by Edie Harris
Her arms looped around his shoulders, fingernails digging into the knotted muscles of his shoulder blades. She moaned with every pump of his hips, every slick, needy slide of her cunt on his cock. Her breaths were choppy and harsh, her mouth hovering over his with the temptation of a kiss. “Yes.”
He froze. “Yes?”
Her lips touched his, open and sweet. “Yes, I p-promise.”
His brain went fuzzy. That promise was what he wanted, all he wanted, except— “Stay.” He moved within her again. “Stay with me.”
“G-Gaspard—”
“Stay with me, Claudia.” Faster, each thrust faster and harder, every word clipped and panted. “Stay and I will make you happy. This is my promise.” Then even words fell away, and he was lost in her as she kissed him, then as she cried out and clamped around him, and, at last, as he spilled his seed on a choked groan.
For a sensation purported to be fleeting, this happiness seemed to have woven itself into the very fibers of his scorched soul and knotted there, never to be severed. I love you. Oh, how I love you.
Her skin was damp with perspiration when he rolled them onto the mattress on their sides. Burying his face in the crook of her neck, he breathed in her scent—the scent of home. He barely noticed when her arms fell away, but he heard her whisper of, “I’ll st-stay.”
More, he heard her tears. “Bébé…” Carefully combing the rich, dark strands of tangled hair back from her temple, he peered down at her shadowed face, evening having fallen during their lovemaking and leaving the bedchamber only faintly lit by the low-burning hearth. His thumb petted her tear tracks, droplets left on his calloused skin when she turned her face into the pillow, effectively shutting him out.
For long moments, Gaspard waited—for her to turn over and tell him what grieved her, for her to further expound on her promise to stay. For her to order him from her rooms. But she did none of those things, and eventually her body went completely lax against him, her breathing deep and even with the cadence of sleep. The room grew darker, but he couldn’t drift off as Claudia had done, unable to soothe the unsettling turmoil that had sprung to life too soon on the heels of their interlude.
Finally, he could take staring at the ceiling no longer and slid silently from the bed, tucking the bedclothes around her. Donning his discarded trousers, he walked to the hearth, staring down into the tamed embers. Gripping the iron poker loosely in one hand, he stoked the kindling, stifling the insistent urge to peer back over his shoulder at the woman he’d left in bed. Instead, he prodded the fire, poking it again and again, encouraging the flames to dance and hiss.
When he heard her shift beneath the covers, it turned out he couldn’t resist that urge.
The blue velvet throw bunched as Claudia rolled over in her sleep, face buried in the pillows, dark hair wild and untamed, obscuring her face. A lump formed in his throat. She had wreaked havoc with his heart from the day of their meeting—an organ she’d so recently brought to life, and now it beat only for her. A poetically cruel twist of fate, he mused wryly, that he should thaw just as she began to freeze.
Would their lovemaking today be enough to melt her? Would she hold to her promise and stay, not for a few days but for forever? He had tried to show her with his body what he refused to admit in words, but even he knew that was a paltry substitute for what she deserved to hear from him.
No one had ever bothered to peel away his façade as a deviant spy and see what lurked beneath the abuse and the hatred and the perversions that had ingrained themselves in his meager scrap of moral fiber. He had never stopped being broken after Marcel de Courreaux had twisted his psyche, but he’d hidden it. Gaspard had hidden it very, very well. Until Claudia.
He loved her, but loving her hadn’t made him any less broken.
As if summoned by his thoughts, the walking stick drew his gaze where it leaned casually next to the door, opposite the still-packed trunk and valise. He’d placed it there hours earlier after entering the bedchamber, intending nothing more than a healthy tupping of his new bride to officially consummate their marriage. His tortured past would always hang over their lives like a specter. He would always have whored himself to immoral men in the name of the king, but it had been a guise—one covering a simple truth.
He hadn’t thought he could be anyone else, anyone greater.
He moved to the door and grasped the walking stick, his thumb brushing across the inscription. His mind blanked for a moment, limbs numb and nausea threatening until he calmed the turmoil with slow, deep breaths through his nose.
Marcel de Courreaux had caned him with a gift from his wife. Now Gaspard had a wife of his own, one whom he had that very morning promised to honor and cherish until death parted them. He couldn’t undo the damage he’d already inflicted upon her, any more than he could erase the ugliness of his past.
But he could banish one specter in particular.
Carrying the walking stick to the hearth, he tossed it in without hesitation. The fire crackled and popped angrily around its new nourishment, and Gaspard watched it burn until there were nothing but clumps of ash and silver left in the grate. Then he shed his trousers and climbed back into bed, curling his body around the softer, smaller form of his kitten.
Gaspard might be a mangled wreck of a man, warped in untold ways, but he finally had something the broken, desperate Gaspard of five years ago had never had.
Hope.
Chapter Eighteen
26 February 1820
When the new butler announced that Lieutenant Sabien Purvis had come to call on her, specifically, Claudia wondered why she wasn’t more surprised.
“P-please give me five m-minutes, then sh-show him in,” she murmured from her seat on the pale blue divan in her morning room, not bothering to look up as the butler departed. The book in her lap had been open to the thirty-first page for the last hour, her gaze trained unseeingly on the paragraphs of black ink.
Claudia wasn’t at all curious as to why Sabien had come to visit so soon after her marriage, when any other soul would leave two newlyweds in peace—at least for twenty-four hours. His words at the wedding breakfast yesterday—I care only for Gaspard’s happiness, my lady…and now yours as well—had spurred her need to escape, and resulted in unanticipated consequences for her when she reached the bedchamber that afternoon.
Her backside still smarted from the spanking she’d received…but if she were honest, she relished the lingering sting. That sting was the reassurance of her husband’s possession, and her continued struggle to accept the reality of their marriage—that all of society thought them a joke, and her a pitiable fool—had eased somewhat when he promised none but her.
Sabien’s presence soured the memories of the night before, which she had been replaying over and over in her mind before the butler’s untimely arrival. Setting aside the book, she fussed with the deep burgundy of her skirts, settling them more smoothly over her legs. It was a bitingly cold day in London for so late in February, with frost on the ground and gray in the sky, but the fire leaping behind its intricately crafted iron grate warmed the room substantially.
A blacksmith would have made that grate, she mused. A blacksmith such as Gaspard’s father—or perhaps Gaspard himself, as Luc-Gaspard Tannet, had he never left home for the army.
A curious numbness had blanketed her senses upon waking this morning, no doubt the result of the shattering intimacy Gaspard had forced upon her last night, an intimacy that had splintered her bones and her heart in equal measure. Last night hadn’t been about six thousand, three hundred and sixty-one pounds, or about dangerous secrets. It hadn’t been about anything other than love, for her—love and the wary acceptance she nurtured with each passing moment as Claudia Toussaint, la comtesse du Lorraine-Mâche.
Yesterday, she had decided to leave him. Today, she realized she likely never would.
Acceptance.
The numbness cracked just the tiniest bit, and she shook her head, doing her best to sw
eep aside thoughts that would no doubt torture her relentlessly for days, weeks to come. By the time the butler returned, a dapper-looking Sabien at his heels, Claudia appeared the perfect cool, calm young matron.
“My lady,” Sabien murmured, his accent smooth and cultured. He held a well-brushed hat in one hand, along with a pair of dove-gray gloves, and hovered his lips over the bare knuckles of her proffered hand, the very picture of handsome propriety.
They were fakers, the both of them.
She nodded when he released her hand. “Please, s-sit.” Warmed in a rather detached way that her stutter hadn’t overtaken her speech, she indicated the tea service on the table next to the divan that she’d too long ignored. “I c-can order a fresh p-pot, if you like.”
He shook his head but thanked her quietly as he settled into the chair across from her, a gold curl escaping his neat coiffure to fall artfully across his forehead. He truly did look like a prince from a dream, she thought wryly. Not a month earlier she would have been a proper mess in his presence, but not anymore.
She was a woman who believed in neither princes nor dreams.
“My lady,” he said again, before pausing to gently clear his throat. “Claudia.”
She raised a brow but didn’t reprimand his intimate use of her name.
Apparently taking her silence as encouragement, he sat a bit taller. “Claudia, you are a lovely young woman.”
She could almost hear the silent but at the end of his sentence. Deep down, she suspected she knew why he was here, could almost predict the offer he might be about to make. There was no other reason for him to beg an audience, not after so many quasi-disastrous interactions.
If he had the gall to proposition her the day after her wedding, he had better do so manfully. At least when Gaspard had announced to the duke and all assembled that he had ruined her, he’d done it with head held high, unapologetic to a fault. It had been horrible in the moment, yes—but he’d owned his words.
The numbness cracked a little more.
“You should know, madame, that I’ve long admired you—”
She cut him off mid-lie. “You c-could not st-stand the…the s-s-sight of me.”
“Not true.” But a flush crept up from his collar.
“If you’ve admired m-me,” she countered, narrowing her gaze as she dared him to contradict, “you m-m-must have known how I f-felt about you.”
Hazel eyes sharpened on her. “Are we being honest now, Claudia?”
“P-please.”
“Then I think it’s fair to say that not even you knew how you felt about me. I was convenient, wasn’t I?” Bitterness laced his tone, a bitterness she didn’t understand.
However, she needed to reward his honesty with her own. “You did s-seem…available.”
“Alas, I was not.” When she raised her brow once more, he answered, “My attentions were elsewhere…engaged. They are no longer so.” There was that bitterness again, but this time she recognized the subtle dagger of heartbreak stabbing through the crisp consonants and precise vowels.
Instantly, any lingering animosity toward this man faded. “Why did you c-come to London, S-Sabien?” So entrenched in her own battles, she’d ignored the odd fact that Sabien had accompanied them from Paris, and that she had heard no word of his intent to return.
For a moment, the lieutenant looked helpless. “I…had to.”
Which was when she deduced the obvious: Sabien wasn’t just Gaspard’s friend. He was a fellow spy, and he’d somehow been involved in the events that had forced Gaspard to flee France. Whether the woman who had held Sabien’s attentions was pertinent to the situation or not, here sat a man—tall and stalwart and more beautiful than any male had a right to be—even more lost and floundering than her husband.
She understood. She sympathized. And, for the first time in her life, she felt as though maybe…maybe she had found a friend. “And why did you c-come to m-me?” she asked gently.
Half a second later, he regained his composure, leaving his hat and gloves on a side table as he moved to sit next to her on the divan, taking her hand in his. “Claudia, there are things you likely don’t know about Gaspard. Things I think you have a right to know.”
This didn’t bode well. She tugged at her hand, but he didn’t release it. “I know m-my husband.”
Sabien shook his head, no less pitying than the assembled wedding guests the day before. “I know that he somehow managed to…to deflower you”—his fair cheeks reddened—“but it’s not to his liking. Which is not your fault,” he reassured her in a rush.
“Dear God.” A nauseating mix of dread and embarrassment coiled in her stomach. Sabien had no clue, no clue about Gaspard’s preferences.
Their friendship spanned half a decade, and yet…
“I know this is indelicate, but Gaspard is my friend, and I…I care about his happiness.” He paused, a trace of sadness in his gaze. “I’m afraid that happiness will leave you unsatisfied.”
“Unsatisfied?”
He flushed again. “In the marriage bed. He’ll neglect you—not out of callousness, but simply because he cannot meet your needs.”
“My needs,” she parroted dumbly, no longer trying to free her hand from his grasp. Her wrist hung there, limp, while she stared wonderingly at the delusional man beside her.
He took a deep, fortifying breath. “Sexually. He won’t be able to…pleasure you.”
The words escaped her before she could rein them in, before she could remember that she now had a role of her own to play—as the sexually neglected, perpetually un-pleasured wife of an effeminate fop. For whatever reason, Gaspard hadn’t confided in Sabien over the course of their years of association. So she spoke without thinking and asked, with genuine confusion, “Why not?”
“Because he desires men!” The statement burst from Sabien, overloud and laced with frustration. “He lusts after men, Claudia. He’s a damn molly.”
She sighed and shook her head, helpless to respond otherwise.
“Claudia—” Sabien cut off with an irritated-sounding grunt, then continued, jaw clenched and tone moderated, “I’m sorry. I know this is difficult to comprehend, but it’s true. And I know that wives…wives are often neglected, even in marriages where the husband is capable of sexual congress.” He paused, the momentary quiet portentous. “What I’m saying is I could see to your pleasure myself.”
“What?”
“You wanted me once,” he said, determination written across his face. His hand squeezed hers. “Know that I am telling you the truth when I say you are an attractive woman. Claudia…I would consider it an honor if you’d consent to take me as your lover.”
“No.” Her head reeled, and that blessed numbness was quickly melting away into something burning and horrifying and distinctly uncomfortable. “No, that would b-be wrong.” And she did not want him, not anymore. No matter how un-ideal the circumstances of her marriage, it was only the public façade they needed to maintain—inside their home, Gaspard would no doubt keep her well pleasured.
The realization shocked her. Their marriage, much like their abbreviated courtship, could thrive in the shadows. He was new to this country, and she rarely socialized to begin with, and most of their days would be spent in the privacy of their home. She wouldn’t feel the sting of loss if friends snubbed her due to her husband, because she’d never made any friends, anyway. She’d always preferred her own company to that of those few souls around her. It was a relief to finally recognize her marriage as something other than complete folly.
With Gaspard in her life now…she would never be lonely.
Sabien released her hand to cup her face between both of his. His palms were clammy against her skin, his hold surprisingly gentle. “It’s not wrong to help one’s friends. That is what we would be doing—helping Gaspard.”
She didn’t fight in his grasp, but she watched him, wary. “You would s-s-seek to pleasure m-me”—her cheeks heated—“s-so that, in all other respects, G
-Gaspard and I c-could have a happy m-marriage?”
“Of course.” Said simply. Honestly.
Even as her mind and body rebelled at the idea of falling into the arms of another man, Sabien’s offer was almost…sweet. Of a strangely dictated morality, of course, but sweet. “You’re a loyal friend.”
His face began to lower toward hers, eyes flicking to her mouth and back again to meet her gaze. “It’s…it’s not a hardship, Claudia,” he murmured softly, a hint of confusion in his somber tone, as though he’d just realized for himself that, indeed, seducing her wasn’t going to be a toil.
She didn’t like that tone. “Don’t—” Held as she was, she couldn’t avoid him as he set his lips to hers in a quiet, tentative kiss. Her chest ached and her throat tightened, and she squeezed her eyes shut against the sight of him as she pulled vigorously at his wrists. He ignored her protests, stroking the curve of her cheekbones with his thumbs, as though trying to soothe her.
Claudia didn’t want to be soothed, nor did she want this kiss, his kiss. She whimpered in distress, mouth clamped shut.
At that moment, the door to the morning room banged open, and a growl of masculine rage was the only warning they had before Sabien was ripped from her and thrown across the room. She blinked rapidly, attempting to make sense of the scene in front of her—because, to her stinging eyes, it looked as though Gaspard had pinned Sabien to the floor, knees to the other man’s shoulders, and had a wicked blade pressed to his friend’s throat.
Gaspard spoke in rapid, biting French. “How dare you kiss her? How dare you even touch her? Claudia. Is. Mine.” He punctuated the last words by fisting Sabien’s hair to yank his head back, revealing the prone man’s vulnerable throat.
“Gaspard, no, I—” A nudge of the deadly knife silenced him, his gaze flicking nervously over to where Claudia sat, stunned, her hand to her chest.
“Are you drunk?” Gaspard demanded. “Tell me, are you drunk right now?”
“I’m not. I’m not, I swear.”