When he withdrew his hand she whimpered in protest. But he swatted her inner thighs, flooding her with excitement. She obeyed the silent instruction, spreading her legs as wide as they would go. She reached up to clutch the carved wooden headboard as he peeled her open with both hands, peering closely at her sex. When she felt his moist hot breath against her she trembled, but she kept herself splayed for him as he bent to kiss her, then to lick her.
The touch of his lips in so intimate a place was almost more than she could bear. If pain could be pleasure, then pleasure was also sometimes pain. She cried out with each little flick of his tongue against her most sensitive spot, and it was all she could do not to clamp her legs around his head. She shuddered with each violent spasm as he sent waves of stimulation throughout her body, manipulating her with his fingers as he kissed, licked, sucked her sleek, dewy folds.
When the climax came she screamed, thrashing wildly on the bed, her legs quaking with the shock waves of ecstasy. Her ears rang, howling with the inner wolf-voice that told her she wasn’t finished, she wanted more, more, again, again….
And as though reading her thoughts, James at last angled his cock between her legs, sliding it inside her with one long, slow, excruciating thrust.
Her body still tingling with the aftershock of her orgasm, Madeleine clenched her inner muscles, wrapping her legs around him as she urged him deeper. He obliged, burying himself inside her. He slowly drew himself out, then pushed in, plunging inside her only to withdraw again. Each powerful thrust made her cry out and sent hot pulses through her entire body. Her climax seemed endless, a sensual assault that threatened to overwhelm her.
She gazed up at his muscular chest, his arms taut on either side of her as he held himself up. In his face were lust, love and fulfillment. All the passion she had craved and been deprived of by her husband, by society, by the nature of human beings who tortured themselves by denying the things they wanted most.
James panted with exertion as he fucked her, his own eyes blazing with animal wildness. Then he squeezed his eyes shut tightly, and his whole body went rigid as he came. Madeleine clung to him, gasping out his name and luxuriating in the sharp hot jets as he emptied himself into her.
Afterward they lay in a tangle of sweaty limbs, exhausted and spent. Madeleine sighed with pleasure as James stroked her face, smoothing her tangled hair.
“You’re breathtaking,” he told her. “In both forms.”
She blushed. It was strange to think that he had seen her secret other self, as though he’d glimpsed her naked and unaware. A wolf, a wild, beautiful wolf like those he kept in the zoo like treasured pets. How often she had admired them. How wonderful to know she was one of them.
An idea came to her as she studied James’s features. His eyes were deep and dark, almost black, like his hair. He was a beautiful man, but as a wolf he would be magnificent. She imagined him in the forest with her, beneath the golden glow of the moon, running free and wild and held by no laws. Released once a month from the prison of their inferior human forms and allowed to become something more, something sublime.
And she smiled a secret little smile. When next the moon rose full and ripe, bringing with it the extraordinary change, she would bite him. She would make him like her. Then together they would pay a little visit to Henry, to reclaim what was hers.
“Where is your mind?” James asked wonderingly.
“With you,” she said. “Forever.”
LIGHTNING IN A BOTTLE
Kim Knox
My guardian had always thought me ignorant of the goings-on in his house.
A vapid girl, alone in the world, who never noticed the dark-robed men arriving in the dead of night. Who never wondered at the hints of sage and frankincense that drifted through the passages of his London townhouse in the early mornings. I knew, had known for quite some years that Henry Bellasis, Viscount Fauconberg, was a warlock. And now I knew that he planned to draw me into his world by offering my virginity to a stranger.
I wrapped my fingers around the great brass key, the pitted metal warming against my skin as I stood in the shadowed passage that led to the cellar door. The place where my guardian had bound his great secret.
Rumors from the footmen over the past week had run that Henry kept a dragon in the arched rooms that also housed his collection of metal automata. A great beast that steamed and groaned and licked fire into cook’s little parlor when the wind blew north.
The maids shared darker stories as they made the beds or took a pan and brush to the ashes in the hearths. The dragon bound in the cellar did more than steam and groan. One maid had blushed scarlet and admitted in a rushed whisper that her dreams were full of a great, dark beast. A wicked beast…with a wicked mouth.
Not that I believed their tales. My guardian set himself up as a collector, an inventor, or that was the face he liked to present to the Fellows of the Royal Society. Those in his inner circle knew better. I knew better. There was no dragon in the cellar. There was something…darker.
I rubbed the key’s bit, the sharp edge pressing into my thumb and digging a swift pain. I’d witnessed the rite that brought the creature into our world and now I stood with my heart almost in my throat, working to find the courage to push the key into the lock and turn it.
In the morning, my guardian would return from Sheffield with my betrothed. Another lie Henry expected me to believe. Aloysius Laythrop was a man more than twice my age, a steel-factory owner I had never met once in my life. However, he had a metal my guardian needed; therefore I was the quick payment for that deal.
I wet my lips and willed my heart to slow. A smile touched my mouth, and I felt the power of it. My guardian wouldn’t have the chance to give my virginity to that man. I planned to offer it to someone else.
The grandfather clock chimed the quarter hour. Fifteen minutes until the stroke of midnight. So little time. The ceremony had begun then, with low chanting and the burning of frankincense.
I huffed out a breath, the air before me misting. Henry had the license to decide whom I chose to marry by right of law, as I was not yet twenty-one, but he was using me for his own purposes. He cared little about any future with Mr. Aloysius Laythrop. Not that he was giving me a future. The promise of an engagement was a sham. My guardian had ruined more than one good woman, so why not his ward?
That made my decision for me.
The metal of the key clinked and clicked in the lock, and I held my breath. The house was silent, with only the familiar creaks of settling wood and the whistle of the winter wind down the chimney in cook’s parlor. Nothing irregular. Nothing suggesting that one of the servants moved about the corridors.
The groan of the door hinges forced me to draw in a quick breath, my heart hammering in my chest. Chill air washed over me, scented with thyme. I swallowed. There was no choice in this. I could not allow Aloysius Laythrop to touch me.
I stepped across the threshold and lifted my lamp, my hand around the wooden handle damp with sweat. Shallow, golden light washed over the first few steps leading down into the thick, silent darkness.
Pressing my lips together to deny my need to call out into the silence, I pulled the door shut and locked it. Locked myself into the cellar. I had my guardian’s only key, stolen from the secret compartment in his bureau. Nothing would disturb me. Nor stop me.
My bare feet were silent on the worn stone, the light brush of my chemise and the heavier cotton of my robe whispering behind me. The thought prickled my skin and I shivered. But still, I descended into the blackness.
The scent of thyme deepened, the added essences of rue and sage sliding across my thoughts. A week before those bewitching aromas had been deeper, thicker, lines of gray smoke enfolding the great open space of the cellar proper.
I don’t know what drew me there on that night. A pull to my soul, perhaps. The right to see what would drive my guardian to sacrifice me to a stranger for a few ingots of metal. There were no great machines, no workbenches an
d tools in Henry’s cellar. Yes he worked with metal, but in a way no other craftsman could. Fellows of the Royal Society thought they knew him, but they didn’t know his inventions, the automata he displayed with such flourish, weren’t wrought and fired by human hand.
Chanting had lifted to the high, arched ceiling with the heavy beat of male voices. My guardian stood in their midst, clad in flowing black silk, fire and liquid metal circling him in living spirals.
And seven days before he had called forth and bound his finest beast.
I stepped down from the last stair, the chill of the tiles shocking my feet. Light touched the first of Henry’s inventions, carving out the shape of mechanical puppets varying in size, from a doll reaching to the height of my chin to automata rising a full head above me. My guardian displayed them with pride, had even shown them to the Queen herself. Lord Fauconberg was famed for them across all of London. They would totter over the floor, cogs and pistons whirring and chugging and snakes of steam streaming from their moving arms and legs.
They always churned the same smell. The sharp cut of coal and bitter smoke, as if a furnace burned at their heart.
I lifted my lamp to reveal the molded face of one of the automatons I remembered from my childhood. Possibly the first I had ever seen. Henry called him Romulus and there was the Roman harshness to his face, as if he’d been modeled on one of the busts of a great general. Romulus had always seemed so…real. Even with his unmoving mouth, iron chest and pistoned arms.
Offering a nervous smile to his blank face, I lowered my lamp and moved on, weaving through the rows of automata. Light glimmered over their progression, from the almost crude mechanics of Romulus to the growing smoothness, the way joints eased into a more natural form, until only the shine of enameled steel gave away their true nature.
Henry never displayed these later models. They stayed safely in the cellars for his own enjoyment. He called them his menagerie. A dark grin would follow and he’d murmur that there was nothing so precious to him as his lightning caught in so many bottles.
I stopped at the first ring carved into the floor. The automata circled it, their blank faces turned into the wide space it marked. Sigils cut the ring’s perfection, the dried flake of blood catching the lamplight. Two more circles wound inward to the high stone oblong of a bare altar…and to the creature who stood beside it. In the wild rite that had created him, Henry had declared his name Augustus.
My heart tightened and the lamp rattled in my hand as my nerves stretched.
I had watched that creation. Crouched at the top of the stairs, I’d witnessed the fire and steel whirl up from the concentric circles and form his perfection. Though he still wore bare steel, Augustus was a silvered man in every detail. My gaze moved over his body, and my breath caught. Every detail.
I straightened my shoulders, willing courage. This silvered man was the most practical solution to my problem. A touch of a smile lifted my mouth. Offering myself to him was also a sharp poke at my guardian. Let one of his creatures have what he wanted to give away so freely. Something twisted under that thought, something deeper that I didn’t want to examine too closely. Denying that urge forced me to speak.
“Great Augustus, I come to offer myself to you.”
The words had a hollow turn to them in the heavy silence of the cellar and I waited, my pulse drumming and my stomach in a knot. The press of the automata surrounded me, so close the scent of steel was in my every breath.
“Rebecca Marwood.”
A shiver ran over my skin as my name whispered through the air. My guardian’s creations never spoke. Never. The first true thud of fear dropped into my belly…but I couldn’t retract my offer. I knew that much about magic. I was committed now.
“You offer yourself. Why?”
I lifted my chin, holding Augustus’s blank, unmoving gaze. The firm, powerful voice could belong to no one else. “Lord Fauconberg plans to give me to Aloysius Laythrop in return for seven ingots. For a metal that concerns you. I believe my plan can benefit us both.”
Augustus’s low laughter skittered through my flesh. “So practical, Rebecca.” His head tilted, the slow slide of metal blooming heat in my chest. “Now tell me the true reason.”
Honesty. He wanted something I could barely admit to myself. I wet my lips. “I saw your creation.”
Augustus blinked, the soft rasp of metal against metal, and stayed silent. Waiting.
“And…I saw what you did.”
“Rebecca…” His voice wrapped around my name, low and deep and igniting a little pulse of unexpected warmth in my belly. “If you cannot give me your truth, then we can have no pact.”
The images of what I’d witnessed burned against my closed eyelids. Lady Saunders, one of Henry’s inner circle, found her robes removed by the smooth hands of automata, and naked, she lay on the altar. Augustus, his silver skin gleaming and new, had slid his hands over her white thighs, parting them. With one thrust, he had buried himself within her, her spine arching and a violent gasp of pleasure escaping her lips.
The rhythmic thrust of his hips had burned heat up through my own flesh, shortened my breath and pushed an unknown ache between my thighs. Only the break in the chant of the robed men had brought me back to myself. I fled the cellar, but the memory burned…and my guardian’s threat gave me the opportunity to play out my forbidden desire.
My heart in my mouth, I admitted the truth. “I wanted to lie in Lady Saunders’s place. For you to have me, not her.”
A smile pulled at Augustus’s mouth, the steel mask moving as easily as flesh. “Then come forward.”
I willed my body to move, stepping over the first thick ring. A flare of warmth ran over my calves like a whisper of breath, stirring my nightclothes.
One of the automata moved to stand in front of me before I reached the second ring. I stared up at him, finding a dark smile on his mouth. His fingers moved to the laces and buttons of my robe, untying and slipping them through with ease. Another automaton took the lamp from my hand, a third drawing the robe from my shoulders.
Cool fingers teased down my bare arms before the three slipped away to join the circle of automata beyond the first ring. The scent of thyme hung still in the air. I moved forward again, crossing the second ring, the rush of heat like hot hands on my thighs. I sucked in a quick breath, ignoring the burst of fear. I wanted this. I held Augustus’s hard gaze. I wanted him.
Another automaton stood before me. His cool hands cupped my shoulders, his thumbs tugging at the straps of my chemise. My heart thudded. I wore nothing beneath.
The automaton held my gaze, a strange dark light firing in the depths of his eyes. With only a slight tug, his steel thumbs cut through the bands of cotton. His hands moved, drawing the material down, cupping my breasts and pulling a gasp from me. My flesh felt heavy, pulsing, hardly my own as his cool thumbs stroked over my nipples. And still he drew away the chemise, exposing my skin to the watching automata.
The air hummed around me and I bit my lip as his large hands slid over my hips, his thumbs so close to my aching center that I had to fight the urge to twist and turn into his fleeting touch.
But then he was gone…a shadow disappearing into the waiting crowd. And they were waiting. The feel of them whispered against my skin, but I could only look to Augustus.
Want burned from him. “Cross the third ring, Rebecca.”
Had Lady Saunders felt like this? Her body thick and heavy with a need she could hardly recognize, the anticipation of what was to come hot in her flesh?
I stepped forward over the third ring and the heat of ghostly hands slipped over my body, sliding between my legs. A low moan broke from me as sweet heat flashed under my skin, and I put out a hand to the altar to steady myself.
Augustus lifted an eyebrow. “You come to me more ready than Lady Saunders. Though for her, these evenings have become more of a…chore.”
“What…what do I do?”
Augustus looked beyond me and the st
ir of air and thyme said the menagerie moved silently across the rings. Cool, metal hands skimmed my shoulders, my hips, and my pulse jumped, a squeak escaping me as they lifted me from the floor. They laid me over strong arms and yet more fingers drifted over my belly, my breasts, dipping tantalizingly between my thighs to stroke and finding hidden points that fired pure pleasure.
I stared up, shadows chasing over their painted faces. They seemed so…alive, dark heat burning over me from their fierce gazes. Their touch hummed over and through me as hands parted my thighs. Smooth fingers dug into my flesh and my heart pounded, a need I could barely name thick and hot in my belly.
The cold stone of the altar was a shock to my skin…and then Augustus’s hands pushed over my calves, knees, thighs, more man than metal with a rough heat that drummed my pulse. He drew me toward him as the automata released me until I lay supine across the altar staring up at Augustus.
“You didn’t…Lady Saunders…”
“We would not gift her with such attention.” His hips brushed against my damp thighs, the steel of his body warm and almost rough to the touch. He ran light fingers across my skin to tease over my belly. “She is far from deserving.”
I swallowed. “And I am?”
He held my gaze, points of dark fire in the depths of his eyes now. “You desire this. You desire me. And you offer me”—he looked up briefly to the automata—“offer us a treasure.” His thumb stole between my thighs, languid and sure. I groaned, my chest tight as he licked his thumb. “A blood virgin of the man who bound us.” His smile was dark. “It’s little wonder he wants you finally covered by some gnarled old man.
“With you taken, he planned to call on no more of our kind.” Augustus stroked over my thighs, so close to where I ached for him. “He taunted us with you.”
“With me?”
The fingers of the automata returned to stroke over my arms and linger over the curves of my breasts, rolling my nipples between slow fingers. The thrill of it wove pleasure down to my belly.
Darker Edge of Desire Page 10
