“His belt.” I bite my lip until it hurts, and my first visit here flares like a beacon in my brain. Ray – with his artist’s palette and brush – naked from the waist up, his feet bare, the toenails so shiny I’d swear they were lacquered, striding across the splintered boards to daub a cross upon my arse.
“There,” he’d yelled. “Keep your fucking hand there, and don’t move until I tell you to. I didn’t hire you to preen.” This from the man who’d taken forty minutes the previous night to fasten his bow tie. “I hired you to keep your damned arse still.”
Hired! Oh, yes, Ray paid me both in cash and kind, but what exactly was my role, model or apprentice, girlfriend or whore?
Gabriel wrestles a hand below my skirt. His gloves are cool against my thighs. One finger flicks upwards and brushes the lace of my panties. Tremulously, I try to push him away, but he thrusts me up against the stacks of paintings, so that my bottom rests on the top of an ornate brass frame and my back arches towards the wall.
“Stop!”
“Is that really what you want?” He rests his hands lightly upon my knees as he lifts one eyebrow. “Don’t you really long to give in. Weren’t you wild once?”
“Never.” Ray was the wild one, the instigator. I was just drawn to his flame. But looking back I know that’s a lie I’ve been drip-feeding myself for over two decades. It’s the way I’ve reconciled myself to the role I chose. I thought I wanted stability and a decent life in suburbia. I’ve made myself into a perfect wife. I’ve performed to the best of my ability, but this staid laced-up woman isn’t me. The real me is buried deep inside, screaming and flailing, now determined to get out. And like his father before him, Gabriel sees it. He slides his hands up my thighs again, until his thumb tip brushes the lace of my knickers, and presses between the lips of my slit.
“Take them off, I dare you.”
This has gone too far! “What sort of pretence at mourning is this?”
And yet, even as I protest, my nerves zing with excitement.
Gabriel’s silver eyes gleam with all the wickedness I could ever wish for. “Tell me to stop again, and maybe I’ll believe you.” One long finger hooks around the leg elastic and touches me intimately. I squirm, but not because of any desire to get away. No, I want more than this tease. I want to feel ecstasy again. I want the bliss a man’s fingers working over my clit can bring. I desire sex that is dirty and crude. That is painful, irresistible and debauched.
“Are you going to take off yours?” I ask, when he tugs again at the lace.
“I don’t have any on.”
“Prove it.” I shove him backwards, and this time I do not find him immobile. He retreats, whilst working open his belt buckle. God, he’s so like Ray, right down to the way he snags his bottom lip with his tooth as he concentrates. Fly undone, he coyly teases the flap of fabric away from his loins, offering me only a momentary glimpse before he hides his assets again. Three times he repeats the gesture, before I shimmy down from my perch among the paintings and rip the fabric from his hand. His trousers pool around his feet, and I shove the hem of his shirt up to towards his breastbone.
Gabriel watches my reaction from under his eyebrows. It’s a look of stubborn defiance that is both incredibly needy and fantastically hot. Unlike Ray, Gabriel is clean shaven. Ink decorates his skin in place of hair, the black lines extending in a bold pattern of knots along the length of his cock, the end of which is pierced with a silver hoop. I wrap a hand around his shaft, but he doesn’t react, bar a subtle hiss when I deliberately squeeze, and then rotate the ring.
“Inked and silvered. I guess I can be pretty certain you’re not a werewolf.”
“I’m a changeling,” he snarls back, and if I didn’t know better I’d swear the gleam in his eyes was born of magic. “Your knickers,” he demands holding out a hand. He steps free of his pooled trousers, and throws his jacket and tie over the hatstand before pulling his shirt over his head, so that he stands before me naked.
He’s everything Ray ever was and more. His abdomen a study in ripped perfection, save for what looks like an appendix scar across one side. The silvered line is ten shades lighter than the surrounding skin.
The Celtic knotwork tattoo that adorns his loins also encompasses his hips, and the long muscles down his right thigh. It’s a fascinating thing, which I picture myself spending long hours tracing in endless circles.
“Seen enough yet?”
I shake my head and continue to drink him down. It’s a long time since I’ve seen a man this attuned to his body up close. I can’t help but admire the hard globes of his backside, the breadth of his shoulders, and his delicate, tightly perked up nipples, the skin of which is so dark they seem pre-stained with blackberry juice or vampish lipstick.
“Now show me yours. Wasn’t that the deal? It’s not like I haven’t seen it before.” He turns another painting around, this one a watercolour of me lying naked by the edge of a lake, adorned with only two white blossoms, one of which pokes from my hair, while the other is captured between my thighs.
“Did he tease you with the stem?”
“I had to hold the stalk between my thighs. It wasn’t erotic. It made my muscles ache.”
“And afterwards?” he enquires, with a raised brow.
Afterwards. Yes, afterwards, Ray filled me with a different stalk. Actually, we took several breaks that day, so he could reinstate theflush upon my cheeks that he wanted to capture.
My smile tells Gabriel all he wishes to know. Hands on hips, he waits for me to do his bidding, and I admit to myself that the prospect of admiration thrills me. Miles, my husband, has only ever seen me naked in the dark. I don a nightgown before he comes to bed, and dress when he’s left for work. Twenty-five years we’ve slept together, and our lovemaking remains as chaste and mechanical as it was on our honeymoon night, when I played the virginal bride and he took command of losing his cherry.
I wobble ungainly as I step out of my knickers, no longer used to making a performance of the act. Gabriel watches me with a predatory smile upon his face. “Ray always said you were atrociously bad at undressing. Said he kept a pair of scissors handy especially for you.”
Were they just for me? I recall the scissors that Ray kept in the rainbow-splattered box in which he stored his paints. He’d use them to cut the sides of my panties, so he could strip them from me once he had me posed. You might imagine I’d have worn my most basic cotton briefs when I came to pose for him considering his disregard for my attire, but the truth is I sought ever-increasing luxury. Silks and ribbons, and lace studded with diamanté. Alas, none of them ever captured Ray’s attention as completely as my bared pussy. Somewhere in this minefield of times past are in-depth studies of both my pussy and my arse.
Gabriel picks the shred of pearlescent pink fabric that comprises my current underwear from the floor. He brings them to his face and breathes in the scent of my body, covering both his mouth and nose.
“Fruity,” he remarks. “Isn’t pink a little frivolous for the occasion?”
“You can hardly comment.” My gaze strays towards his discarded suit, and I remember why we are here. Not to flirt or play games but to say farewell. “What did Ray die of?” I ask, instantly sobered. A stab of pain pierces my chest. Ray is gone. Truly gone, and no amount of time or prayers will bring him back again.
Gabriel stills. “You realize that he loved you,” he says in one breath.
To which I respond in the only way I can. With a laugh that rises up from my belly and explodes from my throat like a great rumbling bark. “Tosh, he did! How old are you? He must have sown his oats in your mother’s belly almost the moment I left. He never loved me. I was a convenience, and a cheap one at that. He paid me less to pose than he did his students, and gave nothing for being his whore.”
“His lover,” Gabriel retaliates. We glare at one another. Strangers again, and for a moment bitter enemies. “I can prove it.”
“How? How can you prove it? You can’
t conjure him up in order to confess. His paintings prove only that I was his one-time model, not that he felt anything remotely warm towards me.”
“Perhaps not in person.” With that cryptic remark, he turns, and strides towards the broken sash window that overlooks the chimneys and the street below. From the windowsill he claims a thick leather book, which he turns towards me and holds against his chest. “See.”
I see my likeness peeking from the page, as radiant as only the young can be. Coy and sweet in one pose, and dashed with anger or irritation in the next. Around the numerous pictures words of the heart form an endless spiral of introspective thought. Declarations are made and crossed out. Only to be rewritten.
“He waited for you to come back. Waited his whole life for you to see sense. He knew you weren’t happy.”
“I’m happy.”
Gabriel continues as if he hasn’t heard my rebuff. “You’re right. The episode with my mother came just after you left. It was his night of revenge, a blind fling in order to get over you. But he didn’t get over you. He never got over you. ‘Gabriel,’ he told me, ‘you have to be there for her, because one day she’s going to wake up and realize what we could have had, and I’m not going to be around to give it.’”
My nose stings at his words. Tears cloud my vision. Gabriel moves in close, so that his naked body presses against the wool of my clothing. “He loved you. You were his muse and his greatest malady. He never forgave himself for letting you go.”
“You still haven’t told me how he died.”
“It doesn’t matter how he died. Only that you came back.”
“He knew where I lived. All this time, he could have called.”
“And begged?” Gabriel lifts an eyebrow in question. “Ray never begged, and he believed in the sanctity of marriage. If you strayed from your vows it would never be down to his cajoling. I, on the other hand, have no such qualms.”
I tut at him in disgust. “You’re arrogant, like him. You mean nothing to me. You’re just an echo of the past.”
“An echo that you’re just dying to fuck.”
He has me hooked at that. Disgusted and infuriated, but hooked. His voice softens, though his words still pack a punch. “Admit it, Sophia. The thought of me sliding my cock into you already has you wet. When was the last time you came by a method that didn’t involve your own hand?”
How can he surmise that from looking at me? “Whether I come with my husband is none of your concern.”
Gabriel shakes his head, so that his dark hair flutters around his shoulders. “Ray made it my concern.”
“It was none of his concern.”
“Just once.” His voice drops to a lethal whisper, coaxing and smooth, the devil’s voice whispering in my ear having kicked the good angel into a vat of tar. “We need never meet again if that’s how you prefer it. But I made a promise, and I endeavour to always keep them.”
Ray, his father, made him promise to fuck me. How twisted is that?
I think it over. One brief moment of passion and then I get to walk away and carry on as normal, only with a bright, new, shiny memory to cling to. If only I could stockpile sexual satisfaction from the encounter to support me through the next decade or two. It’s a crazy, foolish idea, and I’m not quite a crazy old woman, yet. “What sort of screwed-up goodbye would that be?”
“It doesn’t have to be a goodbye. It could be a beginning.”
Fatal words. I feel my reservations crumbling, and a moist ache begins in my pussy. “I’m too old and too respectable.” I protest.
“You’re neither, Sophia Melrose. You’re a beautiful woman who deserves to be herself.”
I hurry away from him, low heels click-clacking on the floorboards, but my flight path is too familiar and the pain of separation from Ray too raw. I don’t want to go. I never wanted to go, and so I turn back at the door and stare at Gabriel in bewildered panic. “Don’t make me do this,” I say to Ray, not Gabriel, seeing the ghost of years ago, standing there in all his paint-splattered glory.
“I can’t marry you, Sophia. I can only love you. I told you that.”
I don’t hear the love in Ray’s voice, or the fear, only the rejection. “You don’t want me. Miles wants me,” I yell.
“He wants to own you. You’ll be another piece of artwork to him, no more treasured than any of the rest. He wants you because you’re a piece of me, you’re my muse, and how incredible to own that. He’s an obsessive. He loves art only because of the value others place on it, not because he admires it himself.”
Truth. All Ray ever told me was the truth, but I didn’t want tohear it, didn’t want to acknowledge it.
“I’m going,” I snap.
“Go then, but don’t come back. I’m not interested in you if you’re wearing his ring.”
The words rage on inside my head, circular arguments, hope and fear rising and falling on a tide of twisting emotions.
“Why did you do it?” Gabriel asks, standing right before me again. I notice his hand is upon the doorknob. “Why did you leave him like that? And are you running from me for the same reason?”
“I wanted stability. Respect. Miles promised me a partnership, and I suppose I saw myself cheering on Ray’s career as his sponsor, as an art hostess, instead of his fuck buddy. Only, it didn’t quite work out like that. The moment we were married, Miles cut Ray’s sponsorship. He moved on, said Ray’s art had become passé, but none of his new fledglings had an iota of Ray’s talent. Miles’ collection turned into a riot of mediocrity. He took to golf and yachting instead.”
“And cut your lifeline.” Gabriel touches my face, bringing me out of the trance, and I realize he’s still wearing his gloves.
“What’s wrong with your hands?”
He grips the leather with his teeth and frees his fingers. Beneath them his skin is milk pale from lack of light, and the backs of them are scarred as if the flesh has been melted and smoothed into place with a butter knife. “Cleaning fluid. When I was twelve. It’s much better than it once was. I was trying to be helpful.”
“You should let the air get to it.”
I study the scars, lifting his hand to rub my lips against their shiny surface as if I can somehow kiss them better.
That moment of closeness as he exposes himself to me, warms me inside. I catch a hint of his scent, and find myself pressing my nose to his skin to breathe it in more deeply. He’s like Ray, and yet he isn’t. I find myself aroused and yet tortured by him. I want to touch. I want to forget. I want Ray, but only Gabriel is on offer. Still, what forty-eight-year-old woman gets a treat like him everyday? My lips reach his wrist, tongue teasing over the pulse point where the skin is smooth and supple.
“Have you any scars?” he enquires.
“Only invisible ones.”
Our eyes meet, and passion simmers. I crave passion and his vitality too much to refuse him. Hell, I’ve been circumspect for too long. Too scared of the hardship freedom might bring to flee my gilded prison.
Gabriel’s hands stretch around my back and he unfastens my dress, which puddles around my feet. “Did Ray love to stripe you because the marks made you more interesting? He used to say to me constantly that it’s our defects that make us unique.” Gabriel’s touch moves to my bottom, holding the fleshy cheeks, and squeezing them. And I find myself quietly chuckling and shaking my head.
“Nothing so cerebral. He liked the way I jumped and my breasts jiggled when he struck, and the fact that it made me so wet.”
“I like the way you gasp,” he says just before he warms my cheek with a smack.
“Ah!” I do gasp, and do so again when he strokes two fingers over the flat of my stomach and down into the springy curls at the apex of my thighs. He cups my mons. Then two fingers press into the slick heat of my pussy and his thumb completes a circuit with my clit. I ride his fingers, sandwiched between his hard body and the door. It feels so good that I realize that I’ve forgotten just how amazing sex can be, and just how
wildly it makes my heart beat.
“Is it me or the place that turns you on, Sophia?”
Neither, I decide, but of course it’s not true. With each passing minute since we left the graveside, I feel Ray’s loss more kenly. Yet, his presence still fills this room, and Gabriel adds a sense of calm.
I look into Gabriel’s silver-flecked eyes and know that he means to take me as I’ve never been taken in years.
“Not here,” I say as his finger catches my clit, and that single caress sets me shivering.
“Absolutely here.”
“I mean not against the door.”
“Where then?”
I drop on to my hands and knees and crawl between his legs. Gabriel follows as I stalk across the boards, naked save for my bra. I pause when I reach the enormous Belfast sink and rise. God, it’s so domestic, being fucked over the washing-up bowl. Gabriel laughs when I waggle my arse, and suddenly I feel alive. I know what I’m doing, my body, my instincts are in control instead of my screwed-up brain.
I quiver in anticipation as he wets his thumbs in my heat, and rise on to my toes as his cock nuzzles against my clit. The ring in his cock moves as he brushes against my nether lips.
“Tell me what you want, Sophia. Do you want my tattooed cock inside you? Are you going to frig like crazy as we fuck?”
“No, you’re going to do it for me.”
He snorts in amusement. Then leans over me as if to assess the angles. “Hard or soft?”
“I’ll yell if you’re a bit off.”
The sound of his chuckles vibrates against my neck. I think he’s about to enter me, but he doesn’t and, when I crane my head to look back at him, he winks. “Do you think we’re moving a little too fast?” In response, I push back against him, so that his erection nuzzles against my slit. “OK, easy.” He slides in deep, and then crushes me tight to his body. We don’t really move, at least not the parts that are joined. Instead, he traces his lips across my shoulder and slowly up the side of my neck. “Normally, I like to kiss before getting quite so intimate. It makes it more personal somehow.”
The Mammoth Book of Hot Romance Page 22
