Vanquished

by Hope Tarr

  That evening, Hadrian closed the door on his darkroom where he'd left the last of the photographs of Callie drying on the line. Once she'd let down her guard, Callie had made a lovely and arresting subject. Callie, eyes flashing fire and chin held aloft, giving him his comeuppance that first day in his studio when he'd deliberately baited her. Callie standing alone in the park, face wistful in profile as she looked out onto the boys playing ball. He had to marvel that what had started out as a ruse had resulted in a first-rate photographic portrait study, worthy of any exhibition-hall showing. Most savory were the myriad more-personal images he held onto if only in his mind's eye--Callie, bold and beautiful, standing on her soapbox outside the match-factory gates, Callie running hell for leather alongside him as they raced through the warren of East End streets, and last but hardly least, Callie looking up at him from his pillow, eyes wide and face stark with wonder, just after she'd come.

  Stripping off his apron, he looked toward the stairs leading up to his flat. He would wash up and then set out for her aunt's house. By the time he got there, she should be home or at least on her way. No point in putting off the inevitable confession any longer. Despite his bluff, he really had no proof of Dandridge's past misdeeds. And after last night, satisfying though it had been, the MP wouldn't rest until he saw Hadrian ruined. Soon Callie, along with everyone else in London, would know the sordid truth of just who and what he really was. The very least he could do to atone for his sins, past and present, was to tell her himself before she found out elsewhere.

  He would have sought her out earlier only he remembered that today was the much anticipated meeting with the prime minister, the culmination to all her sacrifice and hard work. He hadn't wanted to upset her beforehand and telling her just how he'd colluded with Dandridge to dupe and destroy her would most certainly do that. His confession made, he would say goodbye and walk out of her life for good. Surely by then she would be only too glad to see the back of him, especially as she was on the brink of starting a new life with another man.

  Yet those soulful eyes of hers would haunt his dreams for a long time, quite possibly forever, because . . . well, because he was in love with her.

  Ironically it was his encounter with the fiance that finally had freed him to own the truth of his feelings. Ordinarily he didn't deal in absolutes, moral or otherwise. To say "I love you" was lunacy pure and simple; add "forever" to the mix and you bloody well deserved whatever slice of hell fate served up. Or so he'd thought before . . . Callie. Lost to him though she was, he couldn't help his feelings any more than he could help the color of his eyes or the breadth of his shoulders.

  A tail swishing his legs had him looking down to where his cat followed him across the room. Dinah's green-eyed gaze met his and she opened her mouth on a loud meow, reminding him that though his life might be falling to bits, there was still dinner to be dished up. Reaching down to scratch beneath her chin, he said, "Well, Dinah, what say you to Paris next? Or maybe it's Venice you fancy, eh?"

  From the top of the stairs, a female voice called down, "I'm rather fond of London myself."

  Callie? Heart pounding, he bounded up the stairs two at a time to the half-cocked flat door. He entered, the room bathed in the soft glow of candlelight.

  Wearing his silk dressing gown, dark hair flowing about her shoulders, Callie stepped out from the shadows. "Not planning on going on holiday anytime soon, are you, Mr. St. Claire?"

  His heart stopped for what felt like a full moment, but her teasing smile had it resuming beating. She hadn't found him out, not yet at any rate; otherwise she'd never have come, certainly not like this.

  Closing the distance between them, she wrapped urgent arms about his neck and pulled him down for a passionate kiss that sent the room about them spinning. Against his lips she said, "Can I possibly tempt you to join me in an indoor picnic, Mr. St. Claire?" He looked over her shoulder to where a bucket of iced champagne and a wicker hamper set out on the table along with the bank of candles, all the accoutrements of seduction.

  Oh, she could tempt him, all right, in more ways than he cared to admit. He was already hard, a condition that couldn't possibly be lost on her given how she pressed against him. Yet remembering "Teddy's" self-satisfied smirk, he held back at the door and said, "That rather depends on what your fiance would say if he knew you were here?"

  He'd expected to startle her but instead she only sent him a soft smile and shook her head. "As I don't have a fiance, only a dear but rather desperate friend, I'm much more concerned with what you've to say on the subject." She slid warm hands up his arms, palms coming to rest on his biceps.

  She quickly explained the circumstances surrounding her friend's ruse. Embarrassed to have been so easily duped, so quick to think the worst of her when it was he who was the liar among them, Hadrian could only shake his head. "I'm a rum fool. I should have known."

  "Were you terribly jealous?" She tilted her face up to his. Eyes dark with mischief and mouth moist, she looked every bit the part of the tantalizing seductress.

  "Terribly." Though he'd told himself upon entering he'd stay stoic and strong, weak man that he was, he reached for her. Laying hands on the slippery silk at her waist, he pulled her flush against him, his erection pressing into the soft flesh of her belly.

  "If I were a better person, I shouldn't be glad of that, but I am glad. So very glad."

  Reaching between them, her hands found his trouser waist. Any trace of the previous night's reticence was gone as she slipped eager fingers inside and tugged his shirttail free.

  "Callie, wait." He took hold of her wrists, bringing her hands down to her sides. Letting her go, he looked into her eyes and asked, "Do you remember the other night when I told you I'd changed my name once I got back to London?"

  "Uh-huh." She nodded, but her nimble fingers were already working on undoing the buttons fronting his shirt, her attention riveted on the chest she was rapidly laying bare.

  "Callie, hold. I never got 'round to telling you why."

  "It doesn't matter. It's in the past. You don't have to explain yourself to me." She punctuated each sentence with a shake of her head, making him wonder which of them she was working hardest to convince.

  "But it does matter, Callie. I thought a new name would mean a fresh start, a new life with a clean slate." Clean. God, he'd wanted so much to be that.

  He started to say more when she opened his shirt and found his nipples with her mouth. "Hmm," she murmured against his sensitized flesh and try as he might to do the right and noble thing, thinking past the pull of those lips, that laving tongue, was quite simply beyond him.

  She took her mouth away to smile up at him, her chin resting on the broad plain of his breastbone. "We've plenty of time later for talking. For now, take me to bed or better yet . . ."

  Raining kisses over his mouth, his jaw, his neck, she backed them across the room until he bumped against the wall. She reached down between them to the buttons fronting his trousers. Without looking down, he knew that the telltale ridge of his erection would be straining those buttons to the point of popping. Before they might, she had them undone and open. Her hand closed about his cock. "You're so beautiful here and everywhere else," she whispered, lifting her face to kiss him even as she stroked the moistened tip with her thumb. "Does this feel all right?"

  Biting back a groan, he managed, "It feels better than all right."

  "Am I doing it properly, then?" Again, that devilish smile that told him she knew exactly what she was doing to him.

  In the throes of his need, he almost laughed. "Yes, though the word 'proper' doesn't exactly come to mind. Exquisite, more like, though if you keep stimulating me as you're doing, I'm going to lose control. I'm going to climax."

  "That's the point, isn't it?"

  "Not yet. Not if I'm to please you, too."

  "But you are pleasing me. It pleases me just to look at you, to touch you like this. I've thought of little else since leaving you the day before. I cou
ld scarcely attend to what Salisbury was saying, all I could think was that after our session, I could come back here and be with you."

  She released him but only for the handful of seconds it took for her to slide down to the floor to her knees. Hadrian held in his breath as she guided him inside the warm, wet cavern of her mouth.

  Looking down onto the crown of her dark head, her hair sweeping over one shoulder to expose the creamy arc of jaw and throat, he thought he might come then and there. "Callie, you don't have to do this."

  She paused to look up at him with lazy-lidded eyes. "I know I don't have to, but I want to. Is that so very difficult for you to believe?"

  He started to answer, but her lips slipped over him again and he couldn't recall whether his reply was no--or yes.

  "Hmm, you taste nice, delicious even." Her eyes drifted closed again, long lashes brushing the tops of her cheekbones.

  She was awkward at first, finding her bearings, finding her way. Aside from offering an encouragement or two, Hadrian declined to direct. Instead he braced his back against the wall and gathered a handful of her hair to keep it from falling in her eyes. In the throes of his torture, it occurred to him that though he'd performed sexual acts with long Latin names, done things that in retrospect shocked even him, never before had he taken the care to hold a woman's hair back from her face. But then the lovely woman kneeling at his feet wasn't just anyone. She was Callie, his heart's desire. The woman he loved.

  On the brink of climax, he knew he couldn't bear it any longer. Callie must have read his mind. She stood and reached into his robe pocket for one of the prophylactics he kept at his bedside. Watching her roll it over him, her beautiful mouth pursed in concentration, the peaks of her perfect breasts standing out against the silk of his robe, he couldn't wait to much as a moment more.

  He bent down and reached for her. "Wrap your legs about my waist and hold on."

  She obeyed, robe falling open to reveal all that lovely opalescent flesh, full breasts and full thighs crowned with the triangle of dark curls damp with dew. "So beautiful," he moaned, lifting her high against him so that they were on eye-level, the points of her nipples chafing his chest, his penis pulsing against her dewy pink woman's flesh.

  Reaching down between them, he tested her with his fingers. She was ready for him, more than ready, as he'd known she would be. Back braced against the wall, and hands cradling the lush swell of her bottom, he entered her in one smooth, clean thrust.

  Hands atop his shoulders, she tossed her head back, all that lovely long hair trailing down her back and teasing the top of his arm. "Hadrian, Harry, I don't care what your name is, I love you. I love you!" Squeezing her thighs tighter still, she rocked forward, any trace of shyness washed away in the lava-like heat sweeping over them both.

  It was too perfect, she was too perfect. She met him thrust for thrust, and though Hadrian had been with more women than he cared to count, never before had he moved with anyone with such perfect unspoken understanding, such peerless rhythm. Lost in a sea of sensation, he could scarcely credit the murmured endearments slipping forth from his mouth--"so beautiful," and "God, you feel so good around me," and "Callie, I never knew--" Suddenly he did something he'd never done before; something he'd thought himself incapable of doing. He stared into her eyes and concentrated not on him or on her but on them, how good they were together.

  "Oh, God, Callie!" He came so fast and so hard it took several minutes for him to realize that the metal coating the inside his mouth was blood.

  They lay spoon-style in Hadrian's bed, the wrinkled sheet loosely tossed over them. Reaching over to Hadrian's side of the bed, Callie used the edge of her thumb to blot the blood from his lip. "Better?"

  "Much." He lifted her hand to his mouth and pressed a kiss into the palm before returning it to rest on his chest, the left side just over his heart. Her other hand was occupied with tracing invisible patterns on the curve of his bicep. Even after they'd collapsed together into an exhausted heap, she couldn't seem to get enough of him.

  She lifted her head off the pillow; she had to be sure. "Do you get tired of me touching you?"

  His face half-hidden by the pillow, she caught the curve of his sleepy smile. "I could never tire of your touch, not in a million years."

  Not exactly I love you, but a million years seemed a promising place from which to start building the foundation for it. "Good, I'm glad because I'll never tire of touching you."

  Smiling, she pressed a kiss to the back of his neck and snuggled closer, satisfied for the moment at least. There'd been no more talk of love, a sentiment he'd yet to return in words at least, and yet wishful thinking though it might be, she fancied she'd felt it pouring forth from him in abundance-- the melting gazes he'd sent her way ever since she'd met him at the door, the tenderness of his touch when he'd parted her thighs and slid a testing finger inside, the way he'd called out the shortened version of her name, Callie, again and again just before he came.

  In the light of the guttering candles his skin glowed like polished marble, his bones closer to the surface than hers were, his body pared down to its core essence. With no will or need to resist, she ran her hand over the smooth plane of his back, tracing the "V" his shoulders joined to make, reveling in the ripple of warm, taut flesh beneath her fingertips, the dance of light and shadow on the sculpted planes. Brushing a kiss over his shoulder, she followed the downward line of his spine to the sheet riding his waist. Beneath it were, she knew, firm buttocks and thighs and calves muscled as those of any athlete. There wasn't so much as a pound of extra flesh on him, at least not anywhere she could see, and yet she couldn't say he was skinny. Just right or rather better than all right. Perfect in the way that Michael Angelo's David could be said to be perfect.

  Thinking her thoughts aloud, she said, "You're so beautiful. I could look at you all day."

  Glancing back at her over the landscape of one broad shoulder, he smiled his lazy smile, the one that had used to irritate her--only now it didn't anymore. "Only look?"

  That smile, and the reflection of it in his eyes, had her slipping a hand around the front of him and beneath the sheet. As she'd suspected, he was rock hard and velvet smooth and more than ready for her.

  Feeling herself growing wet in response, she ventured, "I've heard that a woman can take a man inside her in any of three places. It occurs to me we've tried all but one."

  Holding her hand in place, he turned on his side to face her. "Callie, what are you saying?"

  Fighting back the old shyness, she forced her gaze to his. "The other night when you entered me back there with . . . with your finger, I liked it. I don't know why only that I did."

  He glanced downward to where, beneath the covers, she'd curved her fingers about the pulse point of his erection. "My penis is a great deal thicker than a finger, Callie. Even with cream to ease you, I won't be able to keep from hurting you, not entirely."

  He looked so serious, so altogether concerned that she reached up and smoothed the frown line between his eyes with the pad of her thumb. "I don't care. I want to be with you, Hadrian, in every way I can."

  The drawer that housed the tin of French letters was also home to a jar of lubricating cream. Reaching across her, Hadrian produced the vessel of cobalt-colored glass and unscrewed the lid.

  Sinking two fingers into the cream, he rolled her onto her side. "Let's begin with a massage, shall we?" Settling his hands on her shoulders, he started working the juncture of her neck. "Do you know I love everything about your body, from your glorious breasts to your tight little tail?" His stroking hands slid down the curve of her spine to her buttocks, which he began to knead. Callie tensed. As if reading her thoughts, he said, "You have a beautiful ass, Callie, voluptuous and full. I'm very much looking forward to fucking you there. Do you know why?"

  Turning her head to look back at him, she said, "Because you fancy women with big bottoms?"

  "You're only partly correct--I do fancy you. As for your a
ss, there's this delightful little indentation just here"--he traced the curve where her left buttock met her upper thigh-- "that I'm particularly enamored of." He ran his finger down the jointure between her buttocks, using the tip of his finger to gently scratch against the puckered flesh.

  Callie shivered.

  He touched her again. "Do you know that when I touch you there, just there, the little curve trembles?"

  No surprise that as her entire body trembled when he touched her anywhere but especially here.

  "So beautiful." He pulled her buttocks apart. Cool air kissed her backside, sensitized from the cream. Then, dear God, he was blowing his breath on her. She shivered, whole body on tenterhooks, poised for the moment when he would enter her, desire pounding through her, making her forget about being sore or even recently sated.

  She was so relaxed she barely felt his finger slip inside her. Instinctively, she crawled onto her knees, pushing against the invading digit, wishing that they might be longer still, thicker still, wanting to take them all the way inside her if only she might.

  Hadrian's breath was hot on her back. "More?" He'd curved his arm about her middle and pulled her against him so that she could feel the heat and strength of his erection pulsing against her.

  "More," she breathed and lest he doubt her, she rolled her hips backward, driving his finger as deep as it would go.

  "Two fingers it is?"

  A slight blunt pain that wasn't quite pain and then oh, lovely, he had a second finger inside her and along with the other was moving it scissor fashion. There was a moment's pause, during which he drew his arm away from her waist and she wriggled in helplessness, a fish caught on a snare-- and yet her only thought was how to get closer rather than escape. Then cool prickly heat, more this time. He must have used his free hand to reach for the jar because there was more of that lovely cream now, and he was using his free hand to slather it between her damp buttocks.