The Devil is French: A Whipping Society Novel

by Delilah Marvelle

  Her hand jumped to her hidden corset buried beneath material she knew he couldn’t see through. Her fingers gripped the clinging material hard, her pulse roaring.

  Smoldering constraint lit his eyes. “Unlike other men, I have the mental capacity to see past your antics.” He tapped at her stomacher, dragging his finger across it. “You wore this contraption to make me crawl, but how about I make you crawl instead? I’m going to make you wait for the fuck we both want.”

  Explosive currents raced through her. She smacked away his hand.

  His hand rigidly skimmed her waist and dragged up to her breasts. His fingertips grazed her exposed skin, spreading them down toward her nipple buried beneath the fabric.

  She choked.

  With the quirk of a brow, he snapped up the hand to demonstrate it was no longer inappropriately touching her.

  She staggered, unable to control the need she always felt in his presence.

  His eyes darkened. “I have to leave. I will see you in five thousand, seven hundred and sixty minutes.” Leaning in, his hot tongue grazed the corner of her mouth, dipping and dragging past her lips and across her teeth.

  Moisture flooded her cunt and she gasped, wanting to be tongued and filled and impaled. Her skin was ablaze, her core demanding his thickness. She grabbed his shoulders hard and veered her hands down between them, grabbing for the flap of his trousers. “Pleasure me,” she choked out trying to reclaim his mouth that annoyingly stayed out of reach. “Before you go. Four days is far too—”

  “Ey. Ey. Ease off,” his voice came low against her cheek. “Your officer is watching.”

  She froze against uneven and harried breaths. Her gaze snapped beyond Ridley’s broad shoulders to the lingering figure of Bradley in the distance. Watching.

  A knot formed in her stomach.

  “He can’t seem to let you go,” Ridley intoned, his chin digging into her cheek. “Why?”

  She almost buried her face against him in mortification. “Why not go and ask him?”

  Leaning back, he gave her a pointed look, his amber eyes sparking. “I have squadron duty and have no time for this. I’ll see you on Friday. Maybe by then you’ll tell me more.”

  The last thing she needed was for him to think there was more. She swallowed. “He signed off on your assignment that you took into Bombay. Were you aware of that?”

  He nodded. “Yes. His signature was there for me to read. Why?”

  “Did you also know it was a felo-de-se assignment?”

  He squinted. “Yes. I knew.”

  She stared in disbelief. “Yet you took it? Knowing you could die?”

  “You needed me.”

  She glared and thudded his chest. “Not at the expense of yourself!”

  His tone hardened. “What the hell is this? What aren’t you telling me?”

  Jemdanee pressed her hands to his smoothly shaven face, thankful he hadn’t been hurt. “Bradley gave you that assignment thinking you would never return from it.”

  His expression cooled. He leaned back, breaking her hold on his face. “Why? What happened between you and him?”

  She tsked. “With such a lofty attempt to slander, I am astounded you did not have my hymen investigated.”

  Something flared in his eyes. “Now is not the time to toss jokes.”

  She gripped his arms in assurance. “I am not a case. This is not an investigation. Cease treating me as if I were a criminal looking to turn against you. Nothing happened outside of what I already told you.”

  He glanced toward the Government House. “I’m going to assign someone to stand outside your door within the hour. Do you know Brigadier Jasper?”

  “I…yes.”

  “He will follow you everywhere until I get back. Don’t go anywhere alone.”

  “Ridley, I have been here for three years without an incident.”

  “Except for the one that happened today.” He pointed. “I’ll be gone for four days and hardly need the distraction of worrying about you. I’ll assign him to your door.”

  “I appreciate the concern, but there is no need to—”

  “Don’t argue.” Edging toward her, he jerked her toward himself. “Give me what you owe me.” Seizing her lips, his tongue rigidly slid into her mouth, pushing deep toward her throat as if thrusting his cock into her womb.

  She gasped, her pulse roaring in disbelief. He was…kissing her!

  His fingers dug into her, stinging her over-sensitized skin as his masculine mouth worked with ferocity, opening her mouth wider to him. His hot tongue tasted, penetrated and dragged against her teeth.

  She almost fainted.

  Pressing into him with the intention of climbing onto him, she tongued him frenziedly, glorying in a moment she had dream of for too long. The prickling heat of her skin beneath the fabric separating them was unbearable.

  Their ragged breaths mingled against each other’s frantic mouths.

  Dragging his large hands downward from her throat to her shoulders to her breasts, his calloused palms almost burned her from the friction.

  Jemdanee staggered against his muscled frame, her hands jumping up in anguished need to touch his smoothly shaven face, his strong throat and his broad chest as the bulk of his arms crushed her closer. She moaned in ecstasy knowing this was real!

  Gripping and tugging at his waistcoat, she submitted to his driving tongue as he sucked her own tongue deep into his mouth, stinging it to the root.

  Her lips burned in an effort to keep up with the mounting intensity.

  The solid muscle beneath his clothing tensed and shifted, warning of building tension.

  He thudded her back hard against the greenhouse door, jarring her into gasping against his mouth from the impact vibrating every limb.

  Growling, he nipped her lower lip, and slid her hand down between them, forcing her to rub the thickness of his rampant cock which pressed against the linen flap straining past the buttons that were shifting. He curled her fingers around the swollen length and imposing size of that cock, inflaming her to forget whatever pain it would bring.

  Her mind reeled, her thighs wet.

  She couldn’t breathe.

  Ridley broke away and released her, removing her gripping hands from his flap and his waistcoat, by unfurling every last one of her fingers on both hands.

  Her face felt as if it had been burnt to the muscle by an iron left atop of sizzling coals.

  Ridley lingered, silence pulsing between them.

  His eyes darkened with emotion. Wetting his lips, he eventually half-nodded.

  A muscle flicked in his jaw. “I’ll see you Friday.”

  Stiffly walking past her and over to the cane he’d thrown earlier, he swept it upward. Without another word, he thudded it into the ground and headed toward the direction of the gathering squadron with a long legged limping stride that shifted the clothing against his imposing, broad frame.

  She lingered, grazing quaking fingers to her scorched lips.

  There would be no separating their breaths again.

  He had marked her to the bone and was now his raven.

  Chapter 5

  Friday afternoon

  The Government House

  Evan Oswald Ridley wasn’t a man known to step outside of his own head very often. When he wasn’t miffed with himself, he rather liked it in there. His mind, after all, held an extensive amount of serviceable information he had ceaselessly gathered throughout his thirty-five years of life, and it was far more organized than the rest of the benighted world around him.

  For he knew what to expect from his thoughts.

  He knew what to do with them.

  He knew how to apply logic and get results.

  More importantly, he rarely disappointed himself when he followed his own set of axioms. While there were too many axioms for him to list, he still abided by each and every one.

  For instance, he knew that getting emotionally and physically involved with a woman made a man do stupid
things. And in his world and in his life and given who and what he was, there was no room for stupidity.

  It led to iniquitous mistakes that could never be undone.

  For every half-second that his watch couldn’t show him, it revealed a thread leading to countless lives that had yet to be saved.

  One wrong tug and they ceased to exist.

  One wrong tug and no evidence remained.

  One wrong tug and a killer was left to do what they did best.

  Whilst too many people seemed to think he was a genius, his mind was only really extraordinary because of one thing: he knew how to retrieve and utilize the information to see past the jargon.

  Unlike these fucking military men surrounding him, who only looked at women and saw a pair of tits, his mind saw into the muscle holding that woman together which allowed her to not only move, but exist.

  He hadn’t always been so enlightened.

  Once upon a time in that often fog-ridden land of London, after he’d solved his first double-homicide back in 1820, there hadn’t been a woman who didn’t notice that, oui, he was good-looking, and oui, he had a subtle French accent, and oui, his overly educated mind wanted the attention, and oui, he was ready to fuck whoever he wanted and however he wanted.

  Back when he was two and twenty, he’d been cocky enough to even fuck the fetching wife of Flanders, a highly ranked lead inspector of the Bow Street Runners. She had been flirtatiously sending him perfumed missives, attempting to engage his newfound popularity.

  Given Flanders had refused to let him in on any cases and had even repeatedly denied his application to the Bow Street Runner’s, Ridley had called on Mrs. Flanders one afternoon and twenty minutes later banged her on the back stairs of the man’s own home like she wanted.

  He even left the used condom on the man’s desk with his rejected application.

  Three days later, Flanders hired two burly Irish men and they rightfully pummeled the British blood out of him in a back alley.

  That incident veered him toward what he called French enlightenment.

  For he had lost sight of what mattered most: absolute justice.

  Setting aside the moral issue that came with penetrating another man’s wife, he had brought justice shame by forgetting his purpose and thinking revenge and any fuck was more important than his duty toward the rest of the world that was always dripping in blood.

  To compensate for his aberration, he focused on what he did best: deconstructing atrocities and connecting them to the criminals whose heads he slammed into prison walls.

  Over too many years of occasionally visiting birch clubs when loneliness got the best of him, he met Elizabeth who dragged his teeth across the pavement until he said ‘I don’t’. After their divorce, he’d learned to take greater pleasure in more subtle things.

  Like pushing aside the skull and looking at the brain. How much could it endure? How much would it embrace? Did it panic? Did it like to experiment? Could it match his intensity?

  That was what mattered.

  But Jemdanee, Jemdanee made him realize…none of those questions mattered.

  The taste of a raw honey stick she had sucked on still clung to the memory of his mind since Monday. The sounds of her uneven breaths and the feel of her small fingers gripping his prick made it impossible for him to focus on anything but what he wanted: her.

  She was the only reason why he was making his way through the vast, silent corridors of the Government House. For three years she had lived in a world he had never wanted her to be part of. For three years, he’d been left to imagine what did and didn’t happen given she never wrote.

  He knew he had earned her vengeful silence, but his need to piece together the years he’d missed was messing with the commonsensical part of his mind.

  It all veered into that dangerous, shadowy and unpredictable bailiwick known as his heart.

  Before deciding on what to do with Bradley, he decided to keep it simple.

  He was going to crawl into her mind first.

  Past her unsaid words.

  Past her pain.

  Past his own.

  Ridley set his cane against the wall outside her bedchamber.

  By packing her effects, he would be unpacking misunderstandings and erasing the three years spaced between them in the only way he knew how.

  He dug out the key the Field Marshal had given him and unlocked the door leading into her room with the jerk of his wrist and pushed it wide open.

  Stepping into the silence of her bedchamber, he closed the door behind himself, locking it to ensure no interruptions. He then did what he always did before sectioning off a crime scene.

  He did nothing but stand in the room and breathe.

  Scent. Jasmine ittar.

  It lingered in the air and yet…it had not lingered on the heat of her bronzed skin when he’d last seen her. The scent was as mouth softening as it was overpowering. Like the color of her gorgeous eyes that were not a mere blue but the color of lightning that lit up the sky during the rage of a storm.

  A storm he couldn’t wait to fuck so he could smell the burn of electricity.

  Ridley shifted his jaw and rounded the massive room, his booted feet echoing as he opened the shutter enough to let in more sunlight. He paused at seeing a maze of hemp. Looped through bolted hooks, the unending rope had been shaped into intricate macramé patterns that upheld countless jars filled with plants which decorated the entire ceiling.

  His lips parted in disbelief. Few things ever astounded him.

  “L’Appel du vide.” It was…his overlord rope.

  The one he thought was still in the attic of his house on 221 Basil Street.

  Why in knucklebones had she…?

  “You minx.” If a sky could be strewn with possibilities he was looking at it.

  Veering to one of the woven nets she had created for her plants out of his rope, he disbelievingly grazed his fingers against the roughness of small seashells wedged into the hemp for adornment.

  She put fucking seashells into his overlord rope.

  Seashells. As if the twisting of hemp into bare skin wasn’t enough to produce a burn.

  It was scatological.

  He imagined positioning them over each of her budding nipples heavily moistened with his tongue, whilst guiding the rest around her bronzed thighs, rubbing her slit.

  Too much of him knew she would never be that given his razored arm alone unnerved her.

  Ridley dragged the rope grudgingly, swaying the entire maze of plants and set the macramé adorned rope against his face. It hurt his heart knowing he was folding her into a life she would never understand or come to embrace.

  It was the price a man paid for thinking he could erase all obstacles in the name of love.

  Easing out a breath in an effort to refocus on what he had come to do, he paused.

  Despite it being two in the afternoon, the linens on her bed were bundled and hanging off the low-lying mattress. Several saris were tossed onto the other side of the bed with equal disregard.

  Two of the three pillows were on the floor.

  Stacks of books and parchments and quills, along with several inkwells that had spattered the linen of her bed with ink, were all stacked from the head board to the footboard on the right side of her bed as if it were its own person.

  A low whistle escaped him at seeing piles and piles of tangling saris that had clearly never been folded or placed into her wardrobe.

  It was rather obvious she yanked out a dozen, before settling for one.

  Her countless slippers and sandals, which anyone would be hard pressed to find its matching pair, were falling out of a trunk that was propped against the wall.

  That didn’t even include the mess on her dressing table, where ribbons and pins and glass bottles of tonics were piled together like stew spilling out of a pot.

  Ridley scrubbed his head in a riled effort to erase the mess he was seeing. “My study never even looked like this,” he mutter
ed.

  He’d long since organized that study right down to the ink.

  Because of her. Because one couldn’t think straight when buried in a mess.

  And yet…she lived like this?

  His boot tapped at a porcelain bowl full of unevenly half-chewed browning apples. He tilted the bowl with the tip of his boot.

  He leaned down, keeping his injured leg from bending as best he could and picked up the bowl. He glanced around, curious to meet this pet of hers.

  Going over to the window, he edged it open and let out a low whistle. “Chunmun.”

  A grey-haired monkey with a charcoal face scrambled up the tree and peered at him.

  Ridley lowered himself against the sill and set the bowl onto the ledge, tilting the apples as he held that eager gaze. “Was that the face you used to win her over?”

  Chunmun jumped down and using hairy hands yanked himself up onto the ledge, which he now sat on. Glancing up, Chunmun dragged the bowl over, uncertain.

  Holding out a hand, Ridley let it graze that narrow little chest. “Don’t you miss your old life?”

  Chunmun shoved away his hand and knocking over the bowl back into the room, jumped down and darted across the garden, disappearing into bushes.

  “If life in the jungle was that bad, we can talk,” he called teasingly.

  Narrowing the window back to what it had been, he gathered the bowl and the apples.

  Going over to her washing basin, he soaped his hands and cleaned them. He flicked off the water to ensure the stickiness of the apples didn’t remain and glanced around.

  He was looking to see if she’d associated with this Bradley beyond what she admitted to. He trusted her, but…he’d also trusted Elizabeth once and that didn’t end so well.

  Relationships had too many veneers and one of them was a need to possess a bit of sanity.

  He had already decided back in London that when it came to Jemdanee, he wasn’t leaving a single drawer unopen. For that lead to misunderstandings and he was far too passionate in nature to trust himself not to muck this up.

  Veering his gaze to the copper hip bath set on the marble floor, he approached, the strain of his stiff leg reminding him he was not without sin. He leaned down toward the tub. With a finger, he dashed it across the oily residue of the tub, creating a line and rubbed it against his fingers, the scent of jasmine ittar drifting toward him.