by Robin Schone
He could feel the pounding of her heart as if it beat inside his own body; the pulse of his desire throbbed in his temples. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“I don’t understand what it is that you expect of me.”
“The truth, Anne Aimes. You may ask me anything you wish and I will not lie to you.” Not in bed, not about sex. “You asked me if I had ever wanted to be touched so badly that I paid for it. Yes. The last five years I’ve paid for my pleasure. Knowing that whores found my touch repulsive, I still went to them. Wanting to touch. And be touched.
“Sometimes, when the sex was over and I lay awake in my own bed, I touched myself and wondered why it wasn’t enough, taking a woman who didn’t want me. I closed my eyes and imagined that there existed a woman who did want me … a woman who wasn’t repulsed by my scars … and I would come again in my own hand.”
Conflicting emotions raced through her eyes, like clouds tearing across a clear blue sky. Shock, that a man would openly speak about his need for a woman; understanding, that he would touch himself and yearn for more.
As this spinster had no doubt yearned.
“I want you, Anne. I want to be more than your whore. I want to be your lover.” He rubbed his lips against hers until they parted and his breath invaded her mouth. “Stay with me. Now. Tomorrow. Stay with me for the month. I’ll tell you what to ask for. What every woman has a right to demand. And then I’ll give it to you. Every touch. Every kiss. Every lick. Things you’ve never imagined. Sexual acts I haven’t performed in five years.”
Pain glistened in Anne’s eyes. “You didn’t cry out … when you reached your orgasm.”
At his moment of climax he had not been able to cry out.
Michel cried out, not Michael.
“Is that what you want? As my procuress, you are entitled to whatever you wish. A whore will cry out, if that is what pleases,” he murmured relentlessly. “Whether orgasm is achieved or not.”
“You’re not a whore,” she protested tightly.
Michael smiled humorlessly, knowing the lie for what it was. “But I was.”
A whore. Courailleur. Stallion. Macqueral. Pettycoat pensioner.
The names for men like him were endless, in both English and French.
“What are you now?”
What was he now?
What was a man who preyed upon a woman’s need for sexual pleasure, and who then used her need to be wanted?
There was no excuse for what he was about to do.
If he didn’t keep her she would die.
If he did keep her she would be taken.
Only fools believed there was nothing worse than death.
Michel had not been a fool—only foolish. Michael was neither.
He felt the coffin lid slam down on them both as he uttered the words that would bind this spinster woman to him.
“I am a man”—Michael harshly expelled—“who wants to turn back time for one month. A man who wants to hear a woman cry out with passion and know that it is not feigned. I want to feel like the man I was five years ago. Whole. Desirable. Like I did tonight, when you climaxed for me. And later, when you slept in my arms. I want to share my body with you, Anne, but I can’t do that if I’m your whore. And I won’t be your lover if all the time you’ll give me is a few hours here and there.”
His needs were echoed in Anne Aimes’s eyes. The longing to be attractive. To be wanted. To experience the special closeness of sex.
“I can’t stay,” she murmured. “I have to go ….”
But he couldn’t let her go.
“You woke up … earlier … and said that you were late.” He lightly licked her lips, absorbing her taste and smell, deliberately imprinting her with the flavor and scent of his own body. “That you had forgotten ‘their medicine.’ Do you take care of someone … nurse someone?”
Guilt spread over her pale features; immediately it was gone as she retreated into her spinster shell. “No. Not anymore.”
He didn’t want to hurt her.
“Then you have no one who needs you,” he whispered. “No one to go home to.”
Michael braced himself against the flatness in her gaze. “No. I have no one.”
“My family died when I was eleven.”
He was surprised at his admission.
She did not seem astounded that a man hired to pleasure her would discuss his family. “How did they die?”
“Cholera,” he lied.
“Does it bother you, being alone?”
“Yes.” There were so many things he would not have to lie to her about.
“What would you do … if I stayed now?”
The ache in his groin crawled up through his body, lodged inside his chest.
Pillowing her head with his left hand, he ran his right hand over the line of her shoulder—memorizing the delicate protrusion of bones, the indentation of her waist, the soft, luscious curve of her hip. “Do you want to stay with me … now?”
A delicate pink flush suffused her face. “Yes.”
Michael grasped her knee, pulled it up and over his hip until her thigh notched his waist. “For sex.”
“Yes.”
The moist heat of her vulva seared his manhood. She was open. Unprotected.
An unwitting victim.
Forcefully he blocked the memories of what the man had done to him. To Diane.
Of what he would do to Anne.
“And will you lie to me?” he asked, needing her willingness, her openness, her naked passion.
Anne tentatively grasped his shoulders, leery of touching him, still afraid that he would reject her. “Why would I lie to you?”
Firmly securing her thigh, he grazed her swollen mouth with his, and eased his left hand out from underneath her head.
“Sometimes a lie is all that protects us.” Michael tunneled his left hand underneath the pulsating warmth of her and clasped her buttocks—the velvety skin there was softer even than her face and breasts. “But there’s no need to lie. Not to me.” He feathered the crevice between her buttocks before slipping lower to seek out the core of her. “We both want … we both need … this.”
Her vagina was burning hot. And wet.
Anne flinched at the insertion of his finger. “I don’t know if I can take you right now. I’m … tender.”
Michael could not promise that he wouldn’t hurt her. In the end they would both be hurt. Or dead.
Shielding the truth with his lashes, he caressed her lips with his. “Do you trust me?”
“If I did not, I would not be here in your bed.”
An invisible fist slammed into his gut.
He should give her to Gabriel.
Michael moved his finger back, circled tightly puckered flesh.
Anne tensed, frantically wriggled, was held firm by his arms and by her hair. “What are you doing?”
“I told you at the tavern that by the end of the night I would know your every crevice … your every orifice.”
Jesus.
His finger was enveloped in blistering heat—hotter even than the fire that had burned him a lifetime earlier. He swallowed her gasp.
She tore her mouth away from his, hands lodging between their chests, pushing to escape the unexpected invasion.
But there was no escape.
“Put me inside you, Anne.”
“But you have—”
“It is the French way. Relax. Take me. Many things will seem strange to you at first. I haven’t touched a woman like this in five years. There’s a special place inside you I want to caress. Let me give you pleasure, Anne.”
“I don’t want—”
But she did.
“What?” he mercilessly interrupted. “You don’t want to explore the boundaries of passion? Wouldn’t you like, just this once, to experience everything … every touch … every pleasure … that a man and a woman can experience together?”
Anne bit her lip, caught between propriety and a woman’s curiosity. “Yes. That is why
I came to you.”
Even in this she would not lie.
“Then take me. Put me inside you.”
Michael helped her, using his right hand to guide her trembling fingers until his manhood was gripped in a different kind of heat than that which bathed the middle finger on his left hand.
She convulsively gripped his waist with her strong thigh, inadvertently pulling him deeper. “Oh, my God!”
Michael kissed Anne’s eyelids closed, unable to bear the stark emotion in her gaze.
He hurt her and she still trusted him to please her.
“Move with me.” Her eyelashes tickled his lips. He carefully commenced the rocking motion that would ultimately bring them to completion. “Take your pleasure.”
Make me forget ….
Her body unwittingly responded to his, as it had in the night house. As it had when he had taken her maidenhead.
Michael watched her face—and did not think of the man who waited for him. He thought only of Anne Aimes.
A slight frown gathered between her eyebrows—they were a darker brown than her lashes, the same color as her pubic hair—as she concentrated on obtaining her release. He could feel her orgasm gathering inside her, could feel the pulse of his own need through the thin membrane that separated his finger and his manhood.
Her expression told him everything: where to touch. When to slow down. When to speed up. How deep to plunge. At what angle to penetrate. When to be gentle. When to be rough …
Anne’s eyelids snapped open.
Her pale blue eyes burned with passion.
For him. With him.
“I want—” Anne gasped, instinctively arching her back when he flexed inside her.
He wanted, too. So many things.
Her muscles tightened around him; Michael had to work to maintain the rhythm. He gritted his teeth; stinging sweat trickled down his temple.
“When you orgasm …” She matched him breath for breath. “I want you … to cry out … like you made me … cry out!”
He had not cried out when the man had taken him.
Would it have helped?
Had it helped Diane?
Would it help Anne?
A face was reflected in her dilated pupils—it was naked with need, curiously vulnerable in its single-minded intent, open mouth gasping for air, nostrils flared in undisguised want.
With a start of shock Michael recognized himself.
He didn’t want her to see him like this.
The madam’s tutelage came to his rescue.
“Come with me!” he harshly urged her. Expertly he twisted his wrist at the same time that he flexed his pelvis. “Now!”
Surprise etched Anne’s flushed face. She threw her head back and cried out her release.
Michael buried his face in the hot, moist crook of her neck. Her muscles clamped his manhood and his finger in a fist-tight vise, fusing their flesh into one. For a brief second he was Anne Aimes, lost in innocent pleasure. An agonized groan vibrated in his chest, his lips, the tendons cording his throat. Then his seed burst from him and pooled inside the rubber condom, a hot bath of sperm.
Reason returned with release.
Stealing a woman’s innocence would not bring back his own.
He inhaled the scent of roses, sex, and sweat, trapped in the spinster woman’s hair and the ripples of her orgasm. He wondered how many more little deaths they would have before the final one.
Chapter 5
Anne awoke with a start to palpitating, rose-scented sunshine. A white-enameled ceiling bordered by a cornice of gilded leaves stared down at her. Pale green silk climbed the walls. Brass gleamed—the footposts of a bed.
She shifted her hand across a cool, slippery-soft sheet and touched a hip.
A naked hip.
Her hip.
“Good morning.”
Throbbing recognition pulsed through her body. It settled in the raw, swollen flesh between her thighs.
The pungency of sex and sweat abruptly overwhelmed the sweetness of roses.
Anne swiveled her head on the silk-encased pillow.
White-enameled wood and sparkling panes of glass materialized out of blinding sunshine—French doors. A man’s dark head solidified out of shimmering dust motes—Michel des Anges.
Scalding embarrassment flooded her face.
He had told her he would make her cry out.
And he had.
Again and again.
Anne gripped slick handfuls of silk to prevent herself from flinging back the covers and running away as fast as her legs would carry her.
The medical conspectus had not cited the repercussions of coition. There had been no reference to the emotional cleaving that occurred with shared orgasm. No mention of the whispered exchange of confidences that exposed loneliness and incited lust.
She was not prepared for this.
Penetration, yes. Possession, perhaps. But not this—awakening in the bed of a man who had stripped away her every inhibition to reveal her for the love-starved woman that she was.
“Good morning,” she offered stiltedly, acutely aware of her unwashed face, uncombed hair, and unbrushed teeth.
Michel set aside a neatly quartered newspaper and rose from a yellow silk-upholstered chaise lounge.
His black hair was damp. It curled over the edge of his white linen shirt collar.
It had been damp last night, too. With sweat.
Hers and his.
Memories flooded her consciousness—of him striding toward her, naked, with the full, heavy thrust of his penis swaying side to side.
How deeply will you penetrate me, monsieur?
Nine and a half inches, mademoiselle.
She instinctively glanced at the vee of his thighs as he strode toward her now.
The gray wool trousers were tented.
Do you always … get erect when you are with a woman?
Yes.
Immediately her glance darted upward.
He loomed over the bed, taller than she remembered, larger than she remembered.
Save for his penis.
She remembered that as being very large.
The scars ridging his right cheek sharpened. “A hot bath will ease your soreness.”
Anne forced herself not to look away from his violet eyes—eyes that had seen both her nakedness and her need. “Thank you. I will take one when I get home.”
A muscle jumped at the corner of his mouth. “I did not please you?”
She took a deep, fortifying breath—if she could solicit a sexual liaison in the dark of night, she could face the consequences of her actions in the light of day. “You must know that you did.”
“But not enough for you to take me as your lover.”
Her heart tripped inside her chest.
She was not the same woman who had demanded that he taste her, lick her, and who had then taken her pleasure.
Any more than he was the same man who had confessed his need to be touched, and who had then pierced her where surely no woman should be pierced.
With the sunlight clearly delineating the fine wrinkles around her eyes and the silver threading her hair, she was once again a spinster who must pay for her pleasure. Whereas he looked like a beautiful, scarred statue, remote and removed from the pleasures of the flesh.
Lucifer after the fall from grace.
He could not possibly want to be her lover.
“Is it …” No, he had said a woman had not solicited his services in five years. “Was it customary for a … patroness … to stay with you?” she asked coolly, carefully masking her discomfiture.
“If I invited her, yes.”
A flush of pleasure warmed her cheeks.
It was quickly followed by the cold slap of reality.
Any woman who paid ten thousand pounds would be welcomed by him.
“I do not wish to inconvenience you,” she said stiffly.
“You do not inconvenience me. My home and my servants are at your
disposal.”
A chill premonition pricked the hairs at the nape of her neck. “You own … this house?”
The hand-carved cornice with its individually molded leaves that bridged the pale green silk-covered walls and white-enameled ceiling were unique works of art. As had been the marble staircase with the intricately fashioned wrought-iron balustrades they had traversed the night before.
“I also own an estate in Yorkshire county,” he said, as if aware of the direction of her thoughts.
But that would mean … “If you own this house … and an estate …”
Her mouth snapped shut.
How stupid of her to presume anything about this man.
Michel des Anges had no doubt made several fortunes. His expertise was a testament to the number of women he must have serviced throughout the years.
Gambling had stripped more than one man of his wealth.
“I see,” she said.
His long, black lashes shielded his eyes. “What do you see, Anne Aimes?”
“Obviously you have fallen on hard times.”
“Is that why you think I took you last night?” he asked silkily.
There was nothing soft or silky about his face. It was filled with stark challenge.
And the compelling knowledge of her most secret desires.
She had cried out, his violet, black fringed eyes said. With the need for satisfaction. The need to be young. Beautiful. Touched. Wanted by a man.
By him.
A man who could overcome a woman’s control and fulfill her wildest fantasies.
And he had.
For a price.
Anne retreated behind a wall of curtness. “Please leave me. I must get dressed.”
Michel sat on the bed beside her, mattress sinking, silk and velvet covers bunching. She clutched the top sheet to her breasts and inched her buttocks across the mattress to stay the slide of her body.
Pain shot through her. It took a second to separate the stabbing ache between her thighs from the sharp hurt that yanked at her scalp. She stilled, held captive by her hair.
Why had he released it from the bun? She would never be able to get the tangles out.
How ridiculous she must look, with her hair loose as if she were a young woman.
A strong, scarred hand reached out, smoothed fine strands of hair off of her left cheek. “Don’t run away from me now, Anne.”