Games of Pleasure

by Julia Ross

  She knelt and set both hands on his chest, then leaned forward to suckle one male nipple, then the other, as she tugged away his trousers. His breathing shattered. His hands sought her naked shoulders. As he pushed down her shift, his fingers outlined the curve of her breasts. Something in the natural courtesy of his movements struck her to the heart.

  His hands were so careful and gentle and tender! When he bent to kiss her nipples, his mouth was as sensitive as if his own flesh lay at the mercy of his fascinated tongue, as if he knew in his soul exactly what she would like, as if he cared passionately for her pleasure even more than his own.

  Yet he was not noticeably skilled. He might not be a virgin, but he could not be especially experienced. It wasn’t expertise that moved her so profoundly: nothing clever or original or wicked, none of the tricks that any rake would have at his fingertips.

  Instead, Lord Ryderbourne stunned her heart. An aching sensitivity offered without cynicism. A piercing innocence coupled with an exquisite generosity of spirit. It was the one thing she hadn’t expected, couldn’t have been prepared for. Miracle quaked as she realized the risk she was inadvertently taking: This one man threatened to melt her to the soul.

  Even in the darkest throes of his passion, long after he had peeled away her corset and petticoat, long after they had both ceased to want delicacy and gentleness, she had still never known anything like it. He carried her sweating and crying and laughing and shouting to the brink of delirium and once again into the endless plunge over the edge.

  She wept at the power of it and despised herself for being so weak.

  Yet she used every skill she had ever learned to bring him more pleasure, more intensity. How could she have known that she would receive more than equal measure?

  “Is lovemaking a duel?” he said at one point, his eyes dazed, his voice jagged.

  The last few candles guttered on the table, casting untrustworthy shadows.

  She lifted her head from his shoulder, aware of the slow stroke of his fingertips down her flank. No man had ever touched her like that before—as if he found her more beautiful than life. Just that one simple caress moved her more profoundly than she could fathom.

  “Why a duel?”

  His gaze shone as dark as the ocean at midnight. “Because the result may be death, perhaps.”

  “La petite mort?”

  “No,” he said, smiling up into her eyes while candlelight glimmered deceptively over the planes of his face. “Not just the little death of climax, but the death of the soul, of the person who once existed.”

  Goose bumps spread over her skin as if winter had eased into the room. “You’re wounded so seriously by a little lovemaking, my lord?”

  He laughed and rolled her onto her back, then took her chin in his thumb and forefinger, playing softly with her lower lip. “I am slain, sweetheart. I’ll never be the same again.”

  Another candle flickered out as he lowered his head to kiss her again, burning away the cold.

  Yet something very deep, something frangible and precarious, seemed to crack in her heart. Had she made a terrible mistake to think that she could pay her debt to him this way and have done? Of course, nothing that had happened between them would harm him. She knew men. She knew how they really viewed sex, whatever flowery phrases they might use at the time. She knew that he’d be glad enough never to see her again, once she told him the truth.

  But for now he was warm and vital and here. Morning was many hours away. Miracle kissed back, ravishing his mouth as she ran her hands down his spine to cup his strong buttocks and pull his body into the core of her heat.

  SHE woke later to reach for him and knew a moment of stark panic when she thought he had gone. But he had only left their bed to throw open the shutters and stand silhouetted against the night sky. A faint glow gleamed along the outline of a muscled arm and the firm shapes of his naked shoulder and back: a silver glimmer that highlighted the beauty of his young male body, careless and certain in its magnificence.

  As if he sensed the instant she was awake, he turned and strode back to the bed. He slipped between the sheets, then cradled her once again in his arms. Miracle relaxed into his embrace and leaned her head against his shoulder. Her palm lay over his heart. She felt mesmerized by the steady pulse of his strong life.

  The rain had stopped. Framed by the open shutters, a handful of stars hung in a velvet sky. She gazed up at a hazy yellow sphere, as if her mind floated in a haven of peace, as if his embrace were a fairy-tale harbor of safety reached after a long and perilous journey.

  “That must be Jupiter,” she said.

  “You know the planets?” His voice breathed husky and warm against her ear.

  “Jupiter takes eleven years, three hundred and thirteen days, eight hours, thirty-five minutes, and four seconds to revolve around the sun.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I was almost exactly that age when I first learned it, so I remembered.”

  His fingers smoothed over her hair, feather-soft strokes at the temple. “You read books about astronomy before you were twelve?”

  “No, but I saw the sky through a telescope and was told all about it. Jupiter has four moons. Saturn has seven. To learn about the stars was like a revelation to me, a miracle. Before that the sky was just a spangled quilt holding down the earth. Afterward it was as if I could lose myself in that huge infinity whenever I needed to.”

  “Do you still wish to lose yourself?”

  She sat up, but his hand only slid down to rest loosely on her hip, his fingers dark and strong and gentle against her white flesh, the bones gleaming in the faint sheen from the window.

  “There are over a thousand stars,” she said. “Every one of them is a sun and each lies at the center of its own system of planets. I’ve always taken comfort in that.”

  “In the perfection of Creation?”

  “No, not that. In its infinite indifference, perhaps. When I was little I thought the universe must be perfect, but even our sun has dark stains on it. The marks grow and shrink as if cinders were being randomly tossed up from a furnace.”

  His palm stroked up her spine as if he would shape her back in his memory. His fingers began to play idly with her hair. “That doesn’t detract from its perfection.”

  Miracle tipped back her head and closed her eyes. “Did you ever look at the stars when you were a boy?”

  He hesitated for only a moment before he replied. “I used to creep out alone at night sometimes to stand on the roof of the Fortune Tower at Wyldshay. Not only to look, but to listen.”

  “Listen?”

  “My ears strained for the thin, high music that the planets sing as they revolve in their orbits. Some nights I even thought that I heard it.”

  “Perhaps you did.”

  He reached to take the brush from the bedside table. “Or perhaps the wind sang just so in the wires on the flagpole, or the breeze simply echoed its sighs around the gargoyles and battlements.”

  “No. You heard the music of the spheres. It’s a lonely enough melody.”

  “I was hardly lonely. I had a brother and sisters and lived in a house full of servants.”

  He began to smooth the tangles from her hair. Long strokes flowed from her scalp to her waist. Little tingles of pleasure danced after them, as if she were melting under his care.

  “Yet you still strained to hear that forbidden song,” she said. “Your soul reached for the harmony of the cosmos. It’s our best escape from chaos.”

  “I wouldn’t have put it quite like that, but perhaps all children make time for such things, even when life demands otherwise.”

  “You were born the heir to a dukedom,” she said. “They must have demanded a great deal.”

  He brushed her hair in silence for a few minutes. Tingling with pleasure at his touch, Miracle stared at the little rectangle of sky and the remote majesty of the king of the gods.

  “Were you lonely as a child?” he asked at las
t. “When you learned about the stars?”

  “Ah!” she said. “Never mind about me.”

  He set aside the brush and began to braid her hair in careful fingers, then unfastened the ribbon at her throat to use for a tie. “You’re perfection,” he said.

  “Don’t say that!”

  “Why not? The curve of your back glimmers flawlessly in the starlight. Your skin seems almost translucent, as if you were a spirit of beauty sent merely to torment me.”

  She turned to look down at him, at his dark eyes and tumbled hair, the broad chest and lovely male throat. With one fingertip he slowly traced the profile of her breast and nipple, as if he painted her in starlight. The sensitive tip puckered as sensation plummeted down to her groin.

  “I torment you?” she asked.

  “Only with the promise of more bliss.”

  Miracle gazed down at him, his splendor blurred by starlight and the wavering haze of sudden tears. She took the ribbon from his fingers and caught his face in both hands to whisper against the loveliness of his mouth.

  “I’m no wraith, my lord, just a woman—”

  He stopped her words with his kiss. Miracle met his tongue with her own, then slid her thigh over his as she pinned his hands above his head in both of hers. His arousal reared hard against her belly. Slowly, exquisitely, she retreated from the terrifying chasm that had begun to yawn at her feet, and began to ravish him again.

  RYDER woke with the bedclothes wrapped about his legs like a shroud. He fought free of them, only to grip his pounding head in both hands. Daylight flooded the room. Not the pearly light of early dawn. Bright, broad daylight. A clatter of activity floated up from the inn yard.

  Though the light assaulted his eyes, he forced himself to look around the room. Harsh yellow beams bounced around the walls to illuminate the cold grate and the cheap furnishings. The fire had gone out. He sat up.

  She was gone.

  A fly buzzed lazily over the cold food on the table.

  I like everything, from the simple to the exotic—

  She was gone. For a moment he didn’t know if he could bear it.

  He dropped his head back against the pillows and pressed both palms over his eyes. Memories swirled, a whirlpool of colored sensation. His tongue, his legs, his back, his whole body ached sweetly: a deep physical exhaustion, as if he had been drained of his soul. His head ached—not sweetly at all—as if a steam hammer had been set to push his brain from his skull.

  Devil take it, how much wine had it taken? How many bottles to find the courage to make love to a stranger against all of his better judgment?

  She had seduced him. Yet in the end the responsibility had been his. He had mouthed platitudes about honor and duty. Then he hadn’t hesitated to exploit the vulnerability of a woman who had barely escaped drowning only a few hours before, a woman whose husband had beaten her and abandoned her to die.

  In a blind search for comfort she, too, had made love with a stranger and even shared a few painfully deep personal insights. Obviously she regretted it. And so she had left.

  Though she was right, of course. To wake together would have presented them both with the awkwardness of facing what they had done.

  His hands shook as a rush of pain dampened his palms. Not the pain of too much wine. The pain of self-disgust. She had asked him for a loan. She had been desperate to leave. Claiming it was only for her benefit, he had insisted that she spend the night with him.

  Had he known in his heart of hearts that he was trapping her into sharing his bed? If so, then he despised himself for his duplicity. Yet how could he regret the bliss he had experienced?

  He had told her that he wasn’t a virgin. True enough as far as it went. He knew now that he’d had no more knowledge or skill than any callow boy. She had used her mouth to take him to the brink of madness. She had used her hands. Her tongue. Her legs. Her breasts. Her body. She had hesitated at nothing, done things he had never dared imagine, taken him to places he hadn’t known existed—and kindled an insatiable potency.

  That, perhaps, was easy enough to understand: the irresistible demands of the body. Yet they had also talked, like lovers or soul mates, lost in shared dreams of stars and childhood.

  God! Why had he told her about those naive boyhood vigils on the roof of the Fortune Tower? He had not thought about any of that in years. He never went up to the rooftops at Wyldshay any longer. Yet he remembered as if it were yesterday when he had first thought that he heard Mercury’s high singing and the base note of Saturn thrumming in harmony. That had been the very tail end of his boyhood, before he had fully realized that there was no place in his future for fantasy.

  But she had woken to regret everything and so she had fled. Tearing his heart from his chest and carrying it with her?

  Perhaps he had gone mad? For even in the height of his passion, his intellect had coolly recognized the level of his foolhardiness: Lord Ryderbourne, fascination and bane of society, had allowed a chance-met stranger to lay open his soul.

  Was this obsession? Was this what had driven Sir Lancelot to betray his country, his king, his best friend?

  Ryder forced himself from the bed and walked naked to the window. Dried sweat salted his skin. His hair was stuck to his head. He was sheened with musk and the scent of orange and lavender.

  His clothes lay stacked neatly on a chair. The clothes he had bought for her were gone. She had taken them, at least—and his cloak, apparently.

  She was, of course, forsworn. He would never know the truth about her now, nor be able to help her. Yet as neatly as if she had tied it up in her black velvet ribbon, she had made him a gift of his inexperience and his hypocrisy, instead.

  What the hell had he given her in return?

  Ryder strode back to his abandoned trousers and felt in the pocket. His purse was still there. He tipped coins onto the table. She had taken nothing, except the clothes and his cloak. So she was penniless. Was she fleeing back along the coast straight into the hands of a husband who had already tried to murder her?

  He filled his glass with the remains of the wine from the previous night. Wealth could buy almost anything. Alas, that it could not buy a man sense! It could not even buy him honor. Ryder tossed back the wine, tugged on his trousers, strode to the door, and flung it open.

  At his shout a man came running: Jenkins, who was taking care of his gelding, but who also owned the inn.

  “Send up hot water and my riding clothes,” Ryder said. “Send the maids to clear away all of this mess and bring breakfast. Saddle my horse to be ready for me in half an hour. You may send the reckoning for everything to me at Wyldshay.”

  The man tugged at his forelock. “Yes, my lord.”

  Ryder turned back into the room. Something small and white caught his attention. He stared at it: One white satin slipper lay curled at the edge of the bed.

  “My lord?”

  He looked up. Jenkins still hovered at the door. “Yes?” Ryder said. “What is it?”

  “And the lady’s reckoning, my lord? We’ll send that as well, shall we?”

  “What reckoning?”

  Jenkins stepped back, visibly anxious. “For the horse and saddle, my lord. For the victuals. For the extra clothes and the lady’s riding boots and the gloves and the hat and all—and the saddlebags to carry everything. For a guide to take her straight to the London road. The lady said it was all by your orders.”

  “A horse?”

  “She said she couldn’t use a hired nag, my lord, and be certain of it being returned. She purchased my daughter’s saddle outright, too. She said it was all right, whatever it might cost, saddle horses for a lady being so hard to come by now that we’ve lost all our trade to the landslide.”

  Ryder stared at him, almost incredulous. “What the devil horse did you sell her?”

  “The very best I had left, my lord: that big chestnut with the bald face and the white patch like the map of Ireland on his rump. Though the lady said she didn’t quit
e like the look of him, that horse’ll go many miles without tiring and he’s gentle as a lamb. Then there was the decent plain habit, the nice brown wool with the black trim that my daughter had new just last winter, and all the other necessities to go with it. But now—what with our business mostly gone—it’s not easy for us to replace, my lord. Yet the lady said not to worry, just to charge it all to your account, even the rope hobbles.”

  “Hobbles?”

  “Yes, my lord. Like the Gypsies use. So the horse can’t run away when he’s turned loose to graze.”

  Hilarity caught him like a punch from an unseen assailant, doubling him over. Lord Ryderbourne, son and heir to the Duke of Blackdown, stood half naked in a tattered bedroom in the most rundown inn in Dorset. It was as obvious as daylight what had happened in the bed.

  Nevertheless, the minions of the Merry Monarch had, as always, leaped to obey his orders—even when conveyed by the unknown woman with whom he had shared the wildest night of his life.

  He threw back his head and laughed till he ached. No word of any of this would ever leave the village, but who could blame an innkeeper if he charged that duke’s son an arm and a leg for his silence and his services?

  None of the servants looked at him askance as the room was cleared, the table cleaned, the bed stripped of its tangle of sheets. Alice and Mary brought copious amounts of hot water and his own riding clothes, cleaned and pressed. Knowing she would be generously rewarded for her labors, a laundry woman must have been up half the night.

  As soon as Ryder had washed and dressed, his hair still damp from its plunge into warm water, Jenkins brought in a tray with coffee, eggs, beef, and bacon. Thirty minutes later, free of any visible trace of his night’s adventures, Ryder sat at the window and stared out over the village to the beach.

  The boats were gone, taken out for the day’s fishing. A million tasks awaited him at Wyldshay, a burden of work as great in its way as that of the villagers, perhaps greater. Jenkins walked the black gelding up and down in the inn yard. Yet Ryder sat as if paralyzed, while thoughts swirled in his head.