Ewan.”
He nodded as he lifted his hands away from her to sign, “The best.”
“And they have a great deal of respect for you,” she said slowly—carefully, he thought. Like she wasn’t certain of his response.
Not that he could blame her. Respect was a tender topic for him, thanks to the complications of both his past and the way others saw him due to his mutism.
“I feel their respect,” he signed each word in his response just as carefully. Not because he didn’t trust Charlotte’s response, but because he wanted to measure his own. “Here I am…home. It isn’t like in London when I’m with…others.”
She lifted her fingers up to trace his jaw gently. “Like me?” she whispered.
He shook his head. “I’ve always been comfortable with you. You would allow for nothing less.”
Her eyes crinkled with a hint of laughter, but he saw something deeper in her stare. Something he had always feared and shied away from when it came to her. Charlotte wanted to say more. She wanted to push. It was her nature.
“Charlotte,” he signed, interrupting whatever was on the tip of her tongue. “I want you. That is obvious. I’ve always wanted you, for as long as I can recall having that notion of a man and woman together.”
She nodded. “But?” she pressed.
“But you…you don’t understand the kind of future you would have with a man like me,” he finished.
She sat up fully, an awkward motion in the tight tub. Her eyes were snapping as she said, “You think I don’t? A life with a man like you—you mean a man I adore beyond reason? A man I count as my friend, a man who is the best lover I’ve ever had? That life? I know exactly what that life would be.”
He pursed his lips. Charlotte always wanted to pretend the damaged parts of him didn’t exist. That if she joined her life to his, it would somehow be a life free of the parts of him that were broken, missing.
He pushed to his feet and climbed out of the tub. As he wrapped a fluffy towel around his waist, with one hand, he signed, “No, you don’t! Damn it, Charlotte, you don’t know what my life is like.”
“Then tell me,” she insisted as she, too, rose from the water.
He was almost distracted by the rivulets of water cascading down her perfect flesh, but he pushed away the raw, animal desires she inspired and focused on what he had to express to her. Now.
“You don’t know what it’s like to have people talk about you when you’re standing right there, talk around you like they do to me,” he signed, aware that his hands were shaking as he did so and that he fumbled to find the signs for a letter or a word. “You don’t know what it’s like to have them ask if you are stupid as well as mute. Or just assume that you are touched because you cannot speak. Or scream at you when they talk because they think you can’t hear.”
Charlotte said nothing, but he saw her bottom lip tremble as she let him go on. And he did go on. Because he had to. Because he couldn’t stop. Because the words flew from his fingers with an urgency he couldn’t define or deny anymore.
And he could tell himself he signed these things to protect her, but in truth it was because he could no longer hold them in. Not with her.
“You don’t know what it’s like to need a pad of paper and a charcoal pencil in your pocket at all times,” he signed. “Or what kind of panic can rise up in you if, God forbid, that pad and pencil are lost or damaged. You don’t know what it’s like to have your father abandon you because you’re impaired and by your existence you are a slight on his very honor. Or what it’s like to find out, upon his death, that the same father put all kinds of barriers in place to make you look incapable of taking his title. To have to fight your own brothers and your mother for that inheritance while they spit on you every time they see you and call you an animal.”
He lowered his hands and turned away. His heart was pounding, for he’d never expressed any of those things all at once to one person before. A few friends knew things here and there, his uncle had witnessed a great deal, but no one knew the whole of it. The whole of him.
But now Charlotte did.
“Ewan, please look at me.”
Her soft voice was a siren song. He was a sailor steering toward the rocks. But that didn’t stop him from doing just as she asked. When he looked at her, she had climbed from the tub. Her damp blonde locks were now around her shoulders, her body wrapped only in a towel, her dark green eyes bright with unshed tears and emotions, he couldn’t turn away.
He didn’t even want to, despite knowing what was best.
She was quiet, calm, as she always was. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s not your fault,” he signed, dropping his gaze.
She moved toward him a step, but stopped short of him. “Not for what happened, though I’m certainly sorry for that, as well. What I meant is that I’m sorry I said I knew your life. I don’t. When you say those things, I can’t imagine the pain that you must feel. The things you’ve endured are not something to be taken lightly. But—”
He moved on her now and reached out two fingers to press them to her full lips. “Please,” he signed. “The rain has begun to let up, the water will recede and the bridge maintained its integrity, so it may be only a day or two before the others come. We have very little time for this. Let it be this until it can’t be anymore. That is all I have to give.”
She pursed her lips and pressed a kiss to his fingers before he let them drop away so she could speak. He saw the pain on her face, he saw it in her eyes, and knowing he’d put it there…again…broke his heart.
But her voice was strong as she said, “Very well, Ewan. Just this. If this is all I can have, I won’t turn away from it.”