Until a hollow sound announced the bayonet had struck something.
Their eyes met for a breathless moment.
Then, she attacked the ground around it with renewed vigor, scraping out a small, square wooden box. She stood, and John could hear Vanessa’s heart beating hard enough for the both of them as she opened the simple container.
Every jewel inside the box glittered gem-bright in the golden glow of the lantern.
But it was the twin rubies he found that suffused him with a lightning bolt of sensation.
“Vanessa. The ring.”
With trembling fingers, she plucked it out and held it up so they could both gawk at its magnificence.
He could feel it pulsing with a magnetism no inanimate object should possess. The lion stared at him from hot ruby eyes.
Claiming him. Calling to him.
He thrust his hand between them, splaying his fingers. “Put it on.”
Her forehead crimped. “What if it doesn’t work?”
“Vanessa.”
She nodded, lowering her hand to slide it onto his finger.
His boots hit the earth with a heavy thud. He had weight. He had mass. The air bit at his cheeks and filled his lungs with a cold incredible breath. His heart threw itself against wide ribs and his muscles corded with strength. Veins pulsed with blood.
With need.
His hand gripped hers. Slim, cold fingers trembled against his flesh. His skin.
Her eyes were wide and watery as she stared at him without blinking.
“John?” she whispered.
He was almost sorry.
Almost sorry that a strangled groan was all the warning she had before he crushed her to him and captured her already open mouth.
CHAPTER 6
His kiss was a sweet violence. Both a conquest and a claiming.
Vanessa welcomed the assault on her senses as this man, this solid, starving, sexual man clamped her entire body to his and devoured her mouth as if her kiss could restore his very life.
The sensation of his lips—his skin—was more than a tingling suggestion now. He was tactile. Warm. Almost as if fed by lifeblood.
Almost.
She still detected that the feel of his flesh was imperfect. A vibration persisted where the smooth whorls of his fingerprints should be. It was at once more than an ordinary touch, and not enough.
It didn’t matter. She’d take whatever she could get.
He had a scent now, cedar and leather and the faintest trace of gunpowder.
It tantalized her endlessly.
Her hands clutched the lapels of his crimson wool coat, reveling in the coarse fibers abrading her fingertips because it meant he was real. Tangible. She suddenly wanted to explore everything. Everywhere. Every hot, smooth and strong inch of him.
He kissed like a man denied a hundred and fifty years of pleasure. Of pain. Of desire and release. There was a savage wildness in it, an untamed urgency that sent little thrills of anxiety and anticipation pouring down her spine and spreading into the deep, empty recesses of her womb.
With a strong, hot lick, his tongue parted the seam of her mouth and dipped inside to sample her flavor.
He tasted like a wicked sin. Like every drink too masculine for her to sip and every dessert to decadent to be indulged.
His arms felt like iron shackles around her, and she became his willing prisoner there in the Chamber of Sorrows. Surrendering to the inevitability of what he was about to do to her. Of what demands he would make of her body.
The very thought made her legs puddle beneath her until she feared she couldn’t remain standing.
When she went all but limp against him with a sibilant sigh into his mouth, his kiss unexpectedly gentled, his lips sweeping across hers in featherlight drags. The contrast was her undoing as she lifted onto her tiptoes to seek more.
His large, rough hands drew up her arms and shoulders until he bracketed her jaw in his palms and tilted her face up, pulling back to look down at her with agonizing tenderness.
“My God, you are so pure and perfect,” he marveled in a harsh, breathless tone.
His words evoked a hot blush that spread up her chest and heated the cheeks he cradled so reverently in his hands.
Vanessa’s lashes swept down over eyes pricked with tears, as a familiar shame swamped her, dousing the flames of her ardor a few degrees. “You know I am not so pure. Not in the sense of the word that seems to matter to most people. I’m no virgin. No ingenue. But neither am I a whore. Do you understand that?” She worried the knowledge he had made her seem more accessible to him, and another part of her fretted that he would think less of her.
“Woman,” he growled, his breath coming in agonized pants, his azure eyes smoldering down at her like the core of a flame burning too hot to be contained. “I’m about to do things to you that would make a virgin faint. I’m going to worship you in ways that would offend a whore. So, I suppose we should both be grateful you are not either of those things.”
She gaped up at him, astonished by his wicked candor. “What sort of thing—Oh!”
He snatched her off the ground with unsettling strength and swept her out of the chamber in a few strides. This time, he had to duck to get through the doorway and deposit her on the bed.
Vanessa was glad for the sturdy wood of the frame rather than creaking brass as he ripped his coat from his heavy shoulders and joined her there.
She had a feeling they would have woken the entire inn with what they were about to do.
He prowled up her prone body like a great cat until he settled fully upon her, his weight a delicious press as he took her mouth once again.
Ribbons of desire unspooled within her as she wound her hands around his neck, tugging the leather thong that caught his long hair into a queue. Releasing it, she twined her fingers into the silky mass at his nape, curling them into claws and nipping at his lip.
His lips tore from her with a ragged sound. “Fucking Christ, Vanessa, if you do that, this won’t last long.”
Vanessa tried to appear contrite, but she very much doubted she mastered the look if his urgent response was anything to go by.
He broke away from the circle of her arms to unlace his shirt, reach back and pull it over his head and down his arms in one graceful move.
Had she been less mesmerized by the magnificence of his figure, she might have been curious about the odd workings of his historical trappings as he divested himself of them.
But he loomed like Apollo above her, his skin like gold and honey poured over solid sinew and steel. The cords and veins in his arms danced and flexed as he worked his belt and trousers free.
Vanessa’s fingers lifted to the buttons at her throat, but he stopped her with a curt order as he bent to kick away his boots.
“The thought of your bare ass beneath that skirt has teased and tantalized me all night,” he said in a low rumble. “Now you’ll let me be the one to decide when to undress you.”
Dominance from any man had always caused a tight ball of frigid defiance to form in her chest, immediately freezing any warm feelings she might harbor toward him.
But his command released a flood of hot, liquid desire from her loins as she veritably bloomed beneath the intensity of his regard.
Vanessa let her hands fall demurely to her sides as she lay back on the coverlet. It was an excruciating exercise in a discipline she’d never actually possessed.
Her eyes touched him everywhere she could not, drinking in the fantastic breadth of his shoulders and the vast mounds of muscle that comprised his torso. She counted the obdurate ripples of his ribs and the corrugated plane of his abdomen before boldly following the vee of his hips to where his arousal jutted from a corona of dark gold hair.