She shook her head from side to side. “Not pity.”
He studied her face for a long moment, his chin lifted pridefully. She knew the instant he accepted her words, because his entire body relaxed. Then, releasing her wrist, he put his hand to her face, brushing a strand of hair back behind her ear.
“I want to kiss you.” he said huskily. It wasn’t a request.
The words were like pellets in a pinball machine, racing to all the important targets in her body. Ping, ping, ping, her defenses were crumbling. “I think I’ll die if you don’t.”
A small smile spread over his lips as he raised his head slightly, narrowing the distance between them. She smelled licorice on his breath—not an unpleasant odor. His lips were a hairbreadth from hers when he whispered a command: “Open.”
She complied instantly, never questioning his authority.
His kiss was violent in its tenderness. He used his lips and teeth and tongue to learn her mouth, turning her pliant and mewling for more. When she tried to deepen the kiss, demanding, “Harder,” he refused, nipping her jaw to show who was in control. He would obviously set the pace.
“Are you punishing me?” she moaned, though some remote portion of her brain reminded her that she was the one who had reason to be angry.
“Yes.”
“For what?”
“I can’t remember,” he rasped out with a laugh.
In a flash, before she could blink, he flipped her on her back and moved over her. Without breaking eye contact, he tore off her robe and tossed it to the side.
This time, when he kissed her, Harriet felt as if a storm had invaded her bed. He ravished her with hard kisses, then drained the life out of her with the heat of his thrusting tongue. Just when she thought she could bear no more, that things were happening too fast, he slowed and gentled. Then his kisses melted her with coaxing expertise.
Oh, he was a good kisser. A really good kisser.
She wanted to put her arms around him, to participate more fully, but he denied her efforts with a masculine growl. Harriet didn’t like being dictated to and she balked, wrapping her arms around his wide shoulders. “Steve,” she protested.
In a heartbeat, her hands were imprisoned above her head, pinned to the mattress by their interlaced fingers. Holding her eyes, he used his knees to spread her legs wide. With slow, slow insinuation, he let his body weight settle over hers.
“I am not Steve Morgan. I am Etienne Baptiste.”
“Oh.” She hadn’t realized she’d spoken Steve’s name.
“Say it.”
“Etienne,” she breathed.
“This is not a dream,” he said between gritted teeth.
“I know,” she whispered. She could feel his arousal growing against the apex of her thighs, and it was nothing like her fantasies. This was so much more.
Her breasts peaked and ached. She tried to move from side to side to abrade them against his coarse chest hair.
He wouldn’t let her move.
“You don’t like losing self-control, do you, Harriet?”
She gasped at his too-perceptive assessment. That kind of knowledge gave him power, and Harriet grew alarmed. This was alien territory for her. Dangerous.
“What are you afraid of, chérie?”
“Nothing.” Why didn’t he just stop talking and do it?
“Did I tell you that I’m an expert in body language, too, Dr. Ginny?” he said smoothly.
Uh-oh! She shook her head. She couldn’t speak.
“The pupils of your strange cat eyes are enlarged and very dark,” he whispered as he ran the tip of his tongue around his lips to moisten them. She followed its path like a hungry wanton. “Do you know what that means?”
“What?” At first, Harriet forgot what he’d asked. Then she remembered his question about dilated pupils. She should know the answer. But she was beyond rational thought.
“It means you’re about to climax,” he said boldly and bucked against her once. Only once.
That was all Harriet needed. To her shock and humiliation, she began to climax. A wild explosion of feeling rippled out from that place where he pressed against her, unmoving now. And all the time he watched her like a hawk with its prey.
She tried to escape his imprisoning hold—to force a response from him, or to escape.
He wouldn’t budge.
“Relax,” he coaxed, “Let it happen. I want to watch. You’re beautiful when you’re aroused. Your cheeks are flushed. You’re panting…”
Panting? Me? She clamped her mouth shut.
He nipped her chin in playful chastisement. “So beautiful. Come for me, chérie, come…”
“No.” She resisted. Harriet had to be in control. She always had been in the past. If she surrendered now, she would be vulnerable. Dependent. “No, no, no.”
Determination sparked in his pale eyes. He moved himself against her slickness, side to side. Once, twice, three times.
Tears streamed down her face as she fought against this shameful weakness. It wouldn’t be so bad if he were as out of control as she. It wouldn’t be so bad if it were dark and he weren’t witnessing her vulnerability. He would use it against her, she just knew he would.
Leaning down, he kissed the side of her lips. Gently. A soothing caress meant to comfort her distress.
It only pushed her closer toward the edge.
“Not like this. I don’t want it like this,” she cried out. “Inside…I want you inside me.”
Oh, this was the worst kind of forceful seduction. Harriet felt like a traitor to herself and all womankind. She was actually begging a man to make love to her.
“Like this?” he teased, taking his erection in hand and placing himself at her entrance, no further.
Harriet screamed. She arched her breasts against his seemingly immovable chest and rocked her hips against him in fast, rhythmic, involuntary undulations. Flinging her head from side to side, she surrendered to the most cataclysmic orgasm of her life. Every inch of her skin was an erogenous zone, convulsing in ever-widening circles of ecstasy.
And when it ended, when she felt she had nothing more to give, she glanced up at Etienne, who watched her expectantly. To her alarm, his eyes were darkening into pools of arousal. His lips parted with soughing breaths.
And, God help her, she wanted more.
Chapter Nine
He released her hands and braced himself on outstretched arms. Slowly, with a long, drawn-out groan, Etienne entered her. And her traitorous inner muscles expanded to accommodate his girth and grasp him in welcome.
“Oh…oh, my God!” To her surprise and his obvious pleasure, she climaxed again.
Panting heavily himself now, Etienne raised himself up so that he sat on his haunches, taking her with him to straddle his lap. He was still imbedded in her.
Through the crimson haze of her nonstop arousal, Harriet saw that sweat beaded Etienne’s brow and his teeth were bared and gritted, as if in agony. The man was just as excited by this loveplay as she was, except that he exercised much greater restraint. Darn it!
Placing a wide palm between her shoulder blades for support, he blades her to arch backward so that her breasts lifted like twin sacrifices for his worship. And worship he did. With the first flick of his tongue, he relit the fire between her legs, and, unbelievably, the erotic spiral started all over.
“Noooo,” she wailed. “It’s too much, too soon.”
“Ah, I’ll prove you wrong, chérie,” he promised and spread his knees wide, taking her thighs as far apart as they would go. The whole time, he tongued first one breast, then another, followed by the fiercest, sweetest suckling on her nipples. Nipples that had magical threadlike connections to every pore and muscle and blood vessel in her oversensitized body. She didn’t look, but she had a sneaking suspicion her toes might be tapping.
From then on, Harriet couldn’t tell where one orgasm ended and another started. She lost count.
During one of the few pauses, she r
ecalled him mentioning something about the need to go get his French Letters and her telling him she was protected by birth control pills. She’d clamped her legs around his waist to prevent his leaving the bed. Oh, geez! Did I really do that?
After that, everything became fuzzy. All she knew was that she’d time-traveled herself to feminist hell, plaything to a macho man’s every whim. And she was loving every minute of the blitz. Gloria Steinem, eat your heart out.
“Why are you grinning?” he whispered, taking a small, teasing bite at her lower lip.
“Because I—” Harriet never finished her sentence because she realized, with shock, that she was flat on her back—though how she’d arrived there, she had no idea—and the brute hadn’t yet begun to move inside her. How did he do it?
Oops! Correction. The grand finale is about to begin. Hold on to your hair net, Harriet. Here comes big trouble.
Levering himself on straightened arms, corded neck arched, Etienne pulled himself out and then eased back in with slow, excruciating abrasion. Over and over, he repeated the procedure.
Her eyes were probably rolling in their sockets like slot-machine fruits. She was pretty sure her tongue wasn’t hanging out, but she clamped her lips together just to make sure.
Harriet remembered reading a statistic one time that the average man thrusts sixty to a hundred and twenty times during sexual intercourse. She hadn’t believed it then, but now she thought a new world record was being set. By a not-so-average man. Oh, my!
She raised her knees to better accommodate him. She caressed his perspiring face, his wide, tense shoulders and his heaving chest. But this was Etienne’s show. He was the maestro calling the tunes. She was the mere instrument. And, amazingly, she didn’t mind.
When his strokes finally became shorter and harder, hammering her, actually moving her across the bed, he began to groan. And it was the most glorious, primal male sound in the world. When he exploded inside her continually convulsing folds, Harriet splintered with him.
For long seconds afterward, she lay stunned, her head mashed against the headboard, her legs spread wide with wanton abandon, an embarrassing wetness—his and hers both—spreading under her. And Etienne was sprawled over her like a clump of Mississippi mud, his face pressed between her breasts. The only sound in the room was the loud, mingled soughing of their burning lungs.
“I have never, ever experienced anything like that before,” she gasped out.
Etienne, whom she’d thought asleep, raised his head to peer at her incredulously. “And you think I have?” He burst out laughing and wouldn’t stop. Even when she pummeled the brute’s chest, he kept laughing. Even when she shoved him over onto his back and straddled him and tried to clamp a hand over his mouth.
Only when she stopped and her face brightened with a sudden idea did he still. He regarded her suspiciously.
She hated the way she’d lost her beloved self-control, but now she was in the driver’s seat, so to speak. She wriggled her bottom on his hard stomach for emphasis. The guy had a thing about her behind, or so he’d said a hundred times or more since they’d first met, and she wasn’t above using it against him. Perhaps she could retain some self-respect if she showed the lout that she was capable of remaining calm while directing his sexual agony. Hmmm. Who said a maestro needed a baton? Who said the kitten couldn’t teach the tomcat a thing or two?
“Etienne, darlin’,” she cooed.
He immediately sensed her plan. “Oh, no. I couldn’t.” Throwing up his hands in mock defense, he chortled, “Not yet.”
Harriet smiled, a pure feline curve of the lips, and proceeded to prove him wrong.
Ten minutes later, she had him purring. In another ten minutes, he was hissing. In the final ten minutes, when he bowed his back and dug in his claws, it was too late. He was putty in her cat paws.
Forceful seduction really wasn’t so bad, she decided, when the shoe was on the other foot…uh, paw.
For the next two hours, give or take an eternity, Etienne found he actually was capable of fulfilling Cain’s outrageous prescription. Although one “tumble” became indistinguishable from another, he figured there must have been at least four.
The woman was amazing.
He was amazing.
He couldn’t wait to see what amazing thing she did next.
He couldn’t wait to see if his amazing rooster could raise its tail feathers again, or if it was in rigor mortis.
“August Twenty-fifth, 1870. MCP File. Subject A, Etienne Baptiste. Today the subject exhibited symptoms of sexual obsession, and deviant syndrome patterns of exhibitionism.”
Oh, no! he groaned inwardly. She’s going to start talking again. You’d think her tongue would be numb from all the exercise it’s had this evening.
Reluctantly, Etienne raised his head from where he lay, facedown, spread-eagled in the middle of the bed.
Harriet was speaking into her hand. Her hand? She must be demented, after all.
On closer examination, he saw that Harriet was speaking into the small black box he’d seen earlier. Not that speaking to a box was any better.
Rolling over onto his side, he braced his elbow on the bed to support his head. Then he scrutinized her in the golden glow of a half dozen candles he’d lit sometime between her riding him and his showing her the real purpose of a fainting couch.
She sat propped against the pillows at the headboard, a sheet drawn up almost to her neck. The whole time, big words—which no doubt couched insults to him—rattled from her mouth like a drum, rat-a-tat-tat. The words he dismissed. He’d rather pay attention to the bruised puffiness of her lips. He loved kissing those lips, he really did. But, taking note of the glare she cast his way as she continued to talk to her box, he stifled the impulse, for now. She might just bite him, deviant sin-drone that he was. In fact, she already had, in some less than delicate places, far from his mouth.
He couldn’t resist a different temptation, though. Stretching out his free hand, he trailed a forefinger up her linen-covered leg from ankle to thigh.
She shimmied away from him slightly, as he’d expected she would.
“Subject A also exhibits symptoms of délire de toucher.”
“Hey! I know what that is. And I do not have a compulsion to touch. Well, at least not a compulsion to touch everybody.” He smiled at her.
Harriet moaned.
He took that as a good sign.
“Subject X, Harriet Ginoza, regressed today under the duress of forceful seduction…and hormone madness,” the wench prattled on. “By surrendering her will to an MCP, she discovered that sex can be a great equalizer. With two winks of an 1870 rogue, she sank to the crude level of aforementioned Subject A, wallowing in the degradation of meaningless sex. Now exploring the possible existence of a Female Chauvinist Pig Syndrome, or FCP.”
Wallowing? I don’t wallow. And meaningless? It meant a lot to me, for a certainty. “What in blue blazes are you doing?”
“Dictating,” she answered absently.
“To whom?” he asked huffily. Not me, honey. No matter how hard you try to hold the reins, I’m driving this Wagon.
“Not ‘to whom,’ silly. To my recording machine.”
“That’s the third time you’ve called me silly,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “It’s not a name I appreciate.”
“Oh, pooh!” she said, dismissing his complaint.
Pooh? Did she really say “pooh” to me? Then, before he could ask her what “pooh” meant, she held up her little black box in demonstration. By pressing a button, the words she’d just spoken, as well as his question, came rumbling out of the box.
He jerked back in surprise. “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” he exclaimed.
“A tape recorder,”
A tape recorder? What the hell’s a tape recorder? One more item added to the mystery of this woman, who was already back to conversing with her magic box. He would study the box later to discover its secrets, but for now, magic of another type was sta
rting to ruffle some feathers…rather, one feather that was not so limp, after all.
Mon Dieu! She was beautiful with her love-mussed ebony waves. Pink bruises and whisker burns already stained her creamy skin. What he could see of it, that was.
The woman was a strange contradiction he hadn’t yet figured out. She was hotter than a June bride in a feather bed, but, in between their bouts of bone-melting sex, in which she was the most uninhibited lover he’d ever experienced, Harriet always withdrew into herself. And blamed him for her lack of control. Merde! Who ever heard of an exprienced woman who worried so about surrendering herself to a man?
“I think I’ll order some buttermilk sent up,” he said, having a sudden inspiration.
She leveled him with one of her I-am-superior-and-you-are-a-scurvy-male looks. After all he’d done for her, too.
He chuckled. “Come on, honey. A little buttermilk will do you good.”
“Buttermilk’s bad for digestion.”
Digestion? At a time like this, she’s worried about her digestion? “What’s really the matter, darlin?”
“I’ll tell you what’s the matter, you…you jerk. You’re turning me into a brainless bimbo.” She pressed a button on the box and set it on the bedside table. “I don’t recognize myself anymore. This is worse than those forceful seduction dreams. Now I’m an active participant, and I just can’t let it continue.”
“Oh?” We’ll see about that. Never underestimate the determination of a Creole man, sugar. His fingertips were exploring other territory now with seeming idleness, like the sensitive skin running from her wrist to her inner elbow where goose bumps broke out like quicksilver. He loved the way she shuddered involuntarily at just that mere touch. She was so responsive. Or was he that good?
Probably both.
He grinned.
“And stop touching me,” she snapped, slapping his creeping hand away.
He grinned wider. And before she could react, his hand darted out and grabbed the hem of the sheet near her neck, flicking it down and off to the side. She tried to slip away but he lunged for her. Because their bodies were slippery, he almost slid right over her.
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