“But I have answered you, as best I can,” she said sweetly, and kissed his temple. “Now I am trying to please you as best I can, in a way that you have taught me. Now I think of how it could have been between us had I stayed. I think of the children we might have already brought into this world, and I want to make it up to you. I want to begin fresh.” She kissed his cheek. “I don’t want to leave you again,” she whispered.

“It’s too late for this, Margot,” he said brusquely, and turned his head.

“It can never be too late—we are married.” She looped her arms loosely around his neck and moved seductively on him, arousing him, hardening him. “Think of it—we could sail to France and begin anew...just you and me.” She kissed his cheek.

“France!” he muttered as she took his face between her hands and kissed one eye, then the other.

“Wouldn’t it be lovely, to go away from Scotland and England, to someplace new? Where no one knows us?” she asked between kisses. “No one to trouble or inconvenience us?”

He wondered who troubled or inconvenienced them now, and this desire, expressed by a wife he scarcely knew now, pricked at his conscience. Arran’s head urged him to stop her, to understand what she meant, not to be fooled by pleasures of the flesh. But his flesh—Christ, tonight his flesh was much stronger in its need of her than his heart.

He would deal with her duplicity on the morrow. Tomorrow, tomorrow.

“We could sail on one of your ships,” she whispered.

There was something quite wrong with her wish to escape, but Arran didn’t want to think of it at that moment. He was in the abyss. “You’re nattering, woman,” he said, and suddenly grabbed her and stood up. He carried her to his bed, deposited her on it and moved over her. He could put his distrust of her on hold for one more night...but only one more night.

Chapter Thirteen

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

IT WAS WONDERFUL, beautiful, extraordinary. There was something so delicious about the way Arran took command of her body, arousing her with kisses and caresses, his tongue lapping her into oblivion, his cock pressing her to a crisis so utterly shattering that she marveled she could find all the pieces of her and put them back together again. It was carnal bliss, wholesale ecstasy, and it left her feeling warm and adored and very lethargic.

But when the morning light began to filter in through the drapes, the questions about who this man was, about who she was now, began to slip back into her thoughts, and the bed felt less warm to her.