by Lynn Kerstan
At the time, she had been unable to think at all.
Now, bits and pieces reassembled themselves into an experience she would never forget. Nor did she want to. It had been almost like music when he touched her and kissed her. His voice sang to her even now, the whispery words of his pleasure echoing in her heart, the thunder of his deep strokes like drums, still throbbing their rhythm between her thighs.
If there had been pain, she could not recall it. By the time he lifted himself over her, she was mindless with need for the probing hardness that thrust into an emptiness she had never felt before. Only when he filled her did she feel complete.
At the last, she almost understood why he gave so much in exchange for a few hours of passion. Whole again with him inside her, she had watched his face during the final moments. Head lifted in fierce concentration, he drove to culmination as if nothing in the universe could match the sensations he was experiencing.
For all the intensity of their physical joining, what she remembered most was Bryn’s almost preternatural tenderness, as if he was creating a new world for her with no thought for himself. She could not help but be aware of his intense self-control when he led her from the sudden attack of fear when she saw his aroused manhood to near delight in taking it within her.
And after, when his breathing slowed, he had kissed her gently, and thanked her, and asked if he hurt her.
“Not at all,” she told him honestly.
He kissed her again, more deeply, and pulled himself off the bed. In the waning candlelight, she saw him move to the dressing table and wash himself. Then he returned, with a damp towel, and cleansed the place between her legs. Finally he told her to lift her hips and drew the stained towels away.
When he was settled again beside her, she went gladly into his open arms. “It was nothing like I imagined,” she said, curling her arm around his waist.
“I hope that is not an insult,” he responded cautiously. “But I suspect you imagined something so horrible that anything would be an improvement.”
“Not … exactly. I just failed to understand why you wanted this so much. Now I do, in a way. It is terribly compelling, what we just did.”
“Yes,” he said after a moment. “And you have only begun to see why. I hope that next time you will share what I felt, Clare.”
She would not, of course, but murmured something meaningless, grateful when he yawned deeply and rested his chin against her forehead. Within seconds he was asleep.
Never could she allow herself to be drawn where he wanted to lead her, for that way led to certain damnation. But perhaps, for a little while, she could give Bryn the pleasure he found with her, and repay her debt to him.
As the pale light of dawn crept into the room through the filmy curtains, her own eyes felt heavy. This once, she would probably sleep through the morning as he did, like a tree stump.
19
Dark wet streets reflected the soft glow from windows and gas lamps as Bryn rapped his cane against the wood panel. The rain had softened to a filmy drizzle, and he decided to walk the last few streets to Clouds. When the carriage shuddered to a halt he swung out, the capes of his greatcoat swirling around his shoulders.
“Go home, Jenkins,” he told the driver, who sliced him a knowing grin before chucking the horses away. After fifteen years in service to the earl, Jenkins didn’t credit him with enough sense to come in out of the rain, and he was on the mark tonight. Bryn tugged his curly-brimmed beaver lower on his forehead. Water dripped from tree branches, loud in the silence, as he strode past the long rows of discreet town houses.
Clare was not expecting him.
Always, he told her what time he’d come, and each day found himself setting the hour earlier. She was good company, already commanding the upper hand at piquet, although her chess remained abysmal. Sometimes he brought business papers with him and worked to the faint scratch of her needle through linen as she embroidered one of her interminable handkerchiefs.
One was in his pocket now, with Clare’s idea of his monogram picked out in satin thread. He chuckled. A large C, and inside it the visage of a surly-looking bear. “Caradoc in the morning,” she had told him.
Grumpy as a hibernating bear roused midwinter was what she meant.
He was a creature of late nights and later mornings. They had quarreled about that, because he expected her in bed with him when he woke up and by then she’d been stirring for hours. Reasonably, she offered to return the minute he summoned her, but it wasn’t the same. He wanted to come awake with a sleepy, languorous woman in his arms. He wanted to kiss her before he opened his eyes and make love to her in warm rumpled sheets. He had refused to compromise.
Obediently sitting up against a bank of pillows while he snored next to her, Clare had embroidered a great many bears and read most of Shakespeare’s plays until, on the sixth day, he gave up. She could get on about her business, and he would call her when he awakened.
That was when he discovered that compromise was not such a bad idea. He never felt her leave, and already she knew the rhythms of his sleep. Clare was always snuggled at his side when he reached for her.
He preferred quiet hours with her to any spent with his friends, and her body to any woman he’d ever enjoyed. She was intelligent and curious, and her wry sense of humor never failed to delight him even when the joke had a special barb for him. Most did. With Clare, a man could not take himself too seriously. He was surprised how relaxing that was and spent most of the time he wasn’t with her wishing that he were. In every way but one, she was the perfect mistress.
When he left her yesterday, unsatisfied yet again, he had not said when he expected to return. Anger was banking inside him, building a heat that had driven him away long enough to consider how to deal with the problem. When he was with Clare, the last part of him that worked to advantage was his brain. She answered all his moods and the desires of his body before he felt them.
She gave him everything, except herself.
God knows he had tried to reach her, especially in bed. Every way he knew how—and there were a great many—he led her to the edge, only to feel her pull away. Not once had she exploded into climax. She melted into the shadows, or closed some hidden door of her own, only to emerge like a force of nature when he was beyond control. Within seconds he was aware of nothing but what she was doing to him, only a faint disappointment hovering like an imagined fragrance just as he collapsed into exhausted sleep.
Her way of calling off the wolf, he knew.
He stopped at the wrought-iron gate leading to Clouds. Wet black metal glistened in the blades of gold streaming through the fanlight over the door. A sconce must be lit in the foyer, he decided, unable to tell if Clare was waiting up for him since their bedchamber overlooked the back garden.
The hours of distance and thinking had brought him back to where he started. Clare knew a thousand ways to make herself irresistible, and one way to resist him. That had to change. He would make it change. This time, tonight, she would cross the line or he’d damn well drag her over it.
He let himself in with his key and heard a sharp hiss as he closed the door. Attila crouched on the stairs, ears back and yellow eyes gleaming with malice. God, he hated that cat! Dogs never scratched a man’s boots or threw up hairballs on a man’s discarded breeches. With the tip of his cane, he nudged the beast to one side and watched him streak up the stairs.
As he stepped into the bedroom, Clare set aside the book she’d been reading and leaned against the bank of pillows. His first thought was that he could see her arms. And neck, and collarbone, and the swell of her breasts. Tiny satin straps were looped over her shoulders, barely holding the transparent lace of her bodice. The negligee was the color of fresh cream, just like her skin.
He sucked in a deep breath. She had many such gowns, all gifts from him, but was always too shy to wear them. At night, she snuffed out all but one candle and drew the curtains against the morning sun. Not once, since the day he
ordered her to strip for him, had he seen her naked in full light.
His body surged. Without thinking, he began to peel off his coat, gaze pinned to her as she slipped from the bed and floated to him in a drift of gossamer and lace. Her thick hair billowed like smoke around her face and shoulders.
He stumbled back, sank on a chair, and began tugging off his boots. “Stay there,” he muttered, the breath hissing between his teeth. “Let me look at you.”
She stopped at the foot of the bed, poised with arms at her sides, her expression unreadable.
Roughly, he jerked away the second boot. Only seconds in the room and already he was out of control. He lay back against the chair, breathing heavily, the fragment of his brain that still functioned telling him that she was leaning over to lift the shirt over his head. Cool fingers skated across his shoulders, pushing starched cambric down his arms. The cloth tangled above his cuffed wrists, imprisoning him. Carefully, she untwisted the links and set him free. His shirt gone, her hands caressed his chest and moved down, pausing at the band of his breeches. Then she loosed the flap and dipped inside.
With a last grip of sanity, he clasped her fingers and pulled them away, while he could. She was bent over him, and a light fragrance of lavender wafted at the edges of his awareness.
“Are you trying to seduce me, Clare?” he managed to say.
“Would that be necessary, my lord?” Her lips curved in that secret smile all her own.
“No. But you have never … that is, you are always beautiful, but never more so than in that gown. Did you wear it for me?”
“Why would you think so?” she observed mischievously. “I didn’t know you were coming tonight.”
“You knew I couldn’t stay away,” he corrected, not liking the truth of that.
“I hoped you could not.”
He didn’t believe her. The robe was meant to please him. She had set out to please him, as she always did of late. But she hadn’t really wanted him to come.
That should have stifled his passion, or at least taken off the edge. But she tugged him to his feet, wrapping her arms around his waist and resting her cheek against his chest. Cool fingers slipped beneath the band of his trousers, incredibly intimate although they reached only a little, to the arch of his buttocks. His mouth was smothered in a cloud of hair, and he couldn’t stop his hands from running up and down the sleek lines of her back and hips and sweetly curved bottom.
He was lost. Seconds later he had peeled off his breeches and she was buried under his driving body, the filmy nightgown bunched around her waist, her legs wrapped around him. The furious completion, his back arched like a bow for the last fierce thrusts, seered him past pleasure to fire. Alone.
Collapsing over her, gasping for air, he felt his heart thundering like a racehorse just over the finish line.
Alone.
With his cheek buried against her neck, he could feel her pulse in slow, steady counterpoint to his, as if she had watched the race from a distance. Still inside her, he was aware she’d gone leagues away, to a place of her own, although one of her hands stroked his back while the other tangled in the hair at his nape.
Groaning, he flopped onto his back, not surprised when she followed, curling against him with her head resting on his shoulder. She knew he liked that. She always did what she knew he liked.
He was beginning to hate her for it.
“I’m sorry for that,” he said after a while. “An adolescent would have more finesse, but you drive me wild, Clare Easton.”
“Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do?”
No, not exactly. But he bloody hell didn’t want to debate the subject. He wanted to show her, except that she invariably made it impossible. Still, it was early. And while his male flesh regathered itself for another effort, the rest of him would have time to draw her irrevocably to the same place she so effortlessly drove him.
“Right now,” he said, “you are supposed to kiss me.” Did he imagine a tiny frisson as she lifted herself over him, her breasts spilling from the slight containment of lace, teasing at his chest as she brushed his lips with her own?
“Your every wish,” she murmured into his mouth, “is my command.”
“In that case, you will do exactly as I tell you.”
His next words were cut off as her tongue slipped between his lips, dancing across his teeth, twirling inside in a sweet invasion that sent blood racing where he wasn’t ready for it to go. Her mouth was warm and sweet, like cinnamon tea.
“You need not tell me, Bryn. I already know.”
He felt the scarred ridges on her palm as it settled on his chest and moved inexorably downward. And he felt himself rising up to meet her.
Not yet, he told himself, but it was too late. Her fingers closed around him, and her thumb rubbed lightly at the tip of his erection. Still moist from the first driving sex, his penis slipped deliciously between her cradling hand, swelling to the pressure of her grip as she stroked him. His back arched against the tangled sheets as he pulled her closer, deepening the kiss, mating her with his tongue and with his shaft against her hand.
He recognized male dominance rampant and yet leashed by the indescribable power of this woman. When she swung over him and lowered herself onto him, he surged inside her with nearly anguished relief. Her knees were tight around his waist, and she was supple as a willow as she moved over him, the palms of her hands braced against his chest and her head thrown back in intense concentration. He saw her with fire-rimmed eyes, molding her full breasts with his hands before seizing her hips and pulling her into his raging drive.
Not like this, his mind squealed weakly, from a distance. Exactly like this, his body demanded, until all of him was centered at a hot point of light. From even farther away than the feeble urgings of his brain, he heard himself cry out in release.
Sometime later, Bryn became aware that he was still on his back, this time softer than hot wax, with Clare once more curved at his side. She took him apart and reinvented him a hundred ways. He was helpless to stop it.
Only a fool would want to. So what if she felt nothing? He’d paid her richly enough, and would give her more. His only concern should be to keep her with him.
His brain, silent through all the time it was supposed to keep him in line, became active again as he felt Clare relaxing against him, her breath soft even with sleep. A perfect mistress. In bed, she would keep him satisfied the rest of his life. Hell, with her beauty and nearly consummate skill she could make any arrangements she liked, with him or any other healthy male.
Clearly she did not want him. His money, perhaps, and the things he gave her—the comfort of this house, the security of his protection—but not him. More and more, the conviction grew that she was working off ten thousand guineas the best way she knew how, services rendered for payment in advance. She was honorable, determined not to cheat him, bent on giving him everything he’d any right to expect. In truth, after only two weeks he considered himself in debt to her, if money for sex was what this was about.
He wasn’t sure when it had stopped being that for him. Probably at the very beginning, when he determined she would want him too. It was a promise to himself, and he always kept his promises. How much of it was vanity he didn’t like to consider, but he expected that unlovely trait had been the driving force.
Was he so selfish, to demand she satisfy his ego as well as his body? Showing her off in public, which she’d hated, was surely male pride, for all his disclaimers about wanting to share things with her. That was true, but early days he had flaunted her before she was ready. Maybe that was one reason she didn’t like him.
There were plenty of other possible reasons, when you came down to it. Though he’d gone out of his way for her, as he had never done with any of his previous mistresses, nearly everything he tried in an effort to win her regard had backfired. The endless days and nights before he was able to bed her had made him irritable, and every bad habit he possessed, admittedly a great
many, rubbed against her exactly the wrong way.
Sighing deeply, he stared at the ceiling and the shadowy candlelight dancing there. In spite of his growing frustration, they were good together. Clare had come to enjoy their outings, however public. With her peculiar grace, she endured encroaching curiosity-seekers, leaving it to him to dismiss them. She ignored the stares they invariably drew because of her beauty and his reputation. And she delighted in the plays and operas, happiest when she could lose herself in the tragedy or comedy on the stage.
They had fun together. Now and again he’d get caught up describing one of his interests, and she loved teasing him when he waxed eloquent about canals and locomotives and his particular fascination with the possibility of flying machines. He was looking forward to escorting her to a balloon ascent, fully intent on persuading her to go aloft with him. It would be magic, soaring to the skies with Clare. He could hardly wait.
Only in bed, it all crumbled. Only there, he had to face the truth that she did not desire him, was not passionate for him. And that where it most mattered, he had given her nothing. This night was worse than most, for she’d not allowed him a chance to try. He’d scarcely touched her. She had kissed him, caressed him, but not once had he felt the dampness of her welcome or stroked her to even the beginnings of pleasure.
His fingers combed through her soft hair, and he felt her stir in her sleep. Well, he’d always wanted her this way, limp and yielding, open to him. And after the two bouts of wild sexual release, surely now he had enough control of his own body to bend her to his will. He had come here tonight sworn to feel her convulse with pleasure, and damned if he’d let that promise vanish in the lassitude that threatened to overwhelm him.
He rolled over until he was on top of her, his elbows planted at her sides, and watched her eyes open sleepily.
“Bryn?”
“Oh, yes, Clare.” Lowering his head, he kissed her for a long time, resting his weight on one arm as he stroked her with his right hand, reaching under the soft gown to her breasts. “Don’t move until I tell you, or unless you can’t help it. I want to touch you, and kiss you, and make love to you for a very long time.”
