The Scottish Bride - Catherine Coulter [69]
“Marry me,” he said into her mouth. “I cannot bear this, Mary Rose. You must give me my way in this. Everything will be all right. You will speak Latin better than Max, and he will glow with pride. Ellis and Monroe will curl around your ankles and sleep against the backs of your knees. We will all deal well together. Marry me.”
Actually, he was beginning to believe that he would simply fall down and die if she didn’t marry him, if she didn’t allow herself to become his wife and belong to him. He couldn’t stop. He kept kissing her until she made a small noise into his mouth. That nearly whispered little sound shot mindless lust throughout his body. He realized in one last flicker of reason that it was simply all over for him.
He nearly leapt away from her, breathing so hard, so fast, that for a moment he couldn’t get hold of his body. When he did, he smiled at her shocked white face. Dear God, he had frightened her. He heard himself say with absolute honesty, “I want to do that to you until we are both very old and doddering.”
“I—” She gulped. “Yes,” she said then. “I would like that very much. I have never done that before. I am twenty-four years old, on the shelf, everyone says. I have never done that, Tysen, never known that one person could make another feel all these strange things. They’re frantic sorts of things. I want them desperately. I don’t want them to stop. I don’t understand.”
“Feel what things exactly?” He couldn’t believe he’d asked her that, but he didn’t take it back. He wanted to know.
He watched her hand fall to her belly and lightly press inward. He watched her fingers press downward a bit more. She didn’t realize what she was doing, but he did, and he nearly collapsed on the spot. It was all he could do to prevent himself from leaping on her again and throwing her on her back on that soft, giving bed.
“It is like I am somehow hungry, my stomach is hot, and I feel like I want to touch you everywhere.”
He nearly swallowed his tongue. Control, he thought. It had been so many years since he’d felt these ungovernable, roiling feelings that made him want to fly and howl and shout for joy. Go slowly, he thought, go gently. “Mary Rose, if you were my wife, then you could touch me everywhere, just as I could you. There is incredible pleasure when a husband and wife come together, so I have heard. I believe you and I would know that pleasure.”
“I was afraid when Erickson tried to hold me like you did. No, I was beyond afraid, I was terrified. Isn’t it peculiar that it is so very different with you? That it is all I can think about? Er, Tysen, could you please kiss me again? Perhaps let me press myself against you, all of you? You are very different from me.”
As God is my witness, I will not go beyond the point where I cannot stop myself. “I will kiss you and hold you if you promise to be my wife, Mary Rose. I am a vicar. I am not allowed to enjoy myself in such a way without God blessing our union. Surely you understand how I am constrained. I have done things in my life that now, knowing how life is, I would do differently, but despoiling you, giving in to a man’s lust—that I will not do.”
“Yes,” she said, so disappointed she wanted to cry, and yet at the same time she admired him tremendously, “I understand. I’m not at all good, Tysen. For many years I was jealous of Donnatella. I am impatient with my mother. I would have shot Erickson if I’d had a gun and knew how to load it and fire it.”
“Are you making some sort of point here?”
“I don’t know if I would make a very good vicar’s wife.”
“Nonsense. You are human, Mary Rose, delightfully so. Jealousy, anger, frustration—those are not bad things, they’re just things that all of us feel because they’re there to be felt. They cannot be ignored, at least