Wild (Regency Scandal 2), Carole Mortimer [novels for teenagers .TXT] 📗

alley somewhere in Inverness, if he had not overheard the Munros’ plan to kill him. “I could not have borne it if you had died too.”

“No?”

“No,” she confirmed gruffly.

Sometime during her previous restless night of being unable to sleep, Cat had accepted her feelings for Andrew were stronger and deeper than anything she had ever felt for anyone before. She could not have behaved so wantonly with him if her emotions were not fully engaged.

It seemed disloyal to Ewan and the years they had spent together as friends and then the few weeks as husband and wife. But the depth of her feelings was undeniable.

She and Ewan had been children and then young adults together, joined by friendship and affection, and then married for the same reason.

Her love for Andrew was that of a sensual, passionate, and fully grown woman who knew her own mind and heart.

A woman who now refused to shy away from acknowledging her feelings. “This might not be the appropriate time to say it, and we have not known each other for very long, but…I have absolutely no doubts that I am in love with you. I do, I love you,” she said again firmly.

“Are you sure?” A nerve pulsed in his clenched jaw. “Be very sure, little Cat.”

She met his pale green eyes unflinchingly. “I love you. You do not have to feel the same way about me— Andrew!” she protested as he rose to his feet with her firmly held in his arms. “What—”

“Hush.” Andrew silenced Cat with a fierce kiss. He pointedly waited for her to reach down and open the study door before he strode out of the room into the dimly lit hallway.

Her arms clung about his neck as he carried her up the stairs. “Where are you taking me?” She sincerely hoped it wasn’t to her own bedchamber where he would once again leave her to sleep alone.

She needed Andrew’s closeness tonight. If only to hold at bay the terrible truths he had told her and the dire consequences that would occur because of it.

Alec and Alastair would surely hang for their crimes, and the rest of the Munro family be in disgrace because of it.

Cat had no doubt it was news that would devastate the whole of the Highlands.

“Your aunt has very kindly given me the bedchamber on the side of the house opposite to their own,” Andrew answered her. “I am taking you there so that I might tell you, and show you, how much I love you, and so they will not hear your screams when I spank your arse at the same time as I thrust my cock inside you over and over again until there is no you or me, only us.”

Cat stilled in his arms. “What did I do to deserve a spanking this time?”

“Nothing,” he assured her lightly. “I merely enjoy doing it. I believe you enjoy me doing it too?” he prompted huskily.

“I do,” she admitted before burying her face against his throat and allowing her lover to take her to his bed.

“I love you, my little Cat,” Andrew murmured in the aftermath of the need they had both felt to possess each other that had overtaken both of them the moment they were alone in his bedchamber. “I love you with a fierceness and depth I had not known I was capable of feeling. It is the same fierceness and depth, I believe, with which my mother fell in love with our butler and Elena fell in love with Hugh. A true love that will never fade nor be gainsaid.”

Cat glanced up from where her head rested against his bare shoulder, both of them naked beneath the bedsheets. Cat’s hair was also loose down her spine, Andrew having scattered the pins about the room when he pulled Cat’s hair from its confines. “You really do love me.”

His arms tightened. “Ecstatically. Feverishly. Faithfully. Eternally.”

“I love you the same way,” she told him with a shyness belied by the passion they had just received from and given each other. “But what shall we do?”

“Do?” Andrew stared at her. “We shall be married, of course, and provide Malcolm with half a dozen cousins he can lord—laird—it over until our eldest son realizes he is a marquess and will one day be a duke,” he murmured affectionately.

Cat looked astounded by his certainty. “But—but you live in London and I live in the Highlands.”

“And there are roads between the two—some of them not very good roads, as my valet would no doubt attest—but I am sure we will be able to manage our lives so that we live in both London and Scotland.”

Cat could feel the excitement building inside her as Andrew portrayed a life for the two of them she had never even dreamed of in her future.

“Half a dozen cousins?” she repeated in astonishment.

Andrew chuckled. “I wondered when you would realize what I said.” He sobered. “My darling, we might already have sown the seed of having our first child together.”

Andrew was right, Cat realized. Neither of them had thought of his withdrawing when they made love a short time ago. Perhaps because they had both known the two of them having children together was inevitable? Either way, she could now feel the wet stickiness of his release between her thighs and in her channel, and she could only hope and pray that it would result in a child they could love as much as they both already loved Malcolm.

She frowned. “You really want to make someone like me your duchess?”

He scowled. “Like you?”

“Andrew, I do not doubt your love for me, never think that, but I am at heart, and shall always be, someone who was born and brought up in the wildness of the Highlands. I am different from the other ladies of London Society.”

His arms tightened about her. “Thank God for it, for I could not bring myself to marry one of them these past ten years, not even