Lessons of Desire

by Madeline Hunter

  She relaxed her body and stretched her naked beauty at his feet. She watched while he stripped off his shirt. “It will not be quite like that. We will have each other.”

  “Whatever you wish. I am beyond caring about the terms of this surrender.” He was beyond caring about anything except the desire getting tauter and more compelling by the instant. He dropped to his knees beside her.

  “It is no surrender, Elliot. It is a truce. One night when we enjoy our friendship.” She reached up to help release the buttons on his trousers.

  Her hands made his arousal savage. He gazed down at her naked body, so vulnerable and welcoming. Images entered his head and urges fired his blood. If she thought this was about friendship, she did not know men very well.

  “Certainly, Phaedra. Of course.”

  He did not mean it. Her soul knew that but she did not care at the moment.

  He looked sensual and beautiful. Even kneeling he was tall. His naked torso and shoulders towered above the straw pallet and her, making her feel small and…vulnerable. That sensation was a new one. She had never experienced it before meeting this man. It was not unpleasant. She allowed herself pleasure in its effect because she knew he represented no real danger.

  The light turned his skin to bronze and drew dark lines along the edges of his muscles. There was nothing soft to see. Not in his body and not in his face. Passion turned the Rothwell features hard even in this most amiable son. His dark hair, mussed and free from the day’s adventures, left loose locks skimming his brow and face. His eyes became black crystals when she reached to help him undress.

  His own hands fell away, leaving her to do it. He just looked down, perhaps daring her to go on, testing to see if she would retreat from boldness.

  She took her time while their gazes remained locked. Wonderful sensations enlivened her body. The titillation was more intense because she knew what was coming. Anticipation pulled between them so wonderfully that it became one of the best pleasures that she had ever experienced.

  Her service done, she trailed her palm up his stomach, savoring the touch of his skin and that masculine combination of soft surface and hard support. She loved the way desire intensified all the senses, even the intuitive one that told her how much he liked that touch and how the rest of reality was disappearing for him too.

  When she could reach no further she glossed down again. Her hand hit the loose lower garments. With slow caresses she coaxed them down, freeing him until the fabric puddled at his knees. Her fingertips learned his body inch by inch. She slid and pressed them over the hard swells of his hips and thighs. She feathered up the length of his erection to its tip and circled softly, then caressed more aggressively.

  He tried to contain what it did to him, but she could see the sensual fury taking control. It made all of him harder. His face and gaze, his entire body, became more taut.

  “You are in danger of being ravished without courtesy or ceremony, Phaedra.”

  She assessed the threat, and her body’s physical arousal. “I do not mind. I am more than ready myself.”

  He joined her on the blanket and kicked off his clothes. He settled his naked body over hers, resting on forearms that flanked her shoulders.

  A kiss. A deep, intimate one so slow and luring that an odd, sweet longing conquered her impatience. She parted her legs so he nestled closer, instinctively inviting him to join her now so that maybe the entire night would be so touching.

  He looked down at her. “You are a very generous woman.”

  “Not generous. If a woman is honest in these pleasures, she gains too.”

  “That is an admirable, democratic view. Only you are not being honest and you invite me to be a bad lover because of it.”

  “I acknowledged my carnal condition most honestly.” So honestly that this delay maddened her. She shifted her hips a bit to encourage him.

  His response was slight, subtle, and devastating. He pressed, but not enough. She felt him down there, barely touching her, a horrible, wonderful tease.

  He pressed kisses to her neck and shoulders. “You said you were more than ready,” he said between administering hot excitements. “That was not true, but perhaps you spoke in ignorance.”

  Indignation spiked through her preoccupation with the marvelous tingles in her blood. “I am not ignorant. I would think that is obvious.”

  He shifted his upper body so he could caress her. He watched his fingertips trail lightly around the base and swell of her breast, much as her own had recently moved over his hip and thighs. “A woman more than ready is not so composed as you still are. You are not nearly as ready as you can be. If you are not ignorant you know that. But perhaps you fear the abandon.”

  He brushed her nipple. A deep tremble shuddered, resonating from her jaw to her toes. Her body ached to pull him inside her so she might escape the sensual torture, no matter how delicious it might be.

  He touched her breast more purposefully, rubbing the tip, deliberately making the shudder repeat with growing intensity. She had begun this seduction confident and bold. Now the tide of that alluring vulnerability washed away her secure hold on herself.

  She could not resist the current. He seemed to sense her attempts to try. He moved off her body as if to announce that he, not she, would decide when she was ready. Stretched alongside her, his upper body rising on one taut arm, he caressed her with long, sure strokes, carrying the possessive touch to all her skin and limbs.

  Her breasts ached for his hand to return. The other pleasure and arousals that he incited made it worse. Frustration had her halfway to madness. She could not even embrace him while he hovered like this. His position forced her to lie open and submissive to his gaze and wicked hand.

  She could not embrace, but she could touch. Not all of him was out of reach. She sought his inner thigh with her right hand. She caressed upward and made sure she would not drown alone.

  He responded as she hoped, the way her essence cried for. He caressed her breasts so fully, so perfectly, that insanity threatened to claim her. The unbearable pleasure got wonderfully worse and the hunger for more filled her awareness.

  He lowered his head so he could use his mouth on her breast. A new sensation rang through the rest. One sweet and intense and so powerful it ripped her grasp from reality. She grabbed his shoulders in a fierce embrace so she would not be adrift alone. The vaguest perceptions entered the dark, focused place her mind had become. Sounds echoed the pleas in her thoughts and the needs wracking her. Hard holds and violent kisses pulled her deeper into pure sensation.

  A new touch. One welcomed and feared and so necessary that she thought she would faint with relief. Her consciousness screamed. She parted her legs more so he would not stop. Profound shivers collected there and spread, increasing the torture until she wanted to beg for relief.

  Then he was with her again, nestled between her thighs the way this had started, pressing slightly in that infuriating, incomplete way. He kissed her with savage command while he entered her, swallowing her groan of relief.

  Hard thrusts, deep and full, took her to fulfillment. The exquisite explosion of pleasure drenched her with peace and perfect sensation. She floated in it, awed by the violence of the climax and the physicality of the ecstasy.

  She emerged from the holy darkness slowly. Her arms felt the shoulders she embraced and her legs the hips they circled. He remained hard and large in her.

  She gazed through his damp locks at eyes still hot and hard with sensual sternness.

  “You seem well contented, Phaedra.”

  So well contented that she thought she could never be ill contented again. “Most certainly so.”

  He moved slowly, creating a long stroke on flesh still intensely alive with the aftermaths of her climax. “I do not think I have ever met a woman so adept at taking her pleasure.” He placed a firm kiss on her lips. Deep inside her the contentment became less so. New needs trembled subtly but distinctly.

  He made it happen
again. He gazed down, too composed, too sure of what he was doing with these slow, deep thrusts. “I do not think I have ever been so thoroughly had by a woman before.”

  “Do not blame me if you did not share the satisfaction. Normally, there is unity in such things.”

  “I doubt there has ever been unity with you. Your friends find their own pleasure while they service you in finding yours, but that is different.”

  She heard an insult in his quiet observations. If she were not so aware of the masculine power pouring out of him, if the shivers of new excitement were not preoccupying her, she might find the words to castigate him for his presumption.

  Only, her body’s contentment was dimming fast. Deep, resonating needs awoke, colored by confusion and teeth-gritting desperation.

  Oblivion beckoned again, but remained tantalizingly out of reach. She remained too much in the world, too aware of the man taking too much time, too conscious that he did not lose sight of her either.

  She shifted her hips to encourage more. Faster. He caressed with one hand to her right hip and pressed, stopping her. “You said we would have each other, and I want to have you slowly.”

  “It was very impolite of you to not be done with this when I was.” She had not even been aware that a man could control matters to this extent.

  She got the barest smile as a response. His hand left her hip. She thought he had capitulated. Instead he reached back and released her leg’s hold on his hip.

  He moved the other leg too. He pushed her thighs together beneath him. When he moved in her again the pleasure focused and spiraled so sharply that she gasped.

  The sensations stunned her. Conquered her. She could not deny them and she surrendered to the abandon. But her first climax meant this was different. She never totally lost hold on the world. She heard her own cries. His aura saturated her. The vulnerability returned, more nuanced this time, still exciting but vaguely frightening.

  He never lost control, never succumbed. Even when his thrusts quickened and increased in power, even when she was screaming at the moment of ecstasy, she sensed how he controlled the power to the end.

  There was unity this time. She was not alone in the oblivion. If anything his presence grew more prevailing. The glorious relief split through her the way lightning claims a tree, but he remained tangible through it all.

  In the aftermath, while her soul sought and collected the remnants of her self-possession, while she struggled to recompose a woman she recognized, misgivings slid into her thoughts. She felt him in her arms, his body covering hers. He was spent and contented and quiet, but starkly, awkwardly real.

  She had never felt at a disadvantage in these things before. Beneath her sated bliss, she lazily examined this new situation. She tried to decide what it meant and how it had happened.

  Surely this mysterious sense of selflessness would disappear when he left. It was only the night and the dark and the pleasure that caused it.

  He rose up on his forearms, lifting his weight off her. His gaze invaded deeply, and so hotly and intensely that she wondered if he was trying to burn a brand on her mind. Then he rolled off her and stretched on his side along her body. He soon fell asleep with one arm across her.

  He intended to stay here all night. She never permitted that with her friends, but she could hardly wake him and demand that he go back down to the blanket on the stones in the chamber below. Still…

  She stared at the dim lights playing across the stones above her. His gaze had been warm and touching during that last long look, but it had also demanded she acknowledge the power of their joining. It had contained the deep intimacy still binding them, and refused to permit her to disentangle from its hold.

  But there had been something else, something she had never seen in a man’s eyes before, at least not when a man regarded her.

  She had just gazed into the eyes of a conqueror.

  She wondered what it was that he mistakenly thought he had won.

  The door to his mind remained ajar. He heard her sigh and mumble in her sleep. Dawn was breaking and she would wake soon enough. For now he enjoyed the peace and her company and the cool air on his body while his mind finished sorting through other things.

  A sound had woken him to the vaguest indications of the new day. Now he peered through the silver light while a form took shape. Another basket was in the room, a new one. It rested right at the top of the stairs. One of the old women had brought more provisions.

  Phaedra slowly woke like a purring kitten. She curled then stretched her naked elegance, and turned away so he could admire the lovely line that dipped down her side and up her hip.

  She appeared very soft right now, and much younger than her years. Stripped of her dark habit, free of the armor with which she faced the world, she struck him as fragile. Last night had revealed this other side of her spirit, in ways unspoken and undefined. Her passion had been both worldly and ignorant, both confident and frightened. He had sensed the weakness and softness that she dared not allow the world to see. She lived a symbolic life that did not permit such contradictions.

  He wanted her again, because she was so beautiful here in the morning and because the naked Phaedra, both unclothed and unarmored, fascinated him. He guessed he would continue wanting her for a long time. He calculated time and place, night and day, while memories of their embraces tempted him.

  She came alert with a start, as if she heard his thoughts. She fell onto her back. Through barely raised lids she assessed where she was and who was with her. The vaguest blush tinted her neck down to her pretty breasts. Their tips tightened, and not because of the cool ocean breeze.

  Her embarrassment made her appear girlish and unsure. He wondered what thoughts caused the little frown she directed at her body. She was not so bold now, when darkness did not set events in another world.

  He pulled on some garments so she would not have to find her own way out of the place her choice had put her. He handed her the black pile of her dress. She sat up and drew it over her head.

  He sat down beside her on the pallet. He wondered if she would speak of last night, and what he should say when he did. This was not a woman who expected either gratitude or apologies. She certainly would not be looking for an offer of either payment or support. She expected absolutely nothing from him, and would interpret any such overture badly.

  “There is Alexia,” he said. “Yesterday you spoke of being alone, but Alexia is a loyal friend.” Her words had played in his head this morning as he lay with her. He wondered about her friendships as a girl, and if she had even had any. He guessed that not many mothers would allow their daughters to be friends with the daughter of Artemis Blair.

  She stretched to peck a kiss on his cheek. At some point today he assumed the latent intimacy would cease and she would treat the night as history. Now, however, she let him know with the gesture that she thought his concern charming at least.

  He took the opportunity to move his arm around her. Sitting like this on the straw bed, his back against the wall, a lovely woman’s head on his shoulder and the sounds and scents of the sea blowing in the windows, would not be a bad way to spend the day.

  “She made your brother promise to permit our friendship,” she said. “When Alexia negotiated that marriage, she made him promise. I just assumed…I declined her wedding invitation and wrote to say it would only cause strife with her new husband. She wrote back and told me how it was.” She inhaled deeply. Her voice grew small. “I wept when I read her letter. It was the most noble thing any friend has ever done for me. That she thought about me at all at such a moment—I still find it hard to believe your brother agreed to it. I am not a woman most men want their wives to know. A courtesan would be more welcome in Mayfair drawing rooms.”

  Elliot guessed that his brother’s generosity had been part of a larger scheme. Phaedra Blair was an easy concession for Hayden to make in the negotiations to get the woman he wanted.

  It would not do to put it q
uite that way. “Hayden has never been society’s slave. He wants Alexia to be happy. He knows that her friendship with you holds no danger to her.”

  “If he believes that, love has made him stupid. I do not resent the fathers and husbands who will not allow me to be received, Elliot. If I were them and believed as they do, I would make the same rules.”

  He looked down at her crown. Her hair appeared more gold than red now in the crystalline morning light. She did not want his pity for her solitary childhood. She did not expect the world to change to accommodate who she was. She merely wanted to be left alone to live in her heresies as she chose.

  Understanding that added a new warmth to the contentment he experienced right now. Unfortunately leaving her alone would be nigh impossible.

  “Lord Elliot.”

  Carmelita’s call did not come up the stone stairs. It bellowed up the exterior of the tower. At least one of them had intruded earlier and now they took efforts not to do so again.

  He got up and looked out the window. The five old women milled around Carmelita, talking closely and still keeping guard.

  “Lord Elliot, here comes Signore Greenwood.” She gestured down the promontory, past the men waking to the new day at its end.

  Greenwood was passing the docks, now filled with fishing boats. Noise in the town reminded Elliot why none had been put out to sea. Today was the feast of San Giovanni.

  The men let Greenwood pass. He said something to them as he walked by. He noticed Elliot at the window and waved greetings. His smile and jaunty gait indicated that he had good news.

  He bowed deeply to Carmelita and the old women, then peered up. “I am to be profusely thanked by you and Miss Blair, Rothwell. I have been so diplomatic, so brilliant, that I deserve a living in the foreign service.”

  “You convinced that fool to end this?” Carmelita asked.

  “I forged a compromise. Enough of one that the services of you ladies will not be required in the future.”

  Carmelita explained things to the old women. She met some resistance there. A little argument ensued but Carmelita won the day. All of the women started walking back to the town.