His leg pressed intimately against the juncture of her thighs and she could feel his arousal, solid and potent. An aching congestion began between her legs and she squirmed. It only exacerbated the sensation. She wanted him. She wanted him to kiss her, to touch her, and to sate this seemingly insatiable need to feel him, all of him, his body, tongue, and hands.
“I’m not what you think I am, Addie,” he said. “Jack Cameron doesn’t exist. He’s a fabrication.”
His words inspired a sudden chill, momentarily distracting her. She wouldn’t allow herself to be distracted. After years of living in a dry and barren place, she had suddenly found this oasis burgeoning with pleasure and promise and ardor. She wouldn’t let him dispel the magic, wouldn’t let him call her back to that sterile little world. Mirage or no, she wanted to stay here. And she would.
She strained upward, her mouth seeking his. For a second he resisted her, trying to speak. She took advantage of the access he provided, slipping the tip of her tongue along the opening seam of his lips. He moaned.
Her hands roamed low on his ribs, tugged at the waistband of his trousers. Finding no satisfaction there, they deliberately prowled along the hard shaft delineated beneath the tight fabric. He reared back, and she was reminded of her first impression of him, demon-angel.
His blue eyes blazed in his pale face and he rose on his knees astride her and, catching her roaming hands in one of his, pulled them above her head, holding her effortlessly.
“Pleasure,” he rasped. “Your pleasure. Yes. I’ll keep the promise, Addie. My own way.”
Slowly he released her hands and then she forgot everything else in the ecstasy of his touch. His hands kneaded her breasts, cupping the mounds reverently yet erotically, his thumbs working her nipples to engorgement. She twisted feverishly and he dipped his head to one breast, taking the full coral tip into his mouth and suckling gently.
Lightning shot along her nerve endings. She arched her back, offering him more, silently begging him to feast on her. His fingers joined the erotic play, stroking her flanks and skimming along her hips. They dipped beneath the ill-fitting garment, finding the exquisitely sensitive flesh of her inner thigh.
Too light, too gossamer. The pleasure between her legs swelled, a hot itch desperate for relief. Her hips bucked to greet his too-leisurely touch. The heel of his hand rode her mons, pressing hard, rocking against her as his finger slid along the moist cleft, unfolding her like the petals of a flower. Deliberately, he fingered the pulsing, oversensitized nub between forefinger and thumb, initiating an excruciatingly languid, rhythmic massage.
She gasped, bowing up from the soft pillows, her heels driven deep into the warm velvet. Fractured light chased across the backs of her eyelids as she spun out of control, into a vortex of pure sensual pleasure. The rhythm changed and he tugged faster, suckled more deeply on her swollen breasts, caressed more solidly her arms and thighs and throat as she panted, every muscle tensed and straining, striving for an end to the torturous stimulation.
“Let it go,” he whispered. “Let go!”
She twisted, panting, but he stayed with her, wouldn’t let her rest, compelled her and pushed her, lashed her with tongue and hand and voice and—
With a hoarse cry she found the release. Wave upon wave of distilled pleasure coursed and eddied and washed along her nerve endings, holding her at the peak of the experience for one timeless moment until, with a gasp, she collapsed, limp and spent.
Slowly she became aware that he had withdrawn his hand from between her legs and that his mouth was no longer on her. She was being petted and stroked with the gentlest of caresses. Her eyes fluttered open. Jack was braced over her, a tender expression on his tragic angel face.
He had given her everything, returned her pleasure in her womanliness, kept all the long-delayed promises. Why he had not even—
With a start, she bolted upright, nearly knocking him in the chin with her head. “You didn’t make love to me!”
A sardonic smile curved his beautiful lips. “I beg to differ.”
“I mean”—she was blushing again, a hot wave creeping up her neck. “I mean you didn’t—there can’t have been any joy—I mean what I just felt, you must want to feel that, too!”
He grinned.
“Don’t you feel it like that?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “What exactly did it feel like?”
She had the distinct feeling she was being teased. His tone was far too quizzical but the thick ridge of flesh still pressed against her thigh belied his casual tone. She loved being teased by him.
“Jack.” She reached up and feathered her fingers through his hair. “Make love to me. With all of your body.”
The smile died on his face, replaced by a look of desperate yearning. “Addie, I can’t.”
“I won’t get pregnant. I’ve just had my—I won’t.” She tried to pull him close for her kiss. “And I won’t force you to any commitment. I promise. I want to share this pleasure with you. Please.”
“Don’t.” He grasped her wrists tightly, pulling them down and away from him. Then, taking a deep breath, he smiled and gently replaced her hands in her lap. He knelt back on his heels, breaking away from her as he rose to his feet.
“If I stay here, seeing you like this, all flushed and rosy and sated, I will make love to you. I haven’t the strength to resist.”
“I don’t understand! Would that be such a sin?” she asked despairingly.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I think so.”
Jack’s hands were still shaking by the time he reached the Merritts’ townhouse after having fled the entreaty in Addie’s eyes. Thankfully, the early winter winds had somewhat cooled his body’s fire if not his longing. A good thing, too, he thought helplessly, because just the thought of Addie as he’d had her—or nearly had her, his mind mocked—swelled him painfully.
Unable to face any interrogation by Lady Merritt, he entered the house through the servants’ door at the rear and found his way to his room. Only then did he shed his overcoat to discover that his shirt still hung open to the waist. The sight brought a swift visceral memory of her hands smoothing over his back, stroking his chest, the taste of her nipple, the buck of her hip seeking jointure as he rubbed and fondled the sleek, heated fold of her clitoris. It had been part heaven, all hell, nearly burning him to a cinder with desire. He’d taken a masochistic sort of pleasure in sipping the cries of fulfillment from her lip, lapping the thin, glistening shroud of passion from her throat and breasts, matching the rocking, inborn cadence of her hips with his fingers. Because though he could not deny her request to be pleasured, he would not allow himself to know her fully. Not when she thought he was something else, someone he could never be, the chimera he had tried to tell her he was.
Not knowing the grief he might visit on her, the ruin he could bring Ted’s career, the shame he could heap on her family.
God! He pounded his fist against the wall. This had to end. He could not go on like this any longer. Before the week was out, come hell or high water, Addie must know the truth.
The decision eased the tension that coiled tighter each day since the charade had begun. Even though he knew the end of this could only bring him her damnation—and rightly so—the relief he felt was nearly palpable.
Wearily, he shrugged out of his shirt and pulled on a fresh one. He was supposed to meet Lord Mitchell in half an hour.
Though he longed to ignore the summons, he could not. He wanted to know why his former commander had supported his masquerade. Besides, going to Whitehall would give him some direction in a series of days that had grown ever more blurred and ill-defined.
Twenty minutes later he was ushered into Lord Mitchell’s oak-paneled office, to stand before the huge ebony desk that belonged to Whitehall’s newest “paper general.”
He was surprised to see Colonel Halvers there, also. Out of friendship, Halvers had sent him the names and copies of the documents pertinent to Jack’s investi
gation. He had never asked Jack why he wanted the information and Jack had never told him. He met Jack’s questioning glance with a small shake of negation.
The general glanced up from a sheaf of paper he held angled in such a way that Jack could not help but note the famous signature scrawled at the bottom: Gladstone. “Well, Cameron, so you didn’t die,” Lord Mitchell finally said.
“No, sir.”
“Who’d have believed it, eh?” He leaned back in the burgundy leather chair and motioned Jack to take a seat across from him. With a curt bow, he did so, removing his gloves and placing them on the desk before him.
“And now it appears you have become an artist.” Lord Mitchell’s bushy brows climbed into peaked ridges above his piercing black eyes. “An interesting change of career.”
“Life takes us in odd directions, sir.”
“Very odd,” the older man mused. “For instance, the War Office finds itself embroiled in a situation that demands the most delicate treatment.”
He looked up, gauging Jack’s reaction. “Here we were casting about, trying to find someone who is in a position to do something—and having no damn luck at all, I might add. Then, one day, a trusted officer mentions that he has seen a former captain of the Gordon Highlanders who not only is in a position to do his country a great service, but against all odds, seems to have begun to do so under his own auspices.”
The Gold Braid, Jack thought, that fellow . . . Ingrams.
“Would you not call that fortuitous, Cameron?”
“I might, sir.”
“Might?”
“It would depend on whether or not the former captain did, indeed, have the same goal in mind as the War Office.”
The general peered intently at Jack a minute before saying, “Let’s cut to the chase, shall we, Jack? We need you. This goes no further than this door, Cameron.”
Jack felt his face suffuse with indignation. He had never betrayed his honor as an officer and a gentleman. He had sacrificed much to pursue his private inquiries and meet the demands of duty. Mitchell must know that. His remark did not even warrant a reply.
He shot a hard glance toward Halvers but the man studiously avoided his gaze. The general cleared his throat.
“Well, damn it, man. You needn’t look so offended. It is not my career I am concerned with. It is the Old Man’s.”
Jack’s eyes widened with surprise. “Sir?”
“The Khartoum debacle has Her Majesty spitting nails,” Lord Mitchell said. “She blames Gladstone entirely. And the popular press is having a field day calling for the Old Man’s head. If only the rescue expedition had been a day earlier . . . or a week later,” he mused with cold-blooded logic, “but to have the damned troops show up a single goddamn twenty-four hours too late to save Gordon’s neck . . . !”
“It was a tragedy,” Halvers said.
“Tragedy my ass!” erupted the general. “Gordon had countless opportunities to leave Khartoum! He could have taken a packet on the Nile a half dozen times. And you know why he chose to remain there, sending his missives on the same boats that could have just as easily carried his hide to safety?”
The general did not wait for an answer.
“He was trying to force our hand! He wanted to provoke an incident so that Britain would be obliged to launch a rescue operation and, once in Khartoum, reestablish a military presence in the Sudan. Well, he got his wish . . . at the cost of his head!”
He settled back, his anger appeased by the reminder that “China” Gordon had paid the ultimate price for his stubbornness.
“The Old Man knew he was being manipulated by Gordon. Didn’t like it. Would have left Gordon there to rot if the populace hadn’t raised such a hue and cry. And then Her Majesty got into the act and demanded we rescue him. But we waited too long and now the Old Man is seen as either a heartless ogre or a blundering old fool. He can’t afford any more bad press. Not while he is making another bid for the Prime Minister’s seat. It would mean the end of his career.”
“I don’t understand what that has to do with me, sir,” Jack said.
His ire spent, the general leaned back in his chair. “Never did agree with that North African policy,” he murmured. “Now, what it has to do with you, Jack, is this. Gordon scripted myriad letters to the War Office during the siege. Most of them are just rambling nonsense. The man was obviously over the edge of reason. But in between the ravings were some things that we cannot ignore.”
He leaned forward and braced his forearms on the desk. “Several of his letters suggest that amongst the Black Dragoons was an officer who used his position and influence to allow the native slavers to operate without interference.
“Do you have any idea of the repercussions should these assertions prove to be true? If it should come out that one of the men—no, not just a man, a member of the premier regiment in the nation—used his position to manipulate troop movements so that slave trades could run freely between Africa and the Middle East, it would be a political nightmare!
“Right now the citizenry is crying out to punish the Mahdi responsible for lopping off Gordon’s head. All very good and well, but it could just as easily turn into a cry for withdrawal from North Africa and then Arabi and from there, God knows where it will stop!”
“And that would be disastrous?”
“You aren’t a fool, Cameron. Britain needs those protectorates. They feed the wealth that flows through this kingdom.”
“Slavery notwithstanding,” Jack said grimly.
“Exactly.”
Both men gazed coolly into each other’s eyes. Neither gave an inch of ground.
Finally Jack said, “Again, sir, I must ask how this involves me.”
“We have been working hard to expose the suspected traitor. But while we have compiled a dossier of information, we have no rock-solid proof. You are in a position to possibly secure the evidence we need.”
“I doubt that, sir,” Jack said. “Paul Sherville won’t let me near him. Thinks I’m the most contemptible catamite.” He’d made a serious blunder in antagonizing Paul Sherville. One he could ill afford. Somehow he had to reinstate himself with the man.
“Paul Sherville?” Mitchell scowled. “What are you talking about? We’re discussing Charles Hoodless.”
Jack stiffened even though he’d suspected as much. If these men knew Hoodless was their traitor for a fact, there was nothing he could do to avert Addie’s social ruin. Nothing he could do except to warn Ted and persuade her brother to take her out of the country.
Mitchell’s words sounded a death knell of all his dreams. Every secret unvoiced hope he’d harbored against all reason was shattered, blasted away in the space of seconds. Addie would never forgive him. It didn’t matter, not really, because he’d never be able to forgive himself his hand in her downfall.
“We have little doubt Hoodless is the fellow we seek.” He heard Mitchell’s voice as from a distance.
“Hoodless is dead,” Jack said, desperate for some way to salvage Addie’s future.
“Exactly. Dead. But justice must still be served.”
“Why do you think it is Hoodless?” he asked bleakly.
“Small details, but numerous. He was one of the few officers in Alexandria at a time we know a number of slavers off-loaded their human cargo. He delivered dispatches to his commanding officers on more than one occasion.”
“So was Paul Sherville—”
“Charles Hoodless fits every circumstance we can track this traitor to,” Lord Mitchell insisted.
It should have been funny, Jack thought. Somewhere, some twisted, malevolent deity was probably laughing his celestial ass off because here Jack was prepared to fight tooth and nail for the reputation of a man he knew to be a sadist and a misanthrope, the abuser of the only woman he’d ever loved. But that was exactly what he was going to do.
“Yes. It fits all the circumstances rather nicely, doesn’t it? One must admit it is convenient to have one’s primary suspect r
otting in his grave. I wonder if you would be so keen to name him if he were alive and could be brought to stand trial.”
The general stopped shuffling his papers.
“That would necessitate a court-martial, wouldn’t it?” Jack continued grimly. “But if the traitor is dead, why, then no one needs to know about it. Justice will have been served and your potential political disaster averted, wouldn’t it? I can see how you wouldn’t know anything of Paul Sherville.”
Lord Mitchell went tellingly still even as Halvers shifted uneasily on his feet. Jack waited, knowing his words were an outrage, wounding and galling to a man with Lord Mitchell’s stature and sense of honor. But they needed to be said.
“Damn your impudence.” Lord Mitchell’s hand balled into a fist atop his desk. “Yes! It would be convenient if Charles Hoodless were the traitor. But I have never bowed to convenience, not in thirty years. You have no right to question my integrity.”
“I would never question your integrity, sir. I am questioning your impartiality.”
“Then I suggest you question your own while you’re at it!” the general shot back.
Jack’s head snapped back as if he’d been hit. Of course, Mitchell would have seen. The only one who’d come late to the realization of where Jack’s interest lay was Addie herself. Even Ted’s snickers had begun long ago.
“Find out who the traitor is, look wherever your inquiries take you. I want the truth. But look to Mrs. Hoodless first.”
“Excuse me?”
“She undoubtedly has letters, notations. She may have books, bills of lading, receipts. She must have some records of where her money comes from . . . somewhere amongst her dead husband’s belongings there must be some piece of concrete evidence.”
“Why don’t you simply ask for her cooperation?” Jack asked stiffly.
“Think, man,” Lord Mitchell said in disgust. “If Mrs. Hoodless knows or even suspects what we think her husband did, how forthcoming do you think she will be in providing information that could result in turning her and her in-laws into pariahs?”
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