“Stop that!” she protested, grabbing for his hands. “You mustn’t—”
He cut her off with a long, needy kiss, the sort of soul-deep kiss she was rapidly growing addicted to. Philip hadn’t been much for kissing…or for silken caresses, either. Lovemaking had been a basic need he satisfied as quickly as possible, often leaving her craving the inexplicable.
But even as Byrne’s caresses built that same craving inside her, he began satisfying it. He fondled the breasts that craved his touch, fingered the nipples that yearned for his teasing, slid his hand up inside her thigh until his thumb found the pulsing center of all her cravings and…
“Byrne!” she cried as he rubbed her most impudently. She grabbed his hand. “I don’t think you should—”
“Hush, my sweet, you think too much.” He stroked her on that tender spot again, making her squirm on the table shamelessly.
Desperately, she fought to keep her sanity. “No doubt you’ve used…that line before.”
“Hardly.” He slid a finger inside her, and she gasped. “You met my mistresses—did they seem the type to need coaxing to misbehave?”
“No, but—”
“The trouble with you is that you have everything backwards.”
Now he was thumbing her nipple with one hand and thrusting his finger inside her with the other. She couldn’t catch her breath, couldn’t halt the rush of sensations assaulting her.
He went on in a husky rasp. “When you should be using that clever brain of yours, playing whist, you let every emotion sway you. But let a man try to make love to you, and all you do is think.”
He heated her cheeks and brow and temples with a series of kisses designed to do anything but make her think. She struggled against the fog stealing over her.
“There you go again,” he murmured. “You’re thinking. I can tell from your frown.”
“If I don’t…keep my wits about me…you’ll destroy me.”
He gave a low chuckle. “Such drama. Does this feel like destruction?”
He drove another finger deep inside her, making her rise up on the table with a cry of alarm…of delight…of pleasure. Blast him.
“You can think later,” he added. “Right now, just feel and enjoy.”
But if she gave herself to him in this, she would give herself in other…more dangerous…Oh, Lord, what was he doing to her?
She gripped his shoulders as he battered her defenses on every front, giving her another of his too-enticing kisses while he caressed her inside and out, her breast…her nipple…the soft, throbbing flesh between her legs. She’d felt a vaguely unsatisfying ache down there before, but Byrne’s caresses sharpened it to a piercing need that grew and swelled and consumed her below, carrying her forward in a rush until she was arching into his hand and gripping his shoulders and reaching for something…
She tore her mouth from his as the craving grew insatiable. “Oh, Byrne…please…oh yes…”
“Is this what you want?” he whispered, his motions growing fiercer, his breath thick and heavy against her cheek. “Is it, lass?”
“I want…I need…” It hit her suddenly, a flood of exquisite sensations she’d never known. “Byrne, yes!” she cried out, as they swamped her senses. “Byrne…oh, my word…Byrne…”
“I’m here.” His hand slowed to a sensuous caress, gentling her, soothing her as she shook from the waves of pleasure rocking her body.
And when it was over, and the excitement faded to a sweet contentment, he nuzzled her cheek, and said again, “I’m here, my sweet.”
For a moment, all Christabel could do was breathe and wonder and try to figure out how he—
“You’re thinking again,” he whispered, then laved her ear with his tongue.
“I’m not…I…what on earth was that? What happened?”
Moving his hand from between her legs, he drew back to stare at her. “You don’t know?”
“Should I?”
His lips tightened into a thin line. “Haversham should have shown you, yes. But I’m not exactly surprised that he didn’t.”
His condemning tone stung. She leaped to defend her late husband. “You can’t expect him to have been as wicked as you. He was a respectable man—”
“Who was too selfish to pleasure his wife.” His eyes bored into her, unsettling her. “Unless you found what we just did unpleasant, don’t excuse him for denying it to you.”
She colored. “Perhaps he didn’t…know how—”
“Then he should have learned.” His hands caressed her thighs. “Trust me, that’s the very least that a man…a lover…a husband should do for his wife. Though plenty of them don’t.”
“I see,” she said inanely. And she did. So very much. This was why married women clamored to play the role of his mistress. They wanted this heady, addictive pleasure that their husbands wouldn’t or couldn’t give them.
He bent to kiss her cheek, then her jaw, then her throat. “Now I see why you balked at sharing my bed. Because you didn’t know what you were missing.”
“That wasn’t why,” she whispered without thinking.
“Then what was the reason?” He tongued the pulse in her neck that still beat so wildly.
Because if I share your bed, I’ll lose myself.
She couldn’t say that; it would give him an advantage.
Still kissing her neck and her hair, he moved in closer, the tip of his erect shaft brushing between her legs. Panic seized her. Oh, Lord, she’d already given him an advantage. He’d pleasured her, but he hadn’t gained his own pleasure. And now he would expect to gain it in her bed. Unless—
Almost desperately, she reached between them to close her hand about his hot, rigid flesh.
He groaned. “Damn, that feels good.”
Tentatively, she worked her hand up and down his shaft, rewarded by another heartfelt groan. She’d caught Philip doing this once, watched secretly as he stroked himself to release. If he could do it to himself, then surely she—
“That’s enough,” Byrne growled, catching her hand to stay it. “I want to come inside you.”
“But I want to touch you as you touched me.” Frantically, she searched for an argument that would convince him. “Philip never let me touch him like this,” she whispered. Though it was true, it shamed her to reveal it. Still, if the choice was to let Byrne take her here, in her own parlor, like one of his wanton mistresses—
“Please,” she continued, “let me touch you.”
After a second, his hand fell away from hers. “If you want.” He thrust into her hand. “We do have all night.”
“I thought you had to be at the club.”
“They’ll send for me…if they need me,” he choked out. “With luck, they won’t.”
Then he surprised her by lowering his mouth to suck her breast. It was like tossing kindling into smoldering embers—her blood raced hot again, and that insatiable flesh between her legs began to throb. Oh, no, no, she mustn’t let him arouse…her…again….
Praying she was doing it right, she increased the rhythm of her strokes. His response was heartening. With a choked gasp, he tore his mouth from her breast and began pumping his hips against her hand. She couldn’t believe how fiercely firm he was, yet how silky soft his skin, like liquid velvet encasing steel.
“God…oh, God…yes, lass, yes…” he growled.
For the first time in her life, she understood what he must be feeling. And to think that she was the one giving this pleasure to him was intoxicating. Perhaps she wasn’t entirely inept at pleasing a man.
She stroked him harder. “Is that what you want?” Drunk with her own exhilarating power, she consciously echoed his earlier words. “Is it, Byrne?”
With a heartfelt curse, he threw his head back, the muscles in his neck stretched taut. “You know…that it is…you bloody, teasing…minx.” Reaching behind her, he snatched up the pair of drawers she’d tossed onto the table earlier and wrapped it about her hand and his aroused flesh.
“
Damn…damn…damn!” he cried out seconds later as his seed, warm and thick like buttermilk, flooded her linen-bound hand.
As she witnessed the blood flush fill his face and heard his breath come raggedly from his throat, a strange awe stole over her. So even the fiercely controlled Byrne was human.
Perhaps he was not so very controlled after all. Perhaps he was even capable of real feeling—
No, how could she even think it? Yes, he enjoyed lovemaking fully—what else could she expect of a man like him? But he would never go beyond that, a fact that he’d made clear in every act, every word. He wasn’t the sort of man to care for a woman beyond the bedchamber.
His head lowered, and his eyes slid open. “Well, well,” he managed to gasp as his breathing slowed. “For a woman who never before experienced pleasure with a man, you are…quite talented at giving it.”
Trying not to let the frank approval warm her, she dropped her gaze from his. “Am I?”
He wiped her hand clean on her drawers, then tossed them aside. “Oh, yes.” Bending to press his lips to her cheek, he murmured, “Time to move to your bedchamber, my sweet, where we can be more comfortable.”
A groan escaped her. He was not going to take this well, was he? “I…I would rather not,” she evaded. “I’m tired, and you have to be at the club—”
“I don’t, I told you.” He nibbled her ear as he laid his hands on her waist. “And if you’re tired, we’ll sleep a while.” A teasing note entered his voice. “Making love is even better in the morning.”
“No, I can’t.” She drew back from him, her head lowered. She couldn’t look at him. “I…I just can’t.”
His fingers curled into her waist. “You can’t?” he said disbelievingly. “You mean, you won’t.”
She nodded.
Seizing her chin, he lifted her head until her gaze met his, now icy gray as a winter storm. “You never intended for us to share a bed tonight, did you? That’s why you jerked my mutton.”
“I…What?”
“You’re a cock-chafer,” he hissed. “You excite a man, then throw him out of your bed without giving him relief.”
“That’s not true!” she protested. “I did give you relief!”
A muscle jerked in his jaw. “Yes, I suppose you did. In a fashion. But it wasn’t the kind of relief I wanted.”
She sighed. “Byrne, you have to understand—”
“No, I don’t. What are you so bloody afraid of, Christabel? That you might enjoy yourself? That you might discover you’re secretly as wicked as the rest of us whom you hold in such contempt?”
She dared not tell him that she couldn’t trust herself with him if she took him into her bed. But she could tell him some of the truth. If he could understand.
“I’m not like your other women, you know,” she whispered. “I’m not willing to take a man in parts. I can’t share your bed one day and blithely look the other way the next as you share another woman’s bed. It isn’t in my nature.” Drawing her chemise up to cover her breasts, she slid her arms through the sleeves. “And it isn’t in your nature to be faithful to a woman, is it?”
He was silent a moment, his eyes boring into hers. And even when he spoke, his answer wasn’t an answer. “So you want marriage then.” He spat the word as if it were loathsome.
She shook her head no. “I will never again place my future in the hands of some man who will end up—”
“Betraying you?”
She nodded.
A familiar calculating gleam entered his eyes. “Ah, but that’s exactly why what I offer is better than any marriage.” His hands rubbed her thighs, slowly, caressingly…temptingly. If Satan were a seducer, that was how he’d do it, too. “We can enjoy our pleasure without fearing that one of us will destroy the other—as spouses so often do. And when we tire of each other—”
“What if I don’t tire of you before you tire of me? Two people needn’t be married to destroy each other—just witness the havoc that Lady Caroline Lamb’s behavior has wreaked upon her lover Byron and her own family.”
He quirked up one eyebrow. “I somehow can’t imagine you threatening me with a knife at a dinner party.”
“Are you forgetting that I shot at you? If I came to care for you, and you treated me as you do your other women, I don’t know what I might do. As I said, it’s not in my nature to fall in and out of a man’s bed without a thought.”
His fingers dug into her thighs. “So you mean to remain celibate all your life? No marriage, no lover, no one but your aging father to keep you company?”
She swallowed. In typical Byrne fashion, he’d left out the most important thing—no children. Since she was probably barren, a new marriage would be difficult. Most men wanted women who could bear them sons.
With a sigh, she pushed his hands from her thighs and slid off the table. “I haven’t thought that far.”
“And no wonder.” Refusing to move away, he planted his hands on the table on either side of her to keep her trapped there. He bent his head, his mouth brushing her ear as he lowered his voice to an achingly seductive whisper. “Until tonight, you didn’t know what pleasure was. But now that you know—”
“I must be even more cautious.” Drawing back, she managed a smile. “Besides, you don’t want a jealous mistress who will demand to know where you’ve been, complain when you ignore her, and beg you to share only her bed. That’s precisely the sort I’d be. I drove my own husband to gamble and drink and…who knows what.” She couldn’t keep the pain from her voice. “Only imagine what I’d drive a debaucher like you to do—commit murder, probably.”
Anger flared in his face. “You didn’t drive that fool Haversham into anything, damn it. From the moment I met him, I recognized him as one of those thoughtless arses whose thirst for the tables blots out any other consideration in his life. That isn’t your fault.”
His words were like a surgeon’s knife probing flesh for a bullet. “Isn’t it? If I had made him happy at home—”
“Did you ever refuse to let the selfish idiot bed you?”
“No, but—”
“Did you make sure he was well fed?”
“Of course.”
“Did you plague him about where he’d been and what he was doing?”
“Not at first. To be honest, I was relieved not to have to play the marchioness in society when I didn’t know the role.”
“So he found you someone to instruct you, did he? Reassured you that you could learn those things? Did his best to help you feel comfortable accompanying him into society?”
His rather pompous dissertation began to annoy her. “Not exactly, but—”
“As I said, a selfish, thoughtless arse. Tell me, Christabel, when you first met him, was your husband a gambler?”
She stuck out her chin. “Moderately so.”
“How do you know he was moderate? Did he ever promise to be somewhere and then not appear, pleading headache or some other nonsense? Was he always the one to suggest cards as the evening’s entertainment? Did his pay often mysteriously disappear—”
“Stop it!” She shoved his arm aside to escape his too-accurate description of a man whose proclivity for gambling even her father had questioned. Once she’d put some distance between them, she faced him. “You have the audacity to call him selfish and thoughtless when you daily show a complete lack of feeling for the women you bed—”
“The women I bed are as uninterested in my feelings as I am in theirs.” Eyes glittering, he stalked up to her, apparently unconcerned that he was stark naked. “They want the same thing I want from them—pleasure and nothing more.”
“Are you sure? Is that why Lady Jenner went out of her way to provoke me this evening? She was halfway to scratching my eyes out.”
He went rigid. “Her pride was wounded, that’s all.”
“Perhaps. But even if you’re right about her and the others, even if they did want only one thing from you, I can’t be like them. So we’re back to where
we started. I simply can’t be the sort of mistress you want. I know my own nature well enough for that.”
A muttered oath escaped his lips. “Fine. Then perhaps we shouldn’t play Whist for the Wicked anymore.”
“And perhaps you should stop trying to seduce me.”
He arched one eyebrow. “That, my sweet, is not in my nature.”
Coloring, she bent to pick up his drawers where he’d left them on the floor. “Then perhaps you should go. Here, take these.”
With a glance that would have frozen ice, he walked past her without taking them, headed for the door. “Keep them. You won them fairly.”
“Byrne, please, at least let me call for your overcoat.”
He stared at her with annoyance. “After tonight, your reputation will be severely tarnished anyway. Since that doesn’t seem to bother you, why do you care if a few servants gossip about how I left your house naked?”
“I just…do.”
His jaw went taut as he laid his hand on the doorknob. He hesitated, then cursed again and opened the door wide enough to call through it. “You there, footman! Bring me my coat.”
There was a ruckus in the hall as someone hurried to do his bidding. Moments later, Byrne thrust his hand out and came back with his coat, then slammed the door.
“Your footman was limping. Another of your ex-soldiers?” he growled as he pulled on his coat and began to button it with jerky movements.
“Yes. He’s missing a foot.”
“Of course.” He gave a harsh laugh. “Only you would hire a footless footman.” He cast her a hooded glance. “You’re the most maddening woman I’ve ever met, do you know that?” He laid his hand on the doorknob again. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
“What?” she asked, bewildered.
“Mrs. Watts is coming back, remember? After she leaves, we’ll play cards again—respectable cards, mind you.” He sneered the word respectable. “And tomorrow evening we’ll go to the theater, so people will see us together socially. Unless you find that activity not respectable enough for a pretend mistress?”
“No, that’s fine,” she said, a little peevishly. After all, she’d only told him the truth about what she felt. No need for him to be so childish about it. “I like the theater.”
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