When the prince’s head hit the top rail of his chair, she saw Nimble Jack sit straighter. When the prince began to snore, his eyes opened fully.
Mariah waved Old Farley to a halt and gave him a grateful smile. The old fiddler nodded, rose, and shuffled off to his quarters in the stables…leaving her and Nimble Jack the only ones awake in the public room.
Her heart started to pound as he rose from his chair. He was taller than she’d realized, and his broad shoulders and long, muscular legs gave him an aura of physical strength that made her want to step back. She didn’t, but regretted it when he loomed over her and her knees weakened.
When he spoke, his deep tones generated a shocking vibration in her skin. She had to shake herself mentally to make sense of what he’d said.
“—cannot leave him here.” He took the unconscious prince by the arms, pulling him forward in the chair. “Show me the way to his room and help me get him into bed.”
She fought the urge to rub the gooseflesh his voice raised on her arms and shoulders. What was the matter with her? She hadn’t had that much of Carson’s brain-fuddling brew.
She stepped up onto a chair to grab a lantern from the rafter while Jack tried unsuccessfully to hoist the limp royal onto his shoulders. With a huff, she inserted herself under one of the prince’s arms, dragging it up and around her shoulders. Muttering irritably, Jack took the other arm and helped her haul the bulky future monarch to his feet.
“Come on, Bertie, give us some help here,” he growled.
But it was only when she spoke—“Come, Your Highness, time for bed. You do want to go to bed, don’t you?”—that some sense of what was happening penetrated the fog in the prince’s head. He roused enough to bear some of his own weight and allow them to propel him forward.
Together—banging and bumping, trading orders and cautions—they dragged the prince up the stairs to the inn’s finest guest room. On the way through the door, his knees buckled. She dropped the lantern to use both hands to help hold him up. They half carried, half dragged him to the bed and dumped him on it.
They stood side by side staring at their future king, breathing hard.
“Should we remove his boots?” she whispered, starkly aware of Nimble Jack’s broad chest rising and falling and of the mélange of intriguing male scents about him. The only light available was from the lantern she had dropped just inside the door. Its glow reflected off the plank floor, casting the upper half of the room in soft shadows. When she looked up, he was staring at her. Tall, dark and potent.
Heaven help her, she stared back…at least enough to see that the bronze disks of his eyes had warmed with a rising heat…that his lips were parted…that his shoulders seemed to grow with each ragged exhalation. She couldn’t get her breath.
The next thing she knew he was moving toward her. She stepped back. His stride lengthened and suddenly his body met hers and swept her back against the wall beside the door. The impact set a pitcher and basin on the nearby washstand rattling.
She was stunned by both the physical contact and her own lack of resistance to it. Then slowly, so slowly that she could have easily escaped, he raised both of his hands, palms out, and planted them against the wall on either side of her. There he paused, waiting, looking at her.
She lifted her face enough to search at close range the features she had somehow memorized over the course of the evening. Those eyes—molten pools of gold…that skin—sleek and drawn taut over strongly carved cheekbones…those lips—broad and neatly bordered, just inches from hers. He roused something in her, something dormant, something not altogether welcome.
She didn’t mean to do it, made no decision, formed no conscious intent. The impulse came from memories stored in her very bones and sinews that made her stretch and arch her body upward, against his.
With a sound that was half groan, half growl, he leaned in and pressed her back against the wall. His body was hot and hard but strangely not shocking against hers; the intimacy was no longer foreign. She remembered. With every breath his body moved against hers like a tide lapping, testing, caressing the shore. Her skin came alive beneath her clothes. More, she wanted more contact. She wanted to feel him.
Her desire to touch and be touched rattled her to her very core. Trembling, she shoved her hands out to the sides…palms pressed flat against the wall…below his. And suddenly she understood why his hands were there.
When she opened her eyes and looked up, her gaze fastened on his parted lips. Kisses, she remembered kisses…mouth to mouth…intimate silk and moist heat. Her lips felt hot and sensitive, expectant. She wetted them, and gasped silently when she tasted the sweetness from the rum on his breath. She swept her tongue across her lip, luring him closer…so close that she could feel his warmth radiating into her skin and his breath curling across her cheek. But his head dropped to the side, and his mouth skimmed her temple, her ear, the side of her throat. The sensations were so tentative—was he touching her or was that his breath against her skin?
Cascading sensations sent a hum through her blood and a shiver through her body. Her nipples drew taut and tingled in a way she hadn’t experienced in a very long time. Holding her breath, she pressed her breasts into him, dragging them along his ribs. He countered her motion, giving her the stimulation she sought and adding a small, tantalizing undulation of his own…one that confirmed the effect she had on him.
Heat rushed to her breasts and her sex, concentrating and intensifying the sensations so that her sensitive flesh burned with the desire for contact. When his knee probed her skirt, she instinctively let it slide between her own and gradually, savoring the yielding, parted her thighs. Steam billowed through her senses as he fitted himself against her. Breath snagged in her throat as sensation mounted like waves.
More, she wanted more.
She pulled her hands from the wall, seized his face between them, and pressed her lips to his. He went perfectly still, and something in her clicked like the switch of an electric light. She froze as reality fanned away some of the steam in her senses.
Abruptly, he peeled himself from her body, leaving her to stagger slightly as she sank back against the wall. The chilled air that invaded the space between them was a rude shock. She was trembling and felt as if her knees had turned to rubber.
Sweet Heaven. What had happened to her?
Her mind clutched at impressions: his burning stare and his hands clenched at his sides…the throb in her woman’s flesh…the prince’s vigorous snores…the open door only three feet away…
She escaped into the hall and down the steps—having to hang on to the railing to remain upright. She headed through the inn’s darkened kitchen and pulled her cloak from the rack by the door as Carson rose from his chair by the hearth. His son, half awake and protesting being dislodged from his father’s lap, clung to his leg.
“You all right, Miz Eller?” The innkeeper dragged his hands over his face, glancing toward the dim glow from the public room.
“They’re out—the lot of them.”
“Just like you planned, eh?” The innkeeper flashed a weary grin.
“Just li-ike—” her voice cracked “—I planned.”
“Want me to walk ye up to th’ house, miz?”
“No—thank you,” she said, grateful for the darkness that hid her burning face. “Morning will come too early for you as it is.” She settled the cloak around her shoulders and pulled up its hood. “And it wasn’t me that drank a hogshead of rum this night.”
“No, it weren’t.” Carson chuckled. “Ye were somethin,’ miz.”