by Megan Chance
I said, “Take off your boots.”
He bent to do as I asked, and when that was done I stepped close to him again, tsking when he tried to touch me. “Not yet,” I whispered, and then I undid his trousers, pushing them and his underwear over his lean hips, revealing him completely. He was ready for me, and oh, he was something to savor, but I was starving, everything in me saying now, now, an exquisitely brutal anguish.
I stepped back, unbuttoning my gown, dozens of little pearl buttons slipping through their loops. He watched me with his own hunger. I let the gown fall, and this time when he came to me, I let him touch. His voice was as reverent as his expression when he said, “I never knew they made things such as this.” He eased his finger beneath the silken strap of the camisole, bringing it over my shoulder, letting it fall to reveal my breast.
“Then you’ve spent no time with courtesans,” I teased him.
“Is that what you are?”
“Perhaps. In another life.”
He moved like one in a spell as he undressed me. When I stood naked before him, he skimmed his hands over my body, my breasts, my hips. His fingers slipped to the bracelets on my wrists, tangling through the many loops of fine chain as if he meant to remove them, and I said, “Leave them.”
He raised a brow, but he didn’t protest. His eyes darkened. He made a sound deep in his throat and jerked me against him, whispering in my ear, “How do you like it? Tell me what you like.”
The question was strange—shocking even. I could not remember ever being asked it before, and suddenly I was quivering. I wanted nothing but gluttony. It was all I could do to say, “Whatever you want.”
“Oh, but I want everything.”
“Do you?” I reached for him, stroking him with a featherlight touch. “What about this?”
“Yes,” he breathed.
“Or this?” I unsheathed my nails, biting into him. His breath was quick and hard, indrawn, but he did not flinch.
“Yes,” he gasped, a breath that seemed to rack him, but he didn’t move. It was as if he were waiting for instruction, but his desire was coiled so tightly I felt it, I knew it must spring. I wondered how far I could push him before it did. I teased him with it. “This?” I asked as I stroked him. I raked my nails down his chest, leaving marks, whispering, “This?”
His answers became harder wrought, assents in the licking of lips, in caught breaths. I waited for him to lose control, to toss me to the bed, to devour me with brutality, but he only closed his eyes and threw back his head and let me torment him. It became a game, one I’d played before, but never with a man who lasted so well. I saw the muscles in his throat work, the tense flexing of his shoulders. I put my mouth to his skin, tasting the salt of him, and his breath came harder and faster. I kissed him, his sternum, his navel, lower, and he only flexed his hands and swallowed.
Then, finally, my hunger became too much, something I could no longer resist. I pressed my body to his; I whispered against his mouth, “I would like you to take me now,” and it was as if I’d released a caught and panicked animal. We were on the bed before I knew it. I was a prisoner to my craving, which wrapped around us like tentacles, sinking its teeth into him, gorging so relentlessly that I knew he could not last long, and found myself regretting that already.
But he was like no other man I’d known. He was willing to do anything, to give anything. He surrendered himself to pleasure without holding back. He was as responsive to gentleness as pain. He had no boundaries; nothing made him recoil or hesitate. Yes, he said, and yes again, an endless and inexhaustible string of yeses that drove me to greater efforts. It was its own kind of aphrodisiac.
I took him until I’d absorbed all I could, until I was swollen and consumed. And even then, even in satiation, I was . . . fascinated, enthralled by him—how impossible this was! He lost himself so completely it was as if he were nothing but desire, an entity that lived for pleasure, bound only by the limits of his own body. I did not understand it, though I would have said I understood all there was to know about pleasure.
I gripped him tight; I heard him groan, and I said urgently, “Look at me,” not knowing what it was I wanted to see, what I thought might be there, only curious to know what made him what he was, what secrets I might discover in his gaze. He obeyed me. He opened his eyes and looked into mine, and I saw elation there, and freedom and relief.
But I did not see Joseph Hannigan. It was as if he became someone else, something else, and suddenly the image of his sister was in my head, her own surrender to his drawing, the acceptance that seemed almost a release, as if she were not herself but something else entirely.
The image was there, and then gone, gone just as he came with a hoarse, guttural cry, collapsing upon me, burying his face in the hollow of my shoulder, his heart hammering. And after a few moments, he raised his eyes to look at me, and he was there again, the Joseph Hannigan I recognized, with a door in his eyes that I realized suddenly had always been there, though I had not noticed until I’d seen its absence. Closed tight. A prison door, I thought, and felt suddenly uneasy and off-kilter again.
He kissed me softly and then rolled off, limp and drained, his breath heaving in a sigh. The marks of my possession were all over him. I should have felt sated, but that uneasiness lingered. He had given so much of himself, and I wondered how such surrender could withstand the destruction of my hunger, as avid as it had grown. How long had I to bring him to the bargain before I drained him completely? Such weakness was part of the process; eventually it ravaged them all. My only task was to convince them to take the bargain before it ruined them. Even Byron had lost his strength. I had relished such debility in him; it had given him humility. I did not think I would relish weakness in Joseph Hannigan, and that surprised me too.
The bells of San Silvestro began to chime. Beside me, he stirred. “Is it so late?”
That he could even speak was a miracle, given how well he’d fed me. I turned onto my side, pressing myself against him, saying, “Go to sleep. You deserve it.”
But he rolled away from me. He sat on the edge of the bed and buried his face in his hands, rubbing as if he meant to wake himself up. In the candlelight, I saw the moles scattered over the pale skin of his back, stretching from his shoulder down his spine. They looked like a constellation, I mused, and one I knew, the Serpent’s Head constellation in the late spring sky, missing only one star—on his shoulder blade—to make it complete.
I felt the urge to touch each one, but he did not give me a chance. He said, “I must go. Sophie will be worried.”
I was annoyed that he’d mentioned her, at the evidence that she was never far from his mind, though I’d thought of her too, only a short time before. “She knows where you are. Stay. You must be exhausted.”
“I have to. I’m sorry.” He twisted, smiling at me, placating, leaning in to kiss me quickly. “You understand, don’t you? She’ll be waiting for me. She won’t expect me to stay.”
“She won’t? Why not?”
He stood, walking quickly to where his clothes lay abandoned on the floor, picking up his underwear, his trousers, pulling them on.
I could only gape at him. Not only because he was leaving me, but because he didn’t stagger or lose his balance. He seemed just as he had when he’d taken me to bed. Strong and vital, not the least bit changed. I sat up, searching for weakness in the dim flickering of the candlelight. I saw none.
He fastened his trousers, pulled on his shirt. I said, “You’ll come tomorrow? Shall I pose for you again? For studies?”
His smile was quick and blinding. “I won’t need studies. I have you in my head.”
“Still . . . you will come?”
He shoved his feet into his boots. “If I can. It will depend on what Sophie has planned. I’ll send a message saying when you can expect me.”
I did not quite believe he would go. I watched him pick up his vest, his coat, his tie. I thought he would pause before he reached the door. I though
t he would do what they all did, throw everything to the ground and come back to bed. I thought he would say, “I can’t bear to leave you.” I wanted to see his surrender again, that release that banished the prison in his eyes, that was as alluring as anything I’d ever seen. I wanted to make him the offer and have him say yes, yes. It’s all I’ve ever wanted. I wanted the rapture of him, and the possibility that he could make of me something at last.
But he did not turn. He did not rush back to my arms, and I realized that I had been wrong about how well I held him. She was there still—his sister, his muse—and I was struck with an almost impossible fear. I’d misjudged how connected they were. I realized that without her assent, he would leave me now, and he would not come back because she would keep him away. I sat up in bed in a panic. Desperately, I called, “Joseph—”
He paused at the door, turning with a smile—was that impatience?
“Does your sister like the theater?”
His brow furrowed. “She does.”
“Then I will treat you both. Will she like that, do you think? Tomorrow night? Will it please you?”
“Sophie would like it,” he said.
“Then it will be done. I’ll call for you both at eight. Don’t forget.”
“How portentous you make it sound,” he teased back.
I did not tell him how very much it was, and he threw me a last smile and was gone.
SOPHIE
I woke in a panic, uncertain what time it was. Nicholas was quiet beside me, his chiseled face soft and easy in sleep, and I remembered last night, the way he’d touched my scars, his tender dismay when I’d told him their origin. He had such gentle eyes; for such a pale color, there was no coldness in them at all. It was that gentleness that had led me to tell him what I’d never before told a soul, and when he had not turned from me, I had felt as Vivaldi in Odilé León’s story, wooed by a devil’s temptation, by the hope and fear that I might have what I’d yearned for, that someone had at last seen me without Joseph’s brush to guide them.
Those possibilities again. Such heady things. I could not keep myself from wanting to believe in them. And yet . . . how could I explain such an ephemeral thing to Joseph? My chest was tight at the thought of it. I did not want to make things worse by having my brother come home to find me gone, to know without my telling him how I’d broken my promise. The morning was slipping into being and I must be away.
I crept from the bed, dressing and going as quietly as I could. The skies were beginning to lighten with impending dawn as I roused a sleeping Marco. I had thought there was a chance I could make it home before Joseph, but the moment I stepped inside the portego, I felt him there, the way I always felt him. He was on the settee in the sala, waiting for me, the color of him washed blue-gray by the burgeoning light of not-quite morning. I stopped just inside, both relieved at the sight of him—he was here, he was unchanged—and dreading his reaction.
His gaze swept me. “You went to him. Even after you promised you wouldn’t. You promised.”
He was hurt; I saw it in his eyes. And angry too. I went to sit beside him. “You were with her and you didn’t care how I felt about it. You’ve no right to be upset over this.”
“You never meant to deny him, did you? Despite what you said?”
“I don’t know,” I said helplessly. “Yes and no.”
“Sophie—”
“What makes you so certain he’ll hurt me?”
“Because I’m never wrong about that, am I? You think every man’s a savior, but there are no saviors, Soph—there’s only me. He’ll just get in the way and we don’t need him. We have Odilé.”
The sound of her name on his lips startled me. It was so horribly intimate. “She doesn’t know the right people. She can’t bring you fame, not the way Nicholas can—”
“We don’t know that’s true.”
“We do.” I struggled for the words to tell him how I felt, but I could not find them, and so instead I said the ones I knew he would understand. “Think, Joseph. You must see that I can’t just throw him aside. Nicholas knows the people who can introduce you to the world. Who does she know? What will she do with the painting she’s commissioned? Hang it in her parlor, where no one ever comes? She can’t help us, but Nicholas can. And he’ll do it for you. For me.”
“I’ve heard those words before. You said the same thing about Roberts and look how that turned out.”
“Why didn’t you tell me he was dead?”
He didn’t seem surprised that I knew. “I couldn’t bear to see that you might still care.”
“I don’t care, Joseph. I’m . . . I’m glad, actually. He caused us so much trouble. I’m glad.”
He looked at me as if he didn’t quite believe me, as if he were searching for reassurance and forgiveness, and suddenly I knew. “How did it happen? What did you do to him?”
“I wrote his father a letter. Anonymous, but with enough detail that it was hard to deny. I think he already suspected the truth of his son.” He paused and then said, an edge in his voice, “I’d known what would happen before I even sent it. Roberts was weak. I couldn’t risk doing such a thing when we were there, but once we were gone, once we had the sketches back . . . well . . .”
“Well?”
“He committed suicide. He jumped off the Staten Island ferry. They didn’t find his body for three days.”
I felt a little leap of—what? Triumph, vindication? Or was it regret and sorrow? Perhaps it was all of those things.
Joseph took my hands. “So you see? Say goodbye to Dane. We don’t need him.”
The way he was looking at me—how very well he knew me. Still, I could not quite make the promise he wanted. “I can’t. Why do you have to go back to her? Wasn’t last night enough? What is it about her that intrigues you so?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose . . . I want to know her secrets.”
I felt cold. That curiosity was new too. “What if she discovers yours?”
“I don’t think she’d care. I think she’d understand.”
“The way Edward understood?”
“She’s not like that.”
“Joseph, I don’t trust her.”
“Why not? She’s saved us already. We need the money, and she has a great deal of it. And she likes you, whatever you think. She wants to take us both to the theater tonight—”
“So she can seduce you after?”
He made a short laugh. “Believe me, she doesn’t need to make an effort.”
I felt sick. “Please don’t say such things to me.”
He swallowed hard—there was a misery in his eyes that matched what I knew was in mine. “It’s no different for me than for you. There’s no room for anyone else, Soph, don’t you see it? Not Odilé, not Edward. Not Dane.”
The truth of his words was a balm, a wish, a poison. I felt the fullness of him as I always had, and yet . . . and yet something felt wrong. Though I could not put my finger on it, I knew it had something to do with her.
Joseph said, “So you’ll come to the theater?”
“Yes.” In that moment nothing could have kept me away. I didn’t trust Odilé, and Joseph was in peril—I knew that, if not how. And I would do what I could to keep him from her. “Yes, of course I’ll come.”
He squeezed my hand. “You’ll see I’m right.”
I didn’t say anything to that—there was no point. I was too tired to keep fighting with him, and I hated to be at odds with him anyway. I pulled away, but gently, and rose. “Well, I’m to bed. I’m exhausted.”
Joseph said, “You won’t see Dane again?”
I hesitated. Perhaps Joseph was right to be afraid. I could not control my feelings as he could. Perhaps what I had with Nicholas would only be a reprise of what had happened with Edward. But it did not feel the same, and I realized it wasn’t just the way Nicholas had looked at me or the things I’d told him that made it so, but something more. Because now there was the danger I sensed in
Odilé, and Nicholas felt somehow to be the counterbalance I needed, my own golden crystal to help me fight what I could not see. He would keep both Joseph and me safe—and the moment I thought it I was surprised. Joseph and I had always been our own bulwark against the world. We had never needed a champion.
But that was before Odilé León.
I argued, “I’ll have to see him again, won’t I? He knows everyone in the salon. I can’t just ignore him. And I don’t want him to be angry.”
Joseph gave me a measured look. “Yes. All right.”
I started across the sala. I was halfway to the door when my brother stopped me with a quiet, “Sophie.”
I paused and looked over my shoulder. The light of sunrise came through the window, casting him in pink, making him so beautiful my heart ached. “What is it?”
“Do you . . . do you mind being my muse?”
The question was odd, but not as odd as the uncertainty in his voice, in his bearing. Joseph wore uncertainty poorly; it seemed to somehow misshape him. I heard in it everything he hid from the world, his own sense of worthlessness, the fear behind his ego. The things only I knew; things it hurt me now to see.
He went on as if he could not get the words out quickly enough. “Do you mind always being unacknowledged? Do you want acclaim? Should I thank you?”
“For what?” I asked, puzzled. “You’re my Prince Resolute. You’ve saved me from monsters and demon-knights. I’m the one who should be thanking you.”
His face sagged. “That’s not what I mean.”
“How can you not understand?” I whispered. “Don’t you know? When you draw me, I’m alive. I have only ever existed because of you.”
I would have said more; I would have told him I had hopes there was someone else who might see me as he did. I might have told him of the possibility I felt. I thought perhaps he was ready to listen. But then I saw how he was staring at me, as if I were suddenly a mystery to him, or rather, as if the world had fallen away and he stood on some great precipice with only the barest of inches between him and the fall. As if he did not know whether to jump or back away. Then he buried his head in his hands, his hair falling forward to hide them from view.