She felt the sticking warmth of his seed as a shaky breath escaped her, seeing every inch of his tan, sinewed and muscled body flexing. “I only want to ensure you never drift into the darkness you once fell into.”
Leaning downward and toward her, he dug his fingers into her hair and bit her bottom lip. “It’s too late for that. My path was set well before you ever blessed me with a smile.” The tension in his face faded as did the grip of his fingers. He searched her face.
She kissed his chin. “No path is ever set.”
“That is your optimism speaking. Reality always has different plans.” Easing away, he rolled them both over, tugging her against himself hard as he laid himself on his back. “For a moment, I was yours.”
Mashing her cheek against his chest, she swallowed in angst and traced a finger against its velvet heat. “For a moment, I believed it.”
His hands roamed over her naked curves. “I miss hearing you laugh. You did a lot more of it back in London.”
She traced her lips against the curve of tensing muscles on his chest. “Hearing you laugh this morning was worth a peacock giving up his bone.”
They held each other in silence for a long time, the net around the bed flowing against the incoming wind as jackals barked in the far distance.
He dug his lips into her hair. “I waited a half hour for you at the Registration Office.”
She closed her eyes, not wanting to think about it or argue. One night of peace. One night of nothing but this. Him. Her. Them. She pretended to sleep.
“Jemdanee,” he whispered. “Understand that any goodness I have left within me would cease to exist if anything happened to you. I would turn into the very thing I’m fighting.”
She pretended to sleep.
Kissing her head, he murmured, “Welcome to the life you never wanted.” He smoothed her cheek and hair.
Those words burned into wanting to hold onto a future she vowed to make real: them.
Despite what he thought, there was no changing what she wanted: him.
Not to say that the words he’d once spoken to her in London didn’t still haunt her mind. It did.
What you do now will affect the rest of your life and will stay with you. Always. Like a knot. Only you’ll never get it out. When you’re older, you’ll find your place and your stronghold. When you’re older, you’ll find a man worthy of you. Unfortunately, that man won’t ever be me. Aside from the age difference, it’s very difficult for me to belong to anyone. For they will always belong to my profession first and to me last.
And she, despite the cursed love she had for him, knew she was still last.
For he thought he could leave her and face evil on his own.
No. Not while she was breathing.
“Jemdanee?” he whispered.
She said nothing. Because damn him into hell she was going to London.
With or without his permission.
Chapter 12
Ridley watched the green net around the four poster bed flow and ripple against the incoming wind. Jackals barked in the far distance.
He knew she was pretending to sleep.
Her breaths were still forced and uneven.
It annoyed him.
It meant she planned to follow him to London.
An arrest was the only thing that would knock some sense into her head. The Field Marshal had already agreed to keep her in confinement until he sent word.
He slipped out from holding her and rose from the bed.
Fastening his trousers, he leaned toward the teak bedside table and grabbed a book. He blankly opened it and paged through it.
Life certainly knew how to rape him. Losing a father wasn’t enough. Losing the goodness of his soul to the criminal world that was determined to destroy the last of him, wasn’t enough. The world now wanted her.
At least he would always have this.
His mind had already accepted what lay ahead.
Two months by coach and two months by boat. Then however long it would take to track this prick down in the name of a game. A game. As if that was all he, Evan Oswald Ridley, was. As if his pain was a deck of cards to be shuffled.
Ridley closed the book, wishing he could erase who he was.
Setting aside the book, he glanced back at her bronzed nudity, her long black hair scattered across the pillow and her closed eyes attempting to play the scheme of stillness despite their occasional movement beneath lids.
It miffed him off.
Everyone treated him as if he were an animal waiting to rip through throats and go wild.
“I know you’re not sleeping,” he rumbled out in agitation. He jerked the linen away from her nude body. “And I also know what you’re thinking.” His hand quaked as he gripped the linen hard to calm himself and his thoughts. “If you oppose me in this, there are orders in place and you’ll only have yourself to blame. So don’t follow me out of the city, do you understand me?”
Her eyes popped open, revealing astounded bright blue eyes. She sat up, dragging back the linen over her nudity and the sari that had pooled around her waist. “You need me.”
Ridley shifted toward her on the bed, taking hold of her long black hair. He raveled it around his hand and held her gaze. “Come here, mon chou. Knee to knee. Eye to eye.”
She hesitated and then scooted toward him across the linen.
When they were knee to knee, he wove both of his hands in her hair and tugged her close. “If you follow me to London, Jemdanee,” he warned in a low tone to ensure he was as serious as the blood running within him, “you will be arrested and kept in confinement. For I would sooner strip you of your dignity and end what we share then let you think you can kill yourself, and in turn, kill me. You will not murder us both.”
Tears welled in her eyes. “Ridley, I am scared for you.”
His chest tightened. Though she refused to say it, the love she had for him was pure. More than he deserved. More than he could have hoped for.
Setting his head against hers, he softened his voice. “One day, mon dévot, we will find a way to be together again. It simply won’t be anytime soon.”
She hesitated, searching his face. “You assemble your weapons and I will assemble mine. Permit me to protect you as you protect me.”
He wasn’t a man known to melt often, but in that moment, he damn well did.
Capturing her lips, he lowered her back onto the mattress, his mind and his body wanting to remember every moment of her and this. His cock thickened and hardened.
There was only one other way to ensure she would stay.
The devil whispered that it was up to him to ensure it.
Working his mouth slowly against hers, he shifted his weight onto her. He wrapped her legs around himself and still tonguing her, positioned his length against her wetness and softness. He guided himself into her and with the jerk of hips, penetrated her tightness to the hilt.
She gasped, stiffening beneath him.
He gently rolled into her, attempting to retain control over her body that was adjusting to his.
This wasn’t about pleasure.
It was about containing her heart. Her breaths. Her womb. Her soul. Her blood. Her life.
He buried his head into the softness of her throat and needing to unleash the depth of everything she made him feel, he pushed into her tightness, stretching it so it never forgot the feel of him. Deeper. More. Burn. The tightness of that cunt was intoxicating. Hot. Wet.
His prick grew stiffer and thicker, pressing and stretching against her squeezing vaginal lips.
Fuck.
His prick grew unmanageable, his sac overly tight.
In between steel-controlled breaths, he jerk-jerk-jerked into her tightness, ensuring her he was hitting her clit every time, while working through mind-numbing, core-tightening sensations, frigging out the primal need to spill.
Their gaze locked.
She panted, gripping his shoulders. “Ah! Ah!”
Her quim.
Tight. Too tight. He gritted his teeth.
Pumping his throbbing prick, and in between pained, ragged breaths that blurred his reality, his skin overheated he thudded three years of need into her. “Do it. Let me hear you.”
“Ridley!” She cried out and shuddered, her nails digging into him.
He imagined every inch of her bronzed writhing body bound, with her hemp-covered knees spread wide to him so she couldn’t ever close her slit to him.
He thudded his swollen cock into her, no longer aware of anything but a need to—
“Fuck.” Intelligent words usually fleeted even from a cultivated mind like his, for he still was at the foundation of his soul what he refused to acknowledge: a man in need of being wanted by a woman who had drowned out his common sense.
His mind spun and careened on its axis knowing that by filling this moment of physical desire, he was tearing apart his soul in her name.
Sweat drenched him as he worked into her relentlessly, smearing his lips across her cheek in an effort to taste the bronze of her skin. “Bite my shoulder. Show me your love.”
She gasped, her teeth punishing him as she dug them into his shoulder.
He was not losing her to what waited in London.
There was only one way of ensuring she didn’t follow.
Beyond prison. He was taking her soul.
Gritting his own teeth, he pushed the length and thickness of his rigid cock hard and harder into her wet tightness, digging deep enough to feel the resistance of her womb. “I may be leaving,” he growled, “but this part of me will stay. You will always be mine.”
She rolled her hips upward, informing him her womb was his.
Pumping through the coiling need of his core that erased his mind with blinding bliss, it rocked him and his entire body forward. His prick erupted, pulsing in time with his swollen sac and his seething breaths that tried to keep up. He hissed out breath after burning breath between bared teeth as he held her gaze.
Groaning, he jutted and staggered.
His ragged breaths filled the room as sweat traced its way down his face and throat.
He savagely held onto her. His breath and body still tight against the crashing waves of pleasure that jarred him further into her. He was…still…climaxing.
He seethed out breaths as his semen spurted into her womb in pulses that rattled him in the longest lasting fuck he’d ever had. He poured his pleasure and every last drop of semen into her sucking wetness to ensure she knew of his love.
There was no taking it back and he didn’t regret it.
Her ragged breaths and his mingled.
She smoothed her hands against his entire back. “What if I end up with a child?” she whispered.
He hoped. “Then it becomes your duty to protect our babe,” he rasped. “You are the shield to its life. That is why you will stay.”
She was quiet for a long moment. “Is that why you did it?”
Ridley swallowed hard, smoothing her hair. “I cannot make promises, but I will do everything within my power to come back and hold you both.”
Jemdanee buried herself against him. “Ridley, you are making me hate you.”
“Better to hate me than to love me and die for it. I can earn your love again when I return.”
She glared. “Giving birth doesn’t come without some risks, phaujee.”
He kissed her. “If you mean to lecture me, I suggest you lecture yourself. Penetration always involves the possibility of offspring whether I spill into you or not.”
She tried to break their hold.
“No.” Rolling them onto the mattress he eased out a breath, holding her tight and tighter. “I have to be in the barracks in the morning and throughout most of the day, so I won’t see you again until tomorrow night when I leave. This is the only time we will have.” He molded her against himself.
She tried to push him away.
He gripped her. “Tomorrow night, I will ensure you receive ten thousand rupees to see you through the next year. Your residence will be heavily guarded by the military to ensure you remain safe at all times.”
Her voice cooled. “There is not much equality in what you are doing. You are binding my hands and expecting me to accept it.” She shoved him and pushed hard. “Release me!”
He unfurled his arms, numb.
She scooted off the bed, dragging her sari off with it.
Ridley watched her tug up her sari over her full bronzed breasts, covering what he already missed. Stay calm. “I’ll be at the tennis courts with Dunning tomorrow at three. Join us.”
She walked over to the adjoining door and unlatched it. “I will be packing my entire inventory of flora all day and will see you tomorrow evening at nine. I depart when you do.”
Anger coiled and singed and scraped the corners of his mind. He sat up. “Ey. Don’t think you can oppose me and treat me like this.”
She opened the door, glaring. “You used my own body against me. How could you?!”
Unbelievable. “I told you what I was doing. You could have stopped me. Why didn’t you?”
Her features twisted. “Maybe a part of me fears it will be all I have left of you.”
Ridley’s heart squeezed with…regret. A bleeding regret that ripped through his mind.
He didn’t regret that maybe her belly would stretch with his child. His regret was knowing he might never see either of them again. There were only so many passes in life that he, as an inspector, was going to get and he knew in his gut that this was it.
He was Faust standing in the darkest part of the woods and it was over. But at least for a few glimmering, incredible breaths, he saw what the future might have been: her.
His soul burned, wishing he could have given her more. It had been wasted on coca/limestone and the three years they had lost. He tapped the mattress, softening his voice. “Stay with me. Sleep with me. Come.”
She glared, her blue eyes flaring. “I have tried to talk to you and you do nothing but play god with both our lives. What if I end up with a babe and you die?”
“Cease being overly dramatic. You might not even end up pregnant.”
“Might is not the same as not. Nor are you addressing the possibility of your death, which obviously does not scare you, but it does scare me!”
Jesus. “Can you permit me a moment of peace I have never known?” He hit the mattress with a fist. “You. Here. Now. Why? Because this sort of love deserves more respect. Are you saying you don’t love me? Show me your love and your respect. Come here. Lay down.”
She tossed her hands into the air and let them flop to her sides. “For as intelligent as you think you are, you are an idiot.”
He pointed. “How does insulting the man you love progress this conversation?”
She rolled her eyes. “Nothing else seems to. Stubborn as you are, you think you deserve nothing but death and off you go to play with it and lalala. No wonder you rifled through nineteen women and could not make your first marriage last!”
Ridley lowered his chin, the sting of that comment slashing far too deep for him to ignore. He rolled off the mattress and thudded his bare feet onto the floor, buttoning his trousers. “Pardon me?”
She paused.
He stalk-limped toward her, towering. “Say it again. Only slower. Something about my inability to be a man to any woman and…Elizabeth? Are you saying you know her? Are you saying you talked to her extensively about the sort of marriage she and I had?” He glared. “All I did was suffer and she enjoyed every fucking moment of it. So go visit that madhouse I divorced and the amount of people she loves to hurt with a smile, because guess what? This son of a bitch that wants me dead, wants her dead, too. So consider yourselves all equally privileged for having ever known me.”
She blinked up at him, then averted her gaze.
Taking her arm, he guided her into her own room. “Insult me if it will permit you to breathe, but we don’t always get to choose how we go in this life. That is life. Do you thin
k my father chose to go by the way of the ax at the age of forty-seven? Sometimes the dirt on the path before us is exactly that: dirt. It’s time you acknowledge what you and your giggles refuse to: the dirt is real.”
Knowing he might not see her again if anything went wrong, he swallowed past that pain and tried to remain calm. “I will see you tomorrow at nine.” He pointed rigidly at her, chanting to himself that he wouldn’t yell at her for taking their only night away from them. For this was not how he wanted their last moments to be spent. “If, in the end, you still prefer to hold an ax over a baby, Kumar, then I have to say, you’re an even bigger loon than I am.”
With that, he slammed the door, tremoring the wall, and locked it.
Everything disappeared into a single pinprick that reminded him of the moment he had been told he couldn’t see his father’s body.
Numb, he damned himself for having love yet another woman.
Without the usual organizational time he took, Ridley started blindly gathering everything in his room and shoving it into trunks.
Books. Clothing. Uniforms. Ledgers. Books. More books. Too many books. His shaving razor. His cane. Everything.
He crushed everything in, trunk by trunk by trunk and strapped all three with the grit of teeth. Hefting it up, he tossed each trunk out the window so he didn’t have to go through the corridor.
He then hopped on the ledge of the window and joined the trunks.
It was his way of saying goodbye to what he refused to feel.
* * *
The following afternoon
Officer Sanctioned Tennis Courts
Although everything was unraveling, the rope master in him always had a plan.
Ridley rolled up his linen sleeves to his biceps, exposing JEMDANEE to the world. He rounded the youth, reached into the basket set beside his boots and snatched up one of the leather balls stuffed with wool. “We begin.”
The Devil is French: A Whipping Society Novel Page 23