I stepped closer. “With me you feel what?”
“You’re only a child,” he said, as if to dismiss his true answer before it was spoken.
I stood chest to chest with him, looking up into his face. From this angle he looked more open. I wanted to force him to admit that he felt something with me.
“No one is only a child, Veek. One thing I have observed. Children can be wise.”
He moved my hair out of my eyes. “And valorous. And too strong for their size.” He smiled.
“Were you too strong for your size once?” I said. He had never told me of his own childhood—only details of the real Clarence’s life.
“I must have been. I’m here now.” His eyes got small as they sometimes did when he was thinking of sad or bad things. His lips were big and soft. I could picture that child, even if I didn’t know where or when to picture him, with small eyes waiting to be hurt, soft lips wanting to kiss and be kissed.
I put a finger on his lips.
Then I stood on tiptoe and kissed him.
He sighed a sigh so deep that I thought he was weeping. He snatched me into his arms, pulled me against his chest, lifted me off my feet, and kissed me many times with desperate, hard, schoolboy kisses.
“What?” I gasped, as he broke for air. “Veek? With me you feel what?”
He was rubbing his face on my hair, as if we had been parted for years. He whispered one word at my ear. “Caught.”
I wondered what that meant. “You wouldn’t choose me,” I said tentatively. “Is that it?”
“How could I? You’re too young, and,” his tone turned despairing, “I might as well be dead.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but he touched his lips to mine.
“Don’t talk. We don’t have time,” he murmured into my mouth. With strong arms he lifted me again and laid me on my back on the bed, then shucked his clothes with one hand, pawed mine away with the other, and pinned me to the coverlet with kisses.
All we have is time, I wanted to say. I was too breathless.
No one had ever made me so hot and slippery as this. His hands were everywhere, teasing my vulve, roughing up my breasts, pinching my nipples, taking me strongly by the throat until I melted from head to foot. I was slowly, heavily throbbing.
My faux Clarence might as well be dead?
His thigh jammed between my legs.
Oh yes, this is a dead man. I giggled.
That made him lift his head. “What?” I could feel him rushing toward penetration, his hand on my hip, his cock a hot iron on my thigh. Come into me! I thought.
I laughed. “This is sex-demon technique, is it?”
“No. This is me, not putting all that on for you. I thought you might understand teenager sex better.”
That was a lie. I heard tightness in his voice.
“I understand it all too well,” I said severely. “It’s lame. I may be young, but I’ve had several competent lovers.”
“Forgive me,” he mocked, his eyes small again.
“So I will, if you deserve it.” I petted his shoulder. “Come on. Don’t be stuffy. Show me,” I begged. “Does it hurt your feelings if I ask for special effects?”
VEEK
“Does it hurt your feelings if I ask for special effects?” she said.
“What?” I said. I was completely distracted by her heat. My own arousal was burning me to ash. “Why would that offend me?”
“Because you’re a sex demon. The pressure to perform, yes?”
“Can we talk about this later?” I blurted, embarrassed to be so frantically, boyishly eager.
Her face lit with triumph. “Hah! I’ve distracted you at last!” She attacked with all her fingers, aiming for my cock.
We wrestled like children. When at last we paused, she was under me, with me trying to quiet her knees, holding her wrists beside her head. Her eyes sparkled, her cheeks were pink, her laugh came in gasps, and her limbs slid along mine like poetry.
“Okay,” she gasped. “Teenager sex. This once.”
Without another word, I humped furiously against her soft, slick thigh. At the same time, I thrust my hand between her legs, putting in one finger, two fingers, twisting clumsily, letting myself forget everything I knew.
She wriggled and cried out, “Yes—yes—now!”
I burst like a teenager. She clenched tight around my fingers in rhythmic throbs that told me she, too, had suffered an explosion. I panted, letting pleasure possess me.
We had forty seconds of blissful silence. Then:
“So does it offend you to be asked to perform, M’sieur Sex Demon?”
My panting slowed. “What do you mean?”
She was talking again. I never met such a girl for interrupting everything, but everything with chatter. I pushed myself away from her and propped myself on my elbows, feeling my sweat cool under the hotel’s ceiling vent.
She pouted. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t presume.”
I groaned. “Speak.”
“Jake made you do this with women. I was there when he said so. I remember sitting in his shop. Women would come in and they would look at me angrily and he would take them into the back room where they would write him a check. The married ones paid cash. And then he would come out and give you advice. How to please them.”
I collapsed. “Oh, God.”
“I’m sorry to distress you. Perhaps you feel like a gigolo. I have offended.” She really was contrite.
I put my hand over hers where she gripped her own knee. “You haven’t offended. Except my cock.” I bucked on the sheet to set it wagging.
She didn’t smile.
“All right.” I surrendered. “What do you want to know?”
“Many things. What is it like, being a sex demon? I mean, what does it signify for you? Do you steal her soul when she climaxes? How much did Jake pay you? How will you meet your clientèle now that he is gone? You told Madame that Samedi granted your wish. Did he make you into a sex demon? Because, if Jake got your navel string, then of course you were once human, yes?”
I covered my head with both arms. “Stop, stop!” Because she looked pouty again, I patted her. “Slowly, I beg you.” And because I knew she wouldn’t stop bouncing at me with her million questions, I gave her answers.
“I don’t steal souls. Jake didn’t pay me, but I did count coup, because I had a phantom account with a division of the Christian hell that paid me thirty pieces of silver for a quota of three sex partners per month. My fellow sex demons and I pooled our scores and drew lots so that one of us could get the monthly bonus. And, no, Jake didn’t capture me. I am . . . I was born human. I gave him my navel string.”
I hadn’t meant to tell her that last part. Maybe listening to her blurt out every thought had infected me with that suicidal impulse to open myself to her.
“You must have trusted him greatly.”
“Oh, you saw that? Good for you,” I said. “My roommate Baz didn’t like Jake. He thought me a fool to give Jake so much power over me.”
“Well, were you a fool?”
Always she asked the hard question. “I don’t know yet,” I said slowly. “When we were boys together in the vodou house, I thought he knew everything I needed to learn. Maybe he did. Or maybe I was a fool after all.”
“What did you want to learn? To be a sex demon?”
I laughed, picturing my fifteen-year-old self, stiff and anxious, fresh from Eton and Cambridge, with centuries of Montmorency propriety weighing me down. “No. I wanted, oh, to be sure of myself, the way Jake was. I wanted to own my place in the world.”
“You said to Madame, you wanted to be a god.”
“That’s what I said to Samedi, too. But what did that mean to me? And what did that mean to him?”
I had no answers. The Baron was inscrutable. My own boyhood desires were no clearer to me, even after all these years.
“But Jake said he kept you moving so that you wouldn’t put down roots anyplace.”
As if she sensed my discomfort, she flung herself back against the sheets and changed the subject. “I wish I knew my place in the world.”
“You have one,” I murmured.
“Where?”
With envy I said, “At Montmorency. The grotto, the maze.”
She studied me past her soft, round, bare, white arm. All her flesh was that pale marble color, thickly white and opaque. Here and there a blue vein pulsed. She mesmerized me.
I became aware of something in her gaze—that look a woman gets, as if she knows too much.
“What?”
“Bite me again?” she said shyly.
That had not been a “bite me” gaze, but I let it lie. I didn’t want to know what she might know about me.
“So you remember that bite?”
I descended to her shoulder, nuzzled along the inside of her arm to her wrist, then worked my way back to her shoulder, sniffing and kissing lightly. “This scent. The Montmorency parfum. It’s different on a woman than on a man,” I murmured. “Maddening.”
I lifted myself off her and brushed the nipples of her little breasts with my chest until they hardened. I poked my nose into her ear. She shivered and arched deliciously into me.
I sniffed strongly in the hollow of her throat. She threw one leg over mine and tried to rub her sex against my thigh, but I refused to put my cock into her yet. She would have to settle for frigging against my leg. She bucked there, making my leg slippery and fragrant, an irresistible smell.
Soon I would feel compelled to penetrate her. With my lips I pinched her throat, and then pinched farther back, making for the nape of her neck. Smiling, she turned her face aside so I could reach it. At last, I took the back of her neck between my jaws. This time I growled.
Her shiver became a shudder. Good, but not enough.
I growled again, deeper and longer.
She held still, arching, rigid, shuddering harder. I put one hand between her legs, ah, how wet! and perfumed my hand with it—then put the hand to her face. I let her smell it.
She drew in one long sucking breath.
Then I covered her nose and mouth, tightened my jaws on her nape, growled deeper, longer, and as she arched, I slid my knee up to her secret and gave it a tiny bump.
She came apart under me.
I was ready to plunge into her, but instead I let her breathe and stroked her hair while the convulsions faded. I could taste her climax in the sweat on her neck, like an electrical charge. The air smelled of vanilla and woman. I so loved this moment with a woman, right after she climaxed.
For a delightful minute, she was silent. Then her head turned. Her eyes met mine. “I’ve never met a man like you. Why don’t you leap on me and do your thing?”
I shrugged. “I was born with a hard-on. All day, every day, and all night, too. It can wait.”
That made her laugh. “Never ever have I met a man like you.”
I hesitated. Even though we’d had sex three times now, including that time in her sleep when I felt her every nerve as if it were my own, I couldn’t help thinking of her as a child. After all the young girls I’d had, it seemed this one should be protected.
Her eyes begged me.
“Do you like penetration?” I said.
“Oh, yes,” she said solemnly. “There’s a condom in my purse.”
“There are condoms in every one of your purses.” I pretended to frown. Finding them had dented my belief in her innocence.
“Want me to get one?”
I smiled and shook my head. Yes, I was hot for her. But the heat was too high in me, centered in my chest, not my groin. I couldn’t look away from her. Caught. Yes. She was a menace. She was like a young, pretty, female version of Jake: mischievous and chaotic and full of indomitable high spirits.
She put her hand on my cock, wrapping her small fingers around it.
And, Dieu, she was randy. What man would not be caught?
My camel-colored linen trousers, hopelessly creased after twenty-four hours of adventuring in Sophie’s company, lay close at hand on the floor. I found a condom in my pocket. It had been a long time since I took a woman with my body like this, without resorting to sex demon tricks. It would never do to make her enceinte.
Her eyes were so big and full of anticipation that I covered her immediately. The skin between her thighs burned mine. I made her bring my cock in with her hand, made her rise onto me, made sure she was ready. I slid slowly in and out of her, my belly against hers. I propped my elbows on either side of her face. We held one another’s gaze the whole time.
I had never felt more in danger.
“This is nice,” she whispered.
“Yes.”
“It’s like making love.”
Like making love? My heart twisted inside me. “Yes.”
“Do you like me?”
“Child,” I blurted, “what kind of life do you lead?”
She looked up at me anxiously, squeezing my cock with expert womanly muscles, her wide, trusting eyes beginning to fill with tears. “But do you like me?”
I brushed the tears away with my thumbs. “Yes, my cabbage, yes, I do. I am devoted to you.”
“Oh. Good.” She gave a huge sniff.
Then she pulled me close, buried her face against my throat, and cried, pumping against me, engulfing my cock with her whole body, urging me on with gulps and sobs and little beats of her fists on my shoulders.
I couldn’t quite make out the words she muffled against my throat. “Be my friend?” Or maybe, “Be with me?”
Her fist struck harder. Her squeezes seized all my attention. Within seconds, I knew I would spend. I slid inside her senses and found her already connected to mine, about to climax. How does she do that? Desire rose in me like lava, unstoppable. I hardened all over.
“Come with me, little cabbage,” I panted, “or I am disgraced. Come!”
She broke wide open as I poured myself out, helpless, unable to hold back.
I was being milked of my sorrow. All the badness of my life drained into her in a hot river. She was doing my weeping for me. I touched my face gently to the blue-black scented curls on top of her head. I who had spent years learning to serve any woman’s wants, I was left with nothing to do, nothing but to hold her and be gentle.
She did all the work.
How could that be?
An old courtesan might be this skilled. That a young girl had learned to make love this way seemed wrong. But she didn’t feel dirty to me. She fountained light and joy and color and heat, feeding me through my eyes and my skin, through every part where I could take her in.
I enjoyed her silence for a full ninety seconds this time. Then:
“I wish we could go there, really. To my cave.”
I sighed too. “In the maze.”
“Yes.” But she sounded a little drowsy now.
“When the iris are in bloom along the canals,” I said, remembering anew. Her talk last night had wakened all my homesickness for the great French marshes. “They bloom so briefly, but so fragrantly.”
“Yes,” she murmured.
“And thousands of little lavande marsh orchids. In spring there are a few days, unseasonably warm, between the rains.”
“Yes.”
Now I was doing all the talking and she was monosyllabic.
I recalled, “I would steal food from the kitchen for a picnic. The cook would have given it me, but it tasted better stolen.”
She giggled. “Me too!”
“Cheese, bread, cherries. I would eat the bread and cheese in my cave,” I remembered dreamily, “and then take the cherries to the edge of the maze and eat them and spit the stones into one particular spot, at the entrance to the maze. I wanted them to grow. One day I walked the perimeter most carefully and spat cherry stones all along the outside of the maze, right under the hedge. I pictur
ed them growing into trees. I wished to make a ring of protection around that sacred space.” I was silenced. Homesickness closed like a hot fist around my throat. In a moment I added, “The next year I was sent away to Eton. Three years later, I went to Cambridge. I never did get back there again.”
She had stopped breathing in my arms.
“Are you all right?” I said to the curls in my face.
Her voice came muffled against my armpit. “They’re quite tall now. The cherry trees around the maze, and the grove by its mouth.” She moved in my arms, her whole body lithe. She lifted her face. “You did well.”
For a long moment I didn’t realize what she had said, or what I had confessed.
“You are Clarence,” she said with wonder. “You are he.”
I felt extraordinary. I hadn’t known how much sorrow I was carrying until she drew it out of me.
Now she knew this secret, too.
I was as light as dandelion fluff.
“You know about the Montmorency perfume. You planted the cherry trees. Jake called you ‘cousin.’ You really are that old man, aren’t you?”
I bowed my head. “That old man is part of me. I have not been able to age. Nor, Jake would say, to grow wise.”
She exploded with more questions. “You’re he! You’re the true vicomte! Mon Dieu! What happened? Why did you run away? What was it like back then, at Montmorency?” Her questions skittered in all directions, like hunting bats.
I said heavily, “No one knows what that was like.” Even now I couldn’t speak of those cold years.
More slowly Sophie said, “But I do. I was raised exactly the same in the same family, in the same places.”
“Eighty years later. Times have changed.” I nudged her. “You carry condoms in every purse. This is a new century.”
“But the family has not changed. To be of Montmorency is to face the supreme challenge. My father has gone mad with it. They beat it into us. We stand up to get whipped when we are small,” she reminded me. This time I shuddered. “Did you play with wooden toys dressed in priceless lace that must not be dirtied? Did you sleep in that cold nursery in the north wing, far from your mother, with windows that look out on the marais?”
“My mother died when I was born. But yes. All those things, we share.”
Walking on Sunshine Page 18
