by Edie Harris
Her mouth watered immediately at the salty taste of him, and without thought, she swirled her tongue around the thick, spongy head. Her eyes slid shut as she heard him groan. It was a wholly masculine sound, a growl that reverberated from deep in his chest down, down, until she swore she felt the vibration of it where her lips formed a tight ring around him.
“Move. Move your head up and down. Yes. Yes, oui, comme ça,” he muttered, guiding her with his hand. Every tug on her braid made the embers at her center pulse with heat, again and again until slick wanting wetted the tops of her inner thighs.
His hips thrust forward suddenly, and her eyes flew open as she jerked instinctively away from him.
“Do not stop.” His hips rolled again, shallower this time, gentler, and she felt the tips of his fingers begin to massage slow circles against her scalp, snared in place by the now-snarled strands. “Do not stop…and I will…tell you…my plan.”
Claudia didn’t care about his words anymore. All she wanted was to burrow her hand beneath her skirts and rub herself to orgasm. She swirled her tongue around his head, then bobbed a couple of inches down his length, her eyes squeezed shut as she fought to concentrate on this task and the power rippling through her with each of his stuttering breaths.
She reveled in the sound of that particular stutter, so different from her own.
“When I ruin you, chaton, it will be in that big bed covered in red and white.”
An image of her temporary bedchamber hovered in her mind. She sucked him harder, tonguing the slit and gathering the trickle of salty liquid she elicited before it slid down her throat.
“I will taste you again. Drink your sweet cream.”
His mouth had felt like heaven on her wet folds, his lips a wondrous torment locked around her needy clitoris.
“I will slide between your pretty thighs and push my cock inside you. Ma bite, my cock. Do you want my bite inside you, Claudia?”
Something low in her abdomen clenched tight at the thought of being filled by him. She had no idea how it would feel—would it hurt, with that sharp momentary pain she’d experienced when his fingers entered her in the linen closet? Though it hadn’t hurt last night, when he’d entered her with his fingers again. Last night, it had been nothing but bliss.
God, she felt so empty.
“Once I am in you”—his hips whipped forward, sending him deeper into her mouth, and she took him gladly—“I will fuck you.” His accent curled around his words, as hot and thick as the cock she so eagerly sucked. “In and out. Like this. But better, because I will be lost in you. Tight, wet you. Claudia…” He was breathless, panting.
A glorious sound.
“I… I will… Dieu, you look…right now… Une ange, bébé, wrapped around my cock. Like sin.”
Strange pride slithered down her spine to fan her meandering arousal until the flames leapt and sparked. She drew him deeper into her mouth with every controlled thrust of his hips, her lips stretching wider in accommodation. He was thick, so thick, her fingers barely encircling him, and when the smooth head nudged the back of her throat, she moaned.
Moaned, and swallowed. Her clit pulsed, and her hand left his hip to fumble for the trapped hem of her skirts. She shifted on her knees, never releasing him from the back of her mouth as she jerked and rent the delicate fabric of her gown in an effort to get a hand between her thighs.
Suddenly, he shifted, and her teeth scraped lightly—accidentally—along the silky length of his cock as he withdrew from her aching throat. His fist in her hair tugged her back, growling, “Are you touching yourself?” His tiger eyes flashed blue as he leaned down before shimmering with gold fire again.
Her lips throbbed when she parted them to answer. Her throat was parched and sore when she tried to swallow. She shrugged, helpless, her fingers caught midway up her thighs, the heavy layers of skirt an uncomfortable weight against her arm.
Blinking up at him, she released his cock, unable to forsake the fingers that were almost where she needed them, almost almost almost there. She grabbed the tidy cravat at his throat, rising up on her knees as she yanked his lips to hers.
The kiss was angry, desperate and clumsy. Teeth scraped, tongues dueled, and she sent breathy whimpers skittering into his mouth while her mind clouded with stinging pinpricks of unmet need. His hands moved to hold her head in place, a large, scarred paw on either cheek. The need he poured back into her was just as catastrophic as her own.
“P-p-please,” she whispered, whimpering when he caught her upper lip between his teeth. “Pl-please, Comte…”
She thought she heard him mutter “Gaspard” as he crouched down to lift her skirts, plucking her hand trapped between her thighs away as his fingers pushed into the slick juncture and fumbled near her entrance.
No, not fumbled. Shook.
The comte shook.
“Open your legs,” he hissed, and she complied, gripping his shoulders as her balance atop her knees threatened to topple. He bunched the frothy layers of pink silk in his fist and twisted it around until his hand was at the small of her back, leaving her hips and thighs completely exposed to the air and to him.
Then, evidently assured she wouldn’t fall, he thrust two fingers sharply inside her.
His mouth descended on hers again as she cried out, her knuckles gone white as her fingers clenched at his coat lapels. He silenced her moans and, seconds later, her screams as her inner muscles clamped around him, a searing blaze of pleasure singeing her from head to toe.
The comte disentangled himself with quick, jerky motions, a growl audible in every harsh breath as he labored to his feet. Claudia opened hazy eyes, sated and bemused, and saw his heavy cock bobbing in front of her. It looked angry.
A glance at the comte proved that he looked angry too, a mean set to his lush mouth and his brows drawn together in an expression of agony.
Without preamble, he parted her lips using the two fingers he’d just pulled from her sheath, still slick and musky sweet with the remnants of her wetness. Her tongue flicked against the rough skin, tasting herself on him, and she hummed her approval without thought.
His free hand fisted in her braid, holding her steady. “Open.” Those fingers stiffened, widening her jaw, and then his cock was back in her mouth. Each thrust was fast and shallow, and her lips stretched around him in welcome as his scent intoxicated her already addled senses once more. His taste grew stronger with each slide of his cock over the flat of her tongue, and she remained still in his hold, sensing that something was about to happen.
What happened was that he started talking again.
“I have not…had a woman…in eleven months.” He slowed his thrusts, a pained grunt slipping free as the hand in her hair clenched and flexed convulsively, tugging taut the tangled strands. “The women I take are whores. I pay for them. Do you know why?”
She didn’t respond, couldn’t respond, but she stared up into his face, his wretched, handsome face, and waited for him to tell her. Her hands settled lightly at his hips.
“Because Paris thinks I am…something less than a man.” His words crawled inside her to seep into her consciousness, insidious and raw. “Perhaps I am. Less. Perhaps I am less. But I am the only man I know how to be, and that man…he wants only you, Claudia.”
Her head was beginning to clear, the last dregs of ecstasy fading with every pump of his cock between her lips. But she was still greedy for him. She still wanted him.
She wanted him more than ever.
So, as one large hand covered his cock, glistening luridly from the attentions of her mouth, she leaned her head back. Her gaze rapt, she watched as he jerked himself hard—once, twice, a third time. He brought the plump head of his erection back to rest between her lips, and when hot spurts of semen coated her tongue, she sucked him until he was spent, drained, listening to him stifle his moans of pleasure. She swallowed what he gave her and nipped teasingly at his thumb when it moved to wipe away a drop that had leaked from the cor
ner of her mouth.
She let him draw her to her feet and fuss with her gown, though she knew the wrinkles would never come free. She let him put himself to rights, fixing the knot of his cravat and smoothing his hair as best she could.
After so many words, silence was a blessing. Her mind was only just starting to make sense of the jagged, jarring scene that had taken them both prisoner in its whirlwind, but Claudia couldn’t think it all through here in the alcove. She needed a bath, a bed, some privacy.
She needed to tremble a bit, and she didn’t want the comte to see.
“I must go.” His English was more rusted than ever, hoarse like sandpaper. “You are…are…messy, yes?”
She nodded. Messy. Yes, she was messy. In so many ways.
“Turn left, and there is a salon two doors down on the right. After, go home. Sleep.”
A solid plan. “Where are you g-going?”
Cupping her face in his palms, he leaned down to gently rub his lips over hers in a slow, lazy kiss. An affectionate kiss, but a lead ball formed in her stomach as he ignored her question and said, “I will find you tomorrow night. At the duc d’Évoque’s ball, I will find you.”
She laid a hand on his chest, needing to touch him again even as she used it to put distance between them. “I’ll b-be there.”
He straightened then and, with a quick nod, left their hidden corner to turn right and stride down the hallway away from her—allowing her to slip to the ladies’ salon unnoticed, with no one the wiser as to who she’d been sneaking around with.
She buried her resentment until she reached her bedchamber forty minutes later. Then it was her turn to shake.
Chapter Eight
“We’ve got a problem.”
Audric Faron’s words chilled some of the drowsy heat swirling through Gaspard’s limbs as he strolled into the library. His spine still tingled with the aftershocks of sated pleasure, and he couldn’t shake the vision of Claudia on her knees before him, his cock heavy and thick between her lips. Blinking, he tried to focus on the three men who’d obviously been awaiting his arrival.
He failed. All he could see, all he could feel, was her painfully lovely face and the rhythmic contractions of her sleek throat as she swallowed his come.
“Toussaint, did you hear me? I said, we’ve got a problem.”
Gaspard had a problem. He’d told her about the whores. He’d told her he wanted her, only her. That the words felt true didn’t matter. What mattered was that he should never have said them. If she kept stripping him of his control like that, there would soon be nothing left of him, and he already had so little of himself to spare.
He’d never considered himself an optimist before this moment, but the cold, hard light of reality put his scheming on harsh display, his idiocy in glaring reflection. Lust for Claudia had made him lose his head.
And she was going to marry Évoque. Their engagement was going to be announced at the duke’s ball tomorrow night. Good God, he’d forgotten all about it until he told her he’d find her.
There were no means of saving his estate or his title, no chance that his wages from Évoque would cover the debts. The idea of marrying Claudia and securing her dowry within days was a ridiculous fantasy, one he’d spun for himself, and it proved he understood nothing of this classist world he inhabited.
He refused to contemplate a return to the poverty he’d known as a child. He refused to reclaim the common name of his birth. He wasn’t that hungry boy anymore.
Now he was a hungry man.
His best choice—his only choice—was to prostrate himself at Évoque’s feet and beg for a loan, else watch his blood-drenched title disappear. Or…or he could use that tiny nugget of blackmail he’d been keeping up his sleeve, as if his subconscious had known he’d need this leverage someday. And as the duke likely still intended to marry Claudia, Évoque could be quite keen to pay a tidy sum for Gaspard’s silence.
Perhaps a sum of ten thousand pounds.
So. That was that. Gaspard would let her go. She had never been his, not really, and now she never would.
His stomach rolled over, a wave of sudden nausea wiping any trace of recent pleasure from his limbs.
“Gaspard?” Sabien’s concerned tone cut through the screaming match taking place between Gaspard’s temples.
Gaspard swallowed around the lump in his throat. “What’s the problem?”
Faron eyed him suspiciously for a moment before using one dirty-booted toe to kick the leg of an empty chair, indicating where Gaspard was meant to sit. He took it and glanced at the serious faces of the three men completing the small circle off to one side of Maxence’s richly appointed library.
It must be quite the problem—Max didn’t look bored, for once.
Sabien spoke first, a cut-crystal tumbler of liquor gripped tightly in one hand. “We’re starting a revolution.”
“How exciting,” Gaspard said, voice bland. “Should we alert the peasants?”
Faron shifted his stocky frame in his armchair, obviously uncomfortable to be sitting and not in action, as was his wont. “Consider me alerted. What did Évoque do with that list of names?”
“Burned it, just like you said.”
“Whose names?”
Gaspard looked at Sabien as he answered the lieutenant’s question, shrugging. “Three stable hands working at the opera house, I believe. Renaud, Vireux and Louvel.”
“I looked into the names.” Faron shifted again. “Turns out Louvel is a saddler in the royal stables. Not only that, he’s…obsessed. With a member of the royal family.”
Sabien drained his drink. “One of the princesses, no doubt.”
“No. With the Duke of Berry.”
Silence reigned for several long moments. Then, “What sort of obsession?” Max asked, standing to retrieve a decanter from the desk on the other side of the library. “Sexual?”
Gaspard could feel each man very pointedly not looking at him.
Faron shook his head. “No, nothing like that. But I talked to some of the hands who work with him, and it sounds as though Louvel hates the Bourbons. Tends to rant on and on about needing to kill them off ‘for crimes against France’ when he’s had some drink in him.”
“Yet he works for the royal family?” Max returned to his seat with the decanter, refreshing Sabien’s when the other man extended his glass. “That seems odd.”
Gaspard cleared his throat. “Are we sure this is the Louvel from the list?” He thought back to the manager of the opera house, Hubert Loureilles. A silly man, to be certain, but not dumb enough to put an employee of the king on a list of names belonging to lowly stable hands. “What about Renaud, or Vireux?”
“There’s only one Louvel in Paris, and it’s Louis Pierre Louvel, the saddler. As for Renaud and Vireux, both work in the stables on rue de Richelieu, for the opera house.” Faron’s pale gray gaze clashed with Gaspard’s. “You were in charge of getting that list, on Évoque’s orders. What else does he want from you?”
What he’d suspected after accepting Évoque’s invitation to the opera last night. “He wants me to kill the Duke of Berry.”
Sabien’s drink paused halfway to his mouth. “Christ.”
Max took a swig directly from the decanter itself. “Berry’s had a price on his head for weeks, but most of us just thought it was talk.”
“Most of us?” Faron reached for the decanter, but Max withheld it, tauntingly.
“Aristocrats. Berry’s enjoying the attention, from what I can tell, but his wife looks worried.”
“She is,” Sabien muttered. Another glass emptied.
They all looked at Sabien, and for a moment Gaspard’s brain veered away from trying to make sense of the whirling chaos of new information. “And how would you know what the duchess is feeling, Sabien?”
Sabien scowled. “What do you think I’ve been doing for the past three months, since I returned from London?”
“The seduction of Princess Caroline.” Max tsked
as he finally handed over the bottle to Faron, who’d landed a heavy punch on his upper arm. “You scoundrel.”
“I demanded a rendezvous with her tomorrow night. She’ll leave at intermission.” A flash of regret danced across Sabien’s handsome features before his face resumed its solemn mien.
The puzzle pieces began to slowly fall into place. “Another request from Évoque?” When Sabien nodded, Gaspard continued. “So the duchess leaves the opera house before the performance is over, the duke is left vulnerable momentarily in the wake of her leaving and I…”
It was Faron who had the answer. “You dress as a stable hand, and you kill the duke. Later, when witnesses are trying to remember what the culprit looked like and Monsieur Loureilles is asked to name those in his stables, Louvel’s name will be on that list.”
A chill slithered over Gaspard’s nape. “So the list I procured—”
“Évoque was simply verifying he had all the chess pieces on the board,” Max answered, his cultured voice cold. “Louvel’s name was probably placed on the opera house’s payroll months ago.”
The valuable information Gaspard had whored for proved to be nothing more than a receipt of sales, in the end. “There’ll be a trial, you know. For Louvel. They won’t execute him right away.”
“He’s insane,” Faron said succinctly. “He’ll take the blame—he’ll want it.”
“How do you know?”
Faron’s scowl darkened. “I know insanity. Trust me.”
“Just…make sure he’s nearby. I don’t want to be arrested accidentally.” Gaspard fell back in the chair with a heavy exhalation. The stolen moments with Claudia in the alcove seemed as though they’d taken place months earlier, instead of mere minutes. Évoque had obviously been planning for this eventuality, had taken great pains to ensure it occurred to his decree. And yet, no one would know him as the puppet master. No one would even think that the wealthy duke, a prestigious cabinet member and close confidante to Prime Minister Decazes, would be plotting to kill the last heir to the house of Bourbon.