PerpetualPleasure

by Dita Parker

  “Oh god, Lucie. Oh god, baby.”

  He pressed his face into her neck, his cock still buried deep inside her body as he gave a low, satisfied growl. “So good, honey. So fucking good I can’t believe this.”

  He pressed his mouth on hers, panted into her, the heat of her breaths on his lips as he tried to kiss her, neither one managing anything other than tiny pecks. He didn’t want to move. He didn’t want to leave her body or her side. Forcing himself into action he pushed himself up and slid out of her gently. Swiftly he removed the pillow from underneath her hips and released her hands. MacCale removed the blindfold. She blinked at the light coming from the bedside lamp.

  “Everything okay?” he asked. Taking hold of her wrists, he massaged them gently.

  “Never better.” Lucie smiled at him reassuringly.

  He kissed both her palms, laid down her hand, stretched beside her and pulled her to him. He needed to get rid of the condom but he couldn’t seem to let go of Lucie.

  “Do I want to know what’s for dessert?” she asked.

  “Clean up, cuddle, nap, and if you’re up to it, encore. In that order.” He kissed her forehead. He could have spent the rest of the night kissing her all over. “But first a warning.”

  She scoffed, trying to pull back. He drew her right back against him.

  “Now a warning? And you tied me up for what exactly?”

  MacCale chuckled against her hair. “Oh, I hope it was as good for you as it was for me, but I meant what I said earlier. No games, Lucie. Just you and me. Try playing me again and you’ll end up on your knees.”

  She wriggled in his arms and MacCale let her lean back to look up at him. “You love it with a touch of kinky. Admit it, MacCale,” she said, her blue eyes sparkling.

  MacCale wondered how many men floated adrift after getting lost in those eyes. He for one never wanted to find a way out.

  Trying to sound all serious while wanting to kiss her silly once more, MacCale went for a stern look.

  “Once again, that’s not what I meant, Lucie. Try to pull a fast one on me and I’ll be forced to take you from behind for the rest of the night, and I’d so much rather see those eyes go wide with pleasure as I push into you. Then close because you can’t help it when I start to move inside you. I want to see how you respond, and I want you to see what you do to me when we fuck. What you have already done to me, you witch.”

  “Witch?”

  He gave her another quick kiss. “Witch.”

  The oddest expression flitted across her face only to disappear behind a small smile. The strangest need to possess and protect washed over him with that one tiny quirk of her lips.

  Lucie. His Lucie, the queen of Savannah.

  And he was the man who would be king.

  Chapter Four

  MacCale woke up to the rays that seeped in through the heavy curtains, the light hailing dawn. Lucie lay beside him on her belly, sleeping peacefully, her slender back and curvy bottom bare.

  He could get used to waking up to such a lovely sight, MacCale decided, and pulled the covers over her to keep his dream sprite warm and comfortable. What he saw as he leaned closer made him stop dead in his tracks.

  Her body, her beautiful body…

  He had hoped to mark her, to leave an indelible expression. Someone had beaten him to it. A crisscross of faint but visible slashes and prick marks scarred her back, here and there. Everywhere.

  He hadn’t seen them in the dimly lit room. He hadn’t felt them as he had held her, but with how thick the skin on his palms was, he didn’t wonder.

  What the hell had happened to her? The rapists she had hinted at that night at Boyd’s?

  A cold sweat of guilt and horror gripped MacCale. Remembering what he had done made his skin crawl. He had made her feel helpless, he had made her beg and plead. Lucie hadn’t moaned in lust when he had first taken hold of her hands to tie her up, she had borderline panicked. She hadn’t said no. She hadn’t told him to stop. But he had hardly listened to her either, only taken what he believed she wanted too.

  Idiot. You fucking bastard. He wanted to wake her up that instant to explain, apologize and assure her the last thing he intended was to make her feel unsafe, in her own home, in her own bed, dammit.

  Swallowing down a groan, MacCale closed his eyes. He felt sick to his stomach, to his soul. Had she played along hoping he wouldn’t take the light bondage any further?

  Pulling on his boxers and pants and leaving his shirt behind, he picked up the belt, rolled it up and shoved it into his pocket. He would shred it to pieces. He would never again be able to wear it without thinking what he had used it for last.

  He searched for the missing pillowcase and slipped it back in place then headed for the door. He needed a moment alone without having to look at Lucie. And in the same room with her, how could he not stare?

  * * * * *

  Lucie woke up to a lusciously exhausted sensation that appeared to have taken over her entire body.

  The room was quiet, the bed cool and except for her, empty.

  MacCale was gone.

  Okay. Good. One thing less to worry about. She had always been the one who sneaked out before dawn. Deciding to take him home for the night, she hadn’t given a thought to what she’d say or do if he lay beside her when she woke.

  The scent of him lingered in the bed, bringing back flashes from the night before. How mouth-watering his skin tasted. How low and gruff his voice could be one moment and how calm and soothing the next. How the feel of his hands all over her body had taken the fight and the flight out of her, made her forget her resolve or why she should have resisted.

  Mac had taken over and promised she would love it. She had. So very much.

  Too much.

  Why the hell had she let him tie her up like that? Lick her pussy? Jesus, her belly clenched just thinking about his mouth on her, lapping at her lips, flicking her clit, tonguing her until she had thought she’d pass out from the pleasure. No, she’d come all over his mouth instead.

  To start with.

  How the hell had she let herself be hypnotized like that? She had let him clean her up afterward. Cuddled with him. Cuddled! Let him hold her. After sex!

  Stupid. Stupid.

  Gathering the covers, Lucie drew them over her head.

  His scent returned with a vengeance. Scrambling up, she flicked on the bedside lamp and inspected her lap. She was holding his shirt.

  Oh.

  Peeking around, she found his shoes and socks lying by the bed.

  Oh no.

  “Mac?”

  The bathroom door was slightly ajar, the lights out.

  Okay.

  He wasn’t in the room. But he was still in her house. A house with several rooms she would have locked down had she been thinking about something else besides getting laid.

  Stupid!

  Scuttling off the bed, Lucie picked up the shirt and pulled it on in haste. The cool and several-sizes-too-big garment fell in voluptuous folds over her, smelling headily like her lover as she padded to the door and stepped out into the corridor.

  “MacCale?” The hall echoed with her voice amplifying it.

  “In here, honey,” he hollered.

  Swallowing down the sour taste of dread, Lucie started down the hallway. MacCale might have been heading for the stairs, but he hadn’t made it that far.

  Lucie stopped by the open door and drew a deep, calming breath before entering her private study. The most private and personal of them all. She never let anyone inside the most sacred of her sanctuaries, but MacCale had already proven himself to be an unstoppable force.

  “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “Tell me about it,” MacCale muttered.

  He didn’t turn to look at her. He stood enthralled before a wall featuring dozens of portraits and photographs. Decades, fashions and continents gone by, her life captured by artists and photographers.

  “I thought I’d seen you somewhere,” he
said. “I went through some of Boyd’s photos and I found a picture of a woman with your face with Boyd and that flying ace, Frank Hunter at some air show. I thought it might be your grandmother, that you looked exactly like her. It was you, wasn’t it? These aren’t your aunts and great-aunts. These are not your sisters, your mother, or your grandmothers. These are all you. Each and every one of them, back to what? The Revolution?”

  MacCale turned to her, his expression dauntless and demanding.

  Lucie drew another calming breath, then several more that did nothing to quell the rabid gallop of her heart as she stared at the epitome of male perfection quietly staring back at her.

  She couldn’t think of anything that would steal away his attention from what he had uncovered.

  Here goes, with everything. He would peg her as stark raving mad and take his leave.

  “I was born the year Savannah became the colonial capital, in 1751. Twenty-six years later I was born again, so to speak, and I never celebrated another birthday.”

  “Wow.” MacCale flashed her a smile that only managed to emphasize the understatement of the century.

  Wow? Wow? She gave him the truth along with a free pass to a funny farm should he ever try to recount her story and the man goes Wow?

  “So it is true,” he said. “Some women stay twenty-something for life.”

  He had to be kidding. No, he was kidding, Lucie decided. He could dish it out, but could he take it?

  “You had sex with an antiquity, buster. Imagine that.”

  MacCale propped his hands on his hips. It was a distinctly male stand, his bare shoulders and chest widening in challenge. “I say bring it on. You were absolutely phenomenal for a two-hundred-and-sixty-year-old. Not that I have a comparison.”

  “You’re not…disgusted?” Lucie blurted.

  “No.” He sounded insulted. It couldn’t be. How could it be?

  “Horrified?”

  His smile was back with a vengeance, sexy and seductive. “I don’t scare easily. Besides, I’ve had to imagine far more fantastic things over the years.”

  Really? He met immortals on a daily basis?

  “You must have a thousand questions.”

  “I have all the answers I need for now right here on this wall. The rest will keep,” he said, then motioned back to the portraits and photographs. “May I?”

  “It seems you already have. Knock yourself out.” Lucie plopped into her office chair, a comforting mammoth of a Chippendale, and watched him go back to her life, all of them, in rapture.

  MacCale smiled at some of the pictures, frowned before others, and didn’t say another word until he got to the late twentieth century shots.

  “Just one question. No, two.”

  Lucie straightened in her seat. “Shoot.”

  “Have you ever met someone like you?”

  “No. But it’s not something I advertise. ‘Oh. There’s something you should know. I’m immortal. I hope that’s okay’.”

  “It’s fine by me,” he said. His smile wavered and then burned out. “You have led an extraordinary existence. It opens up so many possibilities it boggles the mind but you’re also sentenced to solitude.”

  How right he was. How very dead-on he was every time he tried to pin her down.

  It annoyed her. More than that, it frightened her.

  Get him out of here. Now!

  “Is there a question hidden in there somewhere?” she snapped.

  He never even blinked. “Do you consider yourself blessed or cursed?”

  She raised her brows, but decided to tackle that one for him. “I know immortality is something many people dream of. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.”

  “Because you’re destined to loneliness,” he stated. “Because at the end of day one hundred thousand and one, it all seemed old no matter what the latest fad happened to be. Because there’s no one to share your life with.”

  He was an intuitivist all right, the best she had ever encountered.

  Throw him out. Do it!

  “That is more than the two questions I already answered. Now, if you don’t mind, I have business to attend to.” Lucie stood to send him a message of dismissal.

  “Please, don’t let me keep you.” MacCale turned back to the wall and the portraits, at his leisure. “Brunch at one?” he quipped without looking at her.

  What? “I want you gone by one o’clock.”

  “Brunch at noon then?”

  Unbelievable. Did he ever run out of words or steam?

  “I need to shower. There’s this event in town this weekend. The Scottish Games. And I’m a part of it and I still have a lot to do.” Lucie ran through the explanation not caring if it sounded like an excuse. It was the truth, and he was the main reason she was running behind schedule.

  MacCale turned around as if moving in slow motion. “The Scottish Games?”

  He’d never heard about it? Definitely not a local. “Yes. It’s like—”

  He raised his hand. “I get it. Men in skirts.”

  “Kilts. Considering your name, there may have been plenty in your family at one time.”

  “Screw my family. I want to hear about yours. What happened to you, Lucie?” His voice was soft, those tigerish amber eyes staring at her. Calm. Kind. So beautiful.

  Snap out of it.

  She would never see him again. If he told someone in town, they would shrug it off with a smile. No one else would believe him, so what did it matter if she told him or not?

  Nothing like a sad little secret to make a man lose any further interest.

  “My father came from France a widely traveled man. He was the quintessential explorer, and among the multitude of things he brought over was a box I was warned against touching, ever. Maybe Papa knew what powers it held. At least he suspected, because one day it was gone.

  “My parents’ and nannies’ watchful eyes protected me as a child but there was nothing to stop me when I came across the box as an adult. I was my father’s daughter, devil-may-care and too inquisitive for my own good. And what I expected to find was some artifact or other. Never in a million years did I think it might be an…entity.”

  Her voice was calm, but her hands shook. They always did when she thought about that day, of the mistake she’d made and could never undo.

  “I peeked inside, and instantly it came at me. I managed to close the lid but it was already entering me through every orifice. It blinded me, made me deaf and dumb. I suffocated until I passed out. When I came to on the floor I remembered what had happened. I was fine but waited for some deadly disease to strike. Thought I’d been impregnated by a demon spirit. Something. Anything. Nothing happened. I felt fine, always healthy of body. Absolutely unbreakable.

  “It took me a couple of years to understand that’s what I would be, indefinitely, and that’s when I had to tell my mother. That’s when the isolation began. Travel, exile… I periodically return back home as an heir to this estate, never aging, never changing.

  “It seemed like a miracle at first because I felt invincible. I went beyond what women were expected to behave like. I took on the world as my father once had knowing I could survive anything. It got me into trouble, big trouble, the hurtful kind, as all kinds of…misunderstandings ensued. So I took great pains to learn to defend myself.”

  Lucie lifted her eyes to look at MacCale and saw something had shifted in him. His passion was breaking through the cool collectedness as he swallowed hard, his eyes boring into hers.

  “I saw the scars on your back, Lucie. What happened?”

  “Three men with cigars and a horse whip in Marseilles.”

  Naked horror and fury emanated from him as she watched him put two and two together.

  “It’s ancient history, MacCale. Literally.”

  He shook his head, his mouth opening as if he wanted to speak. For the longest moment, he couldn’t.

  “I’m so sorry, Lucie,” he finally whispered. “Oh god. You tried telling me, didn’t y
ou? You said you couldn’t. Oh god.”

  “MacCale, it’s okay, really.”

  His jaw tightened, his hands clenching into two massive rocks.

  “No. It’s. Not. That’s why you panicked when I restrained you, isn’t it?” His calm demeanor was definitely gone, leaving in its wake a rattled man brimming with ill-contained aggression and anger.

  And it was all centered on MacCale himself.

  He was a minute away from shouting, a few words shy of getting physical and smashing something but Lucie could not bring herself to fear him.

  She knew without a shadow of a doubt he would never hurt her.

  She looked him square in the eye. “No, that’s not why I panicked.”

  He started pacing back and forth like a caged animal. He was so achingly beautiful even in his fury, all Lucie could do was stare at him in awe.

  He came to a sudden stop and turned back to her, his eyes feverish. “Bullshit. Bullshit, Lucie. I was there. I tied you up and made you beg. Oh god.” His piercing gaze averted hers for several seconds as he fought for composure. “You don’t have to forgive me but you have to believe me when I say I never meant for you to feel helpless.”

  “I wasn’t traumatized by it, if that’s what you’re driving at.”

  “Well, I was,” he said under his breath.

  He sounded genuinely sorry and so shaken Lucie wanted to explain, pacify him somehow. She wasn’t feeling used or abused and she didn’t want him to think that’s what he’d done.

  “You never hurt me. It’s just that…I’m used to being the one in charge.” Lucie smiled at him reassuringly, needing for him to relax, needing one more moment of his unwavering strength and power. He was sure to leave soon. He had to.

  And she had to will herself to let him go.

  “Just calm that perfect butt of yours down, okay?”

  Watching her with slanted eyes, he pasted on a smile Lucie wasn’t sure reflected what he was feeling at all.

  “A perfect butt. Really?”

  “Come on, Mac. You know you’re a hottie.”