My stomach twisted. My eyes widened. I yanked against his hold as the first spasm crept over me. “N-no,” I whispered. “Hurts. Help, p-please—Augh!” I clenched my teeth as it rolled through me. A fist made with shattered glass and hot knives.
He flinched, but he didn’t let me go. He transferred both of my wrists to one large hand, easily shackling me in place, and dragged his thumb by my nose. As caresses went, it wasn’t kind.
He raised his finger to my eyes. It shone, vaguely pink. Vaguely gold. “What is this?” he demanded.
I squeezed my eyes shut. “Hurts,” I begged.
“Miss Black, where did it come from?”
He was relentless. As my pain climbed to excruciating heights, I managed, “It’s . . . the drug. Came from the cameo.”
Rough fingers slid behind my head. Cradled it. “God give me strength,” he muttered.
“What?” I gasped. “Please, Hawke, what?”
He shook his head, his gaze tipping up to the ceiling. His eyes narrowed once more, that fine line I’d seen at his most resolute. Usually, it was directed at me. Now, he aimed it above my head. “You won’t find purchase here,” he told . . . nothing.
There was nothing there.
Even my hallucination in gold dust had gone.
“Hawke,” I gritted out between clenched teeth.
“I will not let you fade so easily,” he told me, almost conversationally were it not for the implacability of each word. And then he let loose a stream of Chinese that felt thicker than anything I’d ever heard; pulsed as if it lit the air. It didn’t, of course it didn’t, but every hair on my body rose as if with static discharge.
In answer, the pain slammed through me. I opened my mouth to scream.
To my undying surprise, he covered it with his own.
And it was if he’d found a switch; as if he’d flipped it with a casual flick. Electricity sparked somewhere deep inside me. A shower of blue and yellow sparks collided somewhere in my mind and there was only Micajah Hawke. His mouth, warm and demanding and coaxing against mine. His body heat, so close but still too far. The pressure of his fingers locked around my wrists.
The smell of him, spicy and hot and masculine.
The pressure eased. A fraction. Distracted. I gasped and his tongue slid between my lips, rough and wet. It touched mine, rasped against it, coaxing. Daring.
Beckoning.
As dangerous as a hand lifted in a humid bathhouse.
I craved. Moaning, I opened my mouth to his kiss, to his demand. My back arched; his fingers tightened around the back of my head, tangled so deeply in my loosened hair that I couldn’t get away even if I wanted to. The overly sensitive tips of my breasts brushed his clothed chest and I heard him gasp in turn.
He drew back, panting. Color darkened the taut skin over his cheekbones. He studied me. His mouth glistened, damp from mine.
Did mine look like that?
He cleared his throat. “Are you with me, Miss Black?”
I shuddered. “More,” I breathed.
A muscle leapt in his jaw. “Are you with me, Miss Black?”
The other, the only name by which I could call the heavy sensation struggling inside my skin, roiled. Not me. I felt it as if it were its own voice. Its own mind.
This was the worst opium flavor I had ever in my life encountered. Cut with . . . a hallucinogen of some sort? I bit my lip, hard enough to draw blood. Hard enough that his arm flexed, pulled me up on my knees. I sank against him, my hands now locked behind my back.
My nipples brushed his still-clothed chest. It rocked me to my core, flooded my body with liquid heat.
I sucked in a breath. “I’m here,” I said. Was that my voice? Was that me, sultry and breathy and pleading?
Or was it the thing that filled me?
He grabbed my jaw between thumb and fingers, tilting my face up to his. His gaze searched mine. “This isn’t you,” he said tightly. “You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for this magic.” I opened my mouth; he didn’t let me say anything. His voice rough, he shook his head and said angrily, “Whatever you got into, it’s not you begging for it. Don’t think I don’t know.”
I laughed. It hurt, even as it uncoiled inside me like a lush, fragrant flower. “I can’t fight it alone,” I whispered. “There isn’t . . . there’s too much. There’s too much inside me. This drug . . . opium and something. Pink.” Tears gathered in my eyes as pain slid burning tendrils up my spine. My fingers flexed, nails digging in. “Help me.”
Hawke gasped, teeth baring. His nostrils flared, a hound scenting a bitch in heat, and I watched stark arousal fill his features. Watched it and didn’t understand.
But it was his wrist my nails had found.
His blood now trickling down the curve of my hip.
“Save me,” I pleaded.
He laid me back, grabbed my hands as I struggled to dig them into the center of my chest. To peel away the flesh and bone trapping my stampeding heart and let it go. “Stay with me,” he ordered. He leaned over me, once more holding my hands down beneath his.
His lips were a breath from mine. “You hear me, Miss Black? Focus on me. If it hurts, fight back. Force her out.”
Her?
I clenched my eyes shut. “What will you—”
“Patience be damned,” he cut in savagely. “I’ll do whatever I must.” And then his tongue slid along the corner of my lips. It was a faint trigger at first. The slightest pressure. It did nothing to combat the furious battle raging inside my skin. His lips traced the curve of my jaw. I tilted my head back, inhaling deeply as I struggled to find a path through the pink-and-gold violence of my mind.
His tongue trailed a warm, wet line down the column of my throat. A different sort of pressure gathered low in my belly. A different kind of burn.
I gasped as his whiskered jaw rasped against the sensitive flesh of my breast. He tongued the pale upper slope, and my eyes flew open. The world shimmered in vibrant color. Diamond white, shimmering gold. Black onyx, sapphire blue, bloody, vibrant crimson.
My stomach quivered, and I looked down to see Hawke’s dark head against the pale skin of my breast.
His mouth closed over one nipple and the other inside me struggled to surface. Arrowed in with such focus that I moaned.
It was distracted? God Almighty, I was distracted.
Sensations shot from breast to groin, flooding us—me . . . us with pleasure. With warmth. Raw satisfaction. I arched into his mouth, surged out of my skin as his teeth closed gently around the hardened point.
He gave the other breast the same attention, and I barely remembered how to breathe. He slid down my body, and I thought somewhere that I should have protested. That I should have argued, fought him, protected—
What?
He was muttering something against my flesh. Each word skimmed across my too-sensitive nerves, scored as if branded there. Across my ribs, my belly. My hips lifted as he tongued the hollow beneath my left hip and I jerked against his steely grip.
He didn’t let me go.
He raised his head, looking at me from along the length of my own body. My eyes widened.
The man was beautiful. I’d always thought so, but here with the world lit by fire and God’s own colors, I knew him as the dark angel he was. His hair was loose around his face, strands of black pulsating with an eerie lack of light. His skin was burnished gold, lit as if the sun itself burned within him. Control shaped every nuance of his strong jaw and set mouth. Of his eyes, hooded and so guarded, but glittering with such intensity that it took my breath away.
And as if that was the opening it needed, the other erupted into life.
I had no chance to take a breath. No real chance to scream; it strangled in my chest half formed as pain ripped through my body. I felt it; I lived it, I struggled against it as the pressure built and built. As it thrashed against the boundary of me. As it fought for purchase.
It was trying to overtake me. It was trying to devour me
!
And even as I fought it off within the hallucinating cages of my own mind, the ringmaster of the Midnight Menagerie firmed his grip on my wrists, lowered his head, and covered my most secret and sensitive flesh with his mouth.
My back bowed. The cords in my neck stood to abrupt attention as I threw my head back, screaming in mingled pain and pleasure. In forbidden delight and raw terror.
His tongue dragged across my wet flesh, and without my control or command, my knees lifted. My legs fell open. The pressure slammed into place somewhere I’d never known it, coiling higher and tighter and hotter as his lips closed over a tiny nub of flesh and nerves.
My hips lifted almost off the bed, so hard and sudden that Hawke was forced to let me go. My hands moved of their own accord, fingers spearing into the luxurious silk of his hair. I held his head as he licked at me, pulled him closer as he tasted me where no other man had ever tasted me. Where I’d never imagined any would dare try.
Where I’d never even considered letting any man near.
High, keening pants filled the room and I realized somewhere that it was me. That I struggled to breathe and had no ability to censor myself. That I was shamelessly encouraging him with every dip of his tongue, every rasp of his lips and soul-shocking skim of his teeth.
When the dam burst inside me, I screamed with release. The pressure flowed from me, burst from me like a spring released from extraordinary tension. Every muscle in my body snapped at once; every color in the world conjoined into one glorious vision. Wave after wave of pleasure crashed into me, a cooling spray against my fevered skin, a tidal wave of sensation.
Somewhere beyond the drug-addled confines of my own mind, I heard a woman scream in fury.
Strong, muscled arms came around me, steady and gleaming faintly with sweat. I was shifted, repositioned so that I was cradled against his chest. Held in case I slid bonelessly into unconsciousness? I didn’t know.
I took a slow, deep breath. Smelled spice and musk and something indefinable.
I swallowed hard, my cheek pillowed against Hawke’s chest. The even rhythm of his heart steadied mine, and I set my palm over the taut muscle by my ear.
He stiffened.
Somehow, I found words. “It’s . . . better,” I whispered.
“You still glow.”
The statement should have been incongruous. People didn’t glow. Humans didn’t light up rooms, save in the metaphorical sense.
There was no such thing as magic.
But I looked down at my fingers, shaking and still covered in blood against his shirt, and saw that he was right. A faint, shimmering light pulsed from my skin, turning my flesh into something whiter than milk. Brighter than moonlight.
What could I say? Nothing. For a long, silent moment, I only allowed myself to breathe. I could actually breathe.
I was me.
Oh, God, I was mortified.
Despite all the conflict I’d ever had with the man, despite the flutter he caused in my stomach, I’d never dared to even imagine what a night in his arms would be like. I had no basis upon which to compare. He’d never even kissed me, not like Compton had, but I had nowhere to hide now. Nowhere to look but at myself. My own mind.
My own demons, strengthened by an unknown drug as they were.
They taunted me. I had no choice but to admit then that a dark part of me was always tempted, but I’d never even considered the reality.
There would never have been a reality, I was sure of it. I was just Miss Black. A collector. And he was the serpent of an earthly Garden of Eden. He tempted everyone. That was his job.
And I’d gone and . . . he’d . . .
Would the bed open up and swallow me whole? I prayed so. Even as I thought it, my chest twisted. My stomach spasmed, fainter, but there.
I shuddered. “It’s n-not over.”
Hawke slid his fingers into the tangled, half-tumbled knot of my hair, cradling the back of my head in his broad, callused palm. He pressed his mouth to my temple. “It won’t be. The drug must run its course. Until it does, the magic will find a way in.”
“God help me.”
His chuckle, strained as it was, vibrated against my ear. “No need. I’ll stay with you.”
I wasn’t sure that would be any better. I clenched my teeth, but the pain didn’t begin right away. Into his chest, desperate to hide my burning face from Hawke’s too-acute scrutiny, I mumbled, “How long?”
He didn’t answer for a moment. And then, as his fingers pushed through my blackened hair, he asked, “How long have you taken opium?”
I jerked, but his hand flattened against the back of my head, keeping my body pressed to his. My face against his shoulder. I stiffened, to no avail. “I don’t—”
“How long, Miss Black?” There was steel in the question now.
My fingers clenched into his shirtfront as my skin tingled. Prickled as if it would find seams and peel itself open. “All my life,” I whispered.
He stilled. And then, all at once, he let out a long, wordless breath. It stirred my hair, cooled my still-feverish skin as his arm tightened around my back. “Then take heart,” he said against my temple. “Those who eat it for many years must eat more to find the same peace of mind. Your body will run through it quicker than if you had never.”
“Thank God,” I gasped.
“If you must.” But I wasn’t listening. My fingers were already searching for the hem of his working shirt. Tunneling under to find the hot, smooth flesh I knew waited for us . . . me.
Me. Not me. I was losing myself.
His stomach clenched under my seeking touch.
“It’s starting again, isn’t it?” he asked roughly. He didn’t need to wait for an answer. Despite my own mortification, it was as if my addled mind had joined the rising pain and Hawke’s touch, as if it knew how to save itself. “I’ll keep you grounded,” he said again.
I didn’t know what Hawke was talking about. I desperately wanted to ask. But my fingers slid over his belly without my command and I gasped. Swearing, he caught my hands, forcing them out from under his shirt, and laid me once more on the bed. This time on my stomach. As my body started to writhe, involuntarily twisting against the growing strain of whatever it was struggling to claim me, his lips came down on the nape of my neck.
His teeth caught the flesh there. Bit down hard enough to draw an aching gasp from my lips.
“It will end,” he whispered against the pulsing spot.
I grabbed fistfuls of the bedclothes beneath me. His tongue dipped into the small hollows along my spine, but it wasn’t enough.
The force, the weight, slammed into me. Again and again. Inside me. Twisting, clawing. Filling me until the room glowed once more and light spilled from my eyes in shimmering green.
My own hair slid over my shoulder, muted by the lampblack I’d coated across it, but the occasional glimmer of ruby and flame flickered as I twisted and turned.
Hawke remained by my bedside. In my bed. For what seemed an eternity, he battled my demons from the outside as I screamed and fought them from within.
I don’t know when I fell. Something in me gave up.
Oblivion replaced pain, and that was the last I knew.
Chapter Fourteen
Although a lady could maintain a certain elegance of appearance while in public, I’d always felt that among the many hazards of marriage, that time between finding sleep and waking up is the most dangerous for appearances.
Case in point, I woke up with my cheek pillowed into damp bedclothes. I’d been drooling.
My eyelashes scraped against the cushion beneath my head. I blinked slowly, aware that among all of my usual waking complaints, aches and pain always seemed to be at the top of the list.
This time was no different.
My head throbbed. My mouth was dry, my tongue felt like it was swaddled in cotton. My body ached from forehead to heels. It was as if I’d been clubbed and beaten and stomped on by angry men wearing wooden shoe
s. Nausea clamored in my belly, which felt unsettled and wrung out as if I’d spent the night losing the contents of my stomach.
I didn’t recall that.
I struggled to raise myself to my elbows. Slowly, the details of my surroundings swam into focus. White cotton. Black silk. Smudged black stains, as if someone had taken charcoal and ground it into the pristine sheets. A faint glimmer of gold.
Browned stains. Disappearing into the bedclothes beneath me.
“God in heaven!” I scrambled away from the streaks of dried blood, then flailed for the sliding bedclothes as I realized I was nude beneath the sheets. I grabbed at the trailing material, gathering it to myself in whatever shred of modesty I could possibly have left, and glanced quickly at my surroundings.
A large room. Much larger than my own above the drift, and displaying a decidedly masculine flair. The furniture was sparse but elegant, reflecting elements of Oriental design merged with English sensibilities.
The bed I knelt in was large, much too large for a single body, and the black silk coverlet was patterned with uniquely Chinese embroidery in shades of red, green and gold.
The sheets beneath were white. White as snow, save for the lampblack rubbed from my hair. And the brown stains of dried blood.
My dried blood.
I backed off the edge of the mattress, my knees suddenly weak. That was my blood. Mortification warred with anger. Tears pulsed behind my eyes, ached in my jaw, but I gritted my teeth and tried desperately not to think about the dull pain centered low in my body.
What had I done?
I staggered as my feet found floor. My toes sank into the brilliant Oriental carpet, but it wasn’t the masterfully woven pattern I saw as I stared at it.
A vision of Micajah Hawke, his bare chest rising above me, his eyes focused and brilliant in his taut features, was suddenly all I could see.
All I could remember.
Had I—I’d begged him, hadn’t I?
“Oh, God.” My cheeks caught fire as I buried my face into the trailing ends of the bedclothes. I was ruined. I was more than just a girl astray; I was impure. Never fit for marriage, now. Who would want me?
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