Catherine Coulter - Pendragon

"Oh, God knows I want you, Meggie. I am a young man, young men are randier than goats, and I have grown up hearing that goats will bed anything that wags a tail or chews a boot."

"That's vulgar," Meggie said, and laughed. It dried up very quickly. She said slowly, looking at him intently, "Do you think perhaps that we can start over, Thomas?"

"Start over? Start over what? This sham of a marriage?"

She'd been wallowing in guilt, knowing she'd been profoundly wrong. She'd been trying to exert reason and logic, trying to make him see how hideously sorry she was, but now she felt anger filling her, coming right out of her mouth. "This isn't a sham marriage! Blessed Hell, Thomas, I wouldn't let a man do what you do to me, and I surely wouldn't let a man hear me scream in pleasure, if this were a damned sham marriage! I am your bloody wife. Do you hear me? I will grow old with you. Get used to it!"

She was breathing so hard that she was panting now. She realized in that instant that he was looking at her breasts, heaving and pressing against that wicked peach satin. She, the vicar's daughter, straightened her shoulders, stuck her chest out, and said, "So what are you going to do about it, Thomas?"

He slammed out of the White Room.

Meggie stared at the still vibrating door. This was not good. She knew she'd hurt him very badly. But she couldn't control her dreams. She tried and tried, but she simply couldn't remember even dreaming about Jeremy. Oh yes, it had been after he'd sent her the carved statue of Mr. Cork. What could it have been?

And then she remembered.

She bounded out of bed and burst through the adjoining door into his grand and massive and very gloomy bedchamber, which she'd had cleaned, but not really paid much attention to since Thomas spent so little time in here. He was standing by one of the long skinny windows, staring out over the sea.

"Thomas, I remember."

He turned slowly. "You follow me, even into my bedchamber, where I should have privacy if I wish it?"

"Climb down from your hobbyhorse, you ass. I remember the dream about Jeremy."

"You have had time to make something up, Meggie."

She ran straight across the room, right at him, and grabbed his dressing gown lapels. She stood on her tiptoes and said right into his face, "I haven't made up a single thing. Listen to me. I dreamed about him right after he sent me Mr. Cork. Naturally he was on my mind, but not in the way you think. I dreamed about a cat race."

"Ha."

"Shut your trap, curse you. I dreamed that Mr. Cork was running, he was way ahead of the other racing cats. Then he began changing-he turned black, his eyes were bright orange, and then, he was suddenly fat, his belly nearly hanging to the ground. I just couldn't believe it. And then Jeremy was saying that he would have to rewhittle him, make me a whole new statue and it would take him more time than he had, but he had to so he could be faithful to the real Mr. Cork. And I was begging him not to. I wanted my own Mr. Cork back, not this monstrous thing."

"Do you honestly want me to believe that, Meggie?" He spoke very quietly.

She backed away from him, a good two steps. She said slowly, "Have I ever lied to you?"

"You lied by omission."

"Ah, that's a grand sin, isn't it? Will you chew on that until your jaw locks? No, that was rhetorical. Have I ever lied to you, Thomas?"

He was silent. She opened her mouth, but he raised his hand. "No, be quiet. I'm thinking. We were together a goodly amount of time before we married. I'm trying to remember if you lied to me."

Now it was Meggie who began pacing that dismal gloomy room. It was filled with shadows and every step she took sent her into deeper gloom. She hated gloom, she knew too well how it felt inside her. He turned to look out the window again, at the beautiful moon that glistened over the water.

It was magic, a night like this.

"No," he said at last. "I don't remember you ever lying to me."

"Well, good," she said, nearly at a loss for words since she'd fully expected him to come up with something. She was only human, after all. "Then may we please try to begin again, Thomas?"

"Meggie," he said, staying where he was, which was very far away from her indeed, "what if I loved another woman and couldn't have her, then I married you, all without telling you a thing about her."

Meggie stopped cold. She was shaking her head, then she stopped that too. She stared across the gloom at him. "Oh dear," she whispered. "Oh dear."

"Yes," he said. "There is that, isn't there?"

"I would throttle you if I found out. I would stomp you into the mud. I would shave your head and blacken your eyes, both of them. Oh dear. I hadn't thought of the shoe on the other foot."

He was pleased, but he wasn't about to let her see it. "What I did to you was bad enough-forcing you on our wedding night."

"No, what was worse was the last time when you just went away from me and didn't say a single thing. That is horrid, Thomas. Please, don't do that again. If you want to stomp me, I will allow it."

She'd walked into the moonlight again, and that peach thing she was wearing shimmered all the way from her breasts to the floor. He could see too much of her.

"If I slam out of this room, I will be in the White Room again, your room."

"Please don't leave me," she said and came up to him. She didn't touch him, just stopped an inch short and looked up at him. "Thomas, why did you marry me?"

"Because I love you, you twit, because I believed you loved me as well."

"But you never said anything about love to me."

"No."

"Why?"

He said very slowly, "Because there was just something about you, Meggie, something that made me understand how very young you were, how very innocent, untouched. You weren't ready for that."

"All that young and innocent, yet you believed I loved you? That it wasn't some sort of schoolgirl infatuation?"

"I sometimes hate the way your brain works."

"So does my family." She sighed. "There is so much going on here at Pendragon. There is the someone who doesn't want me here, enough to try to kill me. Then there's you, Thomas. You don't know whether you want to strangle me or kiss me or just slam out of the room."

"If you are giving me a choice, then I would prefer to kiss you." He had to touch her breasts, had to mold his fingers around her through that satin, and so he did and he closed his eyes as he cupped her in his palms, as his fingers roved over her.

He felt her pushing against his hands, and he opened his eyes. He smiled down at her. "I believe you want me as badly as I want you."

"More," Meggie said. "You taught me, Thomas, and you taught me well." She went up on her tiptoes and kissed his mouth. "Please open to me," she whispered and he did, and all his heat, all the strength of him, all his passion and the immense hurt she'd dished out to him, it was all in that kiss, in the way he held her so tightly, she believed her ribs would crack, and then she just didn't care.

The huge old bed was only ten feet away. When he lay her on the Aubusson carpet that was so threadbare she felt pricks of cold air touching her shoulder blades, he forced himself to stop, just for a moment, and said, his voice thick and deep and guttural, "I want this to be hard and fast, Meggie."

Meggie couldn't think of a single word, she was thrumming, mewling like her racing cats she was so excited, she felt so very urgent, it was beyond anything she could begin to understand. She grabbed him around his neck and pulled him down to her. "Please, now, Thomas. Now."

He was a wild man, all over her, not a touch of gentleness, and Meggie hummed with power and urgency. She also hummed with something else, but she didn't know what it was.

Meggie would swear that the gloomy room lightened, that the air itself lifted and fluttered when she yelled to those beams in the darkened ceiling. But he wasn't through, bless him, and within a very short time, she was breathing hard again, beside herself, her hands all over him, pulling and caressing and hitting, and her cries heaved out of her mouth against his shoulder.