Eyes closed, he took a languid breath, inhaling deeply, filling his lungs. He then wondered why he bothered. The perfumed candles, hundreds of them in this salon alone, thousands of them lining the castle's hallways so its honored guests wouldn't trip or lose their way, had long since ceased to intoxicate. The whirling, bejeweled, corseted bodies of the men and women supplicating themselves on the polished marble floor in time to the music seemed now little more than a bore.
Food was folly, wine a tasteless affectation. The woman bending low over his shoulder to whisper in his ear, breasts plump, rosy-hued nipples clearly visible above emerald green brocade, failed to elicit a manly response. Her air of innocence, real or feigned, was wasted. She had no idea how close she had come to peril, to a twilight beyond despair. Would she invite him, taunt him, breathe upon him if she knew? Would she offer up her fullness for him to suckle? Might she spread her round thighs in a flurry of skirts and lace and guide his tongue to the dark-haired place between them—a private place heretofore penetrated only by her secret thoughts and longings? Perhaps so, he decided. Innocence was wasted on the young. Pathetically. One move of his eyes, the tiniest portion of a smile upward, and this ridiculous creature would be his for the ride.
The tedium was unending, the turn of time merciless. And yet, he thought as he glanced at the untouched plate on the table before him… and yet through it all, beneath it all, down deep in the pocket of the place where his soul once resided, a sharp, dire, incomprehensible hunger raged.
Oh yes, he might have this girl, this tease, this would-be whore, he knew. Just as he knew his hunger would tear him apart, turn him inside out and leave him to burn, if unappeased. He might take her now, here. On the table. On his plate. Next to the costly linens and Belgian lace soaked in the wine he would spill as he laid her there. Think of the chaos that would surely ensue if he were to strip her over-tight bodice from the quivering flesh beneath it with his venison dagger. He could easily pin her sleeves, thus rendering her thin arms immobile, with a well-placed fork or two struck to the gleaming oak slab.
Would he have her slowly, basting her thighs delicately in the honey so graciously supplied by his host? Kneading her pink flesh with his thumbs as his mouth followed the trail of the sticky, sugary delicacy en route to the door to her womanhood?
Womanhood? That was a laugh. This female was nothing more than a girl—silly, inconsiderate, not yet ripe enough for a true mouthful. She wouldn't be able to stand up to his careful ministrations, nor comprehend what was really happening to her. She would be wearing layer upon layer of undergarments, carefully provided by her benefactor or maid to thwart any such action as this. Any such situation as this.
The girl would squirm, were he to cut her free of her fabric barriers. More wine would spill. More food. She would grow tentative as he crawled his way upward, as he unleashed his stiffening manhood, weary of her fidgeting and her cries.
Stunned she would be as he entered her plush, wet, convulsing canal with a brutal, uncaring shove. Her mouth would open. Whimpers would erupt when he ruptured the last shreds of her innocence. Screams would follow, echoing each plunge he made. Then, a last gasp deep in her throat as he withdrew from this gift of maturity to drop his face between her trembling legs. She would pray, silently, lips moving, when his own lips stroked the wound his shaft had created. She would faint as he lapped at the last visage of her lapsed virginity—as he sampled a moistness almost sweeter than wine.
Blushed flesh. Emerald brocade, stretched out like a patch of verdant grass. White lace in shreds. Vaporous candlelight, trailing the scents of musk and malaise. Whispers of onlookers with lustful, envious scowls puckering their painted faces. All of this before dessert.
His chin lifted. His eyes rose slowly from the imagined scene before him, hesitating on the heaving bosom so very near to his mouth. The silly girl's heavy, buxom bosom. He glanced up, meaning to look at her face… meaning to focus on something to ease the endlessness. Anything to end it.
But he caught sight of something else. Something dazzling in the distance. Something that nipped at his attention.
For the first time he could recall, there came a stirring sensation inside of his chest.
A soft thud not unlike a real heartbeat.
A true heartbeat.
Chapter Two
« ^ »
"Dante?"
Someone spoke his name, parlaying for his attention, but Dante did not want to be disturbed. He wanted nothing to get in the way of this wave of sensation.
A gloved hand covered his on the table. He held his breath.
"Dante? Is something wrong?"
It took all of his willpower to turn his head, to gaze politely at the woman seated next to him, a woman whose features he barely recognized but whose touch he knew intimately well.
"Is something wrong?" Elizabeth repeated in a voice tainted with the grit of jealous inquisitiveness.
"Wrong?" he returned benignly, purposefully regulating his breath and choosing to ignore the subtleties of her warning.
He was staring. Staring at the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. A woman who glided into the room like a liquid moonbeam, pale gown glistening like grated jewels in the candlelight; blue-black curls tumbling across naked shoulders. An apparition, Dante guessed. An apparition come to ground?
The vision's hair was like midnight, loosely gathered around her white face. Thick, shiny, buoyant, stray tendrils of darkness caressed her cheeks—the cheeks of an angel—ageless, timeless, pale and perfect.
Dante sat up straighter in his chair, feeling his body shiver with a vague yet poignant ripple of surprise. He strained for a better look at the radiant creature. His ever-whirling mind grew still.
"Dante?"
Not now, he directed silently to Elizabeth, beside him. A moment, please.
A strange scent flooded the room. Exotic. Floral. Unearthly. Otherworldly. Like the creature's trailing gown, the perfumed air wafted—gauzy swirls of scent caught in the flickering candles, drifting over his face.
"Dante," Elizabeth said more adamantly, but Dante couldn't reply. He couldn't speak.
The apparition's cheeks were tinted with the faintest trace of color—an almost fragile flush of pink. Not from a paint-pot or too much drink, Dante knew instinctively. This was the palette of innocent heat, of untried fire. Christ, he could feel that fire from where he sat.
"I see," Elizabeth hissed, removing the hand she had placed atop his and slipping it beneath the table, into his lap. She uttered a sharp, muffled cry. Her features rearranged like water in a shallow pond upon her discovery of what he had swelling there.
"Perhaps I should leave you to it," she snapped, eyes glittering with malcontent, softness dissipated.
Dante looked across to the angel's eyes, and found her hiding hers. Creaseless lids framed by dark lashes closed slightly over light blue globes, the color of daylight. Her action had been demure, wistful, but her eyes were keen, he decided, and symmetrically placed. Her nose was narrow above a full, febrile mouth glossy with the latest tincture of oil. A mouth no doubt tasting of rose or pomegranate. The kind of mouth a man prayed for, longed for, and then used mercilessly for his own purposes. The kind of mouth which could enslave a man and very nearly drive him mad.
"Bloody hell, Dante," Elizabeth whispered as his gaze swept over the angel's smooth expanse of neck, coming to rest on the hollow of her throat.
His erection pulsed.
She wore jewels, great stones of citrine linked with gold, though she needed no such diversions. The gems vied for attention. He wanted to see her flesh undecorated. A more inexperienced eye than his might have seen little past the necklace's all-too-obvious value. A less experienced eye might have stopped there, missing altogether the beauty of the blue veins spreading gracefully beneath the lustrous white skin, toward the graceful slope of her shoulders and the unconscionably immodest cut of her gown.
Dante's gaze lingered seconds more. A twinge of something
quite akin to pain took root deep inside of his body. Unable to name this pain, helpless to tear his attention from the angel, he sat mesmerized, knowing he had been lost from the moment he had first beheld her. Lost, as would be the moon without the stars. A strange fever heated his face and his motionless limbs. His head echoed inside with the sound of summer thunder.
The only hope, he knew, was to find a flaw—one single crack in the seamless composition of her glorious whole which would allow him room to breathe. A flaw which would enable him to rebind his rapidly fragmenting composure.
"You're a fool," Elizabeth said.
"Am I?" he returned casually.
"Do you know who she is?"
"I haven't a clue."
"Then I will tell you."
"I'd rather you didn't."
His reply seemed to give Elizabeth pause. "You can't have everything you want, Dante. Not everything," she said a moment later, withdrawing her hand.
"I take that back," Dante said, catching hold of her fingers before she could rise from her chair, his tone so serious that Elizabeth stayed quite still for several seconds more.
"Take what back?" she asked at last.
"Who is she?"
The strength of his left arm was the only thing retaining Elizabeth as she said petulantly, "No. I don't think I shall tell you after all. And when you do find out, my door will be locked."
She wrenched her arm free of his hold and stood. Sliding a finger into the tight space between her own partially exposed breasts, she leaned forward, allowing him a whiff of lavender as well as a closer view of her greatest assets—a frank reminder of things he would be missing if he strayed too far. Her cool cheek brushed against his as she placed something in his hand. A key.
"Then again," she whispered, skirts rustling as she turned, "I do love it when a man begs."
As quickly as that, he was alone. Though he noted Elizabeth's exit, he did not turn to watch. Instead, he took a sip of wine and sat back, fingering the key in his hand, wondering if he shouldn't feel guilty and if he shouldn't pursue something tried and true.
To test himself he looked up and across the lavishly decorated room, this time to meet the blue-eyed stare. He stood with a sharp, unconscious move brought on by the unmasked intensity of her gaze. Caught up in the moment, he failed to notice the man at the angel's side until the man moved. Taking her slender elbow in his hand as if she were mere flesh and blood, this companion ushered the angel across the marble floor toward the far door, passing in and out of candlelight so that her gown sparkled like disseminated dreams. No, Dante thought, sending his message silently and adamantly to her as the door opened and a guard moved aside.
Don't go.
The angel hesitated. Her chin lifted regally. She glanced back over her shoulder, as did her companion, whose angular face was illuminated briefly in a light which bathed him with a reddish glow.
"Damn it to hell!" Dante swore as he bowed his head to the angel's comrade in mock fealty. "Damn it to bloody hell!"
It seemed he had found that flaw he had been searching for, and it was a formidable one.
Lord Alan Fucking Rothchilde.
Chapter Three
« ^ »
"Dante?" Elizabeth called out victoriously as he closed the door behind himself.
"Were you expecting someone else?" Dante said.
"It would serve you well if I were."
Elizabeth floated from the shadows and into the light of a solitary candle, scantily clad in something colorless. She tugged upon the ribbon holding the front of her gown, and Dante watched, feeling suddenly sorry he had come, feeling uncommonly disinterested in the yellowish gleam of her naked body.
Elizabeth's creamy drape fell to the ground soundlessly as she floated closer. The lush extravagances of her voluptuous torso filled his vision, blocking the light.
She smelled now of cinnamon.
"You are magnificent," Dante said, reminding himself that he had always considered the lavishness of her curves a delight, and the quickness of her wit a just reward. How now could he ask her for the information he needed? How, in the face of her renewed pursuit, could he insult a woman who had become an ally in a world gone sour?
"Perhaps you're feeling overdressed," she suggested.
He closed his eyes, trying to rid himself of the sensation of having made a terrible mistake by using her key. When her long, warm fingers rested on his arm, he stirred. Though his thoughts had recently flown through the damp air and through each wall of the castle searching for the brilliance of the moon, Elizabeth's touch, as she rubbed up against him, as she carefully removed his coat, seemed merciless in its promise.
"You are quiet," she purred, slipping slender hands inside of his shirt, massaging his chest lightly. "It is hardly like you."
"Too much wine," he murmured, cursing the fickleness of the effect she provided.
"Wine? Is it so?" Elizabeth's mouth nestled close to his ear. "I did not see you finish a single glass."
"You were occupied elsewhere, as I recall."
"I?" She laughed throatily. "That is uncommonly good."
Her breasts were soft against the middle of his back as she leaned still closer, as she thrust her arms beneath his to grind herself tightly to him, confident in her ability to rouse a man.
"No," Dante whispered, sensations coming in ripples as her hands dropped slowly downward, angling toward his waist, "this is uncommonly good."
"You see," Elizabeth whispered triumphantly. "You need me, just as I need you. We complement each other, do we not, while demanding so very little?"
With her out of sight he could almost imagine…
With her body against his he could almost believe…
But her eyes were not of a blue hue, and not so innocent. The flush of color on her cheeks came from a porcelain box, one he had in fact given her.
"Yes," Elizabeth purred as he reached behind with both hands to pin her body to his. But Dante knew he could not yet afford to look upon her face or into her wizened eyes. Not just now. Not as obsessed as he was with the angel.
He had to let the angel go.
Had to.
Didn't he?
As if in answer to his inward question, Elizabeth's fingernails raked across his neck, drawing, he knew, a thin line of blood. Though he winced, the thought arose that he would not long have to withhold the tremendous rise of physical power coursing through his limbs. Nor would he have to be gentle in this taking.
With a single, graceful move, he turned and lifted Elizabeth into his arms. Finding her light in weight, for all her ample graces, he dragged his gaze across her nakedness. He smiled when she moaned. Elizabeth was aware of him as a man, rightly enough, amid all the other things he might be. She still seemed to need what he had to offer, and wasn't afraid. What man could resist this boldness? What beast could turn away?
Yet the bed was not close. Not nearly close enough. If he moved, even a step… If he had time to think clearly about what he was doing and who he imagined doing it to…
Elizabeth's lips found his earlobe. Her tongue, torturously deft, darted into his ear and retreated maddeningly, defying him to pursue his current path of thought. If she knew of his treacherous lusting and the new direction of his desires, she made a good showing of pretending not to care.
That was it. She didn't care.
Why didn't she?
He deposited her on the old hinged chest. Shoving its contents aside with a sweep of his arm, he pressed her back, across the trestle's smooth, polished surface. Elizabeth made another sound, faint and guttural. His action had pleased her.
"Dante?" she murmured, spreading her arms so that her breasts, nipples drawn like peach silk, lifted with the slow rhythm of her breathing.
"Yes?" he queried, watching her shapely legs open just enough to reveal what lay between them. "Yes?" he repeated, hunger now straining at his pants.
Elizabeth reached for him, pulled him down on top of her. She wrapped her arms
and legs around him, driving thoughts of the angel deeper into his mind. His mouth hovered above hers.
"She is not for you," Elizabeth whispered. "Not this one. Not this time."
A strange, oddly profound light shone in Elizabeth's eyes as she said this. The light of challenge? Would he rise to it?
Her mouth was still open when he found it. Her exquisite tongue, so recently removed from his ear, so hot and experienced in the finer pleasures of lovemaking, lay in waiting between her parted lips. He brushed his mouth over hers briefly, felt the accompanying swell below his waist, then bore down. He took her mouth in the name of passion, kissing her with a fury that would have terrified any lesser woman. He bent her backwards over the edge of the chest with his hands on her shoulders, holding her tightly, allowing her no time for a breath. And suddenly, behind closed eyes, came a flash of light. A white face formed in the twilight, illuminating his actions, slowing him down.
He hesitated, lips removed from Elizabeth's.
"Now, Dante," Elizabeth said throatily. "Now, or never."
Slender fingers moving like liquid fire found his belt. Without a glance at what lay unleashed, Elizabeth smiled. Dante smiled back. Cupping her full, ponderous breasts in both hands, Dante leaned forward to take one sensitive bit of her gently between his teeth. With a slow, circular motion of his tongue, he closed in, drawing her flesh into his mouth with a slight sucking sound.
Elizabeth's head dropped back, as he knew it would. Her face was alight with ecstacy. He knew how to pleasure her, all right, and she, in turn, knew exactly what it took to allow him to do this. It was a cunning game of erotica they played, with the leader never truly revealed. Give and take. Lunge and retreat. Artful maneuvering, with sensation as the ultimate goal.
But Elizabeth demanded something more this time. He could smell it, sense it. Her blood was up, her life-pulse fast. She would skip all the pleasures between the kiss and the taking. This is what the rapid beating inside of her chest told him. This was the source of the scent radiating from her—the slightly acrid odor of secrets withheld.
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