When he’d wept in her arms, she would have offered all of herself to save him shedding one of those difficult tears. It hadn’t been only the worldly demimondaine who suffered for him, but the lost girl who skulked inside her. And Leo’s yearning mother. And the free woman she hoped to become when she abandoned this decadent life forever.
She didn’t understand the feeling. But she recognized its power. And its appalling perils.
She’d never felt connected to any of her lovers before. But from the beginning, Lord Erith had set out to foster a link between them that she now had no power to break.
Curse him for luring her into this quicksand. He must know that any genuine emotion between them was doomed to end in heartbreak and loss.
He was an aristocrat at the summit of society. He had a family to whom he owed duty and care. She was a whore.
For both of them, the affair could only be a brief interlude.
Slowly, she made her way up the stairs, doggedly rebuilding her defenses with every tread. She was strong. No man could do her lasting damage. She would survive anything.
Still, as she opened the salon door, knowing Erith waited, she was trembling as she’d trembled when he kissed her in the rain.
Erith sat in a large leather armchair turned away from the fire. He had a book on his lap and his hair was ruffled as if he’d repeatedly raked his fingers through it. In his black silk robe, he presented a picture of perfect relaxation, with one hand holding his book steady and the other curled around a half-full glass of claret.
She tried to stem the wild fountain of pleasure that the sight of him set flowing. But it was like trying to stop a thunderstorm or a tidal wave.
He looked up at her entrance and gave her a sweet, lopsided smile.
She’d seen him rakish. She’d seen him sardonically amused. She’d seen him laugh.
But this smile was so exquisitely tender, it made her heart turn over in her breast. And sent any chance of her playing the cold cyprian flying to the winds.
Stop it, Olivia. He’s a man. All he can offer is pain, slavery, and destruction.
Too late for warnings. Under that smile, her icy, barren soul expanded as though it basked in the sun’s warmth after endless winter.
Would she freeze again or was this feeling a portent of summer?
“Good evening, Olivia.” Even his voice sounded tender.
“Good evening, Lord Erith.” Devil take her shaky response. She closed the door after her and took a few steps into the room.
“So formal?” He placed his wine on the mahogany side table.
Her eyes followed the movement. A bundle of colored silk rested on the polished surface near his glass.
Ribbons? She dismissed the small puzzle as she found herself drawn back to studying his face.
“Erith.”
“Julian.”
She didn’t know why, but using his Christian name denoted surrender. Nonetheless, she nodded. “Julian.”
The smile deepened. “Thank you.” He spoke as if she’d granted him the greatest reward.
She sank into the chair opposite, never taking her eyes from him. She couldn’t read his mood. What she did recognize was that he hadn’t retreated from yesterday’s intimacy.
After seeing him in the park, she’d wondered if when they met again he’d pretend they had never shared difficult confidences in the quiet watches of a rainy night. It would be simpler if he chose that path. But then he never did choose the simple option.
He hadn’t yet touched her, although his state of undress was a message in itself. Even so, his physical reality captured her so strongly that he might as well have grabbed her up against him.
His eyes were a soft, misty gray. Hard to remember a time when she’d considered that steady gaze steely and unemotional.
Gray, God help her, was quickly becoming her favorite color.
“You’ve waited all afternoon.” An inane remark, curse her for a bedazzled fool.
He bent his head in agreement. “Yes.”
“I was with Perry.”
Another inane remark. Anyway, she didn’t owe Erith explanations of her whereabouts. That was the bargain they’d made.
But she was despairingly aware that what hovered between them had nothing to do with that cold bargain and everything to do with a dangerous, world-shaking emotion she could never acknowledge. Even to herself.
Yesterday had changed so much. If only he hadn’t followed her to Kent. She might have some faint hope of dousing this wildfire inside her if he’d stayed a stranger.
The smile still teased his mouth and he hadn’t taken his eyes off her. In all her years as an object of desire, no man had ever regarded her with quite that degree of attention. It was unnerving.
Except she couldn’t look anywhere but at Erith either.
“No matter. I needed time to think.”
She avoided the obvious question. She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer. “Have you eaten?”
“Later. Have you?”
She’d had cakes and sandwiches with Perry mid-afternoon and had felt mildly hungry when she returned to the house. Enough to seek some fortification before her night with the earl. But this strange encounter sent any thought of food to oblivion.
“I’m fine, thank you.”
He laid his book on the table with the wineglass and the pile of ribbons. “Good.”
She leaned forward in her chair. “Erith, I hate to admit this, but you’re making me nervous.”
He smiled again, or rather the curve of his lips stretched into something closer to real amusement. “You have nothing to worry about.”
The hands she braced on the arms of her chair curled into fists. “Now I’m really worried.”
“Would you like wine?”
“Why?” she asked suspiciously. “Am I going to need it?”
He laughed softly and the deep sound trickled down her spine like warm honey. “You may. I want to play a game.”
Her gaze returned to the seemingly innocent pile of ribbons. Except they weren’t exactly ribbons. More like silk cords in an assortment of jewel colors.
“You want to tie me up,” she said flatly.
He had grown tired of coaxing and persuasion and patience. Now he meant to try and force a response.
If asked, she’d guess he had more imagination than this. She’d overestimated him. Clearly his imagination followed the same tired rut as every other man’s.
She supposed she should be flattered he took this trouble to gain her participation. In an obscure way, this new strategy made him both more dear and more disappointing.
Muffling a sigh, she sat back and felt the tremulous tension flow out of her. At last she was on familiar, if banal ground.
He watched her steadily. “You have no objection?”
She began to unbutton her spencer. Of course he’d want her naked. The other men who wanted her arrayed as a captive certainly had. “No. I have no objection.”
Except it would leave her feeling sick and unsatisfied again. And Erith with that hurt, puzzled, sad look on his face.
She could do this, but heaven help her, she didn’t want to.
“Good. We’ll try that next time, then.”
Her fingers stilled on the third button. She rose to her feet, wondering if her unsteady legs would support her. “What did you say?”
Erith picked up the cords and began to play with them. Her eyes focused on the hypnotic shifts of those powerful tanned hands. The endless movement was vaguely unsettling, definitely suggestive.
“I said we’ll try it next time,” he said peacefully.
The mundane certainties of a few seconds ago scuttled out of the light like crabs disturbed under a rock.
“So what do you want now?” She forced the words past the constriction in her throat.
He stood and moved within touching distance. As always, he towered over her, the only man she knew who made her feel small and feminine. Suddenly, the idea of him
tying her down and trying to seduce her into pleasure tugged at her curiosity in a way she wouldn’t have thought possible a week ago.
A minute ago.
He still held the bunched cords. “I want you to tie me up.”
She retreated a step. She hadn’t read Erith as a man who liked to be beaten into submission. One of her previous lovers had needed pain to reach satisfaction and she’d quickly ended the affair. It nauseated her to subject anyone else to a travesty of her first keeper’s violence.
“No.”
Erith gently let the cords slide down his fingers back to the table. “As you wish.”
Her gaze focused on the tangled, vibrant silks cascading onto the rich dark mahogany. Even to a woman dead to allure, there was something undeniably sensual about the slow drift of those delicate strands of color through his elegant fingers.
A strange feeling rippled through her, and she gave a tiny shiver, as if those long fingers touched her bare skin. Then she realized what he’d said.
“You don’t want me to beat you?” she echoed, bewildered.
Shock crossed his face and he looked directly at her. “Do you want to beat me?”
“No.” She frowned. With every moment, she slipped further from understanding what was going on. “Wasn’t that what you asked?”
The smile teased his lips again and he took her hand. As she tried to pull away, he resisted. The warmth of his touch seeped up her arm and melted more of the ice inside her.
Soon no ice would remain at all. Then heaven help her, what would be left?
“You saw me with my daughter this morning.”
“Yes.”
“She made me realize my greatest sin against her wasn’t my desertion, bad as that was. It’s that I’ve never given her any choice in what happened to her.” He paused, and she recognized the ghost of last night’s sadness. “I lost Joanna because I tried to impose my will on her.”
She tilted her head and arched her eyebrows. “You’re a man. You like to push people around.”
“Not tonight. Not you.” He released her hand and straightened. His expression was as somber as she’d ever seen it. “I’ve been doing some hard thinking, Olivia. Thinking that shines an unforgiving mirror on my behavior toward you. Toward all the women in my life.”
She linked her hands together, trying not to miss his touch. “You’ve behaved well toward me. And I’ve hardly endeared myself to you.”
He reached out to touch her cheek briefly. The contact was fleeting and soft as the brush of a swallow’s wing. But its tenderness flowed all the way to her toes. “Don’t be a fool, Olivia. Endearing yourself is exactly what you’ve done.”
She blinked away that annoying mist that appeared before her eyes when he said things like that. She wished he wouldn’t. Because one day very soon, he wouldn’t be here to say them. Even if he was here, he might lose the urge to say them.
Every time he spoke such words, she was like an opium eater getting her daily dose of poison. And like any poor devil caught in the drug’s coils, she only wanted more.
“I haven’t proven much of a mistress,” she said huskily.
“We’re not done yet, my love.”
Astonishment poured through her in a great wave. He didn’t seem aware he’d used the endearment.
Perry called her his love now and again in a careless way. But those two words didn’t sound at all casual from Lord Erith.
She berated herself for a sentimental idiot. But nothing stopped her soul from unfurling like a sail in the wind.
“I can’t give you what you want.” She had to make him see he wasted these sweet, poignant caresses.
“Give me what you can.”
She licked dry lips and straightened her shoulders. “That’s nothing.”
“Not true, Olivia. You’ve already given me so much.”
The tender smile returned. Oh, dear God, how she wished he wouldn’t look at her like that. Every time he did, he pierced her heart with a flaming spear. He pushed her to her limits, forced her to acknowledge her failings, threatened the shell of indifference that held her safe.
He was an unmitigated disaster.
And she wouldn’t have missed knowing him at any price. If at this moment he fell on his knees and offered her the world in exchange for his departure, she’d deny him.
Utterly terrifying.
She started to shake and her heart raced like a wild horse set free. “What have I given you?” she asked belligerently.
“Don’t you know you’ve given me back my soul?”
His stark words cut through her prickly anger like a knife through butter.
With difficulty, she forced astringent words out. “Perhaps you’ll think me worth the money, then.”
He didn’t react with anger. She should have known he wouldn’t. Instead he looked unutterably sad. Which left her feeling more crushed than anger ever could.
“Olivia, don’t.”
Just two soft words and the coiling, raging beasts of shame and truculence and defiant loneliness lay down as peacefully as a child tired after a long day in the sun.
“I want to give you back your soul too.” He spoke so softly that she leaned forward to hear. Drifts of his musky scent made her dizzy with longing.
Longing? She never longed for a man. Even if she did, what use would she be to him? With her body dead to touch and her heart dead to feeling.
Although astoundingly, her heart now was too constricted with painful emotion for that to ring even partially true.
“You’re talking about sexual pleasure,” she said dully.
What was the point of all this? He must know it would get them nowhere, whoever tied whom down. Last night was the closest she’d ever come to wanting a man. What a miserable failure that had been.
“It was an unforgivable crime that your capacity for pleasure was stolen from you.”
“I’ve survived.”
“Survived but not lived.”
She blinked away hot moisture. Just as she could no longer lie about wishing she was the woman he wanted her to be, she could no longer pretend he didn’t move her to tears. And what he said was so true and so tragic.
“It’s too late.”
He shook his head. “No.”
She felt he looked at her more deeply than anyone ever had. She dreaded to imagine what he saw.
“Do you trust me?” he asked.
She glanced at him uncertainly. “I don’t trust anyone.”
“I know.” He paused. “Could you trust me tonight? I’m not asking for forever.”
“People like us don’t do forever,” she said sadly.
“Yes, we do.” His voice was deep and sure. “At least give me the privilege of your honesty.”
She summoned the tattered remnants of resistance. How she wished she could diminish him, make him like every other pathetic man she’d ever had in her bed. “I’m a whore. Honesty is a luxury.”
“Do you feel like a whore when you’re with me?”
How could she answer that? “What do you want, Erith?” she asked desperately, as she’d asked before.
“I want what you want.”
“That’s nonsensical.”
“Unprecedented, perhaps.”
“No man has ever said that to me.”
“I know.” His eyes filled with such compassion that she almost reached out to touch him. But she stopped herself.
If she yielded the last of her defenses and he betrayed her—and as a man, betrayal was his essential nature—it would break her.
She ignored the tiny whisper that any barriers against him had fallen long, long ago.
Without looking, he stretched down to pick up the cords and extend them toward her. “Tie me up. Then do whatever you want.”
Astonishment kept her silent. And automatic, vehement rejection of what he asked.
Something essential in her resisted the idea of placing him so overtly in her power. An alarming admission when power over me
n was what she’d lived for since she was fourteen.
Old cynicism surged up, defiance from the Olivia she’d created over so many turbulent, unhappy years. “Can’t I trust you unless I bind you?”
“Of course you can.” Again that smile. Heavens, she wished he’d stop. “But if you tie me up, you’ll know I’m in your power.”
She didn’t bother to rein in her sarcasm. “And I’ll give you pleasure. Goodness, what a sacrifice.”
“Do whatever you please.”
“Beat you?” Although she never would.
“If you like.”
“Ignore you?”
“Yes.”
“Leave you?”
A muscle flickered in his lean cheek, and she realized that in spite of his outward calmness, he was far from indifferent to her decision. “If you must.”
“Why are you doing this?”
He shrugged again. His voice was impossibly grave. “We have to break the impasse between us. Or we’ll end up destroying one another.”
“The easiest solution is to part.”
“Do you want easy?”
She didn’t dare answer that. “So I tie you up and do exactly what I want?”
“Yes.”
She put out her hand. To her astonishment, it was completely steady. “Give me the cords.”
Chapter 18
Hoping to hell he knew what he was doing, hoping to hell he’d survive whatever came next, Erith passed the silk bindings to Olivia.
Once she realized what he intended, she’d become surprisingly calm. When she first came in, she was visibly uncertain, bewildered. Then she tried to draw the protective shell of the courtesan about her. Without succeeding, he was encouraged to note.
Surely that meant something.
Now what did she feel? Was she angry, reluctant, resigned, triumphant? Repelled?
Devil take it, he had no idea. Not for the first time, he doubted the reckless strategy he’d devised after his troubled conversation with Roma. In theory, it offered a way out of an impossible dilemma. In practice, he felt like he put his head inside the mouth of a hungry tiger.
And Olivia hadn’t even tied him up yet.
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