The Prospect: The Malloy Family, Book 10 Read Free

heard her right “Pardon?”
    “I am ashamed to admit it, however. A young woman should not have such salacious dreams.” She sounded prim and proper, speaking of naughty dreams. He didn’t know what to say. “I want to kiss you. And more.”
    Declan had considered Jo to be attractive, but he tried to keep it to himself, never allowing even a hint of impropriety to enter his mind. Now to discover she dreamed of him, wanted to kiss him and do other things. His body responded with a thick pulse of awareness. It sure as hell wasn’t the time for it, but she had started it.
    “It’s not proper for you to say such things to me. I know it’s the fever talking.” He started to step back, to get a few feet between them while he waited for the girl to return.
    Jo grabbed his arm and held him in place. She threaded her fingers through his. “No, it is not the fever. I have needed to tell someone about it. It has been inside me like a living thing. I do not know what to do.” Her voice had dropped to a broken whisper.
    His sympathy for the girl rose ahead of his foolish body’s reaction. She was an innocent with no experience with men, he guessed. The first time carnal need hit, it was confusing. He remembered fisting his cock in the dark corner of his room, the pain and pleasure roaring through him as he found release. He wondered if she had ever used her own hands to find pleasure, but he doubted it.
    “It’s okay, lass. You’re human and feeling lust for another is normal.” He patted her hand, feeling more like a parent than a potential bedmate. It was awkward and uncomfortable.
    “No, it is not. I have longings, deep inside me.” She pulled his hand to her belly. “Down low within. I do not know what to do except to copulate. That at least I have been schooled in.”
    Declan almost gasped, but it was a close thing. The woman had shocked the wits out of him. Who had schooled her in copulation and more importantly, why?
    “Yet no man wants to copulate with me.” She sounded forlorn, as though she’d been asking every man on the wagon train to bed her but been turned down.
    Ridiculous.
    “Your fever is truly taking a toll on you, lass.”
    “Will you copulate with me, Declan?” She asked the question so earnestly, and he reacted with a swift tightening of every muscle in his body. He had to fight the urge to agree to it.
    “You’re spouting fevered dreams, lass.”
    She frowned. “So you do not want to copulate with me either? What is wrong with me?”
    He was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. “That’s not what I said.” He leaned in close. “I would take you to bed every morning, noon and night if you were mine. You’d never leave my side.”
    There. He’d said it and confessed. He liked Josephine, quite a lot, and her quiet fierceness impressed him. Her dreams of lying with him and finding release, well, he knew what he’d be thinking of when he closed his eyes for the next ten years or so.
    “What’s happened here?” Buck Avery’s voice cut through Declan’s thoughts like a sharp knife. He turned to look at the wagon master, his bushy eyebrows drawn into an angry V. “What did you do to this girl?”
    Declan bit back the retort that threatened to burst from his throat. No matter how he proved himself to his boss, his past was always there. A stain on his soul no one would see past.
    “I brought her back to her family’s wagon. Nothing else happened.” A conversation that no one else would know about but Declan didn’t share that piece of information.
    Buck didn’t look as though he believed him. Before he could open his mouth to doubt Declan, Mrs. Chastain ran to the wagon, her hair escaping the tight bun at the back of her neck. She was as beautiful as her daughters, a smart and strong older version of all of them. Better yet, he knew she was a nurse and could help Jo.
    “ Mon Dieu , Josephine.” She assessed her daughter quickly.
    “After we stopped, I was helping Miss