Chloe’s eyes misted over again with love and uncertainty. “I might not be w-well, Raven,” she stuttered through her uncertainty. “The opium . . . or-or, I do not know,” she finished wretchedly.
“Hush,” he murmured stroking her hair, then his scarred fingertips brushed over her cheek. “Is it because you were sick earlier, Chloe? Is that what you are afraid of?” he asked.
“Yes . . . no,” she responded trying to hold back her tears. But then she blurted, “I cannot remember, Raven! I keep losing what people say to me as though . . . as though, I never heard them and-and I do not know why!” She sobbed then no longer able to hold back her weeping as she reached for him and he lifted her upright into his embrace. “What has happened to me?” she cried into his shoulder.
“Chloe, Chloe,” Raven rasped gruffly as he held her tight in his embrace. “No matter what is wrong, baby girl, I am here. Do you understand, Chloe? You do not have to be afraid.”
“It w-was j-just so h-hard to t-tell someone,” she gasped, ending with a teary hiccup.
“But you are not afraid now, are you? Here with me?” he asked as he rocked her in his embrace.
“N-no,” she answered with a watery gurgling sound as her tears abated further and she snuggled closer into his embrace.
“You need to be brave for me now, Chloe,” Raven murmured. “I want to ask you something.”
“W-What?” she asked.
“Could you be carrying our child, Chloe? Do you think perhaps you are pregnant?”
“Oh sacred Buddha!” Chloe exclaimed, clutching Raven even tighter. “Oh my one! That is it! That is it,” she cried leaning back to look up at him. “Oh, Raven, that is what is wrong. It is just the same as when I had Sebastian. I was so forgetful when I carried him. This is just the same and my sickness...”
“Morning sickness,” Raven supplied with love showing in his ebony eyes.
Chloe blushed instantly and grew suddenly shy as she asked, “T-Then you are happy? About our baby?”
“I am, baby girl, for the first time in my life a very happy man,” Raven replied.
The End
My Lady Captive
By Shirl Anders
Chapter One
"Here–here, Drummond. Congratulations, your wife must be pleased," Wyndham the Baron of Hawkenge toasted to those gentlemen, gathered in the intimate and comfortable study of the new father Drummond, who was the Duke of Kittridge.
"My wife Gabriella wears her heart in her eyes gentlemen," Drummond said, responding to the toast with a sip of Scottish whiskey. "For her to have been denounced in public as barren and now this. Well, I must say that even I am pleased."
Wyndham tilted his head to hear Lord Harrison rasping a saturnine reply. "You simply revel in the fact that it proves to everyone you are still a stallion at the age of fifty-one."
The group of five gentlemen, each of them former spies for her Queen's own, all chuckled as they sipped their whiskey.
"I believe that each one of us comprising the Archangels, should be officially declared, by us of course, as the little chit's godfathers," Lord Radford drawled, tilting his dark head raffishly, so that the gaslight chandelier caught the satin of his black eye patch in a piratical manner.
"You presume the gender already?" Drummond asked with a drawl, flicking his cigar into the crystal bowl beside his hand.
"I for one, will be down on my knees praying that the wee bairn is a lass and not an ugly brute such as yourself," Brynmore, their Scottish Archangel jested.
"Here-here," Saxonhurst pronounced, turning Wyndham's gaze to the last of their cloak-and-dagger group, as Saxonhurst finished his toast. "Here is to a girl child as lovely as Drummond's wife Gabriella already is."
Wyndham watched Drummond pursing his lips, then he smiled slowly. "Just to set all the accounts correctly, before we attend to the business I have brought you here for, my wife Gabriella has pronounced that each one of you is to be declared an uncle and nothing less."
"Of course," Harrison rasped with a serpentine twinkle in his sharp black eyes. "I would expect nothing less from the oh-so lovely lady."
Wyndham eased his injured leg more firmly upon the stool in front of him, hiding the grimace of pain the move cost him, behind a weary, but unstrained look. It did no good to bemoan the consistent presence of pain. Just as he had been wounded in the battle at Waterloo, Brynmore had lost the hearing in his right ear to cannonade, and Wyndham knew that burst eardrum afflicted the man.
Then there were of course Saxonhurst, Radford, and Harrison who had all suffered injuries on a last, badly botched spying venture, while he and Brynmore had been sent to Waterloo. All of them had lost something trying to defeat Napoleon, even their leader Drummond, unscathed physically, had lost a reason for his place in society, when they had returned to England. That was until Drummond had reunited with Gabriella this last year. Wyndham thought they were all a bit like that though, lost . . . at odd ends. War did that to a man, reshaped his priorities, or more, his values.
"Now, gentlemen, to the reason for your presence," Drummond said, leaning back in his chair to eye them all speculatively within a razor-sharp quality he had. "First the background."
It was beginning to sound like an assignment just as in the old spying days, Wyndham thought, as he leaned forward and listened to Drummond continue.
"This meeting pertains to the young widow Orelan Becou, stepdaughter to the late French Ambassador to Spain. As we all know, Napoleon had Orelan's stepfather Ambassador Becou and his wife killed for treasonous acts, before the end of the Spanish War. Furthermore, each of you is well aware of what Orelan did, after her stepfather's death, to help Wyndham recover important international dispatches, at great risk to herself, from the Russian, Alexei Tropov."
Wyndham tensed, watching as Drummond paused to take a puff of his cigar. Orelan, his mind raggedly echoed, as Drummond continued. "That same Alexei, gentlemen, who is now Count Tropov and setup as royalty in St. Petersburg, is now in possession of one Orelan Becou at his impregnable estate of Valcourt."
"Valcourt!" Wyndham snapped. "That is nothing but a depraved miniature Russian Court, Alexei has set up with himself as the head despot."
"Really, Wyndham," Radford drawled. "What a thing to say about your very good friend, Alexei."
"We were never friends," Wyndham snapped. "Only what pretense forced me to be." Christ, he gave away too much with his venom, Wyndham realized, moving automatically to sidetrack the slip, yet still certain that Drummond's keen mind would not so easily be diverted, as he finished wearily. "Damnation, Orelan cannot be much more than twenty-one. How could she be a widow already?"
"Truth be told-," Radford drawled. "Mademoiselle Becou was a ripe peach ready to be plucked, when we knew her at sixteen."
Wyndham rubbed his injured leg with a nervous tight gesture, willing his features to remain dispassionate at the heated reprimand he would have liked to have thrown out. The one and only time he had met Orelan, she had delivered those dispatches as her father would have wished, at great risk to herself. And he . . . he had kissed her. A mere girl of sixteen . . . so beautiful, and he'd simply seen her and taken from her. Lord, but he disliked himself for that. He disliked himself for his desperate need to feel alive at the time, in the face of all the death and subterfuge that surrounded him, making him wonder who he really was. However, he had frightened her. She had been too young for his blatant lust then. Now she was a woman.
"Wyndham, we will need you to go into Valcourt and bring Mademoiselle Becou out. By any means necessary," Drummond said with an unscrupulous look. "I thought perhaps you might insist upon the assignment," he finished.
"I do," Wyndham answered tightly.
"It is the least we owe the young woman and especially her stepfather," Harrison rasped.
"Who will back Wyndham up?" Saxonhurst asked.
"No one," Wyndham replied tersely. "No one can enter Valcourt, but myself, or it will never work."
"Really
. . ." Radford began with a sarcastic sound.
"I said no one," Wyndham responded, sharply interrupting him.
"Bluidy hell, man, you'll at least be needing an escape route. Once you get the lass on the outside," Brynmore said.
At this statement, Wyndham nodded, soberly. "That I will accept."
"How long has she been there?" Saxonhurst asked, with his soulful brown eyes full of meaning.
Wyndham tensed as Drummond answered.
"Thankfully only one week, before we became apprised of the situation. It seems Orelan was in Paris trying to see about recovering her stepfather's estate, when Alexei arrived. The next anyone knew, she was placed with Alexei under suspicious circumstances when he returned to St. Petersburg."
"He knows," Wyndham stated grimly.
"It would appear that Tropov could be seeking revenge for those dispatches of her stepfather's that she managed to lift from his residence in San Lupe," Harrison rasped. "We understand his government was very displeased to lose them and he tottered on the assassination lists, until he managed to reestablish himself brilliantly in Vienna, at the treaty negotiations."
"The man got them back Yugoslavia, did he not?" Brynmore asked.
"He did indeed, and now it is as Wyndham states, he is a minor Russian despot in St. Petersburg. A hedonistic one, I am given to understand," Drummond replied.
Yes, Wyndham thought grimly, he knew Alexei's depravities too well and one week was too damn long for any young woman to be in Tropov's company. But Alexei would play with Orelan in the beginning . . . he always played first. Wyndham could only hope that Alexei had not changed that much.
Chapter Two
When Wyndham caught his first sight of Orelan in the white and gold marbled front salon at Valcourt, he was momentarily rocked back on his heels by the vision of her exotic beauty. Nevertheless, he allowed none of his intense feelings to show other than an involuntary tick on the left side of his firmly placed jaw. The presence of that tick was forced, because a swarthy Arabic man, at the beset of Alexei Tropov, was lewdly groping the lovely Orelan.
That Arab had one diaphanous sleeve of Orelan's plum-colored gown shoved down to her elbow, as he burrowed his ugly mustached face into the supple pillows of her bosom, while he forcefully held her against the wall. Orelan struggled helplessly beneath him, but the Arab had her wrists clamped behind her back as Alexei watched, from an haute but relaxed pose, sitting in a gilded chair, laughing as he quipped. "Struggle, my beautiful puta that will only cost our most esteemed Sultan more rubles to bed you, if I allow him."
The sound that escaped Wyndham's throat was a low human snarling. He ignored the jarring pain in his right leg and stalked forward, surprising everyone, when he seemed to come out of nowhere to grab the Arab from behind and literally shove him across the room. His voice, when he spoke was a low dangerous hiss. "I have come to claim my marker, Alexei. This woman is mine!"
The Arab hit the far wall as Wyndham quickly grasped Orelan by her slender bare shoulders. He tried to gentle his hands as he pulled her forward, whispering intently beneath his breath into her startled face. "Kiss me now, you spitfire, as you would no other."
"Wyndham!" she cried out, with a desperate and emotion filled voice as she flung herself the rest of the distance to him, just as his mouth came down roughly over her mouth.
"Bravo!" Alexei sneered behind them.
Wyndham ignored Alexei as he took his brazen kissing of Orelan's lush lips and propositioned it into bedroom passion. Bending her flowing body over his arm as she clutched his shoulders and opened her honeyed mouth to his advancing tongue.
She was more the woman now, in the six years since he had seen her last. Tall, opulently curved at bosom, belly, and hips. But her mouth was the same. It had always been a sensual wish. Any man who looked upon her pouted lips could do nothing less than desire to ravish their erotic plumpness. She mewled, a soft ardent sound in the back of her throat. Thrilling. It was surrender, pleasure, and desire mixed as he twisted his larger tongue around the dainty petal of her tongue, while his free hand curled into the thickness of her black-sable hair. He was lost again . . . that quickly, even when he knew that he needed his wits about him.
"If you were to insure that she pays completely for her misdeeds to me, I would consider it, my most deviant friend," Alexei's disembodied voice sounded through the flames of Wyndham's passion.
Wyndham tore his lips from Orelan, and rasped defiantly, "I will . . . you know I will." He held Orelan securely with one arm about her waist as she crumpled to his chest, where he could feel her heartbeat fluttering against his.
"Da, I have enough on you to make certain of it, I am sure," Alexei answered with an aristocratic sneer thinning his lupine mouth and shading his crystal blue eyes. "Enough to own you, Khrisinan," he finished, preening his thin blond mustache with one tapered finger.
"Nevertheless, Alexei," Wyndham replied evenly, contrary to the heat of his blood. "You owe me first."
"That I do," Alexei agreed, crossing one leg casually over the other. He wore a Russian Premier's dark green uniform with a dozen medals on the right shoulder. His sandy head turned sharply toward the Arab stumbling upright. "Now what am I to do with him?"
Wyndham knew that he'd won the first battle in what would be an all-out nasty war as he tightened his arm around Orelan and began to move. "That, my esteemed friend, is your problem. I am taking my woman to my suite."
He and Orelan had barely made it through the entryway when Alexei called out. "Why, Khrisinan? Why this particular woman?"
Wyndham turned slowly, looking back at Alexei as Orelan clutched his jacket lapels. He did not look down at her small head beneath his chin, but he could feel her trembling. "She spurned me once," he hissed roughly.
Orelan gasped at his words and Alexei laughed a slashing evil sound. Wyndham ignored Orelan's expression as he pulled her from the room and up the marbled staircase to the floor that held the bedroom suites. Once in the hallway though, leading to his suite, his leg gave out under the determination he'd been holding it to, trying to make it appear normal. He had known any sign of hidden weakness during the first round with Alexei would have been fatal. There was time enough for Alexei to discover the injury. He limped suddenly and heavily, grumbling beneath his breath he expelled, "This will not be easy."
"You hate me!" Orelan gasped, breathless at being forced to keep up with him until now.
Wyndham ignored the question completely and the newest brace of fears showing in Orelan's incredible golden-amber eyes as he stopped before a footman stationed in the hallway. Still holding firmly onto Orelan's slender arm, he addressed the footman. "See that Mademoiselle Becou's entire belongings are brought to my suite as soon as possible."
"No!" Orelan exclaimed, trying to pull her arm free from his relentless grasp. "I will not be made your-your-."
"Whore," Wyndham supplied gratingly, as he pulled Orelan away from the footman, while she sputtered wordless sounds in her apparent indignation. Which ultimately suited him completely, because he needed her distraction to get her into his room and into his bed as quickly as possible. The next round was certain to begin shortly. In this, he would never give Orelan leeway. Never, until they were well away from Valcourt, and then...
"I will not do this! You-you, barbaro!" Orelan cried, as he literally twirled her into his suite, slamming the door shut behind them. His hands became filled with plum-colored silk and supple woman as he lifted Orelan easily into his arms and limped to the bed, while she pounded his shoulders ineffectually. "Wyndham, after all I do for you! How! How could you do this to me?" she cried.
She was spirited and feisty, true to her half Latin, half French heritage. However, he continued to ignore her outrage as he dumped her onto the bed in a pool of purple silk and heaving creamy-white bosoms. He was extremely perturbed, because he'd just realized in the gambit that he played, that he was going to need Orelan's partial cooperation. Christ, it was emasculating when a man could
no longer dominate on top of a good screwing, because his knee would no longer hold him up.
"If you wish to return to Alexei or to the Arab's immediate attentions, spitfire . . ." Wyndham bowed arrogantly as he shrugged out of his shirt. "Be my guest."
"You–you wouldn't!" she stuttered helplessly as the apricot glow of her beautiful complexion paled. Christ, she was voluptuous in her femininity. The silk she wore did nothing to hide her splendid curves, her womanly delicate bone structure, all of which was an exquisite backdrop to her glorious head of waist-length chocolate colored black hair.
"Become my whore or theirs," he stated grimly. "It is the only choice you have, spitfire. The only one you have had ever since you became Alexei's possession."
"Oh! I never would have believed this of you-u...Oh-Oh! What are you doing, Wyndha-!"
Orelan squealed, but the bed quilts from where he had unceremoniously flipped her onto her stomach moments ago muffled the sound. "I take that as a yes," he responded tightly as he planted his good knee into the small of Orelan's slender spine, while his fingers promptly worked to undo the hooks down the back of her gown. He quickly assessed that cooperation on Orelan's part appeared to be out of the question. He would have to improvise. Alexei was not taking his woman. His? Damn.
"Oh, you-you beast!" Orelan shrieked, as she tried to buck her backside upward and kick her calves at the same time. Only succeeding in helping him to remove her gown and camisole, down over said . . . oh hell . . . luscious ass!
"I never should have stolen those dispatches for you, Inglès! Oh!"
Wyndham felt the sweep of rage and terror combined, leaving him senseless for a terrible moment as his broad hand grasped the graceful column of Orelan's tender throat, from where he'd twisted her harshly onto her back. Not quite realizing his own strength, he leaned his chest forward over her plump bare breasts, until his face was inches from where he held her. She clutched the column of his wrist as his fingers flexed over her throat, barely allowing her to breathe. "Never!" he hissed viciously. "Say that in Valcourt again!"
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