Unclaimed (Turner #2)(30)
She let her weary fear flow through her, found that cold, hard center of protest. She’d been letting Weston own her, though she’d tossed him out long before. She’d been flinching from every good thing, from even this simple touch. But she could at least possess this again—this electric feel of honest attraction.
His breath caught as their hands clasped.
“I don’t hate you,” she whispered.
“Oh.” His voice dropped. His thumb encircled her wrist. “Oh, dear.” And then he pulled her to him, gently.
She had a second to look up into his eyes, to breathe in the taste of him. “Sir Mark?” she asked, her voice suddenly quavering.
His lips touched hers.
It wasn’t a fierce kiss. It wasn’t an extravagant kiss. It was just his breath, feathering against the skin of her face, his lips, soft and gentle against hers. But there was not the slightest sense of hesitance to it, either.
She’d been kissed more times than she could count. She thought she’d known how to translate the language of lips. After all, kissing was a communication that spoke of only a few possibilities. A kiss was an offer or an acceptance; it was an invitation to commerce, or, on rare occasion, the conclusion of a bargain. Kisses were money. They were a mark of possession.
Or, at least, they were supposed to be.
But this wasn’t a claim, his kiss. His fingers curled around hers; his lips brushed hers. He wasn’t taking ownership of her. She didn’t know what to make of it. She didn’t know what to make of him. Most important, she didn’t know what to make of herself, of that impossible tangle of fear and want and attraction that she harbored inside.
He lifted his head. His eyes met hers.
He didn’t apologize. He didn’t make promises.
Another man might have made a joke, to pretend that it hadn’t meant a thing. Sir Mark blew out his breath and uncurled his hand from hers. “I did tell you I liked you.”
His words lingered in the air between them, charging it subtly with every breath she inhaled.
So that was what this was, this kiss. Not commerce. Not ownership. Affection, untinged by anything else. She’d never been kissed out of affection before. Her hand rose, as if of its own accord, to touch her lips. To ascertain that her skin belonged to her, that it didn’t bear the imprint of him. That feeling lingered inside her, unfamiliar and yet so welcome all at once.
She liked him.
Not a good idea. Not a good idea at all. She wasn’t sure what to do with that feeling—whether she should stomp it out or encourage it to grow. She’d spent all that time wondering what he wanted of her and none thinking about what she wanted of herself.
She turned to look back at Glastonbury Tor. The wind and sun were making short work of the mist. The tor itself shone distinctly; only the valley floor was a smudged green. It was going to rain. That’s what they said.
She hadn’t needed a folktale to know that. It always rained.
“And what do you do, Sir Mark, if you meet your Guinevere, and she is already claimed by another?”
He said nothing for so long that she turned back to see if he’d heard. His eyes met hers. She remembered them as blue, but they were changeable in the light. Right now, they seemed stony-gray.
“I’m not worried about that,” he said quietly. “I’m not worried about that at all.”
WHEN THE CLOCK struck eleven later that evening, Jessica was alone in her bed, clad in nothing but a linen shift.
It had been a long time since she’d felt desire. The feeling didn’t bother her; she’d come to accept it as a practicality, a tool for survival as much as any other trick in her arsenal. But there was nothing like performing for pay to render the pleasurable prosaic.
Over the past seven years, her desires, her wants, had been submerged in the service of the men who’d paid for her. It had been years since she’d owned her own sexual response.
It wasn’t an intelligent thing, what she did now.
It was one thing to tempt him. It was another, entirely, to tempt herself, to fool her heart and her desires into focusing not on his seduction, but on him. Still, she couldn’t help but revisit that kiss. That moment of startled intensity, when he’d looked into her eyes and said, “Oh, dear.” She relived the touch of his mouth against hers and didn’t stop there. Not with a simple kiss.
She wanted another and another. She wanted his hands on her, not just chastely touching her fingertips.
She wanted to banish the cold fear she’d felt and replace it with the true warmth of his want.
Her imagination sketched in the naked form of his body, stealing the imagery from the remembered curve of his biceps under her hand. He would be lean, but muscular, the lines of his body firm and strong. Jessica felt a slow shiver run through her at the thought, and her eyes fluttered shut. She’d worn his coat; she knew there wasn’t the slightest padding to it. The breadth of his shoulders owed nothing to clever tailoring.
At the thought of his coat, the memory of the scent of his clothing wrapped around her once more, a hot blanket enveloping her in the midst of the cool evening. Mark’s scent was clean male, with a hint of salt and starch. No extraneous perfumes; no pomade, no cologne attempting to mask more intrusive fragrances. His skin would smell like that all over—subtle, strong and attractive—an aroma she couldn’t pin down, somewhere between clean sunshine and the clear, cold water of a mountain spring.