“Yes, I enjoyed that,” he said. “I didn’t think I would do so, but…the blindfold forced me to concentrate on you even more.” She squeezed him more firmly in an irregular rhythm, and he gasped with each constriction. “Oh! The softness of your…skin and…your scent and all the…shapes inside your petals.”
“Petals,” Sylvie repeated. She restrained a laugh, but barely.
“Does it matter what I call them?” he asked tartly, pulling free of her grip. “Your language is sadly deficient, you know.”
“My questions have nothing to do with what you thought of my petals,” she said. “If you would be quiet and listen and do as I say, you, too, could be relaxed very soon.” She cast her eyes about the gazebo’s interior. Except for the benches along the walls, it was regrettably bare. Unless—she inspected beneath one of the benches and found recessed handles. She tugged and out fell a drawer, stuffed full of rugs. “Take some of these out and spread them on the floor,” she said.
“May I—” Raoul indicated his trousers. The fall drew tight across his bulge, and surely the buttons were digging into his flesh.
“No,” Sylvie said. She didn’t carry a cock ring with her, so the trousers would have to do. While Raoul gingerly bent and tugged out small carpets, she extracted her knife and swiftly unlaced her bodice, taking a grateful breath once she was done. “When did you come to court?” she asked. She knew, but wished to establish his capacity for truth.
“Two months ago,” he said, then stopped when he saw her open bodice, rugs falling from his hands. Sylvie cupped her breasts and eased them free of the top of her dress, lightly massaging them.
“Keep working,” she said. “Unless you wish to have splinters.” She stripped off her loosened bodice and dropped it on the floor. The cool air felt good on her bare breasts. Her nipples drew pleasantly tight. “How long was your journey?”
“Eight months,” he said. “As I told you, I am a cartographer. There were side trips.”
“And your sponsor allowed this?”
“I wasn’t being paid very much. It seemed only fair to me. If I arrived and received no commission, I would at least have new measurements and drawings.”
Sylvie watched him spreading rugs on the floor. Rather than a messy pile, he arranged several edge to edge before spreading additional rugs on top, overlapping them in a geometrical pattern. She untied the inner lacings of her skirt and let it fall around her feet. Her petticoat strings had been knotted too tightly, the fault of Alys. She worked them loose as she asked, “Where did you go?”
Raoul froze for a moment, staring at her disrobing, then tossed another rug haphazardly onto the pile. “North,” he said, another rug dangling forgotten from his fingertips. “By sea. She—my sponsor—hired a ship for me. A northern woman was the captain. There were two ships, really. The second was escort to my ship. I think. I didn’t go aboard. No one spoke of it much, or of its captain. It was painted black. Your petticoats are red.”
“They are,” Sylvie agreed. She let all of them fall at once, then stepped free of them. “Get more rugs.”
“Your garters,” Raoul said in a choked voice when he turned again. His arms tightened on the rugs in his arms.
“I will leave them where they are for now,” she said.
“Are you finished with the rugs?”
“Yes,” he said. After a moment, he threw the rest of his armload onto the pallet he’d made. “Why—”
Amused, Sylvie waited for him to finish, while she stretched, readying herself for exertion and providing him with a distracting sight. “Why what?”
“Why are you asking—”
“I am curious as to the identity of your sponsor,” she said. “That’s all.”
“And you’d make love to me to find out?”
Sylvie shrugged, and grinned when his eyes followed her bosom’s movement. “I’d fuck you anyway,” she said.
“You are a very beautiful man. Who is your mysterious court sponsor?”
“Lady Diamanta,” he said. “I suppose it doesn’t matter now if I tell you. Did I mention I had a weakness for blondes? Her first, then you.”
She breathed out slowly. Puzzle pieces came together in her mind, click, click, click. She realized she wasn’t surprised by this information in the least. But she was, just a little, jealous. “What need could she have for a maker of maps?”
“Money, she said,” Raoul said. He looked at her hungrily, but his mind was clearly working at the problem.
“She was interested in certain spices of which I know the origins. Also in trade routes by sea, and then ports into inland cities. What anyone would find interesting, if they wanted to parlay a small fortune into a large one. I appreciated the chance to visit and explore so many seaports and river systems in so little time.”
“Lady Diamanta already has a large fortune.”
“Maybe she wants something else, then.” He took a step closer. “I almost forgot. Do I have permission to come closer?”
Sylvie considered. Best to distract him now. “Be silent and remove your shirt,” she said. “Leave the gloves for now.”
He closed his mouth and toyed with the top button of his shirt. There were only two, so far as she could see, before the shirt disappeared into his embroidered waistcoat, which had its own row of buttons. She could dip her hand into his waistcoat, and tease apart his shirt to reach his belly. Except she didn’t want to prolong their play too much longer before she took his cock inside her. The fun was to torment him, not herself.
“Waistcoat first,” she amended.
His fingers flew down the front, flicking buttons open with practiced ease, despite the awkwardness of his gloves. His shirt wasn’t ruffled at the bottom, and it easily fell open. “Untuck it,” she said. “Take it off.”
He did so, letting shirt and waistcoat both fall to the floor.
The semidarkness was a hindrance to fully examining his chest, but she had a good view of the essentials. He was wider and more muscled than she would have suspected from his wiry appearance. Tight dark curls clustered in the middle of his chest and laid a trail down his belly. His nipples appeared firm and succulent atop pronounced pectorals. She would lick them, she decided, lick and suckle them until he could bear no more.
“Stop,” she said. “Hands at your sides.”
His chest lifted, then fell. The cool air tightened his nipples; she felt her own crinkling as if in sympathy. She padded forward on bare feet and laid her hands on his chest, circling in random patterns with her nails, imagining the currents of sensation she was building across his skin, deepening the pressure whenever she heard his breath catch. She leaned forward and licked his right nipple, letting her hair brush against his chest, nudging him with the tip of her nose as she settled in to nip at him and suck his skin between her teeth.
Her hands drifted down to his hips as she tormented him with her mouth. One of her favorite parts of a man was where the soft flesh of the abdomen yielded to hard hip bones. The skin was thinner over the bones, far more sensitive than elsewhere. She prepared him with slow passes of her thumbs, warming his skin, then dug in with her nails. He made a sound, his hips jolting forward, and she felt an answering jolt deep inside her. “Yes,” she said against his chest. She took his right nipple in her mouth and suckled it, occasionally flicking it with her tongue. His hands lifted, then fell when he remembered her command.
“Good,” she said, rewarding him with another scrape of her nails. She continued to torment his nipples and chest until he moaned. Then she slid one hand around him and massaged his buttocks, pulling him closer to her.
“Now you may touch me.”
His gloved hands landed on her waist and she shuddered at the smooth feel of the leather on her skin. She grabbed his head and yanked him to her for a long, luscious kiss. His lips were as scrumptious as she’d imagined, and as she’d felt caressing the folds of her cunt. She tasted him thoroughly as her hands returned to their gentle scratching all along his t
orso. She pressed her belly into his erect cock, rubbing him through his trousers, and savored his groaning response, a mixture of pleasure and pain.
She pulled away and said, “Take your cock out. Keep the gloves on.”
Even in the dark, she could see the desperation in his face. He fumbled with the fall of his trousers as if her direct gaze physically impeded him; at last he ripped it open without grace and moaned in the back of his throat as he freed his cock, one gloved hand curling around his length.
“Don’t stroke yourself,” Sylvie said. Did she want to taste him first? Lick the head, rub his foreskin against the silky hardness beneath? Or she could have him stroke himself after all, his glove separating his own skin from that on his cock; the friction would be different, and the feel.
No; he could try that on his own time. Her cunt throbbed, and she clenched her inner muscles. She wanted him inside her, now. Whatever relaxation she’d enjoyed from coming earlier in the evening had long vanished.
“Lie down on the rug,” she said. “I want to take you there.” Her throat felt thick.
“I want to touch you,” Raoul said.
“Make me come and then you can touch me,” she said.
“On your back.”
She didn’t allow him to get too comfortable on the pile of rugs. Straddling his hips, she plunged down on his cock as a guardsman might stab a target. Panting, she rolled her hips, savoring the sleek feel of him inside her. She bent low and let her hair slap his chest. “Good,” she said.
Raoul gripped her hip with one hand, almost but not quite stilling her movement. He slid his other hand between their bodies and plucked her clitoris, so harshly that Sylvie cried out. “Yes, yes!” She clenched her inner muscles around him. “Harder!”
His thumb dug into her flesh and she let out a small scream, convulsing hard around his cock, lost in the effort and sweetness of the release. When next she was aware of her surroundings, heat branded her hips: the bare skin of his hands. She covered his hands with hers, her sweaty palms sliding on his smooth skin. “Fuck me,” she said. “Quickly.”
He thrust upward, forcefully. “Oh, yes,” he said. Sylvie closed her eyes, sinking deeply into her body’s sensations—hard, wet, hot, jolting fucking. She came twice more, smaller than before, but she knew a greater climax was within reach; she bent low, changing the angle of his penetration, and gripped his shoulders hard as she moved on him.
Her climax built slowly, deep inside her belly, tightening her muscles so she could hardly breathe, but she had to breathe so her moans of pleasure could escape. Raoul’s nails buried in her shoulders, the small of her back, her buttocks, but she hardly felt it, she needed more sensation so acutely. His deep groan as his strokes turned short and rapid sent her over the edge. She shuddered in slow, heavy waves as he frantically thrust inside her, fighting the current of her clenching muscles. She bit his shoulder and he came with a shout, his body quivering beneath her. His hands fell limp on her back, fingers splayed. “I think you’ve killed me,” he slurred.
Sylvie shifted until she lay fully stretched down the length of his body. His hands moved, lightly caressing her back. She felt a slight difference in texture, as of scarring, but it wasn’t on his fingertips. She turned her cheek to rest on his shoulder and said, “It’s only a little death. I find I have a taste for it.”
“I suspected you might,” he murmured, his hands moving absently. He nuzzled the top of her head, a pleasing sensation. “Your body is soft, gloriously so—” his arms squeezed her, then relaxed “—but you are not soft in the least. I could see it in your bearing, in your eyes.”
“Sentiment has little place in my life,” she admitted, despite feeling a distinct sentimentality about the attractive man she lay upon. That was the problem with sex. If the experience was too good, if the participants were too much in tune, it led almost inevitably into sentiment, and the only escape was physical escape. She was lucky that she only lived close to one or two of her favored partners. Otherwise, her life might become impossibly complicated.
Also, curiosity was a problem. Once she’d fucked someone, man or woman, she often found herself wondering why they’d acted as they had. Why did they let her torment them, or refuse to do so? Why did they want uncomplicated sex, or why was such a thing anathema to them, yet they went through with the act anyway?
“Why do you wear gloves?” she asked.
A long pause. “My fingers are stained with ink. I’ve left marks on your hips.”
“And the scars? Let me see.”
She both heard and felt his breath catch. He didn’t speak or move.
Sylvie poked him hard in the ribs. “Don’t be ridiculous. Let me see.” Reluctantly, she rolled off him and captured his hands before he could pull away. She didn’t see any ink on his dark skin, not in the gazebo’s darkness, but she did see the lighter scarring around his wrists, patches of smooth pinkish skin over the prominent bones of his wrists. “Ah,” she said. “Shackle galls. Best to keep those hidden here, I agree.”
He pulled his hands from her grip. “I don’t wish to discuss this.”
“I may discuss whatever I like,” she said. She straddled him again, then squirmed into a more comfortable position. “I would like your arms around me again. It is disagreeably chilly in this garden.” After his arms came around her again, albeit slowly, she added, “If you didn’t wish to discuss it, you would not have removed your gloves.” She rubbed her cheek against him. “I had no objection to them. The feel of the leather, the idea that your hands could not quite touch me while I enjoyed all the pleasures of your touch—all of that was most inspiring.”
In a low voice, he said, “You can speak of it like that. As if, as if I had done this for the sake of titillation.”
“Why not take advantage?” she said. “It’s clear you would not enjoy the gloves all the time, but for an occasional savor…oh, yes. It matters nothing to me if you were once imprisoned. By your own government, were you?”
“Yes,” he growled. “I told you cartographers are considered dangerous.”
“Only to the wrong people,” Sylvie said contentedly. The crook of his neck was a lovely place to press her nose.
“The right people would not care if your government betrayed you.”
Raoul was silent for a long time. At last, he said, “I have not removed the gloves with a woman since I was released from prison.”
“Did you have many women?”
“One or two,” he said. “Shortly after my release.” He grinned. “I wanted…release. The ladies of my local brothel did not require me to strip off my gloves.”
“They probably liked it,” Sylvie said, idly tracing a rib with the edge of her thumb. “Lady Diamanta was a fool not to take advantage of your many talents.”
“She might yet,” Raoul said. “I haven’t given up. Quite.”
Sylvie didn’t chastise him for speaking of it while in the arms of another woman. She herself had already begun pondering how she might take advantage of Lady Diamanta with Raoul’s help. If, that was, she was complicit in the threat against Maxime’s life. Was she? Would she go that far, and risk her own status? Anyone she asked to do murder for her would no doubt report the connection as soon as they were caught. How arrogant was Diamanta?
What role did Lord Odell play in all this, the man who wanted Diamanta, but had been scorned? Did he bear any past grudge against Maxime?
Sylvie resolved to find out. And Raoul…perhaps she would enlist his help. If he continued to please her with such honesty, perhaps she might even tell him the truth.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
AFTER SEVERAL DAYS OF HARD WORK INTERSPERSED with long swims, Maxime and Imena took the smallest boat and journeyed to one of the other islands in the archipelago; Imena because she chafed at remaining, essentially, docked, and Maxime in the hope of having a little more privacy with her. He’d enjoyed their navigation lessons, particularly the silent moments in which they worked equations or charted the
oretical courses, but there was always the possibility of interruption by one of her crew.
The forest here was dense. Maxime used the excuse of a massive fallen tree trunk to grasp Imena’s long-fingered hand in his and haul her up to join him. No new sapling reached very high yet, so the clearing was pleasantly sunny and free of annoying insects. “What kind of tree was this?” he asked.
Imena reclaimed her hand once she’d scrambled up the tree’s side and settled next to him, letting her legs dangle. “It’s difficult to tell, with no leaves or bark left.”
He ran his hand over the smooth, sun-bleached wood. “Is it any good for ships?”
Imena considered, touching the wood herself, then tapping it with her knife. “Maybe, if it had been properly felled and cured. This tree died too long ago, and is probably riddled with worms and termites.”
He made a face. “Thank you for that.”
She grinned at him. “Lunch?” she asked. She unslung the bag she carried and rummaged inside. “We’ve got fruit and fish rolled up in flatbread, and a flask of lemon water, and a green coconut.”
Imena used her cutlass to open the coconut and they shared the thin milk between bites of fish roll. Neither of them had thought to bring a spoon, so Maxime used his knife to scoop out bite-size portions of the coconut’s gelid meat, delighting in how casually Imena ate them straight off his blade.
After only a few days wandering the reef island and its neighbors, she already looked much better, the dark stains beneath her eyes nearly erased and, even more reassuring, the dreadful tightness gone from her expression. She hadn’t shown signs of dizziness or confusion since shortly after they’d made landfall. He hoped her injury had completely healed.
Maxime leaned over and kissed Imena’s forehead, and nuzzled in the soft fuzz of hair just above. He drew back and said, “Shall we save the lemon water for later?”
She looked at him, her face soft with puzzlement. “What was that for?”
“Well, we had the coconut juice already. We might want the water later on.”
The Duke & the Pirate Queen Page 17