by Lynne Barron
“Lilith,” he began only to realize he hadn’t words to express all of the emotions clawing their way free of the dark place inside him where he’d long ago buried them.
“I like the tenderness you try so very hard to hide.” She swept his shirt up, and Jasper obediently lifted his arms to allow her to remove the wrinkled garment. Long fingers drifted down his back, raising gooseflesh in their wake. “I like the wildness you make no attempt whatsoever to disguise.”
Jasper barked out a laugh and opened his eyes to find Lilith close enough he could count the lashes surrounding her eyes.
“I like that you look at me with unconcealed hunger.” Lilith rested one hand on his jaw while the other trailed down his abdomen, her fingers dipping beneath his trousers. “I like knowing you would risk all you hold dear to be here, with me for this one night.”
“I want you.” The words were simple, the feelings behind them anything but.
“I want you, too.” Her lips formed the words but no sound emerged as, one-handed, she nimbly freed the buttons he’d so recently fumbled over.
Jasper lifted his hips and allowed her to drag his trousers down his legs. Kneeling before him on the hard floor, Lilith removed his stockings. Her fingers brushed the tops of his feet, skimmed up his shins, circled around to the backs of his knees and finally coasted up his thighs, tangling in the course hairs and driving him insane with anticipation.
She lightly grasped his manhood, her fingers circling the shaft carefully, as if she held the delicate stem of a fragile flower, rather than a cock hardening beneath her gentle ministrations.
She bent her head to place a chaste kiss on the engorged head, her lips soft and warm, her breath teasing him when she whispered, “I like how you feel, how you move when you’re inside me. As if you would know me, know every dark corner and crevice within me, if you could.”
“I would know you,” Jasper whispered, one hand lifting to capture a wayward curl and twist it around his finger. “I would fill every dark corner with light, if you would but allow it.”
“You would be sorely disappointed with what your illumination would reveal.”
“Never, my love,” Jasper vowed.
Lilith laughed softly, shook her head, and pressed another kiss to the tip of his arousal. Her lips parted and her tongue came out to swipe around the heavy bulb.
“God,” Jasper gasped, his balls tightening, his cock twitching and his hips bucking.
Lilith took him into her mouth, slowly gliding down his length and enveloping him in wet, velvety warmth. She traced the vein on the underside with her tongue as she slid her lips down, stopping at the barrier of her hand still encircling the root of his shaft.
Jasper released the curl looped around his finger, both hands falling to clench the bed at his hips in an effort not to clasp her head and thrust into the glorious heat of her mouth. With her free hand, Lilith reached beneath him to cup his bollocks, spread her fingers over and around, and gently caressed the tight balls.
“Christ,” Jasper groaned, unable to stop the lunge of his hips that forced his shaft through her fingers and deeper into her mouth.
Lilith hummed, the sound vibrating down his rigid cock, even as her lips glided up the shaft. She lingered there just long enough to lick over and around the head, to lap at the pearl of liquid already seeping from his body.
Tightening her hand around his arousal, she stroked down his length from head to base, her mouth following along at a leisurely pace. Once, twice, thrice, then added a gentle massage of his bollocks, reducing Jasper to a panting beast. And still she worked over him, slowly and steadily, almost tenderly, until Jasper was groaning, his hips jerking and his limbs shaking.
When he thought he could not endure a moment more of the sweet torture, Lilith’s mouth slid away with one final swipe of her tongue and a soft kiss to the tip of his cock. Lifting her head, she offered Jasper a trembling smile.
“I need to be inside you,” he growled.
Silently, she rose to climb onto the bed, straddling him.
With her knees hugging his hips, her lips hovering just over his, and her eyes wide open, she positioned his throbbing manhood at the portal to her body.
Slowly, she sank down over him, claiming him with the same languorous ease with which she moved through life: confident and sure and blessedly aware of her welcome.
“Lilith, my love.” Jasper clasped her hips, holding her steady for the descent, groaning in mingled pleasure and agony when she‘d taken all of him, when there was not so much of a sliver of space between their joined bodies.
When she rose up only to sink back down again, he reigned in the hunger beating at him, urging him to seize control, to toss her to the bed and claim her. Instead, he traced his thumbs over her hipbones and allowed her to move as she wished, to take him as slow or fast, as rough or gentle as she needed.
Lilith needed slow and gentle and so it seemed did Jasper.
Desire flowed through him, and with it came the tenderness he’d attempted to hide, the gentle emotions he’d not allowed himself to feel in years, the hopes and dreams for his future he’d long forgotten in pursuit of fortune and honor.
Lilith’s eyes remained open as she made tender love to him, watching him until the first shudder wracked her slender frame. Her eyelids fluttered shut and a soft, tremulous cry erupted from her parted lips. Her release triggered his own and Jasper let himself go, bowing up off the bed and spending long and hard within her body.
Some minutes later, Lilith pressed a chaste kiss to his lips and gently disengaged their bodies. Slowly she climbed off his lap and urged him down on the bed, following him and curling up on her side beside him but not touching any part of him.
Jasper reached for her, fully intending to hold her until she fell asleep before he found his own bed.
“Oh, don’t,” she exclaimed on a huff of breath, wriggling away. “I’m all dewy.”
“Dewy?” He ignored her protests and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her close and running a hand down her spine. Her skin was unfathomably soft and slightly…dewy.
“I perspire,” she whispered, ducking her head in a gesture that, coming from any other woman, he might have taken for shyness.
“Everyone perspires,” he replied with a laugh.
“Yes, well, I perspire more than a lady ought to,” she said as if she were admitting to a sin of scandalous proportions. “Especially when I am nervous or unsettled.”
“Or when you exert yourself in balmy weather,” he teased.
“You don’t find it rather grotesque?”
In answer, Jasper ducked down and licked her from temple to jaw.
Lilith squirmed about, giggling like a young girl, so he continued the torment, tracing a path down her neck, her skin tasting of her exotic blend of soap and faintly of salt and her own musk.
“Oh…stop…Jasper,” she panted, her laughter escalating until it echoed around the cramped bedchamber.
“Delicious,” he proclaimed, nipping at her shoulder before relaxing back on the bed once more, an odd sort of contentment washing over him.
Lilith curled one leg over his hip, her hand coming to rest lightly on his chest. Carefully, as if testing the protocol of such intimacies, she rested her cheek on his shoulder.
“One day soon I should like to see your hair down.” Sifting his fingers through the curls piled atop her head, he settled her more comfortably against him.
“It gets tangled all around my neck and shoulders,” she answered drowsily. “Like a heavy, woolen hood.”
“Makes you dewy, does it?” It occurred to Jasper there was no coverlet on the bed, only a thin sheet that hadn’t been pulled down.
“Gloves, too,” she replied around a yawn. “I cannot abide gloves.”
“Poor darling,” he soothed on a yawn of his own.
“Perpetual perspiration, it is the bane of my existence.”
“What a charmed life you’ve led if a little sweat is th
e bane of your existence,” he retorted, snuggling against her unabashedly.
“My life has been rather charmed,” she agreed quietly, an odd note in her voice he might have examined had oblivion not chosen that moment to claim him.
Chapter 14
Lilith slept right through dawn, right through what Alabaster would later claim was the prettiest sunrise she’d seen since leaving her native Scotland.
She might have slept straight through the morning had not someone, or a number of someones, commenced banging on the door to her bedchamber.
Except it wasn’t her bedchamber but instead a rather dismal room smelling of mildew and owned by the man who leapt from the narrow bed even as Lilith came fully awake.
Where Jasper thought he was going was anyone’s guess, but wherever it was he made it no farther than the center of the room before the door swung open.
“Goodness, that’s a sight worth waking up early to behold,” Alabaster said by way of greeting.
Lilith had only a moment to wonder why her grandmother, a woman renowned for her aversion to mornings, would be knocking upon her borrowed bedchamber door, before Harry sidled by Alabaster, quickly followed by Kate.
Two pairs of innocent eyes went unerringly to the naked man in the room, staring quite shamelessly even after Jasper whipped around and gave them his back. As if his taut, bare bottom wasn’t an equally lovely sight to behold.
Alabaster blithely stepped around Jasper to retrieve Lilith’s robe from the chair back where Tula had left it, precisely as she’d done every night since they’d arrived in this pretty little corner of Cornwall.
“Cover yourself, dearest,” her grandmother said, eyes twinkling. “Lest you give your sisters more reason than they already have to bemoan their bosoms.”
“I don’t think they’ve yet realized I am here.” Lilith rose from the bed and stepped over Jasper’s trousers balled up on the floor where she’d tossed them only hours previously. She held out the silk robe, waving it about when he didn’t immediately take the offering.
Without a word, and with surprising dignity all things considered, the ninth Baron Malleville donned a red silk kimono embroidered with bright blue and yellow dragonflies.
The garment did not begin to cover his muscled physique, the hem reaching only to his knees while the sleeves brushed his elbows, but with a minimum of pulling and tugging, he managed to cover the essential parts.
Harry giggled and, girls being girls, Kate joined in, the two of them tittering behind their hands, eyes round and cheeks pink.
“Out.” Lilith inflected the word with as much hauteur as a woman entirely unclothed possibly could, but all she did was draw the girls’ gazes her way.
Kate blinked and let out a forlorn sigh, looking from Lilith’s breasts to her own as yet nearly miniscule bosom.
“You’ve still time,” Harry said, her voice laced with the remnants of her laughter. “While I suspect I am quite doomed.”
“Oh, for mercy sake, they are merely breasts,” Lilith said.
“Only a woman with breasts that beautiful could ever say something so patently condescending,” Harry said.
“Lilith can be a tad condescending,” Kate agreed. “And the tiniest bit conceited about her beauty.”
“Out.” Jasper fairly shouted the single word, likely expecting the lot of them to scurry from the room as Tula had done the night before.
He ought to have known Dunaway’s daughters, not to mention the infamous Alabaster Sinclair, were made of sterner stuff.
“I trust you will seek an audience with Lord Dunaway straightway.” Alabaster turned her frostiest gaze on Jasper, though he would have to be blind not to see the amusement pulling at her rouged lips. “After you have donned appropriate attire, of course.”
“Of course,” Jasper agreed with a sharp nod.
“So long as we understand one another.”
“We do, madame.”
Lilith looked from Jasper to her grandmother, panicked by the speed with which events were moving, yet unable to form a coherent word that might stop them. Or at the very least, slow them down long enough for her to catch up and wrangle them back under her control.
“Then we shall bid you a good morning.” Alabaster crossed the room and held open the door, waving for Harry and Kate to proceed her out onto the balcony.
The door closed with a soft click, footfalls tapped out a slow measure on the warped boards beyond, echoing around the bedchamber where Lilith had foolishly believed she could steal one night of pleasure.
Jasper slowly turned to face her, his heavy-lidded gaze drifting over her from her bare toes to the top of her sleep-mussed coiffure before coming to rest on her face.
For the first time in her life, Lilith felt ugly in her own skin, soiled and stained by a past she could not alter, a past she had never truly regretted until she’d met him and realized all she would never have.
Lilith fought the urge to cover her nakedness, to hide the ugliness seeping from her exposed flesh, as grotesque as the perspiration springing up along her temples. “I’ll speak with Alabaster and exact her promise to keep silent. You’ve no reason to seek out Dunaway. He needn’t know anything happened between us. You can still marry Sissy.”
“Marry Sissy?” he repeated, something dark shifting in his eyes. “What sort of man would I be if I married your sister after spending the night in your bed?”
“The sort of man who is but five days from refilling his coffers, reclaiming his birthright, restoring his honor and saving his family from ruin,” Lilith whispered, horrified and shamed by the chaos she’d wrought with her selfish desires. “Please don’t risk it all for me.”
“Too late, love.”
“It isn’t too late,” she protested, capturing his gaze and holding it, nearly losing her composure at the molten heat of his eyes. “Promise me you will wait to speak with Dunaway.”
“Is this the part where you string me along?” Jasper’s voice was so quiet she had to strain to hear his words. “Just before you pauper me?”
“I’ll have no need to pauper you,” Lilith replied, ignoring his first question in favor of answering the second truthfully. “You’ll do a fine job of it all on your own if you seek out Dunaway just now.”
Jasper drew in a deep breath, his chest expanding, a thoughtful frown pulling at his lips. Then, without so much as a by your leave, let alone a promise not to speak with Dunaway, the ninth Baron Malleville turned on his bare heels and strode across the bedchamber, yanked the door open and strode out into the morning sunshine.
Dressed in only a red silk kimono, of all things.
Lilith yanked the sheet from the bed. Wrapping the threadbare linen around her body and tucking the end between her breasts, she moved to the small table upon which sat the basin of water, the forgotten cloth a sodden lump on the scarred wood beside it.
Good Lord, what a shameless hussy she’d been, setting the stage and bathing in the candlelight, using every trick in her arsenal to tempt him to remain with her, to enjoy all the pleasures to be found in a single stolen night.
In punishment for her own foolish behavior, for believing there wouldn’t be a price to pay come morning, Lilith savagely yanked the pins from her hair, ignoring the pain scraping along her scalp and allowing the tangled mass to fall around her shoulders and down her back.
She would wear it down all day, a hair shirt of sorts.
And when she returned to Town, she would have it cropped short in penance for sins too numerous to count.
Only when Lilith could no longer avoid it did she look in the mirror above the table.
A stranger stared back at her, a girl with a pale, gaunt face, eyes shadowed and lifeless.
An old memory, deeply buried and all but forgotten, shivered on the periphery of Lilith’s awareness. One morning long ago, when she had been too young to understand the nature of her parents’ relationship and her place within it, she’d come upon Gwendolyn and Dunaway arguing in the foy
er of her mother’s house. Spellbound by the spectacle of Dunaway’s uncharacteristic lapse of composure, by the disjointed movement of his limbs and the strident pitch of his voice, it had taken a moment for Lilith to notice Gwendolyn’s abnormal stillness, her absolute silence and the utter lack of emotion in her eyes.
Years later, after she’d become inured to Gwendolyn’s mercurial temperament, after she’d been able to pull forth anything remotely resembling sympathy or compassion, Lilith had come to understand she’d witnessed the end of her parents’ love affair.
As Lilith stared at the girl in the mirror, she realized she’d also witnessed the moment when her mother had torn out her own heart, shattering and crushing it beyond repair.
It was a melancholy thought, that after all these years she might feel a kinship to Gwendolyn, a connection made over two hearts broken more than a decade apart.
“Stupid girl.” She watched her lips form the words, not entirely certain whether they were directed at her mother or herself.
Lilith attempted a smile, gave up when all she managed was a wretched grimace. “Stupid, ugly, shameless—”
A soft knock interrupted what promised to be a long list of insults. The door opened and Dunaway poked his head around the heavy wood. “Is it safe to cross the threshold?”
“If you are asking whether I intend to skin you alive, I’ve yet to decide,” Lilith answered, meeting his gaze in the mirror.
“Now, kitten, in my defense, I did warn Alabaster to mind her own affairs,” Dunaway said with a smile as he stepped inside and closed the door behind him. “In response, she shared the oddest tale of a missive sent by express delivery and containing a plea for her to do just the opposite.”
“A moment of sheer madness on my part, that missive which was not sent express delivery, seeing as such a thing does not exist in the wilds of Cornwall.”
“I tried to explain to your grandmother you had things well in hand.”
“I’ve had nothing well in hand since we arrived, as you are undoubtedly aware.”
“You have seemed a bit out of sorts of late.” The earl crossed to sit on the foot of the bed. “Care you share your troubles??”
