Raine’s gaze darted about, looking for any chance to break away. As if he’d read his thoughts, Jacques shoved him again, causing Raine to stumble over his chains. He swung around with a growl. The behemoth met his glare blandly. “I wouldn’t be testing me quite so early.”
Forcing down his ire, Raine shuffled across the yard through the open gates. Once outside he stopped, unable to help himself, and lifted his face to the weeping sky. For the first time in five years he drew breath outside the prison. He closed his eyes, vowing never to return.
“Go on, son.” Jacques’s voice was surprisingly mild. “Get in.”
Raine hefted his chains and flung them in onto the floor of the carriage. Jacques reached past him, snapping a padlock through the chains, locking it to a bolt on the floor. Damn the man’s caution! He’d have to find another opportunity to escape.
Unceremoniously, Raine climbed into the carriage. From across the carriage, boot heels scrabbled against the floorboards. Of course, she’d already entered. He peered around the dimly lit interior.
She was almost indiscernible in her black gown and heavy veils, being tucked as she was as far back into the corner as possible.
As though, he realized, he scared her to death.
Mindful of how his shoulders crowded the doorway and blocked the light, Raine slouched down in the seat opposite her, angling himself in such a way that he did not threaten her in any manner. The side of the carriage dipped as Jacques climbed into the driver’s seat. Raine kept his gaze carefully averted.
He could hear her short, agitated breaths, feel her tension. Jacques called out, and the horses plunged forward with unexpected alacrity, pitching her across the slick leather seat. Raine flung out a hand, his fingers closing around her upper arm.
“Take your hands off of me,” she whispered.
She was not commanding him. She was pleading. There could be no mistaking the imploring quality in her voice. As false as he suspected it to be, her performance changed things, her simulated fear working on him insidiously, potently.
His body reacted instinctively to the implicit submissiveness in her appeal. She was pretending that he held the whip hand, that she was some sort of anxious virgin closeted with a ravening beast. Her fantasy marched closer to the truth than she could know.
Her heat soaked through the gown, warming his palm. Even chained and at her mercy, even knowing that this was all a contrivance to aid her arousal, that none of it was real, he could not deny his own sexual response.
Role-playing be damned. He wanted her.
“Madame,” he said softly, lifting his arms and spreading open Jacques’ cape, displaying his shackled wrists and his naked chest, “as you can see, I am at your disposal, to do with as you please.”
She shrank back against the deep tufted leather seats. “You don’t understand,” she whispered.
“Oui. I do not. You will teach me, though. What is your pleasure, petite Madame? You touch; I am not allowed to touch? You arouse and then withhold the culmination of the arousal? Is that how you achieve satisfaction? Pray, do your damnedest by me. I am in a lather to be victimized.”
“Quiet!”
“Just tell me the rules of the game, Madame,” he said tersely, more than willing to pay whatever price freedom demanded.
He leaned forward and gently grasped her wrist, drawing her palm forth until it lay flat and low on his belly. He drew his breath in with a hiss of undeniable pleasure. “Can you feel my muscles clench with the promise of that which you withhold?”
She tried to snatch her hand back, but he kept it there, desperately trying to gauge the nature of his role. How much to ravish, how much to seduce. His very life depended on his ability to gauge her reactions. Once, a lifetime ago, he’d been well on his way to being a master of such sensual expertise.
“I was resigned to my celibacy, Madame,” he said grimly, “having long since purged myself of the tormenting memories of a woman’s soft body, a woman’s sweet mouth, a woman’s ardent embrace. You’ve resurrected those chimerical images. Given them substance, teased me with hope.” His voice grew fervent and low. She tried to tug away, but her efforts lacked conviction. She wanted to hear this.
“I am a condemned man.” He secured her other wrist, and heedless of her resistance, abruptly yanked her forth, tumbling her into his embrace. He hauled her into the vee created by his widespread legs. His arm snaked about her waist. She gasped, her hands pushing at his cold, damp chest. The feel of her velvet fingers against him stroked his nerve endings. His heart thundered in his chest with equal parts fear and arousal.
“Let me service you,” he growled, the line between playacting and reality blurring with the heady feel of her pressed against him. His patience with the game abruptly wore thin. She would find herself ravished in fact, if he played this part much longer. “Let me touch you. Fondle you. Inflame in you a fire to equal my own. Yield to me, Madame. Enjoy me.”
He tilted his hips forward, rocking lightly against her, while striving to keep the anger from his voice. Anger as much at himself as with her. For his body betrayed him, mind and spirit. “Here. Now,” he grated out urgently. “Let me take you. I cannot wait. Only unchain me,” he ground out in a low, harsh voice, “and I will swive you as thoroughly as a spring stallion at his first mare.”
“Let me go!” The veiled face jerked away and Raine cursed his impetuousness.
He’d read her incorrectly. He could ill afford so grave a mistake. He released her arms immediately.
Trembling she scrambled back into the seat opposite him.
“Forgive me,” he began in a hard, far-from-humble tone. But he’d been stretched a bit far, worn a bit thin. “I should not have allowed my desires to make me so bold.” His hot eyes lifted contemptuously to her concealed face. “But then, I thought you liked your captives vulgar and base.”
He waited for the inevitable: a blow across his face, an imperious call to turn the carriage around.
It did not come. Amazingly, she only squeezed herself further back against the seat. “Sir. Please. Be still. Be quiet. The guards might hear you. Only wait, I pray you,” she said urgently.
They drove a quarter hour longer in silence before the carriage lurched to a halt. Raine peered outside. They had stopped in the yard of an inn. Beyond the three-story building, Raine could see only the occasional light in the distance. They were near the outskirts of the city. Good.
The carriage door swung open. Jacques stuck his massive head in, eyeing Raine suspiciously as he fit a key into the padlock that secured Raine’s chain to the floor bolt. He unlocked it, wrapping the links around his fist and jerking Raine across the carriage.
With a snarl, Raine stumbled out.
“I will take him up,” one of the prison guards said. “Once he is in the hotel room, he is your responsibility. You best make sure he is returned by first light tomorrow.”
Jacques eyed the bloated French gaoler with ill-disguised disgust. “Has Madame ever neglected her part of the bargain?”
“No, make sure she does not grow lax in her … satiation. This one is wily. Reckless.”
Without waiting for a reply, the guard yanked Raine after him, leading the way around the back of the well-equipped hotel to the servants’ entrance and from there up a flight of stairs to the suites.
“Which room?” he demanded.
Jacques pointed to a linen-paneled door a few feet down the hallway. They were almost to it when it swung open and Madame appeared in the doorway.
Jacques grabbed Raine’s arm and thrust him bodily into the shabbily ornate room. A four-poster, hung with dull blue satin drapes, stood in the center.
“Madame,” Jacques said, handing her a pistol. “This will only take a few minutes. I will pay the guard and his partner and return. I would do so here, but I do not trust him to give his partner his portion, and I would not have … you interrupted. In the meantime, keep this pistol trained on him.” Jacques nodded toward Raine. “If he m
oves, shoot him.”
She took the gun, leveling it at Raine.
“I will kill him if he tries anything,” Jacques said tersely, and then, with one more worried glance at Raine, he stomped from the room, slamming the door shut behind him.
Raine stared at the gun. The pistol bore looked as cavernous as the entrance to hell, which, Raine allowed fleetingly, it just might be.
Without a second’s more hesitation, he acted.
His hand flew out, snatching the barrel and twisting it viciously. With a cry, she released it. He grabbed her wrist, spinning her around and slamming her back into his chest, pinning her free arm to her side.
His forearm pressed under her chin. With one hand he manacled her wrist; with the other he held the gun. Carefully he released the hammer and shoved the pistol into the waistband of his breeches.
“Scream now, Madame, and you will die now,” he whispered into the veiled ear so close to his lips.
In response she began struggling fiercely, her free hand tearing at his wrist. She kicked violently, but her movement was hampered by the thick layers of skirt. Still, one booted heel found his foot, crunching down on the instep and drawing from him a hiss of pain.
Savagely, he wrenched her chin back against his shoulder, bringing the veiled face near his mouth.
“Cease!” He heard her whimper, but her struggles abated. Immediately he became aware of her buttocks pressed intimately against his loins. He smiled humorlessly at his body’s heated response.
Since the moment she’d stepped into that damned cell, she’d bewitched him. Perhaps his years in prison had perverted his sexuality because, ’struth, she aroused him more than had a thousand fantasies he’d devised to keep him company over the long months.
“Please,” she rasped. “Please. Listen to me!”
“No, Madame,” he whispered. “You listen. Heed me well. I will never return to that place. Not alive. And you are the means for me to keep that vow. You are my prisoner now.”
She moaned, her face twisting away from his, the silky veil slipping against his lips. “Please—”
“Shut up,” he growled, as a sudden realization overwhelmed him.
He needed to kill her.
Without his doing so his chances of his gambit succeeding were well-nigh nil. Should he actually make it alive out of the hotel, he would not last an hour if he had to drag her along with him. And if he left her behind, she’d raise an immediate cry. He should kill her now: quickly, silently, now.
But he couldn’t. As much as every instinct for survival demanded it, he could not kill her. In more frustration than anger, his arm tightened around her throat. She began kicking again and he lifted her, hitching her against his hip, filling his arms with the firm, supple woman.
The simple act awoke memories of cool Scottish nights and passionate, yearning Scottish lassies striving towards fulfillment, struggling not to free themselves but to find a closer union, their arms wrapped about his throat, their thighs about his hips.
Aye. Not everything about Wanton’s Blush had been unpleasant. And that thought, the old devil-may-care humor that had once been the hallmark of his character awoke. The rash, heedless boy who’d died, unredeemed and unransomed in a French prison, was resurrected. At least one thing he would have of this night, one small victory he would claim.
Damned if he wouldn’t see Madame Noir’s face.
He grasped a fistful of dense, gauzy material. “Madame, you are revealed,” he said. “Voilà!”
He wrenched the veil from her head. Pins scattered at their feet, followed by the soft, soundless flutter of her veil falling to the floor. Loosened tresses, soft and heavy as damask silk, cascaded over his bare forearm in shimmering waves. Gold. Antique gold, healthy and luxuriant.
Confounded, he grasped a handful of the silky stuff and jerked her head back.
Fine skin. Creamy and utterly smooth. Blue eyes, dark blue. Near indigo. Frightened. Young. Very young.
Too young.
“Madame,” he said, easing his forearm’s pressure from her throat, “who the hell are you?”
The Passionate One
© 1999 Connie Brockway
ISBN: 0-440-22629-5
DELL
Ed♥n
The Passionate One Page 30