‘I-I don’t know,’ said Jonathan, his voice edgy with the sound of new arousal. ‘I sort of lost track of them for a minute –’
‘How so?’
‘I was turned on … really hard. I-I had to do something about it …’ Embarrassment made him stutter again, and his fine trembling passed right into Belinda, through the medium of the fingers inside her sex.
‘And was that all?’ she probed, already beginning to feel she wanted more.
‘No … Not exactly.’
Tugging his hand away from her and letting it drop, Belinda moved up on to her knees again, so that she was beside him. Feeling sure of herself, she pushed Jonathan backwards until he was once more lying down.
‘And what does that mean?’ she enquired, slithering her knickers down her calves and off over her ankles, while trying to avoid looking up towards the wall – towards those blue eyes that followed her every move.
‘Well, I was recovering. Getting my breath back and all,’ continued Jonathan, watching her closely now. ‘I was just lying there and suddenly they pounced on me.’
‘They what?’ Belinda laughed, genuinely amused by the idea. If Jonathan had looked as helpless yet at the same time as virile as he did now, she couldn’t imagine a woman who wouldn’t attack him. He was sprawled on the red counterpane, looking every inch her abject victim, while his penis tried to bore out through his shorts. Suppressing her smile, Belinda reached for the elastic at his waistband.
As she pulled down first his loose, cotton shorts, and then the briefs beneath them, she wondered who the clothing belonged to. All Jonathan’s own clothes were presumably still in the boot of the Mini, and she didn’t recognise anything that he was wearing.
Had Oren lent him some clothes? It was possible, but unlikely. The silent servant was well over six feet tall, and in proportion to that his build was broad shouldered and massive. Jonathan was no wimp – in fact he had a rather good if somewhat wiry body – but beside the golden Oren he appeared boyishly puny.
This lot must belong to Blue Eyes, she thought, pulling the borrowed shorts and underpants down to Jonathan’s trainer-clad feet and leaving them there, bunched untidily around his ankles. The two men were very similar in size, she realised, even down to the dimensions of their genitals. Both were sturdy and carried the promise of satisfaction.
‘They pounced on me,’ Jonathan repeated, wriggling his bottom and making his penis sway. He had his eyes closed as if trying to improve his memory. ‘I was lying on the grass … A bit like this … I had my cock out.’ He reached down, his fingers brushing his risen flesh, but Belinda caught his hand and replaced it with her own.
‘And then what did they do?’ she said, exploring the oiled silk texture of his fine, penile skin, and working it very slowly up and down.
Jonathan made an odd little hiccuping sound and grabbed a couple of loose handfuls of the bedcover in his fists.
‘They did what you’re doing … and other things,’ he whispered, his voice thin and breaking. ‘They kept stroking me. Touching me. Everywhere.’ As Belinda slid her gripping fingers down him towards the pit of his belly, he went rigid and rose upward, his body arched. ‘Oh God … Oh God …’
‘And what else?’ She kept him stretched, taut. His swollen glans crowned his straining shaft like a hard red fruit.
Jonathan made several unintelligible noises, then passed his tongue around his lips as if hunting for words to express his feelings. ‘One of them kissed me – it was the older one, I think. She kissed my lips and forced me to open my mouth –’ Belinda blew on the tip of his penis, and his heels kicked and dragged against the coverlet. ‘And the other one got on top of me and fucked me.’ His body bowed again, raising his member towards her.
‘You mean like this?’
With speed and a nimbleness she had never realised was part of her, Belinda released his erection then neatly leapt astride it. Her thin, borrowed dress billowed around her like a boat-sail, and at the last second she reached beneath herself to place him. She was so wet he plunged in easily and sweetly.
Oh yes!
She didn’t speak the words, she didn’t even think them, and Jonathan seemed beyond speaking them entirely. Yet still the exultation rang around her, and she couldn’t avoid looking upwards.
The portrait looked exactly the same as it had done when she had first revealed it. The same, yet unspecifiably different. She didn’t know how to describe it, but Blue Eyes was watchful again, and she got the impression he was well pleased by her pleasure. A rush of energy flushed through her like a rolling bolt of lightning, and she could almost believe the portrait was its source. She was Blue Eyes’ instrument, the living wielder of his power.
Laughing, she shook her hips and felt incredible sensations at her centre. Jonathan whimpered and reached for her, but she swept his hands away and drove down harder on his penis. When she was settled, she whipped her dress off over her head.
There! she thought in triumph, arching her back, cupping her breasts and circling her pelvis. How do you like me now? she demanded silently of her watcher, meeting his painted gaze just as the euphoric spasms sparked.
I like you very well, he seemed to answer inside her mind.
‘Yes, I like you very well indeed,’ repeated André. He smiled into the smoke as it rose towards the ceiling, stirring the thurible’s contents with his narrow black-handled dagger.
Creating an enchantment had been easy, the words and actions as natural as breathing, despite the length of time that had passed without chance to practise. Selecting a perfectly-dried rose petal from a heaped pile on a silver salver, he crumbled it slowly and added the fragments to the flames.
A single strand of hair from each of the lovers – culled by the observant Oren when he laundered their dirty clothing; several desiccated rose petals; one drop of mercury; one of blood, his own; and a little water from a stream that crossed hallowed ground. These were the constituents, the simple, easily-obtainable substances, which he burnt together to create the desired objective – unprecedented lust and sexual pleasure for his new young house guests.
As he stirred, André considered Belinda’s ruminations on power. He heard her thoughts perhaps more clearly than she did, but her misconceptions brought a new smile to his lips.
‘It is not my power you feel inside you, Belinda,’ he whispered to the orgasming girl, as – in another part of the house – she cried out plaintively at her peak. ‘The power is yours, my dear. It is simply I who feed on you.’
Fresh smoke ascended from the tiny pyre in the thurible, and breathing it in André felt a dizzying rush of vigour. His body, naked but for the embroidered silk mantle around his shoulders, was suddenly imbued with a rising, reborn strength. His skin prickled; his penis stiffened. Every sinew, every muscle, every nerve-end – even the individual hairs on his head – seemed to snap with a vivid life and health. In the darkness, his limbs and torso appeared to glow.
It was purely temporary, this state of revivification, he knew that. The effects would persist in him for the duration of the lovers’ current sex act, then linger on for the couple of hours that followed it. The experience was transient at this stage, but while it lasted it was as heady as vintage wine. And in character, it was infinitely more delicious.
Laughing softly, André prepared to slake his thirst. There were more enchantments to be cast if he were to grasp this opportunity, and certain circumstances must be biased in his favour. Using his dagger, he swept the contents of the thurible into an alabaster bowl, and after murmuring an oath of purification, he set up a second enchantment in the shallow bronze dish. The first constituent was another strand of young Jonathan’s dark hair.
‘Forgive me, my friend,’ he said, as he first coiled the hair then dropped it on to the vessel. ‘You must sleep. I need your companion all to myself for a while.’
Humming softly to himself, he began his second arcane task. It was good to wield his gifts again at last.
Chapter Five
An Audience with the Count
A KNOCK ON the door roused Belinda from a light doze. She was not so much asleep as resting her eyes – letting herself drift and just not thinking – and in consequence she was fully awake in half an instant. Sitting up, she grabbed Jonathan’s shoulder and gave him a shake.
The knock came again, but despite her best efforts, Jonathan would not wake up. Belinda was used to his ability to sleep on a rail almost and snatch impromptu naps whenever time permitted, but this deep, near coma-like slumber was frightening. She grabbed both his shoulders and shook him as hard as she was able.
No effect.
‘Miss Seward?’
At the sound of her name, Belinda grabbed the sheet and pulled it up across her breasts. What could she do? She and Jonathan were naked, their clothes were all over the floor, and the black kimono she had worn earlier was across a chair at the far side of the room. She opened her mouth to call out, ‘Just a minute’ but instead, to her horror, she cried, ‘Come in!’
Before she had time to call out a second time, the heavy oaken door swung open, and a familiar figure stepped across the threshold into the room.
Belinda’s heart raced. She supposed, in a way, that her visitor was the one she had been expecting; but it was still a shock to see him standing there, smiling.
Her visitor had his streaked blond hair caught back in a ponytail, and he was wearing clothes now – a white shirt, blue jeans and black boots – but he was definitely her naked dreamer from the tower, the latest representative of a line of blue-eyed men. And he seemed filled with male amusement at her plight.
‘I am sorry. I appear to have disturbed you,’ the newcomer said softly, his distinctive eyes glinting. ‘But I could have sworn I heard you call out for me to enter.’ He grinned, his expression keen and knowing, as if he was perfectly aware of what had happened and had probably even caused it.
‘I-I did. Call out, that is,’ Belinda stammered, feeling both alarm and excitement in equal measures. Blue Eyes was just as impressive awake as he had been sleeping, but his mischievous smile was completely unexpected. All the ancestral portraits had looked pensive and melancholy, and even if they had been smiling, it was a smile tinged with palpable sadness.
And not one of the portraits had done justice to his family’s remarkable eyes, which in the living, present day individual were a blue so intense it was borderline unnatural. They were ultramarine, cerulean, lapis-lazuli; every vivid shade of blueness in one colour. They seemed to flash as if fired by an inner electicity, and they were certainly the ones that had haunted her dreams.
Feeling panicked, Belinda looked down at her body, and realised another disturbing fact. The sheet that covered her had slipped somehow, in spite of the fact that she had been gripping it as if her life depended on it. Her rounded left breast was now completely on show again, its nipple noticeably hardened and dark. When she looked up again, her blue-eyed host did too.
Belinda tugged up the sheet. ‘I-I –’ she began, then bit her lip. What could she say? What could she do? She was trapped.
‘Perhaps this is what you require,’ he said, lifting the black robe from the chair and bringing it across to her. His booted tread was inaudible on the thick Persian carpet as he wended his way among the tangle of discarded clothing.
Belinda began to reach out for the robe, but her host stopped a couple of yards away, a guileless expression on his manly but strangely pallid face.
The bastard! He wants me to get out of bed for it! thought Belinda furiously. Well, all right then, she proclaimed with inward defiance, thinking of the moment a while earlier when she had boldly abandoned her dress. Whoever you are, you’ve asked for it!
With as much grace as she could muster, she slid from between the sheets then turned around and held out her arms behind her, inviting her host to slip the silk robe on her. Without touching her once he complied, but he was smirking when she turned back to face him, having knotted the sash in a doubly secure bow.
‘The robe becomes you,’ he commented, taking a step back as if to appraise her appearance. Belinda got the impression he was a shrewd judge of beauty. Or at least that he considered himself as such. Arrogant beast! she thought, cursing him again.
‘Thank you,’ she said tightly. It was difficult to know where to start in a situation like this, and ludicrously, she found herself holding out her hand. ‘We haven’t been properly introduced, have we?’ she said, feeling an insane urge to laugh. ‘I’m Belinda Seward. And this –’ She nodded over her shoulder at the still comatose Jonathan ‘– is my … my boyfriend Jonathan Sumner. We’re both indebted to you for taking us in,’ she added as an afterthought, wondering if the master of the house had even realised he had guests.
A second or two later, another thought occurred to her, one that shook her even more than her host himself did. He had called out to her from the landing by name, but how on earth could he know it? The only way Oren could have told him was by means of a written report.
Full of doubts now, she hesitated with her hand, then experienced a peculiar phenomenon. She had been going to withdraw it, but suddenly, and as if her whole arm had a life of its own, she lifted her hand again and held it out towards her host.
As he took it he made a movement that was entirely European; a tiny, barely perceptible heel click as he lifted her fingertips and conveyed them to his lips. When mouth met flesh, he looked up at her through his thick, dark lashes, his wicked eyes as bright as blue stars.
‘André von Kastel. At your service,’ he murmured, his mouth still hovering over her hand. His breath felt strangely cool against her skin. ‘Welcome to my home,’ he added as he straightened, releasing her fingers with an unfeigned reluctance. ‘Or perhaps I should say my latest home. I have travelled considerably throughout my life, and this house is just the latest of many.’
This was his longest speech so far, and for the first time she became aware of his accent. It was delicate, very slight; a mere twisting around the edges of the words that made her insides clench and quiver. Like many women, she had always had a penchant for continental men – whether actors, singers or politicians. There was something worldly about them – a quality that was both polished and vaguely savage – which this André von Kastel clearly possessed in abundance. He was one of the most impressive men she had ever encountered, even though he was casually dressed, and appeared – on closer inspection – to still be a little fatigued.
Sleeping Beauty, she thought, grinning at him and knowing she was probably making a complete fool of herself. Did I wake him? Am I the first woman he’s seen for a hundred years?
‘Have I missed a joke?’ he asked, returning the grin and looking even more devastating as a set of laughter lines bracketed his blue eyes.
‘No, it’s just me being silly,’ she replied, twisting the sash of her robe.
‘In what way?’ He was still smiling, still challenging her.
‘Well, what with your accent, and the name, and the boots and all –’ The way his jeans were tucked into his soft, calf-high, black leather boots lent his appearance a vaguely cavalier quality ‘– you’re a bit like a prince in a fairy story. Especially with the long hair too,’ she finished lamely.
And that was another thing, she thought, in the split second during which his smile broadened and he seemed to be preparing to respond. When she had seen him in the tower, his hair had been darker, she was sure of it. More brown, less blond. It was drawn back sleekly from his face now, but it was clearly a good deal streakier, almost platinum in places, as if he had spent day after day in hot sun. Maybe he’s bleached it? she mused, recognising the thought, when it came, as bizarre.
‘I am flattered,’ he replied, making that tiny, almost Prussian bow again, ‘but I am merely a rather poorly-connected count. Perhaps not even as much as that any more. My home country no longer exists.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Belinda, silently upbraiding herself for a curiosity
which could well alienate him. She and Jonathan had blundered their way into this house uninvited. They were here on this man’s sufferance alone. Puerile remarks and personal questions weren’t appropriate.
Count André appeared unperturbed. ‘Merely that it is gone now,’ he said with a shrug. ‘A casualty of the redrawing of Eastern Europe, I am afraid. Which probably leaves me as simply “Mr von Kastel”.’
‘“Count” sounds much better,’ Belinda said impulsively. ‘Much more glamorous –’
‘Why thank you,’ he said. ‘I shall endeavour to live up to my title.’ He reached out for her hand again, then kissed it, the application of his lips far more determined this time, pressing the print of them like a brand into her skin.
Belinda was nonplussed. The touch and the kiss were intensely erotic, even though the contact not much more than minimal. While he was bent over her hand, she seemed to see him back in his tower again, sprawled naked on his bed and caressing himself, and when he straightened up, she found herself glancing at his crotch.
As if he had noticed her ogling him, Count André gave her another of his impish white smiles. ‘May I offer you a glass of wine?’ he asked. ‘We could retire to the library and get to know each other a little, and leave your young friend –’ He nodded to Jonathan, who, as if he had heard, turned over in his sleep and nuzzled his pillow ‘– to his rest.’
‘Yes. I’d like that,’ replied Belinda, very aware that he was still holding her hand and that his thumb was gently stroking her knuckle. It almost felt as if he were rubbing her sex.
‘Come then,’ he said, giving her hand a last squeeze before releasing it. Spinning on his heel, he led the way to the door.
As she accompanied her host along the corridor to the big double staircase, Belinda was torn between studying him and taking another look at his forebears. Seeing the living man, awake now, made her realise how strong the family resemblance really was. The von Kastels of yesteryear were almost identical to her handsome companion; so much so that the portraits could well all have been of him. The likeness was so exact it was uncanny.
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