Cassia cried out, her hands automatically coming up and twining in his hair as she anchored him close to that space where her heart beat.
Nathaniel growled, his breath coming harsh and fast as he reached his hand down between her legs and then rested his palm at that apex.
Moaning, Cassia lifted her hips into his touch, moving restlessly against his palm.
She was passionate and perfectly free as she made love. As a woman ought to be, and as he knew she would be. And yet—
Nathaniel froze, hating that honor reared its ugly, unwelcome, but ever-present head.
And with a pained groan, he ripped his hand away and forcibly rolled himself off her, falling onto his back beside Cassia with their shoulders touching.
Bloody, bloody hell.
He squeezed his eyes shut tightly and concentrated on calming a raging desire for this woman that wouldn’t quit.
The mattress dipped, and he felt Cassia straighten, and coward as he was, he prayed she’d get up and get herself to the other side of the cabin. To move away from him, because Lord knew he couldn’t trust himself around her. She touched a tentative hand to his shoulder, and her touch was like a firebrand.
Knowing a glimpse of the chore that had led Adam to commit that ultimate sin in the name of all mankind, Nathaniel swung his legs over the side of the bed.
Cassia instantly scrambled up onto her knees; his shirt slithered down about her lithe frame.
“You’re leaving,” she remarked, and he felt her gaze following him as he headed over to the chest under the wide set of windows at the back of the room.
Nathaniel fetched himself several blankets and a pillow, and then carrying them to the far corner of the room, as far away as he could get, because that distance proved essential, he dropped them down. “I’m sleeping here.”
“You don’t . . . have to.”
Was she mad? “I do,” he said, his voice strangled. He’d not leave her alone. He trusted his men, but temptation could be hard, and with their leave cut short—
“We can sleep together.”
Satan was real, and the sin of lust and temptation came not in the form of an apple, but in the innocent words of Cassia McQuoid. “We cannot sleep together,” he said, his tone harsher than he intended, but also better that way for the distance he desperately, desperately, needed from this woman.
She immediately went quiet, and he used the time to put together the makeshift bedding he’d had for himself these past several days.
That silence proved as short-lived as all the lady’s other attempts at it.
“I can sleep on the floor.”
“Cassia, you’re not sleeping on the floor,” he said impatiently as he dropped to the floor and pounded away at his pillow several times. “Now, would you just go to sleep?” With a quiet curse, he flopped himself back and lay there.
Her quiet sniffling reached him.
The sound of her tears, a lance to his chest.
Nathaniel squeezed his eyes tightly shut. “What?”
She sniffed again. “I’ve disgusted you again.”
That’s what she thought. That he’d stopped their embrace because he was disgusted by her?
Let her think that.
Let her hold on to that alternately foolish and innocent conclusion she’d come to, because that was better, and safer. It would allow him the distance he needed from her. And yet, even knowing that, he couldn’t let her to that incorrect opinion. One that would put him with the likes of her deuced stupid brother-in-law, who’d chosen the inherently less-worthy sister.
Nathaniel’s eyes went flying open, and he stared at the slats overhead. “You’ve not disgusted me,” he said harshly. And then registered that other—important—word she’d spoken. “Again?”
“That’s why you left before,” she whispered, her voice achingly soft and painful, and it wrenched all the way through to a heart that wasn’t as hard as he’d previously taken it for.
Nathaniel swiped a hand over his face. “I left because I want you, Cassia,” he said bluntly. “Despite knowing you are a lady.” And that she’d wed another, and when this voyage was over, he’d be tied to the bride his father had chosen for him. “I want to make love to you.” He turned his head, facing her across the room.
The moon’s glow cast such an ethereal, bright light over the room, it put Cassia’s face on full, vivid display. Her rosebud mouth formed a small moue of surprise, and it hit him that she had absolutely no idea how damned desirable she was or how badly he wanted her.
“I . . . would like that, too?” There was an up-tilt to her words that turned them into a question, and a strained chuckle rumbled in his chest and made its way up his throat, sticking there.
“Good night, Cassia.”
There came the rustle of sheets and coverlets as she shimmied back under the bedding, and he closed his eyes once more as his mind drew forth a tempting image of her slender, muscled legs exposed and his shirt rucked high about her waist.
Which only conjured thoughts of her bare thatch, and the sprig of colors between her legs; they’d be downy soft and—
His breathing grew labored.
Cassia’s whisper cut across the quiet. “Nathan?”
Do not answer . . . Do not answer . . . She’ll stop . . .
Engaging her any further was dangerous.
“Are you sleeping?”
Bloody hell. She would not stop.
“Yes,” he snapped, his voice tight and sharp.
“I . . .” Cassia’s words emerged haltingly. “I don’t believe you are. If you were, you’d not be talking. Unless you talk in your sleep—”
“You talk in your sleep,” he said gruffly, not sure where that pronouncement came from.
The sheets rustled. “I do? I don’t think I’ve ever done that before. Not that I’m privy to what I say or don’t say in my sleep. But my lady’s maid never said as much, and I do think—”
“Cassia,” he said warningly. “What do you want?”
“Oh, yes. Forgive me. That is right. Before I left you to sweet dreams”—sweet dreams?—“I really would ask that you consider not keeping me a prisoner in here. I really would like to see some of the world before we return and go our separate ways, because . . .”
Go our separate ways . . .
As she chattered on with no end in sight, his mind lingered on that handful of words.
Their time together was finite.
In fact, every day that brought him closer to the upcoming confrontation with the French brought him one day closer to being done with Cassia McQuoid.
Except, where he’d expect a vast rush of relief at being freed of her mischievous ways and endless blathering, he found himself oddly . . . melancholy.
“I know you are concerned about me, and I am very touched by that concern,” Cassia was saying.
Off his head. The lady was driving him absolutely insane.
Or mayhap he was already there. “Fine,” he spat, anything to get her to cease her jabbering for the night so he might get some well-needed rest.
Cassia stopped midsentence and, squirming out from under the bedding, jumped up onto her knees. “Truly,” she exclaimed, clasping joined fists close to her chest.
“Mr. Hayes believes it will be good for you,” he said, already regretting his own capitulation on the matter. “But you need to stay out of trouble,” he added, the warning not even going unfinished before she was talking over him.