by Laurel McKee
“You have been naughty indeed,” she said sternly. “I don’t think you are sufficiently punished yet. You don’t seem truly sorry.”
“I am sorry! I truly am,” the man babbled.
“Not enough.” And the whip flashed through the air again.
“She’s very good,” Lily commented wryly.
“Not as good as you, I daresay.” Aidan slid his arm around her waist and spun her back to the wall. She was caught there with his hands braced to either side of her, his body pressed to hers. He bent his head to trace his lips lazily over her neck. “Whatever can we do to fill the time while we wait?”
She could think of a few things, things involving those intriguing items left so conveniently near. But then his mouth moved over the curve of her shoulder, his teeth scraping lightly over her skin, and she could hardly think at all. She knew she should push him away and concentrate on what they had to do—find Tom Beaumont. Aidan’s mouth, though, his touch… He made her want to forget. To believe there was only him. And the danger around them only made her want him more urgently.
She caught the back of his head in her palms, twisting her fingers in his hair. His kiss slid lower, his tongue licking along the soft swell of her breast pushed high by the tight-laced bodice. Behind her closed eyes, she could feel every shifting movement he made, every soft breath. His hands closed hard on her hips and pulled her against him until she could feel his erection. She could hear the whip from the next room, and the man’s screams of ecstasy.
“I fear I’ve also been very, very bad,” Aidan whispered darkly against Lily’s skin. His fist closed in the fabric of her skirt and dragged it slowly up her leg until he could trace his fingers over the soft bare skin of her thigh above her garters.
Before his touch could reach her damp, aching core, she pushed him back with a laugh. He fell away a step, staring down at her with burning eyes. Something came over her at that look of his, that hot desire that seemed to heat her skin wherever he stared at her. Something that felt powerful and needful at the same time, so wonderful after the helplessness of facing Tom again. Aidan, this handsome, sexy, powerful man, wanted her. She seemed to find a strength from that knowledge, a strength she didn’t even know she possessed.
She slid her hands up his chest and untied his cravat as she made him walk backward to the wall. When he leaned against it, still watching her, she quickly unfastened his shirt and peeled it away from his chest. His whole body grew taut, and she sensed again that way he had of watching a woman so closely, responding to her, gauging her desires and answering them with his mouth, his hands, his penis. As if he could read what a woman needed just from looking at her.
It was no wonder so many women loved him, Lily thought as she ran her hands lightly over his naked chest. No wonder she needed him, when she had pushed away and denied her own needs, her own nature, for so long.
His skin was smooth and warm, slightly damp with sweat under her touch, the muscles hard. She traced her fingers over his flat stomach, then his hip bones as she nudged his trousers lower. His erection sprang free, hard and ready, and she smoothed her fingertip over the pearly drop of liquid at its tip.
Aidan groaned and reached out for her, but she caught his wrists and pressed them back to the wall. She moved his arms up and wrapped his fingers around the chains that hung there. A muscle flexed in his jaw, and for a moment, she was sure he would break away. But then his grasp tightened on the chains, and she smiled.
She leaned against him, bracing her palms on his strong shoulders. She could feel the tension in his muscles there as he held himself bound. “You have been very naughty,” she whispered, and she caught his nipple between her teeth.
He groaned as she bit down lightly and sucked. Her touch glided down his sides, over the stretch of his ribs, his lean waist. She swept her palms over the taut curve of his buttocks, scoring him gently with her nails, pressing her fingertip over his puckered opening before she traced her caress along the top of his hair-dusted thigh.
“How should you be punished?” she mused.
“A good, hard fuck should do it,” he said hoarsely.
Lily laughed. “That doesn’t sound like punishment, now, does it? I suppose I could get out the whip like Jasmine, but I remember you rather like that too.” She went up on her toes to whisper in his ear. “I think I know what else you like…”
The chains rattled as his fists tightened around them. “Lily,” he said warningly.
“Shhh.” She kissed his neck, bit at the curve just where it met his shoulder. She slid down his body until she knelt at his feet. She shook back her hair and looked up at him.
His eyes were hooded, his skin drawn taut over his jaw and his aristocratic cheekbones as he stared down at her. The veins in his arms stood out as he wrapped the chain tightly around his fists. She gave him a smile and slid her parted lips over his erection.
The chains clashed again, and his hips jerked against her. She pressed her palms to his buttocks and held him to her mouth. She traced her tongue flat over his length, tasting the faint, warm saltiness of him, inhaling the sweet musk of his desire. His desire for her.
She slid deeper, slowly wrapping one hand around his base, until he touched the back of her throat, and she swallowed.
“Oh, God, Lily,” he groaned. “Suck me. Just like that.”
She drew off him, until her lips touched just the sensitive tip. “So naughty,” she said, and licked up his length again, harder. She slid her hand around his base to cradle his heavy testicles, and she could feel how tight they were with need. Then she drew him deep again and sucked hard.
Aidan’s control snapped. With a shout that echoed the cries in the next room, his hands released the chains and closed tightly over her shoulders. He dragged her up into his arms and carried her to the chaise in the corner. As they went, she felt one of his hands reach for something, but then he laid her down on the velvet cushions and fell between her spread legs, and she didn’t know anything but him.
“What do you do to me, Lily?” he muttered as he kissed her neck, openmouthed, hot, wet. His hand roughly pushed her skirts up around her waist and tugged down her underthings until he could thrust two fingers into her wet folds. He crooked them, brushing against that spot that made her cry out.
When she reached out for him, he caught her wrists in his free hand and pushed them into the cushions above her head. His other hand left her, even though she cried out in protest and writhed against his hold. Her cry turned louder when she felt the cold metal of manacles snap around her wrists.
“Aidan!” she protested.
He grinned down at her. “I’m not the only one who has been naughty, now, am I?”
“Aidan.” She tried to move her bound hands, but the chain was wrapped around something on the chaise and she was stretched out before him. Under his power. It should have made her panic, scream in protest and fear. Yet somehow as she looked up into his eyes, she felt… safe. Safe, and full of a fresh, hot surge of desire.
She arched up in silent entreaty, and his smile turned satisfied. His hand slid between her legs again, pressing her thighs wider apart. His finger slid into her again, then another and another, delightfully rough and calloused against her sensitive skin. She closed her eyes and gave herself over to the sensations of his touch. He bent his head and his lips slid over her cheekbone, the pulse that beat in her temple.
“I think they’re almost done in there,” he said.
Lily listened carefully and found that the man’s screams had turned to whimpers. “Then you should hurry, shouldn’t you?”
His lips curved in a smile against her. “Ah, so sad. I do like having you bound here at my mercy.”
“Be nice and I might let you do it again.”
“Aren’t I always nice, Lily?” His hand eased away from her, and she felt him kneel between her legs, the tip of his manhood stretching her as he slid into her, one slow inch at a time. “Very, very nice.”
Lily moa
ned. He slid deeper, deeper, until suddenly he drew back and plunged in to the hilt. His hips circled over hers, pulling him even closer than she would have thought possible.
“You’re being very nice right now,” she said. She longed to touch him, to run her hands through his hair and over the taut muscles of his naked back where the shirt fell away, but she was bound. All she could do was arch herself tighter against him, closer until she wasn’t sure where he ended and she began. They were as one being.
“Take me, Aidan,” she said, and his hips pistoned faster, harder. She met him thrust for thrust, the tension inside of her growing hotter and tighter until she feared she would break with it. She cried out incoherently, her hips twisting under his until the pleasure building in her shattered. She cried out his name.
His body tightened over hers, his hips suddenly still. “Lily,” he whispered, just before he came with a deep shudder. He sank down onto the chaise beside her, reaching up to unfasten the manacles.
Lily sighed and turned her face away to stare blindly at the red-painted wall. She suddenly felt so vulnerable, so sad, and she didn’t know why. He took her hand in his, and she felt the soft, gentle touch of his lips on the faint red marks on her wrist. She suddenly wanted to snatch her hand away, to curl into a ball and cry.
But there was no time for that, no time to decipher why she suddenly felt that way. The room next to theirs was silent now.
Aidan rolled off the chaise, and she heard him gathering his clothes and putting himself together again. She slowly sat up and shook her skirts down over her legs as she looked for her underthings. She had just found them under the gilded legs of the chaise when the door opened and Jasmine stood there.
She smiled as she studied Lily and Aidan. “Well, now. It looks like you two kept yourselves busy. Marie says you want to find my sister?”
Aidan held on to Lily’s arm as they made their way down the narrow alley. Rough stone walls rose up close on either side, and the smell of rotting garbage and the tang of the nearby river were strong there, but it was strangely quiet. The doors and windows were closed up tightly.
Lily was quiet too. She had said barely a word since they left Madame Marie’s, just walked with him and followed his lead as they looked for the address where Jasmine said her sister could usually be found. Her face looked very calm and still under the folds of her shawl, all her emotions hidden from him. Had it all been too much, Marie’s place, the rough sex?
“Are you all right?” he asked quietly.
She nodded. “Perfectly so.”
She said nothing else, and Aidan decided to leave her to her thoughts—for now. They had an errand to do. But he wouldn’t let her hide much longer.
“I think this is the place,” he said as he studied the building at the end of the alley. It looked just like all the others, dark and rough, the windows shuttered, but the peeling, black-painted door was marked with mysterious white Oriental symbols. A short flight of stone steps led down to another door at the basement level.
They made their way down the stairs, their boots thudding on the chipped stone, and Aidan pounded on the door. Lily pressed close to his side, still silent and watchful.
A tiny, elderly woman with a shriveled face and tangled gray hair opened the door a crack and peered outside.
“Jasmine sent us to find Ruby,” Aidan said. She tried to slam the door, but he blocked it with his boot. “You don’t want to turn us away,” he said in a hard, unyielding tone.
The woman muttered something in a language that sounded like Russian or Polish. She glared at him from tiny black eyes, but she pulled the door open.
“Does everyone do what you say?” Lily whispered in his ear.
“If they know what’s good for them.”
The old woman led them down a dark, narrow corridor and into an open room at the end. It felt almost like stepping into hell, a black, hazy space broken by red-orange circles of light from oil lamps. Sparks flared as pipes were lit and then went out. A thick, sticky-sweet cloud hung over everything.
Lily’s fingers convulsed on Aidan’s sleeve, and he glanced down at her in concern. She studied the room with a small frown on her brow, and he remembered what she had told him—her mother had been an opium addict.
Had Sandrine been one of those figures slumped on grubby mattresses on the floor, inhaling the smoke from their pipes and falling back with eyes closed, in a stupor? Had Lily watched this every day, breathing the cloying fumes of the drug as her mother’s perfume?
The old woman gestured toward a raised couch in the corner. “Miss Ruby,” she said, and vanished into the darkness.
Aidan wrapped his arm protectively around Lily’s shoulders. “Do you want to wait here?” he asked in a low voice. “I can talk to her, find out what we need to know, and then we can leave.”
Lily leaned against him, but she shook her head. “She won’t want to talk. She’s off in her own world. I know how to get information from someone when they’re on opium.”
“Did you have to find your mother in places like this?”
“No, she never came to the dens. She didn’t smoke it. She drank it in wine, and working at Madame Josephine’s had its perks—her bottles were delivered to her.” She gave a bitter little smile. “She couldn’t help herself.”
She hurried toward the couch in the corner, her shoulders held stiff and her head high as if she were marching bravely into hell itself. Aidan caught up with her and they both knelt beside the woman stretched out on her side on the couch, the paraphernalia of opium smoking on a table beside her, the pipe and lamp and the small, sticky gray ball in a dish.
The woman looked much like Jasmine, tall and dark-haired, but she was as thin and pale as an ephemeral ghost. Her hair was tangled where it fell on her shoulders, left bare by a loose bodice. She stared up at them with dull, uninterested eyes. Her bony fingers caressed the pipe.
“Who’re you?” she said.
“Your sister Jasmine sent us,” Lily said. Her lips were drawn into a tight line as she studied the wasted woman in front of her. Aidan knew he wasn’t the only one who could get people to listen.
“Did she now? She knows I won’t leave here.” Ruby gave a dry laugh that ended on a cough. “She’s always trying to rescue me.”
“Not this time,” Aidan said. “She said you could give us information.”
“About what?”
“About the whereabouts of Tom Beaumont.”
Ruby’s drowsiness vanished, and her eyes narrowed. She tried to sit up but couldn’t. “If I knew where that piece of shit was, I would stay far away. I never want to see him again.” She turned her head to show a long, thin scar along her jaw, her earlobe sliced away into a mass of scar tissue. “He did this to me.”
“You’re not the only one who would like to see the last of him,” Lily said. “That’s what we’re trying to do. But we need your help.”
Ruby gave a soft snort. “You need more than that to take down the likes of Beaumont. But good luck to you.”
Aidan grabbed her arm to keep her from rolling away. “When was the last time you saw him?”
Ruby closed her eyes as if to sink back into her stupor. Her arm was limp in his grasp, and he let her go. But Lily bent down and shook her hard by the shoulders. “Where is he?” Lily demanded.
“I don’t know,” Ruby answered. “But I know someone who might. My friend Sarah, over in the Devil’s Acre. She can’t stay away from him, the stupid slut.”
“Give us her address,” Lily said. Once that information was secured, they left Ruby to her opium dreams again. The alleyway was just as deserted as before, but the sky was beginning to lighten and a fog was rolling in off the river. The night wouldn’t last much longer.
Lily leaned against Aidan’s shoulder and he looked down to see the pale, tired strain on her face. “Where is your family, Lily?” he asked.
“A new play opens tonight,” she said wearily. “They won’t miss me for a while.”
/> “Then come on,” he said, wrapping his arm around her waist. “We’ll go back to my lodgings for a few hours.”
“Shouldn’t we—”
“No,” he said firmly. “We’ll need our rest and something to eat if we’re going to find Beaumont, and you look like you’re ready to faint. Come and sleep in my bed for a while.”
Chapter Twenty-one
Such a pretty, pretty girl.
Lily felt a soft, fleeting touch on her hair, and she almost screamed until she realized it was only a dream. A hazy, cloudy, smoky dream, but one she couldn���t free herself from.
She could smell sweet rose-musk perfume and the heavy, cloying scent of opium that was thick in the back of her throat. She twisted around to see that it was her mother who stroked her hair, who spoke to her softly in that musical French accent. Sandrine lay back on her pink satin chaise, her dark hair trailing around her in mermaid waves, her eyes slumberous from the drug. She trailed her white, soft fingers down Lily’s cheek.
“So very pretty,” she murmured. “Just like me, non?”
“No,” Lily whispered. She was overwhelmed by the flood of so many emotions she had suppressed and denied for so long. Grief and memory, regret, love. “No, I’m not like you.”
Sandrine laughed. “But of course you are, ma petite. You can’t escape what you are, where you come from. I am part of you.” Her smile turned teasing. “Your fine gentleman seems to appreciate that about you. My talent. The touch of the gutter…”
“No!” Lily frantically shook her head, but Sandrine just laughed. She reached for her glass of wine, but it spilled, a torrent of bright bloodred on the pink satin and her mother’s white skin.
Lily tried to run from it, but a rough hand caught her and spun her around. She found herself caught by Tom Beaumont, who laughed at her struggles and her screams. The more she tried to flee, the more trapped she became.