by Gaelen Foley
Damn, he thought mildly, unsettled by his own tenderness as he bent to inhale the flowery warm smell of her hair. What have I got myself into here? He had never been the lovelorn type. In fact, he usually mocked such men, but yet the kiss he pressed to her head was about as besotted as that of a newlywed husband.
Well.
All this was, of course, not what they were here for. And Virgil would certainly not have approved, considering how careful he had been to keep his daughter away from Nick and his fellow agents. No wonder the gruff old spymaster had always been such a mystery.
All those years he had directed his teams hither and thither digging up secrets across Europe, he had been slyly covering up his own.
Ah, well. His handler, her father, might not have approved, but it was too late now after they’d had their way with each other in every imaginable position all night long. A rascally smile passed across his face when he felt her stir.
She awoke tousled and thoroughly ravished, rolled onto her back with a sigh of contentment, taking a catlike stretch beside him. Then she gave him a sleepy little smile.
“Good morning, lovely.”
She touched his face in weary affection. He kissed the dainty fingertip she brushed across his lips.
Then she pushed up from the bed and rose, naked.
“Ow,” she remarked as she walked gingerly toward the screen in the corner behind which the washstand with its built-in chamber pot awaited. “God, Forrester, I can hardly walk, thank you very much.”
“You’re welcome,” he replied, punching the pillow into the shape he wanted.
“Don’t listen, I have to tinkle.”
He chuckled in sleepy amusement. “You think you have any secrets from me now?”
She shot him an indignant pout from behind the screen before she disappeared again. “You are a bad man.”
“Warned you,” he replied, folding his arms under his head on the pillow and feeling quite the sultan of the earth.
He closed his eyes again, simply relaxing until she returned. Then he savored the sight of her sauntering across the room, every lithe, glorious inch of her nude body.
“Goddess,” he murmured heartily.
Her nipples stood erect in the morning’s chill. The vision instantly heated his blood. He was happy to warm her up. “Where do you think you’re going?” he growled playfully when she passed by the bed heading for her main trunk of clothes. He leaned out from the bed and threw his arms around her hips, pulling her to him.
She let out a girlish squeal as he tumbled her back into bed with him.
“I haven’t given you a proper good morning, my lady,” he said with wolfish innuendo.
“Oh, Lord, I’ve created a monster,” she replied.
“A very friendly monster,” he whispered.
“Apparently so.” She glanced down with a breathless laugh at his raging member nudging insistently at her thigh.
Nick grinned like a pirate.
He swept her nearer, curling her body into his, spoon fashion, but his intents were not exactly for a cuddle.
“Nick!” she protested halfheartedly.
“Come on,” he whispered at her ear, stroking up and down her silken side until she stopped fussing uncertainly.
“Honestly. Shouldn’t we get a start on our day?”
“Soon, my lady,” he breathed. “I want to love you again.” His choice of words melted her resistance and startled even him.
It had not been a calculated statement, nor even a euphemism. Somehow that particular verb flowed off his tongue with alarming ease with her.
With any other woman, he was sure he’d have said something far more earthy.
His heartbeat boomed in the morning stillness like the cadets’ morning practice at the artillery range as she yielded to him. Given her body’s permission, he slipped his needy prick into the velvet welcome of her core as they both lay on their sides. Before long, this position no longer satisfied.
He pressed her forward onto her stomach and took her from behind. Soon she was on her hands and knees before him, and Nick had hold of her hips, kneeling behind her.
“So good,” he whispered in mindless bliss.
It turned out to be nowhere near as quick an exercise as he had promised. Not after they had enjoyed their sport so many times last night. If she was using him—and he didn’t think she was, not anymore—he had already made up his mind that he didn’t even care.
He brought her to a wrenching climax that he believed the whole Île de la Cité heard quite clearly, including the nearby convent.
When he tried roguishly to cover her mouth with his hand to muffle the sound, the vixen bit his finger. He laughed, which threw him off his rhythm. He lost it for a moment, but she endured until he found it again.
Intoxicated with her, he wrapped his arms around her hips as he drove into her, savoring every stroke, until that perfect moment of release.
Pleasure exploded across his consciousness. Lightning ran down his every nerve ending. He clung to her, gasping, burying his face against her silky-smooth back. She stopped him from pulling out this time. Instinct had taken hold of her. She drove her hips back, keeping him inside her. Nick didn’t fight it, but sank back to a kneeling position, sitting on his heels; she lifted herself upright, also on her knees, but facing forward, her thighs spread, her splendid body draped across his lap.
He wrapped his arms around her slim waist as her elegant undulations milked his cock of every last drop of his seed. When they both were spent, she laid her head back on his shoulder, panting after the storm.
He remained ensheathed in her, feeling as close to her in that moment as he had ever been to any human being. As though their two spirits had somehow, over the course of the night, become knitted together. He caught himself on the verge of saying, I love you.
What the hell? Surely that was madness. He tried to shake it off. But deep down, he knew as he held her that he wouldn’t think twice about giving his life for this woman if the moment ever came.
“Mmm.” She lifted herself a bit higher on her knees, breaking the seal of their joining, but only to welcome him into her arms when she lay back down on the bed.
Neither of them spoke of the fact that he might have just got her pregnant.
As he laid his head on her chest with a sigh, he doubted he was in any shape for the next thirty seconds or so for catching villains.
He didn’t care. Not for the next minute or two. There would always be evil in the world, but sometimes there was love, or at least beauty.
He had faced death so many times that he had learned to treasure those fleeting brushes with the inherent glory hidden behind all things.
She stroked his hair and his shoulder and kissed the top of his head. “Hungry?” she murmured.
“Starved,” he purred.
“Me, too.”
They had both worked up an appetite last night, to be sure.
“I’ll order some food. What do you want for breakfast?” she asked, kissing his forehead tenderly.
“Surprise me,” he answered, lazy as a lion.
He moved aside to let her up, then yawned and stretched and rubbed his eyes and started thinking about getting up for the day.
But as he watched her walk across the chamber, wonderfully comfortable, it seemed, being naked as Eve, he suddenly could not fathom attempting the American wilderness without female companionship.
Then he frowned. Obviously, the sophisticated baroness would never agree to go along with him on the journey. Dark, uncharted forest filled with hostile tribes, poisonous snakes, man-eating bears, deadly rivers that, after a point, became the only roads? Not a modiste’s shop nor a ballroom in sight?
No, the woman wasn’t a lunatic.
And for the life of him, Nick suddenly couldn’t fathom wh
y he had ever wanted to go in the first place.
It was so much better wherever she was.
God, you are an idiot, he told himself, but he didn’t care. Stick to your principles, man.
Of course, he didn’t actually have any of those, now, did he?
And besides, who could say? The luscious Lady Burke might harbor a streak of the pioneer spirit.
She was half-Scottish, after all. She might surprise him. God knew, she had already done that repeatedly last night—and, indeed, from the first moment he had laid eyes on her through the bars of his dungeon cell.
Presently, as he watched her getting dressed with a possessive glow in his eyes, another stray question ran unbidden through his mind. Who exactly were these “gentlemen friends” who had shared a bed with her?
He bristled, shocked by his own reaction.
Not so much by his mild anger at her, that she’d behave that way, putting so little value on the treasure that she was. But utter, blind rage toward the men.
The thought of any lovers’ ever treating his goddess in a cavalier fashion made him want to kill all “gentlemen friends” guilty of this crime.
Now, now, he told himself, blinking his way back to reason. She was an adult, free to do as she pleased, and too smart to let herself be taken advantage of.
Then again, she had to know what she was getting into, becoming the lover of a trained assassin.
Nick noted his own fiery reaction and realized this could possibly explain another reason why Virgil had never told his boys about his beautiful daughter.
With all of them vowing to protect her, it could have resulted in a very high body count, indeed.
She might even have become the one woman who could have made them turn against each other. Maybe Virgil had known the sort of effect she could have on them.
Hell, maybe it was his boys rather than his femme fatale of a daughter that the old man had been protecting—their cohesiveness as a unit—knowing how she could easily have made them rivals.
Whatever the answer, Nick did his best to shake off his distraction and tore his gaze away from her. Oh, but this woman brought out the most primal side of him. An animalistic side of him, worthy of the wilderness. Fully ready to kill any rival male who stepped too near his mate.
His mate?
Good God. That was all quite enough. He took a deep breath and forced himself out of the honey trap of that bed, willing himself to remember he was primarily a soldier.
Not some lovesick jackass of a poet.
Stalking off behind the screen, he opened the washstand to perform his morning ablutions while Virginia rang for a servant to bring them the house breakfast.
Sanity returned for the most part after he had splashed his face.
Still, he was covered in her scent, marked by her love bites and the light scratches she had raked down his body in some fit of passion or another over the night’s velvet hours. Whew, he thought, shaking his head at his reflection in the mirror.
Then he poured more water from the pitcher into the basin and proceeded to wash. But he paused, smiling wryly when he discovered the mouth-shaped bruise at the base of his neck. Well, she had promised she’d give him a sign.
And there it was, he thought wryly.
Rather like an owner’s mark.
A while later, Nick went out on his own to have a look around inside L’Hôtel Grande Alexandre. He wanted to scout out the territory before them, get a feel for the lay of the land before it was time to present their game piece.
He would mark the locations of the exits, check to see what sort of security the hotel had in place, and keep an eye out for any suspicious people among the hotel guests. He believed he could visually pick them out of the crowd—the sort of shadowy characters who might be also there to enroll in the Bacchus Bazaar.
Gin remained behind to monitor the people coming and going from the hotel through her telescope. Staying discreetly veiled behind the curtains, she had a good view from the glass doors of the balcony, and they had agreed that if she saw anything out of place, she would open the balcony doors and signal to him.
They both were on the lookout for anyone fitting the description of the mysterious Rotgut. Surely, that low criminal would stand out like a fly in a bowl of lemon sorbet in the lobby of the glittering hotel.
Peering through her little brass telescope, she followed Nick’s progress from her perch by the balcony doors. A sated glow of luxuriant pleasure and just a hint of possessiveness filled her as she watched him stride in his bold, confident way down the cobbled street.
She smiled to herself to note the almost jaunty spring in his step after the way she had taken care of him last night. Oh, yes, she quite believed she was getting to him. It thrilled her heart to think she had the power to make that hard, dangerous man happy.
Perhaps it was just as well they had parted ways for now, both of them a little overwhelmed by the intensity of the bond that had blossomed between them.
After the whirlwind of last night, she suspected he needed a little time alone to get his bearings.
So did she, which was why she did not insist on going with him.
Honestly, she was stunned and disturbed by the impulse he had revealed lurking in her heart: the secret, shameful craving to be dominated by a powerful man. She, who supposedly loved being in control at all times!
She wondered if he had somehow sensed that contradictory need in her all along, for he had satisfied it in spades last night. Maybe he had simply seen through her, she mused. He knew a lot about the world and people.
And, apparently, women.
And just to prove how deftly he had turned the tables on her, she found herself wondering, like some wistful, seventeen-year-old mooncalf, what she meant to him. How and where and even if she fit into his plans?
What did last night really mean to him?
Probably just an affair, she thought, and oh, God, it was not a good sign that she already felt her heart clench at the possibility—the probability—that whatever this was, it couldn’t last.
Surely such dizzying happiness could only lead to pain. But she could not stop herself. It was too late. She had already made up her mind to take the gamble.
He was everything she had ever wanted, and yes, he had his problems, but they didn’t scare her. She did not require perfection. Eyes open to the risks, she could not pass up the chance to know what it meant to fall recklessly, passionately in love with the man of her dreams.
If it was not to be, well, then, the coming agony was worth it for the chance to have had this time with him.
Even so, it was a little scary. What had become of her hardened attitude, seemingly overnight? He had cracked her worldly shell and found the vulnerable woman’s heart beneath it.
Ah, but it turned out the assassin had a softer side, too, she mused fondly as she scanned the street with her telescope, seeing nothing of any consequence.
She had discovered his vulnerable side for herself, indeed, had quite fallen in love with it last night during her “interview” of him.
Somehow, she had coaxed him into letting her in. Answering her questions. Lowering his guard. What she did now with this rare trust from the Order’s lone wolf could make all the difference in the world where his life might go from here.
She took it as a grave responsibility. Never in a million years would he ever say he needed to be loved, but it was so plain to her that he did.
He was starving for it, after all he’d been through, and she could do naught but pour out all her tenderness on him in response. She knew it was exactly what he needed. Already the change in him was nigh miraculous, after just one night. Which was why, for however long this lasted, she felt sure she could make a difference for him. Maybe even change the whole course of his life.
He had certainly changed her
s.
Yes, she decided, whatever pain might come when they parted ways, seeing Nick Forrester walk away healed would be reward enough in itself.
Through her telescope, she saw him pause on the curb across from the hotel, waiting as a delivery wagon of some sort went clattering past.
Then he crossed the street, hands in pockets, the wind billowing through his long, dark greatcoat. Head down, he had his collar turned up against the gray drizzle. He walked toward the hotel with the air of a man who knew exactly what he was doing.
A sigh escaped her. But the truth was, taking him for a lover was not the only gamble she had made.
In the midst of all this, she was keenly aware that she had not been fully honest with him yet.
She had not lied, but she had not told the truth, either. Knowing him, the longer she put off coming clean, the worse it was going to be.
But, God, she did not want to break this little magic bubble of happiness in which they two had unexpectedly found themselves yet.
It was too precious.
What if it actually could somehow last between them? she wondered. What if he fell in love with her, too?
But he was Nick. He never fell in love with anyone, according to her father’s scribblings on each of his agents’ temperaments. Nick Forrester, the hard case, the skeptic. Moody, broody, difficult.
But not to me, she thought with a happy little sigh.
She had known she could manage him.
Lowering her telescope to take a sip of coffee and another bite of her very French breakfast of pain-au-chocolat, she found herself wondering how her relationship with Nick might impact Phillip’s life. Or, for that matter, what her son would say if he wound up with a baby brother or sister as a result of last night. Or even what Society would say if she bore Baron Forrester a love child?
Well, they’d say she was as much of a hussy as her mother, the Countess of Ashton, she supposed.
But to hell with the ton. She had a title, lands, her own fortune. She need answer to no one. Her days of living at the mercy of other people’s opinions were long behind her.