‘What are they?’
Errin hesitated. They were fast reaching the point of no return. Her normal self would have said way too fast. Her current self said not fast enough. She wanted this. Her wanting overrode even her native caution. ‘Underwear,’ she said. ‘I’m wearing them now.’
Richard was standing behind her. She leaned back against him and felt rather than heard the way the movement made him moan softly, yet she sensed him hesitate. ‘Errin, I don’t want you thinking I’m expecting anything in return for the dresses. You don’t owe me anything.’
‘I know.’ And she did. It was such a nice feeling, this certainty that he wanted nothing from her. He wasn’t Mark. He was, as he had said, a gentleman. And she was, as he had said too, no lady. ‘So, do you want to see them, from the point of view of scientific curiosity?’ she said audaciously.
His arms circled her, slipping under the loose fastening of her jacket to cup her breasts. He bent his head and nuzzled the sensitive skin at the back of her ear, his thumbs caressing her nipples, his erection pressing into her bottom. ‘Need you ask?’
He turned her round then and kissed her hungrily. Errin clutched at the slippery silk of his waistcoat to pull him closer, her fingers running through the soft-as-silk night-black hair to fasten his mouth harder onto hers. Little gasping moans escaped her as the need for more kisses, harder kisses, grew inexorably, like a craving she could not deny.
Her nipples were tingling, puckered and hard. There was a path of heat blazing from there down to her belly, to her sex, every tiny movement of his thumbs sending a shiver and a connection, like a series of jolting electrical pulses, until she thought she could bear it no more, even though he hadn’t even touched her bare skin yet.
Skin. Her fingers found the nape of his neck but were frustrated by his neckcloth. She struggled with it, then gave up.
Skin. Richard had never wanted to touch someone so much in his life. He had not thought desire could be this heady. He had not thought need could be this achingly exciting. With a growl of frustration he broke off the kiss to tear off his coat, his neckcloth, her jacket, her shirt and then his, and then his mouth was on hers again, his bare chest pressed against her, his hands stroking her shoulders, her back. He sensed she was as aroused as he. Her nipples, budding hard through the lacy scraps of her tiny undergarments, pressed into his chest, begging for his attention.
He skimmed her shape, down her spine to cup her bottom, round to span her waist, up to her breasts, kneeling before her to remove the rest of her outer clothing. She had beautiful legs, long and well shaped but strong, like a dancer’s. And smooth—her skin was like silk. Supple too.
The preposterous things she called undergarments seemed more like extravagantly decorative bits of lace tatting held together with some gauzy material he could not name. Designed to entice attention rather than for any more practical purposes. He cupped his hand over her sex, feeling the heat of her through the transparent material. Then he kissed her where his hand had been, a sort of breathy kiss that spread heat and promise into her, making her gasp with pleasure and anticipation.
Her pulled her down onto her knees and kissed her breasts through the protective lace of her undergarment. Eager to free her from its confines, he searched in vain for the usual lacings and buttons.
‘At the back,’ Errin whispered urgently.
Richard’s fingers wrestled with the unfamiliar fastening. ‘Damnation! A locksmith would struggle to gain entry,’ he muttered impatiently. ‘If this is progress, you can keep it!’ He yanked at the unyielding clasp, then resorted to brute force. The expensive froth surrendered with something resembling a sigh. With a growl of satisfaction Richard fastened his mouth onto Errin’s nipple.
A hot, jagged jolt of pleasure seared through her as she in turn fumbled for the fastenings of Richard’s pantaloons. He made to push her hands aside to help her. ‘I can manage,’ she muttered, determined to exert some element of equality. Her fingers encountered a button. She undid it, and then another and another, and slid her hand inside, wrapping it around the solid length of him, making them both gasp—he with pleasure, she with satisfaction.
She stroked him, relishing the fact that her doing so took him by surprise. She stroked him again, enjoying the pleasure she was giving every bit as much as much as the pleasure she was experiencing. That was new. Her thumb flicked over the sensitive tip of his shaft, making him moan again, and she felt the hot, damp heat between her own thighs increase.
Richard stilled her hand. His fingers edged under the lacy trim of her knickers to stroke and dip, his mouth sucking and tugging hungrily at her engorged nipple. Her climax was building quickly, too quickly. She didn’t want it to be over, not yet. ‘Wait,’ she said pleadingly.
But he shook his head, pushed her onto her back, ripping off the remainder of his own clothes as he did so, and Errin gave up any pretence of control. She lay on the carpet under him, looking up unashamedly at his nakedness. Skin unexpectedly pale, as if it never saw the sun. His muscles had not the prominence of a man who worked out, yet they were there all the same, an integral part of him, built for power rather than show. A smattering of dark hair on his forearms and on the broad sweep of his chest, a thin line tapering down over the flat of his stomach to his lower abdomen, where his erection jutted up. Like the rest of him, solid and hard and potent. She had never considered the male body beautiful but this man, although not perfect in the style of a stylish men’s magazine cover, made for compulsive viewing nonetheless. She wanted every thick, hard inch of him inside her. And soon. Her insides seemed to twist and curl, tightening themselves into a knot.
Richard knelt down between her legs. So slim and taut her body, yet soft in all the right places. He longed for her to touch him again, but he wanted more than anything to be inside her. His erection strained as he felt the damp of her sex through the tiny scrap of lace he pulled down over her long, beautiful legs. Toes red, like her fingernails. He lifted her foot, kissing the delicate hollow at her ankle bone, licking the pulse at the back of her knee, savouring the taste of her, relishing the way she responded, her eyes flickering closed, her breasts rising and falling quickly, her stomach rippling like the quiver of a wave on soft sand.
He licked the inside of her thighs. Lemon scented, her skin, with the salt and vanilla tones of her arousal like a top note, just discernable, totally delectable. Dark auburn hair, soft and downy, short and neatly trimmed. Most unusual. He liked that too. He blew delicately over the soft folds of her sex, watching the ripple of her stomach muscles again, feeling the answering ripple in his own gut. He was more than ready, but he didn’t want it to be over. Not quite yet.
He traced the shape of her with the tip of his tongue, tasting the bittersweet essence of her, teasing his way in a little deeper, flicking over the hardening bud. He dipped his finger into her, just enough to sense the contraction, to imagine how it would feel tightening around his shaft.
Errin bucked under him. Not yet, she thought, not yet, but Richard resumed his tender assault on her, with his tongue, his fingers, tantalisingly lightly, sending sparks coursing through her blood, running white heat through her, coiling hot and hotter deep inside her. ‘Now,’ she said hoarsely. He licked again, did something with his tongue and fingers, plunging and circling at the same time, and her insides twisted sharply, her climax centred like a molten wild thing that had suddenly found its shape, sharp and glinting on the edge of something. ‘Oh God, oh God, oh God.’
The sense that he had been the first to ever induce this state of abandon in her Richard found wildly erotic. His lips sank into the sweet, wet edges of her as she surrendered herself to pleasure, coming against him with a fierceness that tested his control to the absolute limit.
She felt herself unravelling. Exposed, shattered by the intensity of her climax, lost in pleasure as it drummed and rippled and surged again, higher and sharper, pushing her irrevocably over the edge, so that she was nothing and everything, reduced
to pure elements of sensation.
But it still wasn’t enough, for as soon as the pulses began to ease their thrumming, she sought him blindly, her hands on his shoulders, levering herself up so that she could kiss him. Errin ran her fingers down his back. The muscles were tense. Knotted. She felt the delightful nudge of his erection at the apex of her thighs, and sensed a corresponding melting inside her.
‘Now you,’ she said, surprising him by rolling over, pushing him flat onto his back, reversing their positions so that she could cup him. She leaned over to touch her tongue to his shaft.
‘Stop, not yet. Wait,’ he said, his voice harsh with passion.
Errin looked up and smiled at him, a slow, assured, devastating smile that almost sent him over the edge, for her pleasure in his pleasure was writ large on her flushed countenance, in the golden depths of those hazel eyes, in the tight buds of her nipples, the blush of her climax tinging her pale skin. ‘No,’ she said, and took him in her mouth again.
Delicate and soft her mouth was, like warm liquid honey, unbelievably arousing. She nibbled and then she licked, and then her mouth enveloped him. He pushed back the fall of her hair so that he could watch her, feeling the thickening of his shaft as he did so. He tugged at her shoulders and she released him, her nipples brushing his chest, and kissed him hard as she mounted him, sheathing him slowly, slowly, unbearably slowly, until he was enclosed, and she sat up and pulsed her muscles around him, closing her own eyes in ecstasy.
‘Now,’ Errin said, clenching herself around the silken weapon, relishing the inevitable, unstoppable shivering of her impending climax as she moved, a tiny shift, and that was all it took. She came again, the strength of her orgasm triggering a new urgency in him. Richard flipped her over onto her back and thrust powerfully and repeatedly, coming inside her with an intensity to match her own.
Chapter Three
The slow descent into morbidity to which he had become accustomed didn’t materialise. It didn’t even register. Richard lay naked on the floor of his own library with a woman who wouldn’t be born for nearly two hundred years and felt as if he had been rejuvenated. ‘Wow,’ he said, using Errin’s own word and grinning at the strangeness of it. ‘Wow. Did I get that right?’
‘You got everything right,’ Errin replied with a sleepily sated smile.
‘I’m not the only one. I’ve never known a woman who could enjoy intimacy with such relish.’
Errin blushed. ‘You mean I was too...’
‘You were perfect,’ Richard said, marvelling at the way bliss engendered such easy frankness.
‘I didn’t know it could be like this.’
‘I know.’ And he believed her. He was not her first, but it felt as if he was. No one had done to her what he had done. No one had made him feel what she had made him feel. ‘I know,’ Richard repeated uneasily. Because what would happen now?
Errin seemed to sense his change of mood, for she sat up and reached for her underwear, pulling it on hastily, followed too quickly by the rest of her clothing.
Richard too sat up and began to dress, his elation settling into something more sombre as reality reasserted itself. ‘We’ve been pretending that this situation is normal, but it’s not. We can’t keep ignoring...’
‘The elephant in the room.’
‘I’m not even going to ask,’ Richard said, his expression one of sheer bafflement. ‘You claim you got here by sitting in my armchair, but that’s preposterous.’
‘I know, but it’s also true.’
‘And completely illogical, not to say scientifically impossible.’
‘I know that too.’ Errin pulled on her boots and fastened her jacket. ‘But it’s what happened all the same. You said you believed me.’
‘I know, but I realise now I was carried away by the strangeness of the situation. As a man of science, I should have known it was not sufficient simply to eliminate other possibilities. Without evidence, such an explanation can only be surmise, not proof.’
‘Fine. Then I’ll prove it to you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ll repeat the experiment, of course.’ Without giving herself time to think about it, Errin flung herself into the wingback chair. Nothing happened for a few seconds, long enough for her to begin to panic. What if she couldn’t get back? And if she did—she didn’t want it to end like this, on a sour note without time for goodbyes. ‘Richard,’ she said, ‘can’t we just...?’
But it was too late. The chair enveloped her. She couldn’t get up. Her eyes were forced closed. When she finally got them open again he was gone, and she was back in Pandora’s Box, and her watch showed her that only about a minute had elapsed.
Maybe it had been a dream after all? And maybe, Errin thought sadly, that was for the best, for where did the alternative leave her? Bemused and confused, she left the shop and headed back to her hotel, where, after a long soak in a piping-hot bath, jet lag caught up with her. She fell onto the wide white bed of her air-conditioned room with its soft Egyptian-cotton sheets and slept.
* * *
Richard stared at the empty chair in complete disbelief. One minute she was there, the next she was gone. He could swear he had not closed his eyes, but he must have, for he had not seen her leave. He rushed to the door and called to his footman, demanding to know if Errin had left that way, but she had not, nor had she gone through the baize door to the servants’ quarters, nor ascended the stairs, nor ducked into any one of the other downstairs rooms. She had vanished into thin air.
Richard returned to the library and stared at the wingback chair. He sat in it and wished for her to return. Feeling foolish, he closed his eyes and wished for her again, but nothing happened.
Her absence seemed to mock him. The room was redolent of her presence. He thought he could smell her citrusy scent on the tooled leather of the chair. She was certainly there, the tantalising trace of her sex, on his fingers. She was no illusion. She was the most real person he had ever encountered. And now she was gone.
Slowly, it dawned on him that he had missed the opportunity of a lifetime for a student of science like himself. The chance to quite literally see into the future. All the wondrous things she could have told him, scientific advances she could have revealed to him. But all he had been interested in was her. Only her.
‘Errin.’ She didn’t answer. Of course she didn’t, though it didn’t stop him saying her name many times in the course of the following week. It didn’t stop him constantly reliving every moment of their encounter, which made his longing for her increase with every passing day. And with every passing day his certainty that she would never return increased also.
The clothes duly arrived from Madame Celeste but he couldn’t bring himself to send them back. They hung like spectres in his dressing-room closet. He remembered thinking, just before Errin appeared from nowhere, that there was something missing from his life. He remembered thinking there should not be. Now he knew that there was, and who it was, and that she would always be missing. The future stretched out before him, unappealing, grey and tedious.
* * *
Errin awoke the next morning determined to put what she had by now almost convinced herself was a particularly vivid dream firmly behind her. She filled her day visiting sale rooms and going through the catalogues of two upcoming country-estate auctions, but come four o’clock she found herself not far from Pandora’s Box and couldn’t resist going back in. Just to satisfy her curiosity, she told herself.
The wingback chair was there in exactly the same position. She sat down nervously. Get a grip, Errin. You’re losing the plot, she told herself. And then she felt it envelop her, and it happened again. Just like that, she was back in Richard’s library in 1816 and he was there and it all started again. The attraction. The connection. The fun. And the lovemaking.
* * *
A pattern emerged. At the end of every day, Errin went back to Pandora’s Box, acquiring in the process all sorts of unusable bits and pie
ces of junk to justify her visits. Sometimes only a few days had elapsed in Richard’s time, sometimes more. She dressed in her Regency clothes and played the Regency lady. She dined with Richard and breakfasted with him and supped with him. They went riding, and later he kissed better the bruises on her pommel-chafed thighs. They went to the opera, and Errin, used to the reverential hush of the Met, was appalled at the constant hum of chatter and laughter from the audience, most of whom seemed oblivious to what was happening onstage.
She knew she should put an end to these episodes before it was too late, but she could not. It was like playing the ultimate virtual-reality game. She quickly became addicted and, like all addicts, became a master of self-delusion, persuading herself that she was simply acting out a fantasy that would run its natural course. What harm could there be in continuing? As Richard kept reminding her, there was no logical reason to artificially cut short such a fascinating once-in-a-lifetime experience. In fact, it would be a criminal waste. And the insights she was getting into Regency life, surely they would contribute in untold ways to her career?
Errin didn’t argue, because she didn’t want to. And then she didn’t argue because it was too late. Life with Richard was no longer simply fascinating but altogether necessary. Her real life, her real self, began to blur and recede, to take on a dreamlike quality. She felt she was acting out a role she no longer understood or cared for, alienated from the life she had worked so hard to create. She was truly herself only when she was with him. Richard had become her reality. Errin McGill, Manhattan interior designer, became a shadowy figure compared to Errin McGill, Regency lady.
He was the first person she thought of when waking and the last person she thought of before she fell asleep. She spent her day saving up things to tell him, share with him, ask his opinion of, imagining how he would laugh, or how his brow would furrow in concentration. Whatever she had to say, no matter how trivial, he always listened. He didn’t interrupt her or trample on her opinion with his own, and he didn’t hold forth the way Mark had, even on subjects in which he was expert. She had never been in the company of a man whose desire for her encompassed her mind as well as her body, whose delight in her was so universal. But then, she had never met anyone like Richard. He was so perfect she wondered many times during the course of each day if she had somehow invented him, if he existed only in some bizarre parallel universe that she had created. She’d rush through whatever she was doing then, arriving terrified and anxious at Pandora’s Box. Each time she awoke in the chair to find Richard before her, it was like a little death—or a new breath of life.
Lost in Pleasure Page 3
