“Ah.” She arched up against him. Both her hands held his head, her fingers pushing into the thick curls.
And then his mouth was on hers again and she could feel his fingers dealing with the buttons on her breeches. She lifted her hips when she could feel that they were all open and reached down a hand, helping him to slide them off along with her undergarments. She felt the cool night air against her bare flesh. She felt as if she were on fire.
She did not help him with his own clothes. He still wore Rebecca’s robe, and she guessed he wore some kind of breeches beneath. He did not completely remove them. She could feel the fabric against her legs as he came onto her and eased them wide. When he put himself against her, she discovered that she was swollen and throbbing and wet. But she could feel no embarrassment, only the aching urgency of the moment. His hands came beneath her to cushion her.
“Marged,” he said against her ear.
She did not know his name to reply. It did not matter. “Cariad,” she whispered to him. My love.
He came in slowly. But he came deep. She felt stretched wide by him, filled with him. She had never imagined . . .
She had always lain still. Willing and receptive, but still and impassive. She could not be either this time. When he withdrew and slid inward again, she pivoted her hips and tightened muscles she had not known she had in order to draw him far in, in order to feel him there. And then she relaxed while he withdrew again, and lifted and pulled inward when he returned. She had felt rhythm before, but someone else’s, someone doing something to her, pleasurable, but not involving her. This time his rhythm became her own, so that soon she was gasping with him and slick with sweat with him and moving with him to that outpouring of energy and tension that she had always faintly envied in her husband.
“I can’t. . . .” She was frightened suddenly. Suddenly she wanted to turn back, to make different decisions, to give different answers. She did not want to move into this new world.
“You can.” He spoke softly against her ear, though he was breathless from his exertions. “You can, Marged.”
And he held deep in her when she expected him to withdraw and so broke her rhythm and the sudden defenses she had thrust up in her panic. She was impaled on him and had no choice but to give him what his body demanded. Her own body’s surrender. Not the acquiescence she had always given in her marriage, but surrender. Of her body. Of her heart. Of her whole self.
But just at the moment when terror threatened to engulf her, wonder caught at her instead. For with the warm springing of his seed deep inside her she felt him surrender exactly the same things to her.
They had made love, she thought hazily and foolishly. They had not just coupled. They had made love. She had never before really understood the meaning of the term.
She had made love with a stranger.
With Rebecca.
Incredibly she was sleeping. It was a chilly night and the ground was hard, but she lay on her side, pressed in to his body, her head on his arm, her hand clutching Rebecca’s robe just below his shoulder. He had pulled the edge of the blanket up over her. And she was sleeping.
He was moved by the trust in him she must have to sleep in his arms. And to give herself to him though she did not know who he was. It seemed to him so typical of Marged to behave with such reckless generosity.
He fought sleep himself. He was sated and utterly relaxed, but he dared not sleep. There was danger in the fact that he had all the trappings of Rebecca with him when two tollgates had been destroyed a mere few miles away. Though that was not the danger that most concerned him. If he fell deeply asleep, he might not wake until after dawn. And Marged would see with whom she had lain and loved.
He had not intended this to happen. He really had not. Even when he had beckoned her to come back to him, he had not planned this. He had not planned anything. Perhaps he had expected a repetition of Saturday night. Even when he had felt the difference, after she had come back to him, he had thought only of kisses. Even when he had stopped by the trees among which he had changed into his disguise earlier, he had not planned this.
Had he?
Why, then, had he stopped here? He could hear himself asking her the question—Shall we get down, then? And then, so that he would not pressure her into doing anything she did not want to do—as he had tried to do at the age of eighteen—Or shall I take you home?
And yet it was not really a free choice he had given her. He should have fought the temptation to take her in the guise of a stranger. And yet she had given herself freely to a stranger. He might be anybody. He might be a married man for all she knew.
Marged. He rubbed his cheek lightly over the top of her head. Her hair was warm and silky. She had given herself with passion, as he would have expected. There had been a suggestion of innocence too. She had been frightened at the end by the force of her own passion. Perhaps Eurwyn Evans had allowed it to lie dormant inside her. But he did not want to think about her marriage—or how it had ended.
She stirred and her head went back along his arm. She was looking up at him. He wondered if her eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness. His own had not. But it had been reckless to remove his mask and wig.
“Who are you?” she whispered. “Surely you can tell me now. Surely you must know that you can trust me, that I will never betray you.”
He found her mouth with his own and kissed her. “I am Rebecca,” he said.
“Give me a name at least,” she begged him. “A first name. A name to think of you by.”
He wondered what she would do if he simply gave her his name, all of it. For a moment he was tempted. He would hold her very tightly while she raged and fought. And then he would love her again. But it would not be that simple. She blamed him for her husband’s death, and she was justified in doing so. And he had deceived her tonight just about as badly as a man could possibly deceive a woman.
“Rebecca,” he said softly against her lips. “Think of me as Rebecca.”
She sighed and smoothed her fingers through his hair and cupped one of his cheeks with her hand. “Rebecca,” she said hesitantly, “are you married?”
“No,” he said.
She sighed again. “Why not?” she asked him. “There must be lots of foolish women in your village to have allowed you to remain free. Why have you not married?”
“I have been waiting for you,” he said, and realized even as he said it that there was a large measure of truth in his words.
“Ah.” She moved her thumb across his lips. “But you will not even trust me with your name. Will you leave your mask off when we go back out into the night?”
“No,” he said. “And we must go back out, Marged. We ought not to have stopped. It might be dangerous. The alarm might have been raised by now.”
“Ah, must we go home?” she said. “I wish we could stay here forever. How foolish I am.”
He rolled away from her in order to adjust his clothing and feel around in the darkness for his mask and his wig.
“And how selfish I am,” she said. He could hear that she was pulling her breeches back on. “I am close to home. You still have a long way to ride. No, I am not fishing or trying to trap you. But I know you have a long way to go. If you lived close, I would know you. And I do not know you.” She chuckled suddenly. “Except in the most biblical of senses. Why am I not ashamed? I am not, you know. Are you?”