“You seemed to enjoy her,” Alexa returned a trifle tartly. “But to be honest, your performance with me did not match that earlier one. I was disappointed.”
“You were far too argumentative to please me as well as Maddalena did, I’m afraid, and if you expect a better performance from me tonight you should try harder to excite me instead of boring me with your damned chattering!” Without warning Alexa found herself on her back as he withdrew himself from her, only to sit astride her and trap one of her hands in his. “Let me demonstrate to you, my sweet, what might have happened if I’d let Dawes at you first. And be quiet, or...”
She had to bite down on her lip in order not to let him hear her scream out loud with outrage as he used the soft leather straps that Dawes had thoughtfully left attached to the bedposts in order to secure her wrists above her head. Then he let his hands slide down her body in a leisurely and almost possessive fashion, lingering over her breasts for a moment or two before moving downward. Instinctively, angrily, Alexa pressed her thighs together. “Whatever you think you might achieve by the use of force... Stop!” She kicked at him, trying to aim at the most vulnerable parts of his body. Tried to, until he had her ankles secured as well, to leave her open and helpless and now, at last, watchfully silent.
“I do not think, sweet slut, that I will need to use force on you. Why should I? But you have a sweet body that I would like to explore and use as I please, without restraint. And I should hate to have to go to the trouble of gagging you; so perhaps you will attempt to restrain yourself from crying out too loudly?” To add to her almost unbearable sense of frustration he left her there spread out on the bed while he proceeded to add more coals to the fire and then light up another of his “cigars,” dragging deeply on it before he came back to stand looking down at her in a strangely disturbing manner before he said politely, “You’ll join me in indulging?” And leaning down over her, held it to her lips with one hand while with the other he began to caress her with deceptive gentleness.
Even with her eyes squeezed tightly shut Alexa could almost see as well as feel the dark ocean-blue that surrounded her as she rose and sank and rose and sank like a rudderless ship controlled by the wind alone and by the way he was touching her, taking infinite time with her, just as if he had been an explorer who had discovered some new world that might be worth conquering. She felt as if she were a block of marble being sculpted into a statue, the sculptor’s chisel forming every outline of muscle and vein and curve and hollow. And like a tautly spread canvas soaking up a painter’s first light brushstrokes before he added, as he grew more confident, another and yet another layer until she was his picture, his marble statue, his conquered new continent.
There was no help for it, Alexa tried to tell herself. She was a helpless victim, subject to whatever torment he decided to inflict on her. And yet, when his hands molded her flesh, his ringers traced teasing patterns over her skin, his lips and tongue tasted her and tested her endurance she wanted more. Cruelly, calculatedly, he made her want and then need the fulfillment he had made her crave. No longer ruled by reason, but by her senses alone, Alexa had never been so utterly, totally conscious of her body until now, when he had made her so. Or of feeling so acutely, with every inch of her burning, achingly sensitive skin, so many different kinds of touches and textures. And never before had she given herself up so unreservedly to sensation and pure sensuality and to her own sexuality.
There was no world but this bedroom, no time but now, and nothing she wanted more than this exquisite agony and exquisite pleasure mixed together. She wanted to experience everything, to know everything, to feel everything. To watch him make love to her body and to explore his in the same way. There was a mirror set cunningly into the molded ceiling above the bed, Alexa discovered when she slowly opened her eyes. Why hadn’t she taken notice of it before? Pinned down in the center of the blue velvet twilight, the reflected image of her own body seemed to gleam back at her, sprawled across the white bedsheets, pale as ivory in contrast with his sun browned skin and dark head that was bent to her. She heard herself gasp and then moan out loud as she writhed against the sheets and against the straps that held her pinioned, forgetful of aching muscles and chafed skin and everything but a rising, expanding urgency that grew and kept growing until it was all she knew and all she felt.
Alexa’s gasping moans had quickened until she was almost sobbing, and her head thrashed from side to side. “Please, Nicholas. Oh, please, I...I want...” Her voice was a strained and almost incoherent whisper forced out of her without her volition. “Please. No! Don’t...!”
If she could have done so Alexa would have pounded frantically at his chest when his body slid deliberately and teasingly up the length of hers until he had positioned himself between her thighs and she could feel the poised, hard length of him against her there and cried out again when he held her face between his palms and began to kiss her lightly while he whispered between kisses: “Have I made you want me, my sweet captive vixen? My lovely, corrupt Alexa—how easily and how sweetly you yield, and tempt, and plead. But for what, mi corazon? What do you desire? Tell me, Alexa. Open your eyes into mine when you tell me if you’re willing to be my little whore for tonight—for a whore’s price. And will you, my sweet?”
“Yes!” she sobbed out. “Yes, and I want you too! Damn you, Nicholas Dameron! I want you inside me—I want you to... I want you, do you understand? I...”
“This is what you want? And this?” Alexa’s neck arched backward as a primitive, almost animal sound broke from her throat, and her indrawn breath seemed to have become trapped somewhere inside her body; deep inside her, as he was now, filling her so completely that there was no more room anywhere inside her—no empty spaces—ah, not even her mouth any longer as his possessed it fiercely and she was the center, the vortex of a whirlwind and only motion existed and she suddenly became the wind itself—a tightly wrapped spiral whirling higher and higher and higher until she whirled about the sun and became a billion glittering, scattered fragments of light falling through the sky as slowly as eternity.
Ripple after ripple of feeling made Alexa’s body shake spasmodically for a long time afterwards, and she could not remember when he had finally slipped the straps from about her wrists until she realized that she was clinging tightly to him, as if she wished to clasp his body even more closely against hers.
“Don’t go away from me yet; I want you to keep holding me,” Alexa murmured protestingly when he disengaged her clinging arms. And then when she felt him free her ankles at last she said: “I suppose I’m all bruised now, you heartless brute! You did not have to go so far as to tie me down in order to do what you just did, you know, not after I had given in.”
“But I wanted more than ‘giving in’ from you, mi tesoro. I wanted you the way you were. Do you understand? Wanting and lusting and wild with longing, and that is how I had you in the end and will always have you whenever I feel so inclined. Have you learned that yet, bruja?”
Lifting her arms, Alexa slid her palms along his back with lingering slowness while she let a languorous smile curve her lips. “Oh, yes! And I’ve learned also that you want me just as much—which is only fair, is it not, my scowling demon-lover? And have you enjoyed my body as much as I enjoyed yours? Nicholas, I think I’d like very much to touch your body everywhere as you touched mine, and to make you want me all over again so that we could... Ah!” Suddenly tightening her arms about his neck, Alexa reached up to kiss his taut, unsmiling mouth before she lay back again and whispered: “Since I’m your more than willing whore tonight, you should let me try and prove that I am worth the price you offered to pay for my services, shouldn’t you? And if I can please you more than once, perhaps you’ll hire me again for another night or two?”
“Do you know, you taunting temptress-bitch, how many times tonight I have come close to choking you to death? Be careful with your barbed and teasing promises, sweet Alexa, in case I hold you to them and keep you locked
in here naked and available to serve my needs at any time and in any fashion I wish! You might not enjoy being used and being forced to cater to my desires without yours being of any consideration at all to me. So, for your own sake, try not to provoke me any further, in case I make you sorry.”
The abrasively warning note underlying the words he snarled down into her face should have made her thoughtful enough to lose at least some of her newly acquired brazenness, Nicholas thought wrathfully as he wrenched himself free of her false, clinging arms and the lying, suggestive invitation of her silk-skinned body pressing against his with bold, open wantonness while she whispered in a voice as warm and sweet as honey of being his willing whore and of showing him the ways she had learned of pleasing a man. How quickly and easily she gave way to the innate sensuality of her nature, and how dared she blame him for it! With long, angry strides he crossed the room and snatched up a bottle of wine, tilting his head back to pour cool, gold liquid down his throat straight from the bottle itself, like a Spanish peasant. Cleansing the taste of her from his tongue and erasing the feel and the textures of her from his lips. “I have learned that you want me just as much...” she had murmured, discovering his weakness as unerringly as any experienced harlot, curse her! And no wonder, considering her real origins.
“Are you going to finish all the wine without offering me any?” Although he kept his back turned to her Nicholas could not help but watch her in the mirror and see how she stretched with lazy, catlike satisfaction before sitting up against the bedhead with her legs crossed, not making any attempt to cover herself, even when she suddenly met his angry eyes in the mirror and smiled teasingly instead of cowering. “You are very much like a fierce, wild satyr when you are naked, you know. Most men are not as beautifully formed as you are under their clothes. I noticed your body that first time that I saw you in the Governor’s pool, but I would have been far too shy to admit it then, of course. I didn’t know anything at all at that time. Just think, if I had never met you I might actually have been married off to some dull young planter or civil servant or...or even worse!” Alexa gave a small shudder. “And then...” She looked back at his frozen reflection in the blue-edged mirror and said in a softer voice: “Then I might always have felt stifled, and even worse, might not even have known why! Nicholas? I am not provoking you by speaking honestly to you, am I? Have you decided yet what you are going to do with me now that you have me here at your mercy?” The way she deliberately and languorously stretched her arms above her head so that her perfectly formed, pointed breasts invited attention was, he told himself disagreeably, another typical whore’s trick. First she had protested against everything and pretended to resist; and now, quite suddenly, it was quite the other way around and she was not only yielding but eager for more, the unpredictable little bitch.
Without saying a word to her, Nicholas drank again before he slammed the bottle down on the table, making the blue-shaded lamp tremble and the flame waver. Why should her calculated babble of words that were meant to disarm him have any effect on him? And why should he give a damn how many naked men she had seen and made love to—for experience— Hadn’t that been her ridiculous excuse? The fact was...
Warm bare arms encircled him from behind, and a warm naked body pressed closely against his back. He felt the soft, practiced touch of her lips on his shoulder before Alexa laid her cheek against it and said questioningly: “Why won’t you speak to me? Why do you always seem so angry with me every time we meet? And are you tired of me already or...or only embarrassed because you find that you cannot...? If that is all...”
“Alexa!” His voice held such cold menace that it silenced her and held her still. His fingers closed over her wrists and wrenched her arms apart before he released them and turned to face her, looking into her upturned, unflinching face and those witch-dark eyes that could be as opaque as slate or as deeply unfathomable as wells a man wanted to dive into, even if he might be lost forever in their cold, still depths. To Nicholas, fixing his eyes on her parted lips was both safer and wiser. Sweet, lying mouth still red from his kisses. The mouth of a whore. Before she could speak again he brushed the back of one hand across her mouth with careful, deceptive gentleness, leaving his fingers for long enough against her lips to feel the agitated flutter of her breath before he handed her the bottle of wine. “Do you need a glass, querida? Or are you daring enough to drink this slightly warm wine from the bottle, as I did?” He watched her glance at him somewhat doubtfully before she gave an insouciant shrug and tilted the bottle cautiously to her lips. Then he said, his voice steel blades sheathed in velvet: “You have succeeded in making me feel rather guilty, you know. And of course your mouth—especially as I watch you with your head tilted back as you enjoy that wine from the bottle—how could I not remember your mouth as pure pleasure and delight?” He smiled at her quite pleasantly as Alexa lowered the bottle, almost choking over the last swallow she had taken, and removed it firmly from her hand before he slid his hands up her arms to her shoulders, pulling her against him for a moment as he kissed her lingeringly but without passion of any kind.
When he lifted his head and held her away from him with his hands still holding her, Alexa tried to search his eyes; but they looked only at her mouth, and she tried to keep her lips from trembling when she said, “Nicholas...?” She wanted to be brave enough to let her thoughts tumble from her tongue as they flashed through her mind.
To say wisely and sanely, Why do we constantly try to hurt and scar each other like duelists in order to hide the truth? But in the end, as his ringers tightened over her shoulders and he looked at her at last, she said nothing, reading his dark thoughts through his eyes.
“I think you’ve made me yearn for the open, passionate rose of your mouth that promised me anything a short time ago and invites me to want everything now, Alexa, except speech. Now, and here, and in this manner.”
Chapter 41
Mr. Edwin Jarvis’s little offices at Lincoln’s Inn Fields had always seemed cozy and cheerful with the homelike touches added by his wife of fresh flowers in pottery vases and embroidered samplers on the walls; and there was always a teakettle on the simmer in one corner of the anteroom for waiting clients who might enjoy a cup of China tea with plenty of sugar and fresh cream, and shortbread biscuits to nibble on if they were hungry. Today, because it was grey and chilly outside with a sharp wind blowing, there was a small fire leaping merrily in the grate with a gaily colored crocheted rug thrown before it to cover the worn spots in the old carpeting; and a beaming young clerk led Alexa to the comfortable settle set at right angles to the fire, so that she could keep warm.
“I’ll just pop my head in and tell Mr. Jarvis you’re here, Lady Travers, although he does have another client with him at the moment, I’m afraid. If I had known that he was expecting you I would have made a point of reminding him.”
“He wasn’t expecting me. I suppose it was an impulse of mine, since I happened to be in the neighborhood and remembered that I had been wishing to speak quite urgently to Mr. Jarvis on several of my business matters. But if he is very busy, of course...”
“Oh, no, no, Lady Travers, I am quite sure he will want to see you as soon as he is... That is, if you would not mind...? I’m sure he won’t be more than another fifteen minutes at the most. I’ll tell Mr. Jarvis you’re here now, and...”
Lady Travers, Mr. Meeks thought, wasn’t looking at all her usual self this afternoon, poor young lady. Quite peaked, she looked, with those dark rings under her eyes as if she hadn’t slept a wink all night, and even her voice had sounded strangely lifeless. He’d brought her a cup of nice hot tea, but although she’d managed a smile and thanked him for it, he could not help noticing, whenever he glanced up from his ledgers, that she hadn’t taken one sip yet. Just kept staring into the fire as if she could see something in there....
She could see almost too much, her wide, unseeing eyes remaining fixed as if mesmerized by the constantly changing pattern and move
ment of dancing flames as her mind ran backward. Pictures—voices—words. A series of kaleidoscopic scenes, changing and running into each other, some of them etched in blue. Changing... Even her feelings kept changing, and her mind, until she no longer knew what to think or what she should do, or even what she wanted.
Want. Why must she remember herself saying it out loud last night? Alexa’s pale cheeks flushed without her being aware of it. “I want you... and I know that you want me just as much...” she had said, and had proved it to both of them quite shamelessly. But was it only because she had played the whore so well and so willingly that he had wanted her again—and yet again. “You should have been a waterfront doxy, servicing your customers in doorways and behind bales of cargo and making sure each one is satisfied as quickly as possible so that you can go on to the next.” He had growled the words at her in an ugly voice, but the next moment he had pulled her up savagely by the hair to meet his punishing mouth before he carried her back to bed.
It had seemed, at least to her, as if some part of the barrier between them had crumbled after that, and there was suddenly no more need for hard and hateful words and actions meant both to punish and to defend. To her, Alexa thought again, and the thought was as bitter as gall to swallow. Perhaps he had merely decided to try different tactics meant to lull her into confiding in him and trusting him. But then, how was she to know? How could she begin to think in a clear and detached manner when she hadn’t yet learned to sweep unwanted thoughts and images from her mind?
“Shake the kaleidoscope, Alexa, and now look through it again. What do you see?” How old had she been when Sir John had given her that most marvelous toy? It was almost as much fun as the horse. So many different colors and patterns, and her imagination could turn them into anything in the world she wanted to see.
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