by Liz Carlyle
Instead it felt as though she was more apt to die of pleasure.
“Anaïs, so lovely,” he murmured, his lips soft against her most intimate place. “Let me show you.”
This time he stroked his tongue deep, causing her to shudder. She made a sound of sorts, a soft moan deep in her throat, and any hope she might have had of resisting his charms melted away. Anaïs wanted to lose herself to this thing—this magical, aching touch that seemed designed to break her entirely to his will.
Over and over he stroked, teasing with his tongue until she shook, and sliding first one finger, and then another, into her warmth. She was wet and aching; her womanly passage pulling almost traitorously on his fingers, begging him for more.
And then something impossible edged near.
Something new, and unexpected.
Her breath came fast and short, her hands dug into the canvas as she writhed. It was as if she lost consciousness; as if her mind became one with her body, or went to another place altogether. The little death, the French called it—and Anaïs was beginning to fear she knew why.
When the pleasure struck full force, it came at her like a warm ocean, rippling through her body and drowning her in bliss. Anaïs gave in to it; lost herself in it, allowing herself to be carried far, far away on a swell of exquisite, erotic delight.
In gradual increments, she returned to the living, becoming slowly aware of the world around her. She could feel Geoff’s head lying comfortably on the swell of her belly, and the faint rasp of his beard on her skin. Could hear the last of the day’s birdsong beyond the windows. She lifted her head to see that the sky was now striped with purple and azure, the last burst of life in a dying day.
And in that glorious afternoon light, Anaïs could not miss the unmistakable mark inked into Geoff’s flesh, blue-black against the creamy swell of his left buttock. The mark of the golden cross—the Fraternitas Aureae Crucis—overlaid upon a thistle to indicate his descent from the order’s most powerful line. The Scottish line.
It surprised her, and brought home to her once again precisely who he was. Why they were there. And how very short-lived this pleasure would be.
On a groan, she let her head fall back onto the mat. “All right,” she said, setting the back of her hand to her brow. “I haven’t the strength even to beg now. Do with me as you will.”
He chuckled without lifting his head, a low rumble in his chest that vibrated through her as if they were one.
As if they were one.
Oh, she could see how it began, the losing of one’s self. She was reminded again how the hunger might sweep you away from your better, more sensible nature. And she didn’t care. For once she didn’t want to think about anyone but herself; about the pleasure this beautiful man could give her. She caught his hand and drew him up, widening her legs to take him.
Closing his eyes, he knelt there, one hand easing down his erection, which was thick, heavily veined, and a little disconcerting in its length.
Yes, he was exquisitely, magnificently made, this man she did not deserve yet longed for. Geoff’s chest was wide and smooth, his muscles hard and finely delineated, as if carved from creamy marble. She set her hands to his chest and felt him shiver, felt the life and warmth that burned there.
His mouth turning up into a soft smile, Geoff leaned over her, his curtain of shimmering bronze hair falling forward, shadowing the hard turn of his cheekbones as he moved, and began to push himself inside her.
He made a sound, a little grunt of exertion—or more likely restraint. In answer, Anaïs set her hands at the turn of his waist and pulled him deeper, drawing up her knees as she did so. Bracing his hands on the mat above her shoulders, Geoff brought his weight forward, pushing and filling her so deeply she began to fear they mightn’t fit at all.
They fit.
Oh, they fit. Perfectly.
Eagerly she tipped her hips to allow him to deepen the intimacy. He groaned again, the tendons of his neck cording like ropes drawn taut. He drew out, and pushed again, deeper still, pulling at her flesh and making that deep, sweet trembling start all over again.
“Ohh,” she whispered. “That is . . . delicious.”
And it was. If his mouth had been exquisitely sinful, this was beyond it. Beyond it, and yet entirely natural—like breathing. Like something meant to be. Something perfect.
Thrusting again, Geoff stiffened his arms, which were layered with muscle and roped with tendons. “Anaïs,” he whispered. “This is us, love. We are perfect together.”
But what they were together, it soon seemed, was more like kerosene on a banked fire.
He set a rhythm, thrusting deeply and slowly, pushing into her with relentless precision. Anaïs rose to him instinctively, felt her body come to his in a symphony of pleasure, as if they had done this a thousand times. And yet it was wholly new. She began to fear it always would feel this way; forever old, forever new, and that a part of her might feel stripped away when he stopped.
But that was a fear for another moment. Not this one, not this timeless stretch of perfect joy. Anaïs stroked her hands down his back, taking in the pleasure of the hard, curving breadth of his shoulders, then down the sculpted muscles of his back, all the way down to the round swells of his backside that tightened and shivered as he thrust.
His very essence surrounded her in a sensual cloud; male musk, a hint of tobacco, and the rich, warm scent of his cologne. Anaïs tipped back her head and breathed him deep. Drew him deep. Curled one leg around his waist and pulled herself to him, as if they might melt into each other.
He looked at her with an age-old knowing, his face shadowed with afternoon beard. Stroking one long-fingered hand down her calf, he shocked her by lifting her legs in turn, hooking them over his shoulders, and pulling her hips hard against his pelvis, opening her fully to his thrusts.
At once something changed and shifted. Geoff groaned deep and choked out her name. His ice-blue eyes were melting now. Anaïs felt herself quicken and rise to him. She matched his pace, taking him deeper and deeper, right inside to the very heart of her, his gaze never leaving hers as he pushed inside her, spiraling them higher and higher.
Those eyes. Those amazing, ageless eyes; so hot and so cold. She was going to drown in them this time. The warm blue of his ocean was drawing her relentlessly back into the waves like a riptide. Anaïs felt herself torn from whatever earthly mooring had held her fast. After that there was nothing but the brilliant light, a perfect crest, and the whisper of her name on his lips.
They came together as one, and it was as if her soul flew to his. The rich, churning depths washed over her, and Anaïs knew that this time she was lost.
Chapter 13
Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.
Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Afterward, they lay together in the dying light curled round each other like cats. Geoff had settled behind her, her hips pulled to his pelvis, his left arm banded tight about her waist, spooning her body to his. He bent his head to the turn of her neck and set his lips to her pulse point, lingering so long she began to wonder if he’d fallen asleep.
“Geoff?” she muttered drowsily.
He stirred and nibbled lightly at her earlobe. “Umm,” he said, the sound vibrating against her skin. Then he tucked his head against hers and fell silent again. For an instant, she felt herself slip from sensually sated into something perilously like a deep sleep, then jerked herself awake.
“Time for dinner?” she managed, stretching one arm.
His kissed a trail down her throat. “I canceled it,” he said, “before I came up.”
“Oh?” she said, crooking her head to look back at him. “That sure of yourself, were you?”
“Lord, no.” She felt him lift one of her curls and begin to twine it round his finger. “No, Anaïs, I’m never sure of anything with you, a circumstance which I find—and I oughtn’t admit this—utterly refre
shing. And a little maddening.”
“Maddening?” Her curiosity piqued, she squirmed around in his arms, vaguely embarrassed by her naked state.
As if he instinctively understood, he reached behind him, snagged his shirt, and threw it over her. “Here,” he said. “This was the greatest madness, I daresay. We have two perfectly good beds downstairs, and I’m apt to have given you a chill.”
But she was still mulling over his previous words. “Geoff,” she murmured, her gaze searching his face, “can you not . . . see us? Could you not have predicted this, I mean, if you wished?”
He crooked his head to look down at her. “I told you, it’s not like that for me.”
“What do you mean?”
He pulled her closer, and tucked his chin atop her head. “A Vates can’t see his own future,” he said quietly, “and rarely that of another of his kind. I often feel things when I’m near other people—emotions, especially strong ones—if I open myself to it. Things like fear or malice or just plain dishonesty.”
“Yes,” she murmured, “I’ve noticed that about you.”
“But I don’t just see things involuntarily,” he went on. “Not unless I’m ill, perhaps, or in some sort of weakened state. When I was a child, yes, odd visions often went skittering through my head. A touch or even strong eye contact could set me off. I was like Ruthveyn in that way.”
“Until you learned to keep your curtain drawn,” she murmured.
“Yes, and now it’s the other way round,” he said. “Almost always now, I have to try to see—which I rarely choose to do.”
“And intimacy does not . . . open any sort of connection?” she asked.
For a moment, he considered it. “It could, perhaps, but never has,” he replied. “And it depends on what one means by intimacy, I daresay. I’ve bedded my share of women, aye, but I can’t say as I was ever intimate with any.”
“So something like this . . . is just sex for you,” she remarked, cutting her glance away.
“No.” He seized her chin almost roughly, and turned her face back to his. “No. I’m speaking of other people, Anaïs. Besides, it could never be like that for you and me.”
“How do you know?”
“I know,” he said again. “Besides, you are of the Vateis, Anaïs. Like Giovanni Vittorio, you are descended from the great Celtic prophets, or perhaps even the people from whom they descended. And the Vateis cannot read one another. Not deeply. Not like you mean. That’s just how it always is—one of God’s small mercies, Ruthveyn says.”
Anaïs just shook her head. “But how could Celts even get to Tuscany?”
Geoff shrugged one shoulder. “Have you read much Tacitus?”
She cast him a withering look. “Vittorio made me,” she said. “I did my best.”
He smiled and stroked his hand down her hair. “I’m sure he taught you, too, that there was a strong Celtic influence in the provinces north of Rome,” he said. “Some believe Tacitus himself to have been a Celt.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“But more importantly, his writings suggest that Celtic priests—all of them, especially the Vateis and the Druids—fascinated the Romans. They were sometimes captured and taken to Rome, and eventually Romans even intermarried with the Celtic tribes.”
She shook her head, her hair scrubbing on the mat. “I daresay all that’s true, Geoff, but I am not like you,” she said quietly. “I am not like Ruthveyn.”
“Almost no one is,” he replied. “And thank God for it. But the Gift is an amorphous thing, Anaïs. Surely you know that. Some people dream of what is to come. Some have only keen intuition. Some divine from tea leaves in the bottom of a cup—and yes, almost all of those are charlatans. But a few—a very unlucky few like Ruthveyn—can hold your hand, look into your eyes, and tell you the means of your death.”
In his arms, Anaïs shivered. “I don’t fall into any of those categories.”
“No, you have something a little more subtle,” he said. “Vittorio saw it, and honed it, because he knew how.”
She dropped her chin, and did not answer.
“You have a sixth sense, Anaïs,” he said, brushing his lips over her hair. “Like Maria Vittorio said, you’re like a cat in the dark. And perhaps you could not stab someone through the heart blindfolded, like Vittorio, but you can feel the human psyche, I think—unless, of course, you’re completed absorbed by something. Fencing, for example. Or lovemaking.” He paused to cup his hand round her face. “And then there’s the tarot.”
She jerked her chin up. “What about it?”
He brushed his lips across her cheek. “Your great-grandmother was a practitioner, was she not?” he murmured a little too casually. “And honestly, I saw a tarot card propped against the lamp on your night table the other day, so I just assumed . . . well, I assumed that’s what you kept in that old black box you cart around.”
Anaïs didn’t respond. She had no wish to think about her nonna’s old predictions; one of them in particular. Not just now, when she was aglow from Geoff’s lovemaking. Instead she wiggled firmly onto her side, and buried her face against his chest. He smelled of sweat and man and something that felt—at least for now—like comfort.
For a long moment, she simply lay there, covered by his shirt, secure in his arms, and thought about the one thing—well, the second thing—she tried never to think about.
Always, always Anaïs had been willing to do what was asked of her. She was willing to work hard to be a Guardian if that was what her great-grandmother wished. She was a dutiful daughter to her parents—well, most of the time—and a loyal sister to Nate and Armand and the children. She had been a good cousin, too, sitting by Giovanni’s bed spooning him broth and clinging to his hand until the cancer inside him had stripped the soul from his body and set it free.
She had even been a good girl—at least in the end—when Giovanni and Maria had sat her down and explained to her, through their tears and hers, that she had to let her dreams of Raphaele go. That he had a wife and a child, and that while he might be an egregious liar and a scoundrel, he had a family who depended upon him for their living.
So yes, she had been a good girl. She had set away her silly dreams.
But what she did not want to be—what she could not bear to be—was a damned fortune-teller.
And she was mightily sick and tired of being a good girl, too, now that she thought on it. She would far rather be a bad girl—far rather let the wicked Lord Bessett strip her naked and do the wickedest of his wicked things to her. For after one hour in his arms, being a good girl had truly lost its allure.
But some things, she knew, would never change. Some things, Nonna Sofia always said, were fated. Raphaele had not been her Re di Dischi. Certainly Geoff, the elegant and quintessential Englishman, was not. But her Tuscan prince was coming, sooner or later. And Anaïs was destined to be—well, if not forever a good girl, then at least forever honest.
She sighed, and shuddered a little in Geoff’s arms, feeling oddly as if she might cry.
“I read for her today,” she whispered into the soft hair that dusted his chest.
She felt rather than saw him look down at her. “Who?” he murmured. “Charlotte?”
“Yes.”
Geoff sounded fully awake now. “So you can read?”
She shrugged both shoulders. “Anyone can, can’t they?” she said. “It does not require the Gift.”
He gave a bark of laughter. “I don’t believe that for a minute.”
Anaïs sighed. “You’re likely right,” she muttered. “Indeed, I did not mean to do it today. It was a lark. A stupid lark. I meant simply to tell her what I wished her to hear. But the cards, Geoff, they—”
She stopped, and shook her head.
“What?” he gently pressed.
She lifted her head from his chest and looked up at him, feeling more than a little lost. “The cards—they fell true from my hand. And I knew it. They took on a life of their own, Geof
f. Yes, I read them. I had no choice.”
“You mean you read from here—” he murmured, settling a hand over her heart.
She slowly nodded. “And I knew what they meant—not just from years of watching Nonna, but . . . in some other way, I knew. So I told her. And I . . . I frightened her. Good God, I frightened myself.”
“Anaïs,” he murmured, pressing his lips to her head. “Poor girl.”
“Poor Charlotte!” Anaïs corrected. “At first I merely felt dirty—as if I were using her. Lying to her. But afterward, I was furious. With myself, I mean. The tarot is dangerous, not something to be trifled with. I knew that.”
“The tarot is dangerous for someone who has the Gift of reading it,” said Geoff softly. “For one who does not, love, it’s just a pack of cards.”
Anaïs set her cheek to his chest. “I suppose, Geoff, I have been simply deluding myself,” she muttered. “But I don’t want the Gift of anything.”
“I know that,” he whispered. “Oh, trust me, Anaïs, I know too well.”
But before she could speak, Geoff gave her a swift, hard hug, then urged her away. Rolling onto his back, he lifted Anaïs over him until she was balanced on top of him, her knees set to either side of his ribs. Until they looked at each other face to face.
Gently, he picked up his shirt and tucked her into it, then lifted his hand to push a stray curl behind her ear. “So that’s what all this was about,” he murmured, his gaze drifting over her face. “This fury. This hell you unleashed on Monsieur Michel’s poor boxing bag.”
She rolled her shoulders uncomfortably. “Geoff, I just want this to be over,” she whispered. “I don’t want to go on lying to Charlotte about who and what I am. And I don’t want to have to think about what I am.”
“I want it to be over, too,” said Geoff calmly. “But I daresay you probably told Charlotte more truth today than she has heard from anyone since her husband died. None of this is your fault.”
