Mariah shifted. A good mistress did investigate her lover’s history, but she had not been able to find much more than bare facts in John’s. Clearly there was much more to it.
“How did your father cause an estrangement?” she asked softly.
He squeezed his eyes shut. “Many men are disowned from their families, but the reason my father lost his connections was because of his uncommon cruelty. He is like an animal—nothing is too low for him. He destroyed my mother, sending her to live on the street and die alone. I don’t even know where she was buried. He spent his life brutalizing his children. His servants. His workers. Anyone he could bully, he exerted his control in the darkest and most painful ways, only to prove he could.”
Mariah flinched. Here she had spent years wondering at John’s past and the truth of it was as painful as anything she had ever heard. Even without the benefit of fine detail, there was no denying that what he said conjured the most painful and terrible images of two frightened children, ruled by a man on the edge of madness. A man driven to control or destroy.
“John,” she whispered and squeezed his hand gently.
He allowed it, but Mariah could see that he barely felt the comfort she hoped to offer in her touch. His expression was too far away, too lost in memories she could not share.
“He was, and is, a bastard of the highest order. Not by birth, but by action. He will hurt. He will steal. He will destroy if it gets him what he desires. He sees himself as king, with everyone else in his life as pawns on his chessboard. He has sacrificed a great many people in order to further his cause. And that included destroying any relationship my brother and I might have had.”
Mariah stared at him. She had known John as long as she had known Owen, but she had never seen him this way. His pain was palpable, and it was made worse by the fact that he hid it always behind that dashing veneer.
“Why did your brother come to you?” she asked. “Especially if you two had been at odds for so long.”
He sighed. “My father bestowed his entire fortune on my brother some time ago. It was a way to punish me, and the reason for our initial falling out.”
Mariah drew back. “I cannot picture you fighting over something as petty as money.”
“It wasn’t about money,” he said with a shake of his head. “I was already building my fortune when he removed my inheritance. I didn’t care about that. But I did care, very much, that he would have my brother under his thumb in such a powerful way. We quarreled. My father convinced Adam that it was my greed that drove my concerns. And Adam, who always longed to see the best in our father, took his side.”
Mariah dipped her head. “I can well imagine how painful that must have been.”
In truth, she could more than imagine it. Her own family had separated themselves from her once her virtue had no longer been a bargaining chip for them. She had tried so many times to reconcile with them, but they had no interest in associating themselves with a woman they identified as a “whore”. Over the years, she had come to terms with that, but there was no joy in it. So she understood loss.
“When he came to me that afternoon, it was because our father had, in turn, cut him off. Adam…” He looked at her. “That is my brother’s name…Adam…he came with a warning that Vaughn Rycroft was turning his eye toward me again. And he was right, for our father visited me not two days ago with all his demands and attempts at control. When I rebuffed him, he turned those threats toward those I cared for. And I believe…no, I know, that the attack against you was to prove that he could find a way to reach anyone I lo—”
He broke off with a shake of his head. Mariah stared. His truncated sentence could only end one way, but the sentiment was not directed at her, of course. She had been a pawn to Vaughn Rycroft, a test of what John could expect toward those he truly loved. He certainly didn’t count her as one of them. It was not possible.
His shoulders slumped and he shook his head.
“I should have known he would take his threats as far as they would go. I should have protected you.”
She cupped his cheeks with her hands. “Look at me.”
He blinked and his gaze settled on her for the first time since he began his confession. His dark eyes swirled with pain. Pain she wished to take away, even though she couldn’t.
“John, you tried to protect me. You put a guard on me.” She shook her head. “But I did not understand the gravity of the situation and I found a way to escape him. This was not your fault.”
He shoved away from her to his feet. “But it was. I should have told you the moment my father threatened you. Instead, I protected myself by keeping the truth from you. I should have known that you, in all your headstrong glory, would not accept the protection from some unnamed threat.”
He shook his head and paced to the fire. “My father has taken everything, all I ever held dear. I refuse to allow him one more moment, one more person, one more fraction of my soul.”
She stared at him. His voice was cracking, though she doubted he even recognized it and she could no longer hold back and respect his clear desire for space. She pushed to her feet and moved across the room to him. Wrapping her arms around him, she held to him as tears streamed down her face.
“John,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
He looked down at her and gently swiped the tears from her cheeks. “Don’t.”
She shook her head. “How can I not?”
His fingers hesitated against her skin and he stared down at her with an intensity that held her in her place and kept her from breathing or thinking or doing anything except looking at him and seeing everything and everywhere she had ever wanted to be.
Without thinking, she leaned up and gently brushed her lips to his. She felt him hesitate, but then he returned the kiss, holding her so gently that it was as if he thought she would break. He brushed his lips back and forth against hers with a tenderness she had never experienced before.
But as much as she craved that tenderness, she craved something else more. Him.
She parted her lips and demanded more from the kiss as she darted her tongue between his lips and tasted him.
He jerked back as if burned and stared at her. “After tonight—” he began.
She shook her head. “John, tonight I have experienced a great deal of guilt and fear. If I could end this terrible day with pleasure and comfort, I would very much like to feel those things. With you. For both of us. I think we deserve to lose ourselves a little tonight.”
He pinched his lips together and she could see that he was thinking of all the reasons why they couldn’t, shouldn’t, wouldn’t, but then he shook his head. He cupped her chin and tilted her face toward his.
“Will you tell me to stop if you don’t want this anymore?” he whispered.
“If I didn’t want this,” she said, just as softly. “I would tell you. But I do want it and you. Always. I ask you to please take me, claim me, make me forget.”
His jaw set, working with some kind of struggle against what she asked, but in the end it seemed he was as helpless to their bond as she was. He returned his mouth to hers and kissed her once more. This time, she had no doubt that the kiss would end in so much more.
With a shiver, she wrapped her arms around his neck and leaned into him. The terror of the night melted away as he lifted her against him and carried her to his bed. He kissed her as he laid her across his pillows and took a place beside her.
“Let me help you with your gown,” he offered as he began to unbutton the dress. They both looked at the satin fabric, splotched and splattered with blood. “I’ll have it destroyed,” he said softly, “and another brought here by morning.”
She nodded. Certainly, she did not wish to ever see that dress again, even if copious scrubbing could make the bloodstains go away. She would always see them there, splashed across the silk.
When she was in a seated position, he slid the gown away from her shoulders and down around her waist, leavin
g her only in her thin chemise. She lay back down and he removed the rest of the gown to toss it on the floor beside the bed. Then he stared at her.
Mariah had been seen in so many intimate positions in her life. Long ago, she had lost any shame she had in her body or in the pleasures of sex and sin. But here, with John examining her so closely in the firelight, she actually felt…girlish. As if she had never been touched before. Heat burned her cheeks and she fought a strange desire to cover herself.
And yet, perhaps it wasn’t strange. She loved John. Acceptance of that fact had finally settled upon her and she no longer tried to deny it, even to herself. So when he looked at her, it was as if she were being seen for the first time. His opinion of her mattered more. She wanted to please him in every way.
“You are the most beautiful woman,” he murmured, almost more to himself than to her.
“Even battered and bruised,” she teased, if only to lighten the emotion that suddenly hung between them, never to be spoken since it would never be returned.
He frowned. “You are alive. In those moments I thought you weren’t…” He shuddered as he reached out to gently drag his fingertips along her cheek. “No, even these marring bruises are beautiful. They mean you survived. And that means more to me than anything in the world at present.”
She parted her lips to respond, but the only words she could think of were a declaration of her feelings. So instead, she kissed him. Let him feel her love in her body, but she could never say it.
With a groan he glided his fingers into her hair and tilted her head for greater access to her lips. He kissed her and kissed her for what seemed like an eternity and soon she lost track of all time, lost track of everything except for how her body ripened beneath his touch and readied itself for a joining she wanted more than anything.
Except that this didn’t feel like their typical sexual encounter, overflowing with passion and desire and wicked intent. There was something gentle about it. Something emotional. But she couldn’t dare believe that and put it from her mind as she reached up to unbutton his shirt as best she could with a bandaged hand.
He drew back and looked at her with a frown that was filled with the guilt he continued to insist plague him, and there was a moment’s terror that he would pull away entirely. But to her relief, he instead stripped himself of his own shirt, followed by his boots and trousers in short order.
The next time he lay down beside her on the bed, he was more naked than she was and she shivered as his bare skin touched hers.
“Cold?” he asked, moving for a thin blanket draped at the end of the bed.
She caught his hand and lifted it to her breast. “No, not cold,” she murmured.
He smiled and the wickedness that had been in check returned in that instant. He cupped her breast lightly, massaging the flesh with just the right amount of pleasing pressure that made her gasp with the feel of it. As her back arched, he began to brush her nipple through her chemise with the back of his hand, teasing the sensitive tip over and over again.
“John,” she whispered as she turned her head on the pillow and squeezed her eyes shut at the gathering sensation.
“I’ve always been amazed at how responsive you remain,” he murmured as he lowered his head to her breast.
Through the chemise, he blew a gust of hot air that stimulated her even further. She gripped the bedsheets with both fists and gasped out her approval of his attentions.
In response, he sucked her nipple hard between his lips, swirling his tongue around the fabric of her chemise until it was translucent and she was hardly breathing from pleasure.
“Like that,” he chuckled as he withdrew. “I could almost make you come that way. And you’re not even naked.”
She opened her eyes and smiled at him. “If anyone could, it would be you. All that wicked energy focused on me…I hardly know what to do with it.”
“Oh, you know,” he growled and placed both hands on her thighs.
He locked gazes with her and slid his hands upward. Her flimsy chemise glided up over her skin, revealing her sex, revealing her belly and finally he let it gather just below the breasts he had been lavishing with his attention a moment before.
“But if I want to make you come,” he said, his gaze still locked with hers, “I know a way.”
She opened her legs. He hadn’t asked her to, but she had to. She needed him so badly that her body was weeping, her knees were shaking, and the only way to obtain her desire was to give herself over to him. Tonight, she would let him pleasure her. She would let her own needs trump anything else, because he allowed her, nay expected her, to do so.
And who was she to deny him?
He finally broke their gaze and looked down at her sex, presented to him now slick and hot. He shuddered before he pressed a finger against her clitoris and rubbed a circle around the delicate, sensitive nub of nerves.
Mariah cried out as a shocking burst of pleasure cascaded from the place he touched her through her sex, through her limbs, to everyplace that was sensitive and raw on her body.
“Yes, that is how I’ll make you come,” he said, his voice rough. “But not yet. Not yet.”
He removed his finger and her body ached in response, lifting toward him of its own accord and causing her to whimper most plaintively.
“When?” she whispered.
He chuckled and lowered himself between those same legs. As he spread her sex open, he breathed a hot steam of air against her wet sex.
“Soon,” he promised and then stroked his tongue over her entrance.
Although he pointedly avoided her clitoris, that did not mean that he did not pleasure her. With every lick, he seemed to light her on fire. With each stroke he had her rolling her hips to find more pleasure, to demand more of his tongue and his fingers and his body.
She had been pleasured so many times before, but tonight it felt different. Perhaps because of the fear from earlier in the evening. Perhaps because she was too exhausted and injured to try to offer as much pleasure as she gave.
Or perhaps because this was a man she loved and he was giving her something to comfort her. To please her. Something that required no reciprocity.
“John,” she whispered, her voice broken by emotion and pleasure.
He lifted his gaze and met her eyes from between her legs. His sensual, self-satisfied expression made her shiver at the edge of orgasm.
“I want you…inside of me,” she whispered. “Now.”
“No more of this?” he questioned, his tongue darting out and finally stroking her clitoris.
She let out a strangled moan, but shook her head. “You. Just you.”
His expression softened, but he obliged, rising up over her to cover her with his warmth and protection. She put her arms around him and closed her eyes as he glided deep within her in one slick stroke. She came almost instantly, and with a power that took her off guard. She had no control over the lift of her hips, the squeeze of her pussy against his cock. Her cries echoed in the air and the nails of her uninjured hand dug into his shoulder as she rode out the quick, hot, powerful orgasm he had created and now dragged out with each long, satisfying stroke.
And he seemed no more immune to her than she was to him. As her orgasm faded, his strokes increased, becoming erratic, becoming wild until he grunted her name and poured his seed deep into her body.
John smiled as Mariah settled back against the pillows, her face glowing from release and pleasure. At least he could give her that. A small trade off considering all she’d lost thanks to him. Thanks to his father.
He slid away from the bed and retrieved his robe. As he tied it, she sat up, lifting the sheets to cover her bare breasts.
“You are leaving?” she asked, a lilt of panic to her tone.
He turned at her desperate voice and shook his head. “No. No, I’m only going to make the arrangements for your gown.” She relaxed a bit, but he could see she was still on edge. Fearful.
She needed him
. And he was damn well going to be here this time.
“Rest,” he said softly. “I’ll join you in just a moment. And tomorrow…tomorrow we will talk more about what to do now that you know the truth about how deep a threat my father is to you.”
She hesitated a moment, but then nodded. He turned to go to the door, but her voice stopped him.
“John?” she said. When he looked at her, she smiled. “I don’t blame you.”
He nodded and continued toward the door. As he rang for the servant, he heard her yawn behind him, and by the time he looked at her, she had rested her head onto the pillows and was already drifting off to sleep.
She might not blame him yet. But after tomorrow, she might very well feel differently. Especially if the plan he was now formulating to keep her safe was the only one his mind could conceive.
Chapter Seventeen
John looked up as the door to the breakfast room opened and Mariah slipped inside, wearing the gown that had been delivered in the middle of the night.
He caught his breath at the sight of her, despite his attempts not to react. The bruising to her face had grown worse since last night and her hand was swollen beneath the bandages as she held it against her stomach.
She had been smiling upon her entry, but his reaction made her expression fall.
“We did the best we could to cover the worst of it,” she whispered as her cheeks darkened with embarassment. “I know I look a fright.”
He pushed to his feet and moved to the doorway where she lingered. He gently cupped her chin and lifted it so she would look into his eyes.
“I am glad you are alive,” he said. “The bruises will fade, your hand will heal…”
He trailed off because he realized she would probably have an ugly scar on that hand to remind her of last night forever. One more item to add to his list of fault in this situation.
“Now come,” he said with false brightness as he motioned to the table. “Eat. You need your strength.”
For Desire Alone Page 15