Devil's Fire

by Melissa MacNeal

  Still kissing me fervently, Hyde kept his body apart from mine — thwarting my inclination to cling to him, while I submitted to his serving girl’s ministrations. Their teamwork sent me into an unexpected frenzy: when his tongue began to duel with mine, Yu Ling ran her hands up the insides of my naked thighs.

  I realised that she, too, wore nothing as she made a deliberate sweep of my backside with her lips and breasts. Those taut buds blazing trails up my hips were her nipples, and the thought made my own breasts bead up, sending a shiver through me.

  Yu Ling responded by standing against me, spanning my abdomen with her hands and then drawing them lightly up the sensitive skin of my belly until they cupped my breasts. Her moan made my insides coil, right above the slit that was growing slick in spite of my reservations. I almost pulled away, but then Hyde began to suckle the breasts the Celestial offered him with her attentive hands.

  I moaned in surprise and surrender. Sandwiched between the man who licked my nipples with his warm, wet tongue and the serving girl whose mound gyrated against my hips, I could only play the victim. A more willing victim than I dared to admit.

  And when feminine fingers parted my folds to grant Hyde’s hand access, the pressure of at least three male fingers made me gasp. Merciless, my captors continued to thrust and knead and press me between their undulating bodies until I thought I’d explode. My cries reverberated in the steamy room as I bucked between them, the waves of shimmering delight cresting on and on until my knees buckled.

  With a knowing chuckle, Hyde swept me up and carried me to the tub. ‘May I watch Yu Ling bathe you, sweetheart?’ he whispered. ‘What a fetching contrast — your auburn fairness and her blue-black hair and eyes.’

  I felt too loose and jointless to refuse him. I lay like a helpless child in his arms, sighing languidly when the warm bath water lapped around my body. When I leaned against the gentle slope of the bathtub, the Oriental joined me rather than remaining alongside the tub, as I’d expected.

  I had never seen another woman naked. Yu Ling, with her ebony hair knotted on her head, appeared so at ease as to be displaying herself for my benefit. Her golden grace was accentuated by the flickering candlelight, while her obsidian eyes riveted mine. As she knelt to rub her sponge against a bar of rose-scented soap, her breasts bobbed. They rode high and firm on her chest, with the velvety perfection of pansy petals begging for my caress.

  Then she stood up, slight but proud, her gaze daring me to drink in her loveliness as rivulets of bath water trickled from her bush down her parted thighs. The scrape of the soap against her sponge played a suggestive song as she stepped between my legs. Her tongue darted between her lips as she knelt in the water. The steam rising between us intensified our silence.

  I gripped the rim of the tub, waiting.

  Yu Ling slowly extended the sponge. Still holding my gaze, she squeezed, dropping dollops of foam on to my chest. When a gasp escaped me, she smiled, crouching like an exotic predator, well aware of her power. With my legs and arms following the curves of the tub I was completely open to her advances. I’d never felt so vulnerable in my life.

  Her lips parted, inches from mine. ‘You so ready,’ she panted. ‘Yu Ling watch while Mister Hyde couple with Missy Mary, so she been hot and wet between legs all this time. Want you to touch her down there…yes? Please?’

  My fingers tingled as the Celestial guided my hand through the water. When my wrist grazed her thigh, her eyelids flickered. Her face, misted with steam and desire, took on a wanton expression as her jaw went slack. Moaning, Yu Ling eased my palm against her coarse curls and skin so slick it felt wetter than the bath water.

  ‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,’ Hyde muttered thickly.

  This utterance — because of whom it named, and because it reminded me Hyde was watching — brought me back to reality. I suddenly realised that a woman had my hand trapped between her quivering legs, and that she was about to kiss me.

  ‘No! I — please!’ I jerked my hand back, twisting my head away from Yu Ling’s glare to beg Hyde’s understanding. ‘I can’t let her — not while you watch us —’

  The Celestial threw her sponge in my face, cursing in Chinese. Waves spilled over the tub’s edge and her stiff, angular walk across the room hinted at a wrath she might try to avenge.

  Hyde sagged like a deflating balloon.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I whimpered, ‘but I just can’t —’

  ‘I understand, Mary Grace. We’ve pushed you beyond your limits. I can only hope that some of what you’ve experienced has been pleasurable?’

  How could I deny that? And how could I not be grateful for the way he helped me up, and then dried me with a soft towel? Moments later he was carrying me into the next room, where a single candle lit the lavender dimness. On the bed’s soft sheets he laid me, smiling as he shucked off his clothes.

  ‘Shall we rest, and take up tomorrow where we’ve left off?’ he asked with a roguish grin. Then, more seriously, he added, ‘I’ll never expect you to do things you dislike, or place my own pleasure ahead of yours, Mary Grace. Just speak up, like you did tonight.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I whispered.

  He blew out the candle and slipped between the sheets. When he curled his warm body around me from behind, I had never felt so protected. So cherished. So free from the ghosts who’d haunted my dreams, and from the agony my life had become. Despite my excitement at sharing a man’s bed for the first time, I drifted into a deeply contented sleep.

  * * *

  I awoke disoriented, my eyes flying open in the darkness. When Hyde shifted and mumbled in his sleep, I remembered where I was, but remnants of an unsettling dream hung like fog in my head. I recalled an ominous sound, like the pounding of a nail into a coffin.

  And there it was again, metal striking metal. The racket came from a distance, somewhere below.

  Hyde pushed up on to his elbows, scowling. ‘Someone’s at the door,’ he muttered, ‘and Sebastian sleeps like the dead. I’m sorry it woke you.’

  He padded across the room, to be swallowed by the shadows. I lay there wishing for his warmth, or the comfort of the nightgown I’d left at home, for I felt more than the chill of a winter’s night. Voices below reminded me that I slept above a mortuary. I wondered why a corpse couldn’t wait until morning, yet realised that, in the absence of a doctor, an undertaker was often asked to find the signs of life or death. This wasn’t the first time Hyde Fortune had been summoned in the night, and it wouldn’t be his last.

  I snuggled deeper into the mattress, trying to still my imagination. I was alone upstairs, in a house of the dead, in those darkest hours before dawn. That shuffling I heard might be Hyde returning…or the tread of something undead that had escaped from the bowels of the house. Enough moonlight lit the room that I saw the curtains fluttering in the draught from the window. Or was it a departed soul making them move?

  I squeezed my eyes shut so the shapes in the shadows would go away. It would be just like my father to haunt me, shaking his finger at my shameless fall from grace. My conscience prickled when I reviewed yesterday’s events: I’d succumbed to Hyde Fortune with barely a protest. Something about this house and its inhabitants had transformed Mary Grace Michaels into a wayward woman I barely recognised — a wanton my dear mother wouldn’t want me to associate with, let alone become.

  A brittle cough sent gooseflesh up my spine.

  I gripped the blankets, willing away this figment of my imagination. Yet the laboured breathing, and the clearing of a very old throat sounded too real to be a product of my overwrought mind. I remembered the heaviness of Mama’s congestion, the way her consumption gurgled in her lungs, and wondered if it were she, rather than my father, who’d come back to chastise me.

  I peeked through the slit of one eyelid and my breath caught. A stooped-over crone loomed between the bed and the doorway. Was it the moonlight? Or was her translucent white gown the gossamer of dreams gone awry? The wraith was studying me with a gaze so
piercing I wanted to disappear into the weave of the sheets.

  I was very naked, and very cold, and very scared. And this visitor knew it.

  ‘Don’t go,’ she rasped, and the effort made her cough again. The voice wasn’t Mama’s, but this poor soul’s condition sounded painfully familiar.

  ‘Heaven’s Gate,’ the apparition continued, ‘is not what they…not as it…appears. Those who go…are lost…forever, Mary Grace.’

  One of those pale arms rose, and the thought of this zombie touching me made me scream. I burrowed beneath the blankets, into an airless haven that offered no real protection. Was I to become the victim of my own visions? Would I be frightened to death by this shimmering figure and her warning?

  I stopped breathing to listen, until I thought my lungs would burst. I pressed my forehead to my knees and prayed to God like I’d never petitioned Him before. Minutes crept by like hours before I dared uncurl myself for a breath of air.

  The woman — or whatever she was — had warned against going to Heaven’s Gate, and my thundering heart believed her. Yet when the first glimmer of dawn brought back my safety, my sanity, I knew what I had to do.

  Despite my benefactor’s offer of a fresh start, something about Mount Calvary set my teeth on edge. Its shroudlike atmosphere might suck me under, never to emerge as the wife and mother I wished to be. Sebastian Hatch and his Chinese accomplice would hold me hostage with their little tricks, and not even Hyde Fortune’s avowed love — and he had never used that word, I reminded myself — would save me from this humiliation. His cinnamon-eyed smile and promises couldn’t raise me from disgrace or keep that weird, nether-worldly woman from haunting me again.

  And what advantage would it be to live here, to become the fuel for new rumours? My father’s crimes had made me enough of a conversation piece already.

  So I would go to Heaven’s Gate.

  And as far as I was concerned, we couldn’t leave soon enough.

  Chapter Four

  Our Perilous Journey

  Against his better judgment, Hyde agreed to drive me to Heaven’s Gate immediately after breakfast. The sky, a gun-metal grey edged with heavy clouds, promised more snow — not the best of conditions for driving up a narrow mountain road, but he sensed my eagerness to leave Mount Calvary. Sebastian Hatch helped him load large sacks of supplies into the carriage, and waved us off with a look of unmistakable concern.

  ‘I’m sorry to be such a Nervous Nellie,’ I whispered, clutching my cloak around the ivory and green striped gown he’d given me. ‘And thank you for fetching my sewing supplies and clothing from the Home. I just couldn’t show my face there again.’

  Hyde shifted beside me on the padded seat, holding the reins that came through a slot centred before him. The rectangular black carriage was completely enclosed, with small windows on either side and a larger one that spanned the front. For several moments there were only the clip-cloppings of Beau’s hooves and the hum of our wheels on the brick street.

  When he looked at me, I glanced down at my lap. ‘Are you having second thoughts, Mary Grace? About becoming my lover, or —’

  ‘No!’

  His expression showed a vulnerability, a loneliness I glimpsed yesterday. I slipped my hand under his elbow, hoping this contact comforted him as much as it did me.

  ‘Then what’s happened? Yesterday you had the world by the tail and this morning you act as though you’ve seen a ghost.’

  If I told him about the old crone who appeared in my room, he’d think I was insane. Yet if I didn’t explain my turnabout in attitude, Hyde would assume he’d done something for which I couldn’t forgive him.

  ‘I…when you were summoned downstairs in the night, I had a frightening experience,’ I began. ‘Perhaps I imagined her, but I could swear a withered old woman came in, warning me not to go to Heaven’s Gate. Her white nightgown shimmered in the moonlight, hanging so loosely she appeared not to have any substance. And her voice…that cough like Mama’s…’

  The man beside me paled — or maybe that was my imagination, too. My pulse was pounding in my temples as I recalled the panic the apparition had caused, and how I’d burrowed beneath the covers like a frightened child. Hyde scooted against me.

  ‘I’m sorry I had to leave you, sweetheart,’ he said quietly. ‘I didn’t realise how deeply Mount Calvary affected you. I’ve grown so accustomed to its creakings and shadows, I forget others assume the house is haunted by whoever might lie dead downstairs. I had no bodies last night, by the way.’

  The twinkle in his cinnamon eyes made me smile in spite of my nerves. I felt so foolish. I could almost convince myself the visitor was indeed a figment of my overactive imagination, something dredged up from those Gothic novels I’d thought of when the office door opened of its own accord yesterday.

  ‘Thank you for humouring me,’ I murmured. ‘I got skittish in the night and had scary dreams while Mama was so ill, and again when Papa lost his mind. He’d get up to roam around at all hours, and sometimes I’d awaken to find him gone in the morning. Just like…just like when he finally threw himself into that chasm.’

  Hyde’s arm slipped around my shoulders. ‘You’ve been through some terrible times, Mary Grace. Enough to give anyone nightmares. I think it’s best you’re going to Heaven’s Gate for a fresh start, among new friends who will encourage your work. I’ll come to see you every week, of course.’

  This thought, and the mischievous tilt of his grin, brought me out of my troubled mood. On impulse I kissed him, and Hyde continued the embrace with a vengeance. His mouth closed and opened over mine, becoming hungrier as our tongues explored. I was vaguely aware that he dropped the reins, and that the carriage began to tilt slightly as we started up the mountainside. As he held me close for another long, tempestuous kiss, I felt his hand slipping under my shift, slithering along my calves until his fingers found the bare skin above my stockings.

  ‘Hyde! What if the horse —’

  ‘Beau knows the way blindfolded,’ he assured me as his hand stole under the hem of my new bloomers. ‘This is our only chance to be alone for God knows how long, and I intend to make the most of it. I had to do some tall talking to keep Hatch at home. He thinks you’d be a tasty morsel, Mary Grace.’

  ‘But I — sweet Jesus!’

  I slid my hips forward, eager for the feel of him. His fingers found their mark and had me quivering against the back of the bench, shameless with desire. Hyde then crouched between the seat and the front wall of the wagon, lifting my leg over his shoulder as he tossed my skirts out of his way. He grasped my arse, planting feverish kisses along my stockings and into my soft, inner thighs until my lacy bloomers were all that came between his mouth and my sex. Undaunted, he licked and sucked and pressed his lips into me until the silken seam cut into my aching clit.

  I was panting, my cries punctuating his urgent grunts. With his thumbs, he lifted the cushion of my mound and ground his mouth against me until I could feel his teeth riding up and down the seam in a quickening rhythm. I screamed, parting my thighs to thrust against him as the spasms overtook me. Wetness shot out of me, and Hyde pulled at the straining silk until it split open along the stitching, to lap at me with greedy satisfaction.

  ‘Mary Grace…Mary Grace,’ he whispered when I fell back. ‘Sol’s so desperate to be inside you, I can’t stand up without splitting my pants.’

  I giggled, still half out of my head. ‘And who am I to deny a king his every wish?’

  ‘I thought you’d see it that way. Climb over the back of the seat.’

  Slowly the world around me came into focus again: the rising, narrow road before us, the steady sway of Beau’s sleek haunches, the creaking wheels that made an occasional pebble ping sideways at the mountain on our right. Hyde cupped his privates, which were creating quite a bulge in his trousers, and then stepped cautiously on to the upholstered bench. Once he was over the back of it, he extended his hands in an invitation to follow him.

  But when
I sat up, I could only stare. All I saw to the left of us was sky. Growing darker by the moment, those storm clouds rolled towards us like sacks of quarrelling cats. The edge of the road disappeared over a drop-off, and except for the rugged rise of terrain on our other side we appeared to be ascending on air.

  My heart dropped into my stomach. I was certain the carriage would plunge over the cliff. ‘Hyde, I — I can’t breathe!’

  ‘You’ll be fine if you concentrate on something else, love,’ he insisted gently. ‘And I have just the diversion in mind, back here where you won’t be so aware of the winding curves and rising elevation.’

  I didn’t believe him for a minute. I was certain Beau’s next step would send us careening into a rocky grave. I stiffened, the bile rising in my throat.

  ‘Close your eyes, sweetheart,’ his baritone tickled my ear. ‘I’ve made this drive countless times, and I’ve always returned, haven’t I?’

  I did as he instructed, squeezing my eyes shut.

  ‘Now turn, slowly. I’m right here for you, Mary Grace. I’ll never leave you.’

  Such tender words from a man who could so effortlessly control me. I reached around for him. As soon as my foot found the padded seat, Hyde’s hands spanned my waist and I felt myself floating over the back of the bench, into his embrace. He held me close for a moment, reassuring me with soft kisses along my hairline.

  Such a kind, gentle man he was. How could I not trust him to get me safely to my destination? And how could I deny him the pleasure he’d given me? Hyde Fortune had allowed me to choose my future, putting my need for independence ahead of his own desire for affection. The least I could do was set aside my fears and return the favor he’d granted me. It was the best way I could imagine to ignore the disorienting sights outside the windows.