He drew back a few inches and saw panic flare up in her eyes. She might want only an impersonal fuck, but she wanted it very much. “I won’t try to teach you anything. I wouldn’t presume.” He bent to kiss one nipple, just to reassure her of his lustful intent. “But surely there’s some ground for compromise between what you want and what I want.”
“Compromise is but an over-nice way of saying neither person gets what they want. Do that again. This time use your tongue.”
Leverage, finally. “I’ll do it as much as you want.” He retreated to knees and straight arms, too far away to do anything but talk. “After we settle how we’re both to come out of this satisfied.”
Her eyes narrowed. They shifted back and forth, reading his face. “You’ll be satisfied. Have no fear on that count.” Half promise and half threat, the way she said it. “And if you find any hungers unappeased, we’ll do it again, to your taste this time.”
It sounded … so much like a transaction. A trade. She would use him, and then he could use her. Any man might have taken his place, provided the cock was to her liking, and apparently she thought any woman would do just as well for him.
He could refuse. He could clamber over her and right off the bed to where his clothes lay discarded. I’m sorry but this isn’t what I want, he could say while buttoning his breeches over his rampant erection. She would probably throw something at him.
Stop thinking. The woman you want is underneath you with her legs apart. Why in the name of all that is holy do you hesitate? Very well, this round went to her. His eyes still on hers, he lowered his mouth to her other nipple and made a circle round it with his tongue.
She arched to meet his mouth and then sank slowly down, as he followed, until her shoulders lay flat on the mattress. “Yes,” she muttered, eyes fluttering closed. “Good. Now put your cock in me. Anywhere you like.”
Debauched past all redemption. He stroked a hand down her belly, through her maiden hair, to the place where he could make her melt like butter. “Right here is where I like.” His voice descended to a growl. “Where you’re wet for me, and hot. Spread your legs wider.”
She liked that, if he could judge by the shiver that ran through her. And, because she was constitutionally incapable of acceding to any of his commands, she did not spread her legs but rather brought them about, by some miracle of flexibility, until her ankles sat at his shoulders. His cock found the place where she opened to him and he slipped in, all the way in, with no effort at all.
He stayed for a moment, just so. His throat had gone tight and his breath unsteady.
Nearly a year, it had been. Some camp follower in Belgium would have been the last, an anonymous and forgettable encounter that left him vaguely ashamed and not at all satisfied. Then had come that feeling of unfitness; the fear that his darkness, his corrupted soul, might somehow leach out of him to contaminate any woman he touched.
And maybe this was what he’d needed all along. Not a pure-hearted woman who could lift him out of darkness, but one who dwelt there herself. Already corrupted to such a degree that nothing remained to ruin. Incorruptible, now, more incorruptible than the most virtuous maiden.
A furrow traced itself in her brow, above her still-closed eyes. “Hurry,” she said.
He could do that. He half withdrew, and pushed in hard. Her lashes trembled as her hands came up and took hold of his biceps. Again. She tipped her head back, exposing her throat. Once more. Her lips parted and he heard her harsh breaths as he worked to find the right rhythm.
“Lydia, open your eyes,” he whispered on what breath he could spare. “Look at me.”
“No. Harder.” Her lip drew up at one side to show her teeth, again the cornered animal. Her fingers dug into the bunched-up muscles of his arms.
He thrust on, but desolation began to trickle through him in chilly drops, one by one from that icicle of desolation he kept somewhere inside. She didn’t care to look at him, to be with him. He’d thrown away whatever remaining claim to honor he had in order to bed this woman, and he might as well have been with a camp follower again. An imperious, ill-tempered camp follower who meant to leave no doubt of her contempt for him.
“Faster. Don’t slow down.” Her eyes half-opened and glared at him, from between her ankles, without the slightest glimmer of warmth.
Confound her drunken hostility. He would stop this. He would haul himself out of her and flop down beside her and tell her: I’m not your enemy. I’m not your punishment. I won’t play that part for you.
Any minute, he would do that. For now he clenched his teeth to hold back the tide of pleasure and made his strokes swift and shallow.
“Harder. Hurt me.” Her voice was a feral snarl and her face half contorted with loathing.
“I can’t. I don’t want to.” There was a way to ask for such things, and it wasn’t the way she’d just done. He’d tell her so afterward, if she was still inclined to speak to him then. At the moment he couldn’t spare the breath.
She writhed under him and took a new grip on his arms. “You said you’d do what I wanted. My way first, your way after. We agreed.”
His patience snapped, then, and with one monumental effort he halted, half inside her. Her narrowed eyes flew wide with outrage.
“Listen to me.” His chest was heaving and one wrong move would make him spill, but he kept his voice steady. “Against my better judgment and all my principles I am fucking you under your protector’s roof.” One great swallow of air. “I’m plowing you harder than I’ve ever plowed a woman in my life. I’ll probably end with bruises and I won’t be surprised if I make myself ill.” One more lungful. “I’m sorry it’s not enough for you, but this is all you’re getting. I suggest you find a way to like it.”
Her eyes flicked back and forth on his face, as though he were some new adversary whose measure she must take. And devil take her, she got hotter for him. She took her legs from his shoulders to wrap them round his back and tilted her hips to take him deeper. Her whole body roiled under him like molten metal in a blacksmith’s cauldron.
Hell. She’d wanted rude handling and she’d goaded him into it. She had what she wanted and he had … his cock in her hot wet quim. And he was too near his crisis now to complain, particularly as she’d set some muscles in there to doing things he hadn’t even known a woman’s body could do.
Sweet holy mother of … He wasn’t going to last. He would disgrace himself, and leave her wanting. He squeezed his eyes shut, and slitted them open again to see how she arched and gritted her teeth on his every thrust, to see the face that went with those rapturous sounds she was making in her throat. “Come, Lydia. Hurry.” The words rasped out like a death rattle. But at least he was speaking her peremptory tongue.
And this command, thank the fates, she obeyed. She whipsawed under him, head thrown back, and snatched her hand up to her mouth, sinking in her teeth to stifle her cries.
Not a second too soon. Two more thrusts he gave her before climax seized him in its unforgiving talons, bearing him up and away with no regard for his sensibilities, his better nature. This coupling had been so far from what he’d wanted, and pleasure swamped him all the same. He pushed up on straight arms, his head thrown back, and spent himself to the sound of Miss Slaughter’s muffled cries.
He’d never spilled in a woman before. A gentleman always withdrew. This ought to have been … uncharted bliss. Unlooked-for privilege. Something, anything, more than it was.
Pleasure left just enough room for that thought to sidle through. Then pleasure rolled out like a spent ocean wave, and nothing rolled in to take its place. He lifted his body clear of hers and settled to the mattress beside her, limp and unspeaking and utterly barren inside. The whole thing had been just an exercise in her pushing him away. She hadn’t said his name in the end, or if she had, she’d withheld that gratification from him by smothering the syllable with her fist.
He lay on his stomach, head turned away from her, breathing slowly in and out. He
had nothing to say.
Her own breaths sounded behind him, more rapid than they ought to be. She wasn’t relaxed. Perhaps regrets had begun to crash in on her, now she wasn’t addled by lust.
“Have we betrayed someone?” Her words spilled forth with a vehemence that suggested she’d had to launch them before losing her nerve.
“Mr. Roanoke? I think that’s for you to judge.” He turned his head on the pillow. She was staring straight up, tense and unmoving but for the rise and fall of her naked bosom.
She shook her head, lips pressed tight. “I don’t mean him.”
“Someone on my side?” Now he lifted his head, that she might meet his eyes. “There’s no one.” And really, oughtn’t you to have considered this before luring me into bed?
Her eyes cut sideways to him. “There’s a lady who depends on you, I think. For whose sake you want to earn money. I’ve thought she might be the one on whom you called, that day. In Camden Town.”
“No, Lydia. Can you really think I’m the sort of man who—” He stopped. He was the sort of man who took someone else’s woman to bed and used her brutishly. And in regard to Mrs. Talbot, perhaps he was even worse. “The lady you’re thinking of is the widow of one of my men. I promised him I would do what I could for her and their small son. I’d like to see her independent of the relations with whom she now lives. But that’s the whole of it. I don’t think of courting her.”
She’d let down some guard, or maybe the claret had let it down for her. And for a moment he could read her: he saw the shift from trepidation to relief to curiosity in her eyes. “That’s an extraordinary promise for you to make.”
“He was dying.” How much more was he prepared to tell? He knew so many of her secrets—her brother, the loss of her parents, the cad who’d ruined her—and she knew almost nothing of him. “It had been a long day, and a longer night, and I wanted—I wanted to give him what comfort I could.”
“What an honorable man you are.” Her eyes tracked about his face, assessing him all over again. “Not many would make such a promise, let alone strive to fulfill it.”
He couldn’t say more, after that. Honorable man crawled over his skin like a centipede. And what if she was still feeling the effects of the claret? She might receive his story one way now; another way altogether when she woke clearheaded.
She watched him, calm and patient, willing to hear whatever he said and equally willing to bear his silence. Where the devil had this woman been ten minutes ago? Where did she go when that hissing, spitting succubus usurped her body?
For an instant he thought of gathering her in and demanding his turn, his way, as she’d agreed to. But now he’d been sated there was no clamorous appetite to shout his conscience down, and his conscience had a litany to deliver.
He permitted himself one touch: a hand sent out to smooth her hair. “Go to sleep now, Lydia. You’ve had a long day.” He pushed himself from the bed, and went to put out the candles.
THE DREAMS came again, more fiercely than ever. Gunshots. The terrible scream of a horse. Shouting in the darkness outside, and the bang of the coach door yanked open.
Every bit as fierce, though, was the watchful presence beside her, who hauled her out of each dream before the images could progress any further. He pulled her against him, and mopped her forehead with a corner of the sheet, and said things. Lydia, he said. Sweetheart, he called her at least once. You’re safe here. I won’t let anything hurt you. Because he believed the dreams were about herself.
He might have run from her after the coupling, but he hadn’t. He knew of her coarse impatient self-obliterating hungers now. He’d glimpsed the appalling depths of her need. And he’d gone with her into those depths, absorbing every bit of her fury because he was a man of limitless strength, limitless patience, limitless understanding for the frailties of others.
His forehead touched her hair in back. His breath warmed the nape of her neck. He kept an arm over her, as he’d done the night before, though now no nightclothes came between them. Every time she woke, the feel of his naked skin astonished her anew.
Lydia blinked her eyes open. Was it morning? Her head hurt. She oughtn’t to have drunk so much claret.
They hadn’t pulled the curtains last night and now a whisper of light permeated the room. Morning, in strictest terms. But they needn’t rise for hours.
The alertness of his muscles told her he was awake, even as his stillness told her what care he took to keep from waking her. His erection told her how they might pass the time before breakfast, if they so chose.
His arm stirred. His hand found hers, under the covers, and he threaded their fingers together. He knew she was awake.
Some time this morning she would have to confront the consequences of what she’d done. But not yet. She had a distraction in her bed, a magnificent willing distraction who was not promised to any lady anywhere, and she would forget herself entirely with him. She drew his hand up and set it on her breast, her nipple meeting the center of his palm.
He sighed, the sigh of a man who’d lain for long minutes just waiting for a lady to wake up and put her breast in his hand. “How is your head this morning?” He made his voice soft, to spare her. His palm bestowed a slight, sweet friction that made her nipple draw tight.
“It’s rather poor.” He wouldn’t decide he must leave her alone, would he? “Other parts of me fare better.”
She felt a thrumming in his chest, laughter so deep and private it didn’t need to come out into air. “Other parts of you can fare better still if you wish it.” His palm skated over her nipple, striking sparks as it went.
Yes. It was prayer and exultation. Yes yes yes yes yes. “What parts did you have in mind?”
“I shall have to review them and consider.” A soft, unexpected touch: his lips just behind and below her ear. “Turn this way.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Let me see you.”
She rolled onto her back and he pushed up on one elbow. His face in the pale bare light of morning took her breath away. Those dark thick brows that gave him such a serious aspect; the eyes colored like strong coffee; his cheeks rough with the stubble of a beard, and all of it limned with unmistakable purpose. His hand left her breast to tug the covers down, baring her to somewhere near mid-thigh. Baring him as well: she could see the distribution of dark hairs over his chest, the ridges of his collarbone, the place where his ribcage gave way to the first course of flat muscle that continued down his stomach. These subtler details had escaped her notice last night.
His hand came back to her breast, this time to take the nipple between thumb and middle finger. His eyes rose to hers. He wanted to watch her pleasure.
His mouth tautened into a straight line of concentration as he stroked the pad of his thumb slowly back and forth. When she swallowed, his eyes flicked to her throat. “Do you like this?” he murmured.
A shiver went through her. He’d used that same voice last night to ask a similar question. Is this what you want? he’d said, standing before her in all his unbuttoned splendor. A Catholic nun could not have said no.
“Do you?” He whispered the words as his fingers gave a slight squeeze.
“Yes. Harder.” Her breath was beginning to shorten.
He shook his head, the corner of his mouth ticking up. “My way this time, remember? No ordering me about. I place an embargo on the word harder.” His thumb resumed stroking, more slowly than before and with barely any pressure at all.
This would kill her. “What if I beg? Instead of ordering.”
His brows twitched together; his eyes told her he was imagining the idea thoroughly. “It will have no effect,” he said nevertheless. “I have a program in mind and I mean to follow it.”
Panic drove pinpricks all up and down her spine. She knew how to lie back and take whatever a man cared to give her. There were ways to retreat deep inside one’s body, beyond the reach of what went on; there were ways to stand one’s ground and wrest pleasure from the jaws of degrad
ation. Even last night she’d managed him like any other man, taking what she wanted while holding him an arm’s length away.
But she’d woken in his embrace, tired and warm and wide open to him. She’d misplaced her armor in the night and it might be too late to retrieve it now.
“Don’t worry.” He could feel her agitation. “It’s an excellent program. You’ll enjoy it.”
“Sure of yourself, aren’t you?” She would not flinch. She would not writhe, though he’d moved his hand to the other nipple and commenced his same slow torture there. “I should think I’d be the one to say whether or not I enjoy it.” She swallowed again.
“You’re so sensitive.” An awestruck address to her bosom, heedless of the words she’d just spoken. “I’m barely even touching you and you’re on fire. Why do you insist that everything be so hard and fast and brutal when the slightest pressure sends you to the stars?”
“Because I like it that way.” Maybe she could writhe a bit. It wasn’t as though her stillness would fool him into thinking her unmoved.
“You like it this way too.” He flicked at her with a fingernail.
“Yes.” An undulation wove through her, from her toes all the way to the top of her head. “Slide that hand lower and see just how much I like it.”
“Not a bashful bone in your body, is there?” His mouth curved, its lopsidedness dizzyingly sensual somehow. “Patience, Lydia.” He reached across her, balanced his palm on the mattress, and lowered his mouth to her breast.
A short keening cry drove itself out from her lungs. His tongue on her nipple was fire itself.
He lifted his head just enough to look in her eyes. His own were dark and fierce with the primal triumph of a man who had made a woman make that sound. “You could convince the greenest schoolboy to think himself a virtuoso lover,” he said. “No wonder your man wanted me to put up three hundred pounds for you.”
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