Lord Savage

by Mia Gabriel

  “Read them yourself,” I said. “There is not a single word there that would make me leave you.”

  He scanned the notes so swiftly that I wondered if he was looking for some particular word or statement.

  “You see,” I said. “Nothing.”

  He stared down at the last note in his hands, holding it so tightly in his fingers that the stiff card was bending. “You are not frightened of me, as Lady Carleigh says you should be?”

  “Why should I, when you have given me no reason to do so?” It was so hard not to go to him, to throw my arms around him and reassure him the way I longed to do. But I couldn’t—not until he was ready. “You must challenge me more than that, Savage, if you wish to drive me away.”

  “That’s the furthest thing from my mind,” he said, a fervency in his words that I hadn’t heard before. He was watching me closely, ready to pounce on any hesitation or doubt. “But I wish to be certain, Eve, and I wish you to speak only the truth. There is nothing you have heard or read today that has made you distrust me?”

  I didn’t pause, even proudly raising my chin. “Nothing.”

  “Rubbish.” He tossed the notes onto the sideboard and sighed. “I’ve told you before, Eve, that you were not born to tell lies. I heard what Blackledge said to you about my wife, and I heard you gasp when he did.”

  “No, Savage, please!” I cried. “It was because I could not believe he’d repeat such a dreadful story about you—about her!”

  His eyes seemed emptied by sadness, his expression bleak with resignation. “Don’t you fear that you’ll be next, Eve? Everyone else does. Don’t you worry that I’ll shove you from this window to break your pretty neck on the drive, too?”

  Tears of sympathy, not horror, stung my eyes, and I clasped my hands together at my waist to keep from reaching out to him.

  “Tell me what happened, Savage,” I whispered urgently. “I did not believe the baron, but I will believe you. Tell me the truth.”

  He closed his eyes and bowed his head, his dark hair falling across his forehead.

  “I had had her nurse bring her to my library to dine with me, the two of us alone,” he began in a hoarse whisper. “It was her birthday. She seemed happy enough, laughing and teasing the way she had when we’d first married, and I dared to think she was improving. Fool that I was, I turned my back, and that was all she needed. She ran to the window, and before I could reach her, she jumped. That was how she left me, in an instant and without good-bye. She left me, and she was gone.”

  “Oh, Savage,” I said softly. His mother, his father, his wife, all gone without farewell. No wonder he was so haunted by the past, when his past harbored such sorrow.

  “I let them all believe she’d fallen,” he continued, his voice as heavy as lead. “The nurse, the doctors, the police, the magistrate at the inquest. I didn’t want to damn her memory with the truth that she’d taken her own life.”

  “But you told me.”

  He nodded, and slowly raised his gaze to meet mine.

  “I did,” he said. “Because I knew you would be the only one who believed me.”

  I went to him then, slipping my arms around his shoulders as if they were meant always to be there, drawing him close. With a sigh, he buried his face against my hair, his beard bristling against my throat, and clung to me like a drowning man. I murmured little scraps of words and nonsense over his head, and gently stroked my hands along his arms and back to comfort him as best I could.

  I couldn’t begin to imagine what he’d endured by keeping such a secret locked so tightly within him. He’d acted from love, protecting his wife in death as he had in life. In their aristocratic world, madness was unacceptable enough, but suicide was far worse. Her name would forever have been tainted—damned, as he’d said himself—and no minister would have buried even a countess in sanctified ground if it was known that she’d taken her own life.

  Instead, he’d let the rumors circle around him, whispers of what a dangerous man he was, and how he’d pushed her to her death. He’d endured the scandal and rumors, saying nothing and telling no one, for the sake of his lost love.

  At last I understood why, whenever he was most unguarded, he’d been so desperately insistent that I not leave him. His poor, mad wife had fled from him, in the most final of ways, and he could not bear for me to abandon him, too.

  It hadn’t been part of the Game. It was part of his life.

  And now, so was I.

  THIRTEEN

  I wasn’t sure how long Savage and I stood there together. Three minutes could have passed, or thirty. What mattered was that by the time he finally separated from me, the bond that existed between us had strengthened and deepened.

  Although it was curious to think that this had come about because of his late wife, in a way it was inevitable. His Marianne had made him who he was, just as my Arthur was a part of me, too. The past couldn’t be changed, it could only be accepted as it was, and I was touched and honored that he’d trusted me with so intimate a part of his. I’d trusted him from the beginning. Now I knew—now I believed—that he trusted me in return, and that was a bond that would not break.

  “Eve,” he said softly, rubbing his thumb across my lower lip. His features had lost their tension, and though the sadness remained, the despair had left his face. The greatest difference showed in his pale eyes. The haunted introversion was gone, replaced by a clarity that was for now focused entirely on me. “What would I do without you?”

  “Nor I without you,” I said breathlessly, my heart tight in my chest. “Once, you told me that a trouble shared is a trouble halved. It was, and is, most excellent advice.”

  “Indeed it was, and is,” he said. “And you are the most exceptional woman I have ever known.”

  He kissed me then, his lips gliding over mine not in passion—that was sure to come—but to seal his words.

  I smiled and slid my hands inside his dressing gown to lie on his bare chest. His skin was warm, his heartbeat steady and measured beneath my palms.

  “I will always listen to you, Savage, whenever you wish me to,” I said. “Just as I would never wish to hear another deceitful word from Lord Blackledge. Not one!”

  He grunted, displeased by the very mention of the baron’s name. “Then why didn’t you stay here, where you’d be safe?” he asked. “Why did you put yourself in his path like that?”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “Not willfully, anyway. I went to my rooms, and as I was returning, he was also in the hallway. It could not be avoided.”

  He frowned. “What could possibly make you go to your rooms? If you wished anything, you could have sent Barry, or had him summon Simpson. There was absolutely no reason to put yourself at risk as you did.”

  “But there was,” I insisted. I stepped back, untying the sash on my dressing gown. “I wanted to surprise you when you returned.”

  His gaze slipped down to the shadow between my breasts, unable not to.

  “I wanted to finish what we’d begun in the gallery,” I continued, fishing for the pearl necklaces in my pocket. I shook my hair back, and let the silken dressing gown slide from my shoulders to the floor. One by one, I reached up and dropped the necklaces over my head, the pearls sliding and falling heavily across my bare breasts.

  “There,” I said, my voice low and husky. I expected him to fall into the familiar pattern of fantasy, exactly as he had earlier in the mirrored gallery. “This is how I wished to surprise you, my lord.”

  But while his gaze remained on my pearl-draped breasts, he didn’t join the fantasy. “That is where you went? To find those necklaces?”

  “Yes, my lord, I did it for you,” I said. I cupped my breasts with my hands, offering them to him through the sliding curtain of the pearls. “Isn’t this what you desired?”

  “Take them off, Eve,” he said. “All of them.”

  “Truly?” I exclaimed, disappointed. “I thought you’d like them.”

  He wasn’t smiling any longer
. “They were given to you by other men, weren’t they?”

  The question bewildered me, since I was certain he knew the answer. Ladies didn’t buy jewels for themselves, especially pearls.

  “My father and my husband gave the necklaces to me, yes,” I said, reluctantly beginning to lift the first necklace over my head. “But I do not see why I cannot—”

  “Because I want you to wear these instead.” He took a flat jeweler’s box from the mantel and handed it to me. “For you, Eve. From me.”

  I recognized the distinctive red case from Cartier, and I took off the last of the other necklaces before I took the box from him. Slowly I opened the lid, prolonging the moment, and then caught my breath.

  Curled in the silk-lined case was a long rope of the most exquisite pearls I’d ever seen, large and lustrous and perfectly matched. They were nearly identical to the ones worn by the woman in the engravings, and more than worthy of being a gift from a Renaissance prince.

  “For you,” he repeated, lifting the strand from the box and wrapping it around my neck. It was long enough to loop three times around my throat and still drape gracefully over my breasts.

  He led me to the dressing mirror, standing behind me in the reflection. The iridescence of the pearls made my skin glow in comparison, and I blushed with pleasure.

  “They’re so beautiful, Savage,” I said, running my fingers lightly along the strand. I couldn’t begin to imagine its value.

  “You are so beautiful,” he said. “I wanted to give them to you in the gallery this morning, but the man bringing them from London was delayed.”

  I turned to face him. “That was why you went downstairs, for this necklace for me?”

  He nodded, studying our reflection. “Apparently at the exact time you were gathering up those other pearls to surprise me. I much prefer these.”

  “I do, too,” I said. I kissed his stubbled jaw, then trailed my lips along his throat. “Because they came from you.”

  “You will think of me whenever you wear them,” he said, sliding his hand beneath the pearls to caress my breast. “Only me, Eve.”

  “Only you, Master,” I whispered. “Always you.”

  “Yes,” he said, sweeping me to the bed. “Exactly as it should be.”

  * * *

  We spent the rest of that day and the next in his bedroom, and scarcely left the bed. In the back of my mind, I was acutely aware of the final dinner we’d agreed to attend, looming before us. I remembered all too well what had happened the last time Savage and I had joined the others in the dining room, and I dreaded another outburst—particularly one involving Lord Blackledge.

  Yet I said nothing of it, and neither did Savage. It was a sign of how determined we both had become to savor each moment we had together, and to think of neither the past nor the future, nor of anything else beyond that single room. But the moments that remained were dwindling fast, and finally it was Savage who broke our self-imposed spell.

  “I want you to dress for dinner tonight,” he said. We were lying together on the bed with the golden sun of late afternoon spilling around us, I on my back and Savage on his side next to me with his head propped against his bent arm. He was lazily playing with the pearls, trailing them slowing around and over my nipple to tease it into puckering attention.

  “Dress in what manner?” I asked, dragging myself back from drowsiness to reply, though not far enough to open my eyes. “My Innocent costume?”

  “No,” he said. “I do not wish to offer you as temptation to the buffoons. You need not wear the costume again.”

  “Thank you,” I said, more relieved than he could have known. “What will the other ladies be wearing?”

  “I care only for you,” he said, more as a matter of fact than gallantry. “Surely you brought another dinner dress with you.”

  I had in fact brought nine, so that I might have choices. “Do you have a favorite color?”

  He smiled lazily. “My favorite color is whatever you choose to wear.”

  “Then you shall be surprised.”

  “I suppose I’ll have to give you up to Simpson soon,” he said with philosophical regret. “I know how long it takes for ladies to dress.”

  “But not yet.” I didn’t want to think of the tedium of being formally dressed, while I was in his bed. I arched up to kiss him, a leisurely, seductive invitation.

  “And the pearls,” he said. “You must wear the pearls.”

  “Of course,” I murmured, smiling warmly up at him. I had worn the pearls ever since he’d given them to me, and I had no intention of taking them off for tonight. “Only you and I will know of all the things we’ve already done while wearing them.”

  “As it should be,” he said, but his smile was enigmatic as he leaned forward and kissed me again. “I want you to think only of me whenever you wear them.”

  He deepened the kiss and I linked my arms around his shoulders. He rolled over me and I shifted beneath him, parting my legs in welcome. I was still wet from the last time, still swollen enough that he had to push his thick, heavy cock hard to enter me, and I caught my breath at the overwhelming sensation of being fucked open, and instantly filled.

  He took me with the long, measured thrusts that I’d come to associate so completely with him, and I curled my legs high over his driving hips to take him deeper still. The necklace slipped and slid across my body, the pearls rolling over my skin and warmed by it. Each rhythmic stroke of his cock into my sensitized core pushed me a little closer to my release, yet still he held me just on the edge, building my pleasure with his own as he pounded his hips against me.

  There was nothing like the need he could send licking through my body, the hot desire that scorched me. I could not resist him, nor did I want to. I rocked up to meet his thrusts, all sinuous energy to match his fire.

  “My god, Eve.” He groaned, making a guttural demand of my name. “You’re so damned perfect.”

  I understood, for I felt the same about him. All I wished now was to lose myself completely with him, in him, and when he angled his hips to stroke the crown of his cock inside my passage, it was almost more than I could bear.

  “Oh, Savage, please,” I gasped, writhing against the pillows. “Please.”

  “Then come.” His voice was raspy, his handsome face contorted in concentration. “Come with me now.”

  I came hard, crying out as the waves of release rippled through my body. He shuddered as he pumped into me, over and over, his head thrown back in his own ecstasy. He’d said I was perfect, but the truth was that we were perfect together. Completely, utterly perfect.

  We lay together for a long time afterward, our limbs still intimately tangled and sheened with sweat.

  “I can never get enough of you, Eve,” he whispered, dragging his lips along my jaw. “You’ve ruined me completely.”

  I smiled, burrowing against him. “You’ve done the same for me.”

  He pulled his arms more closely around me. “What a pair that makes us, yes?”

  “Yes,” I said, the word a long whisper of contentment. I had never been more satisfied, or happier, either. In my mind, I’d begun dividing my life into the time before I’d met him and the time after. It didn’t matter that I’d known him only a matter of weeks. By comparison, the time with him cast everything else into dull gray shadows of discontent. He’d changed me forever, and I wished never to go back.

  “Yes,” he repeated quietly. “Quite the pair.”

  I hadn’t expected the sadness in his voice, almost a melancholy, with regret mixed in as well. Perhaps he was thinking of his wife, and I kissed him again in wordless sympathy.

  “Ah, Eve,” he said, smoothing my hair back from my face. He smiled, but it was bittersweet, and colored with the same sadness. He held me for a moment longer, then sighed. “I could lie here forever with you, but if I did, Barry would have an apoplexy.”

  “Hang Barry,” I said. “I’d rather stay here.”

  “So would I,” he
said, turning his head to see the clock by the side of the bed. “But it’s past time I gave you over to your maid to make you presentable for dinner, and Barry must do the same with me.”

  He eased away from me and swung his legs over the side of the bed. At once I felt his absence, and I reached for the blanket, pulling it up over my shoulders as I watched him put on his robe.

  “Don’t make yourself too comfortable,” he said. “We must go.”

  I curled myself up more tightly under the blanket, relishing the last bit of warmth his body had left on the sheets. “Why?”

  “Because we owe that much to our host and hostess,” he explained. “I promised Laura that we would be at dinner, and we will. Come, Eve, out of the bed.”

  I couldn’t understand how swiftly he’d changed his manner, becoming almost brusque. Clearly, his thoughts were already elsewhere, away from me, and the ease with which he’d made the transition wounded me.

  “You didn’t care about any of the other dinners,” I said, reluctantly sliding from the bed. “Why should this one be so special?”

  “Because it’s the last one of the Game.” He handed me my dressing gown. “I’ll walk you to your rooms.”

  He was already opening the door for me by the time I’d tied my sash, and though he smiled as I joined him, I could sense the distance growing between us. He offered me his arm as we began down the hall, but I claimed his hand instead, linking my fingers into his to pull him closer.

  “Will we see our hostess on a bed of fruit again tonight?” I asked, striving to be playful.

  His smile was perfunctory. “Oh, I doubt it. There will be some sort of hired entertainment, yes, but by the end of the week, most of the guests are too spent for much more mischief. I doubt most of the men could muster a decent cockstand among them now.”

  “You could,” I said. “We could.”

  He grunted. “Yes, but we’re not about to show them, are we?” he said. “After dinner there will be a short ceremony—a kind of graduation, if you will—where the Protectors will each stand and sing the praises of their Innocents and what they’ve taught them, and pronounce their educations complete. Then other Protectors can offer to take on any of the Innocents for future schooling, a tidy way of deciding who will be paired with whom for the next time.”