“Six-four probably just seems like a giant to you. You can’t be more than what? Five-one?”
“Five-two.”
“Baby-sized.”
His assessment raised her hackles. “I may be small, my lord, but that is where the comparisons end.”
As she should have guessed, those penetrating blue-black eyes dipped to her breasts, and Bliss was mortified to feel her nipples harden.
“No, not small,” he countered in a husky murmur. “Impressive, actually. Distracting, in fact. Far more than a handful, if I remember correctly.”
The memory of his hands on her breasts made heat spiral inside her. “Is your mind perpetually in the gutter?”
“Acutely. I’m a shameless sinner, rarely taken with a noble intention. More so than usual, today. There’s just something about you that stimulates my baser instincts.”
“How flattering. But I doubt I’m the only female who manages that feat.” Olivia Hamilton’s cold, beautiful face came to mind, images of her and Caine in bed, their bodies merging, the warm lips and hands that had touched Bliss with such explosive power caressing the eager widow. “Perhaps I’d better leave if I’m such a distraction to you.”
“I promise I won’t touch you if you don’t want me to.” He leaned toward her, the sea breeze ruffling his silky hair as he murmured, “But I want to. Very much. I can’t help myself. I’m fascinated by all those buttons on your dress.”
Bliss followed his gaze. The tiny pearl buttons ran from her neck to her waist like luminescent beads of chastity, warding off libertines.
Glancing up, she found the king of libertines studying her. “You’re trying to seduce me, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” he confessed, looking boyishly hopeful. “Is it working?”
His blunt, honest answer made her shake her head and smile, though she looked away so he wouldn’t see it. She could see why he had been so successful a rake.
She started as his finger nudged her chin, turning her face toward him, forcing her to meet his gaze. “I lied about your name, you know.” His breath stirred the hair at her temple. “It does fit you.”
Bliss glimpsed the intention in his eyes and laid her hands against his chest. “Don’t…”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t kiss me.”
“Just once.” He edged nearer, his lips only a whisper away, his hand closing over one of hers and sliding it beneath his coat, his heart a steady thump beneath her palm.
“No.”
She thought he would press on, despite her protests. Instead he murmured in her ear, “Do you remember my fingers on your nipples?” His sensual words sent a rivulet of warmth down her spine.
She wanted to scold him for his wickedness, and yet she whispered, “Yes.”
“They were so tight and hot. I wanted to wrap my lips around them and find out how sweet they were.” The finger beneath her jaw trailed slowly down her throat. “Have you ever had a man’s mouth on your breasts, love? Or his shaft between your thighs, pleasuring you in ways you could only imagine?” The fine layer of whiskers on his jaw rasped lightly against her cheek. “Are you a virgin, sweet Bliss?”
The erotic web he had spun dissipated. “How dare you ask such a thing!” She shoved against his chest, but barely budged him.
“I have my answer.” He took hold of her hand and smoothed his thumb over her palm. “How have you managed to stay chaste this long?”
She wrenched her hand from his. “By staying away from men like you!”
“It’s unfair to lump me in with men who don’t know the first thing about giving a woman what she really wants. Such men are only concerned with their own pleasure. Though I’ve never bedded a virgin before, I assure you I would breach your maidenhead with the utmost care. You would be so ensnared in the force of your passion that you would only feel a slick heat when I entered you.”
Bliss’s traitorous body responded to his brazen words, though her voice gave nothing away. “Does this kind of love talk work on Lady Buxton? If so, the woman has even less taste than I had given her credit for.”
His eyes hardened and his jaw tensed. “She has nothing to do with this.”
“No? I would think she has a great deal to do with this. I doubt she would approve. You are her—”
In a second, Bliss was flat on her back with Caine lying half on top of her, his hands pinning hers to the ground, the fury in his eyes a tangible force.
“Don’t,” she whimpered, the feel of him on top of her, his solid weight, the rock-hard muscles she could see flexing beneath his shirt telling her how vulnerable she was.
They were far enough away from the house that no one would hear her should she scream. But she wanted to believe he wouldn’t really hurt her, even though she knew full well how volatile his temper was.
“No one tells me what to do. Not Olivia, not anyone. Do you understand me?” When she didn’t respond quickly enough, he barked, “Do you?”
“Yes!”
The muscle in his jaw worked. “Jesus…you make me crazy.” The torment in his voice almost convinced her that she did, and that vulnerable look haunted his eyes again. “Please…just kiss me.”
“Caine…” Bliss knew she should deny him, yet when he touched her, she forgot everything.
Tenuously, she slid her hands up over his shoulders, following the hard contours to his neck, where her fingers entwined in his thick, silky hair, sifting it through her fingers, unconsciously wetting her lips. His gaze drifted to her mouth and then back to her eyes as his head slowly descended.
The warm pressure of his lips against hers sent sensation everywhere. The ache that had been a dull throb between her thighs built with every sweep of his tongue against hers.
She loved the heavy, solid feel of him that made him real in a way he had not been before, even though she could tell he was keeping his full weight off her. He made her feel fragile, feminine. Protected.
The last thought was odd, considering he had pushed her down into the grass, yet she didn’t want gentleness. She wanted someone vital and strong and magnificent. No man had ever been a match for the strength of her will, but this man was more than her equal.
He took hold of her wrists and manacled them above her head with one hand, leaving her powerless, completely at his mercy. She gasped into his mouth as his free hand cradled the swell of her breast, her nipples hard and sensitive.
Have you ever had a man’s mouth on your nipples?
She never had, but she wanted to feel his mouth on her. She squirmed restlessly against him, her thigh brushing the hardness between his legs.
He groaned, a deep, primal sound, and squeezed her breast. His mouth found every sensitive spot on her neck as his thumb teased her nipple through her dress.
His hand rose to the first of the buttons at her throat. Her heart thumped wildly with each one he released, his lips tasting every piece of flesh revealed.
She whimpered as he worked his way down to the valley between her breasts. He raised his head then, and her heavy eyelids fluttered open to find him watching her as he undid the remaining buttons, slowly pushing the material aside, only her thin chemise separating her naked flesh from his blazing eyes.
Wantonly, she arched up to meet his mouth, her head tossing back as his tongue wet her nipple through the material, making the ache between her thighs redouble. Then his lips wrapped around the exquisitely sensitive peak and sucked with just the right pressure, as though he instinctively knew exactly what she wanted.
But hadn’t he claimed she would be ensnared by passion when he took her? He was a master at seducing women, and only yesterday he had hated her, had wanted to teach her a lesson.
Perhaps he still did.
Wouldn’t it be her supreme downfall if someone should happen along and find her writhing beneath this man? A man who tallied up his conquests in numbers Bliss couldn’t even begin to imagine? And he belonged to the marchioness, his body meant for her sole and exclusive use.
He was out to prove something, to conquer and claim her. And she was letting him.
“Stop!” When he didn’t immediately respond, she tugged at his hair, her nipple slipping from his mouth. She could see the wet spot on her chemise, her areola dark against the fabric, and shame washed over her.
Lazily, he rolled to his side. She scrambled out from underneath him and pushed to her feet. He stared up at her, his dark eyes filled with heat and a burgeoning anger at her dismissal.
“Did I suck too hard, your ladyship? If you would but lie back down, I can try again. I’m sure this time I can get it right.”
Her chest was tight and her fingers clumsy as she did up the buttons on her dress. “Go to hell,” she told him in a shaky voice, her legs threatening to buckle beneath her as she turned away and tried not to run back to the house.
Seven
There, in the moonlight, dark with dew,
Asking not wherefore nor why, would
Brood like a ghost, and as still as a post…
Walter de la Mare
The last reflection of a dying sun coated the sea in an iridescent pool of red as it sank below the horizon, ushering in the night, which settled over the landscape in an inky blackness that was complete. Yet Caine could still make out the looming outline of the massive rocks rimming the quay, blue fingers of fog coiling around the jagged peaks as the cliffs worked their way out toward Morwenstow.
In the distance below, the whitewashed farmhouses and cottages of the village stood out like beacons. Down there they lived another life, far removed from the man who had once been destined to preside over the Hall—before his pleasure-seeking ways had made him oblivious to the world he once knew.
His father’s tenants, now Olivia’s tenants, were the only ones who treated him as though he was the same person who’d grown up among them. They had not acted differently because of what he’d become. And yet Caine felt as though he stood outside a wall a thousand feet high, the gates closed to him.
Perhaps it was the villagers’ plight as much as his own that bound him to this place, adding one more tie that kept him from leaving. Olivia was an outsider. She didn’t understand the way things worked.
Caine’s weary gaze lifted to Bliss’s window. Her drapes were drawn, but he knew she was in there. He had seen a shadow pass back and forth as though she were pacing, perhaps as coiled into knots as he was.
As much as he tried to congratulate himself for his victory that morning—and it had been a victory, for she had succumbed, and so sweetly he still burned from the imprint of her body—he couldn’t seem to summon up much enthusiasm.
He hadn’t handled things well, and that wasn’t like him. But when he looked at Bliss, he didn’t just see the Duke of Exmoor’s daughter. He also saw…Bliss. But he couldn’t allow himself to get diverted. He had to seduce her with the same single-minded ruthlessness he had employed in the past. Yet for one fleeting moment, he felt something he hadn’t felt in a long time. The loss of his humanity.
“There you are, darling.”
Caine stiffened as Olivia materialized from the darkness, a harlot swathed in a cream-colored gown, as polished and unappealing as a wax effigy, though she never failed to believe she looked youthful and innocent—a joke of monumental proportions. Any innocence Olivia had once possessed had eroded long ago.
She had confided to him once that she had seduced one of her father’s closest friends, a lonely widower, when she was only eighteen. She had caught him looking at her and knew he wanted her.
Once she had gotten him in bed, she had driven him to the brink of death with her sexual antics and then taunted him afterwards by accusing him of being a dirty old bastard for defiling a young girl, and threatening to tell her father that he had raped her. She sank the final nail in his coffin when she vowed that soon all of London would know what he did.
The man shot himself that same night.
Caine turned away from her, the sight of her sickening him more than usual. He had touched something pure today, something he had never experienced before—a woman who was completely innocent in the ways of men, who had blossomed beneath his seeking fingers and eager mouth.
Just the image of Bliss’s high, full breasts and those sweet, tight nipples made him hard. And it was that hardness that Olivia felt when her arms wrapped around his waist, her hand, inevitably, moving over his groin.
“You should have told me you were randy,” she purred, massaging him. “You know I would have obliged.”
Caine indulged in a fantasy, letting himself believe that it was Bliss touching him, Bliss undoing the buttons of his trousers and taking his erection into her hands, Bliss skillfully pumping him.
He imagined her as she had been that afternoon, lying beneath him, kittenish sounds falling from her lips, her desire a heady aphrodisiac, making his hands shake and sweat trickle down his back, a single feverish thought pounding relentlessly in his brain: to bring her to the heights of ecstasy and emblazon his touch in her memory.
Yet in the back of his mind, where a tiny speck of sanity still remained, he wanted Bliss to hurl every vile name she could think of at him and push him away, not allow him a single liberty. Christ, didn’t she know he was no good? Couldn’t she see what she risked?
And yet she had given in to him, surrendered to his seduction. Now, in his fantasy, he did to her what he wanted to do then: rucking her skirt up to her waist; her thighs, smooth and taut, opening for him to settle between them; her eyes telling him how much she wanted him.
He eased into her gloved warmth, felt the thin veil of her virginity impeding his process and hesitated. He had taken so many women that their images had become a single blur. But this was different. Bliss was different. He couldn’t mess this up like everything else in his life.
But she saved him, arching up and bringing him inside her, deep, so damn deep and tight. His body was on fire for her. He wanted her to feel each stroke, ache for each erotic kiss, beg for more.
He wanted to be remembered.
And not simply as some stud to be used whenever a female needed his services, but as the man who had taken her virginity as though it was destined for him alone.
And with each deep thrust, each taunting glide, each taste of her pouting nipples, he tried to assure himself that what he was doing was sanctioned, his due, his long-awaited revenge, instead of simply thanking God that she had granted a craven bastard like him such a gift.
As her body bowed against his, her nipples thrust high for him to lave with his tongue, pushing her over the edge into sweet oblivion, the first convulsion rippled through her. Her muscles tightened around his shaft, pulling him into that wet heat. A groan welled up from deep inside his chest as he found his release, her arms twining around his neck and holding him close, as though she never wanted to let him go.
“Mmm, that was delicious,” Olivia murmured against his back, the dream disappearing like a vapor trail. “I came furiously, imagining all that luscious cream inside me intead of wasted on my prized orchids, though I suspect they’ll grow to twice their size now.”
Caine wanted to howl. He opened his eyes, disgust boiling up inside him. Jesus, what was he thinking? They were outside, where anyone could have seen them. His gaze jerked to Bliss’s window, relieved to find the drapes still closed.
He stepped away from Olivia and buttoned up his trousers, feeling nauseated and angry and bloody sick at heart. What had become of his life, his pride? He had been emasculated somewhere along the way and he couldn’t find his way back.
Moving to the edge of the incline, he looked down. “What do you want?”
“A thank you, at the moment,” Olivia replied, her tone self-satisfied. “You must admit, I have spectacular hands.”
Caine didn’t want to think about how images of Bliss had led to his vulnerability with Olivia. “Why don’t you go find your guests? They’re probably missing their reigning queen.”
“Yes,” she mused, a smile in her voice, “they
do adore me. And I must strive to keep them happy. They want to see you, you know.”
“Forget it.”
“Some of your old friends are here. They wish to know how you’re faring.”
Caine had spotted Clarendon, Lynford, and St. Giles when they arrived together earlier in the day. None of those bloody vipers had been his friends. The only true friends he’d ever had were the group of men who formed the Pleasure Seekers Club—all confirmed bachelors with a solitary goal: the pursuit of pleasure in whatever form it took, with himself leading the pack as the founding member.
He had avoided all of them since his father’s death, and had even turned Lucien away a few days earlier when his friend had made a side trip to see him before continuing on to Cornwall to take charge of his ward, Lady Francine Fitz Hugh, whose brother had died serving his country.
Caine couldn’t face them, not now that he had become a mockery of the very sport he had once pursued so vigorously. As for St. Giles and his lot, he’d see them dead before he spent a second in their presence.
“Entertain them yourself,” he said tightly. “You always put on a good performance.”
“Fine,” she replied petulantly. “Do as you please. I will simply have to let St. Giles amuse Lady Bliss tonight.”
Caine stiffened. St. Giles was a bigger reprobate than he was. Whereas a woman could tell Caine’s intentions, St. Giles was a damn snake charmer, his golden good looks camouflaging the rot beneath. All he had to do was smile and a woman was his. None of them realized the depths of his depravity until they were in his bed and discovered that his idea of pleasure included a blindfold and a whip.
“He’s taken quite a fancy to her,” Olivia went on in her calculated assault. “Apparently he caught a glimpse of her this morning and claimed to be hopelessly infatuated. Lynford and Clarendon are more plebeian; they simply want to bed her—both at the same time, a delicious ménage à trois.”
The Pleasure Seekers Page 7