by Robin Schone
A dark shadow shone through the curtains.
Only one had come for him. This time.
The oiled glide of hinged wood stirred the cool air—the drawer in the nightstand.
He had been prepared for Anne with a tin of condoms. He was equally prepared for the intruder.
The ivory hilt of the knife balanced in the palm of his hand, custom-fitted, as had been the French letters. One for fucking; the other for killing.
It did not matter.
He would not go until he was ready to be taken.
Crouching down on the cold wooden floor, he eased up the latch, knife poised, ready to strike.
“Either use it or put it away, Michael.” The whisper was only a breath of air.
Gabriel.
He instinctively glanced toward the bed to make sure that Anne had not wakened. She lay as he had left her, on her back. He had forgotten to flip the covers up. Her breast gleamed in the dim light, as if carved out of alabaster; her right arm lay curled on top of the white silk sheet, palm turned upward.
Michael was not prepared for the rush of emotion that surged through him.
He had serviced women since he was thirteen years old—he had no right to feel pride at being Anne Aimes’s first man.
He had belonged to any woman who could afford his price—he had no right to feel possessive of this one spinster.
But he did.
He did not want Gabriel to see her naked as he had seen her.
“Stay.” Michael’s command was a sigh of sound.
Rising, he grabbed Anne’s velvet cloak off of the chaise lounge where he had earlier thrown it and wrapped it about his naked body. It reached midcalf. He stepped out onto the balcony, toes curling on the damp, icy wood, and softly closed the French doors behind him.
Pink pearled the sky. It was edged by fresh black smoke, London stoves stoked to cook breakfast for five million residents. A bird shrilly sang in the garden below.
Michael and Gabriel stood eye-to-eye, one head dark, the other fair. “I could have killed you, Gabriel.”
Gabriel’s breath mingled with Michael’s, a plume of gray vapor. “Perhaps I wouldn’t mind.”
The anger simmering inside Michael eased. “I would.”
“And you do not think that I will mourn you, Michael? You saved my life. Perhaps I would like to return the favor.”
Gabriel had not considered it a favor when Michael had found him chained in the attic of a rich client’s house. He had fought to die even as Michael had fought to save him.
“Why not enter by the front door?” Michael asked mildly. He stepped back, out of the moist cloud that was their combined breath. “You have a key.”
“Perhaps because I wanted to see how prepared you are to deal with the men who will come for you. These French doors offer no protection. Why haven’t you put grids over your windows?”
“Because if I do that, they cannot take me, can they?” Michael softly reasoned.
“What if it isn’t you they take, but the woman?”
Michael remembered the feel of Anne’s maidenhead stretching to allow him entrance.
She had screamed: first with pain, then with pleasure. Just as he had promised her she would.
He ruthlessly buried the memory. “Then she will gain me entrance. Perhaps she will die, perhaps not. I will still kill him. Or die myself, trying.”
“You smell of her.”
“I’m wearing her cloak.”
“You smell of her sex, Michael. Of her pleasure. And yours. She did not come to you as a decoy. Will you let him do to her what he did to Diane?”
Michael closed his eyes, trying to shut out Gabriel’s words.
For one infinitesimal moment he relived the experience of Diane, a woman who had walked away from her titled husband to be with him, a man whom she believed was nothing more than a French male whore. He remembered her uninhibited laughter and her unrestrained passion; her unadulterated lust for life.
When the man had taken her, she had broken in two months. Only in death had she regained peace.
Damn Gabriel.
Michael had loved Diane.
And her killer was free.
He opened his eyes. “Yes. Yes, I will let him take Anne Aimes.”
They stared at each other, two fallen angels who wanted too much, dared too much, and had paid the price.
Gabriel stepped back, sudden comprehension flowing across his fair, flawless face. “He already knows.”
Michael did not lie. “Yes.”
He had known for the past five years that a spy had been planted in his household. He had also known that as long as he remained submersed in his own private hell he would be safe.
But then the solicitor had appeared on his doorstep.
Michael had followed the spy, who in turn had followed the solicitor.
The solicitor had led them both to Anne Aimes.
There was no doubt that the man knew who had procured Michael’s services. Just as he knew that she was a lonely spinster who would not be missed until it was too late.
“And when you kill him, Michael? How will you live with yourself, knowing the price another woman will pay?”
Michael’s lips quirked in a brief, ironic smile. “Perhaps I will not kill him. Perhaps he will kill me.”
“Let me take her away. He knows that you are no longer content to play farmer. You lie to yourself if you think that women do not want you. There will be others, now that you’re back. You do not need Anne Aimes. It is your sexuality that is the bait, not this woman.”
Anger threatened to destroy Michael’s sangfroid. He lashed out, wanting to hurt, knowing the tool to use. “Do not judge a woman’s tastes by yours, mon frère.”
The hurtful words hovered between them.
Both knew them for the lie that they were. Neither had chosen the life that they led.
Gabriel’s eyes narrowed; they gleamed silver in the new dawn. He did not bother denying what was so patently false. “You’re a fool, Michael. Buy a mirror. Look into it. He didn’t condemn you to hell; you did.”
Michael’s lips tightened. “Stay away, Gabriel. I will not lose this time.”
“You’re afraid I will warn her?” he mocked.
There was no trace of the thirteen-year-old boy Gabriel had once been. No vestiges of laughter or tears.
Michael did not have to buy a mirror; he was looking into one.
The coldness numbing his feet settled in the pit of his stomach. “Yes, Gabriel, I am afraid.”
“And if I do warn her?”
Michael turned without comment and eased inside the French doors.
Darkness closed around him.
There was too much death.
He had almost threatened to kill his only friend. He was going to kill the only woman who took pleasure in his touch.
Movements jerky, he turned up the lamp, needing the light to hold the past at bay.
Anne had asked him to extinguish the light when he undressed her.
If he had been another man, he would have respected her modesty that one time, her first time.
But he was not another man.
There was only one thing he feared more than fire. And that was darkness.
Michael silently appraised the woman in his bed.
She lay peacefully asleep, impervious to the man who watched her. Impervious to the fate that awaited her. Impervious to the cold that would blanket her.
A curly black hair rested on the plump white flesh of her breast—a hair from his chest. Below it, her nipple was dark and swollen, like a bruised strawberry.
She was very sensitive—she had almost orgasmed when he had suckled her.
Her slender fingers were devoid of jewelry, her short, buffed nails a healthy pink. Carved half-moons throbbed in his back and shoulders.
She did not look like the passionless, anemic woman who had entered the House of Gabriel, any more than she looked like a woman marked for death.
&n
bsp; He remembered her choked gasp when he had initially brought her to orgasm.
In the cab she claimed she had never before seen a naked man. Yet not once had she displayed the modesty or timidity society expected a well-bred virgin to exhibit.
Married women had come to him, ignorant of the names for their sex organs. How had this spinster gleaned her knowledge?
What kind of life had she lived, that she did not think she could cry out with pleasure … or pain?
Michael inhaled heavy, sweet air. The scent of roses failed to mask the pending stench of decay.
Anger fisted inside his stomach.
His muscles ached from the labor of satisfying a woman instead of the labor of working his farm in Yorkshire. The latter had exhausted his body while his mind ran rampant. Anne had occupied both his mind and his body.
Damn the man for using the one means guaranteed to destroy him.
For one rage-filled moment he wondered if Anne Aimes had been hired to bring him back to London.
The man was capable of such a scheme. He knew Michael’s weakness.
Immediately the anger dissipated, leaving behind only the need.
No amount of money could buy the passion he had seen in Anne’s eyes.
The trembling started deep inside him, familiar but never welcome. There was only one way to stop it.
Tossing the velvet cloak aside, he snatched a condom from the tin and skillfully rolled it over his erect manhood. Unbidden, he remembered Anne’s clumsy attempt to sheathe him with rubber.
She had been so afraid of losing control, standing before him naked and trembling with her hunger. So very determined to exert power that she did not possess.
Michael slid underneath the covers. The sheets were warm, inviting, the scent of sex alluring.
It had been five years since a woman had warmed his bed. Five intolerable years since a woman had gifted him with her ecstasy.
Michael rolled over onto his side and reached out—
His heart skipped a beat before accelerating to a loud roar.
Anne’s pale blue eyes were open. They regarded him alertly, undimmed by sleep or dreams of the past.
Had she been awake when he stood over her?
Had she heard him step out onto the balcony?
Had she overheard his conversation with Gabriel?
“The birds are awake.”
He did not move for fear of alarming her. “Yes.”
“It’s late.” Her voice was distant, composed, not at all like the voice that had cried out with passion. “I have to leave.”
Michael was suddenly tired of pretense.
He wanted.
She wanted.
Why couldn’t it be enough?
He wasn’t Michel, no matter how hard he pretended or how much he wished otherwise. The man he had been five years ago was dead. Everyone he had ever loved was dead.
Michael cupped Anne’s face in his hands—Michael’s hands, not Michel’s. Hands that repelled rather than attracted.
But she had not been repelled.
Even now she unflinchingly bore his touch, her expression cool, guarded.
Gabriel was wrong. There was no other woman who would take him as Anne Aimes had taken him.
She had been bluntly honest about her desires. She deserved honesty in return.
“In the cab, I didn’t tell you something—something that I should have told you,” he whispered.
Uncertainty flared in her eyes.
She had such clear, pale eyes. So achingly expressive. They spoke of loneliness and pain and the gut-wrenching need to be touched, held, accepted.
Michael’s language, not Michel’s.
“What?” she whispered back, her breath hot and sweet with the remnants of champagne, tooth powder, and a woman’s satisfaction.
“I didn’t tell you that when a man is inside a woman”—he slowly stroked her velvety soft cheeks with his thumbs while cradling her shell-shaped ears in his palms—“it is her breath that sustains him … just as his does her. I didn’t tell you that I need you, Anne Aimes. I need you to touch me. And I will pay for it.”
She stiffened, unprepared for Michael the Englishman. Unaware that it was he who had taken her maidenhead, not Michel, the French courailleur. “There is no need to patronize me, monsieur. I am well aware that a man like you does not need a woman like me.”
Michael spread his fingers, trapping her baby-fine hair and eggshell-fragile skull in his hands. “You think that a man who is scarred does not need the touch of a woman?”
She held perfectly still, as she had in the night house, surrounded by philanderers and whores. As she had in the hansom cab, pressed against a man hired to take her virginity. As she had in his arms when he had undressed her, immobilized by fear and desire. “I did not say that.”
He tilted her face so that it was aligned with his, lips to lips, nose to nose. “Then you think that because I’m a whore, I don’t need to be touched.”
She rolled slightly toward him to relieve the pressure on her neck and grasped his forearms. “I did not say that, either!”
Panic and embarrassment were rampant in the spinster’s eyes.
She was right to fear him—Michael, unlike Michel, would take and take until she had nothing more to offer. He would not seductively cajole her from maidenly shame or modesty as Michel would do. Time was too short.
His fingers held her head immobile, his gaze locked to hers. “Then what did you say, Anne Aimes?”
Her breath fanned his lips in short, hot spurts. “I merely imported … You have many women who come to you—beautiful women. Younger women.”
How could she be so naive?
Did she need spectacles? Couldn’t she see what he was?
“I have not had a patroness in five years,” he said bluntly, acutely aware of his throbbing, engorged penis and the confession that would change everything.
Her eyes widened in disbelief; the frantic tug of her fingers slackened. “Why?”
“There was a fire,” he returned roughly, dreading pity even more than repulsion.
“You did not wish to … be with women, because you were burned?”
How could Michel’s pain—a man who had been dead for five years—hurt so much?
“Women did not wish to be with me … because I was burned.”
“I find that difficult to believe, monsieur.”
“Why?” He dug his fingers into her scalp, not exactly rough, but not exactly gentle either. “Why do you find it difficult to believe that a woman would not pay to lie with a scarred whore?”
“Because you are still the most handsome man I have ever seen.”
Michael froze; the bird warbling outside the balcony was suddenly, piercingly loud. Nine miles away in London proper, Big Ben announced the time—one distant bong, two, three, four, five. “You have seen me before?”
“Once. Eighteen years ago. At a ball.”
“I do not remember you.”
“No. Of course not. Why should you?”
It should not matter that she had seen him before the fire.
But it did.
“I am not the same man.”
“I have no complaints.”
Lightninglike sensation rammed through Michael.
Why did this spinster accept him when every other woman spurned him?
He eased the pressure of his hands and threaded his fingers through her hair; it was warm and alive as he was not. “I asked you what you wanted. Before I took your virginity.”
“I told you what I wanted.”
“No.” Michael gently massaged her scalp, easing away their pain, hers … and his. “You repeated the words that I gave you. The things I said I would do to you.”
Her affirmation was swift and firm. Heartbreakingly predictable. “But I did want those things.”
“But you didn’t know that a man kissed a woman’s clitoris,” he ruthlessly insisted. “That a man tasted her, licked her, tongued her. Until
tonight. Did you?”
A pale spark of desire flamed in her eyes.
She liked the words. Explicit words. Sexy words. The carnal phrases that between a man and a woman created an intimate dialogue.
Finally, reluctantly, she admitted, “No.”
Michael breathed in the scent of her, of her sex, the sweetness of her unperfumed skin and feminine lust.
“If I had not told you about these acts, what would you have asked for?”
How she hated confessing her ignorance. Yet her inherent honesty would not let her lie.
“I don’t know. I didn’t think you would ask me ….” She closed her eyes, hiding her vulnerability. “I didn’t know what to ask for.”
And she still didn’t.
“But you knew that men touched women. That men lay with women. Tell me what you thought I would do,” he said softly.
“I thought … that you would kiss me … on the mouth.”
“Did you know that a man suckled a woman’s breasts?”
“No.”
“Had you ever imagined a man suckling your breasts?”
Distress pulled at her lips. “Yes.”
He gently feathered her eyelashes—they were short, spiked, tipped in gold—with his thumbnails. Her eyes sprang open at his touch.
“Tell me,” he whispered, wanting to share her simple desire. To forget, however briefly, the evil that men did to men. Women. Children.
“I’ve seen mothers nursing their babies, and I thought … I thought how nice it would feel … to have a man suckle at my breasts. What a special closeness it must create.”
Michael’s breath quickened, his own need fanned by her innocent sensuality. “Did you ever touch your breasts when you had these thoughts?”
The mattress shifted underneath him.
“No.” Michael held on to her, forcing her to turn on to her side and fully confront her passion. “Don’t pull away from me.”
They were all each other had—possibly they would be the last person either would ever touch. Hold. Love.
She rolled against him—her nipples bore into his chest; his manhood prodded the vee of her thighs.
“Your feet are cold,” she murmured breathlessly.
And she still did not flinch from him.