Kate Welsh - His Californian Countess

It did. She cried out and tipped her hips as if seeking more, rocking against his hand. “Please,” she sobbed. “I … I need—I need….” She tossed her head and held her arms out to him.

She might not understand all he’d made her feel, but he did. “Oh, yes, sprite, I do, too,” he assured her. They needed to lose themselves in each other. He gave in to all his secret desires. He shifted over her and covered one of her sweet nipples with his mouth and suckled her till she cried out again. Her scent—a combination of flowers and musk—seemed to surround him, then desire overwhelmed him.

He pulled her hips toward his and entered her tight core.

She made a small distressed sound and he tensed. Even a dream lover deserved care and consideration. “It’s all right. Don’t worry. I’ll make it good for you.”

Something was different about this coupling from those he’d had with his wife. Try though he might, his mind was too clouded with passion and need to identify what he’d missed or to consider anything beyond the desire this dream woman had stirred in him. He was no longer sure of even who she was—the sprite or Helena, he could no longer tell.

Knowing he had to coax her back to him, he covered her mouth with his and caressed her lips with his own. When she opened them on a gasp, he twined his tongue with hers. She was soon with him again and he rewarded her trust by carefully pressing forward, then pulling back. He rocked on her till he was buried to the hilt in her sweet depths. “Better? My God, tell me it’s better!”

She nodded, sucking in a breath. “Better than better. Perfect,” she breathed. Her tightness caressed him and rapture called, but he struggled to hold himself in check. He supported his weight on his forearms as best as he could, but soon, shaking with need, he lost himself. All thought fled his mind when she circled his waist with her long, slender limbs.

Somehow he managed to fight back from the precipice of satisfaction, desperate to ensure pleasure for the magical woman in his arms. Sweet breath puffed from her lungs in the rhythm of his thrusts. Then when he could no longer hold off reaching for the ultimate rapture, her muscles began to pulse around him and he gave himself over to the wonder of the dream. Her cries of ecstasy tore through the little room and he gladly followed her. As he emptied his seed into her keeping, he cried out her name.

Helena.

Feeling as if she’d drained every ounce of strength from him, he rolled to his side to keep from collapsing on her. Chilled, he flipped the blanket over them both, and then pulled her along his side, settling her head against his shoulder. Exhaustion closed in on him, but he managed one more coherent thought. Who would have thought Helena would be so passionate a lover? This dream was better than any he’d had before he’d given up the idea of marriage between them.

As the fog in his mind closed in on him, Jamie felt a tear drop on to his shoulder, then another. But he couldn’t manage to ask why she’d cry.

Amber tried to hold on to her emotions, but one tear fell then another and another. How could a heart break and allow the owner to live with such pain? She would rather die than have him know the destruction one word—one name—had wrought within her.

It had all seemed like a dream at first. Indeed, she had had similar dreams for days. With every fiber of her being Amber had believed this was a dream, as well. He’d been so sick and she’d been so afraid to believe he was on the mend that awaking in his arms had truly felt like a secret wish come true.

A fantasy.

A dream.

Then, when things she’d never imagined or heard of began to happen between them, she’d fully awakened and thought the real Jamie had come to her, wanting to make their desperate unromantic marriage a real one. And God help her, after all her protestations that she wanted no man in her life, in her exhausted sleep-deprived mind she’d wanted him. She’d believed the beautiful act they’d performed together came from feelings in each of them that matched perfectly.

Those traitorous emotions had grown against her will while she’d nursed him. Now she’d have to use all her willpower to obliterate them. Because he’d turned the dream she’d awakened to from beautiful reality to a nightmare with the shouted name of the woman he believed her to be.

Not Amber. Not even Pixie.

Helena.

Beautiful, wealthy and proper Helena.

So now Amber lay, silently weeping, unable to move away without risking his awakening and seeing how deeply he’d wounded her. The abyss of troubled sleep claimed her before she could stem the flow of her tears. While she slept in his arms, her dreams were full of confrontations that featured Jamie and Helena with Amber in the role of their child’s governess or some other lowly servant.

Jamie stirred and Amber woke with a start. Morning light flooded through the porthole, illuminating the cabin and sending reality crashing in on her like a mighty wave, assaulting her heart and soul. Everything between them last night had been a fraud.

She recoiled and tried to scramble away when Jamie’s gaze fell upon her face and anger marched across his features. He tightened his grip on her shoulder and pushed himself up on one bent arm, staring down at her with narrowed, furious eyes.

It was then that she remembered she was ignominiously nearly naked in the arms of her counterfeit husband. He’d taken her body when he thought she was his high-society love. Or maybe it was she who was the counterfeit in this marriage. After all, it was she who was not the woman he thought he’d wed. She was not his precious Helena.

Amber wished he’d say something.

Anything.

“What is this about? Was our meeting on deck an accident, Pixie?” His beautiful mouth twisted in a sneer and “pixie” ceased to be a sweet pet name. “I thought you were a disadvantaged innocent, forced to travel alone.”

“I had my reasons for being alone.”

“I must wonder if your reason was to lure me into this trap so you could then demand marriage. It worked for my late wife, but I won’t be trapped that way again. I care not about my reputation here in America.”

Amber felt her temper rise. Now she scrambled away, dragging the blanket with her as she stood. What did she care if it left him naked and exposed? She’d bathed him and cared for his needs for days on end. She could look at his naked form all day and feel nothing but contempt.

But then he stood in all his naked glory—bold as you please—and captured her gaze with his own narrowed, hard-as-amethyst eyes. It was she who broke away from their locked gazes. When her lowered eyes fell on to his manhood, her face heated in a betraying blush. She looked away quickly, but the damage was done. And that set fire to a temper few had ever seen.

“Luring you into marriage?” she shouted. “You must still be suffering from delirium. Your uncle has apparently already done his worst by freezing your heart. I did not need to trap you into marriage. We’re already married. It was you who begged me to marry you to protect Meara. You promised an annulment if you survived the fever and I wished for one.”

He opened his mouth to speak, but she rushed on, not caring what he planned to say. She had heard all she wished. “It was you who crawled on to my pallet last night and made annulment impossible. This is my thanks for caring for you all these long days? I should have let the captain toss you overboard. You endangered everyone on board just to follow your obsession with Helena!”

She stormed out into the saloon, her shoulders and back stiff as the deck she’d been sleeping on. Still wrapped in the blanket, the neckline of her pretty silk shift peeking out, she was mortified to bump into the ever-present cabin boy. But she raised her chin and stomped by him, refusing to show her embarrassment.