by Jade Lee
—Opposition MP William Gladstone, 1840
Chapter Eleven
The morning came with wailing, and Zhi-Gang tried to bury his head against the sound. He ended up burrowing into soft female flesh—a breast? He smelled the familiar musk of a night spent in what he and Jing-Li called physical study. He felt the lift and lowering of the woman’s sweet chest, heard the steady beat of her heart, erratic now that she too was waking, and the ever-present wailing from the other room.
It was the widows, making their show as was wholly traditional, proper—and exceedingly tedious. He could not wait to escape this mud pit, and yet he had no wish to cease his current studies.
He rubbed his face against the woman, noting the size and texture of her breast. It was large and full and especially delightful. He smiled and opened his eyes. Morning light shone full on her white skin, the faint rosy tint the effect of his morning beard on her tender flesh.
Anna. Sweet Anna.
He blinked, memory coming back with a flood of mixed delight and horror. The delight was obvious. His body was relaxed with satisfaction, his muscles even sore from their exertions. In truth, they had done nothing he had not experienced before, and yet she had been wonderfully open to everything he did, everything they tried.
What was different was the way she had spoken to him. He grew hard remembering her words: awkward and stuttering, but in time flowing stronger, more articulate. She’d told him what she wanted and how she felt when he touched her.
He had not minded when her speech had splintered into disassociated thoughts, bizarre images, and unusual associations. That made it all the more amazing, all the more erotic, since he knew he was the one who’d sent her mind flying into unforeseen directions. And where she went, he went too. He’d shared every moment of her experience and that made his own all the more explosive.
She was different from any woman he had ever touched, and that made her exceedingly special to him. Especially since he had no expectation that last night’s explorations would be any different from tonight or the next night or the night after that. Her mind was a strange and amazing place. He could spend many long nights in exploration of her thoughts and never grow tired, even as he pumped himself into her over and over again.
The thought was so compelling, he found himself catching her rosy nipple in his lips, teasing it into a tight point. She responded immediately, her breath catching on a gasp. His hand had been on her belly. He slid it between her legs where she was wet and slick and ready.
He forgot the horror of the morning’s equation. All was lost in the scent of a willing woman. Then she started speaking again, and he could not pretend this was just any woman; she was herself, her words unlike anyone else’s, and he wanted to be inside her more than he wanted his next breath.
“Tell me more,” he gasped as he shifted his weight between her thighs. It was an awkward movement since he was still stroking her yin pearl, but he managed while she began to arch into his hand.
“Your fingers spread me open,” she said. “I can see it in my mind, you opening me up.”
“Like spreading apart flower petals; I hunger for the pollen inside.”
He felt her chest ripple with humor. “I was thinking more like parting the curtain into Venus’s immortal pool.”
He plunged himself into her. He had no idea who this Venus was, but he liked the image. “And now?” he pressed. “What do you see now?”
She opened her eyes, looking directly into his. “You,” she whispered. “I see you, and I feel you inside.”
He began pumping his buttocks, though leisurely, without any great power. Not yet. He wanted to hear more, to know what she felt. “As I slide in and out, I think of you squeezing me, pumping the vital essence of my organ into my blood, my heart, my mind.”
“I think of you taking me with you—drawing into you, then being pushed back. Me into you. Then—”
“Then myself into you,” he said.
“Yes.”
He smiled. “I like that.”
“Every time you thrust, you pull more of me around you. And every time you withdraw, more of me follows.”
He shook his head. “I am the man who pours into you. My vital essence heats, it burns, it erupts… “ Not yet. Soon, but not yet. “It will become part of you. I will become part—”
“You dive into Venus’s pool.” She arched, her inner muscles tightening in preparation. “I am the water that surrounds you.”
“Take me.” His rhythm was faster now, his body thrusting hard against her pelvis, grinding up and around when he could. “Squeeze me.” She did, and his eyes nearly rolled back in his head from the exquisite sensation.
“Fill me,” she gasped. Her quivering was beginning, starting at the base of his organ and flowing upward, over and over, each wave more intense, more demanding. “Take. Me.”
“Where?” he gasped, trying to hold off. “Where will we go?”
“We’ll. Fly!”
“Yes!” He erupted. His body, his mind, all his will poured into her. His vision went dark as it flew with her, and he felt completely weightless, completely empty. He knew nothing but the endless flow of power into her. It was as if she wiped him clean, and he gloried in his newness.
Until it was over. His mind slipped back inside his body, his vision returned, and he could hear his heartbeat as it pounded through his head. He returned to himself, and eventually, he forced himself to open his eyes.
His arms were straight, supporting his weight. She lay beneath him, her face flushed, her lips open, red, and wet. Below, he could still feel her contract weakly around him. Her eyelids fluttered and she looked up, a dazed expression complementing her soft smile. Her breasts shifted with her breath, and her belly still quivered. In his mind’s eye, he saw her pulsing feminine flesh as it had been last night, smelled the womanly scent of her, and knew the absolute truth:
He had consorted with a white opium runner. She was a clear link in the chains of drugs and prostitution that bound his country. And rather than cut her out of his life and his homeland, he had taken his ease between her thighs. He was a vile hypocrite!
Anger began to well up inside him. As quickly as the rise of lust, this fury boiled, making his hands clench and his face twist.
He was familiar with this reaction. It often happened in the morning when he looked down at his women, whichever lay beneath him. But like everything else with Anna, his feelings were this time stronger, quicker, more raw. He could not stop them if his life depended on it. Nor how he would lash out at her, cutting her with words for no reason he understood.
“What are you thinking?” she asked, her words jarring the rhythm of his hatred. It threw him off his stride.
In anger—at himself, not at her—he began to roll off her, but she was faster. Her legs wrapped around his and she gripped him in place. He could not even pull out of her, she held him so tightly.
“Don’t leave until you answer. What are you thinking?”
“That the widows’ wailing is irritating.” The sound had been a steady backdrop to last night’s and this morning’s exercise.
She shook her head. “Why are you lying?”
He had been looking at the sunlight on her white skin—so pale he could see the tracery of blue veins beneath. But now his vision snapped to her eyes, her round brown eyes.
“You are not who I thought you were.” The words were confusing and not at all what he meant.
“I am not anyone to you. A white prisoner. A woman who wanted opium but got this instead.” There was no anger in her voice, merely… confusion. “I have not thought about opium at all until this second.” Her expression shifted into a stunned smile. “Not at all.” Then she wrinkled her nose. “But I don’t suppose Father Thomas would approve of the substitute.”
She was a bizarre creature, her mind hopping from one thing to another without any evident logic or reason. A moment before, he had found it charming. Now he found it… He groaned and co
llapsed half on top of her, half to her left side. He still found it completely intriguing. He could not predict anything about her, and that kept him interested.
She shifted with him, keeping him trapped. Except, he did not feel trapped. Even his hatred was distracted. “Will those wailing women ever stop?” he grumbled with a curse.
She did not answer. “You are angry. I am not who you wanted. I was acceptable for a night and a morning, but you are angry because—”
“Do not lecture me, woman!” he bellowed into the mattress.
She fell silent, obviously startled by his anger. He felt her take a breath, shifting her shoulders even more. “You spoke into the sheets. I couldn’t understand you.”
He lifted his face off the mattress. “Do not lecture me, woman,” he said slowly and clearly. But it did not have the same effect. And it was a stupid comment anyway. She hadn’t been lecturing him. Only Jing-Li still tried to do that, and his friend took great care in his timing.
“Is this part of your habit, then?” she mused aloud. Her eyes were dark as they flowed over his face and body. “Do you always wake angry?”
“Yes,” he snapped. Then he frowned, hearing the truth in his words. “Yes, I always do.”
She nodded, as if she had expected such a thing. “I myself wake every morning thinking of opium. And that makes me angry.” She frowned. “What woman do you want?”
A tiny face flashed through his mind: sweet and young, it contorted with fury while tears streaked the dirt on her cheeks. He closed his mind to the image, but apparently he forgot to mind his tongue. Words flowed too easily with this woman, and he was speaking before he even realized.
“A girl. My sister.”
She pulled back, horror on her face. “You want to do this with your sister?”
“No!” Then he pressed down on her knees, shoving backward and out of her. She was not strong enough to stop him, and he was too unsettled to be delicate. “No!” he repeated firmly. “You… this… “ He rubbed a hand over his morning beard, using the motion to settle his thoughts. “You distract me from my plans. I am trying to find my sister, and this… this distracts me from her.”
“And here I thought you meant to distract me last night.” Her voice was dry.
Her accusation was also true. Last night he had thought with his organ. Today brought a new direction. He was headed for Shanghai.
He stepped away from the bed, the morning air chill on his naked body, and he pushed away his thoughts, performing his morning exercises with quick, fluid motions. He followed his daily regime, which was necessary to keep capable with his knives. The patterns were exact, the motions ingrained after years of practice.
Yet, this too felt new. She was watching him. And that added extra potency to his movements—to the swipe of an arm, the stretch of a leg, even the sudden slash of a pretend blade.
“Where did you learn that?” she asked as he began his second pattern.
“Peking. It is where I learned everything.”
“But you were born at that village, weren’t you? You stayed there how long?”
He answered easily. Between her questions and his morning exercises, the anger was fading, the moodiness that came after bed games quickly eased. “Until my father could teach me nothing else. I was ten when we left.”
“And now you go to Shanghai to find your sister.”
“Yes.”
“How did you lose her?”
He was spinning on his heel, ducking a shoulder before a complicated twist that he had perfected by the age of fifteen. At her words, his belly tightened, his rhythm shifted, and he lost his footing. It was not a large stumble, and yet it infuriated him. The peace he had gained flew from him, and he found his hands clenching as if he had real blades in his hands.
He rounded on her, raising his hands to slice with his pretend blades. All she saw were fists coming up toward her face. She should have flinched. She should have cried out and run away. She did none of those things. She remained on the bed, calmly watching him. Her eyes barely even blinked as his fists made it to her throat and held a blade’s length away.
Her lips quirked in a wry smile. “Last night you saw my darkness,” she said. “I told you what I have done, why I want to fly away.” She swallowed, her skin impossibly white in the morning sunlight. “Why I eat opium to forget.” She reached up and surrounded his fists with her tiny hands. “You have a darkness too, an anger that boils through your moods, staining everything you do. Sometimes you can hide it. When you are thinking, perhaps, or, pursuing a criminal. But mostly, I think, you are as addicted as I—and for the same reason.”
“I have no taste for your opium!” he snapped, his fists quivering near her throat. But he did not move, and neither did she.
“Not opium. But you distracted me from it with sex. I believe you distract yourself in the same manner.” She sighed and rolled away from him, easily pushing his fists out of the way. He watched her breasts bob as she reached for her skirt. He stood fascinated by the fullness of her bottom as she tried to shake the creases from the silk.
“I do not eat opium!” he repeated, knowing she accused him of something else entirely. Then he stepped forward, rubbing his hand down her behind, feeling the smooth warmth of her skin. Already his organ stretched for her, and without prelude, he slipped himself close to press into her. He was not hard enough to penetrate, but soon he would be.
She did not flee from him, and yet she did not press backward either. “I am not thinking about opium right now,” she said softly. “I do not need such distraction.” She twisted to look at him over her shoulder. Her dark curls tugged backward with her movement, lifting up over her near breast. He watched the dark strands slide upward, slowly revealing the white globes of her breasts. Unable to stop himself, he reached forward and cupped one, squeezing the nipple with just enough pressure to make her gasp.
“Where is your sister, Zhi-Gang? Why does talking about her make you want to run to the nearest woman?”
He would have discarded her then, perhaps pushed her away with an angry curse, maybe even hurt the breast that he cupped so gently. But again, she covered his hand with her own, holding him still. And below, she arched her pelvis backward, stroking his organ enough that it thickened most delightfully.
“Answer my questions and get a reward,” she said lightly, an echo of what he had said to her last night. “What happened to your sister?”
He closed his eyes and leaned into her. He smelled their musky scent, well mixed now, and still heady. He was fully hard, and he wanted to be inside her. To reach for the forgetfulness of release. To be wiped clean once again.
But she pressed him to speak, and he could not refuse her. He had no understanding of why. Perhaps she was the first woman to ask in such a way as to tempt him to answer. It did not matter. He pressed her forward so that she bent over the bed. She did not resist, but she did not help either. And so he began to speak.
“My sister was sold into prostitution when I was ten.” He thrust himself fully inside her. She was wet from before, so he went in easily. But she was also tight enough to grip him wonderfully, and excited enough to gasp at his motion.
“There is more,” she prompted.
“Oh yes,” he agreed, and reached around to cup both her breasts.
She stilled. He felt her inner muscles relax completely. “You are tracking a child sold… how long ago?”
“Nearly two decades.”
She arched the tiniest bit more, and he was able to move again: sliding out, pressing in.
“So, let me get this straight. You are on a dual mission—the first, as the Emperor’s Enforcer, to destroy the opium routes into China. But the second, you also track your lost sister to Shanghai.”
“Yes.” He continued to slide back and forth into her. In and out, in a steady tempo that held the anger at bay, that erased the guilt and would soon wipe his mind clean.
“But the Emperor has been imprisoned. His mother rul
es in his name, and she has begun killing all who were in his inner circle.”
He was so close. His release was at the very edge, but he froze at her statement. “How would you know about these things?”
Her laughter rippled through her body into his. “I live in this country. Why wouldn’t I know about these things?”
Because she was a woman. Because she was white. Because a thousand different things filtered through the sensations that distracted his mind. He stilled his body to think more clearly. “You should not know these things.”
“You should not use women to distract yourself.”
“You should not eat opium or sell it to my countrymen.”
She fell silent, and he knew she was as unsettled as he. So he reached for the one thing that would calm them both. He slipped a hand down off her breast, across her belly, and into the junction between her thighs. She welcomed this change. Her responses were no longer words but soft gasps that fired his blood.
He began to time his movements, rubbing her yin pearl with his fingers as he pushed his sex deep inside her. His tempo increased, their breaths shortened. And soon she cried out in joy, her body convulsing around him.
He thrust one last time, deep inside, and poured himself into her. Again, he felt his mind wiped clean, his body trembling with release and relief.
They trembled there at the end of the bed, holding themselves in their ecstasy. And then as one they toppled forward. He slipped away as she dropped boneless onto the mattress. He fell beside her, finding barely enough energy to wrap his arm around her and tug her backward against him.
He spooned her and buried his face in her hair. He held her tight, wondering if she would pull away, but she did not. In time, she exhaled a shuddering breath and relaxed completely back against him.
They would have slept then. He felt her breath steady into a slower and deeper rhythm. His own eyes drifted shut, his breath synched to hers. Sweet oblivion awaited, and he rushed headlong toward it.