Burning Up

One of his tenants, he thought, setting Neptune at the descent. A fisher’s wife, a farmer’s daughter, a serving girl perhaps. No gentlewoman went bonnet-less and barefoot on the beach.

At the sound of their approach, the song ceased. The girl turned, pushing back her tumbled hair with one hand. The pose and the wind molded her gown to her body.

Lust slammed into Jack like a bullet.

She was tall and lovely, her breasts high and round, her skin as pale as pearl. Her face was almost savage in its beauty, her broad jaw and level brow balanced by a full mouth and strong cheekbones.

Jack sat like stone, his blood pounding in his head and his groin. Beneath him, Neptune stood like a monument, iron muscles quivering.

He should say something, Jack thought at last. Reassure her. He was a stranger, after all, and she was alone.

“Major John Harris at your service, ma’am.” His voice grated on his ears.

She regarded him without expression, her eyes tarnished gold.

“From the hall,” he said since she seemed not to recognize his name. “And you are . . . ?”

“Morwenna.”

No surname. A servant, then?

He cleared his throat. He was not accustomed to the company of women. But his years of military service had given him the habit of command and some small store of social conversation. “I saw you from the cliffs,” he said.

And promptly plunged down the bluffs like a sailor diving after a mermaid’s song.

She would think him mad.

Perhaps he was.

“You were singing,” he added. As if that explained or excused anything.

“I was not calling you.”

A dismissal, by God. She did not speak like a servant. Despite the absence of gloves, her hands were tapered and smooth. Her dress . . . Well, he didn’t know much about women’s fashions, but the fabric appeared very fine. Perhaps she was a gentlewoman fallen on hard times.

He should ride on. He could not stay, looming over her like the lord of the manor riding out to debauch village maidens.

She met his gaze boldly, like a woman willing to be debauched.

His blood thrummed. Before he could consider the consequences, he swung from his horse, landing hard and heavily on his right leg. He gripped the saddle and breathed deep and evenly, willing the pain to subside.

“You are injured,” she said behind him.

Scarred.

He turned stiffly. “Nothing to signify.”

She considered him, those strange golden eyes traveling down to his boots and up again, lingering in places no well-bred woman would look. He felt the stroke of her gaze like a smooth gloved hand.

She nodded. “We had better go to my cottage, then. There is a bed there.”

Jack’s mind reeled with shock and possibilities. She was a whore.

Or he was still stupid from a lack of sleep and a surfeit of whiskey. She looked nothing like the prostitutes he had seen on London’s streets or the camp followers he had known in the army.

Yet she was living outside the village. She had invited him to her bed. Surely he had not misunderstood?

He attempted a smile. “A chair would suffice.”

Her face lit suddenly with humor or awareness. “It might suit you,” she said. “It would not suit me.”

As if—the image fired his brain—he had suggested they engage in sexual congress on a chair.

He shook his head to clear it.

“Come.” She smiled at him and turned. “This way.”

She glided toward the bottom of the bluff, all billowing skirts and floating hair.

After a moment’s hesitation, he stomped after her, alert as if he rode into ambush. His riding boots slipped and skidded on the shale. Neptune plodded behind.

Jack had spent the past week riding over the estate, trying to familiarize himself with his new duties. This was not the first time a cottager had invited him to inspect a chimney or a leaking roof, to listen to a list of complaints or take a cup of tea.

Surely she was offering more than tea.

Or was it only her beauty and his own soul-deep loneliness that made him wish for more?

The cottage garden was bright with gorse and heather. Pink roses nodded by the open door. Jack tethered his horse to the front gate and ducked his head to follow her inside.

The single room was cool and bare and dim. No lantern. No fire. Sunlight leaked from the shuttered windows to stripe the room’s wide bed. The covers were tumbled.

He wrenched his gaze away.

A simple plank table teetered in the center of the flagstone floor. He took in the oddly bare shelves, the room’s only chair. “You live alone?”

“Yes.”

The single word dropped into the quiet like a rock into a pond. He felt the ripples to his fingertips.

But he must not misunderstand her. “There is no husband to help you with your holding?” he asked carefully. “No man in your life?”

Those full lips curved. “Many men. None that I would choose to live with.”

Something reckless in him rose to meet the wicked challenge of that smile. But he was never reckless. He had been a careful officer, deliberate in battle, calm under fire, conscious always of the men under his command.

He glanced again at the empty hearth, the lack of furniture, the plain, bare walls. “Then you must tell me how I may be of service to you, ma’am.”

She reached behind her back, her hair sliding forward over her shoulders. He watched as her gown fell away from her bosom and rustled to the floor.

Well. His lungs expanded. There was no misunderstanding that.

She was completely naked, her skin pink and white and gloriously bare. No shift. No stays.

The blood left his brain to pool hotly, thickly, in his groin.

He had never seen a woman more beautiful. He forced his gaze from her long, slim legs to the pale thatch between her thighs, up the curve of her belly to her high, full breasts. Beneath the flowing curtain of her hair, her nipples were pink and tight.

She tossed her head and smiled into his eyes, accepting his stunned silence as the tribute it was. “Serve me.”

All traces of headache vanished. There was only this need pulsing like fire through his veins. He had almost forgotten the relief, the solace, the sweet forgetfulness to be found in a woman’s body. This woman’s body, naked and almost within reach. It had been so long. Not since his injury and his inheritance, long before his return to England.

But he was her landlord.

Jack had not been raised in the ways of the landed gentry. A poor relation without the means to purchase a commission, he had joined the Infantry as a gentleman volunteer, fighting with the enlisted men, subsisting on an enlisted man’s rations, until an opening was created by heavy casualties in the officers’ ranks. He did not know what his cousin, the expected heir of Arden, would have done in the face of such magnificent temptation.

But he did know a man of honor did not take advantage of his dependents.

Even if one of those dependents was a whore.

She lived alone, she had said, without a man to fish or farm for her. Did she fear for her living?

“You are not obliged to do this,” he said carefully. “I will not turn you out. If you owe rent—”

“I owe no one. I please myself. Today I choose to be pleased by a man. By you,” she said clearly, so there could be no doubt.

Inside him something rigid as a scar relaxed. She desired him. Although a woman