“What?” she asked. “What are you doing?”
“Do you have a middle name?” he repeated.
“Isabel,” she said.
“Really?” he asked. “Well, then, Henrietta Isabel Buchanan, will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?”
She gave a bark of laughter. “You’re mad.”
“I wasn’t mad when we were kissing, but I am when I offer, in the most gentlemanly manner possible, to marry you?” He rose to his feet.
“I’m not going to marry a man I hardly know,” she protested.
“But you will kiss one?” he suggested.
She looked at him askance. “Apparently, I will.”
“Well, you should at least consider it,” Jean said, “because I intend on ruining you most thoroughly tonight.”
“Don’t I have a say in the matter?” she returned.
“Do you think you shall say anything but yes?”
“I already have.”
He caught the back of her neck in his hand, and she went suddenly, completely still. “And how long will it last?” he asked. “I promise you’ll be begging for everything I do to you before the night is over.”
He felt her shiver against his palm. “I shouldn’t have come.” The words were hardly more than a whisper.
He hoped that she lived. It was a sudden thought, a surprising one, but this girl was worth more than a night’s entertainment. He’d left so many thrown aside in his wake that he hardly recognized the feeling. Nostalgia? No, simple regret. Regret that she would die, like all the others. Regret that such a pretty, vivacious thing would end her short days in a crumple of lifeless limbs.
It almost made him want to send her packing back home, with a curious story that she wouldn’t dare to tell anyone else.
Almost.
“Oh, but think of how I’d miss you,” he said. “Tell me you want me to kiss you again.”
She met his gaze, and he felt the yearning in her body like the string of a harp, pulled too tight. “I do. Oh, damn me, but I do.”
And so he bent and kissed her forehead, lightly, gently, and she let out a soft breath that was like a new life.
“Do you want me to stop?” He asked the question against her skin, and she made a tiny noise.
“No.”
He kissed one temple, then broke away. “Where, then?”
“What?”
“Where do you want me to kiss you?” he asked.
“Mr. Morel.” His name was a protest.
“I think we have crossed into the area of friendship where you may call me Jean,” he said dryly.
She ignored that. “You can’t possibly expect—”
“I do,” he said. “I very much expect it. Tell me, where would you like me to kiss you next?”
She stood frozen for a long moment, then finally, in a voice that was almost a whisper, she said, “My mouth. Please, kiss my mouth.”
Chapter Seven
And he did, instantly, not waiting for her lips to tease his but taking her completely, masterfully, urging her jaw open with a thumb on her chin. She melted into him, her body soft under layers of cloth and the hardness of the corset that clasped her waist. He stroked her with his tongue, thrusting deep inside her mouth in promise of what was to come. And she surrendered to him, completely.
His mind burned with all the things he wanted to do to her body. But the hunger was on him, the gnawing need growing sharper by the moment, and he didn’t know how much longer he could hold out.
He’d miss this one. Already, he felt a sharp pang of loss at the thought of her demise. But he was also half-mad with the thought of her taste, her blood bright and coppery in his mouth, burning down his throat, bringing health and strength back into his wasting limbs.
With that thought, he broke away from her mouth and kissed a line down her neck to the décolleté of her dress, tasting her sweet skin. Her fingers had found his hair, twining in it and pressing his mouth to her body.
He paused. “Where else, Hattie?” he murmured, looking up into her flushed face.
Her half-unfocused gaze fell on him. “What?”
“Where else do you want me to kiss you?” he prompted.
“Oh, my,” she said, her voice hoarse with desire.
“You have to tell me.” And he sent his compulsion over her in waves.
“I think”—she swallowed—”I think…everywhere.”
“Not good enough,” he said. “Your wrist. Would you like me to kiss your wrist again?”
She nodded.
“I can’t hear you,” he said.
Her eyes sparked. “Yes,” she said, her voice suddenly steady. “My wrist. My arm. My body—”
He clicked his tongue. “Not good enough, my dear. You will tell me with perfect specificity. But we’ll start with the wrist.”
And he raised it to his mouth and began to work, watching her flush, her breath come faster. He moved up her arm to her inner elbow, and she swayed in his grip, the waves of pleasure coming off her so strongly that they swayed him along with her.
“How?” she mumbled. “Oh, God, how?”
He broke off, and before he could say anything, she said, “My lips. Again. Now.”
And this time, her arms were around his neck, her mouth hot and desperate against his, giving and taking in equal measure.
And when he finally broke away, she looked straight into his eyes and said, “My belly.”
Jean chuckled, and the sound surprised him. He was already feeding off her excitement, and he felt more alive than he had in a very long time.
He reached behind her and began working the row of buttons down her back. At the same time, she opened his coat and his waistcoat beneath, her fingers nimble on the buttons.
“I still won’t marry you,” she said then.
“I won’t force you,” Jean predicted.
He freed the last button and the bodice fell to the ground. He turned her in his arms, pulling her body against his for a moment as he loosened the buttons down the front of her sheer shirtwaist. His cock was so hard that it was throbbing, and his thirst was a tangible force now that made every touch of her skin a pain. His mouth found the nape of her neck, working its way up and down again. Even as she leaned into his touch, she said, “I didn’t say neck.”
He broke away. “You don’t have to.”
“If you’re to make a game of it, I do,” she said. “You may not kiss me where you will.”
Jean smiled. She was fighting a different kind of fight now.
“And it’s just for the night,” she said. “It must be just for the night.”
“Let us see what tomorrow brings,” he said—though he already knew that for her there would be no tomorrow.
He pushed the fabric of the shirt off her shoulders, and she tossed it away, revealing the corset underneath. Her skirts were next, the hooks and eyes surrendering to his quick fingers. A tug at the laces of her petticoats and bustle untied them, and all her skirts slid from her generous hips with a push. Then it was the turn of her corset, and he worked his way up and down it, loosening the laces expertly. Hattie tugged at the front of the busk and freed the hooks, dropping it aside.
Her short camisole followed, and then she turned around in his arms, her naked flesh pressed up against his snowy white shirt. Her body was soft, slightly plump in the delicious way of youth, with small high breasts that fit perfectly against his chest. Holding her was like grasping a flame. He could feel the hot blood pulsing through her body, yearning for him and the fulfillment that only he could give her.
Jean looked down into her eyes, the blue gone smoky with her need, and he let his power wrap around her, his will bleeding into her own. Yet her mind stayed bright, distinct, unsullied by his darkness even as he bent her desires to his own.
“Your belly,” he repeated. “Of all the places on your body, you want me to kiss…your belly.”
“My lips,” she said, the words ever so slightly slurred in the intoxica
tion of his presence. “I want you to kiss my lips first. Then my throat. Then down—between my breasts. I want you to kiss there. And lower until you reach my belly. And then I want you to kneel in front of me, and I want you to kiss me as if you had a goddess in your hands.”
Those words reverberated back through his hold on her, into the darkness that passed for his soul, and they shook him with their conviction and their arrogance, even in the grips of his influence over her. And he realized that he loved that about her, this mere human, and he wondered if he was going mad.
Because it was a game, he told himself—and only because it was a game—he said, “Gladly, my lady.”
He took her mouth again, his hand cradling her neck and his fingers working deep into her hair. She tasted so young, so alive and vibrant, so hot under his questing lips. She did not simply submit to his mastery. Instead, she kissed him back, her tongue probing his mouth with less skill but a keen eagerness that awoke sympathetic fires within him that had long been quiet. He had grown so cold, so dull, so jaded under the weight of the years that even feeding had become mechanical. Any other girl, and she’d already be dead at his feet. But this one—this one, he didn’t want to die. This one, he was almost frightened to lose.
With this one, he almost felt alive.
So he kissed her mouth for a very long time, drinking her desire, storing up the memory and the taste of her so perhaps he could take it out again one day and feel some shadow of what he was feeling now. The need was building in him now, pounding in his veins, the hunger for her blood and for her body. And he savored that, too, the demand that had already crossed the line into pain, because it was something true and bright and real in his world of gray.
He kissed her throat gently, carefully, because he felt the sharpness of his teeth now, almost grazing her skin. But he wouldn’t let himself go, not now, not if it killed him, because dying like this was better than living in shadow.
She swayed on her feet as he moved lower, onto the line on her sternum that paved a path between her breasts. Her hands had been splayed against his chest, and now they tightened around the fabric of his shirt, as if she were clinging for support. And when he looked up, her clear, bright eyes burned as she looked down at him, her face tight with the onslaught of his lips and tongue.
He knelt as he reached the softness of her belly, and as he held her hips in his hands, he kissed the lines that the corset had made upon it. He drank from her navel as she rocked to his touch, and he moved lower to the slight, sweet swelling of pale flesh below. His hands moved lower, sliding across the swelling of her buttocks, teasing the cleft where they met, hands and mouth working together.
“I—I hurt.”
Hattie’s words were soft and surprised, a whimpery almost-whisper. Jean broke away to meet her bewildered gaze with his own.
“Where?” he asked. “Tell me, and I will kiss you there, too.”
“Oh,” she breathed even as shock made her eyes widen. “Oh, my.”
“But you have to tell me where,” he said, his hands still grazing her body lightly. “Did you learn words for such things, among your reagents and Bunsen burners?”
“Anatomy was required,” she said, and he felt her hesitation, suspended between her desires and her reticence.
“Then tell me,” he said. “Or I will stop. Now.” That was a lie, a terrible lie, because there was no stopping the hunger in him now. But he did not want to force her with the power of his will that was now tangled in her own, not even to say such a word. He wanted her to force herself into his embrace because she could not turn away.
And then she did.
“Mons pubis,” she said, clearly and distinctly, as if she were answering a question in a recitation.
Jean tugged the cord of her drawers loose and pushed them over her hips until they slid down past her knees to her ankles, revealing a nest of curls that was only a few shades darker than her pale tresses. And Jean buried his lips in those curls and kissed her there, and she made a noise in her throat that was a kind of humming laugh.
“Labia majora,” she said, a little catch in the words, and she tilted her hips into his mouth as his fingers tightened around the flesh of her buttocks and he moved downward still, his lips and tongue playing with the crease of her thigh and her outer folds. He could smell her eagerness now. Already, her slickness had dampened her curls, and his mouth reveled in the bright saltiness.
“Minora,” she said, and this time her words were almost a moan.
Jean let his tongue explore then, sliding past the edge of the curls against the swollen flesh of the layered folds, and her body shook, her hands on his chest trembling. Her need washed back into him, driving his hunger to such a fever pitch that his vision darkened for a moment, and it was all he could do to battle back that part of him that wanted to take, take until she could give no more.
She made more sounds as he worked against her flesh, moans and tiny snatches of syllables. And then, finally, she managed to force out something coherent—”Clitoris. Oh, please, now, clitoris, forchette, please, vagina, everything, everything, everything, please.”
And Jean pulled back just long enough to catch her hands and pull them from his shoulders to tug her toward him. She tumbled forward, into his arms, and he eased her down onto the thick, layered rugs on the cabin floor. He pulled her feet, still clad in their neat little boots, free of the tangle of skirts and drawers, and then he eased himself between them.
The need was beating a rhythm in his brain that he could ignore only at his peril. If he did not sate it soon, it would indeed take everything, and then whatever slight chance that abundant and clear flame of life might have would be utterly destroyed.
And at that moment, he could not even bear the thought of that. So just before he kissed her one last time, he looked up into those wide blue eyes and said, “First, you must promise me something.”
She moaned, her hands on his shoulders digging into his flesh. “No marriage, Jean. Not even for you. Not even for this.”
“No,” he agreed. “I merely ask that you not die.”
The words surprised an unsteady laugh from her lips. “That I have no intentions of doing.”
“I know,” he said, and then he pushed her thighs apart and lowered his head, working against her entrance with the flat of his tongue, kissing and licking all the places that she gave those cold, clinical names, claiming every centimeter as his own, his own forever. Her hot flesh and her delicious shudders and her soft moans and her sharper cries all belonged to him and him alone. Her creases and folds and clefts, her peaks and her valleys, the salty tang of her wetness, the heat of her skin and the thrumming of her blood—he laid claim to it all.
As he drove his tongue deeply into her, he engraved the sound of her gasp, raw and real, straight onto his brain. The fingers of one of his hands slid up her need-slick thigh and deep into her heat as he suckled her hard nub, his hands and mouth stroking her until her back arched and her cries grew high and desperate, and she tore through into a climax that almost carried him with it.
And then his hunger could be denied no longer, and even as he drove her deeper into her pleasure with the stroke of his fingers within her, he shifted his mouth to her thigh. He could feel the veins there, just beneath his lips, the blood eager for his mouth. He released the last of his will, let it consume her utterly, just for the moment, wrapping her brain it. His kisses grew hard, harder still, and then his sharp teeth cut through, into the soft white flesh, opening that vein for him so that the hot blood rushed, sharp and coppery, into his mouth. Her pain was his pain then, bitter and bright, and then his pleasure was hers, and she gave voice to it for them both, a keening climax of fulfillment as the blood coursed across his tongue and down his throat and his body blazed with her heat and her life even as he took them both from her.
He drank. Too long and too hard he drank, losing himself, until the memory of a pair of clear blue eyes flashed into his mind, and he tore himself awa
y even as a part of him chided himself for his foolish hope. He should drink his fill, drink his fill and be done, for surely she would be dead, whatever he did.
Jean rocked back onto his heels above the crumpled form of the beautiful woman, silent now and still. Her hair, still clasped in its pins and ribbons, was now a farce of a lady’s coiffure, the long, solid limbs of her body heavy and limp. And he closed his eyes, his brain still sizzling with the life of her, the heat of her, the challenge and the brilliance of her.
She had been wasted on mere human men. And now she had been wasted on him, as well.
There was a noise, a noise so faint that it was at the edge of even Jean’s hearing. He dragged his eyelids open as it came again.
A breath. A breath so small and faint that it was more the echo of a breath than a breath itself, coming from the girl’s pale lips.
She lived.
And then Jean felt it, the tie that bound his soul to hers, feeble now in its merest infancy but growing stronger with every one of her shallow breaths. The gash in her thigh, the terrible gash that he had made with his mouth and his teeth was already knitting together as he watched because she had lived, and she had changed.
Now she was his, in all her brightness and heat and light. Forever. Her body, her pleasure, her pain, and her mind and her love—all his.
And because Hattie lived, so would he. Now, finally, he would truly live.
Kneeling over her naked, living, breathing body, Jean smelled the salt of the sea and the copper of her blood, felt the threads of the carpet through the fabric of his pants, and he sensed the beating of her heart, which was an echo of his own.
For she held his heart now as surely as he held hers.
And Jean threw back his head, and for the first time in his memory, he truly laughed.
Chapter Eight
When Hattie finally opened her eyes in true wakefulness, she knew that she was far out at sea. The gentle motion of the bed under her had come to her attention even before the texture of the sheets and the softness of the bed, and the sounds of the waves lapping against the sides of the boat were a constant murmur in the room.
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