Unclaimed (Turner, #2)

She liked him.

Not a good idea. Not a good idea at all. She wasn’t sure what to do with that feeling—whether she should stomp it out or encourage it to grow. She’d spent all that time wondering what he wanted of her and none thinking about what she wanted of herself.

She turned to look back at Glastonbury Tor. The wind and sun were making short work of the mist. The tor itself shone distinctly; only the valley floor was a smudged green. It was going to rain. That’s what they said.

She hadn’t needed a folktale to know that. It always rained.

“And what do you do, Sir Mark, if you meet your Guinevere, and she is already claimed by another?”

He said nothing for so long that she turned back to see if he’d heard. His eyes met hers. She remembered them as blue, but they were changeable in the light. Right now, they seemed stony-gray.

“I’m not worried about that,” he said quietly. “I’m not worried about that at all.”

WHEN THE CLOCK struck eleven later that evening, Jessica was alone in her bed, clad in nothing but a linen shift.

It had been a long time since she’d felt desire. The feeling didn’t bother her; she’d come to accept it as a practicality, a tool for survival as much as any other trick in her arsenal. But there was nothing like performing for pay to render the pleasurable prosaic.

Over the past seven years, her desires, her wants, had been submerged in the service of the men who’d paid for her. It had been years since she’d owned her own sexual response.

It wasn’t an intelligent thing, what she did now.

It was one thing to tempt him. It was another, entirely, to tempt herself, to fool her heart and her desires into focusing not on his seduction, but on him. Still, she couldn’t help but revisit that kiss. That moment of startled intensity, when he’d looked into her eyes and said, “Oh, dear.” She relived the touch of his mouth against hers and didn’t stop there. Not with a simple kiss.

She wanted another and another. She wanted his hands on her, not just chastely touching her fingertips.

She wanted to banish the cold fear she’d felt and replace it with the true warmth of his want.

Her imagination sketched in the naked form of his body, stealing the imagery from the remembered curve of his biceps under her hand. He would be lean, but muscular, the lines of his body firm and strong. Jessica felt a slow shiver run through her at the thought, and her eyes fluttered shut. She’d worn his coat; she knew there wasn’t the slightest padding to it. The breadth of his shoulders owed nothing to clever tailoring.

At the thought of his coat, the memory of the scent of his clothing wrapped around her once more, a hot blanket enveloping her in the midst of the cool evening. Mark’s scent was clean male, with a hint of salt and starch. No extraneous perfumes; no pomade, no cologne attempting to mask more intrusive fragrances. His skin would smell like that all over—subtle, strong and attractive—an aroma she couldn’t pin down, somewhere between clean sunshine and the clear, cold water of a mountain spring.

In her imagination, she didn’t touch him. She didn’t need to. In her imagination, there was no reason to put his pleasure above hers, to set aside her own desires to make sure that he was fulfilled. He thought of her. He touched her. He took care of her.

It was just her imagination, but, oh, she wanted him. And it had been so long since she wanted anything, let alone a man.

She let herself want him in the safety of her own bed. She could want him without thought or analysis, without calculating the effect of every touch. She could want him purely for herself.

She gasped, and the night air was cool against her lips. Fantasy-Mark had no hands, and so her own had to do. She touched herself, taking back territory that she had ceded to others over the last long years: her breasts, her thighs.

She imagined his hand at her nipple instead of her own. His mouth. His fingers, spreading her legs, his palm brushing her thighs before he found the nub between them.

It didn’t belong to anyone, that spiraling twinge of pleasure she felt. Not to anyone except herself. It was her want, her desire. Nobody else mattered. No one else needed to be satisfied. She had no need to falsify a response, to try and inflame another person.

It shook her, that final moment. Ecstasy raced through her. It was stronger and more powerful than just physical release, and she almost wept from the joy of it.

Hers. Hers.

She belonged to herself again, body and soul, pleasure and heartbreak. She was every inch hers again, her body reclaimed from those long years of bitter ownership.

She was hers.

She drew a tremulous breath, shaking, her eyes opening to see only darkness before her.

She thought of Mark. “Oh.” She exhaled slowly. “Dear.”

CHAPTER NINE