by Mia Gabriel
Oh, yes, he’d been right: I did want him. My whole body ached fiercely with wanting, my quim too empty and longing for him to fill me again.
And that need would humble my pride every time.
I took a deep breath, striving once again to look like the lady I’d been born, at ease with servants, and not a scorned Innocent in a rumpled costume.
“Thank you, Barry, no,” I said. “I require nothing more.”
He bowed, and I retreated inside the room, letting him close the door gently after me.
I rubbed my arms against the evening air, noting wistfully how my nipples now were tight from the chill, not Savage’s touch. With a sigh, I pulled the costume over my head—I was sure he would want to discover me naked when he returned—and climbed into his bed.
The sheets had been changed since Savage and I had lain there earlier, the pillows plumped and the coverlet straightened, and in vain I tried to recapture some sense of how it had felt to have him beside me. The bed was too large for one person alone, and I curled into a tight knot in the very center of the mattress with the coverlet pulled high beneath my chin.
I wondered where Savage was now. Was he stalking through the manor’s hallways or gardens? Had he retreated to the library to lose himself in a book? Had he taken a horse from the stables to ride hard across the estate’s moonlit fields?
I prayed he hadn’t returned to the others in the dining room, and wasn’t party to whatever else Lady Carleigh had concocted for entertainment. I remembered all too vividly how earlier he’d called the viscountess by her given name, and how both Lord and Lady Carleigh had hoped he’d come join them in their bed with their Innocents.
I prayed he hadn’t gone there, either, or to any other bed besides. There was only one bed where he belonged, and it was here, with me, and I smiled forlornly at how woeful and pathetic that small certainty, however true, would sound to anyone else.
Lying curled on my side, I gazed through the open window at the stars and the rising moon. He would return to me soon. He must. I remembered how upset he’d been when he thought I’d left him, and now that he was the one who was gone, I felt his absence with a keenness I’d never expected.
We only had a handful of days at Wrenton, days that should be spent together, not apart.…
“Hush, Eve, I’m here.”
I stirred, still too deeply asleep to tell if I was dreaming his voice and the brush of his lips on my cheek.
Then the springs creaked and the mattress shifted beneath his weight, and I felt a slight breeze of cooler air as he lifted the sheet and coverlet to join me in the bed. I was still on my side, and he glided his hand along my body to follow the dip of my waist and the swell of my hips. The hour was late enough that all the candles had guttered out, but there was light enough from the moon.
Drowsy as I was, his caress was enough to wake me, and I tried to roll onto my back to kiss him, or at least to see his face.
“Stay as you are,” he said softly as he held me steady. “I want you like this.”
He slipped his body close behind mine, fitting neatly against me like we were two spoons. He was naked, his skin warm, and I wriggled more closely to him, relishing his heat as much as the intimacy of our position.
But he wanted me. That was what mattered most.
Instinctively I pushed my bottom against him and felt his cock, already thick and hard against his belly. There was the proof of his desire, and my heart quickened in anticipation. Again I tried to twist around to face him, expecting him to take me like that.
“No, Eve,” he said, keeping me on my side. “You’ll like this, I promise.”
His hand swept along my hip again, then raised my upper thigh, bending my knee and easing it slightly forward to open me. I was trembling with both uncertainty and eagerness, and when he stroked his fingers along my slit he found me wet, the lips of my quim pouting and ready like another kind of kiss. Still, I heard him lick his fingers, sliding his saliva across my opening to make me even wetter.
“Oh, please, Savage,” I murmured as I pressed back against his fingers. “Please, don’t torment me any longer.”
He chuckled. “Do as I say, and I won’t. Be easy, and let me lead. You’re so tight, and I don’t want to hurt you.”
Instead of his fingers, I felt the blunt head of his cock pressing against my opening. I gasped, struggling to do as he’d said and not to push back, and he pressed his hand onto my waist to hold me steady. He shifted his hips to better his aim, then pushed into me. I gasped again as his cock opened me, sliding far into my passage. Two quick shoves, and he’d filled me completely, his balls pressed against my bottom.
Buried deep, he paused to let me grow accustomed to taking him like this. It wasn’t the same, the angle making his cock fill me in a new and different way that stole my breath away. I loved how this position made him curve around me, his large, muscular body bending to fit mine.
I gave a small shimmy of encouragement, and at once he drew back and plunged back in, making me whimper with delight. I twisted my hands in the bedclothes, bracing myself to take more.
“I told you that you’d like it this way,” he said, his voice a rough growl against my ear. He drew back so far he was almost free of me, only to plunge back in with shuddering force. “I knew you would.”
“I—I do,” I said, the last word drifting off into a groan of purest pleasure. “Ah, Master! How well you know me!”
I’d effortlessly slipped back into the Game. Not being able to see his face seemed to make the pleasure more intense, as if the way his cock was stretching me, pounding back and forth so deeply inside my channel, was all I could concentrate upon. I hadn’t expected to be so excited by the feeling of his balls slapping against my anus, something so absolutely forbidden that I’d no words for it.
“I know you better than anyone, Eve,” he said. He shoved the thick waves of my hair to one side so that he could kiss the side of my throat. “I know what you want and what you need, and I know how to give it to you.”
I believed him. The sensations he was creating within me were unlike anything I’d experienced before. He did know what I wanted, what I needed, and as for giving it to me—ah, I was eager for everything he could offer.
“Say it to me, Eve,” he whispered. “Tell me what I’m doing to you.”
I struggled to put together the words he wished to hear—a small price in return for the pleasure he was giving me.
“You’re fucking me, Master,” I said raggedly, no longer amazed by the power of those simple words to send a shiver through me as well. I loved how completely he filled me, reaching the very end of my passage with a finality that was just short of too much. His strokes were long, nearly pulling out, only to push back into me in a steady rhythm that was rapidly bringing me toward my release. “You’re fucking me, and I’m fucking you, and it—it’s divine.”
“Divine?” He grunted, almost a laugh. “Then it’s my duty to make you see all the stars in the heavens.”
“Stars, Master?” I asked breathlessly, not understanding. I couldn’t make myself focus on anything but what he was doing to me, let along stargazing.
“Stars.” He reached over my hip and between my legs until he found my pearl.
I whimpered as he began to massage that tiny, vital part of me in light little circles, timing the pressure with the driving of his cock. Unable to stop, my hips rocked against the double pleasure of his teasing fingers and his driving cock. I was shaking with the force of my building climax, clutching the sheets with feverish desperation.
I arched my spine with my head thrown back as the tension built within my core. My breathy little cries punctuated every one of his thrusts, until at last my release crashed over me and my quim convulsed around his cock in pure, wild joy. I fell limply against the pillows, gasping as the last tremors rippled through me.
But Savage wasn’t done. Now that he was assured of my pleasure, he began to chase his own. He braced himself, movi
ng lower to increase his penetration, and moved like a piston so relentlessly that I instantly felt another climax coiling within me.
Mindlessly I let myself go with it, with him. Our bodies were slippery with sweat, and his balls struck heavily against my bottom with each stroke.
He shoved aside the damp curtain of my hair to kiss my shoulder, a kiss that was so rough and passionate that it felt more like a bite, a primitive expression of mating at the moment his climax began. It hurt, and made me cry out with the unexpected pain, yet it excited me, too, to have his passion so beyond his control. He groaned and swore, shuddering with the raw impact of it.
His cock ground against me so hard that the force of it echoed within me and triggered my second orgasm. I bucked and cried out, exhilarating in the glorious moment when he filled me with his hot seed.
And then, at last, I understood about the stars.
Utterly spent, he sank back against the pillows, drawing me with him. I settled naturally against his chest, savoring how his arms circled me protectively and our legs were tangled. His chest still heaved with each breath, and beneath my fingers I both felt and heard how his heart continued to race.
I was amazed that his cock continued to fill me, awash as I was in his spendings. Yet, I liked that, too, even as I tried not to read more into it than he likely intended. I had to remember that the intimacy of our bodies had nothing to do with the intimacy of our souls and hearts, and that what we did here in this bed was intended for pleasure, and nothing more.
He didn’t speak, and neither did I. As his breathing slowed and he relaxed more fully beside me, I suspected he’d fallen asleep. Finally his cock slipped free of my quim, but I didn’t reach for a handkerchief, not wishing to disturb him. He shifted against the pillows and tightened his arms around me. I smiled, letting myself enjoy the warmth of rare happiness and contentment, and purposefully not thinking of what would come next.
He was the one who finally broke the silence, startling me there in the dark.
“I couldn’t stay away,” he said. He spoke in a low, matter-of-fact tone, as if discussing a topic as ordinary as the weather.
But I wasn’t fooled. I’d already learned to my sorrow that even the mildest of words could turn treacherous with him. This didn’t feel like another part of the Game, but I couldn’t tell for certain. How was I to reply to such a statement? How much could I dare confide of my own thoughts?
I shifted to face him, resting my arms on his chest. In the moonlight his face was planed with shadows, his dark hair tousled against the white linens.
“I’m glad you returned,” I said softly. “Truly.”
He paused before answering, just long enough to make me fear I’d made another misstep and confessed too much.
“It was good to find you here,” he said finally.
Relieved, I smoothed a stray tendril of my hair behind one ear. “I was lonely.”
He grunted. “I would venture that loneliness must be an unusual condition for a woman as beautiful as you are.”
“It’s not,” I said, trying to smile. “I believe I’ve been lonely my entire life. You guessed that of me that first night, when we danced.”
“I said that you were alone by choice,” he said. “Being alone is not the same as being lonely. And it wasn’t a guess. It was a certainty.”
“Because you are that way, too,” I said. “You recognized me as a renegade, exactly as you are yourself.”
“That must not have been easy for you,” he said. “It’s been my limited experience that New Yorkers are almost alarmingly social.”
That made me smile in earnest. “They can be, yes,” I agreed. “Mrs. Astor, Mrs. Vanderbilt, Mrs. Whitney—they are indeed alarming in their pursuit of social esteem.”
“Then what of the beautiful Mrs. Hart?” he asked, curious. “What of her place in that teeming, tawdry New York society of parvenus and oil magnates?”
His playfulness took me by surprise, and made me drop my guard more than I’d intended.
“My place there among those ladies is secure enough, for as long as I wish it,” I said. “They would never dare not invite me to their balls and parties. I’m too wealthy to scorn.”
“Then you should never be lonely,” he said easily. “Balls and parties are the very lifeblood of ladies. Even the renegade ones.”
“Perhaps,” I said warily. “But I—I am not adept at transforming acquaintances into friends. My father built his fortune by trusting no one, and he did the same with me. I was never permitted from our house unattended. Servants raised me. He had me taught at home, and I never was sent to school. He didn’t believe any other children were worthy of my company, and thus I had none. He chose my husband, and I went from the schoolroom to marriage. Then Arthur died, and I became a widow, and that—that is my story.”
I gave a little shrug of my shoulders, already regretting having said so much.
“What of your sisters?” he asked. “What of your mother? Why did she permit this?”
His unfeigned interest surprised me, yet reassured me, too.
“My mother died of influenza when I was an infant,” I said, unable to keep the old sorrow from my voice, “and I have no brothers or sisters. There was only me. So you see why loneliness and I are old friends.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. He traced his fingertips along the curve of my cheek with such unexpected gentleness that tears stung my eyes.
“You needn’t apologize,” I said quickly, drawing back a fraction from his touch. His tenderness was too much, too sudden, and guessing that it could not last made it unbearable. “You are hardly to blame for anything that has happened in my life.”
His face suddenly turned guarded. “I never said it was. But things are different for women.”
I couldn’t begin to guess what that meant. “If you are implying that only women are lonely—”
“I didn’t intend that, either,” he said, the slightest edge of testiness in his voice.
“Although as a man, and a peer as well, you would never be lonely,” I said, more wistfully than I realized. “The whole world is open to you, without any of the limitations that constrict women.”
“Eve, Eve.” He sighed wearily. “I meant only what I said: that loneliness affects women in different ways than it does men, and given the warm nature of most women, it must be more difficult for them to bear.”
“So you have never been lonely yourself?” I asked, longing for him to share his past, his fears, with me as I had with him. “Not once?”
His guarded expression did not change, a wall carefully composed to keep me at a distance.
“Men are different, Eve,” he repeated, and, to my disappointment, that was all.
I drew in a deep, shuddering breath, then let it out in a long sigh. He was not saying anything that was offensive or disrespectful or challenging. I was the one who’d rambled on and then turned prickly, and with no real reason, either.
And I was the one breaking the rules of the Game, too, yearning for more from him than sexual experience and pleasure. I was not only an Innocent but a fool as well. I was fortunate that he didn’t climb from the bed and walk through the door again, and not return.
Yet, I’d feel like an even greater fool if I apologized now, directly after I’d told him he needn’t apologize. Why was it that Savage and I did so much better when we were Protector and Innocent?
Confused and frustrated, I pushed away from him and sat upright, hooking my arms around my bent knees with my hair falling down my back. I rested my chin on my arms and closed my eyes, determined not to let my emotions spill over as tears. I’d never thought of myself as a weeper, but there was something about Savage that made me feel everything, good and bad, so much more vividly that I couldn’t help it.
“Eve,” he said behind me. “Look at me.”
I shook my head. Even in the moonlight, he’d be able to see my tears, and I was too ashamed to let that happen.
“Eve,” he
said, his voice low and rough and faintly puzzled. “Please.”
That was not the command of a master but a simple request from a man. It was also more than enough to make my eyes fill in earnest, and I buried my face against my folded arms.
He didn’t try again. Instead, he reached out and swept the tangled mass of my hair to one side and over my shoulder, baring my back. I felt the mattress sink as he came to sit behind me and stretched his long legs on either side of my hips. Instantly I felt better; it had taken no more than the heat of his skin against mine, the rough hair on his legs against the soft skin of my hips.
I started when he put his hands on my shoulders, not expecting it.
“Be easy,” he whispered, his breath warm on my cheek. “Close your eyes. Empty your head, and think of nothing.”
How could I think of nothing with him so close? He began to massage my back, digging his strong fingers into my muscles. I hadn’t realized how tense I’d become, my back as taut as an arched bow, yet the circling pressure of his thumbs was breaking it down, freeing me. I raised my head, letting it fall back toward my spine, and let my arms drop limply to my sides.
“There, there,” he said quietly, calming me. “Be easy, and trust me.”
I was unable to keep back my little moans of pleasure, for his hands felt that good as they kneaded my flesh. He worked all along my spine, up and down and back again, clear to the twin dimples at the top of my bottom. When at last he was done, I sank back against his chest, limp and blissfully at ease.
“You will be pleased to know I’ve had words with Lady Carleigh,” he said, over the top of my head. “We’ve reached an understanding.”
At once the pleasant feeling began to recede as I imagined him spending the time he’d been gone frolicking in the Carleighs’ infamous bed.
“You have?” I asked.
“I have,” he said, “or rather, Lady Carleigh and I have together. To avoid any further disturbances with Blackledge, you and I are excused from dining downstairs. Unless, of course, you wish it, Eve.”