Daring Widow: Those Notorious Americans, Book 2

by Cerise DeLand

  Growling, he slid her to her feet and twirled her around to face the windows and the skylight. The sun was setting, a bronzed ribbon along the horizon, the roofs of Paris glistening like tarnished silver, the dome of Les Invalides shimmering like an upturned bowl of molten gold. He curled his arms around her as she looked her fill.

  She wore the fragrance of camellias upon her skin, her little hat lost in the foyer, her white gold hair falling from her loose chignon, no jewelry, either. Beneath his fingertips, he detected she wore few layers. A simple gown, lavender cotton, buttons up the bodice. Perhaps only a corset, or a chemise. His cock jumped, eager, rushing past the enchantment of the moment and his intention to slowly seduce her into his bed.

  “Do you know that Pierce wants to invest in Parisian sewers?” She allowed him the freedom of kissing her ear.

  “A worthy enterprise,” he murmured, laughing at the topic and the addicting opiate of holding her in his arms.

  “Paris seems so settled already,” she said, her voice catching as he slid his lips along the delicate cords of her throat.

  “We grow, change, every minute.” He took her portfolio from her and placed it on his worktable. Then he sank his splayed fingers into the magnificence of her hair, turned her around and kissed her until he needed breath.

  They broke apart with a gasp.

  “I wanted you all day,” she whispered and pressed herself to his length. “Kiss me again.”

  Her invitation ravaged every polite restraint he’d schooled in himself. He took her lips, his tongue invading, seizing from her all the passion she would give him.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked, breathless, attempting to be a gentleman and not a satyr.

  “Yes.” She went up on her toes, her strong fingers cupping his cheeks so that she put her mouth to his again. Her kiss was sweet, short.

  He hugged her and chuckled. “I have supper. Vin blanc, a veal of—”

  “No, no, Monsieur. It’s only you I want. Feed me that.”

  He secured her to her feet, his lips twitching. Urgency propelling his hands to unbutton her gown. Her own fingers unwinding his leather belt. His trousers purling on the floor. Her lovely lithe form, her lush breasts pushed up by the corset, her petticoat, cream and lace, untaped, gone to the floor as well. No stockings tonight. Only slippers. Pink satin that she stepped from. Her arms reaching around his neck, looping there as he picked up her, naked to his naked heart and loins and legs. Naked and his.

  His cock probed her cleft. She was hot and very wet. He picked her up, tilted her hips and in one sweet slide, he sank inside her. Mindless and sweet. Where did he begin and she end? He could not say.

  She gasped as he moved inside her, backed her to his worktable and set her there.

  Glancing down, her eyes went wide and then closed. “Oh, Andre. Andre. Give me more. I am so greedy to have you.”

  And when he drove inside her to the hilt, his own rapture dissolving reason, he inhaled and withdrew to take her once again, deeper, faster, harder.

  She clung to him, her skin his. Her cries, his own.

  Their mutual satisfaction, one, wild, and vibrant.

  But not enough. Each minute that passed meant the sooner she’d leave him. He had to treasure the seconds, forget the future.

  He scooped her from the table and strode quickly to lay her to his bed. The two of them panting, the minutes rolling past, he caressed her throat and breasts as their bodies cooled and the sun sank on a hot August night.

  He pushed her wild hair back from her face. “I think you need food now.”

  “Cheese and bread.” She traced the whorls of hair on his chest. “Some of that wine and veal. Where is your maid? She’ll think we are animals.”

  “Not here. Gone to the hotel in the Place du Tertre. I gave her the fee.”

  “I am costing you good money.”

  He caught her hand and kissed it. “Spent in good cause.” My love. He’d almost called her that. Which would never do. She’d run. Run far.

  Clearing his throat, he rose.

  She looked at him askance. “What did I say?”

  “I have money for whatever I want in this world.” If only I could buy you, I’d beggar myself.

  “You are a fortunate man, in so many ways.” She lay there, not a stitch on her, without a bashful hint of modesty. Letting him gaze his fill, as if he ever would have enough of her.

  “I am. How is it that I can attract a beauty like you, hmmm?”

  “You have what I want.” She wiggled her brows suggestively. Her eyes fell to his cock. “Even now,” she said on a raw whisper and let her gaze rise to his. “Every bit of you is inspiring. Strength and ardor, muscle and passion. Wit and compassion.”

  Flattered, he fought for humility. “Did you come to this conclusion easily?”

  “No. I was blind to it. Only seeing that you were the epitome of man for me. And I ran from it.”

  Don’t you still?

  She sat up, throwing her long white hair over her shoulders. “I brought my sketches for you.”

  He strode to his wardrobe, pulled out one of his linen shirts and picked up his black robe. Walking to her, he said, “Lift your arms,” and he pulled the shirt over her body.

  Shrugging into the robe, he said, “Now, show me your work.”

  She’d not been shy to display her body to him. Her folio, however, she held in her fingers for a minute or more. Biting her lip, she slowly unwrapped the ribbon and extracted a notebook of foolscap. The edges of the pages were ragged. She’d not spent much money on it.

  He strolled to his granite workbench, pulled out two stools and gestured for her to join him. Without looking at him, she came to him, sat near him and pushed the notebook unopened toward him.

  He did not touch it. “How many years have you drawn?”

  “Always. I cannot recall when I didn’t. I drew ants and bees, a kitten I had once. Then I tried drawing our horse, an old nag my father said would die soon.”

  “And people? Did you draw them?”

  “Once I began, I have never stopped. Our kitchen maid. Our porter. My parents. I drew them often and they encouraged it. I saved those. Most of them I did before I was married off.”

  Married off. “Did you draw your husband?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “To remember that I must look to a man’s character first. Always.”

  Her resolve, her sorrow gutted him. “Do you still draw him?”

  One shake of her head. “No. I’ve learned my lesson.”

  Her answer was too quick. “I see.”

  “I learned by drawing him and many other men.” She swallowed. “During the war, the Yankees came south, headed to Richmond, which was the capital. My land, my husband’s and mine, was in their path. They took it, most of it, for their camp. Ate my chickens, slaughtered my pigs. Oh, they shared the spoils with me, but I couldn’t absolve them for it. They made my parlor and my dining room their hospital. I drew them all. The Yankees on my carpet. Bleeding on my floor. Their surgeons piling legs and arms in a ditch beyond my barns. I hated those drawings and I threw them away.”

  Shock of what she’d witnessed riveted him to his stool. What he heard was her horror. “I understand.”

  “Do you?” She challenged him, anger in her tone, the first he’d ever heard from her. “Have you drawn men in pain?” she asked him, the shadows in her green eyes resurrecting her own suffering.

  “Only Samson.”

  “Do no more. You don’t need to. To feel it is to know and wish to forget. And the relief when it’s gone is miraculous.”

  “But to face its existence even when you can’t feel it, isn’t that wise?”

  “Is that what art is? To summon the pain of the past?”

  “Isn’t it to mark the human condition? After all, we are just flesh and blood.”

  “No.” She shot up from the table. “I won’t do that. Look at those, if you like. I—I’m going to examine yo
ur garden.”

  Hands at her sides, fists hard, she made for the far door. His garden had been a refuge for him when his work cast dark shadows on his ambitions and only the sun or the moon could shine a light into his energy and resurrect his insights. She walked out, a hand to her brow as the sun struck her. Through his unlatched window, he heard her muttering to herself and he knew enough of her anger not to follow her out or to ask, when she returned, what irritated her so. Some subjects were meant only for discourse with the soul.

  Some. Yes.

  He placed his hand on the notebook. Inside was the essence of Marianne Duquesne Roland. Once he looked at this, he’d know her more intimately whatever her skill. Her talent had never been a qualifier for him. She liked to draw. She did it often. His self knowledge told him that one who was compelled to draw or paint or sculpt was usually also obsessed to do it over and over again. Perfection was not the goal. Articulation was. And with the attempts to render came a polishing of the ability. Praise by the public or critics was not so much a goal as a nuisance. Many artists made a living by simply doing what they wished. God knew, he did.

  He opened the first page.

  The second.

  The next.

  And next.

  He considered the far wall, an expanse of white plaster. The only blank wall in his studio. His screen. His tabula rasa for his visions.

  He shut his eyes.

  There, as on the white wall, he saw her portraits. Her Uncle Killian, the rogue, laughing like a boy, one aspect Andre had never seen in him. Her cousin, Lily, now a duchess, waltzing on the wind, in love in the arms of his friend, Julian. Ada, the child with an adult’s intuition and a sharp tongue. Pierce, gazing sorrowfully at the back of a lady dressed in finery. Was that Julian’s sister, Elanna? A young woman Pierce had met briefly and who had tricked him into kissing her in a garden days before her wedding to an older man she despised.

  Andre flipped another page. There he was, gazing at himself. A portrait in grey graphite. Another and another in ink. His torso swathed in a formal cravat, stickpin, waistcoat, cape. The attire he’d worn to the opera months ago when first he became enraptured by her. The expression on his face was one of wonder. He ran a fingertip over the bold india ink of her impression.

  He turned another page. Here he was as he’d met her last night in the informal shirt and pants. Here he was at ease, his eyes wide and appreciative of what he viewed. Her. She had drawn him as he was when he looked at her. His was the look of love.

  Did she recognize it?

  Panic drummed through him.

  Did she understand that how she saw him and how she’d drawn him where unique representations of the truth? Her own artistic truth? One she had the talent to use to make her life sublime?

  No. That was the answer.

  No.

  He stood. Paced.

  How to make her see her full potential? As an artist? As a woman? He had so little with which to bargain.

  He had to show her…not tell her…

  He could not ask her to marry him, half free as she was. If she said yes, she’d come to him thinking she could remain only half of herself. The woman, the lover, the wife of the sculptor Remy. Happy as that might make her, it would be only half of what she could become.

  And if he did not offer soon, would she not end their nights together? Of course, she would. Fear of gossip and fear of pregnancy plagued their future rendezvous. And yet if she was not with him, night and day, how could he illustrate what was possible for an artist who lived to her full potential?

  He stood, strode to his window. She walked among the roses, devoid of their blooms, bending to inhale the fragrances of his chrysanthemums, roots he’d purchased years ago from a Chinese man in a tugboat along the Seine. In the shade of his tall stone wall fence, the plants soaked up the heat of summer and grew like tall green weeds. She inhaled their perfume. He wished to create a new fragrance of life for her.

  She lifted her face and across the grass, their gazes locked.

  He smiled at her. She responded with a grin and strolled toward the house and him. She might have experienced loss and depravation, but she was not mean. Nor did she dwell on their differences. She knew how to fight for herself, else she would not have survived her war so well. But he bet that she wished never to fight again.

  “I’m hungry now,” she told him when she pushed wide his garden door. “Can we have that veal chop and your wine?”

  The next morning as the sun cracked the shell of night, she rose up on her elbows and stared down at him. Felling her gaze on him, he feigned sleep. He had loved her so well, so often last night, he was a bowl of mush. But he could rise again in an instant to show her how deeply he cared for her.

  “You’re awake!”

  He opened one eye, then grinned.

  She cuffed his shoulder. “Oh, you deceive me.”

  “I was letting you admire me.”

  She laughed heartily. “Ah, so you didn’t like my sketches of the noble sculptor Remy?”

  His failure to discuss her talents bothered her. She’d mentioned it often last night when he would not comment. He hooked an arm around her shoulders and drew her down atop him. “I did not say that.”

  “You did not deny that.” She scowled at him. “What is your assessment of what you did see?”

  He touched a fingertip to her nose. “Why?”

  She twitched. Defensive and skittish, she sought to leave his arms.

  “No. Stay with me.”

  “You know what I ask for,” she told him, tense.

  “I do.”

  “Well?” she prodded.

  “I will tell you in my time.”

  That had her frowning. She pushed away and eluded his reach. “Time to go. Valmont will soon be here and I am not washed or—”

  He shot from the bed and caught her around the waist. His hands stroking down her stomach to her neat little thatch, he pressed her back to him. “I will wash you.”

  She strained to get away from him. “No.”

  “Yes.”

  She stomped on his foot.

  “Ow!” But he clamped her tightly to him. “Meet me at noon at the Purple Cow in Place du Tertre. I will introduce you to friends of mine.”

  “No, I can’t come. I have errands to do.”

  “It won’t take long. An hour. And I promise you, you will enjoy it.”

  “Why?”

  He found the center of her seam, the tight nub that could unlock her petulance and make her the agreeable girl he adored. Circling her flesh, he heard the liquid sound of how her body flowed for him. All that she was betrayed her intentions to leave him.

  She sighed his name. “You are not fair.”

  “I play to keep you.” He let his lips slide along her bare shoulder. “I’ll brush your hair, wash you everywhere, everywhere.”

  She made a feral sound and swayed with his touch. “You can’t.”

  “I can.”

  She sank in his embrace, sweet surrender.

  He caught her up and placed her back in their bed. “Don’t go. I promise to reward you.”

  “You are devious,” she accused him.

  “And to your benefit,” he said with a wicked arch of his brows. “I’m getting warm water and cloth and then your hairbrush.”

  “Evil man.” She huffed, then spread herself out on the bed, arms out, legs parted, an indelicate goddess for his appreciation.

  He chuckled and ran an open palm over her throat, her diamond hard nipples, her belly, her hot wet folds. She made him weak with want. Delilah to his Samson. How little he’d known of the power of a woman when he’d hacked that man from the marble. Understanding that, he tore himself away from her beauty.

  He had the need to show her what she lacked in life.

  “You’ll return?” she asked, anxious.

  “I will. Only a few minutes. Stay where you are.”

  When he returned, he had all his strengths in hand. Siren that she
was, he had a point to make here and she would benefit from his reluctance to tell her what he truly thought of her talent. He rinsed the cloth in the warm water he’d boiled and cooled. He soaped it, beginning with her throat, the fragile clavicles that spanned her chest, her shapely arms and elegant fingers. He rinsed and soaped the other side of her. He returned to her breasts, each a firm mound topped by large chiffon nipples the color of peaches. He drew each into his mouth and sucked her until she whimpered and bucked. Then he scrubbed her with the cloth and made her groan in joy. He moved on. Her belly was concave, smooth as glass. One day, please god, she’d carry their babies there. And if she never did, he’d need her as desperately as he did today. He’d love her and keep her, delving inside her with his fingers and his tongue. He’d part her and kiss her tender little clitoris and make her squirm and beg and demand, as she did now, to have her, put his cock inside her, and cry to never leave her.

  “Never,” he whispered as she sank to the mattress her orgasm this time as fiery as ever before.

  “Come inside me,” she begged him, her hands sliding down his ribs to take him by the cock and drive his mind blank as she stroked him. “You must enjoy us.”

  He must. He certainly must.

  The feel of her around him, soft as down, sleek, burning him, branding him, making him hers was once more his finest ecstasy.

  She laughed. “You see, you can’t wash me without making it necessary to wash me again.”

  “Who is the fiend now, eh?” he asked as he quickly washed from her thighs the traces of their raptures. He pulled her up and sat her in his chair. Naked, the sight of her lush body nagged at him. Have me again. Kiss me there. And there. Put your fingers there. Oh, yes.

  But restraint was necessary. He left her, rubbed his hands together and returned to do justice to her hair. He took her long silken mane and flowed it over his forearm. Separating the mass into skeins, he brushed the waist-length waves until they shown and shimmered in the rays of dawn.

  Beneath his ministrations, she had sat silent, flowing with his strokes, limp, mesmerized by his rhythm and his care.

  He lifted her by her shoulders. He dressed her, lacing her corset, taping her petticoat, putting down her slippers for her to step into. “Time for Valmont to appear and take you away from me. Look at me.”