A Thief in the Nude

by Olivia Waite

  His mouth tightened into a grim line at the frankness of her statement. “Do you have a solution then?”

  “Yes,” Hecuba replied. “Listen to me, Mr. Rushmore. Believe that I want you as badly as you want me. Trust me to tell you what I need, and I will trust you to do the same.” She glanced down at their joined hands. “My cousins and my aunt have brought home to me just what I can hope to find in a husband: a steady man, probably a great deal older than myself, who cares more for his own domestic comfort than for anything personally or physically appealing about me. He will have neither title nor fortune and yet he will expect me to be grateful for the opportunity of bearing his children and managing his household. My allowance will be meager if he provides one at all—and should I ever betray by word or deed that I have some dream or thought or desire that does not revolve around him, he will be gravely disappointed.” Her gaze lifted again, her mouth set firm. “You’ll forgive me when I say that the ruin of my virtue in a blaze of passion is much less dangerous to me than the dull, drawn-out oppression of a life barely lived.”

  Mr. Rushmore was looking at her very keenly now. Hecuba forced herself to breathe deeply and evenly because holding her breath in suspense was unproductive. She felt lightheaded enough as it was.

  Mr. Rushmore nodded once in sharp decision. “A blaze of passion,” he said. “I like the sound of that.” His eyes on hers were resolved. “But I still insist that we go slowly.”

  Hecuba felt a ripple of anxiety, which dissolved when Mr. Rushmore leaned down, slid the strap of the Grecian gown to one side and put his lips to her shoulder.

  The gentle touch scored through her, a comet blazing across the sky between them. Hecuba held still, afraid that if she moved the spell would be broken. He moved deliberately, leisurely over her skin, spreading fire wherever his lips touched, going as slowly as he’d promised. She fisted her hands in her skirts to keep herself from reaching out to hurry him. It was torture, but she was determined. She would stand firm and let him proceed at his own pace. She would not submit, even though he flicked his tongue out to taste the hollow of her collarbone and set her pulse dancing within her. It didn’t matter that he leaned close enough that she could smell the spice of him with each shuddering breath. It was nothing to her if all her nerves were alive to the fact that his tall, hard body was separated from hers by the merest few inches of space.

  Mr. Rushmore slid the second strap off her shoulder, and the bodice of the amber gown tumbled down around her clenched hands. Hecuba fought back a moan. The gilt rope held the garment around her waist, but her bosom was now naked in the chill attic air.

  Though not for long. One of his hands slipped to her waist and the other closed warm and firm around her breast.

  Hecuba screwed her eyes shut as the shock of that touch streaked through her. He moved his lips to her ear. “This isn’t too slow I hope?” he asked.

  The laughter in his voice surprised her into opening her eyes. He was grinning at her. She glared at him in return. “You devious bastard...” The words trailed away on a gasp as his fingers pinched her nipple and his teeth closed on the tender lobe of her ear. He chuckled. That dark, lush sound finally undid all her reserve. Her better intentions fell away and took her inhibitions with them.

  She unclenched her hands from the fabric and loosened the gilt rope belt. It fell to the floor and took the gown with it, leaving her clad in nothing but candlelight.

  She half expected him to pull away, but instead he bore her down to the floor and pushed one trousered thigh between her spread legs. Hecuba had but a moment to glory in the friction of his clothes against her bare skin before he leaned down and took her nipple in his mouth.

  Heat and pressure and the sweet, sliding motion of his tongue soon had her writhing beneath him, the floorboards hard and cool against her naked back. His weight pinned her in place, though it was pure delight to arch up and feel the heft of him against all the points on her body that were crying out for more contact. When he lifted his head from her breast, she took advantage of the respite to say, “Your clothes, Mr. Rushmore.”

  “What of them, Miss Jones?” he returned. Hecuba had no time to muster a reply before he bent and slid further down her body. She jumped a little when he brushed kisses along the sensitive curve of her stomach, the warmth of his mouth a counterpoint to the rough scrape of his jawline.

  “Are you going to remove them?” she went on, though words were increasingly difficult to arrange amid the tumult of her senses.

  He smiled against her skin. “I’m wearing only a shirt and trousers, Miss Jones.”

  “Socks,” Hecuba pointed out, lifting one leg and sliding the sole of her bare foot along the back of his calf.

  “And socks,” he agreed on a gratifying moan. He splayed his hands wide on her hips as he slid lower still, holding her fixed and bending down to press his mouth against the throbbing bud between her legs. Hecuba gasped and trembled as he punctuated his next sentence with long licks from that clever tongue. “No boots...no waistcoat...no coat...no gloves...no cravat.” He gave her a teasing glance, arch with false dignity. “And you want me to be even less presentably attired?”

  She didn’t know why he was demurring, but she didn’t particularly care. Instead Hecuba groaned, threaded her fingers through his hair and pushed his head back down.

  He sighed with pleasure, the sound rumbling through her and adding to the pitch of her arousal. His tongue left no part of her untasted while she arched and cursed and begged for more, pressing her heels against the floor to push herself more firmly against that wonderful, devilish mouth. There came a point when Hecuba believed she really, simply couldn’t take another second, when the pleasure was so intense it nearly became pain—and at that moment he put his lips around her bud and sucked.

  Satisfaction tore through her in waves, ebbing and fading only to return again with new strength, while he teased at her slick flesh and she cried out in sheer relief. She was left boneless, shaking, while Rushmore stretched out alongside her and pulled her into the warmth of his embrace.

  Hecuba sighed and snuggled closer. The haze of gratification didn’t prevent her from noticing that beneath his trousers he was still prodigiously hard. Idly she wondered if he might ask her to do something about that. It could be interesting...

  He brushed something gritty from her shoulder with one hand. “An attic floor,” he said. “How terribly romantic of me.”

  “It was your only option,” Hecuba replied, her cheek against the soft old linen of his shirt. She was not quite ready to let him go just yet. It was not entirely a comfortable realization. She shivered a little against the chill.

  He brushed more dust from her back—paying particular attention to certain lower parts of her—then, to Hecuba’s frustration, he rose to his knees beside her. “I shall arrange something better next time,” Rushmore promised.

  “So there is to be a next time,” Hecuba said. Her discomfort evaporated like dew beneath the sun. She stood and padded behind the screen where her clothes rested.

  “We have three more sittings according to the terms of our bargain,” he said, following her to the screen and watching while she donned her clothes and restored her hair to decency. He wasn’t dodging, surely?

  “I wasn’t thinking of the sitting but about what happened afterward,” Hecuba said. “I assume you, as a man, know of certain ways to prevent me from conceiving? And that you would not hesitate to use them?”

  He nodded.

  “Good,” Hecuba said. “That makes things much simpler in the long run.”

  “I agree,” Rushmore said. With a single guttering candle, he guided her back down the stairs and to a convenient side door, providing her with a key to the lock, which was a thoughtful touch. Before Hecuba turned the corner, she allowed herself one glance back at the window where Rushmore stood sentry. The lone candle glinted like a lighthouse on some faraway shore.

  Hecuba shook off the fancy and vanished into the dark
ness.

  Chapter 5

  For the next two days and nights, John lived in a waking dream.

  Memories flashed continually before him: Hecuba’s skin in candlelight, Hecuba swathed in green, her warrior’s poise, her menacing figure as Circe, the sound of her fluent cursing and the taste of her pleasure on his tongue. With these images came other visions, daydreams and allegories, all making his hands itch to be working as he went dazedly through his normal social rounds. He had been inspired after that first kiss—or had it been the second?—but that had been but a pale shadow of the urges that drove him now.

  When on the second evening he found himself seated three rows behind Hecuba at a musicale, he found it difficult to convince himself she was really, physically present and not simply a figment of his overzealous imagination. He spent the whole time staring at the line of her neck and the arrangement of her hair, some complicated whirl of red strands, curled and pinned. Her gown was a delicate ivory and seemed likely to have been originally made for her rosy, dark-haired cousin, as the color made Hecuba herself look wan and ghostly. She disappeared with her aunt and uncle shortly after the performance ended, which only added to John’s impression of otherworldliness. He’d gone home and immediately filled several sheets with images of her turning her head, craning her neck or leaning forward to better hear the music.

  And tonight she was due to return.

  He knew better than to imagine, as some men did, that he could simply slake his desires with one riotous fuck and move on. It would be like a man dying of thirst thinking he could save himself by plunging off a cliff and into the sea—merely a different danger. Nor did he imagine that fucking Hecuba would be anything less than life-changing. She’d nearly sent him up in flames the other night and remembering it only made him burn more. Physical pleasure had not been unknown in his life, but it had never taken him with such force before. He’d poured this longing into his art, and the results had been immeasurably gratifying.

  Of course that begged the question: if he spent all that energy in bed with his muse, would there be any left for his painting?

  It was that fear that had compelled him to remain clothed the other night, even as he had indulged his need to enjoy her, just a little. John knew that he would not be able to resist temptation a second time—especially since the lady herself seemed quite determined to be debauched.

  It was inevitable, John decided at last. He exerted himself to finish as many sketches and studies as he could before the well went dry and decided to paint something wildly ambitious before he let himself burn on the sacrificial pyre.

  So when Hecuba Jones arrived in the north attic on that fateful night, she walked into a room transformed.

  Circe was leaning against one wall, set aside until it had dried enough for John to add finer details and highlights in a richer layer of paint. A stack of prepared canvases lay beside it. Most of the other sketches and papers had been tidied away, so previously mysterious hulks were revealed to be an old desk, an armchair and a divan with fraying upholstery. The green wool blanket from the earl’s study had been spread in the center of the floor and spectacularly lit by the combination of an enormous candelabra and a strategically tilted mirror. A broad basin of water lay at the base of the mirror so that the rippling of the water was reflected back over the wool in waves of eddying light. John was working at his easel, filling in the background—a shadowed forest in green and gray, crowded with mournful willows and ethereal birches. A deep pond lurked ominously on the left-hand side, ringed by a sheltering stand of trees.

  The thief walked over and considered the scene with a wrinkle of her nose. “Tell me you’re not going to turn me into Ophelia.”

  John shook his head. “You don’t strike me as the type to go mad because some waffling prince throws you over.”

  “I’m not,” she replied, her satisfaction evident.

  “You strike me as the type to take what you want, when you want it badly enough,” John continued equably.

  She looked at him with narrowed eyes. John entertained a fleeting notion to paint her as some imperial assassin, sly and strong and bristling with filigreed blades. “That does not sound like a compliment, Rushmore.”

  “But is it inaccurate, Jones?” His name on her lips without the formal prefix caused an alarming surge in his blood—he wanted to confirm the growing intimacy between them, but her Christian name once spoken aloud would ensnare him, he was certain. The more so since her Christian name was so very pagan. He wondered if she had been wild and witchlike from birth or if she had merely felt compelled to live up to the ancient name her parents had given her.

  Hecuba’s mouth turned up at the corners. “Jones,” she repeated. “I quite like that.” Her smile warmed further as she continued to look up at him in the candlelight.

  John’s mouth went dry and he was suddenly intensely conscious of how thin a barrier a mere shirt was against a woman like Hecuba Jones. And this was a virginal Hecuba. What would she be like once she knew precisely what pleasures a man’s body could bring her? John was petrified by the idea, in more than one sense.

  He took a steadying breath and shook off his reverie. He would deal with that complication later. For this last brief window of time, he must think more about art than about her. “I’m going to make you a naiad,” he said.

  She raised a skeptical eyebrow. “A water nymph?”

  “Yes—specifically, the nymph who seduces young Hylas and drowns him while trying to love him.” He pointed toward a mossy bank on the right side of the painting, where a nearly nude youth reclined on one elbow. A leopard skin thrown over his hips was his only concession to decency. His hunter’s spear was tumbling from his hand as he stared in astonished surprise at absolutely nothing on the pond’s edge.

  Hecuba leaned closer to the canvas. “Rushmore,” she said, looking at the painted man’s face, “is that you?”

  John felt a dull flush clamber up the back of his neck at the amusement in her tone. “I hadn’t the time to secure the services of a male model, and I have always been more comfortable painting from life.” He gestured at the figure of Hylas, as if he could wave her knowing glance aside as easily. “I tried to make his features more youthful and perfect than my own, but I’m not quite sure if I succeeded. He needs to be someone worth taking advantage of—someone so helpless and beautiful that abducting him is plausible.”

  Hecuba’s gaze flickered over John from neck to knees. She might as well have run her hand over the length of him, the way his body responded to that look. She turned back to the painting with an air of speculation, as though comparing the nudity there with what John’s current clothing offered. “He doesn’t look helpless: he looks ready,” she said. “Look at the tension in his thighs, the way he’s half-rising from the ground—he isn’t running away, he’s running toward.” She smiled. ”Poor boy.”

  The fond tone and the latent heat in her expression galvanized John. It was just the expression he needed for the painting.

  It also made him want to throw her to the floor and fuck her until she screamed his name.

  But he couldn’t do both—he had to choose one. “I’ve taken the liberty of selecting a costume.”

  She followed him behind the screen, where he’d unearthed a bundle from some long-forgotten theatrical something or other. The gown was a froth of ivory fabric covered with layers of sequins and netting and tulle in shades of teal and turquoise. The whole mess fluttered like a trapped butterfly between his outstretched hands. “It’s a little more complicated than the last one,” he said in apology.

  Hecuba stared at it for a long moment as though he’d offered her a rotten apple from the ground beneath the tree. “No,” she said at last.

  Disappointment pricked at him like a thorn in the side. “Because it makes you look too exposed?” he guessed.

  She rejected that with a most unladylike noise. “Because it’s too ballerina-pretty,” she replied. Her expression was frank. “Do you
want me to be a monster or don’t you?”

  John found himself speechless. Hecuba took the glittering thing from his slackened grip and began turning it this way and that, sifting through the diaphanous layers. “Naiads are supposed to be pretty,” he stammered.

  She made that sound again, an earthy grunt of rejection that against all expectation sent the blood rushing to his cock. “This one is also supposed to be fatal. She pursues her own pleasure to the point where it destroys an innocent young man.” She knelt and spread the costume out on the attic floor then glanced up at him. “May I make some slight alterations?”

  John swallowed half a dozen perilous suggestions for other things she might do from that position. “Please,” he said simply.

  Hecuba gripped one shimmering turquoise panel of tulle and pulled.

  With a shearing sound, the small panel tore away from the rest of the costume. She found more pieces in the same shade, ripped them out and lay them to one side. When she’d found all that she could in the mass of fabric, she put the despoiled garment back behind the screen and took her plundered scraps to the basin beside the mirror.

  With a casual, matter-of-fact gesture, Hecuba pulled her black shirt over her head.

  John stood rooted to the spot.

  She loosened her hair from its chignon, tucking pins into her trouser pocket, until soft waves fell around her shoulders, the ends curling flame-bright against the pale linen of her chemise.

  Breathing became a Herculean labor and John clenched his fists hard enough to drive his own nails into his palms. Only that spike of pain kept him from reaching out for her.

  Hecuba dipped her hands in the basin and ran wet fingers through her hair until the locks were dripping and twisted around one another. Reflected ripples danced over her kneeling form as she picked up the tulle scraps, soaked them and draped them over her upper body—bare shoulders, arms and the long line of her collarbone.