by Litte, Jane
Another laugh—delicious, rumbling. His gray eyes gleamed silver. “You are a constant surprise. I believe I should be happy you invaded my bedchamber.”
“I said I was sorry for that, but in a way, I’m not. This is . . . You are . . . I quite like it all.”
“Do you?” he asked softly.
“I do.” The second time she had spoken those two words today, and she meant them this time. Lucien Ransford did something to her insides that was inexplicably wicked.
And welcome. Maida felt alive—like a woman—for the first time in her life.
He toyed with the cording at her throat, wrapping the ends around his long fingers. “This is not a game to me, you know. I have a need to . . . to control. To punish.”
She did know. There was a darkness in him that was almost palpable, despite his golden good looks. He suffered, and this marriage would never be easy. Would not be what a well-brought-up young woman expected or possibly even deserved.
But she didn’t care right now, only knew that she wanted his mouth on hers, dominating, demanding her surrender. He had it, even at a distance.
“Kiss me, Lucien.”
And then he did, a kiss at first so sweet and feather light that she couldn’t credit it. But it was not long before he withdrew and pulled her arms back over her head, lashing her to the bed. His large hands weighed her breasts and pressed her nipples almost painfully between his fingers. She ached as he suckled and nipped, working his way back up to her throat, surrounding the corded necklace with savage kisses. She would bear his marks with pride—he needed her, needed this, and she would make sure he got what he needed.
And God help her, she needed it, too.
When he entered her, she was more than ready. The brief moment of difficulty was secondary to her satisfaction that he was seated within her, hers. Their eyes locked as he strained above her, pushing himself ever deeper with each thrust. Her bare skin sang in response as he crushed her beneath him to kiss her everywhere again—her eyelids, her temple, her nose. He captured her lips, conquering her cry as he poured himself into her, flooding her, fucking her.
When it was over, they lay heart to heart as the November wind howled and rain rattled the ancient windowpanes. Their wedding night was nearly over. Whatever their future held, Maida would never regret tonight. If this was punishment, she planned to be very bad again as soon as possible.
Lucien rolled away, and to Maida’s dismay, left the bed to rummage in his trunk again. She wondered what he’d find this time.
Oh dear. A knife.
But he merely cut the cords that bound her.
“Thank you.” She was too lazy with lust to see if her limbs still worked, so she lay in the bed, hoping for her husband’s return to it. He paused over her, his face shadowed.
“I’ll leave you now.”
Maida scrambled up and clasped his hand. “Oh, no! Please don’t go.”
A muscle twitched in his jaw. “I must. I don’t sleep well.”
“Then we needn’t sleep. We can talk. And do other things.” She really couldn’t wait to do those other things, she thought ruefully.
She watched him struggle with the thought of staying. The tension had returned to his lean, battered body. Despite the web of scars, he was magnificent. Maida longed to kiss them, just as he’d done to her.
“All right.”
And it would be all right. Somehow they would make this marriage that began so badly work, one word, one knot, one kiss at a time.
Margaret Rowe is a former teacher, library clerk, and mother of four who woke up in the middle of the night and felt absolutely compelled to create the perfect man and use as many adverbs as possible doing so. A transplanted New Yorker, she lives with her not-quite-perfect husband in Maine, where the cold winters are ideal for staying inside and writing hot historical romances. For more information, please visit www.margaretrowe.net.
SHAMELESS
EDIE HARRIS
PHILADELPHIA, 1859
The corset helped.
Her lover, James Pierpont, lounged carelessly next to her in the second-level opera box, his attention firmly fixed on the soprano floating across the stage. “La traviata,” he had declared before the curtain rose, “is a good lesson for you, Caro. Pay attention.” He then proceeded to ignore her.
So the corset, forcing her posture to mimic attentiveness, helped.
Though Caro’s understanding of Italian was limited, she understood the opera’s general story: A courtesan falls in love, is forced to leave her lover, and subsequently dies.
Lucky woman.
Once a week, she attended the opera on James’s arm. It didn’t matter if they’d seen the production before; on Saturday evenings, like clockwork, his carriage would roll up to her modest townhouse, whisking them both to Broad Street for a night of music.
In theory, these public outings should have been romantic. The golden glow from the gas-lit chandelier, plush red velvet everywhere she looked, and the obscenely wealthy man responsible for her silk gown and glittering diamond earrings at her side—combined, these elements should have set her heart all aflutter.
Her stomach roiled with shame.
Caro’s mother, the estimable Mrs. Davis, had died ten months earlier, secure in the knowledge that her affianced daughter would march down the aisle and become a respectable young matron. But as soon as Mrs. Davis found her final resting place, Caro smothered her grief in the arms of her fiancé. Out of wedlock. And without the estimable Mrs. Davis looking out for her only kin, Caro remained decidedly out of wedlock.
She’d never become Mrs. Pierpont; instead, she was Mr. Pierpont’s mistress.
Now, pressing a hand to quell her aching abdomen, Caro watched the first act come to a close, the soprano now center stage, her face alive in the footlights with her arms outstretched. From James’s box, Caro could see into the far wing, where the stagehands waited to draw the curtains. As her gaze delved the dark corner, a tall figure seemed to materialize in the shadows, leaning against the ivory column marking the edge of the proscenium.
He simply stood there, a faceless entity on a stage that must be blisteringly hot. The soprano bustled past him, but he didn’t move. The conductor brought the orchestra to a halt, and he still didn’t move. Applause pulsed against her eardrums, but he gave no sign of noticing it. She sensed James stand and exit the box, but she remained seated, her wrist aching as she fanned herself with a delicate contraption of stiff lace and polished bone that matched her dress perfectly.
Caught. She felt trapped as she stared at the shadowed man. She would turn away. She would. Any second now.
Finally, when the tightly laced corset no longer seemed like such a blessing, he stepped forward. Probably no more than an inch or two, but suddenly the chandelier’s crystallized light illuminated his features.
It also illuminated the fact that his gaze was locked on her.
Unable to help herself, Caro leaned forward, dropping her fan to rest both hands against the polished railing. He wore simple clothing, simpler than most stagehands: dark wool trousers, a thin cotton undershirt rolled up to his elbows, heavy boots, and loose suspenders. His lack of attire highlighted his broad shoulders and thick musculature, very unlike James’s, she thought. Her lover was considered quite handsome, with his slender build and strikingly dark coloring.
This man, however, had close-cropped blond hair and dark eyes. His face would never be thought of as handsome, but the defined angles and broad planes worked together to create a craggy sort of appeal. That appeal, coupled with his undeniable masculinity, called to her body in a way James never had.
What does that mean?
Her trance broke when a firm hand settled on her shoulder. She looked up at her former fiancé, unable to muster her customary smile. Blue eyes gazed down into hers, their gleam growing colder with each passing moment. Lean fingers tightened until she felt his nails dig into the exposed flesh at her collarbone.
Stifling a wi
nce, she turned back to glance at the blond man.
He was gone.
“After the performance, I’ll be heading backstage.” A weighted pause filled the opera box. “To pay my respects to Miss Lorenzo,” he murmured, naming the soprano.
Caro didn’t react. She’d known it would happen, from the moment he had mentioned his aversion to marriage nine months ago. That he’d mentioned this after spilling himself inside her didn’t seem to bother him. In that instant, Caro hated him—more, she’d hated herself.
“What would you like me to do?” she asked softly, eyes trained on the dark corner where she’d first seen the blond man.
“Take the carriage, go home.” The words rang with damning finality.
They didn’t speak again. Not during the second act, nor the second intermission, and certainly not when Miss Lorenzo died in the arms of the long-haired tenor playing her true love. When James jumped to his feet at the close of the curtain, clapping madly, all Caro could think was, Lucky woman.
She remained in the box long after James left, wondering if the unhappiness churning in her gut had more to do with anger at being thrown over or worry over the future of her situation. Her options were so limited: find another “protector”—how she sneered at the word!—or leave Philadelphia. No matter her respectable upbringing, society now knew her to be a fallen woman.
She wished she could lay the blame entirely at James’s feet, but she had been the one to ask him to make love to her the afternoon of her mother’s funeral. She was the architect of her reputation’s demise; James merely played opposite her, much like Miss Lorenzo’s tenor.
Sitting here wasn’t doing her any favors, so she stood, collecting her fan from the floor, holding her breath as her corset compressed her ribs to the point of pain. Every one of her senses felt drenched in a dull lethargy as she glanced once more at the shadowed wing that housed the curtain pulls.
And there he was, leaning against a Corinthian-style column as he stared into the box.
Caro froze.
Everything in his posture screamed of capable confidence; in her current state, his poise pulled her as surely as if he’d tied a rope around her waist and tugged. Some unidentifiable sensation simmered beneath her stays as she steadily met his gaze from fifty feet away.
A minute tilt of his head indicated the darkened corner at his back, and he lifted a brow in question. He wanted her to . . . to meet him backstage? Caro stopped breathing.
The small quirk of a smile stretching his lips decided her. Before she could think better of it, she smoothed a hand over the bell of her skirts and swept out of James Pierpont’s opera box for the last time.
She must have stayed in the concert hall longer than she’d realized, because the second-floor lobby stood empty. The heels of her evening slippers clacked loudly as she hurried across the varnished wooden floorboards. A small door at the lobby’s rear led down a curving stair, and though she didn’t know where she was going, her body drew her unerringly toward the stage.
One heavy-paneled door stood between her and the wings. Patting a hand over her nerve-riddled stomach, she pushed it open.
After all, I have nothing left to lose.
A few stagehands loitered among the brightly painted set pieces, but she didn’t see the blond man anywhere. Not sparing a moment for self-doubt or recriminations, she wandered along the back wall, amongst the pulleys and chairs and barely avoiding a rack of sparkling costumes that appeared out of thin air in front of her. Small boys with arms overloaded rushed past her as if she were invisible.
Caro rather thought she liked being invisible.
By the time she made her way into the left wing, after nearly knocking her head on a wall-mounted ladder, Caro was convinced the blond man had left, that she’d misread his nod and his smile and the way he watched her. Flipping open her fan, she basked in the cool air wafting over her face as she studied the vast, almost-abandoned stage to her left.
“What’s your name?”
She whirled around, snapping the fan closed and brandishing it in front of her, saber-like.
The blond man laughed, a rusty sound that heated her recently cooled skin as quickly as if she’d been doused in flames. “Easy. Didn’t mean to startle you.” His voice carried the hint of a foreign accent.
“I wasn’t startled,” she muttered, lowering her makeshift weapon. “I thought you’d left.” Her tone was accusatory.
“I wouldn’t leave.” He crossed his thick forearms over his wide chest, and her gaze strayed to the muscles delineated there. “What’s your name?” he asked again.
“Caroline Davis.”
A single gas lamp lit their corner, the ropes of the curtain’s pulley system throwing line after line of shadow across the man’s face. They stood behind a black half-curtain, shielded from view on three sides but open to the main stage. In the low lighting, she could see his eyes were a deep, clear brown, the color of rich liquor in a cut-crystal tumbler.
“Thomas Vaughn,” he murmured in that husky voice of his. He couldn’t be a singer, not with those smoky vocal chords.
How did one go about this, the impetuous assignation? Caro felt herself coloring the longer they stared silently at each other. She had made a mistake. She should go, now, and—
“I saw the man you were with.”
“What?”
“The man with you, during the show. I saw him come backstage.”
Her blush consumed her. “Ah. Yes. He, uh, wanted to see Miss Lorenzo.”
“And left you alone?” His tone conveyed his disapproval.
One of the good things about assignations with complete strangers, Caro decided, was that she could ignore polite constraints and be perfectly honest. “We’ve ended our liaison. As of tonight.”
He leaned back against the taut ropes. “He’s a fool, then.”
“No more a fool than I.” She shrugged, the short sleeves of her gown falling off her shoulders at the careless movement. His eyes immediately flitted to her newly revealed skin. Suddenly, she wanted to remove the dress in its entirety, simply to see what he’d do. “Are you one of the hands?”
He shook his head. “No. The choreographer.”
She felt her eyes go wide. “You’re a dancer?”
A quiet bark of laughter greeted her incredulous question. “I choreograph the fight scenes. I’m the company’s combat master.”
Which meant he would leave when the troupe moved on. Perfect . . . Wasn’t it?
He uncrossed his arms, reaching out to trace the curve of her collarbone. “I saw him hurt you.” Every pass of his roughened fingertip over her skin made her shiver.
“So?” She didn’t care what he’d seen, didn’t care what he thought. She just wanted the anger still heating her blood to go away. And she desperately wanted a reprieve from having to make a decision about her future, if only for a short while.
“Is that why you’re here? Because you enjoy being hurt?”
“What? No!” His question perplexed her, made her wary.
His shrug caused the suspenders to dig tightly into his brawny shoulders. “Some women like rougher men.”
“Is that what you are?” James had never been violent with her. Only quick. “A rough man?” Saying the words had a singularly interesting effect on her body: wetness dampened the apex of her thighs and her mouth went dry. She licked her lips.
His finger dipped to edge of her neckline, skating across the plumped tops of her breasts. Hooking that finger into the top of her bodice, he pulled, yanking her two fumbling steps forward until a scant inch separated his chest from hers. “Yes.”
“Yes, what?” she breathed, having lost her train of thought at his nearness. Heat pulsed off him, causing sweat to bead at her temples. Her body had never reacted this strongly, this sexually, to anyone before, and it both thrilled and terrified her.
Vaughn leaned in until his lips hovered next to her ear. “Yes, I’m a rough man,” he whispered, his nearness making her ni
pples bead within the tight confines of her undergarments. “And you’re an angry woman.”
His tongue darted out to trace the shell of her ear, and a strangled sound escaped her, though her emotions from the evening were still too tumultuous to make room for something so impractical as embarrassment. “I am angry,” she whispered back, as honest as before.
His mouth, open and blistering, skimmed over her jaw until their lips met. It wasn’t a kiss so much as one gentle brush after another, mouth against mouth. His tongue wet her lower lip, then caught it between his teeth. The nip made her gasp, and he slanted his mouth over hers, delving in and tasting her.
She met him stroke for stroke, open and oh, so willing to let him kiss her until she forgot James and the shame she feared would haunt her eternally. Though they touched nowhere other than their mouths and where his calloused finger rested between her breasts, she felt him imprinted on every pore as he took her tongue in a daring dance that left them both panting.
Perhaps the man is a choreographer, after all.
Abruptly, he pulled back, lips swollen from their assault on hers.
“Hit me,” he commanded, husky.
She blinked, certain she’d misheard him.
He wrapped his wrists around the curtain pulls, effectively trapping himself in the thick cord of two ropes. With arms splayed above his head, he widened his stance and eyed her with an arrogant gleam. “I said, hit me.”
His gaze and tone rankled. “No,” she snapped, stepping back. “I don’t know what it is you think I want, or what it is you want, but I won’t hit you.”
“Your lover threw you over tonight. For a woman who won’t even be in Philadelphia past next week.” Each word felt like a slap, and she bit the inside of her lip to avoid flinching as he continued in a quietly mocking voice. “He left you in your box to go to her, while you were still in the building. He’s probably fucking her right now.”
The fan snapped in her hand. “I don’t care.”
“If we’re quiet enough, I’d wager we’d hear her cries.”
