by Black Silk
What Graham didn’t know how to do now was dispose of his own emotion. He stood there, choking, his blood pumping, wanting this woman to understand something for which there seemed to be no words. That he loved her, loved her, loved her, loved her. That he would love her always, passionately, indecently beyond reason, and under any circumstance.
Submit stood by Henry’s desk in stunned, silent disbelief while the far-too-handsome earl of Netham tapped his hat against the leg of his trousers.
“You have just done a mean and horrible thing,” she told him. “Rosalyn doesn’t love him.”
Graham glanced at her, his dark eyes quick and intense. “So why do you have to save him?”
“I don’t. I love him.”
“No you don’t. You love me.”
Submit sniffed at that. “What an arrogant—”
“Arrogant but truthful. How many men have you screwed in a stairway?”
She blinked, once more having to leap to meanings. When he didn’t take time to think, the man before her had an expansively coarse vocabulary. “None but you,” she said with an uncomfortable laugh. “You’re the only one who has ever wanted me to so badly.”
“I doubt it.”
Submit pulled her mouth into a tight line. It was a narrow look meant to halt this heart-pounding conversation where it was. She went to turn away.
“Damn it.” He took her arm. “Any number of men would screw you in a second—”
“What a lovely thought. So beautifully expressed—”
“Listen to me! So would Schild—the poor man likes women who don’t love him. But I’m the only one you want to touch you. You let me, damn it, because you are absolutely beside yourself with liking me—loving me—”
“Lusting after you—”
“Same thing.”
“It’s not!”
He laughed. “Yes it is. Trust me, I’m an expert on lusting. I love soft saddles and mean horses and bright, booming fireworks that end in a rain of sparkling ash. I would love to roll around on the floor with all of these, touching them with the most sensitive parts of my body. But the truth is, none of them are really as good for fucking as the woman I love. And you’re it. I want to screw you till neither of us can stand straight, and the funny thing is, just my saying this I’ll bet is making your knees weak and your head dizzy. And you’re going to call it something else. Damn, mean, stupid woman—you won’t let go of the fun of torturing me with this long enough to let it come.” His voice broke. “God, come—” He let go of her. At least literally. He turned around from her, shaking, struggling for air.
Submit was transfixed.
And so flabbergasted, she couldn’t move, couldn’t think, couldn’t speak. She had never heard such an insane, impassioned declaration. It offended her. It pleased her horribly. It made her chest warm; it left her in hot confusion, without breath.
Then, as if her silence itself were censure, he said, “Right. I’m going.” Graham pushed his way in front of her. She glimpsed the back of his coat, an arm, as he closed the study door behind himself, leaving her alone.
Submit heard his footfalls soften when they got to the carpet of the library, then fade down the gallery toward the entry room. A minute later, she heard the front door’s familiar creak, then its quiet closure. As soft as the lid of a coffin coming down.
Submit’s heart pounded for three, four, five long seconds. Then she picked up her skirts and threw open the study door.
“Graham!” she screamed.
She tore through the rooms, one after the other. Her shoes slid, her hands grabbed for balance at door frames. China in cabinets shimmied and clinked. Her legs wouldn’t move fast enough. Her feet beat on the floor, her urgency jolting up her legs. She turned the corner, ran halfway down the long carpet of the entryway—and stopped cold.
He was standing there, his back leaning against the front door, his arms folded, his expression pensive, waiting. There was only a modest hint of triumph in his face.
Submit’s face flushed. Anger. Outrage. Commotion rose up inside her. “Damn you!” she shrieked. “Damn you!” She clenched her fists, felt herself, let herself, shake with wrath. “You son of a bitch!”
He smiled that easy, creased, ridiculously handsome smile. “What a lovely thought,” he said. “So beautifully expressed.”
She could hardly believe it—chastised with her own words, on top of being duped by such an old, predictable trick. “You fraud!” she screamed. “You—you actor! You trickster!” None of these were really good enough. “You game-playing son of a bitch!”
Pure, blind fury swirled. In the midst of it, a funny feeling took hold. It started at her solar plexus, moved like a tickle. Her hands flushed suddenly warm, wet. It felt like something was releasing inside. And as it did, she found she couldn’t quite fight back the smile that threatened to break through.
While the idiot man, maddeningly calm, took out his watch—he was wearing about eight of them—from a bright floral vest. “Go ahead,” he said. “I’ll give you ten seconds’ head start.”
“What?” She narrowed her eyes. Her breath wouldn’t come right.
He said slowly, “Ten.” Then, “Nine.” He stopped a moment, tilted his head. “You know, Submit, you’re smart as a whip and—William is right—pretty damn smug about it. But what you are a true novice at is pure, unadulterated fun.” He glanced at his watch. “Eight.”
“What?” she said again. She could barely get the word out.
“Seven.”
Submit blinked, tried to slow her thudding heart with pressure, but it only beat like thunder against the heel of her hand.
“Six,” he said. “What do you want, Submit? If you really want to fight it out, you’ll stand a lot better chance if you take a running start. Five.”
“Graham, don’t be absurd.” She swallowed a slightly giddy laugh.
“If I were you, I’d head for privacy. Because where I catch you, lady, is where it happens.”
“Graham!”
“You’d better run.”
She did.
It helped that he had to cover the length of the entryway. It helped that the staircase was close at hand. But by the first landing, he had one of her feet. She shrieked, “Behave yourself! Be civilized—”
She lost her shoe as they both went down. Hoops billowed. She couldn’t even see but rather felt him grab her foot by the instep and arch. He ran his hand up her calf, to the back of her knee. His solid grasp made her dizzy, insanely furious. She kicked, fought, yet heard herself laughing. “This is”—she panted—“so stupid—”
It was. It was positively silly, though the fact didn’t keep her from bashing him across the shoulder, then pulling a small jardiniere over on him. He made a sound, oof, as she scrambled through dirt and dried-out dieffenbachia, free of him again. Around the turn on the next landing, she pulled out every chair in the window bay, putting obstacles between them. He came anyway, cursing, laughing, shoving, vaulting them, not a man to be slowed down by dignity.
Behind her, up the next flight of stairs, she heard his clamoring footfalls. She felt a pull of her skirt, a hand over her arm, and he collided into her. He grabbed, tried to keep them both from falling, while Submit wrenched away—too hard. They went down. She went flying, sliding three feet on taffeta along the polished wood floors of the main bedroom wing lobby. She was stunned for a moment, as she lay on the floor sprawled, then she felt his fingers snake round an ankle. He pulled. On a shush of accommodating fabric, she slipped helplessly along the floor till she lay on her back beside him. He threw his leg over her.
“Don’t.” Submit tried to draw air into her lungs. Panting, she complained, “You didn’t even give me ten seconds.”
“Such a stickler.”
He moved up to his knees, then lay his full weight on top of her, collapsing crinolines, gathers, ruffles, making a wobbly quiver of steel hoops as he made a valley for himself between silk-covered mountains.
Submit
lay there, trying to catch her breath. She could feel their hearts, their bellies beating together. She could see Graham’s dark face coming. He licked her lower lip briefly, wiping with his thumb the wet spot he’d left. She stared up, dumbfounded for a second as he massaged her lip. When he kissed her, he held her cheek, stroking her lip with his thumb even as he put his tongue deep in her mouth. She made a funny sound of befuddlement, resistance. She turned her face. “You—” Submit exhaled. “Not—not here—You can’t—” His head followed hers around.
“Give in,” he murmured. “You think too much, Submit. Stop thinking. Just feel.”
He kissed her again, while adjusting his hips, till the outline of a firm erection fit flush against the rise of her mons. The instant satisfaction was indisputable, as if their bodies were the final pieces to a puzzle linking up at last. His hips moved with a gentle, rotating pressure that matched the action of his tongue. Submit groaned. What remained of her struggles became subdued, then shifted. Her arms went up. She clutched his neck. His hand molded up her ribs to cup her breast, his thumb rubbing its tip till the nipple pulled together into a hard, shriveled bit. The game rolled over on itself. Her stomach lifted, as if taking a bump too fast in a carriage going full pelt. She closed her eyes, and he kissed her with deeper, greedier, wallowing kisses, as she raised her knees and opened her legs to him—
“Madam.” A voice rose from two floors below. “Is everything all right?”
They froze like guilty children, the heat between them trapped like a secret. Their breaths hissed.
“Madam?” It was the butler. His voice two flights below moved to the foot of the stairs.
“It’s all right,” Graham called. Which made him and Submit have to stifle laughter.
She chimed in, “Yes, I’m fine. Everything is fine.”
“Come on,” Graham whispered. He lifted her up and took her by the hand.
“My bedroom—” she began.
He threw her a strangely intimate look. “Yes. I know where your bedroom is in this house.”
Graham pulled her up against him as he kicked the door closed, then backed her up against it. He kissed her insistently, but through her half-closed eyes over Graham’s shoulder she caught a glimpse of Henry’s wardrobe. It stood behind him, eight feet tall and six feet wide, a dark mass of almost black mahogany.
“Graham—” She turned her face to the side. His mouth followed. She turned the other direction. He found her neck. She flexed, bringing her shoulder to her cheek in an effort to make him stop. She whispered, “I think we should go some other place—”
He took hold of her jaw and backed off three inches, a distance from which he stared her directly in the face. “Yes, it’s Henry’s room,” he told her. “And, no, I won’t go anywhere else. It’s Henry’s house, Submit. It means nothing. It’s walls and furniture. Now will you stop worrying whether everything is perfect? It’s perfect enough.”
“It’s not that—”
He put two fingers over her mouth. “It is. You’re frightened and you don’t like to lose control, so your mind starts inventing excuses. Submit, listen to me. There are probably good reasons why we shouldn’t be together. But the overriding fact is I love you, and you love me—you need me. I can keep your life from becoming hopelessly earthbound. And I need you, as sure as leaps in the air need gravity.” He took a breath. “In the future, there will be times when I count on your guidance, times that call for a cool, rational head. There will be other times, though, when I expect you to trust me. We’ll do things my way because I’m better at letting fly than you are.” Very firmly, he said, “Now not another word, do you understand? I’m going to push you over the edge.” He laughed. “Without mercy or compunction. I’m going to make love to you in ways that, if you stop long enough to think about it, will make you cringe. So turn your little mind off. It’ll only get you in trouble.”
If she could have found words to answer such a lecture, she didn’t get a chance to. He kissed her open mouth and began to pull her toward the bed. With a foot and a knee, he knew how to manipulate the structure of her dress. He had no trouble getting under and into it, or unfastening crinolines and corsets and corset covers. Submit took his expertise in, as she fought her own odd moments of conditioned resistance. The adeptness with her clothes, she discovered, was not the sort of competence that made a man less attractive. As each hook gave, as his hands slipped closer and closer to the skin of her midriff, her breasts, her buttocks, the mild alarm of each invasion piqued a warm, expanding delight. A yearning deep in her belly began to squirm and become active. She caught a glimpse of Henry’s four-poster, then felt Graham’s hands, several fingers heavily encumbered with rings, move into the little recesses of open clothes. He touched her bare back, and every other awareness went blank.
His fingers ran up the hollow of her spine until her shoulder blades drew together involuntarily. The movement thrust her breasts out. She wet her lips as his hand took a breast. He lifted the small weight in his palm, then took her nipple between his thumb and the side of his hand, pinching and tugging in a movement vaguely akin to strong suckling. He bent his head.
“Gracious Lord,” she whispered. She would never recover from this, she thought, the feel of Graham’s mouth on her breast combined with the odd, particular pattern of Graham’s touch, the feel of heavy gold warmed by smooth, inquisitive fingers grazing her belly and buttocks. She wanted to collapse from the joy of it. Then she felt his fingers go between her legs. She felt the delicate movement of his turning a ring with his thumb, and he used the edges of the facets against her.
“God in Heaven,” she murmured. Her muscles contracted.
At the bed, he tried to lay her down gently, but she wanted suddenly nothing that left her nearly so passive. She refused to lie back but remained on her knees, pulling his face down to her. Her whole body strained toward him as she began kissing him and touching him. She was filled with wonder at the power in her: the power of letting herself want him, reach for him, be surrounded by him.
Graham twisted his head to take the kiss deeper. As he stood by the bed, he lifted her slightly to be hip to hip, searching, then finding that incomparable fit, male to female. They kissed with deep, thirsty ardor, arms, mouths, bodies. Submit couldn’t believe he wanted her like this, that she could make him shake and shudder and pant for breath, that he couldn’t control his response to her.
She let her hands roam his vest, a vest covered in a raised profusion of silk-embroidered flowers. She dipped her hands inside it. He was so tactile. His watch chains swung and tickled against her elbows as she ran her hands up the starchy pleats of his shirt, then inside his coat and over his shoulders. She pushed his coat off, with him helping and clinging at the mouth, sucking, slathering the dryness of lips and tongue and teeth with the longest, wettest of kisses.
She tried to pull him down on her, but instead his hands dug into her buttocks. He peeled off the last of her drawers. Like a madman, he was throwing off his own clothing. Watches scattered. Submit tried to help. She pulled at his vest and stripped his trouser braces down over his shoulders.
The bed sagged as they fell onto it. Submit closed her eyes, arched her back, and slid her hands under the shirt they had only managed to get partially unbuttoned. His chest was heaven. Warm, furred, fluid with muscle. His belly was paradise. She ran her hands down him, tracing the fine, smooth hair down the furrow of his abdomen to where it spread out and became coarse, a regular jungle. He groaned. He felt thick and resilient as she wrapped her hands around him. Hot, tumid, marvelous. Submit shivered, feeling sensations so strong they constricted her muscles till she coiled around him. She clasped him with her legs, shocked, entranced by the force of what was happening to her.
“Slow down.” He laughed, then spoke in a hoarse whisper. “Not so fast,” he said. “I want to savor this a little.”
She didn’t want to savor anything. Submit turned her head from side to side, fidgeting, twisting in denial.
>
He laughed again and pinned her back. She was like a spring that had to be stretched out. He laced his fingers into hers and forced her hands out by her shoulders, trapped her legs under his. He loomed over her, his face watching her. “Oh, God,” he breathed, “I love you like this. I never thought I’d see it.” He rocked and lifted his hips, nudging her between her open legs till awareness itself seemed to run into inky blotches.
“Graham,” she murmured, “I’m going to pass out—”
“Shh.” He laughed. “That’s not what it’s called.” He bit her lips, her cheeks, her eyes. For a few more seconds, he left her hanging there, pinned out on the bed, near demented.
“Graham—” She felt herself straining, trying not to give way to something that was about to roll over her. It felt like holding back a boulder on the incline of a mountain.
“Give in to it,” he whispered. “Let it take you.”
Anticipation, a second ahead of reality, made the warmth start to flood. Blood rushed down her veins into her fingers and toes, to the center, the apex of her body. Slick, swollen, she began to convulse at the one and same moment she felt him enter her. And the world bent, refracted, then disappeared entirely into the central moment of Graham parting her, pushing her flesh aside…into wanting, having, loving him…into a spill of sensation that held nothing back….
Graham awoke before Submit to find himself lying quite peacefully in a place he’d only been partially aware of last night. What at dusk had seemed to him more Submit’s room was, by morning light, the bedroom of Henry Channing-Downes. The room was not precisely the same as he remembered it. Yet there was a sameness to its colors and furniture and draperies, all permutations of past ones. There was almost no evidence that Submit had lived here at all. Her possessions were packed away in the boxes in the corridor, Graham presumed.