by Nikky Kaye
“Yef, ma’am.”
His hands spanned her waist, then wandered underneath the waistband of her leggings as he continued his assault on her swollen and tender breasts, until she stirred impatiently underneath him.
“More,” she implored.
A flush rose on his cheeks and his eyes burned brightly at her as he released her nipple. “More?”
She nodded, gulping air into her throat as his fingers circled her ankles and swept up her calves, lingering on the tender skin behind her knee. It wasn’t until he gently kneaded her thighs that she realized she was almost hyperventilating. His hands lifted from her legs to cover her breasts, trapping her thumping heart inside her chest.
“Relax, Sophy.”
She nodded, her eyes fluttering shut. “I’m just...”
“Excited?”
“Mmmm.” Excited and aroused and completely brain dead. Her body had taken over, and it was a terrifying prospect. What if it didn’t do what she wanted it to?
“It will,” he assured her, and she realized that she had whispered the thought out loud. She could hear the dark laughter in his voice as he continued, “And even if it doesn’t, it will do what I want it to. I’ll take care of you, Sophy. I promise.”
Her eyes flew open again and took in the sensual twist of his mouth and the glitter in his eyes. In her mind’s eye, she saw him as Maxmara, all sleek muscles and threatening sarcasm. Sophy swallowed tightly, wondering if Clarissa would succumb so easily to the earl as she feared she would to Max.
He sat back on his heels, surveying her with narrowed eyes.
Raising an eyebrow, she reminded him, “I’m not a lab rat, Max.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he replied. “You have a great tail.”
Her cheeks burned and she reached up to pull him closer. “You’re wearing too many clothes,” she admonished.
Max nodded and reached behind him to yank at the back of the heavy white canvas jacket. A vein stood out in his temple as he struggled with the buckle and perspiration dotted his forehead. “I’ve almost got it. Just a little...more...”
Sophy propped herself up on her elbows and wondered if she should help him with his pants. She was great at undoing buttons.
“Damn it!”
She sat up straight. “What is it?”
“The sleeves are caught.” He shrugged his broad shoulders, his arms twisted behind him.
Sophy frowned, idly wondering if her hero would have such a problem with his skintight Regency clothing. “You look like you’re wearing a straightjacket.” She scooted towards him. “Turn around,” she ordered.
His cuffs were caught on the buckle, and she picked it apart carefully. It was an expensive jacket, and she didn’t want to damage it. “Okay, all done,” she announced.
“Thank god!” he cried, and flailed his arms in sweet freedom.
His left elbow connected with Sophy’s nose and she shrieked in a burst of pain as she was knocked backwards. Somehow, she had the feeling that Clarissa didn’t have to put up with anything like this.
Max gasped. “Oh my god, are you okay?” He took her chin in his hand and turned it to the side.
Her eyes smarted with tears, blurring her vision. “Nice shot,” she muttered, and tried to smile.
“Well, I guess that killed the mood.”
Her body was still throbbing. “Not at all,” she murmured. “Just a small scientific setback.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?” The concern in his eyes battled with a familiar gleam of dark arousal, and he stroked her face gently. His touch made her tremble, and her body ached for him. Except her nose, which just ached.
“I’ll live, but not for much longer if you don’t touch me. Now, where were we?” She dragged the jacket off his shoulders and made quick work of the buttons of his shirt.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked, concern in his wide blue eyes.
“Promise,” she assured him, and slid her hands up his bare chest. His chest hair rasped against the palms of her hands and she could feel his heart beating beneath her fingertips.
He groaned and pushed her back onto the floor, burying his face into her neck.
She shook her head slightly and frowned as black spots danced behind her eyes. Maybe she had gotten knocked harder than she thought. Or maybe it was just passion. She had read a love scene once where the heroine saw a kaleidoscope of colors, but she thought it had just been poetic license. Who knew?
Max hovered over her, muscles bulging in his arms from the superlative effort of his restraint. Would the earl be so restrained, or would he grab Clarissa and devour her until she begged to be taken?
She felt the heat radiate from his body, and shivered. “More,” she pleaded.
He braced himself with his elbows, his hands hard as they cradled her head and his eyes gleaming softly. Her legs wrapped around his hips and they rocked together slowly.
When she moaned Max spun them swiftly and smoothly so that she was riding him.
Her fingers splayed out on his hard chest and her eyes snapped open again. “Max!” She breathed heavily and light danced behind her eyes again. She licked her lips and tasted blood. Blood?
“Uh, Max?”
He grunted, his hands clasping her hips as he rocked her back and forth on top of him.
“I think—ohhh—I think you may have hit me harder than I thought,” she said.
He tilted his hips in response and the thought flew out of her head as he pressed up against her.
“Oh god!”
She trembled, feeling dizzy and strange. Was this what everyone talked and wrote about, including her? She suddenly felt like laughing at the curious and unfamiliar sensations overwhelming her body.
He pulled her close, let out a groan and stilled, his face hot against her own.
Her heart was still racing as she took in his enormously pleased expression. “Now that’s passion,” he said.
Sophy blinked as he blurred in front of her. She wriggled slightly on top of him, trying to keep her balance.
“Uh, Max?” She tried to focus as something dripped from her nose. There was a frown on his face he melded with the carpet in a beige blur. “I feel kind of funny.”
And then everything went black.
* * *
When she came to, her head was cradled in his lap and her cheeks stung from the tiny slaps he was administering.
“Come on... that’s it...” His voice sounded far away and muffled, as though he was speaking into a cone of cotton candy. Slowly it came closer, and became clearer.
She opened her eyes.
He exhaled raggedly and smiled down at her. “Hi.”
“Hi.” She blinked. “What happened?”
“You fainted.”
She smiled weakly. “I guess you’re better than you thought, huh?”
“Very funny.” He combed her hair back from her forehead in smooth soothing motions. “How do you feel?”
Sophy stretched, feeling a twinge in her thighs “Incredible.” But she couldn't help the blush that spread over her.
Max laughed. “You’re incredible.”
“Thank you, kind sir,” she replied. She turned her head against his bare chest and breathed in the musky smell of his skin. “Really, thank you.”
He tucked a curl behind her ear and grinned at her. “My pleasure.”
“Not all yours,” she reminded him. “So that was passion?”
“Hmmm.”
She closed her eyes. “Then I passion you, Max. I really, really passion you.”
“Hmmm.” He handed her a damp facecloth. “Here.” She took it and frowned. What was she supposed to—? “Wipe the blood off your face,” he said.
The facecloth was pink when she dropped it back on the floor, but her face was clean and the horrible coppery taste wiped from her lips.
Max frowned. “I still think I should take you to the emergency room.”
“‘S’okay,” she murmured into his
bellybutton. “I’m fine now.”
His fingers left their position on her forehead to drag through his hair. “So what do you think of passion?”
Sophy stiffened. Isn’t that what Clarissa asked Maxmara? “Dangerous,” she muttered, and attempted to sit up.
He steadied her with his large hands and raised an eyebrow. “Dangerous?”
“Dangerous,” she repeated, shivering suddenly. She reached for one of the fencing jackets and pulled it on. She drew her knees up against her chest and wrapped her arms around them.
“I can see how some people might mistake passion for love,” she murmured.
Max’s eyes narrowed and he reached for his pants. “But you won’t,” he stated. He stood and yanked on his trousers, then reached for his crumpled shirt.
She was silent. She could mistake this for love if she didn’t know better. If she didn’t know Max better.
The disappointment flowing through her veins like ice water surprised her; she hadn’t expected him to declare his undying love for her, but some genuine affection would certainly have been welcomed.
“I won’t,” she finally said. “Just think of it as research,” she added jokingly.
“What?”
“Consider this research for your study. Cause and effect, remember? The power of romance?”
He let out a bark of laughter. “And I suppose you consider this—” He waved his hand absently at their half-naked bodies. “—research for your book?”
She reached for his shirt, avoiding his gaze.
“Oh my god, you did,” he breathed. His hands pressed into her shoulders and he jerked her around to face him. “Is this part of the deal?” he asked, realization dawning in his eyes. “You didn’t want me, you wanted whatshisname in your stupid book!”
“It’s not a stupid book!” Oh, she thought, seeing the horror on his face. Maybe that was the wrong answer.
“Sophy! Was I here with you? Just now? Please tell me that you weren’t fantasizing about your own hero!” Maybe she had managed to bruise his ego along with her nose.
“No, that’s not true!”
Was it? She wasn’t sure anymore. If she told him that she wanted him, wouldn’t she look like a hypocrite for refusing him the other night? She had told him then that passion wasn’t enough for her; that she needed love. And she certainly didn’t want him to think she was in love with him. She knew he didn’t love her, but she could at least pretend that the earl loved her.
“Isn’t it?” His fingers dug painfully into her shoulders. “Who am I, Sophy?”
“Max—” She broke off in shock. Oh god, had she been about to say Maxmara?
His grip on her eased and he stroked her upper arms. “Yes, that’s right, Max,” he said.
Sophy felt the heat crawl up her cheeks and didn’t protest when he pulled her into his arms.
Damn Clarissa! She didn’t have this problem, Sophy thought to herself. When she sighed and tilted her head back to meet Max’s suspicious gaze, she realized she was in even more trouble than before.
She was falling in love with him.
The only hitch was that she wasn’t sure if it was Max she was falling in love with, or the Earl of Maxmara.
9
She leaned against the door and let out a long spine-shaking sigh.
He hadn’t argued when she told him she needed some time alone. In fact, he had jammed his feet into his shoes and grabbed his jacket quicker than a politician in a brothel. His quickly mumbled goodbye was grim-lipped and non-committal.
She wished she knew what he was thinking, but as usual, he was impossible to read and even harder to approach. As soon as he plucked his glasses out of his blazer pocket and perched them on his nose, it was like a shield had gone up. Professor mode, all cloaking systems go.
She needed chocolate for dinner. A quick rummage through her hiding place behind the cat food proved fruitless; not even a square of baking chocolate could be found. Gritting her teeth in rising need, she rooted through the freezer but she was even out of ice cream. This was not to be borne.
She needed high-calorie brain food. She needed something she could binge on that would torpedo her self-esteem and make her feel racked with guilt afterwards. Sophy closed the freezer door as she realized the inevitable.
She needed to talk to her mother.
According to the clock in her car, it was just after eight o’clock when Sophy pulled up in front of her mother’s house and yanked the key out of the ignition. She strode up the front walk, bypassing a small mound of dirt from the petunia bed that the neighbor’s dog had surely dug up, and jabbed the doorbell with her index finger.
The sun was getting low in the summer sky and the scent of lilacs filled her nostrils. The exuberant shouts of “car” from the ball hockey-playing kids down the street battled with the rasping of cicadas in her ears, and she waited for the door to open. And waited.
Sophy frowned. The lights were on and her mother’s car was in the driveway, indicating she was home. She leaned on the doorbell again and pressed her face to the long mottled window beside the door, but she couldn’t see any movement inside.
Wondering if perhaps her mother was in the backyard enjoying the last flicker of sunlight on the horizon, she went around the side of the house. The yard was empty but when she tried the back door, she found it unlocked.
She stepped into the kitchen and she surveyed the burnt down candles on the kitchen table and the dirty dishes in the sink. Typical. Well, she thought as she eyed the melted wax on the tablecloth, at least they’re not still burning.
Maura had an uncanny knack for creating havoc. Sophy still remembered the time she set the table on fire at Thanksgiving by setting a autumn-themed dried flower arrangement too close to the flickering tapers.
“Mom?”
She wandered into the den but it was empty, the television dark and the stereo silent. She pivoted on one heel on the Berber carpet and was about to go out to the garage when she heard a thump above her head.
It was only eight-thirty; she couldn’t be in bed already. Then Sophy remembered the depression her mother seemed to be suffering from. She had said something about not wanting to get out of bed in the morning, Sophy remembered. Had she been there all day? The idea was worrying, and Sophy leapt up the stairs to make sure her mother wasn’t sick, or worse.
When she bumped open the bedroom door with her shoulder, she discovered it was worse. Much worse.
“Mother!”
Sophy’s jaw dropped to the vicinity of her knees, as did her stomach as Maura yanked the bed sheet up over her bare breasts. Her mother’s eyes widened in shock and the long line of her leg under the covers shot to the side and connected with another, larger lump. Sophy heard a muffled squeak and then the lump swum to the side of the bed and fell to the floor with a thump.
She stalked to the side of the bed, her arms crossed over her chest. What she saw there, she was sure, would be burned onto her retinas for the rest of her life.
“Oh. My. God.”
Sophy screwed her eyes shut and spun around unsteadily. She reached out for the wall, trying to make it out of the room without seeing any more. When her shin collided with a rocking chair, she shot out her arm to steady herself, forgetting that rocking chairs rocked. The thump she made as she hit the floor was eerily reminiscent of the one that had just resounded in the bedroom.
“Are you okay?” Maura called from the bed.
Sophy realized she had to open her eyes sometime, so it might as well be now. Averting her gaze away from the side of the bed, she rubbed her knee and winced.
“Couldn’t be better,” she replied with a liberal dose of sarcasm.
“Sweetie, I know what you’re thinking but—”
She held up her hand to cut her mother off. “I doubt it.” She finally turned her attention to the side of the bed, her eyes narrowing. “And you!” She pointed a finger at the huddled mass on the floor pulling a shield of blankets off the bed. “How cou
ld you?”
Her father wrapped a plaid wool throw around his waist. His Adam’s apple bobbed nervously in his throat like a buoy in the middle of the ocean and he looked plaintively to Maura.
She shrugged, and he turned back to Sophy. “This is your mother’s and my affair, Sophy.”
“Obviously!”
Richard Hadden sat up straight and narrowed his eyes at his daughter. “What I mean is that this is our business and it has nothing to do with you. You’re a grown-up and so are we. So stop acting like a petulant brat!”
Sophy filled with shame, but she still wanted to stamp her foot and cry. Wasn’t anyone behaving normally anymore?
“Why did you come over?” her mother asked gently.
To Sophy’s horror, tears started to choke her throat. She took a deep breath and waited for her fingers to stop trembling. “I wanted to talk to you about Max. And me. Max and me.”
Maura patted the bed. As Sophy sat down on it, her father crawled to the ensuite bathroom, the plaid throw secured around his lower body. When the door clicked shut behind him, Sophy felt much more comfortable. If such a thing was possible in this situation.
“When are you and Dad getting remarried?”
“Sweetie, we’re not.” Sophy tried to bolt up from the bed but her mother’s hand shot out to wrap around her wrist and hold her there. “Your father and I divorced for many reasons. Those reasons haven’t changed.”
“But—”
“But we’re still good friends, and we have fun together.”
Sophy yanked her arm out of her mother’s grasp. “How long have you been having... fun together?”
Maura reached for the red silk robe on the floor beside the bed. “About a month.”
“A month? You’ve been...” She searched for the right word. “...riding the percale rails for a month?” Sickening realization dawned on her. “Oh my god, that day I came over with croissants... he was here, wasn’t he?”
Maura shoved her arms through the sleeves of the robe and held the lapels closed as the sheet fell from her breasts. She tied the belt and met Sophy’s horrified gaze.
“Yes,” she said simply. “You have to understand, Sophy. Your father and I were unhappy for so long.” She shook her head. “This is the first time we’ve really enjoyed each other’s company.”
