Sexy Beast II

by Kate Douglas, Noelle Mack

  A strongman came swaggering into the ring to meet her. His outline shimmered, too, and Tanya wondered if Jean-Claude’s CGI artists had already staged this scene, or if it was being created before her eyes. A few details seemed roughed in, but the strongman did look like a Toulouse-Lautrec sketch. There wasn’t much to his costume, just a few artfully shredded scraps of fabric over his bulging crotch and muscular butt.

  How nice that he wasn’t the balding, beefy, wax-mustachioed type of strongman. This guy was young and sleekly built, with a lot of dark hair and a boyish grin. The woman on the wire flipped off and he caught her with ease, bending his head down to kiss her lovingly on the lips when she twined her arms around his neck.

  She whispered in his ear and wriggled in his arms, laughing. Then, with a little assistance from him, she climbed up onto his shoulders, and from there, back onto the wires again. He stood underneath her, looking up between her legs. Jean-Claude stood behind Tanya, his chin just above her head and wrapped his arms around her middle, just under her breasts. The intimate contact felt amazingly right. Connecting with him sexually was what she wanted to do…and she knew it was going to happen tonight. But for now, she was willing to watch.

  “Do you like my tableau vivant?”

  “Is that what it’s called?”

  He brushed a warm kiss against her. “Yes. A living picture.”

  Tanya drew in her breath when the woman pulled aside her leotard, revealing a shaved pussy to her lover’s ardent gaze. Okay, well, showgirls shaved. Nothing new about that.

  The woman on the wire laughed and slid a finger between her labia, then touched it to her tongue.

  Tanya hadn’t been expecting that. Things were heating up fast.

  “Do you want to watch?” Jean-Claude whispered.

  She leaned against him. His cock was already stiff and it pressed against the small of her back. He held her closer still, and she enjoyed the feel of his muscular thighs against her soft ass.

  Did this count as voyeurism? Did she care? She was sure the lovers in the ring weren’t real. Three-dimensional, yes. But insubstantial. Definitely holograms. How nice of Jean-Claude to arrange an erotic after-dinner entertainment like this. “Yes,” she whispered back.

  The woman in the leotard balanced on one leg in an arabesque, stretching her arms out to the side and proudly thrusting out her breasts. The fine knit of her leotard showed her erect nipples to advantage and the strongman applauded. Then she came out of the position, setting a foot on each wire again. Even shaved, her labia didn’t show much, pressed in too long, perhaps, by the tight leotard. Again she slipped a finger in between them, opening her sex in the same way the maid at the dinner table had played with the petals of the roses.

  Hmm. Coming into the dining room and looking at the maid, Tanya had found the gesture sensual but not remembered the fleeting thought until this moment.

  The acrobat bent her knees again and the strongman moved so that he could slip his tongue into her pussy. He thrust in and out, letting her bounce ever so slightly on the wire to take his tongue deeply inside her. She moaned with pleasure when he flicked the soft tip over her clit again and again. But in another minute she straightened, thrusting a fingernail through her leotard and unraveling it so that her bottom was bared too.

  She turned around and flashed him, bending just enough so he could grab and squeeze her beautiful buttocks from behind while she pleasured herself with her fingers in front.

  Tanya wondered how the woman could keep from coming. She didn’t seem to be afraid of falling. Having sex on a tightrope came as naturally to her as walking. She watched the woman stand up again and step onto one wire with both feet, then slide down into a full split.

  She’s computer-generated, Tanya reminded herself. You could do it too if you were digitized.

  The strongman just about licked his lips at the sight of the pretty acrobat. He steadied her on the wire by cupping her buttocks, and stared at the pussy that was stretched completely open, dark pink and juicy, before he got to work himself and made her come in his mouth. Once…twice.

  Just what Tanya had been thinking about Jean-Claude doing to her. She was distracted by the acrobat’s cry of joy at climax, and rapturous words of love in a language Tanya didn’t understand. Not French. Who cared? The two were giving each other pleasure that any human being could comprehend.

  The strongman kissed her between the legs one last time before she slid off, using his body for support. He turned around and then Tanya saw his erection. The tattered thing he wore barely contained the straining flesh.

  The woman pulled down his scanty costume, and kneeled to lick his tight, heavy balls, fondling his buttocks and making him stand with his legs apart, stretching the fabric between his muscular thighs. She encircled his shaft with her fingers, then wrapped his hand around hers, sliding hers away to let him pump hard, waiting with open mouth for the first hot spurts.

  It didn’t take long. She stroked his scrotum as he gripped his cock, holding himself punishingly tight to make the strong sensation last. He moaned when he ejaculated, pulsing over her tongue. A few drops fell on her skin and she made him let go, closing her lips around him and sucking his cock, holding him tight in her loving mouth.

  Shuddering, he balanced himself by holding on to her shoulders, taking deep breaths that hollowed his tense belly. He was beautiful. Tanya couldn’t believe she was watching this, but she couldn’t look away.

  Jean-Claude released her and lightly, ever so lightly, cupped her breasts through the thin black material of her dress. He rubbed her nipples with his palms until she wanted to cry out with pleasure. But she couldn’t. The couple in the ring might not be real, but their presence was most definitely felt.

  Jean-Claude stopped what he was doing and dropped his hands, clasping her just above the hips. All Tanya could think of was how it would feel to be naked, on all fours in his bed, being fucked from behind while he held her hard where he was holding her gently now, experiencing the deepest possible penetration.

  “Thank you for sharing your fantasy, my dear Tanya,” he whispered in her ear. “I am glad to be able to make it come true. Did you enjoy that show? The dancer on the wire and the strongman were amusing touches, I thought.”

  She turned around and gave him a startled look, remembering his words to her before they entered the tent. You will be standing in the dark and watching them. As if they only existed in a dream. Your dream.

  “But I didn’t share it. You must have—”

  “Read your mind? Yes. We shared that fantaisie.”

  She blushed, feeling guilty. Not that she had anything to be guilty about, even if she had imagined oral sex with him. Six ways from Sunday. Had it been that obvious?

  “Forgive me. I have perfected the ability over many years. My performers can improvise from very little—a few words, a fleeting image. And they are quite uninhibited. But none of what you saw is real.”

  “I figured that out. Cool trick. But let’s get one thing straight: my mind is off limits.”

  “Why, if I may ask?”

  The couple in the ring were caressing each other but Tanya suddenly wanted to slap him. “Because it’s my mind. Not yours. Stay out of it.” Being snapped out of an intensely sexual experience was bad enough. Finding out that her brain had literally been picked was worse.

  “Very well. I do apologize. I only wanted to give you pleasure. And it is not as if all of your thoughts are an open book. But sexual desire is very easy to read.”

  Stirred up and angry with him, she gave him a scornful look, chiding herself for drinking so much wine and wondering whether he was crazy. Then, out of nowhere, another face came over his, like a transparent mask. The lion’s face. The eyes looking through it were identical.

  Tanya gasped and the apparition vanished. He was himself again. Handsome, rugged, exactly the same. Then the light in the tent went out. He took her hand and led her out of it as quietly as they had come in.

  S
ome part of her wanted to pull away—and wanted to run. But she didn’t. In the dark, out in the woods, she felt irresistibly drawn to him and that pull was much stronger. She was intrigued by the game he was playing, when it came right down to it, and very curious to find out what he would do next. But where he was taking her, she didn’t know. The feel of the soft sawdust under her feet kept her on the path. She clung to his hand.

  “Who are you?” she said in a whisper.

  “Someone you have met before.”

  “I know we haven’t.”

  “Allow me to explain—”

  “Please do. I know those two weren’t real, but the others—the trainer and those servants—what about them?”

  He brought her to the edge of the field where she had groomed the lion. “Figments of my imagination also.”

  “Then where am I?”

  “In another time. But you are safe here.” He looked toward the chateau. Wreathed in mist, it was elegant—and eerie. A lit-up window on the ground floor radiated warmth, but all the others were dark. Was that the kitchen the housemaid had come out of with the little boy? She could always run there. But they were his servants. This was his house. She wasn’t safe. Not with someone who could read her mind and make people appear when they weren’t really there.

  She turned to look at the tent. It too had vanished. Okay, so he could make things disappear too. She half believed in his magic and half didn’t. Whatever. She was going to play along. His world, his rules.

  “Is that why I didn’t understand those two?”

  He seemed reluctant to answer. “They talked in patois. Circus folk are from everywhere. Gypsies. Italians. Russians. Who knows what they say?”

  She got the message: she couldn’t communicate with anybody here. That wasn’t good. It was night and she was alone with this guy. Reminding herself that she had been alone with the lion only a few hours before and survived to tell the tale did not cheer her up. She stopped and yanked her hand out of his. “Wait a minute. Is my Now your Then? What year are we in?”

  “It doesn’t matter. You would not believe me if I told you.”

  He folded his arms across his chest and waited for her to argue with him. She didn’t want to. Damn and double damn. What the hell was going on? Never mind the wine she’d downed. Chalk it up to Jean-Claude’s psychological acumen and intense animal magnetism. She could see that in his eyes. The transparent face of the lion? Blame that on the moonlight. Somewhere not far off she heard a lonely, deep-chested roar.

  Tanya took a deep breath. “Let’s begin at the beginning. I was picked up at the airport by—by someone who drove me here. In a limousine.”

  He shrugged. “I avail myself of modern conveniences when I can. And I could not send a coach and four to fetch you from Paris, my dear Tanya.”

  “I guess not. So you live in another time but—hey, you e-mailed me. I haven’t seen a computer since I got here. How did you do that?”

  He raised an eyebrow as if that were a very stupid question. “I have a laptop.”

  Of course. No doubt he kept it locked up in a Louis XIV armoire, next to his crystal inkwell and quill pen. She couldn’t find the words to ask another question, although her mind was buzzing with them. What she had heard so far was beyond comprehension.

  Jean-Claude gave a deep sigh. “The lion and I—”

  She caught a flash of gold in his gaze and held up her hand. “Hold it right there. I saw the lion’s face appear over yours. What was that all about?”

  Jean-Claude smiled sadly. “He is my Other.”

  2

  “I float in time and so does he. It might be more accurate to say that I am caught in its flow. I have not figured out how to escape.”

  Tanya felt a chill come over her at the desperate calm she heard in his voice. “What does the lion have to do with it?”

  “He too is caught. In our youth we gamboled upon the lawns of this chateau. A cub and a child, without a care in the world. He was kept here, in a menagerie that no longer exists. I—I was the son of the duke who built this chateau centuries ago.”

  “That makes you”—she hesitated—“practically ancient.” She looked him up and down. He was in great shape for a really, really old guy.

  “Yes.”

  “I feel like I should curtsey. I mean, your father was a duke and your mother was a duchess—”

  “She was not,” he said softly. “She was a Bedouin, captured on the ninth crusade by my father.”

  “Uh-huh.” Tanya tried to remember what she knew about the Crusades. Not much. “You still haven’t explained the lion part.”

  “Her tribe traveled in caravans. One day her kinsman killed a lioness in the grassy lands of Africa and my mother, a young and beautiful widow whose baby had died of a sudden fever, took pity on the tiny cub they found by the lioness’s body. She suckled it at her own breast.”

  Tanya just stared at him without replying.

  “The cub struggled to live. Little by little it grew—equal measures of her magic and her mother love.”

  Her eyes got a little misty. This was quite a story. She wanted to hear more about the magic part, even if it couldn’t possibly be true and this couldn’t possibly be happening to hard-headed her.

  “So. The caravan made its way to Jerusalem, not knowing that a battle raged there. My father claimed her—or abducted her. He would not say. I am sure that he was determined to possess her, unaware that she was a sorceress of genius. She cast a spell that made him love her, lion child and all. Some months later I was born.”

  “What a beautiful story. I don’t believe a freakin’ word of it.”

  “Nonetheless, it is true. Her final spell bonded the lion to me as a blood brother—and made us immortal. She thought of it as a blessing. To me, it is a curse.”

  Play along, play along. “Why?”

  “Because I am lonely. The lion and I have no other kin. You, however, emanate an intriguing aura that makes me wonder. I have never felt as attracted to a female as I am to you. Why is that?” He cast an appraising look at her that made Tanya squirm.

  “Beats me. I don’t have a drop of lion blood,” she said, swinging her high heels by the strap. “Just your standard seventh-generation Texas mix of Irish-German-Mexican-Scots-Hungarian-Basque-French-Czech genes. And that’s only my mother’s side.”

  “Tell me about the French relations. What was the family name?”

  Tanya couldn’t remember. Then it came to her in a scary flash. “I think it was…no. Couldn’t be.” She pressed her lips together in case she blurted out the name. Deslions.

  He smiled very widely. “Of the lions. Forgive me for reading your mind again.”

  He had. He really had. There was no way he could have known that. She herself had only seen the name once, written in the huge old bible her mother kept in a locked chifforobe. “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  Jean-Claude put his paws—his hands, his hands, his hands, she chanted silently—on his hips and stood with his muscular legs apart. The bulge in his pants was bigger than the strongman’s. She wanted to touch it. Must be the moonlight. Must be madness.

  “Come inside.” He beckoned to her. “Come.”

  Tanya had a feeling she was about to be mounted. And not on the wall. In his bed. By him. Repeatedly. The call of the wild was echoing through her body, damn it.

  “What are you afraid of? I will show you the painting of my mother suckling her two sons. It is very small—a miniature, on ivory. I keep it under lock and key in my study.”

  She shook her head. “More computer-generated imagery. That won’t prove anything.”

  Jean-Claude only shrugged. “Come inside anyway. Your feet are bare and the grass is damp. You cannot sleep out here.”

  She looked at the shoes in her hand, wondering if it was possible to stun someone with a pair of discount-shoe-store high heels. They would probably fall to pieces. “Uh, no. I’m going back to New York. Tonight.”

  “And how
will you get there?” he inquired.

  “I have a round-trip ticket. I’ll call a taxi—” She fell silent, realizing that she hadn’t seen a vehicle with an internal combustion engine since the limousine had driven away.

  Jean-Claude sighed. “As you wish. I will not keep you here against your will. You may return to your own time tomorrow.”

  “Do I have to say thank you?”

  “No. But I shall miss you. You are a unique woman, Tanya—and extraordinarily beautiful. You could stay, you know. We might as well enjoy each other’s company for a few more nights.”

  There was no doubt in her mind as to his meaning. Despite her misgivings, she was actually tempted. He was playing games with her mind, but they were extremely interesting games.

  “My dear Tanya…if you were to grant my wish—I suppose it is too much to ask. Never mind.”

  “I don’t grant wishes. I’m not a fairy. I’m a hairdresser. And by the way, even if I leave tomorrow, you still owe me for the entire week. I have a payroll to meet.”

  He smiled slightly and walked ahead with long strides. “Come into my study,” he called over his shoulder.

  “No way.”

  “It is where I keep my accounts—and my gold. A man caught in time accumulates far more than he needs. I shall pay you now and be done with it.”

  “It has to be modern money,” she shouted after him. “Not ducats or doubloons or anything like that.”

  “They are worth much more than euros.”

  Humph. If he was right, she didn’t want to be wrong. Her financial problems weren’t going to go away without a big pile of money to throw at them. She followed Jean-Claude back to the chateau.

  Tanya settled herself on a rococo chair, and watched him carelessly scoop a handful of gold coins out of a drawer in a desk. He put them into a small leather bag and handed the bag to her. She folded her hands around it and kept it in her lap.

  “Take those to a dealer in antique coins. He will wonder how you came by them, but there is no tracing their provenance. Tell him whatever you like. They are worth a fortune and you will be a rich woman.”