Chapter Five
Heat like she’d never known before engulfed Caroline. Forbidden excitement streaked through her. Good sense went up in flames as her temper and desire rose to meet Silas with equal fervor. She was lost to the storm raging between them. Anything beyond this moment faded to insignificance.
With sizzling intent, his mouth moved on hers, demanding participation. Helpless to resist, she parted her lips, sighing surrender. He dragged her closer and his tongue dipped into her mouth, making her shake with reaction. She moaned and curled her arms around his neck.
With a suddenness that left her bewildered, he jerked free. Ruthlessly he hauled her arms down. Then his hands circled her upper arms, hard enough to hold her, soft enough to feel like a caress. He glared down at her as if he hated her.
“Slap me. I deserve it,” he said roughly.
She fought to find her balance. The abrupt end to that fiery kiss left her reeling.
“Curse you, I should,” she hissed as her lips tingled for more kisses. She felt so torn—until this moment, she’d had no idea he even wanted to kiss her.
Well, now she knew, and the knowing was dangerous. If she had any sense, she’d scurry out of this greenhouse as fast as she could run. But confused and unsure, she lingered. Her pride had crumbled so low that right now, she almost didn’t care if he kissed her in anger or pity or passion. She’d take anything as long as he didn’t leave her teetering and dizzy on the edge of this chasm.
“Then do it.” He still looked half mad.
She had no idea what he wanted. To send her away? To throw her onto one of those cluttered benches and toss her skirts up? The wanton image of Silas thrusting inside her made her belly twist with such anticipation, it felt like pain. A whimper escaped her as she fought the need to pull him down and kiss him until he satisfied her ravenous hunger.
“Caro, for God’s sake…” His eyes were black and lightless. Deep lines extended from the corners of his lips to his nose. A muscle jerked erratically in one cheek. He looked close to shattering. After one little kiss.
She sucked in a deep breath and felt her senses expand. Silas smelled different today, his familiar male scent mixed with earth and plants. The combination was heady, made her mouth water. He smelled wild and primitive, not like the man who drank tea and traded witticisms in his sister’s elegant drawing room.
She read arousal and shame in his strained features. Right now, he wanted her, and he despised himself for it. His hands tightened and his eyes focused on her lips with such searing attention, it felt like another kiss.
“You have no right to manhandle me.” She straightened and stared back at him, imperious as a queen.
“No.”
The universe of despair in that one low syllable astonished her. The blood pounding in her ears muffled rational thought, but in some dusty corner of her mind curiosity stirred. He wasn’t acting like a man in love with another woman.
“Then release me.”
Immediately she was free. She staggered and fumbled for the bench behind her. For a giddy second, she wondered if her knees would hold her up.
“Lord, Caro, forgive me,” Silas said bleakly. “I’m a barbarian.”
“Yes, you are.” And she’d had absolutely no idea. What else was hidden under his polished exterior?
“Slap me.”
“I’d love to.”
He closed his eyes and stood still as a post. She stiffened her spine and drew back her hand. Her heart beat so fast, she felt lightheaded. Outrage fed frustrated desire. She couldn’t precisely say why. It wasn’t because he’d kissed her. Perhaps it was because this whirlwind of emotion and hunger couldn’t take them anywhere, shouldn’t have brought them this far. Swirling, unsatisfied cravings had her at their mercy. She hated how the force of her love left her powerless.
“Do it,” he said through his teeth as she hesitated. His features tightened, but he made no attempt to defend himself.
Very well.
As Caroline swung toward him, the air swished under her hand. Only at the last instant did she slow the blow. Gently as a bird alighting on the grass, her palm landed flat on his cheek and curved to shape his face. That dear, dear face.
When she offered tenderness instead of violence, shock whipped his eyes open. She didn’t know who moved first, but she was crushed against him, his arms were lashed around her, and their lips collided with blind ardor.
This kiss was unlike the first. The rage had gone. The passion burned white hot. It was completely outside Caroline’s experience, for all that she’d been married ten years. This was fire and lightning, and astoundingly carnal. Open mouths joined, tongues slid and twined and danced. She’d never forget Silas’s taste as long as she lived. With shaking hands, he caught her head and held her as he plumbed every inch of her mouth. She felt devoured, seized, ravished. And she adored each moment.
Eventually when the heat between them threatened to melt her into a puddle, he wrenched away. He stared down at her, his expression tormented. She shivered with fear and excitement. She’d never in her life imagined that she could drive a man mad with lust. Yet apparently she had. However unfamiliar she was with seduction, she couldn’t mistake that he burned for her. All the time, her bewildered mind kept repeating, “But this is Silas.”
Fury flared in his eyes, turning them brilliant gold. He gripped her shoulders. “How the hell do you dare to kiss me like that, then say you’re going to West?”
Her eyes narrowed as the sensual mist swiftly receded under the force of his demand. Right now, she didn’t want to think about West or what she wanted in the future. She didn’t welcome this reminder that she’d chosen another man to be her lover. “You know, Silas, sometimes discretion is the better part of valor.”
“What the deuce does that mean?” His fingers tightened, although she had no intention of retreating.
“That means every time you speak, I end up wanting to pitch you through a window. You’d be better to stop talking.”
His tawny brows lowered and the fierce glitter in his eyes made her bristle with nerves and anticipation. “I’d like to stop you talking.”
She thought she now knew the power of his kiss, but she’d had no idea. His mouth ravaged hers and she met him each step of the way. She wasn’t backing down. He wasn’t going to get the better of her.
The kiss started as a battle with neither ready to declare a truce. Then in an explosive flash, it transformed into something more. A dark tide of pleasure rushed over Caroline, washing away all thoughts of winner and loser. The only thing that mattered was for Silas to keep kissing her. She clung to him, clawing at the soft linen of his shirt. She moaned with delight as he nipped at her lower lip, then returned to sweep his tongue into her mouth. Vaguely through the ferocious onslaught, she felt him shift. Then something crashed to the floor at her feet.
She closed her eyes as the sound echoed around her. What did she care if the world shattered as long as that eager mouth plundered hers? She’d never bitten anyone in her life, but she returned the favor, scraping her teeth across his jaw. His grunt of appreciation was muffled against the sleek cushion of her lips. She tugged and ripped at his shirt until finally she found the hot, smooth skin of his back. Her fingers dug deep into the pads of muscle lining his spine.
The falling sensation seemed part of the frenzy. Then her back bumped onto a hard surface. He leaned over her, flattening her against unforgiving and angular wood. She gasped, then gasped again when his hand landed hard and possessive on her breast. Sensation thundered through her like a thousand runaway horses. Her nipples, already aching, beaded to an agony of yearning.
Silas swore softly and bent forward to press between her spread legs, close to where she wanted him. But not close enough. He cradled her head, keeping it from knocking against the boards beneath her. Another whimper escaped her as a second crash resounded through the greenhouse.
A hard, insistent pulse throbbed in her lower belly. Only Silas could
fill this excruciating emptiness inside her. Perhaps he knew, because he pushed forward into her mound. She shuddered in reaction and cried out, bowing up to increase the delicious pressure. She thirsted for this primitive, earthy pleasure that turned her bones to honey.
Damn this dress. Voluminous skirts hampered her access to him. If they were naked, he’d be inside her. Her stomach cramped on a thrill to think that might yet happen. When she twisted like a maddened animal to advance the contact, she tangled herself unbearably in a gown that became an instrument of torture.
She pulled away long enough to snatch a breath. She placed her palm on his chest. “Silas.”
He didn’t hear her as his hands feverishly stroked her breasts. She could hear his erratic panting and feel his radiating heat. He rocked slowly between her legs, torturing her with the promise of where he wanted to take her. He returned to those deep, luxuriant kisses that left her shaking.
And close to forgetting everything but her hunger for this man.
On the verge of sinking fatally into the undertow of desire, she reached up and tugged hard on his hair. He shuddered, but didn’t stop. She pulled again and at last distracted him from kissing her.
“Devil take you, Caro.” His voice was hoarse as if it hurt to speak. Reluctantly he lifted his head to survey her with glassy eyes.
“Silas, I can’t move.”
She found unworthy satisfaction in how long awareness took to penetrate his daze. “What in Hades?”
With another breath, the wildness retreated a fraction. Enough to allow her mind to register where she was and what she was doing. She glanced around and to her horror realized that he had her splayed across a workbench. During those incendiary minutes, she’d lost contact with everything solid except Silas’s body against hers.
She made a dismayed sound in her throat as her appalled gaze took in the wreck surrounding them. All that crashing and banging had been Silas’s botanical equipment hurtling to the floor. The greenhouse was a wilderness of spilled dirt and shredded plants and smashed glass.
“Dear Lord in heaven,” she whispered in shock.
He loomed above, hands spread on the bench on either side of her. His eyes were molten caramel and the determination sparking in them suddenly made her afraid. “Take me as your lover.”
“Silas—”
“Don’t pretend you don’t want me as much as I want you. Not after that.”
She gave him a shove, but it was like trying to move the Great Pyramid with a teaspoon. “I’m not pretending anything.”
When he’d touched her, she’d succumbed to madness. Now she surveyed the shambles they’d created and grim reality cooled the fire in her blood. She made herself recall all her reasons not to give in to Silas. Principally quite how muddle-headed he made her. She could see herself reaching a point where she lived for the sound of his voice. And there was no freedom in that.
“I want you and you want me,” he said urgently.
“Yes, I want you.”
His eyes flared and he loomed toward her with undisguised intent. This time she punched his shoulder hard enough to elicit a grunt of discomfort. “What the deuce was that for?”
“You’re not kissing me again.”
“Why not?”
She punched him once more, because despite knowing that this reckless interval must end, passion’s interruption left her stirred up and edgy. Her mind told her to stand up and walk out. Her sinful, hungry body wanted to lie back while he ripped away this pestilential gown and delivered the pleasure every kiss had foretold.
She hardened her jaw. “Because I’m going to be Lord West’s mistress.”
That uncompromising statement achieved what pummeling hadn’t. He jerked upright and stepped back, regarding her like a pernicious weed invading his orchard. “What blasted rubbish is this, Caro?”
To her chagrin, it took her several clumsy moments to straighten her dress before she could sit up and meet his eyes. He looked angry again. And hurt. She curled her fists against the bare planks beneath her as she fought the need to give him anything he wanted as long as he lost that desolate expression. Definitely muddle-headed.
Even more lethal to her frail willpower, he also looked utterly magnificent. She tried to regret the destruction she’d wreaked on his clothing. She’d dragged his shirt off one shoulder, baring part of a hair-roughened chest. The shirt hung loose around his thighs where she’d torn at it to reach his skin. His silky light brown hair fell across his forehead, leaving him deliciously ruffled. With his hands on his hips in unconscious arrogance, he looked like a swaggering pirate ready to ravish a willing captive.
Well, Caroline Beaumont was far too sensible to have any dealings with pirates. However dashing they might be. “It’s not nonsense.”
“Yes, it is. You want me.”
“Stop saying that.”
“It’s true.”
She sighed. Reaction set in and she suddenly felt deathly tired and disgustingly wobbly. “Of course it’s true.” When her mumbled admission set his eyes glittering, she raised a shaking hand to keep him away. “You’re the man I want, but West is the man I need.”
He frowned and that tiny muscle renewed its agitated dance in his cheek. “What the hell?”
“He’s perfect for a quick affair. You’re…not.”
“You’re deranged.” He ran a hand through his hair, becoming more beguilingly disheveled.
Her mouth dried and she swallowed to quash a pang of desire. To remind her why he wasn’t for her, and to punish herself for ceding to this futile pleasure, she pointed out the facts in a flat voice. “You’re in love with Fenella.”
When she’d seen them dancing a month ago, she’d been so sure that was true. His unaffected shock now made her question her conclusions before he spoke. “You bloody little fool. Is that really what you think?”
His swift and scornful dismissal had her lips tightening. “You’d be perfect together.”
If she kept telling herself that, she might come to accept it. That hadn’t happened yet.
He watched her with an intensity that made her shiver, despite the greenhouse’s humid air. “Indeed we would.”
The pain of hearing her impressions confirmed made her breath catch on an audible squeak. He continued before she could summon a response. “Which is a damned pity when I’m not in love with Fenella.”
Stupid to be happy about that. Dangerous. This pendulum of emotional extremes should be warning enough that she was better off with West. “You’re not?”
“No.” His smile was wry. “I’m in love with you.”
Shock stopped her breathing. The words pierced her like spears. The chains squeezed clanking around her chest again, starving her lungs.
“You can’t be,” she said in a constricted voice.
“I can.”
She’d been angry with him before. Sometimes she thought she’d been angry at him for months. Nothing matched the rage that flared at that moment. Reviving air rushed into her, lending her power to deny him. “You will not love me. I won’t allow it.”
He moved and she thought he meant to take her in his arms. Instead he regarded her with a masculine superiority that made her want to hit him again. “You have no power to change my feelings for you.”
She brushed back the hair tumbling around her face and struggled to her feet. She hated to be cruel to him, but she had to stop him before he lured her over that deadly edge. Beneath her anger lay the old fear of being trapped the way she’d been trapped with Freddie. Her voice shook as she spoke. “You won’t love me after I’ve given myself to West.”
The line of his mouth was grim. “Yes, I will.”
“And West’s successor. I’m not tying myself to any one man. I did that once and I loathed it.”
“Is that why you won’t have me? Because you think I want forever?”
No, she wouldn’t have him because she feared she was the one who might want forever. And forever was freedo
m’s opposite. She shook her head emphatically. “I’m not going to argue about this.”
“You’re a coward, Caro.” He didn’t shift to allow her access to the door. “I never realized that before.”
“That’s not fair,” she protested, stung. “You know what my marriage to Freddie was like.”
His expression was unrelenting. “I’ve guessed. You’ve never actually told me. Every time we approach anything like a serious conversation, you change the subject.”
“Then take my word for it, I’ll never marry again.”
“That’s devilish interesting, especially as I haven’t asked you.”
She flinched. Another humiliation to pile on this morning’s hundred other humiliations. “So when you say you love me, you mean the way you loved all those flighty widows and opera dancers?”
Bitterness edged her question. She hoped the reminder of his wicked past would make him retreat. He stayed planted in front of her, cornering her against the bench where she’d been seconds away from taking him into her body.
“I didn’t love them. You’re the only woman I’ve ever loved. And, yes, I may as well admit it, little good it will do me—you’re the only woman I’ve ever wanted to marry.”
No, no, no. She wouldn’t take responsibility for his happiness. She briefly shut her eyes to close out his burning sincerity. If she could close her ears to his declarations, she’d do that, too. “I don’t want you to love me,” she said desperately.
“Too bad.” He caught her shoulders again, more gently this time. “Caro, look me in the eye and tell me you feel nothing.”
She raised her chin and met his gaze with a false show of defiance, while her heart begged her to confess her love. Ruthlessly she reminded herself how smothered she’d felt with Freddie. Living with Silas would be worse. He knew her so well that he’d see how she strained against the restrictions of marriage. And when he saw that, she’d hurt him.
Silas’s eyes softened as he studied her. Briefly he was the kind, undemanding man who had brought light to the long, dark night of her mourning. “Caro?”
For one fraught instant, vows of love trembled on her lips and she let herself imagine what it would be like to live as Silas Nash’s beloved. Then very deliberately she put aside that picture and remembered her suffocating marriage, and before that life with her bully of a father. She’d dreamed of liberty for too long to relinquish it. Whatever the enticement.
“Silas, this has to end now.”
“Why?”
She forced herself to give the only answer that would keep him at a distance. “I intend to arrange a rendezvous with West after his picnic at Richmond tomorrow.”
Her announcement snuffed out the light in Silas’s eyes and he went white. She waited for him to push her away in disgust. She hadn’t answered his question, but he was so on edge, she prayed he wouldn’t notice.
Instead of letting her go, his hold firmed. “Then damn you, Caroline.” His voice was like gravel. “Damn you for throwing away what we could have created together.”
“You have every right to be angry,” she said, struggling to sound like her heart wasn’t breaking. “I hope one day you’ll understand.” She’d reached a point where she wasn’t even sure if she understood anymore.
“Then the least you can do is kiss me goodbye.”
Her wayward soul, the soul convinced that rejecting Silas was a huge mistake, welcomed his embrace. She made no attempt to contain her response to his savage kiss. It was the last time before she put away her love forever and seized the life she’d always dreamed of. Those dreams had kept her going for so long. They couldn’t be wrong.
“Caro…” he muttered, burying his hands in her tangle of hair and nibbling a tantalizing line down her neck.
Sensation rippled through her, turned her blood to syrup. He edged her backward until her hips hit the bench behind her. She was nearly back to where she’d been before. She looked dazedly over his shoulder—and met Helena’s interested dark gaze.
“Silas, stop,” she gasped, turning rigid as a board in his hold.
“There’s a reason they call them glasshouses, you know,” Helena said in a mocking tone.
“Hell and damnation,” Silas growled and wrenched away to face his sister. With quick protectiveness, his arm curled around Caroline.
Shame prevented Caroline from appreciating the gesture. “Let me go,” she muttered, wriggling free.
Her unsteady hands rose to her bodice. Against all odds, it remained in place. Without meeting anyone’s eyes, she frantically checked the chaotic greenhouse for her pelisse and reticule before remembering that she’d left them inside. She hadn’t come here to see Silas—she hadn’t known he’d returned from Leicestershire—but to see Helena. Helena who surveyed the two of them with arched eyebrows and an expression that combined amusement and curiosity and surprise.
“I must go.” Caroline pushed past Helena and headed doggedly for the door. She cursed the shards of pottery impeding her progress, mute witness to the madness that had possessed her. She wanted to leave this greenhouse more than she wanted the hope of heaven.
Behind her, she heard Helena say to Silas, “Just what have you got to say for yourself, my dear brother?”
Caroline knew she had no right to delay outside to hear his reply, but she did. She may as well have kept going. She learned nothing new.
“Mind your own bloody business and leave me the hell alone, Helena,” he growled. Through the glass—it was mortifying quite how visible he was—Caroline watched him turn his back on his sister. He braced his arms on the workbench and dropped his head to stare at the rough boards. His stance reeked of defeat and desolation.
She’d done this to him and she hated herself for it. On a cracked sob, Caroline turned and raced across the lawns to the house.