"How did you manage to come by this dog-eared conveyance?" he inquired, watching her hands on the reins.

Judith stared out between the horse's ears, the ordinary question offering a breathing space. After a minute she replied calmly, "Oh, I found it outside a tavern. The owner is probably so far under the hatches by now, he won't notice its absence for hours."

Marcus sat up straight. "Are you telling me you stole it?"

"No, I just borrowed it," she said with an airy wave of a hand. "I'll put it back when I've finished with it."

"You are an incorrigible, unscrupulous, card-sharping, horse-thieving hussy!" Marcus declared, truly shocked. "By God, someone had better take you in hand, before you do some serious damage and find yourself at the end of the hangman's rope."

He jerked the reins from her grasp and guided the horse over to the side of the road, in the shadow of a bramble hedge. The horse dropped his head and began to crop at the grassy verge.

"What are you doing?" Judith demanded.

"I don't know yet." He turned on the bench, catching her shoulders, and the minute he touched her that jolting current surged between them. Judith looked into his eyes, glittering with purpose, and she shivered, feeling the heat in her belly slowly turning bone and sinew to molten lava.

"You weave the strangest magic, Judith," he said, his voice a husky murmur, his eyes holding hers. "You confuse me so much I don't know whether I want to beat you or make love to you… but I have to possess you one way or the other."

Judith shook her head dumbly. She seemed to have forgotten how to speak. She knew only that she wanted his hands on her; rough or gentle, it was immaterial.

Marcus groaned in defeat and pulled her against him, his mouth coming down on hers with a crushing violence akin to punishment. Judith responded unhesitatingly to the bruising pressure, her lips parting for the determined thrust of his tongue. Her hands found their way around his neck, her fingers raking through the thick, dark hair. Deep within her was a warm, throbbing core of excitement and wanting that seemed to spread in waves through her body. She had never felt anything like it before and she yielded to the hot, red sensation, reaching against him as if she would be a part of him as his hands moved over her, outlining her body, learning its contours.

Slowly Marcus released her mouth for as long as it took him to readjust his hold so that he could pull her sideways onto his thighs. "I need a little more of you," he said softly, finding her mouth again. Her head rested against his shoulder, her mouth below his now more vulnerable and accessible to the deepening exploration of his tongue. His hands found her breasts, molding the soft swell beneath her jacket, and she felt in some way opened to him. She stirred on his lap, her thighs parting without volition as the deep red heat within her threatened to consume reason and reality.

"Dear God, but there's a passion in you, my lynx." He raised his head, gazing down into the bemused but desirous golden eyes.

"It must be the champagne," Judith mi'rmured, reaching for his head again, bringing it back to her.

Marcus pulled back, laughter sparking in his gaze, rippling in his voice, lust's flame abruptly reduced to a smolder. "Did I hear you aright? You attribute such a passionate response simply to an excess of champagne?"

"I think it must contribute," she said, grinning up at him. But the mischief couldn't hide the banked fires in her eyes, the deeply sensual curve of her mouth.

"Wretch," he said softly. "I don't know what you deserve for interrupting me like that." His hand moved again to her breast, ringers deftly unhooking the frogged buttons of her jacket. Judith quivered, the moment of levity past. The tiny buttons on her lawn shirt flew apart and his fingers were on her skin, warm, firm, knowing. She raised one hand to caress his head, her body arching upward into his hand with the sweliing urgency of her wanting.

"I have never felt like this," she whispered on a tiny gasp of excitement.

"That's much better," he murmured. "We'll have no more nonsense about the uninhibiting effects of champagne." He smiled at her, a glinting smile of male satisfaction. Holding her gaze, he dropped one hand to her knee, hitching up her skirt inch by inch. The warm breath of a summer's night brushed her bared legs as the skirt reached her thighs. His palm cupped her knees and slid upward beyond her stocking tops, over the satin softness of her inner thighs.

"If you knew how often I've dreamed of this," Marcus said, still smiling, still watching her face, as his fingers crept upward on an intimate, tantalizing invasion. "While you've been treating me to the sharpest edge of your razor tongue, I've been tormented with visions of your body, with fantasies of how your body would respond to mine."

Judith made no response, but her tongue touched her lips, her eyes narrowing as she drifted in sensation, the rapid rise and fall of her bosom the only indication of her mounting excitement.

Abruptly the self-enclosed world of arousal was shattered by the sound of voices, the tramp of feet, a harsh clarion call of a bugle. The horse between the shafts started and plunged forward into the hedge. Judith fell off Marcus's knee with a thump and a yowl of indignant surprise. Marcus, swearing, grabbed up the reins he had negligently let fall and hauled back on them, dragging the terrified horse out of the hedge.

"Hell and the devil!" Judith expostulated, clambering back onto the bench.

"Nicely put," Marcus approved, looking over his shoulder. "We appear to find ourselves in the midst of a regiment on the way to battle."

"Well, it's most inconvenient of them," grumbled Judith, smoothing down her skirt.

Marcus shot her a sideways glance, radiating amusement. It seemed they must take a brief respite from passion.

"Tell me," he said with deceptive innocence. "Why would you consider my proposal this morning to be without honor, whereas a scrambling tangle in a hedgerow like a milkmaid and her swain on May Day is perfectly acceptable?"

Judith combed her fingers through her disordered curls. "Is that a serious question, my lord?"

"Most certainly."

"You haven't offered to pay for my services on this occasion. Surely you can see the difference between a whore and a lover."

Marcus inhaled sharply and then slowly exhaled, steadying himself. Eccentric principles were at work again. But he didn't care on what terms they conducted their liaison, only in its fact.

"And you are willing to be my lover?" he asked quietly. "I want you, Judith, with the most powerful hunger. If you say so, I'll get down here and leave you to continue your journey, and I will never interfere in your life again. Otherwise…" There was no need to complete the sentence.

"I don't want you to leave," she said, meeting his eye with clear candor.

"And you know what that means?"

"I know what that means."

Relief swamped him. It was a pleasure to deal with a woman who was plain speaking and unvirtuous. He'd never had a taste for ingenuous, virginal misses, and found sophistication and honesty infinitely more arousing.

He glared impatiently at the ranks of men marching along the road. How the hell long was the column?

Judith shifted on the bench. "Where are we going?" The die was cast, and yet she was suddenly apprehensive.

"There's an inn up ahead," he said. "If I remember the road aright… Thank God, I think the column's passed."

He drove the cart back onto the road and resumed the journey toward Quatre Bras. Full dawn was breaking. Red streaks slashed the sky, finally permeating the gray with a deep rosy glow.

"How beautiful," Judith said. "I've always loved traveling in the dawn."

He glanced sideways at her. "It's an unusual time of day for travel."

She shrugged. "Perhaps. For other people."

Marcus said nothing. He didn't want her to expand on that… not now… not at a moment when he wanted her to forget the constraints of the past, to be driven only by the urgent desire that he knew matched his own. She was an adventuress, wicked and unfettered, and right now he wanted her just as she was.

A thatched-roof building loomed ahead in the gray light, a creaking sign swinging in the dawn breeze.

"Journey's end," he said quietly.

Or journey's beginning, Judith thought. Her head swirled with an intoxicating brew: equal parts excitement, apprehension, anticipation. She didn't question her actions or her motives. She was accustomed to following instinct, but even if she hadn't been, she knew she was in the grip of a compulsion that must be satisfied. She wanted the man beside her, his body on hers, within hers. She wanted to feel his skin, to touch every part of his body, to know his body as she knew her own. It was a primitive bodily hunger, and at this moment she was as red in tooth and claw as any lynx in the jungle.

6

The whitewashed bedroom beneath the eaves was sparsely furnished but clean. A rush mat covered the uneven planking, faded muslin curtains blew at the open dormer window, matching the tester of the poster bed. Judith walked across to the window, noticing distantly that her hands were shaking as she drew off her gloves. She looked out unseeing over the kitchen garden and the panorama of fields beyond. Behind her Marcus patiently dismissed Madame Berthold, the innkeeper's wife, whose anxious descriptions of the room's amenities were interspersed with dread predictions on the possible outcome of the coming battle.

Finally Madame was induced to leave and Marcus leaned against the closed door, regarding Judith's turned back, allowing the silence to fill the room, the anticipation to build again. He tossed his whip onto a chair and slowly drew off his own gloves. Judith didn't move.

Marcus came up behind her. He lifted the massed copper curls from her neck and laid his lips softly on her warm nape. A shudder went through her and he felt again that jolting surge of energy that met and matched his own. His lips moved to the soft vulnerable spot behind her ear, his breath whispering over her skin.

"My beautiful lynx, I want to see you naked." He drew her backward into the room, turning her to face him, taking her chin between thumb and forefinger. Judith read the brilliant sensual sheen in his eyes, as vibrant with longing as his words, and she felt herself slipping into some half world where the only reality was contained within the powerful surges of her responses. Her need and her hunger were his. She whispered that she wanted his nakedness as he wanted hers, and she ran her flat palm over his cheek, lightly tracing his mouth with her little finger. His hand came up to grasp her wrist, holding her hand steady, and he sucked her probing finger into his mouth, delicately nibbling the tip.

It was an exquisite sensation. The nerve endings in the tip of her finger seemed to be connected to other parts of her body. Her tongue ran over her own lips and her eyes glowed up at him, the sensual currents as frank and clear as his own.

"Sweet heaven, but I want you, Judith." His loins were on fire with wanting. "I have to look at you." He lifted her, feeling again her light, tensile muscularity. A true golden-eyed lynx.

He carried her to the bed and sat her on the edge, dropping to his knees to pull off her boots. He rose and drew her to her feet again. "I'll find it easier to undress you standing up," he said with a smile, kissing the corner of her mouth.

"I could do it more quickly," Judith offered.

Marcus shook his head, taking a handful of her hair in each fist, holding her face steady as he kissed her mouth. Her breasts pressed against his chest and she moaned softly beneath his lips. With a sharply in-drawn breath, he released her head. His fingers, swift and deft, moved to her jacket. The buttons flew undone and he pushed the garment off her shoulders with rough haste, before turning his attention to the buttons of her lawn shirt.

The soft mounds of her breasts, the nipples hard and erect widi desire, disappeared into his warm palms. Judith closed her eyes on a deep shudder of pleasure as his fingertips teased the taut crowns. He ran his hands down the narrow rib cage, feeling the shape of her, the smoothness of her skin, the delineation of her ribs, until he spanned her waist. He took a step backward and looked at her, bared to the waist for his hungry gaze, her hair lustrous against the whiteness of her skin, her breasts moving gently with her swift breath.