Portia groaned again. She swiveled round so she was facing up the stairs and lifted the puppy up three steps. “Stay there.” Then painfully she hitched herself upward until she’d reached Juno and could lift her farther up.
The front door opened so softly she didn’t hear it, so intent was she on this exhausting ascent. She didn’t hear Rufus until he exclaimed from the bottom of the stairs, “I don’t believe this! Tell me I’m imagining this, Portia.”
“It’s Juno,” she said, between tears and laughter. “I know you said she couldn’t come up, but she was yapping and whining so much I couldn’t go to sleep. So I’m trying to get her upstairs so I can sleep! I’m so tired, Rufus.” The last was almost a wail.
She was so utterly irresistible in her obstinate, dogged persistence against all the odds. Anyone else in such a state of exhaustion would have been able to ignore the puppy’s distress. But not Mistress Worth.
Rufus reached up in a leisurely movement and plucked Juno from the step, holding her by the scruff of her neck.
“Oh, please don’t put her outside,” Portia begged.
“I’m going to bathe her.” He held the animal at arm’s length. “It’s not what I usually like to do at eleven o’clock at night. However, needs must when the devil drives, and you, Portia Worth, wield a damnable devil’s pitchfork.” He dumped the puppy on the floor and leaned forward to scoop Portia into his arms again.
He carried her back upstairs and deposited her firmly in bed. “This time, would you please stay here?”
“You’re not going out again?” Her eyelids were drooping already.
“No.” He tucked the sheet tightly around her so that she felt as if she were in swaddling bands. “Now, for pity’s sake, go to sleep.”
Portia listened for a minute to the comforting sounds of his movements below. She could hear his voice, soft and slightly exasperated, talking to the puppy. She was trying to make out what he was saying when she fell into the deep black hole of oblivion where the scratching and whining and yelping from downstairs could not penetrate.
Juno objected vociferously to hot water and lye soap, but Rufus was ruthless. It didn’t take long for the puppy to recognize the hand of a master, and finally she gave up her struggles and merely looked miserable and more akin to a drowned rat than a dog.
Rufus toweled her vigorously. “I know damn well you’re going to insist on getting on the bed,” he said. “And that mistress of yours is going to turn her slanty green eyes on me and there’ll be nothing I can do about it.” Juno thumped her tail, sending a shower of drops across the room. “You are trouble!” Rufus stated vociferously. “But I tell you straight, I am not going to sleep with a smelly wet dog, so keep still.”
Finally he set her down in front of the fire, poured himself a large dram of whisky, and sat down beside her, stretching his legs to the fire. Juno put her head on his foot with a little sigh of contentment. Rufus glowered down at her but the puppy merely grinned at him.
Rufus gazed down into his whisky and turned his thoughts to the information Portia had brought him. His fertile brain examined and discarded plans as his blood stirred with anticipation. He saw his chance to outwit Granville and make off with the treasure, with little or no danger to his own men.
And the treasure would be his perfect bargaining counter.
His lips thinned, making of his fine mouth an almost invisible line. If the king wanted Decatur assistance, he would pay for it.
Chapter 16
As Portia swam up from sleep, lingering tendrils of warm dreams clung to her, drawing her down again to the soft pillowy depths. She lay buried in warmth, her body so heavy she couldn’t move a limb, her mind drugged with sleep. For long minutes she was disoriented, images of ice, of closed doors, of cold corpses battering against the shutters of her mind. Then, slowly, full memory returned. She still couldn’t move a muscle, but her fogged brain cleared, and she knew that she was lying in Rufus Decatur’s bed, that her body was pressed to his side, rolled against him by his weight on the mattress. She was aware that the chamber was filled with a pale light that some part of her brain identified as snowlight. She remembered the blizzard then. She remembered Juno and as she lay still in the uncanny quiet created by the snow blanket beyond the window, she heard the puppy’s snuffling breath from the end of the bed.
And then she became aware of something nudging her bare thigh. The shirt was twisted around her waist and something was burrowing, nuzzling against her skin. Indolently she moved a hand down and her ringers closed over the hard shaft of flesh that with a life of its own flickered, grew, pulsed against her palm.
Portia smiled to herself. Rufus was still asleep while his body frolicked, following its own instincts. She played with him, her fingertips lightly stroking, kneading, sliding back the soft hood to feel the dampening tip. The flesh leaped in her palm, like some blind burrowing animal. Her smile broadened, her loins were filled with a delicious languid warmth, and with her free hand she touched herself.
“Let me do that.” Rufus’s sleepy voice, husky and with a smile dancing in its depth, caressed her even as his hand moved over her belly, slid between her thighs. His fingers found the little nub of her sex, the moist and tender opening of her body.
They lay side by side under the nesting warmth of the covers, playing with each other, until urgent desire banished the last vestiges of languor. Rufus turned her gently so that her back was to him and fitted himself against her, curling around her bottom. “I don’t want to hurt your ankle,” he whispered, his beard silky against her shoulder, drawing a surprised chuckle from her. “Bring your knees up.”
Her body thus opened to him, he slid within her, one hand at her waist, the other against the nape of her neck, warm and firm. Portia could do nothing but lie still while the waves of delight lapped over her, awakening her muted nerve endings, her sleep-quiet skin. And when he grasped her tightly against him, his breathing swift and hard against her neck, his belly pressing against her bottom, his flesh pulsing deep within her, flooding her womb with his seed, she felt herself drifting away, without form or sinew, a bubble of exquisite sensation.
With a soft exhalation, Rufus fell back, his hands loosening on her body. “Welcome to the day, gosling.”
Portia chuckled weakly. “That was a delicious good-morning. Oh, Juno!” she exclaimed as a wet tongue slobbered across her cheek. “But you do smell clean,” she murmured with approval, patting the puppy’s head. Juno gave a little yap of pleasure and tumbled off the bed, running to the head of the stairs and then back to the bed.
“She’d better go out.” Rufus flung aside the covers and stood up. He stretched, and the muscles in his back and buttocks tauntened. He bent to poke the fire into life again, throwing on kindling, then logs as the blaze took.
Portia feasted her eyes on his naked body, noticing how the pale light from the window caught the fine red-gold hair clustering on his shoulder blades, in the small of his back, along the lean, powerful thighs. He was very beautiful, she thought drowsily, regretting the moment when he reached for the robe she’d borrowed the previous evening.
Juno yapped again and Portia sat up, sensual dreaming forgotten. “On, Juno, no!”
“God’s Grace!” Rufus exclaimed, turning on the puppy, who was squatting by the head of the stairs, a puddle spreading beneath her. “The wretched creature isn’t even housebroken!”
“She can’t help it,” Portia said. “She’s so little and she’s been on the bed all night. She was probably bursting.”
“I was about to take her out,” Rufus said grimly. He caught Juno up by the scruff of the neck and carried her at arm’s length downstairs.