by Jane Feather
The tied hands weren’t the problem so much as the gag, Gabrielle decided. It dehumanized one in some way. She had no choice but to stand there, mute, under a cold stare that made her feel like a worm. She thought longingly of her bed with its crisp white sheets and feather mattress. Why on earth hadn’t she settled for the simple comforts of an uninterrupted night’s sleep, instead of reaching for the moon?
“Turn around.”
She obeyed, and to her inexpressible relief he unfastened the belt that bound her wrists. She pulled the wadded kerchief from her mouth and ran the back of her hand over her dry lips, trying to moisten her mouth with her tongue. But she kept her back to him, too intimidated by that ruthless display of the spymaster’s power to face him as yet.
“Why?” Nathaniel demanded.
“I wanted you,” Gabrielle spoke the truth because there was no lie that would be as convincing. “And I thought you probably wanted me too.”
Nathaniel’s anger seemed to have exhausted itself, and the reality of the situation now hit him. For better or worse, she was there and so far undiscovered.
Gabrielle turned to face him. Her eyes raked his face and detected the slightest softening. “I am truly sorry,” she said. “Everyone’s asleep. I locked my chamber door. The window’s open, so if Jake did cry out, we’d hear him. It didn’t seem such a big risk, not when the stakes were so irresistible.”
She had a smudge of dirt on her nose where her face had been pressed to the floor, and a wisp or two of straw in her tumbled hair. The cloak had fallen back from her shoulders, and the white nightgown was streaked with dust.
He could still feel the shape of her body in his hands as she’d fought him. He could feel the curve of her thrusting hip as she’d twisted beneath him, and he could smell the soap on her skin.
He was aware of excitement and his body’s arousal, the fullness of his loins. Subduing Gabrielle had excited him in some way that he didn’t entirely understand.
Her eyes held his.
“God’s good grace, woman,” he whispered. “What is it about you?”
“Just that, perhaps,” she replied as softly. “That I am woman and you are man, and we seem made to fit each other.”
Nothing mattered but the need to take her body into his own, to become flesh with her flesh; to hear her murmured words of need, the hungry, earthy words of passion and demand; to feel her skin, alive beneath his hand; to touch and probe in the way that set her body alight; to explore charted territory and discover the bays and the hillocks that he’d missed before; to draw her essential scent deep into his lungs as his tongue translated the scent to taste.
And as he looked at her he knew that his thoughts were hers … that she was as hungry for his body as he was for hers.
Gabrielle moved toward him, impatiently shrugging the cloak off her shoulders. She reached for him, throwing her head back, lips parted in invitation. He circled her throat with his hands, and her pulse beat fast against his thumbs with the energy of arousal.
Gabrielle waited in a state of suspended animation for him to do something other than gaze at her, his face so close to her own, his eyes narrowed with a predatory glitter that she hadn’t seen before. A thrill of almost apprehensive excitement jolted her belly. This was a different mood from any they’d shared before, and she had the sense that almost anything could happen.
“What are you looking at?” she whispered when the tension of their silence became unbearable.
“You,” he replied simply. And it was as if he were looking through the glowing braziers in her eyes deep into her soul.
But still he made no move. Gabrielle drew a shuddering breath and palmed his scalp, bringing his mouth to hers. His hands stayed at her throat as she kissed him, pressing her aching loins against the hard shaft of his erect flesh. Her hands moved down his back, down to his buttocks, her fingers biting into the powerful muscles, expressing her need and the demand that he make some response to match her own.
Finally she drew back, breathless, her lips reddened, an almost feral glitter in her eyes. His hands on her throat seemed to be imprinted on her skin, and she could feel the pulse in his thumb beating in rapid time with her own as his own blood flowed swift with passion. And yet he was doing nothing to partner her. He just stood there, clasping her throat, and gazing at her with unreadable eyes and impassive mouth.
“What is it?” she asked, her voice sounding strange and thick, as if it emerged through fog. “What do you want?”
“This,” he said. His hands went to the neck of her nightgown, and the flimsy lawn parted as he tore through it and down.
The cold air laved her bared body and her nipples grew small and hard on the crowns of her breasts. Her tongue touched her lips and her eyes grew wide. He pushed the torn garment off her shoulders, and it fell to the floor in a puddle of white, silvered in the moonlight falling through the round window.
“This,” he repeated softly but with infinite satisfaction as he touched her, drawing a finger down from her throat, between her breasts, down to her navel, slipping between her thighs. Her feet shifted on the straw as the questing finger probed and found what it sought, and ail the while his eyes held hers, watching, gauging, as he played upon her, drawing from her the ultimate response that she knew she couldn’t have controlled even had she wanted to.
And Nathaniel knew it too. He was mastering her body as assuredly now as he had done in his earlier anger. And Gabrielle, fierce, independent, challenging Gabrielle, was malleable clay and glorying in it as ecstasy ripped through her, tearing her apart, and she fell shuddering against him, for the moment unable to support herself.
He held her tightly and the linen of his shirt rubbed her nipples, the leather of his britches was cool and smooth against her belly and thighs. This time he kissed her, his mouth hard and possessive, his tongue driving deeply within her. Her head fell back under the pressure of his ravaging mouth, her body arching backward against the hands in the small of her back as she bent like a willow before the wind.
Without moving his mouth from hers, he lowered her to the floor. The entire surface of her body was sensitized, every nerve ending close to the surface, so that the prickle of the straw against her bare back and the Sensation of linen and leather rubbing her breasts and belly was intensified.
Nathaniel left her mouth. Kneeling astride her, he ran his hands over her breasts, circling the hard buds of her nipples with a fingertip. That same air of detachment clung to him as if he were discovering something entirely new that had to be absorbed, catalogued, understood.
He looked up and met her gaze, and for the first time he smiled. He unfastened his waistband and his flesh sprang free from constraint.
“Come closer,” Gabrielle murmured, moving her hand down to enclose him.
He inched up her body so she could take him in her mouth, and he threw back his head on an exhalation of delight, kneeling up, his hands resting unconsciously on his hips as she pleasured him.
When finally he entered her body with a long, slow thrust that penetrated her core, Gabrielle cried out, curling her legs around his hips, her heels pressing into his buttocks as she pulled him into the cleft of her body with fervid urgency.
Nathaniel shook his head in abrupt denial and resisted the pressure, pulling back to the very edge of her body. He looked down at her, that predatory glitter in his eyes again, the tiniest smile touching his lips.
Gabrielle lay still, her body thrumming with expectation as he held himself immobile, and slowly, inexorably, the sensation built deep in the pit of her belly. Still smiling, he watched her eyes, again gauging the progress of her spiraling climb to ecstasy.
When she thought she could bear it no longer, when she thought her body would shatter like crystal under the tension, he drove into her, filling her, becoming a part of her as she became a part of him.
His mouth covered hers, suppressing her cry of joy the instant before it broke from her lips. His body moved in hers, and they ros
e and fell in mindless union, flesh and bone and sinew joined as one. And then the climactic explosion tore through them and she clung to him like a shipwrecked mariner clutching a broken spar before falling back, barely conscious, on the hard, cold floor, crushed by his body.
“Sweet heaven!” Nathaniel gasped after an eternity. His breath was still an exhausted sob. “What was that?”
“La petite mort.” Gabrielle could barely speak.
Nathaniel chuckled weakly. “The French have an accurate turn of phrase.” He rolled sideways and lay on his belly, his forehead resting on his forearm as his heart finally slowed and his breathing eased.
Gabrielle struggled up and sat blinking around the moonlit loft. Her ruined nightgown lay in a heap on the straw. “It seems as if I’m going to have to cross the yard stark naked. Whatever possessed you?”
“God knows,” he said, sitting up himself. “The devil in you, I suspect.” He reached for her discarded cloak and wrapped it around her damp body. “You’ll catch your death of cold.”
“I doubt that.” She smiled and then shivered. “Then again, it is March.”
“I used to think I was perfectly sane,” Nathaniel remarked in tones of mild interest. “But I now realize that I’m heading for Bedlam. Stand up.” He pulled her to her feet and cupped her face between his palms. “Driven there by a wanton brigand! What the hell am I going to do with you, Gabrielle?”
“You seem to have done a fair amount tonight,” she observed judiciously. “You’ve wrestled me and manhandled me and tied me up and then dispatched me to the outer limits of bliss. What else is there?”
Nathaniel shook his head in mock reproof. “You’re an impossible woman, too much for any ordinary mortal to manage. Hurry back now into the warm.” He pulled the edges of the cloak tighter around her. “Go on, quickly!” He pushed her to the ladder.
“I’d expected a little more ceremony,” Gabrielle grumbled, obeying the hand in her back. “But I can’t think why, since this has been a most unceremonious evening, one way and another.” She edged backward onto the ladder and grinned at him, blowing him a kiss before the bright head vanished into the darkness below.
Nathaniel stood at the window, watching her run across the yard and slip safely into the inn.
How could someone so open, so gloriously candid in her desires and her needs and her loving, be treacherous? And how could he lose all sense of that when he was within her, when she was a part of him and he of her?
He’d asked himself the question before, and, as before, there was no answer.
17
“The spymaster is in Paris?” Talleyrand most unusually revealed his surprise as he poured wine into two crystal goblets in the study of the house on rue d’Anjou.
“Just so.” Gabrielle untied the ribbons of her hat and tossed it onto a leather couch. She peered at her reflection in the glass over the mantelpiece and tucked a straying wisp of hair back into the pins.
“Where?” Talleyrand handed her a glass of burgundy.
“Merci.” Gabrielle took the glass with a smile and inhaled the bouquet. “I don’t know,” she said frankly. “He wouldn’t tell me. I’m to wait to be contacted.”
“A cautious man, as one would expect.” Talleyrand nodded. He made a steeple of his fingers and gazed into the middle distance. “For some reason, your letter gave me the sense that there is a … a frisson”—his hands opened eloquently—“between you and Lord Praed.”
Gabrielle sipped her wine. How had he guessed that? She’d thought she’d been completely emotionless in her letter. But Talleyrand always saw beneath the surface, and there was never any point attempting to pull the wool over his eyes. “Yes,” she agreed. “In fact, something rather more than that, I believe.”
“I see.” The Minister for Foreign Affairs examined her with the searching, assessing scrutiny of a connoisseur of women. “Passion becomes you,” he stated after a minute. “It has always been so. You looked thus after your times with Guillaume.”
Gabrielle met his gaze steadily. “There are similarities,” she agreed.
“They are—were—both master spies,” her godfather pointed out dryly. “It would seem you have a fatal predilection toward the devious, mon enfant.”
“With such a mentor, does it surprise you?”
Talleyrand laughed. “Such a quick tongue, you have. How does your spymaster react to it, I wonder?”
Gabrielle rightly assumed that no response was required.
“So, does this added dimension alter your attitude in any way?” Her godfather shifted the subject, blandly matter-of-fact.
“He was responsible for Guillaume’s death,” she answered. “I can’t forget that, despite—” She shrugged. “Despite physical passion. We have that, certainly, but it alters nothing essential.”
Talleyrand stroked his chin. “Let us be sure we understand each other, ma fille. You are saying that despite physical passion, you still intend to be avenged on this man for his part in Guillaume’s death?”
Gabrielle wandered over to the fireplace, staring into the flames. Guillaume’s face rose in her internal vision. He was laughing, his eyes so alive, his beautiful mouth curved …
“Oh, yes,” she said, almost to herself. “I will use him, sir, in whatever fashion you dictate.”
Talleyrand nodded, satisfied. “There is much at stake. Too much to be sacrificed to blind passion.”
“I understand that.”
There was a knock at the door, and a footman entered to light the candles, draw the long brocade curtains over the windows as dusk deepened, and make up the fire.
They were both silent as the man went about his work. Talleyrand looked down into his glass as if reading solutions to unanswerable questions in the ruby wine.
“You must be tired after your journey,” he said as the servant finished mending the fire and the door closed behind him. “Why don’t you go to your apartments and rest. I’m sure Catherine must be eager to greet you.”
“Yes.” Gabrielle rose immediately. “I’m glad you’re in Paris. I’d find it hard to weave my way through this tangle without your counsel.” She picked up her discarded gloves and slapped them idly into her palm before saying abruptly, “There’s a complication. Nathaniel’s son is with him.”
“In Paris?” Again Talleyrand revealed his surprise. “How old’s the child?”
“Six. He stowed away on the boat and there really wasn’t any choice but to bring him. Nathaniel has a safe house where he says the child won’t be remarked, but if Fouché were to hear of Jake …” She fell silent, chewing her bottom lip.
“He mustn’t,” Talleyrand agreed instantly. “You will have to submit to an interview with him. You must be very careful.”
“I know,’ she said simply. She bent forward for the avuncular kiss he placed on her forehead. “Will you be dining at home, sir?”
“I hadn’t intended to, but in the circumstances, I believe I shall,” he said, patting her cheek.
“You do me too much honor, sir.” Her eyes twinkled, banishing the seriousness of the last exchange.
“Go and do your duty to Catherine,” he said gruffly. “I don’t know what your father would say to this habit you have of forming highly improper liaisons. It’s high time you found a husband and started having babies.”
“I would if I could,” she said, and the twinkle faded. “But I don’t seem to be attracted to men who want to lead conventional lives.”
“Probably because you don’t want to yourself,” her godfather observed briskly. “The vicissitudes of war suit you.”
“And what does that say about my character?” Gabrielle queried, shaking her head.
“I’m sure you can work that out for yourself.” Talleyrand waved her way, reflecting that Gabrielle was one of the people for whom fate had fashioned a twisted destiny, one of great passions and great sorrows. In many ways she was to be envied. She lived on the cutting edge, never in the comfortable safety of the middle, and
she’d experience heights and glories that ordinary people would never approach. But such a life had its price, as she already knew. Twenty-five was young to have lost so much.
Gabrielle found the Princess de Talleyrand in her boudoir. Catherine had been married to Talleyrand for five years—a misalliance that shocked society as much as it puzzled. That Talleyrand, a descendent of one of France’s oldest families, should have married a woman of inferior birth, his own mistress of four years, and reputed to have been the mistress of anyone willing to keep her, was completely incomprehensible. Catherine was a silly woman with vapid conversation, no companion for the urbane and brilliant Minister for Foreign Affairs, and she was no longer young, although her fabled beauty was as yet barely dimmed.
Gabrielle privately believed that her godfather had married his immensely good-natured mistress because it was as easy to do so as not. As an excommunicated bishop, Talleyrand despised the church, and as an aristocratic intellectual, he despised bourgeois morality. So when Napoleon had conducted one of his periodic moral sweeps through his court, demanding that irregular relationships be regularized, Talleyrand had yielded to imperial pressure simply because he didn’t give a tinker’s damn one way or the other.
Catherine greeted Gabrielle warmly but rather as if she’d just returned from a shopping expedition instead of an extended visit to England.
“Ma chère, how well you look.” She lifted her powdered, painted cheek for Gabrielle’s kiss. “Have you seen Monsieur le Prince?”
“Just now,” Gabrielle said. “He’s dining at home, he tells me.”
Catherine made a small moue. “What a nuisance. I am engaged to dine at the Bonnevilles and I can’t cry off. You’ll have to entertain him for me.”
Gabrielle hid her smile. Catherine’s ability to entertain her husband in any arena except the bedchamber was open to question.
“I have some straw-colored sarcenet,” Catherine was saying, examining Gabrielle closely. “It doesn’t suit me, I’ve decided, but it would look very well on you, ma chère. Clothilde could make it up for you. There is a perfect pattern for a morning dress—let me see, where did I put it?” She sorted vaguely through a stack of periodicals on a marble-topped Louis XV desserte table. “Ah, here it is.”
