by Moriah Jovan
Building, building. Just as she began to slip into orgasm, he held back, making her nearly cry with frustrated joy. “Sebastian,” she whispered, agonized. “Please.”
“Please what?” he whispered back.
Eilis arched her back in an attempt to draw him closer, to persuade him to release her tension for her, but he held back. A low moan escaped her when he began to move again, grateful for anything he would give her until she sucked in a sharp, surprised gasp: Sebastian had sneaked up on her and she began to come when she least expected it and oh, it was divine—
—Sebastian grasped her buttocks and pushed her back against the wall, his hand up high on the wall, supporting himself. He crushed her mouth with his while he thrust into her, coming with a tortured groan that Eilis heard as harmony to the melody of her own moan of utter bliss as she came with him.
Finally, Eilis opened her eyes and stared at him as water sluiced over his head, down his face, making his skin glisten. His ice blue eyes had darkened to violet and he watched her intently, a small smile on his face that made him look like an ordinary man. She smiled at him, then, delighted that he was just an ordinary man, not King Midas and not Ford.
Neither said anything for a while, listening to the sound of running water and feeling it drench them, looking into each others’ eyes and feeling each others’ bodies. Finally, the water that ran down Eilis’s face had nothing to at all to do with what was coming out of the showerhead.
Then he murmured, “Was that Sebastian or Ford?”
“There is no Ford,” she whispered in return, choking. “Only you.” She held his face between her hands just to look at him, to study him.
He stared at her. “Are you crying?” he asked, wondrous.
“Yes,” she replied, then laughed through it. “That was the first time I have ever made love, Sebastian. It was the most joyous experience I have ever had. What blessed magic have you worked on me?”
“What magic have you worked on me, Eilis Hilliard?”
She swallowed, another first bursting in her soul: The first time she liked hearing her birth name, because it had been said by Sebastian and Sebastian took pain away.
He pulled her away from the wall. Still inside her, her legs wrapped around him, he turned off the shower and carried her to his bed. He turned and sat, then lay back so that she was on top of him, straddling him. She felt him harden again inside her again.
“I want to paint you like this,” he whispered. “On top of me, with me inside you. I want to see you pregnant with a child I put there, my child, and paint you like that.”
Her eyes widened and she sucked in a breath. “You didn’t use a condom.”
“No, I didn’t, and I have never not used a condom in my entire life.”
“Why?” she whispered.
“Didn’t want to litter the world with a bunch of little me’s that I’d never know about. I never intended to use a condom with you.”
“You want to get me pregnant,” she murmured, slow.
“Yes.”
“Pregnancy results in things that are a tad more long-lasting than an architecturally interesting belly. What would you do with them?”
“Love them,” he said simply. “I left my childhood religion behind long ago, but one thing I do know is that the Man who created this—”
He gestured to her body, running his hands down her ribs, inspecting her with both a lover’s and an artist’s eye, with awe and reverence. He hefted her generous breasts and laid his palm flat on her flatter-than-before belly and swept down, caressing the hair of her pubis. His hands gripped her generous hips and still he studied her, his gaze caressing every part he touched as he touched it.
“The Man who created this is a master artist and craftsman and he loves and is in love with a Woman, a fertility goddess. He loves her so much that he wanted to immortalize her. So he made you, a replica of her, his woman, in all the variations he could think of. And because you are his tribute to his Goddess, he loved you and he loved you so much that he made you his assistant. And as his assistant, he trusted you with his best work, which is Homo sapiens.
“There is a Woman, the Fertility Goddess. The Master Artist, her lover, worships at her feet, and whatever he gives her, she gives to us, her children. The only thing I can do as a man and as an artist is attempt to outline a child’s character—to pencil sketch what I see and set the child loose to finish the painting himself. The sketch will tell me when my part is finished and to let the child have the brushes, even when my mind, my heart, tell me I’m not ready to let him make free with the paint.
“I want to make and raise children with you, Eilis. I want to bind you to me forever.”
Tears ran down her face at his reverent soliloquy. She throbbed with the passion he infused through her, the spirituality that ran so deep it couldn’t be seen unless he chose to show it.
She swallowed. “Sebastian, I’m forty-one and I— I don’t even know if I want children. I don’t— Not because I don’t like children, but I don’t know what kind of mother I’d be. Maybe not a very good one, I think.”
He looked at her for a long time and she was afraid to look away in case she would blink and he would be gone. “Eilis,” he said, “I don’t agree you wouldn’t be a good mother, but I love you. I’ll take you any way I can get you and if that means no children, that’s what that means.” He lay his hand flat over the tiny pooch of her belly again and caressed it. “You are my fertility goddess and if the only way I can immortalize you as the Master immortalized his Goddess is to paint you, then I’ll take it and be grateful for it.”
* * * * *
66: LE CYGNE
“Why didn’t we sleep in the bed downstairs?” Eilis asked late the next day as they ate together in what Sebastian called the conference room. She wore one of Sebastian’s Oxford shirts and nothing else.
Sebastian wore only a pair of very short cutoff jeans shorts that rode low on his hips and showed off his body in a way Eilis had never seen it. He hadn’t bothered to button the fly and she couldn’t keep her eyes off the trail of black hair that disappeared into the V of the plackets. He took her breath away.
He caught her staring and cast her a wickedly lusty grin. “Giselle calls this my Parisian peacock look.”
Eilis laughed, delighted, because it was true. “I could look at that for a while.”
Chuckling, he said, “The bed up here, where we slept last night, is where I sleep alone, where I dress, where I get ready for the day’s business. I have never had a woman in that bed before you and I wanted our first time together to be in that room, Sebastian’s room.”
Eilis blushed and felt warmth suffuse her.
“The one downstairs is for love and sex and fucking. I’ve never slept in that bed alone.” Eilis’s smile dimmed a bit, but he went on in a wry tone, “It seems my family makes frequent use of it. Apparently, my cousins who know I’m Ford bring their spouses on a rotating schedule timed for my out-of-town trips. I came home early from Italy and caught Giselle and Kenard in flagrante delicto.”
“They slept in your bed?” she asked, aghast.
“No, they didn’t sleep in it,” he grumbled. “That’s my point. Mind you,” he added, “that’s going to stop because I don’t intend to sleep upstairs again anytime soon. I haven’t slept in that bed for five years and I’ll be damned if I just turn it over to my family.”
Eilis’s eyes widened. “Five years?”
He nodded. “Yep. Giselle is the only woman I’ve painted nude in all that time and there was nothing arousing about it. It was a statement on her conflicted sexuality, so it doesn’t count.”
“Why haven’t I met her yet?”
“You have. She’s the Virgin.”
“That’s Giselle? The one Fen’s terrified of?”
“Yes.”
“Oh,” she breathed, re-experiencing the warmth and love the Virgin had surrounded her with. “She’s wonderful.”
There was a pause and
Eilis looked up to see him studying her with an inscrutable expression. “How do you mean?”
“She took care of me that night,” she said, clearing her throat, remembering. “She put a robe on me and helped me to the shower. She brushed and braided my hair. She took me home and undressed me and tucked me in bed. She took my painting down off the wall and put it on the floor, face to the wall, so I wouldn’t have to see it when I went to sleep and woke up.”
Sebastian was dumbstruck. “Giselle did that?”
“Yes. She stayed the night in another room. She took care of me the next day, too. She cooked for me. She rocked me and sang me lullabies, and I poured out my soul to her and she held me while I cried on her shoulder, and she cried with me. She brought me dinner in bed. For a week, she was the mother I never had.
“She wouldn’t tell me her name. I never called her anything. We didn’t talk a lot. We did a jigsaw puzzle together that first day. Her husband came every night to sleep with her because he couldn’t stand to sleep alone. He brought more puzzles. And it didn’t matter that I didn’t know who they were. All I knew was that she took care of me until I could do it myself. I never met the Giselle you talk about and even her husband called her ‘warrior queen.’ I don’t understand that.”
“Sometimes,” he said slowly, “I think Giselle has no place in this world. She takes the church seriously, but she’s steeped in the eastern ideas of war and honor and justice, and she’s sensual to her core. She doesn’t even try to reconcile them all and she won’t choose one over the other, so they’ve torn her apart most of her life.”
“I never saw the warrior.”
Sebastian took a deep breath and stared at her for a long time as if trying to decide what to say. “Giselle is the one Fen referred to as his daughter.”
Eilis felt the bottom drop out of her world and her breath catch in her chest. She wondered if she would ever be able to breathe again. “I— I told her everything, all about my life,” she whispered, swallowing, panicking. “Things I’ve never told anybody, things I don’t ever want to talk about again. What must she think?”
“She apparently thought enough of you to knock Fen senseless and break Trudy’s face,” he muttered. “She didn’t want me to bring you to me that night. She really tried to talk me out of it, but I didn’t listen to her and I played on her sense of obligation to me and guilt to make her do it. I wasn’t at all honorable about it. Before she took you home, she came up here and chewed my ass but good. She told me what to do to salvage that mess I made, but I didn’t listen to her. She hasn’t spoken a civil word to me since.”
Eilis blinked. “She— I don’t understand why she’d care for me, defend me. She doesn’t know me.”
He shrugged. “That Giselle you described to me, who cared for you and cried with you? I don’t know her. I can’t tell you why she did what she did. Knox would know.” His voice had a strange hollowness she didn’t understand and she looked up at him, but he looked away from her. She didn’t press the point.
“Her and Fen—”
He cleared his throat. “We never understood her relationship with him until you said he had another daughter. Fen respects her, loves her in his sick and twisted way, but he’s always resented that he couldn’t control her the way he controlled Knox. They always got along well as long as Fen amused her and hadn’t pissed her off, which he did a lot. I’m positive that Fen doesn’t care that she beat the hell out of him. His punishment is that he can’t redeem himself in her eyes now.”
“She would forgive him trying to kill her but not for having abandoned me?”
“She can take care of herself and she has all the power their relationship. An abandoned child can’t take care of itself; it has no power.”
Eilis’s head swum and she laid her forehead in her palm.
“I’m so confused. She was so gentle.”
“You’ll have to introduce me to that woman some time. I’d like to meet her.”
“But her husband knows this.”
“He would have to, I guess.”
“She calls him Ares.”
Sebastian gave a short laugh. “The god of war. He caught her where she lives and breathes, which is on the battlefield and as far as I can tell, their bed is their battlefield.”
Eilis could feel the heat rising up in her face. “When they were at my house, I heard them. He’s— When they— Um . . . ”
“Vicious?”
“Yes. It bothered me. Well, bothers me. I— No, I hate it,” she burst out. “He’s twice her size. I thought he would— I almost called the police.”
“Given what David did to you, I can understand why that shook you up.” He paused. “That’s who they are, Eilis. It was what Giselle was looking for and it works for them. They don’t act that way outside the bedroom and you caught them in a private moment, so . . . ”
Eilis digested this for a moment, recalling how Ares—Bryce—had tiptoed around her that week as if afraid he might say or do the wrong thing, but always helpful, always thoughtful.
She sighed and admitted, “He was very kind to me. I shouldn’t have let that color my view of him— Of them.”
“He makes Giselle happy. He’s Knox’s best friend. He fits in with the tribe and he’s become a good friend to me, so that’s really all I care about.”
She took a deep breath. “What did Trudy do to Knox?”
“Kicked him out of the house with nothing but the clothes on his back. He was fifteen.”
Eilis sighed. Her mother hadn’t wanted either of the children she bore; she just couldn’t dispose of the second as easily as she had the first.
“It wasn’t as bad as it sounds,” he added, as if reading her mind. “He went to live with Aunt Lilly and Giselle. I mean, it wasn’t like he didn’t have anywhere to go. He was the golden boy of the tribe. Good kid, did what he was told, didn’t drink or smoke or do drugs—basically your regulation Mormon kid in spite of Trudy. Cheerful, optimistic no matter what. He liked going to church and someone in the tribe made sure he got there every week, without fail. Sometimes Oliver would take him if he wasn’t busy. Wanted to go on a mission. Trudy made sure he was educated and cultured. And he had an adventurous streak I’d compare to Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn.”
A faint sadness underpinned Sebastian’s matter-of-factness.
“What happened to him?” she asked softly, although she had a pretty good idea and Sebastian’s next words confirmed it.
“Losing that trial. He was fresh out of law school, naïve and he had to study things—photos, autopsy reports, you know—that no human should ever have to know exist. It did something to him— I don’t know how to put it. It raped his personality. His joie de vivre was gone. He was never the same after that and he . . . lost it. Totally spiraled out of control. He’s a completely different person now.”
“I remember the news then,” Eilis said softly. She would never forget the publicity that surrounded him at the time. “That’s when I found out I had a brother. After that, I always paid attention if I heard his name.” She had never wanted to believe— Yet she was glad that— “Knox didn’t really . . . ?”
Sebastian raised his eyebrow at her. “Sometimes what’s moral and just is very, very ugly.”
“Did your church teach you that?”
“Shit, no. It’s one big reason why I left.”
She hesitated. “So . . . David—?”
“Eilis, we do what we think is right. No, I haven’t done a lot of the things Knox and Giselle have done, but don’t doubt for a minute I wouldn’t. I carry on the off chance Fen comes after me, but I haven’t had to use a gun since I was a teenager and I certainly haven’t been presented with the situations Knox and Giselle have. We—the three of us—are a pack of fighters and we believe in justice at all costs. Then we got Kenard, who’s just as ruthless, with his own brand of justice.”
Sebastian studied her for a long moment until she squirmed. Then he opened his mouth and said, very deliberately,<
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“And now we have you.”
Her eyes widened.
“I’ve never met anyone with an iron will like yours, Eilis,” he said with reverence. “Very few people in the world could build something like HRP, beating Fen back at every turn. You stayed with a man who’d raped you so you could save your company and the livelihoods and life savings of two hundred and fifty people. You sold your paintings to keep those people employed. How you handled Fen in New York was magnificent. If that’s a glimpse of the ruthless bitch I’d heard about, then I’d sure like to see more of her come out to play.”
Then she realized: Sebastian Taight—King Midas—didn’t simply love her, desire her, want children with her; he respected her as a businesswoman, a fighter. Eilis thought she’d never catch a breath.
He stood then and held his large hand out. She put hers in it and felt his fingers close around hers gently to pull her up and out of the chair, then to the basement door. He led her down to the studio where she’d found shame in her fantasy and for betraying the real man. He flipped some switches so that they had enough light to see their way to that decadent bedroom.
“Do you remember,” he murmured as he led her into his other bedroom, and she began to feel desire course through her when she understood that he was bringing her into Ford’s bed now that she’d been in Sebastian’s, “at Christmas when I told you you’d understand why I didn’t want to play my favorite music for you when you heard it?”
“I remember.”
“Have you ever listened to it?”
“I didn’t remember the title.”
Sebastian held her hand as she climbed up the step stool into the bed, then he closed the velvet and chiffon drapes surrounding it before getting in the other side. She gasped as the first chord rang out. Sebastian sat cross-legged on the bed, then reached out for her.
Sebastian ran his hands through her long blonde hair and he pulled her close so that she was lying on her belly, looking up at him; she had never had to look up to look him in the eye.