Chapter Eight
She had become distant from him, somehow, somewhere. He wasn’t sure what it was that had prompted that, but he didn’t like it. Despite the fact that he couldn’t seem to keep his hands off her and every time he reached for her he made sure that she experienced her own version of paradise, which didn’t seem to help his cause at all, he did his concerted best to be more pleasant to her than he had been overall, trying to converse with her and talk about himself—although she never reciprocated at all.
He had been considered a bit of a raconteur in college, so he began to tell her stories about how much trouble he’d gotten into there, trying to make her laugh, which she did only very occasionally, although he had a bit of a sense that she was stifling it sometimes, or something about what had made her so somber was doing it for her.
They had been travelling for nearly two weeks now, keeping to the back roads that were barely more than paths once they hit civilization, skirting all cities until they came to New Orleans. Then he brought her into the heart of the city, to places where he knew she would be safe so that he could get the lay of the land and approach his father.
The place he’d brought her to—on the distinctly wrong side of the tracks—was what he blithely referred to as a bordello. Rachel barely knew what one was, although she got the gist not long after entering. She’d never seen so many other women in various states of undress! It was quite elaborately decorated in shades of red and gold with the occasional splash of white, and the ample bosomed proprietor seemed to know him quite well, literally clutching him to her bosom for some time until he fought his way out quite valiantly.
They ended up in her office, sitting in Louis XVI knock off chairs and sipping inferior sherry.
“Marielle, I’ll come right to the point. I need a safe place to stay for a short time. If our usual agreement would suffice for the use of a discreet room … and et cetera?”
Rachel’s eyebrows rose. Usual agreement?
She found herself being given the once over by the madam. “And I assume you won’t be requiring Penelope’s services?”
Cage had blushed, and then smiled. “No, thank you. Please give her my sincerest regrets and regards, though.”
They were shown to a room down through a labyrinth of hallways, each with dozens of doors off it, through which the most intriguing of noises were transmitted. The madam opened the door to their room herself. “My finest and most discreet accommodations, only for you, Cage.” She pronounced his name with a painfully bad French accent.
She almost told him—in front of Madame Marielle—that she’d be happier sleeping in the woods, and she’d hated every interminable moment of that—the bugs, the dirt the hard ground to sleep on. At one point she’d chuckled to herself, thinking he’d be amazed to realize that, as a child, she was barely allowed to go outside at all, much less sleep there. Her father liked her to be clean and neat—not some scuffed up tomboy.
But the room was nowhere near as bad as she thought it was going to be, however gaudy. And there was a lovely big bed that she had to restrain herself from jumping on immediately.
“I’ll send the girls up with water for your bath,” she winked as she closed the door.
“What was that all about?” Rachel asked.
“What?” He seemed preoccupied.
“The way she winked after saying bath. Didn’t you see it?”
“Yes, I did—she was intimating that we might actually only need one bath.
Her eyes went round. “One bath? But there are two of us!”
Her complete innocence was charming. “Yes, there are. So what would that mean, when there’s only one bath tub?” he asked, enjoying how she blushed at the suggestion.
There was a discreet knock at the door and girls paraded by him with bright smiles, some greeting him quite familiarly as he bowed low to them, then her as she stared quite rudely at what little there was to their outfits. The majority of them held pails of steaming water, and the other two pushed a truly enormous tub that looked as if it was made of solid gold.
As they trailed out, he gave each of them a nice tip from the money he had taken off the agents at the cabin, which was what they had been living off for the past week. Rachel had to wonder if they would have preferred their money to be spent that particular way, but then she remembered that they were men and they probably would have been fine.
“We won’t be needing another tub, Trixie, but we will want more water,” he said, winking at the girl who giggled breathlessly up at him.
Rachel couldn’t contain her rolling eyes.
When they were gone, he bowed low to her, his hand extended towards her. “Your bath, Milady.”
Of course, he undressed her before he helped her in. The girls had left tons of towels and lovely rose scented soaps, and she allowed herself to relax a bit and enjoy the experience. She didn’t even try to scoot out from under his hands as they became quite bold while he was undressing her.
He simply pulled up a chair and sat next to her for a while, trailing his hand in the perfectly hot water and enjoying watching her relax back in it. Then he took a washcloth and soaked it in the water, lathering soap all through it and washing every bit of her, including her hair, quite expertly.
“I don’t think I want to know how you learned to do any of this, or how you ended up befriending a madam.”
“I don’t think you want to, either,” he answered, his cloth covered hand wandering down between her knees then up the insides of her thighs to rub insistently over the part of her that he seemed to find most fascinating, judging by the amount of time he spent touching or kissing or inside it.
“Cage, stop! Please, Sir!” Thoroughly embarrassed at the idea of being groped in the bath, somehow, she reached down to try to move his hand away, but all she got was a quiet warning she had since learned to heed if she wanted to sit comfortably.
“Oh–oh–oh.”
Her fingers released him as if his skin had scalded her, and he was free to explore her to his heart’s content.
But it wasn’t his heart that wanted contenting.
Cage suddenly took a step back and began to undress, so Rachel began to rise. “Stop,” was all he said.
It was all he had to say.
She sank obediently back into the water, biting her lip and waiting for him to join her. He did, but he didn’t lie down, he stood. “I don’t think I should get my wound wet, but I want you to wash me. I feel so dirty.”
Rachel didn’t know why this was different, but it was somehow. Usually he ordered her around and forced or bullied her into doing things, but this time he actually asked. She had worried about his wound for a while—how he was never going to be able to avoid getting it horribly dirty, despite how she did her best to try to keep it clean. They had run out of clean bandaging material long since, and she had been reduced to tearing off pieces of her underskirt in order to put some sort of makeshift bandage over it.
She surprised him by not balking—even silently—at his request, and it made him wonder if she’d be more amenable in general to things if he asked rather than ordered. But then, they had been—and really still were—in a tenuous situation. Now the tenuous situation included a bed and four walls and readily available food.
He gallantly offered her his hand to help her stand, and she took it. Her hands felt incredible in his hair as she washed all of the grim and crap out of it of all that time spent travelling and the dirt and the grime. Once she had that done, she took a clean washcloth and wet and washed him, starting with his face, and working nicely over all of him.
Except those areas that he most wanted her to dwell on.
She even did all the way down his legs and his feet, but she had completely avoided his butt and his genitals, as if they didn’t exist.
When she tried to pretend she was done, rinsing out the washcloth and throwing it away, he said, “Go get another. You’re not done.”
Rachel didn’t bother to pretend
she didn’t know of what he spoke, she just went and got a wash cloth, then let him lift her back in. His erection was already poking at her—heck, he’d had it since before he’d begun washing her.
And now he was requiring her to soap up the cloth and wash him. She did it, but she did her best to appear not to like it. In reality, she adored it. It was so alien to her that she was infinitely intrigued by it and would—if she had felt comfortable doing so—spend an abnormal amount of time touching and exploring it. But she wasn’t about to let him know that, so she did her best to make him think that she hated it. It was better that way all around.
She loved the way that the longer she stroked him, her small hand slick from the soap, the more and deeper he groaned. The sounds he made encouraged her to continue more than almost anything he could have said, and she did, quickening her movements in time with his exclamations, until he clasped her to his side.
“Keep going. Keep going. Please. I’m gonna–I’m–”
Rachel had wanted to do this but would never have the gumption to ask, and she amazed that she was going to be able to do that for him. His head was back, his eyes were closed and his hips were bucking so fiercely that all she really had to do was keep her hand clasped around him and he was doing all the work.
At the moment of his orgasm, she watched him avidly, adoring the sound of his uncontrollable groans and the way he spasmed in her hand. It was a very powerful thing to do to a man, she realized.
Once he was clean, there was another knock at the door and he sank down into the water while she put on one of the robes the girls had also left.
It was Marielle herself, with what looked like a nice new suit of clothes for him and a beautiful dress for her that would highlight her eyes. She’d brought all of the other necessary accouterments, too—shaving things for him in a small leather case and hose and undergarments for her.
Relatively soon, she felt almost human again, and as she stared down at her dress, she recognized that feeling she was having. She felt as if she was a girl again, showing off a new dress to her doting—if strict—father. It had been a very long time since she’d had a new dress.
And Cage—she took to sneaking peaks at him as he shaved off the scraggly beard that had covered his face, leaving a neatly trimmed Van Dyke in its wake. When he turned to her, clean, shaved, neatly dressed, he took her breath away.
“Do I pass inspection, Missus?”
He hadn’t called her that in what seemed like a long time, although it had only been the better part of a month. “You do,” she said, suddenly feeling shy for some reason.
She didn’t look nearly as fine as he did—their benefactress hadn’t included the things necessary to put her hair up, or do her makeup, but she was bathed, clean faced, her long hair drying slowly into waves that fell past her shoulders, and she was wearing a very pretty dress, but although she had stockings, she had no shoes, and when he stepped close to her, he seemed for some reason to be just that much bigger than usual.
His arm curled around her waist and drew her to him. “You look ravishing, Rachel,” he breathed, leaning down to kiss her, and he meant every word of it.
“Thank you, Sir.” It was the first time she’d used the term when it almost seemed to fit. “You look almost civilized.”
He winked at her. You’d be surprised at just how civilized I can be.”
With that he turned to the door and she had to stop herself from following eagerly after him. Even though they weren’t very close to where her father lived, she felt very uneasy, and she would prefer to stay with Cage—although just the thought of that surprised her.
“You stay here, Rachel. Marielle’ll take care of you. I’ll be back shortly.”
The meeting with his father went well, and he felt good about bringing Rachel to his father’s estate on the outskirts of the city—he employed Pinkertons to handle the security, which was extremely tight. They would both be safe there until things were worked out to everyone’s satisfaction.
On his ride back, he found himself looking forward to seeing Rachel. He’d always thought she was beautiful—although he supposed he ought to tell her that. The smile he’d been wearing faded, when he replayed what had happened between the two of them, how he had acted more abominably than usual towards her, in every possible way. He swallowed hard. He could barely believe she was still with him, but he intended to make it all up to her if he had to spend the rest of his life doing just that.
He wanted to show her that he wasn’t just an autocratic bastard who took an unnatural enjoyment in spanking her bottom and molesting her person, and he was going to start this evening. On his way to their room, he stopped in the kitchen, where he knew the chef personally, and asked for a special meal to be sent up.
Marielle saw him in the hallway on the way to his room and caught his arm. “You ordered a special meal for two, no?”
Cage’s eyebrows rose. “Yes, I did.”
“For yourself and the mademoiselle that came in with you earlier?”
“Yes. What’s this about?”
“She is not there, Cage.”
He chuckled, but she wasn’t smiling.
“Someone came for her—an older man with a lot of other big beefy men around him.”
Cage’s blood chilled in his veins as he entered the room to find it empty of her presence. “Did you catch who it was who came for her?”
He knew he’d have to move heaven and Earth to find her, no matter who it was.
“I believe it was her father, Cage.”
He stopped his fist inches from driving it through the wall. She’d’ve made a scene, he knew, if Mr. H. had come for her. But her father? He knew much less about that man—except that he had apparently given her over to a sadist who enjoyed terrifying young women, and that she had seemed just as afraid of him as she had been of Hemmingway.
It had been a very long two months since he set out to get the invention back, full of attempts on his life, attempts on his father’s life—although those were much less frequent because his father followed the guidelines and let the bodyguards do their jobs. He was home again, although he felt like part of himself was still missing, hence his fervent search for the woman he had come to see as his own.
Cage spent all of his spare time looking for Rachel, and coming up with completely empty hands. It was as if she had been a figment of his fevered imagination. His wound was healing, but his heart was not. He had to see her again. He just had to.
They had come to an arrangement about his father’s invention. Cage wasn’t any too happy about it—he thought it made his father look weak when he was the genius who had come up with the invention, but he had acquiesced because he knew it was what his father wanted.
There was a big meeting tonight Cage, his father, Quinlan and their respective lawyers. Dinner was planned afterwards, and they were meeting at the home Quinlan was renting, which was a few miles from theirs.
It was a beautiful estate, no doubt bought at a bargain after the War. They were left off at the bottom of the steps to the grand verandah, which wrapped around the entire house. Arthur Quinlan was there waiting for them, and he greeted them quite warmly, guiding them into the grand foyer and through it to the impressive study, where he introduced his lawyer, who was at least as old as he was.
Cage was, as usual, the youngest man in the room.
Their business was conducted quite congenially, mostly because Cage had conceded and wasn’t contesting any of the components of the agreement, even though he felt that they weren’t necessarily in the best interests of the invention itself or his father’s business. His father wanted peace, and Cage wanted Rachel more than he wanted to argue with his father over a company he didn’t much care about any more. Eventually, everything was signed and legal, and handshakes, brandy and cigars were distributed all around.
His father, Clare Lincoln, stood and was about to dismiss his lawyer, as they were apparently moving to the more social aspect of the even
ing.
But Arthur stood, too, saying, “You might not want to jettison your counsel quite so quickly, Mr. Lincoln, if I might suggest.”
With that, the door to the study opened and, for some reason, Rachel stepped in.
Cage, in his shock, rose to go to her, but his father wisely put a hand on his son’s arm to prevent him from doing so.
Rachel didn’t so much as look at Cage. Instead, she glided elegantly over to stand beside Mr. Quinlan. “Gentlemen, I’d like to introduce you to my daughter, Rachel Hemmingway.”
The older gentleman let everyone bow to his daughter, but when it was Cage’s turn, he said, “I don’t believe introductions are necessary between you two, are they, Mr. Lincoln?”
Every eye in the room settled uncomfortably on him, except for Rachel’s. She was staring studiously at the floor. And there was something unusual about how she was standing, too. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it.
Leave it to his father to say the awkward thing, turning to him and looking puzzled. “Do you and Mrs. Hemmingway know each other, son?”
But Arthur answered before Cage could. “Indeed he does, Mr. Lincoln. Indeed he does.” And he did not sound very happy about it. Not happy at all.
Cage didn’t care much about how Arthur Quinlan sounded. All he cared about was the man’s daughter. He’d been looking for her for so long—spending all of his off time bribing police officers and wastrels and gamblers and pimps and not coming up with a crumb of information about her whereabouts, but he’d had no idea that she was his father’s rival’s daughter. No wonder she’d gotten so quiet when he’d told her Arthur’s name.
He would have thought that a couple of months under what he assumed was her father’s watchful eye and she would have looked the picture of health. But when he took a better look at her, he could see just how wan she was. Her face was drawn, her eyes red rimmed as if she’d recently been crying and she looked unbearably unhappy. And, for some reason he couldn’t fathom, she kept laying her hand over her stomach protectively, almost, as if she wasn’t feeling very well.
Caged Page 9