Corroded

by Karina Cooper

  The man knew nothing of me. Or of my wants.

  I did not even know myself.

  The manacle released, tore at the tensile wrist it bound. Hawke fell to the floor, landed like an agile cat upon his bare feet, and he dragged me with him. Wrenched from the chair, I found myself gripped in hard hands as he spun, took long steps to the nearest wall and shoved me brutally against it. The impact jarred me to the bone, but it was nothing to the press of his body against mine, the feel of his lips taking mine with such controlled deliberation that I had no opportunity to mend my defenses.

  His mouth trapped me, stripped away every word I knew, every bit of will I could pull together, until there was only the heat of him surrounding me. The taste of him upon my tongue. I moaned into his mouth; he took it, demanded more. Pinning me with nothing but his hands and his lips, he feasted at my kiss, sucked at my tongue, bit hard enough at my bottom lip that the pain wrenched a harsh sound of blatant arousal from me.

  I would never have believed it of myself.

  When he raised his head, I stared at him. My swollen lips parted on a discordant exhale. Yet silence would never soothe the chaos within me.

  I could not bear it falling between us.

  “What, then?” I whispered, a harsh inquiry. “Will you lay claim where there is nothing to gain?”

  Hawke’s mouth curled up, a cruel edge chiseled in exquisite resolve. “You lie, my lady.”

  I winced at the courtesy. “Do I? You’re familiar enough with the precepts of flesh for demand—”

  He shifted, and hard fingers bit at my cheeks, silencing my provocation. “Lie to yourself if you must,” he breathed against my lips, “but you will never lie to me.” It was not hope I heard, or consideration. It was statement of fact, as if by saying it, I would see it true—taste the lie as the weak obstacle it was.

  Again with the demands, the orders, the effortless authority.

  I shuddered in his grasp as Hawke wrenched my face away, such merciless strength that did not care what I wanted. What I needed. His lips drifted against my jaw, my throat. Over the rim of my corset’s protective collar, his tongue flicked, damp and hot. A groan rose in my chest; I swallowed this one down, bit at my throbbing lip.

  “I warned you.” Hawke’s lips brushed my sensitive skin with every rough word. “Now I take what is mine.”

  The very threat should have ended my reluctant capitulation, should have torn loose what was left of my sensibilities and flung me into action. It should have earned my ire.

  I reached between us, caught two hands full of his long, velvet hair and wrenched hard enough to hurt my mending palms, pulling his head back from me. His nostrils flared, eyes widening before narrowing just as abruptly.

  “I am no man’s,” I said fiercely. My grip tightened. “I am untouchable.”

  “Say what you will,” he replied from between gritted teeth. “I know what you are, charlatan.” Stark arousal filled his features, and I remembered the same upon him that night—a tangle of half-formed memories shrouded in a curtain of pink and gold. There was no alchemical concoction to ease my way now, but in the silken grasp of opium’s bliss, I felt no fear.

  “Then we are both the same,” said I.

  His teeth bared. “Do not speak of what you don’t understand.”

  I laughed in quiet amusement as I allowed the soft, silken strands of his hair to slip through my shaking fingers. The sound seemed to surprise him.

  His eyes banked, tawny gold and blue shrouded in shielded reserve, and suddenly, he stepped away. That I was left feeling suddenly bereft snapped another layer from my protective armor.

  How? How did he do that? How did he know how to dig his fingers under the measures I desperately utilized to protect myself?

  It was as if he tore through them all, as if they were naught but silk and his attention a blade.

  He turned, strode away from me across the bare stone floor. His feet made no sound. My heart beat unevenly inside the fragile cage of my ribs, echoed like a death knell in my hearing. I didn’t know if I should feel relieved or indignant at his departure.

  Had I been saved?

  No. I did not want saving. I did not need saving, not from the likes of him, and not from myself. I jammed my trembling hand into my pocket, fishing for the bit of opium I’d only just taken, when Hawke halted beside the hearth. The firelight loved him, as keenly as if it would bond with his skin, gilding him in wicked orange and devil’s gold.

  Real enough to touch, were I brave enough to try.

  “Come here.”

  The order came softly. My fingers, newly wrapped around the found bit of paper wrapped tar, clenched.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I looked upon Hawke’s back and did not read welcome in the set of his shoulders, but that was not the way he had ever operated. His gift was not in welcome, not in the promise of safe harbor, but in temptation. In seduction.

  In authority and demand.

  Slowly, I straightened from the wall. My shoes made somewhat more noise than his bare feet against the stone, a faint rasp of boiled leather, but he did not turn as I approached.

  My insides fluttered, as if I’d swallowed a ball of electricity and it sizzled within.

  The fire jumped and flickered, painted this strange dungeon in wild flame, and I watched it play along Hawke’s hair. His back. Slide along the high, carved line of his cheekbones as he turned to pin those wicked eyes upon me.

  “Fetch the water.”

  As if in a dream, I found my feet moving. Obeying without rancor, without a struggle. My gaze slid to the shelf set over the hearth, close enough to keep its contents warmed but avoid burning.

  The large pot resting atop it steamed gently.

  Letting go of the opium in my pocket, I reached for the wooden handles on each side, polished and worn. I tried to move the whole, to lift it, but the large pot was too heavy for my efforts. I pulled harder. The water inside it sloshed too close to the edge. I flinched as it sizzled upon the fire-warmed hearth.

  His hands curled over mine, dwarfed my own. He’d made no sound, but suddenly he surrounded me. Once more, I was ensnared between his arms, caged by the fell and smell of him. I shuddered as the force of my need, the sheer bloody-minded want of him, nearly took my knees out from under me.

  He pressed my palms to the temperate wood. With his help, we lifted with an ease that set my heart pounding harder. I could all but taste the pulse at the back of my tongue, as if it were a flavor or a scent.

  Walking in tandem, we set the pot down together.

  Hawke took me by the shoulders, neither gentle nor patient, and turned me about. His eyes seemed darker, somehow, but the shape of his mouth, the set of his jaw, had not eased. As if he were angry. Conflicted.

  Large, blunt fingers pushed the coat from my shoulders. Peeled it down my arms and left it where it fell.

  My heart drummed faster. My mouth dried.

  Hawke studied the fit of my collecting corset, straighter than fashionably required and thicker than most. Again, his fingers bit into my shoulders. Again, I turned beneath his unyielding guidance. This time, I felt the laces of my corset give.

  I took a deep breath. It shook.

  “Hawke, I—” It was not him that stalled me, but my own preoccupied consciousness. What would he do? What would I allow?

  Would I be afforded a say?

  Did I want to be?

  The belt holding my various pouches slackened, and this, too, was stripped away. I heard it clink against the floor, the discarded buckle meeting stone.

  I felt him step closer, felt the heat of him against my back as one arm came around me to withdraw the blade I carried from its sheathe. The edge winked, razor sharp and lit to brilliant gold.

  I felt the same give in my back.

  “Such toys,” Hawke murmured behind me.

  Delicious shivers whispered over my skin.

  The knives were abandoned. Clink. Thud. His fingers swept my loose braid to
the side, and I felt the rasp of his calluses against my nape. The buckle at my throat gave.

  The corset fell to the floor with the coat, and I stood clad in only my trousers, a thin cotton shirt and boots.

  The air that surrounded me was not cold, yet my nipples tightened. I shuddered with the sensation. My fingers tightened into frightened fists at my side.

  I swayed. “Hawke.”

  “Say the word,” was his reply, but there was no kindness in it. “Beg me to let you run.”

  Run? He expected me to run? In that moment, I decided that I was through with running.

  I had come to demand his intervention, but the game had changed. I would beg for nothing.

  One large hand spread across my back, and the feel of it fractured something brittle inside me. Something cool and cautious; something I had forgotten at his first imperious directive.

  I was to be untouchable, was I not?

  How foolish I was.

  He cradled me in the crook of his arm, supported by his strength, until my boots were removed. Then I was righted, as if I were no more than a toy at his beck and call, and I felt his fingers at the flap of my trousers.

  My head came up. My hands laced around his, gripping tightly as heat suffused my cheeks. “Wait—”

  Deftly, he reversed my grip, caught both hands and banded me securely between his arms. “Beg for me to stop.” The dark menace in the ultimatum ghosted across the sensitive skin of my ear and heightened that delicious sensation inside me. The flesh between my legs clenched, and I gasped.

  I did not beg.

  Holding my wrists with a single firm hand, he undid the buttons holding my trousers in place, and pushed them down. My saving grace was that my shirt, a man’s and much too big for me, hung to my knees. Yet I could not deny that I could feel the air upon my bare legs, shuddered as it slipped beneath my shirt to brush against my sensitive flesh.

  I inhaled sharply.

  Hawke drew me from the pile of discarded clothing, guided me closer to the basin of steaming water. It was not nearly large enough for a bath, and I wondered on a strained note of near hysteria if he intended to drown me in it.

  “Kneel.” It was a taunt, a dare that I could not mistake.

  He knew I wouldn’t misunderstand. Had counted on it.

  My lips curved. Did he consider me so weak?

  I knelt. The stone bit into my knees.

  Hawke’s jaw shifted, a muscle leaping near his temple. A dull flush darkened the skin pulled taut across his cheekbones, and the answering thrill this engendered pulsed a wicked pleasure through me.

  Slowly, deftly, he rolled his sleeves to the elbow.

  It was easy to imagine this man center in the rings, whip stretched taut between his elegant hands; effortless in direction, unforgiving in expectation.

  I watched him now, trembling with anticipation, as he cupped his hands and submerged them into the basin. Water splashed to the stone when he raised them again, trickled down his forearms and peppered his trousers. I watched the glistening liquid trace his skin, catch on the dark hair revealed by his rolled sleeves.

  When he allowed it to drip over my shoulder, to seep into the pale fabric of my shirt, I stirred. The heat of it simmered against my skin, slid across my breast and down my back. To my surprise, a moan rose in my chest.

  “Release your hair,” Hawke said, his eyes not on mine but the stain spreading over my shirt. I looked down, breath catching as I saw clearly the outline of one pale pink nipple, cradled gently by translucent fabric.

  I’d never had to consider the issue before, as my corset concealed all.

  Now color rose in my face, and self-conscious awareness shredded the remains of my calm. I sucked in a breath that broke half way, made as if to stand.

  Wet hands caught my head, fingers speared into my hair. I was forced to look up, to meet the madness in Micajah Hawke’s mismatched eyes, the intensity with which he studied me.

  I had never before seen that look upon a man, never understood to what lengths a woman might go to do so. What gripped him seemed as close to savage hunger as I could imagine, focused as a predator might upon such tender prey.

  Madness, perhaps, but if it truly was, it was a kind of lunacy I understood.

  Such things came with the blood, after all.

  “Your hair,” he rasped, forcing the words out as if he were angry. Or desperate. “I would see you as you are.”

  My undoing, that heated sentiment. Whatever he felt, whatever he wrestled with inside his own skin, it was me he looked at.

  With shaking fingers, I unbound my plait. It left my fingers gray and smudged, but this did not last. For ten long, torturous minutes, the ringmaster of the Midnight Menagerie washed the lampblack from my hair. He smoothed the stains from my skin, ran his work-roughened hands over my shoulders, peeling down the shirt’s collar just enough. My arms, my throat, even my bare legs were not neglected. To see his golden skin against my much paler flesh was as shocking now as it was when first I’d noticed it, an uncomfortably powerful intensity that served to heighten my senses to the point of excruciating anticipation.

  Each second burned, each stroke another finger of heat burning my resolve into nothing.

  I watched him work, concentration and fierce passion branded upon him like the firelight that saturated us both. In him, I saw a hunger so desperate that I felt compelled to look away, as if I had seen a secret I was not supposed to.

  Water dripped from my chin, my fingers. Even from my legs, draped by sodden fabric but bared to the warm air between my knees and the ground I knelt upon. My breath came too fast, shallow bursts of air that did nothing to ease the riotous sensations plaguing me from all directions.

  Hawke wrung out my hair, and I peeked to the side to find his fingers tangled into the sodden red strands, a look of such possession upon his face that fear crawled inside my haze and shuddered.

  I would not be a thing to own.

  I scrambled to my feet. The act wrenched my hair from his hands. It swung wide, made heavier with the water, and flung droplets across the chamber. Over Hawke’s chest, scattered to the stony floor.

  Hawke did not lunge for me, as I half expected. He did not reach. He rose to his feet, then fell so still, he could have been made of the stone I’d often likened him to.

  For all his immobility, nothing in this world could hide the predatory control with which he marked my every movement.

  With my heart in my throat, I backed from him. My hair clung to my waist in heavy wet strands.

  His gaze touched upon my collar bones. Then my bosom, patently visible through the clinging fabric. I crossed my arms over my chest. It did no good. The shirt clung to me. I may as well be nude, for all the good it did.

  Shame and fear and the sharp edges of arousal battled within me.

  Hawke took a step closer. “Where do you run?”

  My knees firmed. “I do not run,” I spat.

  “Then what do you call it?”

  He terrified me. This, what I felt, this oddly tender way he washed my hair and the fierce branding of his stare, were all too much. What was I to do with this?

  What did it mean?

  He closed the distance step by determined step. I backed away, until there was no more room to move and the wall came up hard against my shoulders. It was cooler on the far side of the chamber. Not as brightly lit.

  His eyes glittered still, that devil’s streak bluer than any blue found in the natural world. Wicked bright.

  Knowing.

  “Are you frightened, my lady?”

  “Do not call me that.” The words lashed out, ragged and angry.

  “Do you fear what you’ll find, Countess?” He did not slow, did not pause. The taunt in his tone was not enough to hide the rough aggression buried beneath. He came closer until his hands pressed against the stone on either side of my head, and he bent until we were eye to eye.

  Trapped, I could only bare my teeth at him. “Do not use that t
itle.”

  “Is it not true?” His lips touched mine. A skim, nothing more. “Are you not a countess?” Another, this time a nip of his white teeth against my lower lip, as if he could not help but steal a taste. Just a bite. I jerked. “Does not a man of my low-born consequence sully your white skin, my lady?”

  Oh, God, help me. Why were these taunts not stoking my wrath? Why did they instead cause a different burn entirely between my legs? Within my belly?

  Why was I not furious?

  Hawke’s teeth closed over the soft skin of my throat. Pleasure lit across my nerves like a fuse. The cold wall was nothing as to the heat of his body trapping me, touching me only with his mouth. Pain sparked beneath his bite.

  I groaned, despite my efforts to muffle my own voice. “Yes,” I gasped, “you do.”

  The acknowledgment seemed to light an answering wick within him. A terrible fuse that would not leave me unscathed.

  “Then I will touch every part of you,” he growled, and fisted both hands at either side of my shirt. His shoulders tightened, the muscles of his arms clenched, and buttons flew as the wet fabric tore free of the thread holding each in place.

  Suddenly, I was bare to Hawke’s gaze. Every part of me, as he’d claimed. Pale and shuddering and damp from the impromptu bath.

  Hawke pulled the shirt down, but only in as far as it caught at my elbows. Twisting it tightly in both hands, he used it to trap my arms to my sides, to clamp me against the wall and in place as he sank to his knees before me.

  His gaze was rapt upon my figure, fuller than fashion demanded and less narrow at the waist than a corset allowed. Were I standing before the seamstresses above the drift, I would be forced to endure cheerful reassurances that I could be made more fashionable. More to the liking of the Society who tolerated me.

  Yet what I saw in Hawke’s fierce expression was not pity. Nor disgust. What I saw was not the ambivalence of a man purchasing his flesh for the evening.

  I was not sure what I could call it, but his was not the demeanor of indifference.

  “Every part of you,” he repeated harshly, and I was given no more warning before his lips scored a path from my collar bones to my breast. I arched as the sensations assailed me, a drum beating deep inside my body and demanding something of me I was not prepared to understand. I shivered while his tongue flicked damply against my breast. When he found the nipple, pulling it into his mouth so hard that I nearly screamed with it, I thought I might die.