Once she reached the circular front drive, Annie reined in her delight and focused on the meeting ahead. Clearly his lordship held an appreciation for mechanization and she had no qualms in saying that she was the best engineer in London.
Squaring her shoulders, Annie caught the brass ring held in the jaws of a massive lion’s head doorknocker and rapped it sharply. She was initially surprised when a human butler opened the door, but that passed swiftly. The baron could afford the luxury of live servants and their wages. She, on the other hand, had created Alfred from scrap parts.
The butler took her hat, gloves and pelisse before showing her into a shadowed study.
As he bowed and moved to turn away, she said, “I will require more light, please.”
The striking of a match preceded the flaring of illumination from one of the room’s corners. Her head turned swiftly, her breath catching as a man stepped forward. She scarcely paid any mind to the door clicking shut behind the retreating servant.
“Will this do?” he asked in a low, rumbling voice. He turned up the flame in the gas lamp he carried and joined her at the desk where she’d deposited the birds.
She stared, riveted by the savage beauty of his face and the intensity with which he regarded her. His dark hair was long, hanging to his shoulders in a thick, glossy mane. A wide band of pure white strands embellished his left temple, framing a silver eye. Even as she watched, the metallic iris turned, the lens adjusting to accommodate the brighter light. A scar ran diagonally from his temple, across the eyelid and over his upper lip, explaining how he’d lost the eye he had been born with. The blemish did nothing to mitigate his comeliness. While it altered her perception of the symmetry of his features, it was in a manner she found highly appealing, as she did the air of danger surrounding him.
The provocation she felt was far from fear.
Breathing shallowly, her gaze raked over his face, admiring his dark winged brows, brilliant green iris and the impossibly sensual shape of his mouth. His jaw was square and bold, his cheekbones high and expertly sculpted. He was far too masculine to be pretty, but he was certainly magnificent, and younger than the strip of white hair and his world-weary gaze would suggest. The drawings of him in the gazettes had never done him justice.
“Miss Waters,” he greeted her, extending his gloved hand. “I cannot tell you what a pleasure it is to receive you.”
“My Lord. The pleasure is mine.” She curtsied and placed her fingers within his palm, shivering as he clasped her. There was a sincerity in his commonplace greeting that startled her. Then something else unexpected—the unforgiving strength of metal curling around her fingers—stole her attention. “Your hand…?”
“My arm,” he corrected.
An entire arm. Mechanized. Excitement coursed through her.
He watched her with searing intensity. “Would you like to see it?”
“Yes. Please.”
Releasing her, he stepped back and shrugged out of his beautifully tailored velvet jacket. He tugged off his gloves; first the one on his mechanical hand, then its mate covering his physical one. She was amazed by the dexterity of his copper fingers as he freed the button at his cuff and rolled his sleeve up.
Her lungs seized at the wondrous sight. She took a step forward without her volition, her gaze riveted to the softly whirring copper and steel gears. They had been fashioned into the shape of an arm and so precisely meshed that she doubted even air could slip between the cogs. Encased in what appeared to be thin glass, it was worthy of museum exhibition.
“How extensive is the replacement?” she asked, fighting the urge to run her hands over it.
“To the shoulder.”
Her tongue darted out to lick suddenly dry lips.
His green eye flashed with heat and his mouth—that wicked, wonderful mouth—curved in a rakish smile. “I would gladly show you the whole, but I’d have to undress further. Do you object?”
“No.” She quivered with anticipation. “Please.”
The baron loosened his cravat. She was so mesmerized by the expert craftsmanship of his artificial appendage, she scarcely registered that he was disrobing. Until the tight lacing of his abdomen was bared. Followed by the rippling expanse of his powerful chest.
“Oh, my…” Her arousal spiked. Her blood was hot for him, her body softening to accommodate the hardness of his. Unseemly thoughts filled her mind. Naughty thoughts. Highly sexual.
He was scarred on his chest as well. As with his face, the puckered bullet hole and multiple knife slashes only made him more delicious. Annie’s lips parted on lightly panting breaths, her breasts swelling within her bodice.
She flushed and tore her gaze away from the seductive expanse of flame-lit muscle and golden skin. It shocked her to realize how much effort was required to focus on his finely wrought arm instead. In truth, it had been far too long since flesh and blood had held more appeal than steel and grease. She found herself at a loss over which arm was more skillfully cast—the one afforded him by the grace of God or the one crafted by an earthly engineer.
“Exquisite.” Annie referred to the entirety of him, not merely the manmade pieces.
Judging by his sudden low growl, the baron knew it.
Sharp tension spiked between them, a heightened awareness that swept across her skin in a prickling wave. An aching need built between her legs, a reminder that she had suppressed her desires for years. Or, more accurately, it had been that length of time since a man had proven capable of rousing them. After the loss of Gaspard, she’d wondered if grief had made her immune to masculine charms. But the baron was proving her wrong. Her gratitude for that was as potent as her attraction.
Turning away abruptly, she faced the desk and lifted the lid on the delivery box with unsteady hands. The lovebirds glimmered in the firelight, their tin feathers flexing as they moved closer to each other. “I hope these are satisfactory, my Lord.”
He came up behind her, his greater height enabling him to look over her shoulder. He stood so close she could smell him: warm, virile male with the faintest touch of clove and bergamot.
“My god,” he said gruffly, reaching around her to slide his hand beneath a bird and lift it out. “I have never seen the like.”
Annie’s stomach quivered with delight at his praise. The way the baron hefted the small creature—curling his palm around it and testing its weight—incited scorching thoughts of his hand on her breasts, cupping them from his position behind her, admiring her form with equal warmth.
“Do not remove them too far from one another,” she warned. Her voice softened with the memory of another pair of birds, a gift from a man she’d once thought to spend her life with. “They cannot be parted, if you don’t wish them broken.”
“Broken.” His warm breath blew across the shell of her ear. “Is that not true of us all? Once we find the other half of ourselves, we are never again whole without them.”
“Yes.” Her gaze remained riveted on his hand, the warm live flesh carefully holding her delicate creation. “Will they be a gift? For your other half, perhaps?”
“They are for you, Annabelle,” he said softly. “To replace the ones you lost.”
“My lord?” Her chest lifted and fell in an elevated rhythm. She wondered if he knew how the soft hum of his turning gears affected her. The low sound coursed over her senses in a constant tingling stream.
“Gaspard Vangess served under me. He spoke of you. As beautifully as you create things with your hands, he created you in words.” There was the veriest hint of his lips against her ear. “Before I saw you in truth, I dreamed of you. Wanted you.”
With shaking hands, she took the bird from him and set it carefully back in the box. Its partner cooed and shifted closer.
“Have I frightened you?” he asked hoarsely. “I meant to woo you carefully. That remains my intent. I apologize that I wasn’t prepared for your effect on me. The moment you entered the room, I was ensnared. But I won’t press you beyond yo
ur allowance.”
“I’m not frightened.” She exhaled in a rush. “He is gone, then?”
“Yes.”
“I knew it. Felt it.” But she also felt a quiet, painful relief to know her first love’s fate for a certainty. Not knowing had become the most painful aspect of all.
“His last words were of you. He secured my promise to replace the birds he’d once given you, the ones you lost during the London invasion. He went to war to make the world a safe place for you to have precious and fragile things, and he wanted to see that goal met and come full circle. I chose to present you with a gift that won’t die. I cannot replace Vangess, but I can give you something of him that will never leave you.”
A tear slipped free, along with an aching weight she hadn’t realized she was carrying. “My poor, sweet Gaspard.”
The baron stood at military rest behind her, a stoic yet soothing presence. “My heart aches for your loss.”
“Thank you.” Annie watched the small parrots nuzzle against each other. She was powerfully aware of her desire to do the same with the man behind her. A man with whom she felt an undeniable affinity and appreciation. “I am no longer the girl he told you about.”
“No. That girl was his. Annie, he called you. But I think Bella better suits the lush and courageous woman you’ve become.”
And the woman she’d become was suddenly unencumbered. And so very lonely. She watched the lovebirds and envied their bond. “For a time, I was broken.”
He touched the top button of her jacket where it lay against her nape. “And now?”
“Now…I am whole but empty.” And mantled by a man who stirred her blood while desiring her in return. An unexpected yet welcome miracle.
“What you would have of me? You have only to ask.”
Her head fell forward, her eyes drifting closed. “I want you to touch me, my Lord. I want to be the Bella you see when you look at me. I want to be filled again.”
He nuzzled against her upswept hair. The first of her coat’s buttons was urged free of its hole. The rest swiftly followed, coaxed into surrender—as she was herself—by the baron’s agile and dexterous mechanical hand. When he pushed the garment forward, over her shoulders and down her arms, she reveled in the rush of air that cooled her fevered skin.
“I must tell you,” she whispered. “My brother, Thomas, aspires to work for you.”
“I will train him myself.”
The largesse of his quick offer and the joy it would bring to Thomas softened her heart. “That isn’t why I want you.”
“I wouldn’t care if it was.”
Annie glanced over her shoulder, her heartbeat faltering at his beauty. “Why not?”
He brushed the backs of his fingers across her cheek. “Clearly a man with my embellishments would benefit considerably by an association with an engineer of your skill, but that does not mitigate the fact that it’s the living parts of me that need you most. Requiring each other for more than sex is a blessing, Bella, not a curse.”
She lifted her arms over her head, wrapping them around his neck and pulling his mouth down to hers. His kiss curled her toes. Lush and deep, he took her mouth with a fierce possessiveness. He ate at her, licking and suckling in a manner that had her writhing against him, seeking the kind of closeness that required bared skin.
The remainder of her clothes were swiftly shed—her shirt and skirt, pantalettes and stockings. When he freed the stays of her corset with a hiss of compressed air, she sighed along with the sound, her inhibitions stripped away with her attire. Not that she’d had all that many by the time he touched her. The baron had been seducing her from the moment he commissioned the lovebirds. The journey to this point, both mental and actual, had only lured her deeper under his spell.
“Annabelle.” He cupped her breasts through her chemise, lifting their moderate weight and kneading gently, just as she’d imagined mere moments before. He rolled her nipples between thumb and forefinger, and her head fell back against his shoulder, her lips parting on rapid breaths. Both of his hands were warm, his touch both reverent and rapacious. Her nerve endings woke from their extended dormancy, prickling with near-painful intensity. She grew slick and hot between her legs, her sex throbbing with greedy hunger.
Her fingers slid through the long, thick strands of his hair to reach his nape. She stroked him there, shivering when he groaned. Her hips began to rock in small circles, deliberately massaging his cock with her derriere. “My Lord…”
The baron nipped her ear with his teeth and clutched her possessively between her thighs. “Raphael,” he corrected. “I want to hear you say it.”
His lips moved across her nape, caressing, goading without words. Her heartbeat stuttered.
“Raphael.” Clutching fistfuls of courage along with her chemise, Annie pulled the garment’s hem to her waist, the material sliding between his gentle grip and her tender flesh.
He parted the lips of her sex with scissoring fingers. “I’m going to put my mouth here and lick you. Make you come.”
Annie sagged against him, slicking his artificial hand with the liquid proof of her desire.
The use of that hand told her that he knew her. Understood her. There were few who collected her appreciation for mechanization. Even Thomas wondered at her fascination with well-oiled and effortlessly moving parts. He didn’t comprehend the thrill she felt, the rush of excitement and pleasure. She wasn’t certain she understood it, but there was no denying her attraction to the baron. All of him. The parts pulsing and breathing with life, and the metallic ones having those very effects on her.
“I want my mouth on you, too,” she confessed. She would start at his lips and work her way down his arm, sucking each copper finger before performing the same service to his cock.
“It will be.” Raphael caught her by the waist and lifted her, eliciting a soft cry of surprise. He carried her to the damask-covered settee and arranged her on her back, sinking to his knees on the floor beside her. Gooseflesh raced across her skin. One of her legs was lifted and draped over his muscular shoulder, then his head lowered to the glistening flesh between her thighs.
The first teasing lick made her arch upward with heated lust. Sweat misted skin that felt too tight and hot. “I am too fast with you,” she gasped.
“Am I not equally so with you?”
“You are a man.”
“I promise to make you happy about that.”
Annie laughed, then caught her breath, her stomach concaving as he covered her with his mouth. “Yes.”
Her moan echoed through the cavernous room, her fingers pushing into the silky curtain of his hair. He tongued her gently, the pointed tip stroking feather light over her distended clitoris. Pleasure coiled like a compressed spring. Too swiftly. “Raphael. Please.”
“Not yet.” Lips curving against her, he angled his head and speared his tongue into her quivering sex.
Beyond shyness or shame, she tightened her leg over his shoulder, tugging him closer. Raphael obliged with a growl, fucking her aching flesh with quick fierce stabs. She rocked into his working mouth, circling her hips without thought or reason. Effortlessly, he lifted her, balancing her with one hand as he pushed two unyielding copper fingers inside her.
Fingers that vibrated.
Annie jerked in startled delight. The slightly ribbed texture of the flexing joint meshing sent tremors through her limbs. She sobbed as the vibration increased, beading her nipples into painfully hard points. He began to thrust, his fingers pumping through her spasming tissues with tender purpose. Determined. Expert. Knowing just the spot to rub with those wickedly pulsating fingertips. All the while he sucked her clitoris, tugging and worrying the sensitive point with frenzied flicks of his tongue.
She gasped his name as she shuddered into an orgasm so powerful it blackened her vision. Violent trembling racked her body and she clung to the edge of the settee, seeking an anchor as reality fell away.
The baron lowered her gently to t
he cushion, his wet mouth nuzzling against her inner thigh before he withdrew from her and pushed to his feet with powerful grace. He undressed swiftly and unabashedly, his abdomen lacing tightly as he dispensed with his boots, a task impossible for most men without the aid of a valet. Flushed with lust, lips wet and swollen from the attention he’d paid to her, the baron’s gaze slid over her like a tangible caress: soft, yet resolute; his mind clearly occupied with all the ways he wanted her and how he would have her.
It was a novel and highly exciting perusal for her. Gaspard had been nearly as untried as she had been, their love having grown from adolescence. Raphael was mature and delectably well practiced.
He set one knee on the cushion between her sprawled legs and stabilized himself with one hand around the wooden lip of the seatback. “What are you thinking?”
She realized then how exposed she was, how immodest and unguarded. “What have you done to me?”
He cupped her cheek with his free hand. “No more than you have done to me. This arm you admire is not the one given to me on the battlefield. Such craftsmanship could not be found in that hell. The grafting of the first, crude replacement was excruciating. Death would have been a kindness and there were days when I prayed for it. Gaspard Vangess—awash in needless guilt that I had shielded him from the blast that took my arm—would sit with me and distract me with tales of you. He regaled me with stories of a rambunctious girl with freckles on her nose and mischief in her blue eyes. Mindless with agony and laudanum, my mind took possession of the memories he shared. For a time in my delirium, you were mine and I loved you beyond all reason. It was for you that I recovered, only to realize you were a dream that belonged to another man, a promising airman who was killed a fortnight before I returned to the fleet.”
“Raphael—” She cupped his hip in her palm.
His breath hissed out. He mounted her, his patience seemingly at an end. The thick head of his cock tucked into the slick and swollen entrance to her body. She held her breath, waiting.
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