“I know that to go into a hasty marriage while Chauncey has a spy sniffing around could bring all our plans crashing around our ears,” Anabel said, turning red. “I’ll thank you to have more care how you speak to me.”
“I’ll speak to you any way I damn well please, madam. You exist by my pleasure.”
She whirled about, flipping the full back of her violet velvet pelisse-robe behind her. “Don’t suggest that you have any power over me. One word and you are finished. Do you understand, Etienne? One word from me—or rather, the failure for me to give a certain word when it is expected—and you are a dead man.”
“You will not give me my orders, madam.”
“If my solicitors should ever fail to receive word from me on dates already appointed between us, they will instantly open letters sealed in their vaults. Do I make myself clear?”
God. How he was oppressed by damnable females.
“Etienne,” she crooned, positioning herself between him and the nearest window. She spread her arms, bracing them against the frames. “My own dearest one. When will you learn to trust Anabel? When will you learn to stop being frightened and let me take care of everything for us?”
When would he be free of her?
“My plan is perfect, sweetest. You need do nothing. Nothing. I shall ensure that Innes slips neatly into our hands.”
“This story of yours is exactly that, a story. You have no proof that the man is anything other than an opportunist looking for a patron”— he compressed his mouth and stared at the full flare of Anabel’s hips beneath the pelisse —“or a damnable seducer set on snaring himself a rich bride.”
“You need me, Etienne,” Anabel said, swaying. The motion showed how her high-collared robe opened daringly to reveal a hint of a very low-cut black gown and a great deal of the woman’s big breasts.
He narrowed his eyes, bent his head to one of those breasts and sucked in a soft, scented mouthful of white flesh.
“Ouch!” Anabel pulled him away by his hair, but she was laughing and her tongue made a slow progress around her lips. “I shall make you pay for that.”
“How?” He enjoyed her, dammit. And he’d use her until he could find a way to get his hands on her precious letters—if they existed.
“How shall I make you pay for hurting Anabel?” she mused. “First, you must promise to allow me to deal with the annoyance of your little fiancée.”
“You will do—”
“I will do what must be done. And we shall have her dowry. Fear not. As I have already explained, Innes will die in the act of kidnapping dear Philipa. Philipa will die at his hand and Chauncey will give the grieving groom the only suitable price for his silence—Cloudsmoor. Delicious.”
Etienne looked into Anabel’s blue eyes. Clever blue eyes. If her plan could work, he might be free. And he need never marry this conniving jade. This time she’d be permanently silenced by her own crime.
“You are an inventive gel,” he told her, pulling undone the satin bows that closed the front of the pelisse. “Why shouldn’t I give you a chance to see if you can accomplish this thing?” One by one, he undid the bows.
“I can accomplish it, I tell you,” she said, slipping away from him to sit on the back of a cane couch. “You have been very preoccupied of late, Etienne.”
He followed until he stood between her splayed thighs. “Can you wonder at my preoccupation? My future is at stake.”
“The viscount is leaving,” she told him. “That will make my task easier. I don’t like that man. He sees too much.”
“Do not underestimate Innes. His innocent prattle is all an act. I swear he has put himself in my way to interfere with the marriage.”
“He has,” she agreed. “I’ve told you as much. But do not worry, my pet. Entertain me instead. To inspire me.”
He fumbled inside the robe and hefted her breasts free. For a while she was content to mewl and pant and writhe whilst he suckled her distended nipples, but then she plucked at his shoulders and pushed him away and said, “Imagine how the mouse, Philipa, would please you, Etienne. Imagine how she would attend to your needs.”
Smiling, he took off his coat. “Regardless, I do believe I shall make sure I take that particular pallid flower before that thief, Innes, can have her.” With one hand he began loosing his trousers; with the other, he sought to tear the remaining bows away. “If you are very good, I may arrange for you to watch. Should you like that?”
“We shall see—later,” Anabel said, laughing and staying his hands. “Not so quickly, Etienne. There is something I have come by recently. I could use it selfishly, but I’d much rather share my pleasure with you. Stand quietly. Be good.”
Already his shaft sprang free of his clothes.
“Ooh,” Anabel said, her mouth remaining in a moist pout. “How lovely. I’m going to have such a lot of fun tonight.”
He fumbled with her clothes, only to be pushed away again.
Anabel opened the robe and revealed, not a gown, but black satin stays edged with lace below her breasts. Black satin drawers, of the kind he’d seen on Frenchwomen, parted beneath her fingers. “Now you can feel,” she told him.
He felt. She was wet. “I like these new possessions of yours,” he told her, applying the heel of his hand in the way he knew drove her to a frenzy, and anticipating watching his rod enter her between the black satin folds of the garment.
“Not these,” she said, her voice as satiny as the drawers. “What I have is not satin. It is this.” Leaning back, she retrieved something long and shining from the couch—a golden tube that glittered in the weak shafts of late sun through dusty windows.
Etienne frowned, then narrowed his eyes once more. “Where did you come by that?”
“From…It is said to have belonged to Nefertiti.”
He made a grab for the elegant toy, but she held it aloft. “I asked where you came by it,” he said and saw her breath quicken. She had good reason to be afraid of his anger. She’d tasted it before—and suffered before enjoying it, he thought darkly.
“A good friend gave it to me, Etienne. You aren’t jealous, are you?”
“Jealous?” He snorted and thrust his engorged rod toward the enticing gap in those black satin drawers. “What need have I of an Egyptian queen’s dildo?”
“Wait,” she told him. “And watch.”
Where he would have found his pleasure, she slowly inserted her cold, golden substitute. So very slowly, the shimmering thing passed inside her and she dropped her head back, panting aloud, her breasts heaving.
Fascinated, sweating, he watched her body easily take in the massive plaything until her fingers rested in the thicket of golden hair between her legs.
Ah, yes, she was inventive, his little nemesis. His penis throbbed and the ache was exquisite. “Finish your game, Annie,” he gasped, his eyes squeezing shut. Another moment and he’d have little need of her.
A cool hand surrounded him and he sagged forward.
“You are so beautiful,” a familiar and hated voice said.
Etienne opened his eyes and looked into the saturnine face of Henri St. Luc. He summoned enough alarm to mutter, “How long have you been here?”
“All the time, darling,” Anabel said with a bubbling chuckle. “Henri is our friend. And he is my insurance. He will look after my interests. Just as he will look after yours.”
“But of course,” Henri said, pressing his lips to the other man’s while his strong, clever fingers did their work. “It has been too long since you and I were together, mon ami.”
Even while some shred of him clung to loathing, Etienne’s body betrayed its voracious appetite for what Henri St. Luc offered.
“See?” Anabel said, withdrawing the golden rod and driving it in once more. “See?” Her voice rose and she fell to her knees.
Etienne felt Henri slip down the length of his body, felt his knees surrounded and held in a strong arm—felt himself drawn in, and milked.
“We wil
l have it all!” Anabel shrieked, and collapsed, writhing in the throes of her self-made satisfaction.
They would have it all here, Etienne thought. They might have it all again and again—before he had it all for himself.
Then he fell through pulsing blackness, gave himself up to that which the world forbade yet he craved.
The evening’s entertainment had truly begun.
Charmed Twenty
“Repeat after me,” Pippa said to Ella. “I am not happy to hear this.”
Ella settled herself gracefully in her straight-backed chair, pleated the skin between her brows in concentration and said, “I am not happy to ’ear this.”
“Hear this,” Pippa said, walking to the schoolroom windows to look down upon the stable yard far below.
“Hear this,” Ella said, her voice pleasing. “I am not happy to hear this. I’m gettin’ better, ain’t—am I not?”
Pippa smiled at the girl. “You are getting better so quickly, I can hardly believe it. Your mother will be so pleased,” she added before she could contain the urge to find out more about her mysterious pupils.
Ella’s dark eyes assumed their familiar shuttered expression. “How old is Saber?” she asked, the tilt of her chin declaring her determination to keep her secrets to herself.
“The earl is twenty-three,” Pippa said, pressing closer to the window to look down on top of two dark-haired men beside a single horse. “Lord Avenall is a man of the world, Ella.”
“I don’t think so,” Ella said.
Calum and Struan were in the stable yard. Pippa watched Struan mount the horse, wave and spur the animal into a gallop. Through the open window she heard the distant clank of metal tack and the clatter of hoofs on cobbles.
“Hmm?” She glanced back at Ella. “What did you say?”
“I said that I don’t think Saber’s a man of the world. Not like some anyway.”
“Has he told you to call him by his given name?”
“Of course.”
Pippa frowned, not knowing exactly how to answer. “He is a great deal older than you, miss, and you’d do well not to entertain any romantical notions about him.”
“She is, y’know,” Max said, breaking the silence that invariably accompanied his labored efforts at penmanship.
“Shut your mouth, Max,” Ella snapped.
“Hush,” Pippa said. “She is what?”
“What you said. Soppy about that young lord.”
“I ain’t—am not,” Ella argued.
“Of course you aren’t,” Pippa said, smiling a little at the faint flush that showed on Ella’s honey-colored skin. The feeling of protectiveness and empathy she felt with the girl brought Pippa a secret joy. “Max, you are doing extremely well with your D’s. Clearly you are going to be a remarkable man of letters one day.”
Max, his tongue between his teeth, finished his latest letter with a cramped flourish. “Like Mr. Innes,” he said. “I think I’m going to do lots of things like him. Papa’s had to go to, er, Dorset. ’E’ll be back, though. ’E said so, didn’t ’e, Ella?”
“He,” Ella said. “Of course he did.”
“Yes,” Max said. “I ’spect Mr. Innes would rescue us again if we ’ad t’be rescued, but—”
“Max,” Ella said ominously.
Pippa stopped herself, not for the first time, from telling the children that she was well aware of their peculiar position. As long as she hadn’t been given permission to reveal that she knew their secret, her silence was a trust.
She returned to the window. Calum stood in the stable yard, staring into the empty spaces where Viscount Hunsingore had disappeared. Even at a distance, she felt a need in the man left behind.
Oh, what was to happen? None of this was as it should be. Surely Franchot would not suffer the presence of a man he despised much longer. Already a week had passed since the duke’s arrival, and tension sprang from him every time he as much as looked at Calum. Franchot didn’t look at Pippa at all, thank goodness.
“Ella,” Pippa said, “would you kindly attend to Max’s lessons until it’s time for your luncheon? That will be quite soon. And I’ll see you here tomorrow morning.”
Without waiting to hear more than Ella’s assent, Pippa left the schoolroom in its lofty tower perch and ran swiftly down the spiral stone staircase, past a succession of floors to the stark, undecorated hall at its base.
By the time she’d made her way through a corridor bordered on one side by storage used by the castle steward and on the other by the laundry, she was out of breath and convinced Calum would be long gone when she finally reached the stable yard.
A kitchen garden and a big herb patch, hemmed in by a high stone wall, led to the stables, and Pippa was fully running by the time her slippers hit the cobbles.
She’d been almost right. Calum, mounted on a bay hack, cantered from the yard and began to drop from sight even as she watched.
If she waited to find a mount, she’d never know which way he’d gone. Her feet flying, trying to ignore the stares of stableboys and grooms, she held her skirts above her ankles and dashed from the yard to the stony pathway that wound downward toward the castle’s great drive.
He was below her already. Heedless of who might hear, she called, “Calum! Wait! Calum!”
The bay continued to pick a path on slipping shale and Calum didn’t look back.
“Fie,” Pippa said. “Everything is such a bother.” And she launched herself in a reckless downhill flight, stumbling, catching her balance, only to slide again.
“Calum!” Her voice rose to a squeak and she began to fall. Pippa hit the ground with a thud that knocked out all her wind. She thumped, twisted sideways and slid—and heard a hard, rapid thrumming she knew were returning hoofbeats.
Ooh, she hated to be humiliated.
“Stay,” Calum called. “Do not move, Pippa. Stay exactly where you are.”
She shut her eyes tightly, then opened them a crack and saw the legs of a bay horse.
Then she saw the legs of a man.
The long, powerfully muscled legs of a man who wore doeskin breeches and top boots that clasped tight to strong calves.
“My dear,” Calum said. “My dear one.” He went to his knees beside her.
Pippa held her breath.
Gently, he stroked her freed hair back from her face. “Can you hear me, Pippa?”
She nodded a little.
“Thank God.” His sigh was audible. With careful hands, he felt first one of her arms, then the other. “Where do you hurt?”
“I don’t know,” she said honestly.
After a small hesitation, he began to test her ankles, then her calves. When he reached her knees, Pippa could no longer bear to trick him.
“I am so clumsy,” she said. “Really, it is such a trial. My father always said so and—and—”
“And you did not admire him for it,” he suggested with such an odd note in his voice that Pippa opened her eyes and looked up into his. “Poor Pippa. You did not hear nearly enough praise for your virtues when you were a child, did you?”
She could not criticize Papa. “I did very well, thank you. I was a most fortunate child.”
He smiled down at her, slid one arm around her back and the other beneath her knees and lifted her easily into his arms. Back on his feet, he studied her face as if she were both interesting and a stranger.
“Did I hear you call my name just now?” he asked.
Pippa chewed the inside of her lip. A lady was not supposed to chase after a gentleman, particularly when the lady was already engaged, and not to the man after whom she chased.
“Did you?”
“Yes. And you can put me down. I am quite unhurt, except for my pride.”
He threw back his head and laughed. He laughed and showed marvelous, strong teeth and made his chest rumble against Pippa’s side.
“I cannot find any humor in my damaged pride, sir.”
“No,” he said, struggling for con
trol. “But I find true wonder in your lack of coquetry and guile. I’ve never met another woman who would willingly point out her faults—even faults she does not have.”
“Where are you going?” she asked, unwilling to continue this examination of her character.
He studied her for a moment longer, then hoisted her sideways onto his saddle and leaped up behind. Settling her, he held her safe against his big body and urged the hack back on the path he’d been taking before Pippa had managed to make herself the fool.
Her hair had completely slipped its bonds and whipped madly about her face. The air was warm, the wind gusty. Pippa felt the warm, sweet wind. She thought only of the man who held her, of his strong, gentle arms—of the comfort he offered, if only for a little while.
They avoided the drive, going instead by way of a path through towering trees where sun wands pointed earthward through rare gaps in the dense growth. In those bright wands, sparkling fairy motes spun.
Pippa would have curled into Calum’s embrace, but the comfort she found with him, the sweet yearning to forget that there was any world outside the forest, was tinged with an ache in her heart. This could not be—not for more than a few stolen moments.
At last they were within sight of the edge of the trees. In the distance Pippa could see a meadow sweeping down to the castle walls, and the glitter of the sea beyond.
Calum drew his horse to a halt.
Pippa sat quite still, leaning against him, waiting.
His hands on the reins were long and tanned and capable. The hands of a poet or a farmer, a painter or a smith. Hands that had been used. They made her want to be touched by and to touch them.
As if he heard her thoughts, he crossed his arms around her and chafed her arms, rested his cheek atop her head and held her so tight she could scarcely breathe.
The silence stretched on and on.
Pippa could not bear it to end, yet she could not bear for it to continue. The time for confrontation had arrived.
“I wanted to talk to you,” she said.
“Where is your private place?”
At first she didn’t understand; then she nodded. “I told you. At Cloudsmoor.”
Fascination -and- Charmed Page 63