The man at Robertson’s side, who called himself Beaumarchais, concurred. Tall, with a lacquered elegance that extended from the brilliance of his pomaded hair to the patent shine of his shoes, Beaumarchais gave a guttural sigh. “A superb suggestion, my dear. Who knows what the night will bring?” he said, directing his words at Julia. But it was the lifting of his dark brow, the insolent drifting of his eyes over her form that prompted the subtle yet defiant uptilt of her chin.
Strathmore felt another unfamiliar spurt of irritation. Julia’s face was unreadable when Beaumarchais’s gaze seemed to linger on her breasts hidden in the shadows of Strathmore’s evening coat. Normally, he was slow to anger, but something in the cool hauteur of Julia’s face set off a series of small explosions in his chest. He clenched his jaw, the annoyance a foreign emotion. Wadsworth droned on while Strathmore began contemplating the more concrete details of getting through the evening successfully. He reached for another drink—brandy—and studied Julia over the rim of his glass, then drained it.
He was getting soft. He’d already decided that he wouldn’t kill her and now he was hesitating fucking her.
God damn himself to hell and back. He was not an unlucky man but for some unforeseen reason, all logical thought had fled him the moment he’d laid eyes upon a dreary spinster who trailed in her wake the aroma of musty books, copper, and iodine. He was acting like some damned Lothario, strung as tight as a bow, because of a woman who conjured, of all things, feelings of protectiveness. He nearly spewed his last gulp of brandy onto the carpet. Protectiveness? He knew better than anyone women’s capacity for cruelty. They truly were the stronger sex.
He considered Julia Woolcott, meeting her eyes for a moment, like the glancing of fencers’ foils. She was untried, his gut told him. He hadn’t expected that. He hated virgins, never had one before in his life, not even when he was offered the youngest daughter of the Sultan of Perak, and he was not about to start.
He pretended to listen but didn’t hear the words tumbling from Miss Woolcott’s lips as Beaumarchais and Robertson leaned over her like two slavering dogs with a bone. He listened as Beaumarchais regaled her with details concerning Wadsworth’s cache of lewd memorabilia including erotic drinking vessels and phallic sculptures made of precious stone. Robertson invited her to join him the following day to discover the contours of Wadsworth’s secret garden wherein the shrubbery resembled the female form, with two hills topped with pink flowering shrubs and a tightly cropped triangle of forest.
Strathmore forced himself to straighten away from her chair. Nothing marred the serene innocence of her expression. No coquettish guile. No flirtatious smile. Only the concentrated, intelligent gaze that, he convinced himself, hid more than it revealed.
Fuck. What was he going to do?
Somewhere in his peripheral vision, the sinuous Felicity hanging on his arm, Wadsworth clapped his meaty palms, his pronounced jowls and heavy joviality urging his guests to be seated. The heavy double doors dividing the salon, embossed with cavorting nymphs and satyrs, began to open slowly, as if by unseen hands.
Chapter 4
The light dimmed. The aroma of burning wax scented the air. Julia shivered. Strathmore’s hand held her arm in a firm commanding grip as he eased her back into her chair. The huge double doors parted, candlelight falling upon and then playing with a set of flowing curtains.
“Follow my lead.” His breath was hot in her ear as he stood beside her. She didn’t have to turn her face toward his. His image burned behind her eyes, hitching her breath as when he’d first appeared on her threshold in his elegant evening clothes, clean shaven, stark featured, his gray eyes unfathomable.
“I am quite willing to go through with this, Strathmore,” she said stonily, her mind focused on the goal of gaining purchase into the world of Montagu Faron.
“That remains to be seen.” His voice was low, unassailable with a hint of aggression coloring his usual inexpressive tone. Suddenly, she was all too aware of the diaphanous dress clinging to her body in the most tenuous way, reminding her of why she was there. She glanced around furtively, at the intense profiles of the men and women in the room, their mouths slack with lust as they watched the scene unfolding before them.
Julia swallowed hard, counseling herself to become the observer, the eye behind the lens as she watched a group of three men and two women embracing on an oriental carpet. They were slick with some kind of unguent, offering their nakedness to each other to caress and play. Their bodies were like the Greek and Roman statues she had seen at the National Gallery in London, the men taut and rippled with muscles, the women subtly rounded with high, bouncing breasts.
She watched, her muscles tensing with each movement and each caress, unbearably aware of Strathmore’s strong hard hand at the nape of her neck, conscious of the fleeting stabs of pleasure, invading her senses. Her mouth dry, she watched the two women twisting and bending to give the men purchase to every orifice of their bodies. She tried to avoid the obvious—the hard upthrust appendages of the men, the shadowed hollows of the women.
Was it a dream? Or a nightmare? Her exposure to the opposite sex had been limited to a string of tutors, one paler and more harmless than the next and Randolph Codger, the son of the local vicar. She forced herself to focus on the memory, anything to take her mind from the abomination taking place in front of her. She and Randolph were more excited by their passion for William Gruber’s Stereopticon view camera they shared than a passion for each other. She recalled one furtive kiss, after a Christmas reverie, buoyed by mistletoe and rum punch.
She kept her eyes half closed. Her gaze was riveted on the scene before her, setting her mind reeling, the memories of Randolph Codger dissipating like dew in the heat of the salon. It was nothing like she had ever read, nothing like the books in the library at Montfort. Even the specter of marriage had never hinted at such unholy fusion of writhing bodies. The prospect of matrimony had never been on the horizon. Meredith’s disquiet dictated they rarely move in London circles, which didn’t allow much opportunity to meet possible matches. If she and Rowena had harbored such desires deep in their hearts, they would never have let their dear aunt know. Julia had lost herself in her studies and photographic pursuits and Rowena in her love of the outdoors.
She had boasted to Strathmore just hours earlier of her sophistication. How absolutely absurd. She flushed at the memory and at the two women offering their breasts to the men who began sucking them noisily while they rooted their hands in the women’s nether regions. They appeared as one twisting, sinuous beast, one body merging with the next.
Julia’s pulse pounded in a combination of burning shame and desire. Need, as unfamiliar as rain in a parched desert, flooded her chest. She yearned to regain control. Watching was unimaginable, unconscionable, impossible—as the two men grabbed one of the naked women, slick with oil, and pushed her to her knees.
Julia squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them again, the woman was being serviced from behind while she attended to the other man with her hand and her mouth. The remaining man and woman, beautiful and naked as Adam and Eve, walked hand-in-hand into the room toward the spectators.
Toward her. Spots danced before her vision and she felt faint, she who prided herself on her quiet, cool reason, her unflappable calm.
She bit back a moan of pleasure and shock. Worse, she was blindingly aware of Strathmore so close to her she could feel the heat from his body. She licked her dry lips. Good lord, he was watching her every reaction, from the pulse jumping in the hollow of her neck to her thighs that she squeezed tightly shut in an attempt to halt the flow of sensation raiding her body.
She dared herself to take in the scene immediately around her. Robertson had seated himself on one of the settees and pulled the naked woman onto his lap, immediately latching onto her breasts. Julia jerked her gaze from the sight only to see Wadsworth and Felicity join the nude man in one of the alcoves. Before she could look in the other direction, Julia saw Bea
umarchais make his way toward her, already loosening the complicated knots of his cravat until it billowed like an unmoored sail behind him.
She made a sound of alarm at the back of her throat. Suddenly, she was pulled violently to her feet.
“Play along.” Strathmore’s breath was hot at her ear and on the soft skin of her neck. He covered her mouth, and she let him. He kissed her with an urgency that startled her more than the bacchanalian scene transpiring a few feet away. He cupped her head and drew her mouth to his in a slow kiss that sent shock waves from the top of her head to the soles of her feet.
She could scarcely absorb the sheer sensuality of it, and her legs spread to receive him—the flawless connection of their two bodies, hip to hip, groin to groin, perfect complements. Breathing was an impossibility. Pulling back slightly, he brushed his lips over hers, back and forth until he felt them tremble. He kept his hands on her shoulders, using only his mouth to arouse her. “Give me more,” he said so quietly she thought she misheard. “We must be convincing, unless you want company.” Then he took her lower lip between his teeth.
Julia was dying, the breath robbed from her lungs. She was convinced bursting into flames would be next, as Strathmore’s lips feathered their way to the base of her throat. He directed his attention to the sleek slope of her shoulder, and she thought his evening coat slid to the floor. A loud roar hummed in her ears as heat shot through her veins, and whether Beaumarchais or the devil himself was at her heels, she didn’t care.
“I shall try.” Her voice was husky close to his ear. She felt her fingers curling around his waist in exquisite anguish. Instinctively, she drew his head to her breasts amazed to see that with one flick of his fingers, the clasp on her gown gave way, allowing the silk to fall from her shoulders to linger on the upper swell of her breasts. She couldn’t believe simply one hour earlier she had cowered behind the heaviness of his suit coat and now she was directing her aching nipples toward him.
Strathmore drew back, resisting, playing some ungodly trick to keep her in languorous suspension, his eyes flickering with need as he took in the swelling of her breasts against the silk.
“Oh yes,” she breathed, dissolving when he pressed his lips to the base of her throat. She wrapped her arms around him possessively, and instantly his mouth came down on hers with a violence that spoke of some submerged exasperation. She felt his hands down her back, stroking her buttocks as he maneuvered them against a wainscoted wall on the far end of the room, the weight of his body illogically reassuring and alarming at the same time.
Thoughts no longer mattered. Reason had flown through the high mullioned windows into the dark night air. Everything was mired in sensation, an incandescence that glowed from the depths of her abdomen to her highly sensitized skin.
Coming back down to earth, not gradually but abruptly, she felt another pair of hands—strange hands, not Strathmore’s—grasping her buttocks. She drew back from the arms that held her, turning her head away to see Beaumarchais, his palms sliding insinuatingly over her waist and backside.
“I believe I know what kept you two so long from dinner,” Beaumarchais said unctuously, his grasping fingers slicking over Julia’s silk sheathed hips. The candlelight gleamed on his pomaded hair, brushed back from a narrow forehead. “You have had your fill of each other, surely. Now is the time to share, no?”
Before Julia could register the demand, Strathmore slid his body between her and Beaumarchais. “As a gentleman, perhaps you should ask the lady,” he said smoothly. Other voices, as though coming from a long way away, intruded. All the while Strathmore’s hands grasped her hips in a show of possession as he pulled her tightly to his body. “What would you like, darling?” he asked for the benefit of their audience when he knew exactly what she craved.
A thousand champagne bubbles burst in her head. You, she wanted to answer. The rest of the room dissolved leaving only the two of them in a nimbus of light. Her lips parted but no words came.
Wadsworth and Felicity, her dress pooling around her waist, her torso completely naked, followed in Beaumarchais’s wake. The small, rotund man had his arm around her shoulders, slipping down over a pendulous breast to finger a rouged and swollen nipple. Felicity arched her back against him and ran her hands over his generous waist like the enthusiastic actress that she was.
“Well, my darling, what shall it be?” prompted Strathmore. “Remember,” he murmured in a low growl, placing a hot, lingering kiss on the skin of her neck, “we are not alone.”
It was almost as though he wanted her to declare it, state her need publically to the people crowding around them, the musk of sex scenting the air. How could she ever have believed she could find her way to Faron through that thicket of depravity? Confused, hovering between an incendiary desire she had never experienced before and a pulsing revulsion mixed with dread, she forced herself to form the words.
“I want…” she whispered. What did she want? And did it matter? What had taken her there and why? Faron. She thrust the thought aside. “I like…” she tried again.
“To take your pleasures slowly, isn’t that right my pet?” supplied Strathmore, coolness in his eyes despite the heat surrounding them, despite the heat of his hands on her shoulders, sliding up her arms, smoothing the midnight silk and, with dexterous fingers, covering her bare shoulders.
The small coterie moved closer, a bath of fetid breath and unslaked lust. Julia burrowed further into the warmth of Strathmore’s body and watched as he flicked his gaze over Felicity who returned his glance with sharp appetite.
“Alas, my friends”—the words rumbled from his chest while his eyes lingered deliberately on the sultry blonde—“my sweet Julia has suddenly developed a certain possessiveness. Most unfortunate.”
“She will change her mind soon enough,” said Wadsworth, his arm still resting about Felicity’s shoulders, his eyes bulging like a carp’s, upon Julia.
Strathmore made a low sound in the back of his throat. “You would not wish to see her upset, trust me Wadsworth. Speak with your footman if you’d like to know more. She exhibits a nasty temper when provoked, like a veritable wildcat in a temper.”
Beaumarchais’s lips thinned. “Then why did you bring her as your guest, Strathmore, if she won’t play?” He narrowed his eyes. “She’s a good enough looking piece, young, firm-fleshed from what I can see. And those legs, a man can’t help but wish to see what heaven lies between them.”
Julia’s head swirled. Despite the vastness of the hall, the walls were closing in around her, robbing her of air. She took a deep breath, sagging against the hard chest and arms that held her. It had to be an illusion. She was an actor without a script in a mad piece of theatre. Nothing was real. Except Strathmore.
If only she could follow the thread of his logic, if it indeed did exist. Wildcat, temper, possessive.
“You’ll get your chance, Beaumarchais.” Strathmore’s assurance, and his words, burned through the thin silk of her gown. “She will prove much more biddable if I indulge her for the moment. Take the edge off the lady’s appetite, as it were, prepare her for the main event.”
The image was obscene. Julia turned in Strathmore’s arms, forcing herself not to bolt from the room like a child fleeing from monsters. Desperation washed over, suddenly clearing her mind. Strathmore wanted to be alone with her. Alone. Without Beaumarchais, Wadsworth, and the others.
At that moment, it was like savoring the sweetest salvation. She lowered her lashes and pursed her lower lip, hoping she was the picture of hot-blooded truculence. Sighing long and loudly, she improvised, “I want you, Strathmore. Now.” It was a voice that was not her own. Her heart pounded wildly. “You know how much more tractable I am when I’m given free reign.” The last three words were delivered in what she hoped was a sultry tone.
Strathmore gave a short laugh and dropped a casual, stinging hot kiss to her lips. “We’re not finished here, my darling, that’s true, but you know I cannot deny you when you’re in on
e of your intriguingly volatile tempers. I still bear the scars of last night’s passion, you’ll recall.”
“We have never even started,” growled Beaumarchais too close for comfort.
Desperation made her brave. She had eyes only for Strathmore, cutting Beaumarchais with a chilly glance. “You know how I get…and you know what I want,” she directed a pout at Strathmore with the imperiousness of an empress. Forcing her movements to slow, she languorously swept her palms down the front of her breasts, past her waist to the apex, just above her thighs. And held his gaze.
For a moment, she thought she’d almost had him convinced. A slow fire glinted in the gray of his eyes before he turned to Wadsworth and his coterie. “Believe me ladies and gentlemen,” he said slowly, his voice lower than usual, “we shall all be better off if I first slake the lady’s prodigious enthusiasm. After which, I’m certain, we shall continue our play with renewed vigor and appetite.”
“By God, you had the whole afternoon with her in your rooms, Strathmore.” Felicity spoke in a high breathy voice.
Something about the woman pulled Julia’s nerves taut. “And it clearly wasn’t enough,” she said throatily, deliberately dismissing the older woman. “With Strathmore”—she emphasized pointedly, wondering if desperation could make an actress of her after all—“it can never be enough.” She didn’t have to feign the rising anger in her tone.
Strathmore smiled wolfishly, the picture of a man with his hands full of demanding woman. “Hush, no need for one of your outbursts,” he said pulling her closer for the benefit of their intimate circle. With the fog of desire and revulsion beginning to lift, Julia felt the cool air on her bare skin just as Strathmore tilted her face toward him for a kiss. He began moving them, a slow languid dance, toward the hall’s entranceway. Miraculously, the small crowd parted.
The Deadliest Sin Page 5