by Susanna Ives
She leaned down, letting her lips hover over his, her hair falling around his face. “Let me love you.”
He closed his eyes. She could see the conflict on his stricken face. Proper, old-fashioned George trying to protect her virtue. She kissed around the edges of his mouth. “Let me.”
“You’re a virgin,” he hissed, his jaw tight. “This isn’t the best way.” He drew her onto his body, running his fingers lightly up and down her sides. Then, in an easy motion, he rolled until he was on top. He rose to his knees, letting them push her legs apart. She had managed to cede her power. Now he could walk away.
Yet he continued to stare at her, her face, her belly, and her open, exposed sex.
“Please,” she whispered.
He released a hard, anguished cry and threw off his shirt. The dim light and shadows contoured his taut, powerful muscles. He gently lowered himself onto her, sheltering her.
His tongue stroked and soothed hers as his cock progressed along her swollen folds, finding her core. He pressed gently, seeking entrance. For several long moments nothing happened, even as his pressure increased.
What was wrong?
He withdrew from their kiss to whisper “Try to relax” in her ear. She obeyed, letting go into his embrace, feeling the protection of his powerful body over hers.
A twinge of pain shook her. He caught her gasp in his mouth, his fingers tightening around hers. She stayed in his kiss, letting his caresses chase away the sting.
Gently he slid into her, letting her adjust his weight and heat until inch by inch he was snugly inside.
“My beautiful lady.” He studied her, not with the hard concentration of the drawing but with dark want. Then he smiled tenderly, letting her know she was safe in this new sensuous landscape.
He began to move with gentle strokes, leaving tiny explosions of pleasure in his wake.
“Oh my, ohh…” Her words drowned in a high, soft cry.
“Does this please you?” he asked.
She wasn’t capable of words and pulled him back into a kiss, letting her tongue answer.
His pace quickened, his strokes deepened. Her body moved in unison with his, rising in welcome with each thrust, and then writhing, grinding against him, trying to sate the hunger he elicited. Pleasure yearned for more pleasure, like air to fire. She began to rebel against his controlled and gentle motions, pushing harder, greedy for the sensation. Her body needed no guidance, instinctively knowing to shift her thighs and arch her back, allowing him to penetrate more fully.
He clenched his teeth and closed his eyes as if pain.
“What’s wrong?” she cried, trying to rise up to hold him.
“I’m— I’m trying to control myself,” he choked. “Dear God! I can’t.” His motion turned wild and savage. He thrust and thrust and thrust. She met every one, squeezing his cock, trying to relieve the mounting pressure within her walls else she would burn to death from the inside out.
She was so close to something she didn’t understand. She dug her nails into his skin, her thighs quaking.
He drove deep inside her with a teeth-gnashing grunt, raising her thighs off the floor. Wet heat filled her womb as he shuddered. Then his frantic energy subsided like a storm passing. Yet she continued to move, rocking against his now quiet body, pleading for the same relief. All his tension was gone, but it remained in her, burning and painful. She whimpered in frustration, turning her head and biting down on her fingernail.
“My poor beauty,” he said. “I was too excited. I was…” He didn’t finish, but slid off her.
“No,” she cried. He couldn’t leave her in this torment.
But he hadn’t left her; instead he stationed himself between her legs. He drew up her knee and opened her folds with his fingers.
“What are—” She gasped as his tongue brushed across her peak. He lapped, licked, played, toyed, letting her body grow rigid and her legs quake again, until she could almost reach a pinnacle of something. What was it?
Release? Ecstasy? Incineration? He tortured her with pleasure, seeming never to tire of the game. She was open and at the mercy of his tongue. He let it swirl on her apex until she reached that state again where she could scarcely breathe and her body trembled. A roar filled her ears, she opened her mouth to scream but only the shrillest thin sound escaped. In this place she was suspended. Then his tongue moved a fraction higher and her muscles contracted, waves and waves of tension gushing out of her. His tongue kept moving, milking her until the climax petered away.
He rose up to his knees and studied her spent body. “I think I should draw this—Muse After Rapture.” He lay upon her, letting his cock, now aroused again, rest against the wet curls between her thighs, his arms resting on either side of her, keeping her close. Perspiration gleamed on his muscles.
“That was the most exquisite thing I’ve ever experienced,” she confessed, once she could talk.
He chuckled and kissed each of her hardened nipples.
“No, no, I am wrong,” she corrected. “It’s the second most exquisite.”
“Impossible. What could possibly be better?”
She twined her finger through a strand of his wet hair, drawing it roguishly over his forehead. “When I saw your art in the attic.”
He didn’t say anything. Light from the grate reflected in his deep gray eyes. The scorching heat of desire now cooled, yet there remained inside her the feeling of safety in the embrace of a man she had despised for years. Whom she had penned terrible things about under the guise of fiction. Who created the most stirring, precious art. Tears gathered in her eyes.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he said, distraught. “I tried so hard to be gentle.”
“No.” She traced along the lines cutting down his cheeks. “It’s that I love you,” she said softly. He deserved to know. “I love you with all my heart.”
* * *
She loved him.
The words should have incited fear. He should have been panicking over what had happened.
He felt none of this. Only a deep satisfaction arising from some place deep below his thoughts. Lilith was his.
Finally.
He would like to think he was under some spell of her beauty, as her addle-minded art friends would say, but he knew in a primitive way what he was doing as he entered her body. He knew the entire time. He had recklessly claimed her, driven by desire, with no care for the consequences. He had forced his own hand and there was no going back.
Lilith, the unruly family outcast, was to be the next Marchioness of Marylewick. There was nothing to be done.
He rose to his knees and studied the shadows from the fire dancing on her thighs and breasts.
“What is wrong?” she whispered. “Don’t be upset. Come, let me hold you.”
“I’m not upset.” He chose his words carefully. “Having a wife who loves me is the ideal situation.”
“Wife?” She propped herself on her elbows. “What do you mean, ‘wife’? Are you suggesting that we marry?” She laughed, albeit a bit nervously.
“We must, after what I’ve done.”
“My lover.” She sat up and kissed his forehead. Her warm touch seeped past his flesh into the marrow of his bones. “We did this together. I came here tonight because I wanted to. I love you, but I don’t want to marry.”
He shook his head. “I ruined you. There is no choice in the matter.”
“Ruined me? Did we somehow tumble into the medieval age? Don’t talk such nonsense. You’re turning this beautiful moment ugly.” She kissed his lips.
Her words chafed. How could she say she loved him and then brush him off in the next breath? She had a responsibility to him now.
“This will turn ugly, Lilith, whether you want it to or not.” He rose to his feet and paced to his desk. “I promised your grandfather I would take ca
re of you. You are my duty and I took your maidenhood. There is no other course.”
Anger lit her eyes. “I’m not another duty! I’m someone in your life who only wants to love you and not to make demands on you. I want…I want this pure moment in all its beauty, not polluted by an unpleasant past or a future of demands.”
“You are naïve. You just told me that you loved me. What if I’ve fathered a child?”
“Frances told me about precautions I could take.”
“Those kinds of precautions don’t always work. I know it doesn’t mean much to your wild set, but what respectable man will want to marry a woman already known by another? Some medieval notions carry over. The future will find us regardless.”
She opened her palms. “Why can’t you just let me love you? Why can’t that be enough? Come back. Let me kiss you.”
Her response only enraged him. No, a kiss wouldn’t do. He could not set her free now that he had captured her. Now that he had mentally committed himself to their union.
“Please,” she said.
How could he work on her?
He knelt before her. She came to her knees, pressing her belly against his cock, her breasts against his chest. She gently kissed his chin, his neck, his shoulder, all the while saying, “I love you.” Whatever magic she possessed filled him again. Everything was Lilith, the soft brush of her hair against his skin, her scent of citrus and vanilla mingled with earthy lovemaking, the lilt of her voice, the pressure of her nipples. Her hand found his cock, caressing it until it was hard with want again. He trapped her in a kiss while lowering her to the floor.
He entwined his fingers with hers and locked them to the floor, to hold her there, and then he slid his thighs between hers, letting his cock wait outside her folds. She writhed, straining to feel him, but he clung to every last shred of his self-control.
“P-please, don’t torture me like this,” she whined.
“If you could behave as you have at this house party,” his words rushed out, “you could make an extremely competent marchioness. I’ve watched how you navigate people and situations. You are brilliant.”
“No, I want you. Now. Not your name, this estate, all the horrible memories. I certainly don’t want to behave. Please love me again. You see how I want you.”
“Do you think I want this estate, this life, these mem—” He faltered. “You can’t give your maidenhood to me and then pretend nothing has changed. That I wouldn’t act honorably afterwards.”
“I’m not another duty in your life. I just want you to draw. I wanted to see you smile, a true smile. I wanted to hold the real George and know his touch. I wanted to be his art.”
He gently entered her again. Her body rose with her sigh, welcoming him. He groaned, feeling her snug around him. He released her hands and came to his elbows. “If I drew for you,” he whispered, kissing her ear as he rocked gently inside her.
“What?”
“When we’re alone, if I drew and painted for you. If I promised you kindness and loyalty.” His voice turned to a labored whisper. “If you behaved like a proper marchioness, as dazzling as you have been these last few days, but when you were alone with me, you could be as wild and high-spirited as you want to be. Would you marry me then?” He pressed deep into her, using pleasure to weaken her resistance.
“This isn’t fair how you are asking me,” she cried.
He altered his tactics, trying to cut closer to her heart.
“You said that all you wanted from a husband was kindness and loyalty and a home. I will give you all. I promise that you will never be lost and wandering again.”
Tears wet her eyes. “But you don’t love me as I love you. You need to love whom you marry. You need to love and be loved. You need it so much.”
The words “I love you too” caught in his throat, burning there. They frightened him. He knew if he uttered them, he would relinquish his control over her.
And himself.
“Say yes,” he urged, moving inside her.
“I can’t—I—”
“Be my wife and I will draw for you.” He kissed her jaw, her cheekbone, her wet eyelids. “Say yes. And I will be a loyal husband.”
She whimpered and squeezed her eyes shut, a tear rolling from the edge. She could not turn him down now that he had finally captured her, like an exotic butterfly, wings spread, pinned beneath him.
“Please, let me give you a home. A family. Come in from the cold, Lilith.”
“Yes,” she said, the word flowing on her breath. “Yes.”
“Lilith.” His mouth covered hers. He moved in rhythm with her, plunging and withdrawing as her body commanded. The words he couldn’t say, the fear and ecstasy that pulled him apart, he put it all into his sex, letting her take it away as her thighs quaked in climax and he released deep inside her.
Afterwards, she laid her head on his chest, her arm across him. His heart filled with a sweet sensation of happiness he hadn’t known for years. And this same joy scared him to his core.
* * *
Lilith felt the warm glow cocooning them begin to crack and she clutched him tighter.
Had she agreed to marrying into the family that had rejected her? Had she promised her life to the very man she had spit such vitriol about in the pages of her story? A man who couldn’t say he loved her but looked at her with raw, vulnerable yearning? Who created art that broke her heart?
How could she say no? His words had shot right into her emotional Achilles’ heel. You will never be lost and wandering again…Let me give you a home. A family. She grabbed for what he offered like a hurt child reaching blindly for comfort. And his body, so powerful and strong, covered hers, blanketing her in safety.
He would draw for her. Let her live in the gardens of his mind.
But now her secret betrayal wormed in her heart.
She couldn’t begin a life with such a wonderful man keeping the dark secret of her authorship. But she couldn’t dare tell him now when everything was so fragile. She would redeem the sultan. She would show the reader how Colette was confused all along. She would make the reader love the sultan as she now did. Only then would Lilith tell George the truth: that forever he could have his own Colette.
“Now, we have to be in agreement about something very serious before we continue this marriage endeavor,” he said.
She lifted her eyes to meet his. The tenderness in them warmed her with the same sensation of being immersed in sun-heated water.
“We must have no disagreement on this point,” he continued.
“It’s too late for more terms,” she teased. “You should have made me agree while we were making love.”
“It is this,” he whispered in her ear. “We will tell our children that I proposed to you in the study with our clothes on.” He kissed her earlobe.
She couldn’t imagine their children or their future. This was what the other young ladies at the party did—daydream of having his title and home. She just wanted to love him and that was all she knew.
Nineteen
“Muse, these need to be the best pages I’ve written in my life.” Lilith opened her portfolio, her body still bearing George’s scent and the feel of his love-making. “We need to approach the brilliance of Milton and Shakespeare. We may even consider iambic pentameter.”
She leafed through what she had written, her horror increasing. Her art wasn’t nearly as good as George’s. Her words floundered like dying fish on the land. Not the light and lushness of George’s work, but page after page of stinking, dying fish.
She had a vision of handing him the pages and exclaiming, Guess what? The sultan is redeemed. He was good all along. Only to have George say, Dear Lord, you mean you wrote that hideous chapter? I couldn’t possibly marry the author of such claptrap.
Still, Lilith dipped her pen and forged on, desperate for the l
ife George offered. “Brilliance or death, Muse.”
* * *
Lilith came down to catch the last of breakfast. She slowed her steps as she wove through the labyrinth of corridors. Her nerves were giddy at the prospect of seeing George again. This frightened her. Her life couldn’t possibly be this good. Something bad was clearly going to happen.
Lady Marylewick’s tinkling laughter flowed from the open breakfast room. Lilith’s stomach clenched. Was she really ready to have Lady Marylewick as a mother-in-law? But George could tell her to trek across the burning sands of the Sahara and she would do it for him.
The room was alive with a crackling, wild current or perhaps it was only Lilith’s nerves. Warm morning sun bathed the walls and tables. From all corners, she could hear the rustling letters and newspapers, the scents of tea, sugar, and cream, and the murmur of excited conversation. The servants were beginning to carry away the empty serving platters from the sideboard. She glanced about, finding her heart’s obsession conversing with the Duke of Cliven, their heads down, eyes serious as if engaged in deep, parliamentary contemplation. George glanced her way for the tiniest of moments, long enough to let her know he saw her and remembered all the delicious details of last night. Lilith’s heart wanted to do things that would make a chemist marvel—rising, melting, and bursting into flames all at the same time.
“Miss Dahlgren, you shame the very sun.” Lilith jumped. Lost in sweet memories of George holding her safe and snug, she didn’t see Lord Charles materialize at her side. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath through his nose. “Ah! Can you feel it?” he asked. “Is not the air alive with romance, or I do mean to say ambition. All the ladies are abuzz like honeybees in spring about the ball tonight. Crazy for the sweet taste of the title marchioness. Will the mighty Lord Marylewick finally fall this year? The suspense! It just bores me.” He leaned closer. “We must steal away from the maddening frenzy this evening, Miss Dahlgren. We true romantics.”
Oh no. She knew what he meant. In her real life—her life away from Tyburn and among her artist friends—she could say, I would never consider marrying a man who maliciously enjoys taunting others and thinks himself more clever than everyone else. But now she had to come up with the words that gently let him down, without upsetting George’s political aims. In that moment, a future of political intrigue, as twisted and tangled as the old French court, opened before her. Was this what her life was going to be like? Careful, lithe words and smiles that concealed? Would she get her head lopped off at the end like Marie Antoinette?
