“Yes.” She admitted so much with that single word.
His voice was strained. “So you lied yesterday.”
“You’d hurt me. I wanted to hurt you back. It sounds childish.” She bit her lip then forced the necessary apology out. “I’m sorry.”
“And you love me.”
It was a statement, not a question.
“Yes.”
“Isn’t that enough? I love you, you love me.” He cut the air with one hand as if canceling all her objections. “What does a damned piece of paper matter? There’s nothing to stop us loving each other for the rest of our lives. You’re throwing away paradise for want of a grand gesture you must know I can never make.”
“But perhaps the gesture’s very grandeur is all that will convince me we truly have paradise,” she whispered in despair.
Guilt lashed her like a scourge. She loathed hurting him. But nothing, not even his visible agony, could shake her adamantine determination. Only this extravagant act would show her he believed she was worthy to stand at his side.
He dropped onto the sofa and seized her trembling hands, pressing them to his chest. Under her palms, his heart pounded with frenetic speed.
“Olivia, if it were just me, I’d do it. I’d do it tomorrow. But there’s Roma and William.” His grip tightened almost to the point of pain. “And there’s Joanna.”
She gave a low cry and tried to wrench free but he wouldn’t let her go. “You think marrying me would sully her memory.”
“The world would see it so.” His flushed face was vivid with uncomprehending anger.
“Do you care so much for the world? You say you don’t think of me as a whore, but every time you open your mouth, it’s clear that’s what you believe.”
“Just because I won’t ruin my family by marrying you?” His body was rigid with resistance to what she said. “You wouldn’t exact such a price. Not you. Not the woman who protected Leo all these years and loved Perry, knowing what he is. Not the woman who tried so hard to save Roma from scandal yesterday.”
“But I need to believe you think I’m worth the price,” she choked out. “Unless you’re willing to give up the world for me, I don’t want you.”
She flinched as his brows lowered in a furious scowl. “You’re asking more than any man can give.”
Through tight lips, she forced out the difficult truth she knew he didn’t want to hear. “Kylemore did it for Soraya.”
He made a frustrated sound deep in his throat. “All due respect to his grace, but we have to live in this world you’re so eager to abandon. Or at least I do. I have work in Vienna.”
“Which you’ve grown tired of. I saw your face when we drove through those fields the other day, Julian. You were brought up a countryman. You’re still a countryman at heart.”
“Perhaps. But that doesn’t mean I can humiliate my children. Good God, Roma’s about to make the most brilliant match of the season. How will her new family react if her father marries the queen of the demimonde?”
Of course she cared about his children and his reputation. Above all, she cared about him. The price of her demand—for him, for her, for those he loved—ripped at her anew. But still her heart refused to relinquish its stubborn crusade.
Blinking away tears no longer worked. One overflowed and trailed down her cheek. “And what about me, Julian?”
“Come to Vienna.” His grip on her hands softened, became a caress. “You’ll be my wife in all but name, loved and safe and protected under the law. I’ll have contracts drawn up. Property. An annuity. You’ll never want for anything.”
“Except for what I really want,” she said with arid desolation. “A man who tells me, tells the world, that I’m worthy of his love.”
“Don’t smash what we have because you can’t have everything.” His voice lowered and the deep timbre seeped into her bones. She adored his voice. How could she live without hearing it? “I’ll love you to the end of my days but I can’t change the past.”
She realized she leaned toward that honeyed baritone like a starving bird craning for a crumb from the hunter’s hand. She jerked back, and this time he released her without protest.
She dashed the torrent of tears from her face, but more just fell to take the others’ place. Damn Julian. Before she met him, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried.
“I want my birthright,” she said doggedly, even while her traitorous heart whispered to accept the love he offered so freely. Accept, and forget that he failed her in this ultimate trial.
“At the cost of my children’s happiness? I can’t believe that of you, Olivia. I can’t. I know you better than that.”
Every word he spoke flung her dreams further out of reach yet only made her blindly, unreasonably determined to hold her ground. She refused to settle for second best, now that she’d discovered a real, enduring love. If she let Julian treat her as second best, that’s what she’d stay forever. In his mind and in hers. Living with that knowledge day after day would crush her. More, it would crush what they felt for each other.
“I don’t want to cost anyone their happiness,” she said through numb lips. Why, dear Lord, did this have to be so hard? It was like flaying herself alive. “I only know I can’t live in the shadows. I deserve better. Our love deserves better. Either you’re proud to own me for the entire world to see, or you don’t own me at all.”
“I won’t respond to threats,” he snapped, stiffening with renewed rage.
“It’s not a threat,” she said sadly. “If you can’t offer me marriage as a mark of the honor with which you regard me, I won’t stay with you.”
His eyes narrowed. “Damn you, Olivia, you know I can’t do this.”
His biting anger didn’t cow her. When she spoke again, her words rang with conviction. “I know you’re the man I love and you can do anything. I know how clever you are, how resolute, how strong.” Her voice roughened with urgency. “If you want it enough, you can achieve this, Julian. Make it so your children don’t suffer. Make it so we’re happy. Make it so we’re together.”
He shook his head with horrified disbelief. “You ask the impossible.”
“If you love me, you’ll make it true.” She already knew her words fell on deaf ears. As they’d always been bound to. “I ask you to do the honorable thing.”
He stared at her as if he hated her. “By making me dishonor everything else in my life.”
She looked away in swift shame. She wasn’t a fool. Nothing could restore her innocence or social standing. But if Julian married her, against sense, self-interest, inclination even, she could trust him forever. She swallowed and spoke with difficulty. “If you feel like that, there’s nothing more to be said.”
“So that’s it?” he asked bleakly.
“Yes.”
In quivering misery, she waited for him to get up and leave, but instead he grabbed her arms and forced her to face him. Challenge sparked in his eyes.
“What about this?” he asked fiercely.
He wrenched her up and kissed her with unabashed hunger and anguish. She couldn’t hide her swift and eager response. It was the last time he’d touch her like this. She knew that in her soul.
His lips ground down on hers. He’d never kissed her so violently, not even at the heights of passion. She started to cry once more, helpless against the sorrow that held her in its talons.
“Oh, my love,” she moaned as he pushed her against the arm of the couch and clumsily shoved the blue dress up.
“Yes,” he breathed into her mouth.
Tragic to think how rare kisses had been in her life until she met him. Tragic to think how she’d miss his mouth on hers.
She didn’t resist as he parted her legs and stroked her sex. Moisture bloomed and her belly clenched in swift response. How quickly he stirred her excitement. But every moment of pleasure shredded her heart. Until Erith, she’d never known this joy. After Erith, this joy would be forever denied to her.
His eyes were nearly black with desire and overmastering emotion. He trembled with desperate passion and a fierce need to persuade her with his body now words had failed. She knew why he did this. But as her own desire spiraled upward like flame, she couldn’t summon the will to resist.
This was the last time.
His stare was unwavering. With deliberate slowness, he lifted his slick fingers and sucked them, savoring her with voluptuous pleasure. The sight of him tasting her so blatantly shocked her, made every muscle tighten, heated the blood in her veins to lava.
His silver eyes glinted with knowledge and unbearable need. He silently told her that both of them were prisoners to desire and she attempted escape at her peril.
“No,” she whimpered, even as she arched toward him in frenzied eagerness.
“Yes,” he said implacably. His hands were equally implacable as he hitched her hips high and dipped his head between her legs. He’d done this before, in those wild nights when she’d surrendered herself to love.
But something about his unhurried determination, the graceful lowering of his dark head, the hard purpose of his mouth at her core, made her shudder with new passion.
His tongue probed her sleek heat and then he took her in his mouth and sucked hard. Her body spasmed with dazzled delight and she shoved a shaking hand between her teeth to muffle her hoarse scream. She gave herself up to the blinding light. She wanted this one true love to explode to its end among the stars. When she closed her eyes, she saw radiant suns. Spinning. Dancing. Combusting. Sizzling pleasure struck her like summer lightning.
She still quaked when he began to lick her again. She was so sensitive that the faintest brush of his tongue built another climax.
This one hit hard enough to stop her heart. Without knowing what she did, her shaking hands buried themselves in his thick hair. Tears poured down her face and she bit down hard on her lower lip to stifle sobs of sorrow, cries of pleasure. A rhythmic growling sound emerged from her throat. Too soft to be heard outside the library but enough to inspire Julian to work his mouth in time with her moans.
Hold, release, hold, release.
Her hips moved toward him and back as they did when his member was buried deep in her. He gripped her thighs more firmly, parting them to give him greater access. His tongue penetrated her and her intimate muscles contracted to keep him there. Female musk surrounded them in a sensual cloud.
The climb to ecstasy started again. Before the quivering aftershocks from her previous climax subsided, his fiendishly adept mouth flung her back into a fiery sky.
“Julian!” Her voice cracked as she reached her shuddering peak. “Oh, Julian!”
She bowed up. Somewhere beyond the brilliant blaze of sensation, like a shadow behind the sun, lurked the cruel knowledge that after the ecstasy came devastation.
This was the last time.
For an endless space, she clung to that burning height, unaware of where she was. Although she was always aware of who she was with.
Her love. Her only love. Her lost love.
Vaguely she felt him move, shift, reposition himself. Then glorious pressure as he pushed into her swollen, creamy tissues.
“Open your eyes, Olivia.” His demand emerged in breathless gasps. He sounded angry. He sounded fierce. He sounded as though love drove him to the edge of madness.
Silently, she obeyed him.
His face was haggard. His lips drew back against his teeth as if he were in excruciating torment. His skin seemed too tight for the bones of his face.
Determination firmed his jaw as he met her stare. “I want you to look at me while I take you,” he insisted gruffly. He edged his way farther into her body. “I want you to feel every inch. Then I want you to try and tell me you’re leaving me.”
He leaned over her, his powerful chest and shoulders dwarfing her. He supported himself on taut arms, and his savagely glittering gray eyes didn’t shift from hers. With ruthless purpose he angled his hips and seated himself completely.
She had a dazed second to adjust to how he filled her. Then he began to move, hard, arrogant, commanding.
Every stroke irrefutably claimed her as his.
She clutched at his back as each powerful thrust bumped her against the arm of the sofa. Her hands bunched in the fine wool of his coat. She bent her knees to give him greater access, her thighs chafing against his trousers.
A barrage of sensations attacked her. The vigorous virility of his body in hers. The sharp tang of sweat and desire. Her own flooding, uncontrollable response. His breath rasping as he moved, owning, branding, marking.
She rose to meet him and moaned as he went deeper. He’d taken her so often, but never before had her body become an extension of his.
All the time, those gray eyes bored into hers. Charting the rise of her pleasure.
While part of her resented how easily he subdued her, her greedy soul snatched what pleasure it could. She’d never feel this with anyone else. Every second was precious, perfect, irreplaceable.
Relentlessly he pushed her higher and higher.
After what he’d done to her with his mouth, she couldn’t believe she had anything left to give him. But she did.
She reached helplessly into the void. Still, final pleasure eluded her grasp. The pressure built and built until she thought she must shatter.
She gave a choked sob. Her fingernails drove into his back. If he’d been naked, she would have drawn blood. She closed her eyes and arched, blindly seeking that ultimate, transcendent connection.
He withdrew to the limits of her body. She braced for him to plunge back.
Nothing.
She opened her eyes. “Julian?”
“Look at me, damn you.” His voice was harsh and shook with the superhuman control he exerted.
“I am looking at you,” she said breathlessly, frenzied with the need to have him inside her. She surged up, her hands fisting in his coat.
“And you love me.”
“I love you.” It was a frantic cry. “Don’t stop.”
“Never.” He drove down hard and everything around her erupted into a coruscating burst of white.
She cried out and clutched at his back as her body convulsed in a pleasure higher, purer, brighter than any she’d ever known.
Through the conflagration, she heard him groan, then she felt him shudder over and over again as he spilled into her. The perfect rightness of the moment held her suspended in joy and anguish as her tight passage milked him of his essence.
She opened tear-filled eyes to see him poised above her, his head flung back, his hair damp with sweat, his face taut. She carved the sight on her memory forever, even while her body gripped him as if she never wanted him to leave her.
She didn’t.
She still quivered with helpless reaction and astonished rapture when he pulled out. With a long groan, he collapsed against the back of the sofa. She sprawled where he’d left her. Every bone had dissolved into hot honey. Her face was sticky with tears and stung from the abrasion of his shadow beard.
She ached. He hadn’t been gentle. But how could she regret what had happened? The throbbing peak had been unbelievable. Exquisite. Heartbreaking.
His chest heaved as he struggled for air and his pulse beat wildly at the open neck of his shirt. Somewhere in her passion she’d ripped at his neckcloth. She couldn’t remember when.
His black hair was disheveled and a lock fell over his forehead. His clothes were crushed and damp with sweat. His trousers gaped, revealing the tangled black curls of his pubic hair.
Neither spoke for a long time. He’d pushed her to her limits. She wasn’t sure she’d ever move again.
He looked across to where she lay with her legs splayed and her blue gown twisted around her body. “You look utterly ravished.”
He sounded lazy and pleased. He sounded like the exciting lover who had taught her the meaning of pleasure.
“I feel utterly ravished,” she said in a husky voice. �
�I think we’ve ruined the couch.”
“Kylemore can afford a new one.” Julian’s gorgeous mouth twitched into a sensual smile. “Anyway, after that, I’ll gladly buy him a hundred couches.” He paused and the smile slowly faded, to be replaced by an intent stare. “Are you coming to Vienna?”
Poisonous reality doused her pleasure like a cold wave washing over footprints on a beach. Her lips were tight as she forced out the question she had to ask. “As your mistress or as your wife?”
He frowned. “You know the answer to that. It’s the only answer I can give you. Surely after what we just shared, you can’t mean to send me away.”
Gracelessly she straightened her legs and sat up. Grief was a leaden weight in her belly, and her heart beat out a grim rhythm of farewell. She had the answer to her question. He loved her but he didn’t love her enough. The inevitable moment had come. Passion had staved it off but couldn’t change the outcome.
She felt like she poised trembling on the edge of a chasm. She drew in a scraping breath and stepped off the edge. “Yes, I can.” Her voice was low but steady. “Good-bye, Julian.”
His jaw set in an angry line and he hurtled to his feet, fastening his trousers with violent movements. “Damn you, Olivia. I’m bloody sick of pleading. I’m sick of lying down in the dirt in front of you just so you can kick me.”
Aghast, she stared at him. He sounded as if she’d gashed a hole in his heart. How could she stay adamant against his suffering? Was anything worth his crippling agony? She stretched one trembling hand in his direction. “Julian…”
He didn’t seem to heed her. “Let me know when you change your mind. As you will change your mind. But be warned, my lady—don’t expect me to wait forever.”
It hurt to swallow the hard lump of anguish in her throat. “I don’t expect you to wait at all.” Although the idea of him with another woman made her want to yowl and scratch at him like a maddened tigress. “I told you before you gave me that most memorable farewell—it’s over.”
He sent her a freezing glare. How could eyes that had been so warm only seconds ago turn so frosty? His voice was cold, hard, superior. “I’ve begged you repeatedly. I won’t beg again. You’re doing this out of stupid pride, Olivia. I hope you and your pride are damned happy together.”
Tempt the Devil Page 31