He closely watched those around him, their hearts on fire with greed and lust and so many other human emotions. It made them reckless and illogical, but that fire also made them strong, tenacious, and brave.
Were he capable of envy, the Rook would have coveted that very human heat. But he realized early on his heart was made of other stuff. His internal workings emulated the complications of gears and cogs found in a watch. His was a clockwork heart. Where others’ beat and burned, his only tick, tick, ticked away the hours, the minutes, the seconds that separated him from one other soul on this enormous globe.
Lorelai.
Every year he suffered, every chain he broke, every possession he took, and every man he killed, he’d done it in her name. Knowing all the while, she’d not want any of it. That she’d reject who he’d become the moment she laid eyes on him. It’d occurred to him she might even have moved on. Fallen for someone else, some gentle, pretty lord, and given him a brood of children.
Would he have taken her if that were the case? Stolen her from a happy life?
Probably.
He’d become a monster, after all, and monsters did monstrous things, despite the consequence to anyone else.
In fact, he could scarce believe that he’d found her just as he’d left her. Untouched by another. Unloved.
And unwilling.
Touch me. He silently yearned as she just stood there, paralyzed, doing her best not to glance below his navel where his sex jutted toward her, erect and throbbing, impatient to claim his mate.
He dimly realized part of the reason he’d finally come for her was because of this moment. This ultimatum.
This offering.
Here was the final threshold between man and monster. In his tenure as the Rook, he’d taken things from men and women who’d sobbed and pleaded for mercy and he’d felt … nothing. No scruples. No hesitation. No remorse.
They were weaker than he. And in this world, weakness was not rewarded. It was exploited. He’d known that even before he’d lost his memory. He’d understood it the moment he’d woken on that bed in the Weatherstoke mansion, broken and lost. His vulnerability had battered at him, taunted him. For no one protected the weak. No one rewarded the innocent. No one was kind to the maladroit.
If you wanted something, you took it, and then you fought to defend it, or someone would take it from you.
In every kingdom, either of man or animal, this was a fundamental truth.
Only one person had ever consistently contradicted that certainty.
Lorelai.
Kind, patient, tender Lorelai. Champion of the weak and wounded. She took beasts who should have suffered their fates with all the brutality nature could devise, and she healed them, taught them to thrive with their impediments.
She was what he desired above all else. He’d thought he could take her. Whether she wanted him or not. He’d told himself that he deserved her, that he was owed the one thing that had ever delighted him in twenty years. He’d given himself, and her, every reason why he should claim her as his right. Why he could. Why he had.
And yet … here she stood. Waifish and delicate, innocent and untouched.
Even by him.
Because here was the one threshold he could not seem to cross into his final damnation. The one thread that tied him to a flickering vestige of humanity. His one island in an endless ocean of unforgiveable depravities.
No matter how cold and cruel and inhumane he’d become … he physically could not bring himself to face a weeping Lorelai Weatherstoke. He could not stand to be the cause of those tears. He, who could burn all of London to the ground and not lose a blink of sleep over it, trembled at the sight of her distress. Quivered for one tick of his heart to be spent basking in her touch.
He simply could. Not. Hurt. Her. Even if it meant denying himself the one thing he’d lived for.
And so, the problem remained. How did he get what he wanted? What he deserved? How did he find the sanctuary he knew only existed in the circle of her arms? In the bliss of her caress. In the depths of her warm body.
He’d been up all night considering that very thing, until the answer had struck him with all the might of a rogue wave. Instead of forcing himself upon her, like the heartless fiend that he was, he could offer himself to her.
She could do the taking.
It was the perfect solution. All he wanted was her touch, in whatever form she could offer it. She’d only just proven that a sharp slap delivered by her palm was better than an intimate massage by any one of a thousand well-trained whores.
When he’d become the Rook, he’d vowed to slaughter anyone who’d ever dare raise a hand to him again.
And yet, when she’d done it, he’d wanted to purr. He’d wanted to growl, but not with his teeth. With his throat. With that bestial part of him who’d come to enjoy the blow. To crave the pain. For in the impact of lash against flesh, he did sometimes find his lost humanity.
Only to lose it when the pain subsided.
Would she hit him again? he wondered. And had to bite down on the inside of his cheek against an unbidden groan of anticipation.
“I—I don’t understand.” Her voice shook with a husky emotion he couldn’t identify. Somewhere on the spectrum between terror and temptation. “You claim to possess me in one breath, and then proclaim that I own you in another. What … what am I supposed to do with that?”
You’re supposed to heal me. Or hurt me. To save me. Or condemn me. To remind me that I’m human.
It was too much to ask of anyone, he knew that. And so he didn’t. He truly expected none of that from her. He just wanted her to fucking …
“Touch me,” he said as evenly as he could through clenched teeth.
He stepped out of the tub and onto the plush rug beside it, but advanced no further, even when she retreated a step back.
“I—I’m not sure if I—or how to—”
“There is no right or wrong way of it,” he pressed. “Just do what you want.”
She did everything she could not to look at him, and why he found that charming, the Rook would never know. It was as though she desired to preserve his modesty, rather than hers.
Was there such a thing, he idly wondered, as a modest pirate?
“But … you’re all wet,” she protested.
That word, on her lips, nearly drove him mad.
Wet.
Yes. He was, indeed, wet. And if he had his way, she would be, too. But only in that sweet, hidden place.
And only for him.
He glanced down at his chilly, decorated body. “If you wish me dry, you may help.” He gestured to a plush towel hanging from an ornate banister at her elbow.
Her delicate throat worked over a difficult swallow before she dragged the towel away from its perch and attempted a cautious approach.
She still wouldn’t look at him, he noticed. For the most fleeting of seconds, her gaze would drift toward his body, land, and then dart away, like a hummingbird testing a flower.
Settling her hands—covered safely with the towel—on his shoulders, she tentatively soaked up the bathwater with soft little drags.
He watched her as she did this. Delighting in her shyness. In her artless, gentle caresses. When one dried themselves, it was usually with firm, decisive strokes, but her touch barely deserved the designation.
It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Lorelai was here. In his cabin. Touching him.
Sort of.
“W-where did you sleep?” she queried.
It was something she did, he remembered, when she was anxious. She tried to fill a fraught silence with polite conversation.
“I didn’t, really. I stayed awake to watch the tempest.” He obediently lifted his arms toward her as she pulled the towel down each one, revealing his colorful, permanent sleeves.
“Don’t sea gales ever frighten you?” she asked, running the cloth down the ripples of his ribs.
“No.”
She paused at
his waist, unwilling to go further, and circled around to his back, drying his shoulders. “Why not?”
Because I tasted your lips on every rainstorm.
“Because fear is dangerous,” he answered aloud. “Fear gets people killed.”
She left that response alone. “What about my kittens?”
Something in his lust-clouded brain stalled. Kittens? Who could be thinking of fluffy, noisy little beasts at a time like this? “What about them?”
“Why go through the trouble of bringing them on the ship?”
Why, indeed? he wondered. “The crew can be superstitious. I figured, like the whores, the kittens would appease them. It’s considered bad luck to have women on board at sea, you know. But quite good luck to have cats.”
Her brow wrinkled. “But … if women are bad luck … why bring—er—other ladies onto the ship?”
“The bad luck doesn’t apply if we are anchored.”
“I see,” she murmured, as though she didn’t see at all. “Why are cats considered good luck on a ship?”
“It’s been thus for as long as men have taken to the sea,” he answered almost irritably. Was it her aim to torture him? To explore the sensitive columns of muscle beside his spine as they discussed maritime superstitions and accursed felines? “They kill mice and rats. Which was helpful in times of plague, I imagine.”
“Oh…” His ears perked to a disenchanted tone in her voice. He realized, belatedly, that in this case the truth might better serve them both. He took a deep breath, willing himself to try. “Barnaby mentioned that the beasts in the menagerie would be all right without you for a time, but without constant care, the young kittens would die. Their deaths would have … distressed you.”
“Oh.” This time, her voice seemed a bit brighter, and he wished that she was not behind him so he could see her face. Had he pleased her?
Not that it mattered. It didn’t. A delighted sort of warmth spread up his neck, taunting him for a liar.
“It has not been apparent that my distress is of great concern to you,” she remarked dryly.
He scowled, his pulse elevating. “Were that the case, I’d have fucked you a dozen times by now. I’d have spent the night in here, instead of in the rain. I’d have pulled you into that bath with me and washed the sweat and leavings of our sex off of and out of you before supping on your slick flesh. So be careful of tossing about accusations, Lorelai, or I might decide to live up to them.”
He clamped his lips shut, then. How distressing that she continued to goad him into speaking without careful estimation. A dangerous influence of hers, that.
The tickle of her short, shocked breaths against his back distracted him from his ire and spread chill bumps across his entire body.
She must have noticed, because she silently resumed her hesitant ministrations with the towel. When it dipped below his waistline, his hips, and he felt her fingers trail below his ass, he had to close his eyes against a wave of desire so exquisite, it threatened to buckle his knees.
She’d knelt down, drying his legs from the back and reaching around his thighs to be thorough.
He glanced back at her bent head, her eyes no doubt fixed firmly on the floor.
Clever girl. She’d avoided the sight of and all contact with his sex as best she could.
But she was on her knees. All he had to do was turn around and her mouth would be right there …
Something in his jaw cracked, along with his self-possession.
Without thinking, he bent down, grasped her arms, dragged her to her feet, and pressed his lips to hers. He wouldn’t force her. He’d keep his word. But their first kiss had been enough to span the memory of two decades, and damned if he could live without tasting her again.
She made a sound, though whether shock, protest, or surrender he couldn’t tell. It didn’t matter.
He had, indeed, fancied that he’d tasted her lips on the rain, had savored the memory of her innocent kiss on the darkest nights of his life, and it had still been like trying to catch the warmth of the sun from its reflection on the cold moon.
A lovely, but pale comparison.
With a throaty growl, he locked her body against him with one arm. His other hand slipped past the collar of the shirt she wore until his fingers found the delicate nape of her neck. He spread his fingers up her scalp, threading them in the flaxen tangles of her unbound hair until her head rested in his palm.
How long had he waited? How many nights had he imagined this? Burned for it? When he’d been chained in the hull of a ship, whipped, stabbed, beaten, or starved, this was the future he’d clung to.
This was the moment he’d lived for.
He’d once been a tortured slave who had mutinied, looted, and gorged on the feasts of the wealthy exotic merchants who’d kept him like a ravenous hound.
And even that meal wasn’t as splendid as this.
She tasted of simple joy. Of innocent pleasure. Of tea and honey and hope.
Her hands rested on his bare chest and, though her arms were tense, she didn’t push him away.
He wanted to savor all of her. Every soft, delicate, hidden part. Behind her ears, the supple curve of her bare shoulder, the taut peaks of her breasts, her quivering belly.
His tongue slid past her lips, enticed by the wicked fantasy he’d conjured. He lapped and nibbled at her in a warm mimicry of what he thirsted for.
An intimate taste of her.
He yearned to feast on her desire, and then on the warm rush of her pleasure. A pleasure he wrought upon her before he finally claimed his own and lost himself inside her. His was an appetite crafted only for this woman, and he’d not be satisfied until he’d sampled every lush, pale or pink inch of her.
Driven by twenty years of pent-up need, he backed her against the nearest wall, lifting her so her weight wouldn’t rest on her ankle.
She might be slight, and delicate, but he had enough strength for them both. She never had to worry about that. He would bear the brunt of any cruelty. He’d shield her from pain. He’d fulfill her every whim.
All she’d have to do was endure him. Was that too much to ask?
Probably.
He swallowed her exhale of astonishment, fusing their mouths, their bodies. The blood danced in his veins when her arms slid around him. His frame went taut with triumph when she timidly kissed him back.
He folded over her. Into her. Curled around her as if she were the last bit of warmth in a world of ice and terror and deprivation. Even his joy became its own kind of torment. This was both everything and not enough. He needed to claim her. To crawl out of himself and to sink into her. He was like a pilgrim kneeling before a holy relic, desperate for a miracle. Praying for the touch of a deity. For the love of his goddess. Had he a soul, he’d have offered it to her.
But he didn’t.
Not anymore.
All else he possessed was hers. His money. His body. What was left of his life.
Didn’t she know that? How could he make her understand?
He would show her. Like this. He would drain every last gasp of carnal bliss from her lungs. He would worship her with his hands, with his mouth, until she begged him to stop. He’d deny himself his own fulfillment until she came to him. Until she was as desperate for him to be inside her as he was.
Reaching down, he parted her legs so he could get closer, cursing every single layer of her skirt, her undergarments, and even the air that took up the space between them. He drove his hips against the silk of her skirts, sex against sex, frustrated by the barrier, but aroused by her soft hiss of breath and the tremble he felt roll through her limbs.
The first of many, he vowed.
“Can you feel a whisper of what I can give you?” he asked, rolling against her again, knowing he abraded the sweet little nub with each flex of his hips.
“Y-yes … but I…” Her fingers became claws on his shoulders, as though she feared falling.
I’ll not let you go. He kissed the corners
of her mouth, her chin, and dragged his lips over the downy skin of her throat, stopping to nibble at the pulse he found leaping there. I’ll never let you go.
“Are you wet for me?” he demanded in a harsh whisper.
It took her three tries to swallow. “I—I’m…” She lost her words when he bit at her earlobe.
“Let me make you slick and slippery,” he urged.
“Make … what?”
“Let me make you writhe. And beg. And scream. I will exhaust you with ecstasy. You will come apart in my hands, beneath my mouth.”
“Please, just…” She gasped on a shuddering breath. The words, combined with her slight squirming against his nude, aroused body threatened to drive him beyond all control.
His shirt, already enormous on her slight frame, had come lose in their clench, and his composure slipped in time with the collar as it drifted down her bare, pale shoulder. His lips followed the seam, exploring the softness of her skin on an expedition toward her breast. All he had to do was expose it, taste it—but in order to do that, he’d have to cease his soft thrusts against her core.
“Wait,” she groaned, tugging at his hair. “I’m going to…”
Was she going to come already? He hadn’t even started yet.
“I meant what I said,” he crooned against her skin. “My body is yours, to use as you will. I will be a slave only to your desires. What do you want me to do?”
“Stop,” she sobbed.
He froze, pulling away to gaze down at her, and saw the panic in her eyes. Her skin flushed from pink to pale in the course of a stunned breath, and a sheen of sweat bloomed at her hairline and over her lip.
“Lorelai?” He carefully lowered her to the ground, his arousal turning to alarm as she frantically pushed him away with feeble trembling limbs. “Lorelai, are you hurt?”
She shook her head, but her eyes clouded, her movements almost inebriated. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, reaching out for the edge of the tub, for something to stabilize herself upon.
“What’s wrong?” he demanded, fighting the urge to shake her, to stun life back into her eyes.
“I’m sorry … Ash.” Her eyes rolled back and every limb slackened. She felt as limp as a corpse when he caught her and lifted her into his arms.
The Duke with the Dragon Tattoo Page 15